Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England by Ann C. Christensen (review)

Commercial expansion in Early Modern England resulted in a significant increase in the number of husbands who traveled for work and the number of wives who were left behind to manage domestic obligations and keep their homes (and themselves) secure. Ann C. Christensen’s thorough and compelling book, Separation Scenes: Domestic Drama in Early Modern England, argues convincingly that the impact of business travel on the wives and households husbands left behind is a unifying concern of domestic dramas popular during this period. Individual chapters focus on five emblematic plays of the domestic drama genre in which “the departure of men and their households’ accommodation of their absence constitute the main plots” (3). Those plays are the anonymously/ambiguously authored Arden of Faversham (c. 1592) and A Warning For Fair Women (1599), Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness (1607), Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c. 1613-21), and the rarely addressed The Launching of The Mary, or The Seaman’s Honest Wife written by Walter Mountfort, a clerk in the East India Company. A brief epilogue expands the discussion to the life and poetry of John Donne.

Christensen’s introduction provides a brief and broad, but helpful, overview of period documents and key approaches to domestic tragedy in existing scholarship by Frances Dolan, Catherine Richardson, Lena Cowen Orlin, and others. Christensen thus situates her own analysis in the context of feminist historicist approaches to marriage, sexuality, labor, space, and domestic violence in the Early Modern period. The introduction defines key foci and terms, such as separation scene and “unpartnered wife” (11), and proposes a number of cultural questions that these plays explore by using “absent husbands and domestic settings . . . to articulate the broader cultural concerns brought home (literally) from an expanding commercial world” (3). The chapters that follow are self-contained and well-ordered to build a comparative framework for these plays that is cumulative and nuanced, showing how business travel and its often violent impact on the domestic vary in articulation, detail, and “in degree but not in kind,” across this genre (3).

Chapter 1 explores how the titular Arden’s travel between home and away structures Arden of Faversham. The central analysis of Alice’s performance of housewifery shows how the fraught deputation of authority to the unpartnered wife in this play drives the plot and critiques sixteenth-century ideals about the division of domestic authority. The second chapter illuminates how A Warning For Fair Women’s use of liminal spaces (such as doorways and shorelines) reveals the heroine’s vulnerability in a domestic sphere in which her labor and authority are devalued and denied. The third chapter addresses Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness. Christensen insightfully demonstrates how this play stages consumption (of meals, fashion, and novelties) to “critique a domestic ideology that falsely imagines women as consumers and men . . . as providers of ‘kindness’”—a job men supposedly sustain by travel away from home (108). In the fourth chapter, on Women Beware Women, the author focuses on class and economic disparity as complicating and violence-inducing factors in household models where husbands travel to support domesticity (and fail to do so) at home. A nuanced reading of the trope of “the ruin” shows how it functions in the play to stage the collapse of structures (homes, marriages), while also trading on period associations of the ruin with the sexual dishonor of women. The final chapter seeks in part to lift The Launching of The Mary from critical obscurity, and so provides a much more thorough overview for this understudied play. Much of the chapter is concerned with explaining the play’s treatment of the effect of global commercial travel on seamen’s wives. It does so by cleanly contrasting the play’s treatment of the East India Company, seamen, and their wives, with treatments offered by Thomas Mun’s A Discourse of Trade (1621). This comparison is especially effective for articulating the...