Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (review)

Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama begins with Henri Lefebvre, for whom space is "Janus-faced: constituted as an expression of existing power structures and simultaneously constituting the potential for challenging those structures" (1). Alison Findlay's aims are similarly twofold: "to open up the playing spaces for women's drama as determinants of meaning and to show how women played with space in scripts and performances as a form of political intervention" (10). To this end, she focuses on venues (interpreted broadly to include sites of composition, performances, and imagined productions) and settings (the fictional "worlds" of plays and the scene-by-scene locations of the action). In five discrete chapters, she explores homes, gardens, courts, sororities, and cities—places that "women writers and performers transformed . . . into spaces of possibility where they could articulate their different experiences of the present and wager on their imagined versions of the future" (224). Taken together, the five chapters do not constitute a single "narrative of progress" (225); instead, they illustrate the "richness of spatial signification" (16) in early women's drama.

In "Homes," Findlay argues that the country house and aristocratic household gave a privileged female elite a secure place in which to foster writing and theater. But the patriarchal household was also alienating, often being a "home" in which women felt homeless (17). Women's drama invokes the domestic scene, where they governed (especially during the Civil War) in the absence of husbands or fathers, so as to interrogate and undo (if only temporarily) the oppressive effects of a patriarchal status quo, not only in the home but also, potentially, in the homeland. "Gardens" begins with the image of the Virgin Mary as a walled garden and ends with The Pastorall (ca. 1645) of Lady Jane Cavendish and her sister Lady Elizabeth Brackley, who "create a virgin sanctuary that allows them to remain poised as authors of themselves in the privileged space of their father's garden, a paradise they do not intend to lose" (109). Venues loom large in the discussion of drama at court, where "the Stuart queens negotiated their positions as consorts" (13). Whereas Queen Anne appropriated male-created spaces such as Hampton Court or the Banqueting House "to recite and re-site queenly authority" (120), Queen Henrietta Maria created in Somerset House an alternative, female-centered venue where she and her ladies "showcased" themselves "as women with voices" (141). Chapter 4, "Sororities," tracks the abiding appeal of the convent and of Catholic aesthetics, which fostered a sense of sisterhood and the representation of utopian alternatives for women, alternatives in which "a room of one's own was replaced by the company of women" (179). Turning to city settings in her last chapter, Findlay illustrates how women dramatists and actors entered into the risky world of the market, "a commercial arena . . . of financial and cultural exchange where their increased visibility established a public presence for women" (225). While these generalizations offer glimpses of the direction of Findlay's arguments, none of them does justice to the complexity or scope of her work. Homes, gardens, courts, sororities, and cities: each of these places "offers a mass of multiple but distinctive cultural meanings" (224).

Each chapter of Playing Spaces follows the same pattern. Findlay begins by establishing the theoretical and historical basis of her analysis, deploying in new ways Elizabeth Grosz on the chora, Foucault on "'heterotopia'" (70), Baudrillard on "'the simulacrum'" (111), Bakhtin on habitus and the chronotope (146–47), and Donatella Mazzoleni on "'a culture of cities'" (183). These theorists' ideas, along with the observations of early modern commentators on homes, gardens, courts, schools, and cities, inform her exploration of the cultural significance and theatrical potentialities of various locations, such as the Great Hall of Penshurst; the gardens of...