Women on Stage in Stuart Drama.

Raber, Karen

Women on Stage in Stuart Drama, by Sophie Tomlinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2005. Pp. xii + 308. Cloth $96.00.

For so many years, scholars of English Renaissance drama accepted the proposition that no women performed on stage until the Restoration and when they did appear on English stages, it was assumed their advent was the direct result of English exposure to female actresses in Europe during the Interregnum. Sophie Tomlinson's Women on Stage in Stuart Drama provides a significant and well-argued addition to feminist qualifications to such a narrow view of women's participation in, and influence on, pre-Restoration theater. As Tomlinson rightly points out, Restoration actresses were not a break with tradition, but the logical completion of a process started in the early Stuart courts: as she notes, "women's increasing cultural visibility" led to concern "with issues of liberty and civility that derive from a sympathetic interest in female selfhood" (3); the "sexual realism" and fascination with women's wit and ingenuity on the Restoration stage can trace its origins to Jacobean and Caroline developments in court masques and stage plays. In other words, rather than investing in historical rupture, this study emphasizes continuity, and draws the reader's attention to overlooked aspects of seventeenth-century performance in order to prove its case.

Tomlinson begins with the court masque as it was transformed by the early Stuart queens, Anna of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. The ability of masques to create performance out of non-speaking gesture, costume, symbol, and even silence itself made it a flexible instrument adaptable in promoting "radical sexual and political alternatives" (45). From the start, then, Tomlinson invites us to think more broadly about "acting" that is not limited to the standard devices and performance styles of the public theaters: dance, facial expression, physical postures, approval of scripts, movement and lack of movement, singing, the use of props and scenery--there are myriad ways that "acting" happens in Stuart dramatic environments. In a second chapter, Aurelian Townshend's Tempe Restored (which featured a female singer/actress), Walter Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise (performed by Henrietta Maria and her court ladies), and Milton's Comus provide evidence of an emergent "female voice" in the pastoral; as divas, diplomats, sirens, and sage virgins, women are accorded a range of roles that promote an important "debate about female performance" (52) that ultimately makes the appearance of professional actresses inevitable.

In subsequent chapters, Tomlinson questions the definition of a term like "actress" by insisting that female characters in Stuart theatrical comedies and tragedies should be read as such: rather than obsessing about the male body within the costume, Tomlinson asks what effect the characters themselves had on cultural beliefs about women as actors. Analyzing Jonson's The New Inn, Shirley's Hyde Park, and William Cartwright's The Lady-Errant, Tomlinson finds that women's "shifting"--"moving from one state to another" (85)--casts them powerfully as theatrical catalysts, often in the interests of arguments about liberty, marital civility, and even intellectual or sexual fulfillment. Caroline tragedies like Ford's Love's Sacrifice and The Broken Heart explore women's subjectivity, especially as it is riven by conflicts over appearance and actual feeling; the same requirement--to put on a show for others--that makes women chameleon actresses in the comedies, leads to madness and destruction in the tragedies. In either case, however, women as actresses is a consuming theatrical obsession.

To account for performance during the Civil War and Interregnum before she turns to the women writers who benefited from "new opportunities for women" that were generated by the "rupture" and discontinuities in public theaters during that period (156), Tomlinson includes an "interchapter" on the siren appeal of song. Women's singing is a sub-theme throughout the volume, but here it steps center stage in Davenant's Siege of Rhodes, which draws on the musical culture of the Royalist elites. Concluding chapters on Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips emphasize continuities both with an earlier court performance environment and conventions, and with the emerging place for women on public theatrical stages during the postwar years. Tomlinson returns to the much-cited account in Cavendish's work of her encounter with a woman actor on the Continent during her exile to begin her analysis of Cavendish's theater of the imagination, in which women can act, wittily, agilely, and to the good of all. Contra Catherine Gallagher, Tomlinson argues that Cavendish's theater of the mind is all about self-projection, not merely "self-withdrawal" (176), and so is enabling to female performances of all kinds. Her treatment of Katherine Philips also works slightly against the grain in dealing more with the character of Cleopatra than with that of Cornelia in Philips's translation of Corneille's Pompey. As elsewhere, Tomlinson insists that we link the creation of a literary persona like Philips's "Orinda" (through which she was able to "exercise her literary gifts with impunity" [202]) to other kinds of performance, like that of a commanding, heroic character within a closet drama.

Tomlinson's work, despite its importance to feminists and critics of the drama, does suffer from some drawbacks. It is at once too narrow and too broad in different aspects of its research and argument: too narrow, because it does not offer an overarching, fully theorized account of all forms of performance (including nonelite) in which women engaged, and too broad because so much of its argument is created through lateral accretions. Because Tomlinson includes a much-neglected form of performance like music, she begs the question how other forms of "performance art" that cropped up shortly before the war and during the Interregnum would also have contributed to the acceptance of women as actors--in other words, why isolate singing from other dramatic skills like public declamation, street performance, political demonstrations, nontheatrical cross-dressing, and the like? Without blaming Tomlinson for these gaps, it is still possible to say that her work points out the need for another kind of project, one that more completely and complexly deconstructs the apparent boundaries between types, locations, and expressions of dramatic performance, in order to give us a better vocabulary for talking about "performance" in all its registers during the seventeenth century. Tomlinson's is a step toward such a project rather than the final result. And because the occasional female artist noted in Tomlinson's study is decidedly non-elite, the volume sometimes seems to invite further attention to class and social status in determining these various expressions of performance arts (hence, perhaps, the choice of singers who bridge class divides rather than highlight them), while it consistently steers away from such issues. This again suggests a more complete account is possible. At the same time, Tomlinson often argues via addition and analogy: many moments in her readings are compared to moments in a huge variety of other plays (with language like "this may remind us of ... " or "we can see echoes between ... " and so on), sometimes without enough clarification of the differences between them. This tends to work against her view of historical continuity, since all the evidence begins to look like all the other evidence; nor do these analogical readings often add much to the final analysis. The project does succeed, however, in its main purpose of making connections between pre-and post-war Stuart culture, convincing us that for women, at least, a slowly growing set of images, practices, and ideas were inexorably opening the way to their full representation, in the flesh and in spirit, on the theatrical stage.

Reviewer: KAREN RABER