Female Playwrights Research Articles

Sleeping Heroes, Speaking Heroines: Performing Gender Roles in the Tragicomedies of Françoise Pascal

Almost forgotten today, Françoise Pascal was the most prolific female dramatist of seventeenth-century France. Writing plays which, by placing contemporary novels on the stage, found themselves at the intersection of prose and the theatre, the past and its seventeenth-century representation, she confounded expectations for male and female writers. This article examines the theatrical worlds created by Pascal, and the ways in which gender is constructed in those worlds. On the one hand, Pascal’s selection of material marks her as a female dramatist drawing on intertexts which were written in the vernacular, and considered to have a largely female readership. On the other, by choosing to write for the stage, Pascal demonstrated her determination to be accepted in a literary field which was dominated by men. I draw on this contrast to underline the ways in which Pascal’s writings show her awareness of gender roles and the limits of those roles. By comparing male-authored intertexts of Pascal’s tragicomedies with the plays themselves, I highlight the transformations that the subjects undergo in preparation for the stage, and the impact of those metamorphoses upon the society represented on stage. Focusing on particular character types, and particularly on the young couple at the heart of Endymion, Agathonphile, martyr, and Sésostris, I examine how behaviours and attitudes are gender-marked, and investigate the contribution of these carefully constructed and nuanced gender roles to the creation of an alternate reality on Pascal’s stage.

Feminist Perspectives And Intra-gender Conflict In Tess Onwueme’s Tell It To Women.

INTRODUCTIONFeminism has over the years foregrounded a system of ideas and theories that pay particular attention to women's rights especially as these affect their place in culture and society. As an umbrella ideological concept, it designates the point of view that women's rights and opportunities have been circumscribed by social systems specifically designed to benefit men to the disadvantage of women. It operates on the belief that the negative impact of patriarchal values and practices on the lives of women is a major for most of the injustices suffered by this group of individuals. Hence, Lisa Tuttle sees feminism as ... the advocacy of women's rights based on a belief in the equality of the sexes (Acholonu 7). She further describes a feminist as ...one who is aware of and seeking to end women's subjugation in any way and for any reason (7). Simply put, feminism advocates the empowerment of women through the enthronement of their fundamental human rights. It is the agitation for parity between men and women in economic, political and social spheres of life, in the belief that women have been persistently discriminated against by virtue of their gender. This type of discrimination is assumed to have continued to inhibit their sense of wellbeing and confidence in their personal potentials.Historically, the feminist movement evolved from radical politics in the Western world-Europe and North America-between the 1830s and 1890s. In these continents, it included women's struggle for improved work conditions, remunerations and suffrages. Women won the right to vote in the United States of America in 1920 and in Europe in 1928. In outlining the history of feminism, the era of the various campaigns to obtain the rights to vote has been described as the first wave of modern feminism while the women's liberation movements of the 1970s is its second wave (David Macey 123). But today, feminism as an ideological construct has succeeded in influencing the emergence and growth of feminist literary studies, even in Africa. Feminist criticism devotes much space and time to the discussion of literary texts through the analysis of issues relating to women and gender. African feminist writers like Mariama Ba, Buchi Emecheta, Zaynab Alkali, and Tsitsi Dangarembga focus on examining the ideological basis of denigrating women and suggest ways of redressing the situation. These African female writers' creative credo is essentially womancentred and promotes change-oriented literary works.The notion that the woman's value as a human being is often tied to her roles within domesticity has been the subject of heated and often controversial debates within and outside the world of academics. In fact, the proliferation of women centred texts in recent African literature is often regarded as one means by which women intend to correct the imbalance in gender relationships. For example, many African female literary critics (Rose Acholonu, Helen Marie Umeh, Rose Mezu, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, Katherine Frank, and Mary Modupe Kolawole) are quick to pick holes in the type of delineation given to female characters in many maleauthored texts. These critics argue that, even at their best, imaginative writings by men are not accurate representations of the actual positions of women in society. In their view, nobody can best apprehend and faithfully reflect the complexities of the condition of women better than the women themselves.TESS ONWUEME AND HER ARTTess Onwueme is one of Africa's most prolific female playwrights. She obtained her Ph. D. from the University of Benin, Benin-City, and her first and second degrees from the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, both in Nigeria. She is the Distinguished Professor of Cultural Diversity and English at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, USA. Recently, Onwueme was appointed the University Professor of Global Letters, a very prestigious honour which officially makes her the solicitor and advocate for the oppressed (The Guardian, February 27, 2011). …

A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies (review)

Reviewed by: A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies Anne M. Pasero De Ros, Xon, and Geraldine Hazbun, eds. A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies. Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2011. xiv + 405 pp. In A Companion to Spanish Women’s Studies, editors Xon de Ros and Geraldine Hazbun, lecturers in Spanish literature at the University of Oxford, have provided the reader with an array of critical essays having in common their focus on Spanish women’s studies, but from a diversity of time periods, aspects, and perspectives. The editors affirm in their introduction that the collection presents a “a good range of models for scholarship and a sound insight into the main issues and recent critical debates in the field of women’s studies, showing its possibilities within the Spanish context and opening up avenues for further research” (4). As have many other studies following up on Beth Miller’s call to attention with her pioneering book (Women in Hispanic Literature: Icons and Fallen Idols, 1978), this one continues in the same direction but from a contemporary point of view, serving as a reference to and representation of important studies undertaken since, a “record of the present state of research” (22). The anthology consists of a collection of twenty-one essays divided into two sections, with the first ten articles focusing on Spanish women writers from the medieval and early modern period and the remaining eleven covering writers from the eighteenth century up to the present day. Chronology provides overall unity to the collection, rather than an emphasis on any one specific approach or discipline. Individual essays in themselves offer a variety of critical foci, ranging from literary criticism, to historical and sociological analysis, to an interdisciplinary cultural lens. Many of the contributors are already well known in the field of Spanish women’s studies and offer new, distinctive approaches: Lou Charnon-Deutsch on women and visual culture in nineteenth-century Spain, Margaret Greer on María de Zayas and “Carnal Knowledge,” Louise Haywood on “Choosing and Testing Spouses” in medieval literature, Susan Kirkpatrick on “Women as Cultural Agents in Spanish Modernity,” Frances Lannon on “Gender and Change” during the Second Republic, Roberta Quance on women artists and the “Theatricalized Self” from 1920 forward, Alison Sinclair on “Containment and Excess” in the nineteenth century, and Joyce Tolliver on “Politics and the Feminist Essay,” for example. The other authors included provide great promise as well in their innovative treatments: Andrew Beresford and Georgina Dopico-Black address the issues and problems of medieval and early modern female saints, the latter focusing on [End Page 378] St. Teresa and the “unstable body,” Nieves Baranda discusses male discourse in medieval women authors, and Mariana Masera also takes on the question of language and female voice in early lyric poetry. Difference is again the prominent question in the articles by Rosanna Cantavella, whose thesis is vindicating women through the unique figure and activities of Isabel de Villena, and Alexander Samson, who brings a fresh perspective to the age-old question of whether Spanish Golden Age female dramatists can be considered distinct. The editors themselves cross chronological boundaries in their essays, as Hazbun discusses female roles in medieval epic poetry and de Ros brings the reader up to the present with her piece on reading contemporary women’s autobiography. Going beyond limitations of word, space, and time, Mónica Bolufer examines eighteenth-century French and Spanish women writers working in translation and co-authors Helen Buffery and Laura Lonsdale focus on Catalan women writers and the “Contested Space of Home.” Also transcending a strict disciplinary focus, Carmen Fracchia considers women’s art and visual representation in the early period and Jessamy Harvey (“Spectacular Eroticism and the Spanish New Woman”) and Jo Evans (“Almodóvar’s ‘Others’: Spanish Women Film-Makers, Masquerade and Maternity”) evaluate contemporary representations of women in Spanish film. All essays include suggestions for further reading and bibliography. The collection concludes with a comprehensive and useful bibliography for the study of Spanish women’s studies over the past 35 years. In their introduction, the editors provide a helpful summary and synthesis of the study of Spanish women’s writing dating from the publication of Miller...

Una voz femenina en el teatro de mediados del XIX: la comedia de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

El análisis de siete comedias de Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda nos descubre la voz de una dramaturga valiente, inconformista, que expone sus ideas en torno a una serie de problemas que le preocupan, así se manifiesta a favor del amor sin presiones familiares, económicas o sociales, donde se pueda elegir con libertad al cónyuge, rechazando los matrimonios concertados porque sólo traen la infelicidad de los contrayentes. Respecto al papel de la mujer en la sociedad de su tiempo, censura la total dependencia de éstas respecto a los varones y critica cómo están sometidas a unos estrictos códigos de conducta que ellos les imponen, adelantándose en muchos años a las denuncias feministas.

'Descuidóse la poeta; ustedes se lo perdonen': el gracioso en las comedias de Ana Caro

Most studies on Spanish female playwrights of the Golden Age have not taken into account how their use of some of the most recognizable and conventional rhetorical devices of the Golden Age Theatre help them put their own authorial stamp on the plays from a feminine perspective. This essay focuses on the particular use of the gracioso character in Ana Caro's two extant comedias (Gaulín from El Conde Partinuplés, and Tomillo and Ribete from Valor, agravio y mujer) to analyse the way in which these figuras del donaire — usually misogynists and censors — create a subtle and paradoxical strategy to defend female writing. Rather than as an opposition, Caro establishes with her gracioso characters an identity that subtly emphasizes differences, and makes the gracioso highlight the feminine nature of the author and strengthen her public image and fame as a playwright.

<i>The Basset Table</i> (review)

Reviewed by: The Basset Table James E. Evans Susanna Centlivre . The Basset Table, ed. Jane Milling. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2009. Pp. viii + 166. $18.95. Ms. Milling aptly justifies reprinting The Basset Table in our time because of "the range of strong female roles and the play's interest in female scientific education." Unlike the editors of the only previous paperback version in Female Playwrights of the Restoration: Five Comedies, she provides useful contexts and careful annotation. Centlivre's comic formula—"Humour lightly tost up with Wit, and drest with Modesty and Air"—well describes this lively play about amusingly transgressive women departing from cultural norms. Ms. Milling's fine Introduction makes one wonder why the play did not please its first audiences more. Writing for an actors' theater, Centlivre with "theatrical savvy" recognized the talents of Robert Wilks and Anne Oldfield, whose pairing "as a sparring romantic couple" soon reached its apotheosis in Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem as Archer and Mrs. Sullen. Ms. Milling might productively have juxtaposed these very popular dramatists of the century's first decade. I wish, too, she had devoted attention to Centlivre's pairing of Wilks with John Mills as double gallants, libertine and sentimental, respectively. The Introduction effectively contextualizes Centlivre's gambling and learned women, two recurrent late Stuart stereotypes. Whether reformist or sentimental versions of the female gamester, as found in Steele's The Careless Husband or Cibber's The Lady's Last Stake, spoiled the reception of this play is difficult to determine. Examining Centlivre's representation of Lady Reveller and her gambling companions, Ms. Milling highlights the "unusual stagecraft" of the basset game and the servants' role in the opening scene (as well as the scientific discovery scene in Act 3). I do not know of another comedy which employs so effectively the material disorder associated with gambling; yet, despite this comic chaos, the play "relishes the excitement of gambling culture." Going against the grain of most reactions to Astell's and others' proposals for women, Centlivre provides a "sympathetic" portrayal of Valeria's learning and "reveals some of the economic, social, and gendered forces at work in the rise of natural philosophy itself."With Lady Reveller, the play also modifies the stage widow stereotype in the direction of a stronger female role. Following the first published edition, the text takes "a light touch, offering little editorial alteration." Ms. Milling retains most of the original spelling, punctuation, and placement of stage directions, highlighting Centlivre's use of the long dash as a performance guide. Readers can find a digital version of the 1705 text in the database Eighteenth-Century Collections Online for an even better glimpse of print culture. Ms. Milling's notes are sensible and unobtrusive. Appendices reverse the order of topics in the Introduction, beginning with "Female Education," followed by "Gambling," "Writing for the Stage," and "Criticism," and feature judicious selections by Astell, Defoe, Addison, and others. Useful additions would have been the Prologue and Epilogue to Centlivre's The Gamester, to which this play is a thematic sequel, and [End Page 83] key paragraphs from Farquhar's "Discourse upon Comedy," which parallel Centlivre's defense of their genre. While Ms. Milling includes a passage from Cibber's Dedication to The Lady's Last Stake, I wish she had reprinted part of Act 5, in which Lady Gentle nearly loses her honor as well as her game. There is one notable omission from Works Cited: John O'Brien's "Busy Bodies: The Plots of Susanna Centlivre" (2001). James E. Evans University of North Carolina-Greensboro Copyright © 2011 Roy S. Wolper, W. B. Gerard, E. Derek Taylor, and David F. Venturo

Taking the Long View

Taking the Long View Brandi Wilkins Catanese (bio) With my contribution to this forum, I hope to linger in the critical and political space suggested in the midst of Julia Jordan's passionate opening remarks from the town hall meeting that she convened with fellow playwright Sarah Schulman in October 2008. In decrying the persistently unequal rates at which women playwrights see their work produced relative to their male counterparts, she made a necessary rhetorical gesture toward a broader coalitional field, noting that "[w]riters of color are also part of everything we discuss here tonight. But women cut across all racial lines, all class lines, they write in all aesthetics, and we have so much power in our numbers that we have the responsibility to lead."1 Admittedly, this framing of women's simultaneously singular responsibility and multiple social locations risks eliding other power dynamics that also contribute to the political economy of professional theatre and deserve consideration. Nevertheless, Jordan introduced a necessary quantitative dimension into this broad appeal for women playwrights by gathering information about the recent production histories of several major not-for-profit theatres in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, which confirmed what she already knew as a working female playwright: that most of the production opportunities at these theatres were being awarded to men—a fact that Jordan sees as a reflection of a pervasive cultural bias that devalues the work of women in nearly all professional fields. With a nod to the late August Wilson, I decided to repeat and revise Jordan's question by examining the upcoming seasons for the seventy-six member companies that comprise the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), the primary negotiating entity that manages relationships between producing regional theatres and the unions that represent creative artists. While Wilson studied LORT information to condemn the lack of black member theatres in 1996, I write today to understand how these (still) nonblack theatres are participating in the cultivation of (African American) women playwrights.2 Why focus on LORT theatres, one might ask? As a network of theatres that has a reciprocal relationship with Broadway (which is understood by some measures as the [End Page 547] cornerstone of American theatrical culture), LORT member organizations offer a glimpse into the material and discursive mechanisms through which playwrights develop the national reputations that allow them to make a living at their craft. The site at which philanthropic-foundation dollars, critical acclaim, and extensive media coverage converge, major regional theatre houses are instrumental in producing playwrights whose work can be trusted, especially in difficult economic times, to sell tickets and to facilitate the exchange of cultural capital between artists and institutions. One of the perceived shortcomings of regional theatre is its conservatism, its tendency toward reproduction of the theatrical status quo (whether through staging revivals of "classic" works or through a seemingly national consensus that certain plays deserve multiple productions within one seasonal cycle) rather than fostering innovation. However, this conservative tendency might, when viewed through a charitable lens, be an economic necessity that helps to preserve institutions from one year to the next, enabling artists to believe that there is, in fact, an American theatre for which to write. Although such a rationale is no substitute for a nuanced politics of representation, the principle of continuity—or, at least, endurance—deserves some place in our consideration of what forms and methods of feminist involvement in the mainstream are most appropriate. In gathering information for this brief essay, I have not pursued a longitudinal study: this summary does not inherently reveal emerging or longstanding trends in the selection processes of regional theatres, but is instead a snapshot of the moment in which I am writing and could therefore betray time-specific idiosyncrasies of the institutions involved. Based on my retrieval of 2010-11 season announcements from LORT member theatres, it appears that there will be at least 467 productions across seventy-three member companies, of which 360 will be plays written by men and 107 by women. Of these 107 plays by women, thirty are productions of plays written by women of color, and of those thirty, twenty-five are productions of plays by...

Editorial Comment: Special Issue on Contemporary Women Playwrights

Editorial Comment:Special Issue on Contemporary Women Playwrights Penny Farfan, Special Issue Coeditors and Lesley Ferris, Special Issue Coeditors Theatre's "Dirty Secret" In 2003, the New York Times published an art news item with the headline "The Season of the Female Playwright." Splashed across the half-page article were large photos of Tristine Skyler, Julia Jordan, Tracey Scott Wilson, and Amy Freed, all of whom were having premieres of their plays Off-Broadway. The article began by describing an encounter, ten years earlier, that playwright Theresa Rebeck had with an established male director who told her: "Women don't write good plays. . . . Look at history: they write good novels, but as for plays, they just don't have the knack for it." Rebeck described this offhand comment as "the dirty secret of the American theater."1 A few years before, the Guerilla Girls, the anonymous group of feminist art activists, launched a new campaign that focused on theatre (fig. 1).2 In 2000, Sue Halpern, in Mother Jones, described the Guerilla Girls as "the queens of agitprop" and wrote about the expansion of their "anarcho-franchise to theater," and specifically about their street protest of the fifty-fourth annual Tony Awards at which the "masked avengers" passed out cards with political commentary, including the following: "Q: What do toilet stalls and the Tony Awards have in common? A: They only let in one woman at a time."3 This particular political jab referred to the absence of women directors from the awards, but a few years before, in 1998-99, the Guerrilla Girls had protested the exclusion of women playwrights by posting political stickers in the women's toilets of major New York theatres that had not produced a play by a woman that season. The stickers read: "In this theater the taking of photographs, the use of recording devices, and the production of plays by women are strictly prohibited."4 In 1999, the Guerilla Girls published a full-page ad in the Tony Awards issue of In Theatre magazine that read: "There's a tragedy on Broadway and it isn't Electra."5 In reaction to the continued lack of representation by women artists in the awards, the newly formed Committee for Recognizing Women in Theater initiated the Lilly Awards, named in honor of [End Page xi] Lillian Hellman. The first awards ceremony took place at Playwrights Horizon on 24 May 2010 with just a two-week notice. The style of the awards is decidedly different from the Tonys: there are no nominations, simply awards and recognition of a range of women artists.6 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Guerrilla Girls On Tour in their Tony Awards demonstration, Times Square, New York City (1999). (Photo: Guerilla Girls on Tour.) Arts Council Counts the Numbers According to some playwrights, the reason for the 2003 season turnaround was the publication in January 2002 of a report based on three years of research by the New York State Council on the Arts. The report, made by the council's Theatre Program, was titled "Report on the Status of Women: A Limited Engagement?" and was widely disseminated. As Rebeck [End Page xii] recalled, "Everyone read the study. . . . We passed it around like a joint."7 While the statistical findings were mixed, the message was clear: "Without a doubt, there is significant progress. But that progress has been both inconsistent and extremely slow in coming. Women have, according to The Women's Project, tripled their participation rate from 6-7% in the late Sixties through early Seventies, to roughly 20-25%, where it had been holding for at least five years. This past year [2001] saw a decline of women playwrights to roughly 16%." The report goes on to note that this "figure does not take into account that much of that 16% is accounted for by a single play, Art, by a single woman playwright, Yazmin [sic] Reza—who is not American." Beyond the significance of the statistics, the cold, hard facts demonstrated that smaller, low-budget theatres produced the majority of the plays by women.8 Flash forward five years from the 2003 New York Times celebration...

A Dream of Making

A Dream of Making Caridad Svich (bio) If the position of women in theatre seems healthy in the United States in the early twenty-first century, it is due in part to the assiduous efforts and hard work of trailblazing women who came before. While up-and-coming female dramatists today can readily look up to Suzan-Lori Parks, Theresa Rebeck, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Sheila Callaghan, Lucy Thurber, Julia Cho, Young Jean Lee, Karen Zacarias, Katori Hall, Lisa Schlesinger, Chiori Miyagawa, and many others, it is important to remember that the steps taken by these and other women in the theatre are not singular, but rather part of a complex trajectory of labyrinthian paths in which women have had to engage for many years. When I started writing for the theatre, Wendy Wasserstein was one of the few women who regularly had plays produced at major US theatres; in many a theatre season, she was the lone woman in a roster of five to six plays otherwise written by men. When I went to the public library and browsed through the stacks of plays on the shelves, the only ones written by women that I could find were those by either Lillian Hellman or the estimable and seemingly ageless Caryl Churchill. Occasionally, if I visited a library that was particularly well stocked, plays by Ntozake Shange, Susan Glaspell, Sophie Treadwell, and Mae West also materialized. The rest of the burgeoning stacks overflowing with scripts were populated by men, with central roles written for men. Imagine how I felt at the thought of even considering writing for the theatre. It seemed a dour enterprise and definitely one very much uphill. There was not a Latina playwright in sight on the library shelves at my high school or college. It was not until graduate school at University of California, San Diego (UCSD) that I encountered the works of Adrienne Kennedy, Adele Edling Shank (who was my professor), and Maria Irene Fornes, and also, along the way, plays and librettos by Gertrude Stein, Paula Vogel, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Cherríe Moraga, Lynne Alvarez, and Dolores Prida. I remember being a bit confused by the "strange" texts that were suddenly on my syllabus: plays that behaved quite differently in terms of form and content from countless others I had read (and seen) as a young adult. The confusion was offset by a somewhat secretive sense of pleasure. In these dramatists' works, there was theatrical "misbehavior" of all kinds, including an unusual attention to poetic language, the examination of women's roles in the public and domestic sphere, and a formal fearlessness I had not quite encountered before, except maybe in the radical plays of Euripides! What I felt more than anything was that I was not so alone in the world of writing plays. Certainly the fact that the head of playwriting at UCSD at [End Page 511] the time was a woman was a key part of that discovery, and although as a professor Shank was mindful to honor our voices as student writers, the fact that she exposed us to plays in print that many of us in the classroom had never heard of before was crucial to her instilling in her students an expansive grasp of what was and is possible onstage. Although Shank was a fine, sensitive teacher, I remember being drawn more and more to the work of Maria Irene Fornes. Perhaps the fact that, in a class of three playwrights, I was the only woman and also the only Latina in the graduate program had something to do with this. But I think it had more to do with Fornes's vision of theatre. Here was an author born and raised in Cuba who was writing stark, emotionally resonant plays in English—and not only English, but an acquired American English. I was taken with Fornes's work, because the themes she was exploring in her plays Mud, The Conduct of Life, and Sarita (the first three of her plays that I read) were similar to those I was already exploring in my own early works. Again, the feeling of solidarity was central...

Playing for All in the City: Women's Drama

English women's drama was crucially shaped by the city between 1660 and 1705, the period when female actors and playwrights first entered the professional theatre. This article uses selected scenes from the comedies of Elizabeth Polwhele, Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre to examine how women coped with the high-risk strategy of participating in commercial theatre and the vast circulation of trade which grew up around the City, a flamboyant sign of high capitalism. On one hand, the city represents movement, a crossroads of possibilities in which to redefine female agency. In plays such as The Rover, The Frolicks and The Gamester, female dramatists script movement across the city in a way that pre-empts De Certeau's model of ‘walking the city’ as a way for female characters and actors to inhabit public spaces of their own. On the other hand, scenes in these plays critically interrogate Raymond Williams’ classic distinction between discursive constructions of the city and the countryside in which the city's blatant expose of social and economic processes is associated with dirt. The contaminating pollution is feminised in the trope of actress, playwright and whore. Actresses and playwrights were ‘playing for all’ in more than one sense, and gambling exemplifies the risks involved for women attempting to manipulate the urban and theatrical locations that attempted to commodify them.

Redefinition of the Position of Women in Osonye Tess Onwueme's Play "the Reign of Wazobia"

Tess Onwueme is a Nigerian female playwright who is devoted to changing the position of women in her society, as her plays depicts. The Reign of Wazobia is one of such plays. The play portrays the story of women around a female character ‘Wazobia’ who rebels against the customs of her people. She articulates concern over the undignified position of women in her society; a situation which most modern female scholars view as an act of injustice meted to women in most African societies. The female protagonist “Wazobia” in the play informs the basis of our analysis. She is endowed with certain character traits that do not only portray her as deviant or non conformist in this male dominated society, but also, as a voice to the voiceless in such societies. At the end of the play, even the traditional ridden female characters, became conscious of their low status in the society and joins in the crusade against all forms of discriminations experienced by women in the society. This paper argues for the need to educate and to recognize the presence, strength and the contributions of women in societal growth. This is necessary if the women must be free to participate in nation building, beginning from the rural level; this is because, a recognition of the women’s ability is a panacea for a positive development in any society and as popularly known, two different heads are better than two of the same kind and teamwork doubles the success.

Sharon Pollock (review)

Reviewed by: Sharon Pollock Robyn Read (bio) Sherrill Grace and Michelle La Flamme, editors. Sharon Pollock. Volume 10 of Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English Playwrights Canada. xviii, 182. $25.00 As the tenth volume in the landmark series Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English, Sharon Pollock is a crucial collaborative examination of the career of one of Canada's most celebrated female playwrights. This critical collection, edited by Sherrill Grace and Michelle La Flamme, joins a handful of vital contemporary texts on Pollock recently or concurrently published: another collection of essays edited by Anne Nothof, the three volumes of Pollock's Collected Works edited by Cynthia Zimmerman, and a biography by Grace. Grace and La Flamme's comprehensive compilation of essays and interviews ranging from 1986 to the present has just one overlap with the aforementioned texts, as Craig S. Walker's essay (the sole publication on the evolution of Pollock's one-woman show Getting It Straight from a never-produced play entitled Egg) previously appeared in Nothof's collection. I refer to the book as a study of Pollock's 'career,' as Grace does in her introduction, because of what the collection achieves as a whole: it [End Page 537] contextualizes the playwright's oeuvre. By this I mean that in addition to comparative essays on the plays themselves (like that of Denis Salter), Nothof pays significant attention to the production of Pollock's work. Similarly, Rita Much reflects upon Pollock's shift from being Canada's first female artistic director of a major western theatre in the eighties (Theatre Calgary) to her involvement in the founding of Calgary's Garry Theatre in the nineties. Much's piece, which includes her interview with Pollock, is one of four in the collection in which the playwright's voice is transcribed directly and at length. It is joined by Pat Quigley's interview with Pollock concerning the Stratford Festival's productions of Walsh and One Tiger to a Hill, and two fundamental essays Pollock wrote in the early nineties that document her passion for the representation of the work of Canadians - and particularly female Canadians - in Canadian theatres. It is a collection that examines the forces both within and without Pollock's work. If several of Pollock's themes and character types may be said to reappear in her plays throughout the years (for example, as Zimmerman posits, the spectral mother from Doc), many might also be said to employ recognizable structures: they often involve role play and re-enactment (noted by Grace, among others) in order to question what has become appropriated in the recording of the past and its peoples (Nothof's second essay in the volume). Where Pollock's plays destabilize the concept that a reading of a historical moment can be absolute, the chronologically ordered essays in this volume (a structure consistent with the other volumes in this series) demonstrate the benefits of continually revisiting and reinterpreting Pollock's plays over the years, accruing multiple perspectives of her work. Thus, this collection includes readings of her two Governor General Award-winning plays, Blood Relations and Doc, that range from the psychoanalytic (Madonne Miner), to feminist/autobiographical (Rosalind Kerr), to those that read her work as historiographic meta-narrative (Herb Wyile), or that explore the work's subversion and challenge to national, dominant histories (Grace). Also, Pollock's work is examined in the context of work by other Canadian playwrights by Jerry Wasserman (in his essay on incest in Canadian drama) and Michelle La Flamme. La Flamme's closing essay on Pollock's The Making of Warriors is a crucial inclusion, as it documents Pollock's representation of indigeneity and her commitment to staging marginalized histories, while also demonstrating a concerted editorial initiative to incorporate studies of Pollock's lesser-known plays. Over the years, Pollock's work has actively teased open the fissures of historical records; she stages what is ambiguous or uncertain and strives to leave her audience with more questions than answers. These questions beg for a breadth of Pollock criticism - a call answered by this volume [End Page 538] that provides a close, but certainly not a closed, study of...

Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation (review)

{ 280 } Book Reviews perhaps too obviously a short paper on a specific conference theme. Nonetheless , even these shorter essays provide descriptive introductions to plays that are not necessarily widely known to scholars of the Ameri­ can theatre, particularly those by younger playwrights. This is an interdisciplinary volume in which interpretations of the historical and cultural past of two nations promote an understanding of how national, ethnic, and personal identities are shaped. It will interest those teaching and researching North Ameri­ can drama for the accent placed on the significance of form and the innovative approaches to plays as constructing memory, history, and identity. Barbara Ozieblo — University of Málaga \ \ Women in Irish Drama: A Century of Authorship and Representation. Edited by Melissa Sihra. Foreword by Marina Carr. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. xix + 241 pp. $74.95 cloth. On April 2, 1902, in St. Teresa’s Hall in Dublin, British-­ born and fervent Irish Nationalist Maud Gonne indelibly created the title role of Kathleen ni Houli­ han, the symbolic Mother Ireland who inspires her native sons to defend her honor by becoming martyrs for her—the Nation—in her quest for independence. Exemplifying the “overall disempowerment of women in mainstream channels of artistic expression” (9), William Butler Yeats claimed sole authorship of ­ Kathleen ni Houlihan. Scholarship, however, has proven that Lady Augusta Greg­ ory penned the majority of the play. Gregory remains the token woman represented in the canon of Irish dramatic literature, a monolithic figure of Irish drama whose undeniable contributions have nonetheless overshadowed those of other women of the Irish theatre for the last one hundred years. It is appropriate , then, that Kathleen ni Houlihan, a play for which her authorship has only recently been restored, is perhaps her most important work. The character of Kathleen, promoting feminized concepts of the nation, determined subsequent portrayals by male Irish playwrights of Irish women as icons, disavowing their lack of agency as subordinates in the patriarchy (1). Lady Gregory’s creation of Kathleen ni Houlihan (exacerbated by the hypnotic performance of the striking and influential Maud Gonne) as well as other female characters symbolizing Ireland dominated patriarchal twentieth-­ century Irish drama as the most common representation of women. { 281 } Book Reviews Certainly,as Janelle Reinelt asserts in her preface,contemporary playwrights such as Marina Carr and Marie Jones have some level of recognition, as their works have been produced internationally, and “most theatre scholars and avid theatregoers will have heard of Lady Gregory and associated her with early Irish Nationalism” (xii). However, as Reinelt adds,“few will know in any detail many of the women in between”(xii). Marina Carr notes in her foreword that ­ Melissa Sihra’s edited collection begins to name the “vanished women” (xi) and their unknown or forgotten plays. Sihra, who is interested in representation as well as authorship, proposes that her collection will further attempt “to interrogate the signification of ‘woman’ as idealized trope of nation and to look at the ways in which the works of later Irish dramatists either contests or per­ petu­ ates this legacy” (1). Sihra commissioned twelve essays by Irish academics, arranged chronologically “in order to enable the historical, social and thematic contexts to emerge organically” (11), with brief interchapters providing insight regarding the “governing of gender, sexuality and the female body . . . as encoded by both the Catholic Church and Irish Constitution” (1) that twentieth-­and early-­ twenty-­ first-­ century female playwrights observed, reported, and challenged. Eamon de Valera’s 1937 Constitution of the Republic of Ireland enshrined woman in the home, but urbanization, a booming economy, demands for equal pay and education, and the signal election of Mary Robinson as the first female president in 1990 reflect the evolving status of women since the Republic’s founding , and the fairly recent decriminalization of contraceptives (1985), homosexuality (1993), and divorce (1995)—as well as vocal demands for the legality of abortion—­ reflect the Catholic Church’s waning political power following allegations of child sex abuse by the clergy and other scandals. Sihra acknowledges that the chronological framework allows for “moments of intersection and thematic interrelationship [that] have materialized in the volume of their own accord ” (11). While not a comprehensive...

The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth Century Spanish Theater (review)

Reviewed by: The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth Century Spanish Theater Hilaire Kallendorf Robert Bayliss . The Discourse of Courtly Love in Seventeenth Century Spanish Theater. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Pp. 204. $45.00. This revised dissertation, the product of Indiana University's traditionally strong Comparative Literature Department, is arguably one of the most important comparative contributions to be made by a young scholar to the field of early modern Spanish drama in recent years. Executed within the framework of discourse analysis, it is both theoretically informed and intellectually engaging. It is well organized to the point of becoming a bit predictable (the formula for each chapter involves a section on non-Spanish courtly love intertexts, then echoes of these intertexts in Spanish nondramatic works, then discussion of a canonical comedia written by a man, and then, finally, discussion of a more "marginal" comedia written by a woman). But this author is admittedly trying to keep quite a few critical balls in the air, and he juggles them nicely. For a comparatist, the most gratifying part of the study is its rich comparative texture on multiple levels—both historical (medieval texts are juxtaposed to seventeenth-century ones) and transnational (Old French, Italian, and Spanish passages are interwoven seamlessly). Bayliss is in complete control of the three languages in question. He has clearly been impeccably trained. Another refreshing aspect of this book is that it is somewhat unusual to find such a sensitive feminist critique written by a man. This is in fact the larger ideological project of the work. I particularly like how he historicizes current scholarly debates (typically performed by male versus female scholars, both playing predictable roles) in terms of the medieval tenso, or elaborately staged courtly love debate between the troubadours and their female counterparts, the trobairitz. I only wish some of my male colleagues would start strolling down the hallway, singing to me with lutes … The introduction to this study, "Courtly Love and the Comedia as Discourse," sets up the methodology of discourse analysis as applied to these two distinct literary genres. In this section, Bayliss argues convincingly that "the variety of texts and contexts often subsumed by the label 'courtly love' suggests that it is a procrustean term exercised by modern scholars to create a tradition out of disparate texts that have been taken out of their original contexts" (13). While [End Page 521] not so iconoclastic as to deny some validity to the gran récit established by such grand old men as Denis de Rougemont and C. S. Lewis, Bayliss nevertheless makes the case that their formulation is in need of updating and nuance. In his self-described "pluralistic reading of courtly love" (14), he is cautious enough to identify three main hallmarks of this tradition that he declares to be constant: "its performative and self-referential nature, its implicit construction of ideologically determined gender roles, and its dynamic treatment of the relationship between the sexes" (14). Invoking Foucault, he reminds us that once upon a time, courtly love must have seemed revolutionary, and that the role it assumed in Western culture unfortunately became one of power, dominance, and exclusion of the female speaking subject. Now, he rightly points out that this exclusion was not absolute: in fact, he resurrects a little-known feminine tradition within courtly discourse (namely, the performances of female trobairitz) to illustrate the discursive complexity of the original courtly love scenario, not to mention its subsequent instantiations. But this brings us to his book's greatest vulnerability, and to describe it we shall have to take a short detour. Bayliss himself admits that the "engagement of male courtly discourse in dialogue by the trobairitz has only recently been studied by literary scholars; it is the monologic male troubadour tradition that exercised influence on future generations and schools of lyric poets through the early modern period" (44). Indeed, he finds himself forced to acknowledge that "widespread dissemination of trobairitz poetry … would not occur for seven hundred years" (44). The same problem may be found, likewise, on the other side of Bayliss's critical equation: namely, that extant works by Golden Age Spanish female dramatists are lamentably few and...

"For want of Clelia": Re-placing the Maternal Body in The Twin-Rivals

"For want of Clelia":Re-placing the Maternal Body in The Twin-Rivals Elizabeth Savage (bio) In his preface to the 1702 comedy The Twin-Rivals, George Farquhar speculates that the play failed in part because Clelia, the pregnant woman for whom the midwife-bawd in the play attempts to secure a husband, never actually appears onstage; he claims that spectators found "the Design … defective for want of Clelia's Appearance in the Scene" (Preface 500).1 While the midwife, Mother Midnight, is a central character in this play, mothers and midwives were both notably absent from the period's comedies in general2—an omission which stands in stark contrast to the sometimes quite lively debates of which they were the subject in the culture at large. Ironically, this dramatic lack signals the important social, cultural, and economic roles of mothers and midwives; the importance of these historical roles for women requires more compelling female characters to represent them in the period's comedy. These mothers and midwives on the stage, as a result, prove too dynamic to be easily circumscribed into the comic world that would control them at the end of the play. In this essay I argue that the power that Mother Midnight, and through her, Clelia, still command at the end of Farquhar's play exposes the risks of staging such characters, and suggests why they are largely absent from the period's comedy. Even here, the mother herself—Clelia—is a victim of a double elision: Farquhar never allows her character to appear on the stage or to speak for herself; the character who stands in for her, Mother Midnight, is played by a male actor. This double erasure of Clelia's pregnant body highlights its potential to disrupt the play's thematic and ideological closure. Instead, the midwife character—a mother to all mothers—speaks and acts on Clelia's behalf, attempting to dupe a suitor into marrying Clelia and [End Page 481] fathering her illegitimate child. Although the mother never appears on the stage, then, Mother Midnight effectively represents the corruption of all mothers; she facilitates their inherent duplicity, which threatens the patriarchal inheritance that depends upon the body of the mother for its transmission. Several critics have identified the agency and self-determination displayed by the witty heroines of comedy as crucial characteristics which allow strong female characters to avoid being entirely controlled by the male forces that attempt to contain or direct their power. Misty Anderson argues that female playwrights, specifically, exploit the conventions of witty heroines in comedy to change the very assumptions of a comic ending, and Pat Gill's study of the restoration comedy of manners argues that the wit exercised by these female characters allows them a greater space for self-determination and self-definition.3 The subversive potential of these generally more powerful roles for women becomes infinitely compounded, I argue, in Farquhar's play, which departs from typical comic fare in the person of Mother Midnight, an exemplar of female duplicity. Although she lacks the wit and attractiveness of the kinds of characters Anderson and Gill discuss, this does not strip her of her power; instead, the midwife's ability to directly and tangibly corrupt families' heirs, and through those heirs the future of English masculinity, grants her a much more threatening potential that—like the wit of the heroines discussed by these critics—cannot be shut down within the comic structures of the play. The powerful image of the midwife figure was, of course, not new, and Robert Erickson has constructed a history of the figure dating back to Socrates which shows that the midwife can serve as an overwhelmingly positive figure. However, he finds that as a rhetorical figure the midwife can proliferate negative associations, as well; most commonly, she acts as a witch and a bawd,4 and is "an enigmatic figure of mystery and power, at once strange and familiar, an uncanny creature."5 He goes on to argue that "in a sense [she is] beyond time and thus [has] a godlike status" because she mediates life and death, but is herself too old to bear children.6 Common stereotypes...

Editorial Comment

Editorial Comment Catherine A. Schuler Feminism redux—or, if Sarah Palin is the answer, what was the question? While preparing this issue of Theatre Journal over the last several months, my eye has often fallen on advertisements for theatre, film, and television in the New York Times and the Washington Post. This morning as I pulled apart the Sunday Times, I was particularly struck by an advertisement for CbS’s “Premiere Monday”: six panels featured eight male and two female actors; the male figures were prominently displayed, while the women receded into the background. In the Post, of thirteen panels advertising the new fall season, only three featured women—and Laura Mulvey might be moved to theorize their representation and reception. I then turned to the Times’s “Theatre Directory” to peruse offerings on, off, and off-off broadway. out of sixty-four entries, my quick scan revealed two female playwrights: Saviana Stanescu, whose Aliens with Extraordinary Skills was enjoying a limited run at the Women’s Project, and Leslie Lee, author of The First Breeze of Summer, which is currently in revival at Signature Theatre. Turning to the Post, I found one play by a woman, Karen Zacarias’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent, at Roundhouse Theatre. Although the film section in the Times was somewhat less grim than the one in the Post, flipping through both revealed a host of fathers and sons, men with guns, and men competing with other men for women. Judging by the advertisements, the ratio of leading men to leading women in most films is still about four-to-one—not much improvement on the typical English renaissance tragedy. Is it just the marketing, or have our representational practices really changed so little since the emergence of modern feminism in the united States during the 1960s? I never thought that I would long for a Wendy Wasserstein/Marsha Norman/beth Henley retrospective on broadway, but I am on the verge. It seems to me that women in the academy have fared somewhat better than women in commercial professional theatre. In the late 1980s, more than one senior woman warned me not to risk my career on feminist scholarship, because it was a red flag for both search and APT committees. If I were lucky enough to be hired, they insisted, I would surely not achieve tenure or promotion. Although some disciplines are more resistant to feminist and gender scholarship than others, in theatre and performance studies, some of those barriers have fallen. The proliferation of conference presentations, journal articles, and booklength studies on women in theatre, alternative sexualities, gender and performance, and performing gender suggests that in certain respects we have come a long way since the 1980s. At least a third of the articles I read for Theatre Journal have a gender component, and although, like Jill Dolan, I am sometimes troubled by the diminished presence of women in the broader study of gender, I am gratified to know that the roots of gender studies are in feminist studies. Nonetheless, the academy can still be a chilly environment for women. In my own university, women are still locked out of top administrative positions; except in women’s studies and English, the number of female full professors is small; pay inequities persist; and legal dodges pass for fairness. Although, in the interests of “equity,” our season generally includes one female-authored play, the season selection committee is often stumped after its members run through the usual suspects: Caryl Churchill, Wendy Wasserstein, and Marsha Norman. (beth Henley has long since been forgotten.) bardolatry endures, and it is still the job of women on the faculty to know the literature by women. In my youth, a prematurely optimistic Virginia Slims ad asserted, “You’ve Come a Long Way baby”—but what was the destination, and are we there yet? Perhaps the articles in this issue of Theatre Journal can help us to pinpoint our current position. The two articles that bookend this issue of Theatre Journal are at once retrospective and introspective, and the authors of both care deeply about the state of feminist critique in U.S. theatre and society. In the...

Southern crossroads: perspectives on religion and culture

The position Frances Burney (1752-1840) holds as a novelist, journalist, and letterwriter is now undisputed, thanks to reevaluations of the canon in recent years. Yet Burney was always intrigued by, and wrote for, the stage. Though only one of Burney's dramas was performed in her lifetime, Barbara Darby places the plays in the context of performance and feminist theory, challenging past assertions about Burney that were based entirely on her novels and journals. Darby maintains that in exposing the failure of such practices and institutions as courtship, marriage, family, government, and the church, Burney's dramas often exceed her novels in the depth of their social commentary. In her four comedies and four tragedies, Burney uses stage space, dialogue, blocking, and gesture to highlight the ways power is distributed among society's members. According to Darby, these plays show that the eighteenth-century female experience was dominated by physical, psychic, and emotional regulation that included bodily punishment and the limitation of personal choice. Placing Burney alongside other prominent female playwrights of the period, Darby brings to light a substantial body of work, revealing that Burney's drama was not a casual sideline to her novel writing. Frances Burney, Dramatist, expands our appreciation of the extent to which eighteenth-century women playwrights used the stage as a forum.

Latin American Women On/In Stages (review)

172 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW la relación entre el fenómeno y su entorno social. Sostiene que cualquier intento de estudiar las manifestaciones artísticas / estéticas desvinculadas de la relación con dicho entorno anulan al sujeto enunciador y reducen la complejidad del acontecimiento. De esta manera, lo liminal importa como condición desde la cual se vive y se produce arte, y no únicamente como estrategias artísticas de cruce, siendo el actor un ente liminal entre el arte y lo real. Las experiencias de alteridad que promueve contribuyen a formar nuevas posibilidades de communitas, entendida ésta como un espacio otro, una anti-estructura en la que se suspenden las jerarquías y las relaciones entre iguales se dan espontáneamente, sin legislación. La otra columna que sostiene el estudio de Diéguez Caballero es la noción bajtiniana de la arquitectónica como acto ético y la forma estética de los actos éticos. Por ello trabaja con manifestaciones artísticas que pretenden mejorar la comunidad y relacionan al arte con la protesta, con la estatización de los gestos colectivos de resistencia y con las calidades de la memoria. María Natacha Koss Universidad de Buenos Aires Milleret, Margo. Latin American Women On/In Stages. Albany: SUNY P, 2004: 263 p. Margo Milleret’s Latin American Women On/In Stages convincingly puts to rest the misconception that women have contributed little to the history of Latin American theatre. From the original corpus of 120 woman-authored plays Milleret collected for her research, the study analyzes twenty-four plays by eighteen playwrights (b.1940-1960) from the following countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Venezuela. If, as Milleret argues in her introduction, “Domesticating Drama,” the theatre constitutes a site where women have been “domesticated,” or, subjugated, then she also persuasively shows that female dramatists during the latter half of the twentieth century have made great strides in “domesticating” the theatre by making it a place where women’s spaces and experiences can occupy center stage. The plays included in this study showcase women on theatrical stages and their constantly evolving identities in different stages of life. Accordingly, the book is organized along the contours of a conventional female life cycle; Chapter 1 looks at male-female relationships during women’s formative years, Chapter 2 focuses on mother-daughter relationships during the child rearing years and Chapter 3 examines aging during middle age and menopause. Each chapter includes comparative close readings of the plays through the lens of a wide range of theories about gender from the social sciences and the theatre. In Chapter 1, for example, Milleret uses research on marriage and family and theories of theatrical space treat the themes of romantic love, sexual politics and gender bending in the context of heterosexual love relationships. She argues that plays byAna Istarú, Inés Margarita Stranger, Consuelo SPRING 2008 173 de Castro, LeilahAssunção, Sabina Berman, Estela Leño, and Thais Erminy critique patriarchal male-female relations and show how reclaiming the domestic space of the home is paramount in asserting female identity and equitable gender relations. Concepts from female developmental psychology and scholarship on the cult of motherhood in Latin America frame Milleret’s argument in Chapter 2. In this section, she scrutinizes the intergenerational mother-daughter relationship as another site of female socialization. Milleret contends that in plays with rebellious daughters by Isis Baião,Ana Istarú, Thais Erminy, and Rebecca Bowman, “patriarchal mothers” impose traditional gender roles and the mother-daughter relationship is ultimately destructive, whereas in dramas by Pilar Campesino, Maria Adelaide Amaral, Susana Torres Molina, and Diana Raznovich, older mothers and daughters find ways to renegotiate their relationship and to expand their definitions of female social roles. Chapter 3 charts new terrain by identifying a group of plays that stage the taboo subjects of aging and sexuality. Milleret studies societal messages about aging and physical appearance in works with middle-aged protagonists by Lidia Rebrij and Isis Baião, the playful search for new identities by women who refuse the sexless stereotypes of postmenopausal femininity in plays by Mariela Romero, Leilah Assunção, Gabriela Fiore, and...

Dueling Discourses: The Erotics of Female Friendship in Mary Pix's Queen Catharine

Dueling Discourses:The Erotics of Female Friendship in Mary Pix's Queen Catharine Dawn M. Goode To be free, I have no taste of those insipid dry discourses, with which our sex of force must entertain themselves, apart from men. We may affect endearments to each other, profess eternal friendships, and seem to dote like lovers; but 'tis not in our natures long to persevere. Love will resume his empire in our breasts, and every heart, or soon or late, receive and readmit him as its lawful tyrant. (Congreve, The Way of the World, II, 23-30)1 The above excerpt from William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700) reveals several of the ideologies surrounding female romantic friendship in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In an effort to persuade the wife of her lover that she is a true and loyal friend, Mrs. Marwood freely (if oxymoronically) assesses women's friendships as affected, temporary, and doomed for sacrifice upon the altar of hetero-romantic love. Admitting that she has "no taste" for conversations between women that are not male-centered, Mrs. Marwood voices the belief that women, restricted from an active participation in the affairs of the greater world, have nothing to offer each other beyond "insipid dry discourses" that hold little importance or interest for anyone. Mrs. Marwood's rejection of female intimacy's inherent value, along with the noted hypocrisy of her own behavior, reminds Congreve's audience of the long-held cultural belief that women were incapable of the sacrifice, loyalty, and passion necessary for real amitie, and as a consequence could never achieve the ideal of male heroic friendship. The fact that this assessment comes from the disingenuous and morally bereft Mrs. Marwood, however, testifies to the [End Page 37] presence of a counter-rhetoric that identified such relationships as emotionally and spiritually equal, if not superior, to heterosexual relationships. The cultural cachet achieved by female romantic friendships by the time of The Way of the World is most commonly linked to the mid-seventeenth-century poetics of Katherine Philips. Known by her contemporaries as "the Matchless Orinda," Philips claimed for women the classical and Renaissance model of male friendship in which same-sex friendship was believed to offer emotional and spiritual intimacy superior to heterosexual love. In such poems as "To my dearest Lucasia" and "Orinda to Lucasia," Philips valorized female friendship as a platonic ideal, a "meeting of the souls." Building on Philips' language of intense sentiment and passion, later seventeenth and early eighteenth-century poets such as Lady Mary Chudleigh, Aphra Behn, Anne Killigrew, Jane Barker, and Anne Finch continued celebrating female friendship, a celebration that became a staple of the eighteenth century novel.2 Prior to its much-documented place in the novel and its satirized turn in Congreve's comedy, however, female romantic friendship made its most notable appearance on the stage in the tragedies of Catharine Trotter and Mary Pix. The concurrent rise of the she-tragedy genre and the influx of female playwrights in the late seventeenth-century theater ensured a greater emphasis on female characters that revealed "a much richer conception of the character of woman" than had previously existed (Kendall, Love and Thunder 11). Pix's tragedies, Queen Catharine (1698) and The Double Distress (1701), and two of Catharine Trotter's tragedies, Agnes de Castro (1696) and The Unhappy Penitent (1701) all highlight the female romantic friendship as part of this "richer" conceptualization of the character and lives of women.3 Of these plays, it is Trotter's Agnes de Castro that provides the most idealized rendering of female romantic friendship.4 It is Pix's Queen Catharine, however, that corresponds more closely to the attitudes and values of the late Restoration theater audience. In fact, Queen Catharine, Or, The Ruines of Love can be read as the blueprint for Mrs. Marwood's pointed critique of female friendships.5 Effectively, Mrs. Marwood's speech (and Congreve's overall commentary on female friendship) is little more than a succinct rendering of Pix's more sustained assessment in the earlier Queen Catharine. For while Anne Kelley correctly states that the play is "about male power...

A Companion to Golden Age Theatre (review)

Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 157 Reviews____________________________________________________________________ Reviews Thacker, Jonathan. A Companion to Golden Age Theatre. Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis, 2007. 223 pp. JONATHAN THACKER accomplishes what few are able to achieve by publishing an original and valuable study relevant to varying levels of comedia studies. Steering clear of creating a history, Thacker pens a practical pedagogical resource that the most seasoned of professors will find simply outstanding. Not only does he provide an overview of the major playwrights and theatrical forms, he also incorporates performance studies. The variety of this volume’s content allows for incorporation into undergraduate courses on the comedia, and it should most definitely be a required text of any graduate student of the comedia. The thrust of the first half of the Companion is the examination of the theatrical roots of the genre along with the practitioners of the comedia. It commences with “The Emergence of the Comedia nueva” in which Thacker analyzes the usual cast of pre-Lopean playwrights. A novice will undoubtedly be enlightened by this overview and those that follow. The veteran, moreover, will discover pedagogical gems with each turn of the page. For example, subtle reminders about the complexities of the development of the comedia nueva show how easily one can become victim to the “simplifications of chronology” (21), thereby giving an overly general evolution of the comedia nueva when, in actuality, it is complex. These and other points will have experienced professors re-evaluating their teaching habits. The next three chapters analyze individual ingenios and their respective corpuses. As is deserved, Lope de Vega receives his own chapter. A short introductory and biographical sketch ends in a suggestion for a more authoritative biography, noting how Lope’s “myth-like status has tended to prevent scholars [. . .] from challenging naïve assumptions about him” (23). Although Thacker admits the chapter is reductive, with his mentioning of a mere forty plays (55), it does provide a nice overview by examining them. However, one begins to note the arbitrariness of modern day classifications of genres and particularly of subgenres, a topic discussed later in the volume. Thacker looks at Lope’s earlier works along with his political and peasant plays, his comedies, and his tragedies. No other dramatic corpus, not even that of Calderón, receives such scrutiny. 158 Bulletin of the Comediantes • 2008 Vol. 60 No. 2 ____________________________________________________________________ Reviews Chapter 3, “Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, and the First Generation,” considers Lope’s contemporaries, whose work “could not have developed without Lope,” but who are “not slavish imitators by any means” (56). After a detailed look at Cervantes and Tirso, Thacker provides shorter glimpses of the usual suspects of first-wave playwrights. However, a final analysis of both minor and female playwrights of this generation further enriches the volume, adding to the work’s distinctive flair. The fourth chapter, “Calderón and the Comedia’s Second Generation,” focuses most of its analysis on Calderón. Many of his plays are examined, but what is particularly valuable is the treatment of how Calderonian drama differs from that of the first generation. Not only is this change due to the dramatist, but it is also due in part to the change in performance space during the second half of the seventeenth century. Calderón’s contemporaries are discussed to a lesser degree. The final pages of the chapter strengthen the volume’s value by incorporating Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Bances Candamo into the discussion. The second half of Thacker’s Companion delves into sundry aspects of the comedia. The fifth chapter, “Staging and Performance,” makes observations about dramatic spaces, actors, and performance. The accompaniment of performance studies alongside the analysis of playwrights and their corpus sets Thacker’s Companion apart. Chapter 6, “Types of Comedia and Other Forms of Theatre,” catalogs the numerous genres and subgenres of the comedia along with the shorter theatrical forms. The final chapter, “A Brief History of Reception,” accomplishes what the title proposes. However, while the volume is amazingly free of typographical errors, Thacker misspeaks in this chapter when he attributes the operation of the Chamizal festival solely to the Association for Hispanic Classical...