A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama.

A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. By Alison Findlay. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 1999. vi + 206 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]; $49.95 (paperbound 13.99 [pounds sterling]; $19.95).

Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage. Ed. by Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 1999. vii + 270 pp. $49.95 (paperbound $19.95).

Renaissance drama, as Alison Findlay points out, is predominantly written by men. Recognizing this, she argues a strong case for starting from a focus on the historical female audience and using women's writing to supplement the absence of any direct critical commentary from Renaissance women on the plays they attended. This seems a sound project. Subsequent chapters, however, do not consistently carry it out. Female spectatorship recedes from the discussion, and women's writings are used only intermittently as a perspective on that spectatorship. Findlay examines two plays by women, Wroth's Love's Victorie and Cary's Mariam, but the study of female-authored plays offers a different trajectory from the one outlined in the introduction. Where the project announced really is pursued, as in the analysis of Measure for Measure alongside Mary Ward's writings for women in the early seventeenth century, or Epicoene alongside a selection of women's writings on the city and the market, the results are revealing; but elsewhere the approach is both less well documented and less gender-specific. The opening analysis of Dr Faustus, for example, reminds us that women read and sometimes wrote religious works, and argues that the familiar Eve/Mary binary can be used to suggest that the play may be seen as `a tragedy of knowledge which debates women's relationship to learning as much as men's' (p. 15). While this may be true, it does not offer us any very strong sense of how women's responses may have differed in specific ways from men's, and uses the playtext itself, rather than any supplementary material, to mount the argument. The move into psychoanalytic territory with the argument that Mephistopheles is `a feminized figure in that he represents lack' seems to unhinge the connection with historical spectators altogether by simply setting out along a different critical path. Chapters on female self-fashioning and on revenge tragedy as `a feminine genre' (p. 49) explore interesting territory, but the argument is mounted primarily via the plays themselves. The book ultimately fails to bring enough evidence to maintain its proposed agenda; the women's writings cited are quite simply insufficient to anchor the readings of plays within a context of contemporary female self-expression.

The collection of essays edited by Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell makes a more significant contribution to gender studies in relation to Renaissance theatre. All the essays are new, and together they illuminate a wide range of issues across a reasonable spread of plays, though with a recurrent focus on Shakespeare that does not leave a great deal of space for other dramatists. Janet Adelman's opening essay provides an important antidote to the tendency amongst Renaissance scholars to treat Thomas Laqueur's account of the one-sex model as orthodoxy. Adelman looks closely at a range of English vernacular medical treatises and finds the Galenic model not only notably absent, but subject, where present, to vigorous critique. She uses this finding not only to question broad assumptions about early modern understandings of gender, but also to contest, through brief but suggestive reference to Antony and Cleopatra, the widespread tendency to write about boy-actors as though they necessarily highlighted female absence. Anne Walworth's essay also takes up the question of oppositional constructions of gender via contemporary medical theory, demonstrating how the theatrical use of illusion to cure delusion (both in stage-fiction and in documented medical practice) exposes the ambivalence of such constructions.

Michael Shapiro's account of the advent of actresses to the English stage usefully complicates Stephen Orgel's recent work (in Impersonations) by shifting Orgel's view of England as uniquely insistent on an all-male acting profession to one that sees England simply as later than other European countries in introducing women to the stage. Shapiro also returns to the question Orgel was asking when he first began work on the subject of boy-actors in the late 1980s: `Why were women more upsetting than boys to the English?' Where Orgel's own discussion, stimulating and suggestive as it is, considers the question within a context that assumes sexual anxiety and thus necessarily loads the answers in that direction, Shapiro brings together the available evidence on actresses before and just after 1660 succinctly and helpfully, and reframes the argument in economic rather than sexual terms.

Laurie Osborne's article offers some illuminating discussion of the female playgoer. Concentrating on Love's Labour's Lost and Hamlet, she argues that Shakespeare's representations of female spectators on stage play out Stephen Gosson's concern that women in effect provoke theatricality by their presence. Her analysis shows how when men become the spectacle their female audience may be empowered by thereby becoming established as spectators, but demonstrates at the same time how compromised by issues of class and formality that empowerment is.

Other essays look at plays by women (Cary; Cavendish and Brackley), Marlowe's Dido, Webster's White Devil, and other Shakespearean plays. The book offers a range of thoughtful and stimulating approaches to gender on the Renaissance stage.

JANETTE DILLON
UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM