Karen Raber. Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class, and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama.

Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2001. 338 pp. bibl. index. $49.50. ISBN: 0-87413-757-8.

It is fair to say that if early modern women had not written closet plays, the resurgence of critical interest in the genre over the past twenty years would not have occurred. Karen Raber has been at the forefront of this critical movement, and the publication of her book--the first monograph on early modern women's closet drama--is a timely distillation of feminist scholarship on these plays. More importantly, it is the first attempt to offer a coherent account of closet drama as a counter-tradition to the commercial stage.

Raber's book puts a premium on difference: the closet drama, she argues, was a "determinedly nontheatrical" genre (255), a form of play which was understood by those writers who used it as an alternative to the public stage. Raber insists on the existence and significance of this distinction in mapping the various uses to which closet drama was put over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: to shore up the validity of conservative social hierarchies at the turn of the century; to articulate cultural continuities amid the ruptures of the civil war period; to affirm or reject the ideology of monarchy at the Restoration. In each of these settings, Raber posits an operative distinction between closet and stage drama that made the nontheatrical kind of play available to appropriation by elite groups who were in various ways disempowered. Against this social and political backdrop, Raber argues that gender played a crucial role in distinguishing what a male or female writer was able to accomplish in the genre: while men dealt with the implications for the aristocracy of changes in social and political organization, quite often through ultraconservative depictions of domesticity, women writers capitalized on revolutionary moments to redefine women's roles in social and political organization, including the role of women's speech in the public sphere.

Raber's analysis of the difference in representations of domesticity between male and female writers is completely convincing. She pairs women's plays with those of their male contemporaries: thus, Mary Sidney's Antonie is read side by side with Kyd's Cornelia; a reading of Greville's Mustapha serves as a transition from Sidney to Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam; Killigrew and Cavendish are thoughtfully read together as aristocratic exiles; and, in a brief but intriguing conclusion, Katherine Philips' accommodation of the stage and closet is contrasted with Milton's absolute rejection of theatricality. Through careful, detailed readings of the plays in question Raber reveals that the women writers did, as a group, engage in a kind of feminist critique that is strikingly absent from male-authored closet plays. While Raber judiciously avoids arguing for closet drama as a coherent female dramatic tradition (which it was not), she succeeds in isolating gender as a "dramatic difference" in the groups of plays to which these women's works belong.

Less successful, if no less provocative, is the argument that closet plays were by definition situated in opposition to the commercial stage. Raber erects this distinction in an attempt to isolate the role of class in the production of closet drama, but in doing so she unnecessarily simplifies the cultural continuities between closet and stage plays--continuities that can be traced among groups of writers (Kyd and Daniel both wrote closet and stage plays), among forms of publication (the appearance of closet drama in print is not unlike that of many published theater plays), among patrons (the Herberts, most importantly), and among readers (there is no evidence that closet plays were positioned any differently in the culture of reading than plays with a performance history). Rather than undermining the validity of Raber's overall project, these continuities between the literary and the performative suggest that the kind of social and political intervention women playwrights sought to make might best be understood as integral to early modern theatrical culture more generally. Raber's book is thus a crucial first step in placing women writers in dialogue with the commercial theater, a dialogue that can--in future studies--realign critical and historical perceptions of professional stage drama no less than women's closet drama.

MARTA STRAZNICKY

Queen's University