Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance and Society, 1790-1840 (review)

Abstract

Theatre has always represented a curious loophole for ambitious women. It is multi-faceted as an art form, and consequently has many component tasks. This adds up to both more surface area and greater permeability. Women emerge in Catherine Burroughs's distinguished collection as performers, playwrights, managers, critics, and translators in the theatre of the Romantic Period. There is a canny resilience to the way they position themselves in and about theatre and also to how they disappear from the premises when the scrutiny turns hostile. Or, in extraordinary moments, they stand their ground. In an essay by Katherine Newey, we are asked to see women's work in the theatre of this period as part of a dialectical process, a live discussion in which they were speaking back to their culture and shaping it even as they threaded their way through its judgments and restrictions. A palpable sense of women mobilizing themselves through theatre into the public space of debate underpins this entire book, giving it vitality and freshness. We have passed the point of recovery; we know from the accumulated work of scholars over the past two decades who these women were. We are now in a position to try to understand what they were saying.