Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage by Misty G. Anderson (review)

Abstract

170 Reviews unsurprisingly, 'Signs of Pope are nowhere' (p. 40). At its most worrying, we find a sequence of neat misreadings of eighteenth-century texts, enabled by a sequence of subtle misquotations. This process begins with Vermeule's account ofJoseph Wright of Derby's painting Three Persons Viewing 'The Gladiator' by Candlelight, where it simply strains the evidence of our own eyes to claim that 'the rationalist elder statesman or merchant [. . .] has arranged his two hands in a pose that mimics that of the gladiator', so that the discussion can, through comparing the significance of hands, conclude that the painting is 'an allegory ofthe ways thatpeople resist each other's pressures' (p. 26). His gloss on Pope's 1705 letterto Wycherley, too, does not quite reflectwhat Pope actually wrote; on the contrary, Pope seems to be going out of his way not to call Wycherley 'a tree past bearing' (p. 76). Again, in his sequence of remarks on acting, during the Hume phase of the book, Vermeule quotes Lichtenberg's description of Garrick playing Hamlet. Here he turns Lichtenberg's observation of the audience's silent anticipation of the appearance of the Ghost, 'as quiet, and their faces as motionless, as though they were painted on the walls of the theatre', into their 'awareness' ofthe actor's 'tricks' simply by citing the line after the description of Garrick's 'prolonged backward stagger' when the Ghost does appear (p. 175). The letterhas ample material to allow for discussion of naturalism and artifice without thus slanting the evidence. The book is not without interest, or ingenuity, or range, or learning, but it is oddly conducted and often oddly stated, as oddly, for example, as this conclusion to Vermeule's long chapter on the Life of Savage: In the introduction to this book, I proposed that Johnson's text raises certain questions about the moral life: What can we do to be more moral? [. . .] Johnson's exploration of the limits of sympathy and moral command delivers good news and bad news. The bad news is that there is nothing special we can do to be moral; the good news is that as reciprocal altruists we already are moral. (p. 153) University of Northumbria at Newcastle Allan Ingram Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. By Misty G. Anderson. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. x + 262pp. ?35. ISBN 0-312-23938. Misty Anderson offers close readings of the popular comedies of Behn, Centlivre, Cowley, and Inchbald, tracing their comic strategies as they respond to changes in marriage law. She draws attention to the inconsistency between comic events manipulated by the heroines and comedy's final closure of marriage, in which the identity of women is subsumed into that of their husbands. Feminist criticism has found comedy a rich source for the exposure of inequities in the lives of women, and Anderson's work complements Audrey Bilger's examination of female comedy in the novels of Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen (LaughingFeminism: Subversive Comedy in Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998)), and the work on nineteenth-century women dramatists by Catherine Burroughs (Closet Stages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977) and (ed.) Womenin British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, iygo-1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)), Ellen Donkin, and Tracy Davis (Women and Play writing in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. by Tracy C. Davis and Ellen Donkin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)). However, Anderson emphasizes that her readings show these dramatists exploiting comedy's potential for dissenting points of view that 'do not entail radicalism' (p. 203). MLR, 99.1, 2004 171 Two introductory chapters lay the foundations for her readings. The firstgives a chronological account of theories of comedy, a narrative spanning Aristotle to Northrop Frye and beyond, wittily branded 'a shaggy dog story'. Anderson's own work is set in the context of the feminist 'insights' of Barreca, Walker, and Gillooly; and introduces the theories of comedy of her four subjects. Her second chapter documents marriage and contract law and relevant cases in the period, acknowledging Susan Staves's work as providing the iegal framework' (Susan Staves, Married Women's...