Male Playwrights Research Articles

Native American Female Playwrights And Their Role In Growth And Development Of Native American Drama: An Overview

The Native American Literature has its root in the form of oral storytelling tradition before Europeans arrived on Native American lands. It was then in the 18th century it developed into written literature. Early Native American writers used poetry, novel, and autobiography to express their feelings for human rights, lands, culture, sovereignty, and their community. Despite its rich legacy, Native American drama faced challenges and hardly received its recognition as a genre in later half of the twentieth century. Not only men playwrights, but also scholarly and prolific Native American women playwrights have contributed significantly to the success of Native American theatre. Their unique writing styles and contributions are equally important as male playwrights. The present paper studies Native American drama with the aim to find out the contribution of Native American women playwrights to Native American theatre and drama. The present study being interpretive and descriptive in nature hence it has applied close reading and interpretation of the primary and secondary sources.

A Critical Study on Women's Language in Indian English Drama

The function of language is associated with the verbal code. It becomes important when the verbal code itself becomes the central theme of a dialogue. Language has a key position in drama as it is, like in real life, the most important means of communication on stage. It has to be regarded as the one basic feature of drama that is related to both the dramatic characters and the action. Language in drama is represented as spoken language or, in other words, as speech. Dramatic utterances are poly functional: they can have several functions at the same time, both in the internal and the external communication system. The present paper aims to show women 's language used by both male and female playwrights and the essential rebellious spirit against the male chauvinism and talked of women's emancipation, individuality, and their socio -economic and political equality in present day society. Women performed in the earlier phase very happily to the script written by male playwrights. Though many male playwrights talked about women's issues, their presentation lacked the authentic ring of women's emotions and feelings.The women playwrights who are remembered for their remarkable contribution are Deena Mehta, Manjula Padmanabhan, Polie Sengupta whose texts have been discussed here. They have introduced new subjects affecting the feminine psyche using their language and technique.

Elizabeth Boyd's Disappearing Act: Performing Literary Legacy on the Georgian Stage

How do we trace the historical processes that grant some writers visibility and, hence, legacy, while shoving others into the historical closet? This essay offers the case study of Elizabeth Boyd (1727-1745), a novelist, poet, and playwright who has received some attention from scholars interested in women’s contributions to the legacy of William Shakespeare in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. In particular, her unperformed play, Don Sancho: Or, the Students Whim, a Ballad Opera of Two Acts, with Minerva’s Triumph, a Masque (1739) dramatizes a woman writer’s reflections on the politics of legacy at this formative moment in the history of authorship and the British theater. While the play was not performed, key scenes were later plagiarized in popular afterpieces by theater managers and playwrights Henry Giffard and David Garrick. Boyd, along with her inclusive vision of theatrical legacy as the domain of men and women of different classes, disappears in the male playwrights’ fantasies of exclusively masculine, British literary greatness. The story of Boyd’s erasure speaks to the gendered and classed exclusions and elisions in the social and economic processes by which legacy is formed, in this case, in the gendered power relations of eighteenth-century theater and its management.

Racial Discrimination and Dilemma of Colorism in Afro-American Drama

African, black, coloured, Negro, and, more recently, Afro-American, or African-American, was the most often used and accepted terminology. These phrases were included in legislation limiting people's freedoms and human rights. So, racial discrimination is one of the most discussed topics nowadays and throughout history. It means the denial of opportunity for a specific group of people. It is usually based on a number of factors, such as race, the color of skin, social class, and religion. The present research aims at showing racial discrimination and the dilemma of color in two Afro-American female and male playwrights. They are Zola Neale Hurston (1891-1960) and Langgston Hughes (1920-1967). In her play Color Struck (1926), Hurston sheds light on the problem of colorism and its effect on women. It deals with the dilemma of Emma, a young black lady whose deep color-consciousness leads to an inferiority complex under miners in her own life and future. Hughes also addresses the realistic source of conflict in Mulatto (1935), which is the color line that individuals must transcend in order to embrace each other as human beings. The study concludes with a conclusion that summarizes the findings.

All-women theatre in Saudi Arabia

The subject matter of women’s creative experience and contribution to the theatre in Saudi Arabia is challenging, as it relates to the reality of Saudi society. Women were not entitled to participate in the theatre based on the cultural and social values of Saudi society: during the emergence of modern arts in the country, its conservative society refused to allow women’s appearance on stage. The social ban resulted in an institutional ban, which made many male playwrights take the female component out of their texts. There is no doubt that, to an extent, this resulted in the delay of women’s direct involvement in the Saudi Arabian theatre and is what prompted women to take an interest in finding a theatre that suited their needs. This article investigates the appearance of the so-called all-women theatre, its successes and shortcomings, and presents an argument about the role of official and commercial venues in assisting this unique theatrical experience. It also applies a critical analysis to two plays by Wafaa Al-Tayeb, who wrote mainly for the all-women theatre: After Me, The Deluge and With a Pink Ribbon, both published in a collection in 2016. It is hoped that this article can trace most of the cultural, social and commercial aspects that shaped these plays and gave them their characteristics.

A Critical Gender Analysis of James Atu Alachi’s Enekole

Gender is a concept that has gained so much attention in the theatre today. This is due to the current agitation and turbulent struggle that women have been doing because of the oppression, mistreatment and relegation they face every day as a result of patriarchy – the culture of male domination that has secured a foothold mostly in dramas written by male playwrights. James Atu Alachi seems to be different. This paper, through the analytical approach, attempts an investigation into one of Alachi’s plays, Enekole, in order to point out the fact that there are male playwrights of this present generation that can join their creative hands with those of the female playwrights to ensure a gender sensitive and equal Africa.

Drama and Bloom's Canon

Drama and Bloom's Canon Gina Masucci MacKenzie (bio) There is Shakespeare and then all the others. That seems to be Harold Bloom's barely unspoken commentary on drama since the Renaissance. Rarely does he comment on it, other than to extol Shakespeare's greatness, and then his commentary is clipped and a bit narrow sighted. This seems at odds with one of the most important literary critics of the contemporary errors and one of the greatest explicators of Shakespeare, in any time. What is it about most drama that limits Bloom's interaction with it? In particular, what about American drama diminishes Bloom's interest and respect? In Dramatists and Drama, a book still most notably devoted to the ancient Western and Renaissance dramatists, Bloom does a respectable job of covering many of the great male playwrights of American history: Miller, Simon, Albee, Stoppard, Shepard, Williams, Wilson, Mamet and Kushner. In his last great survey of American writers, The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon, he and editor David Mikics chose only to include commentary about O'Neill, Williams and Albee. Baldwin too is mentioned, but for his novels only, not his work for stage. It seems that Bloom's work on American drama is reflective, not only of his theory, but of the study of theory as a whole. Bloom provides a limited view of the American canon. The works represented are certainly great works, but there are so few of them and he reads them as literature, which is, at best, only half of what drama is. For Bloom, drama is rarified art in the American canon, a "shining city on a hill." Whether that city shines like a Christ, transfigured in Biblical stories, or a teenage vampire lounging in the woods in a Stephanie Meyers novel, doesn't matter. What matters is the accessibility of the exalted and the path one can take to join them. The image of America as a shining city on a hill can be traced back to John Winthrop's fire and brimstone preaching to his Puritanical followers. He reminded people of the exceptional status of the American colonies. With that exceptional status, he warned, came great responsibility. The spotlight not only highlights the good being done, but also the flaws. Winthrop, in his unflinching desire to intimidate his flock, emphasizes that those in the valley will look to the hill to see greatness, but are more likely to see degeneration, if there is any to be seen. The concept of the canon mimics that same pattern. Those held up as the gods of the literature are most easily those criticized and [End Page 455] those creating the canon are subject to the same fate. Mikics' introduction to The American Canon intimates this when he write, "Bloom, a lifelong man of the left, laments the dire politics that often results from the American taste for the unfettered, God-approved selfhood: self-absorbed greed, worship of power, the cult of masculine regeneration through violence" (2019, 8). Bloom is aware of the danger of using power and position, sometimes in the guise of religion, to assert primacy, but sometimes, seems unaware that he enacts that practice. As a public intellectual with a career of influential writing that spanned six decades, Bloom himself stands in the town square of theory, in the literary city on a hill. As critics, it is imperative to see his flaws, but also to recognize his greatness. From the very limited perspective of a theorist of Modern American drama, Bloom is deeply flawed. He either consciously, or unconsciously edits out his own influence and bias, while knowingly limiting drama to its written value, all but ignoring performance. He places Eugene O'Neill, an undeniable deservedly giant figure in American drama, at its pinnacle, writing, "[Y]et O'Neill, despite his many limitations, is the most American of our handful of dramatists who matter most: Williams, Miller, Wilder, Albee, Kushner, perhaps Mamet and Shepard" (Bloom 2019, 216). Interestingly, it seems to be O'Neill's own fraught relationship with his emotional and intellectual nemesis, New England Puritanism, that same tradition which builds the city on the hill. Here...

전후 영국사회의 금기를 다룬 연극과 영화 : 쉴라 딜레이니의 A Taste of Honey 다시 읽기

This paper reappraises the dramatic implications of Shelagh Delaney’s working-class drama, A Taste of Honey (1958), from the perspectives of media-crossing, gender, and class. In the late 1950s Britain, when the female voice was rarely heard on the British stage, Delaney was notable for her use of the Kitchen-Sink format, investigating taboos (racial discrimination, fragmented family, teen-age pregnancy, single unwed mothers, and homophobia) that contemporary male playwrights had largely shunned, and placing female characters at the centre of the action. In order to reexamine A Taste of Honey and its commentary on the insecurity, patience, and resilience of a dispossessed postwar family and society, this paper compares the original stage play for the 1958 Theatre Workshop premier, directed by Joan Littlewood, with the 1961 British New Wave film adaptation directed by Tony Richardson. It is argued that this play is uniquely significant for its portrayal of postwar British lives and taboos on stage and screen, and deserves deeper critical attention, especially since the issues addressed are still pertinent today.

Attempts on (writing) her life: ethics and ontology in pro-feminist playwriting.

Does a feminist dramaturgy exist for male playwrights? The post-1990s work of British playwrights Simon Stephens, Tim Crouch and Martin Crimp variously enact an attrition between female protagonists and male writers. Appraising these "attempts on (writing) her life" requires a feminist criticality that can incorporate the unique, intersubjective relation of playwright and character. What is the gendered relationship of these actors? In the manner of Performance/Philosophy, this essay finds that Levinasian fecundity answers this call – finding a crucial space for continental philosophy in the pro-feminist movement. Drawing on the philosophical significance of “objectification”, this essay argues that ethical portrayals of gender - in Peggy Phelan’s notion of the ‘representational economy’ - bestow a responsibility upon male playwrights to explore the potential to contribute to feminist critical writing. Whether this is a matter of ontology – and the essentialism of sexual difference that accompanies such a position – is weighed against the ethics of men-writing-women.

A Stylistic Analysis of Rhetorical Questions in Feminist Plays: Female Vs. Male Playwrights

A Stylistic Analysis of Rhetorical Questions in Feminist Plays: Female Vs. Male Playwrights

Counterattack of Julie: Feministic Reading of August Strindbergs Miss Julie

Miss Julie is mostly misjudged as an anti-feminism play reiterating patriarchy especially in that the author himself claims to be a misogynist. According to Strindbergs preface to the play, he is exerting his offense against female subjectivity as far as he could; however, regardless of what the playwright intended or believed, the text itself rather subverts and criticizes traditional male-oriented society. This study will explore how Miss Julie originally purposed to trample female subjectivity wrought the counter-effect, based on textual evidences such as characterization of the main character (Julie), theatrical devices, and the ending. Before delving into the text, stereotypical representations of female characters prevalent in texts written by male authors in the nineteenth century will be presented as one of three frameworks to demonstrate how female representations in Miss Julie is different from that. Also as mentioned above, previous studies predominant views of the play will be introduced briefly. Furthermore, similarities between the play and other feminism texts will be presented as a schema to illustrate how Miss Julie can be viewed feministic. Feministic reading of Miss Julie is significant in terms of the fact that the play is written by a male misogynist playwright in the nineteenth century. It not only deconstructs another stereotype that only women are able to discuss feminism by reevaluating the male playwrights work from a different perspective but also has possibilities to resonate more. This study is expected to contribute to the academia by encouraging the values of rereading and rediscovering texts.

Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre by Brian Singleton (review)

Reviewed by: Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre by Brian Singleton Nelson Barre Masculinities and The Contemporary Irish Theatre. By Brian Singleton. Performance Interventions series. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 240. A joking remark at the book launch of Melissa Sihra’s 2009 Women in Irish Drama prompted Brian Singleton to write this book, a volume that explores new territories of Irish representations of masculinity. In addition to seeing more stories told by and for women, the past twenty years in Ireland have been characterized by the appearance of new types of Irish male. Singleton argues that Irish masculinity is described by no single narrative, but rather by a plurality of new voices spawned during the last decade of the twentieth century. The decriminalization of homosexuality, along with the shifting cultural and economic climate of Ireland before, during, and after the Celtic Tiger economic boom has sparked a theatrical creativity among men that “tears apart the notion that masculinity is a pre-ordained or fixed identity and to pluralize the construction of that identity” (3). Singleton’s book restructures the conversation on masculinity, shifting the dialogue from long-held views of Irish theatre as a stage for conventional masculinity to a space that houses a multiplicity of experiences and stories of Irish men who perform their masculinity—and “Irishness”—in nontraditional ways. Singleton’s focus is the 1990s and onward, a period characterized by significant social and political changes. The author looks at historical contexts and developments as theatre flourished well beyond the major Dublin theatres to smaller, experimental, regional companies. He introduces readers to more than seventy performances from new companies like The Corn Exchange and THISISPOPBABY and playwrights like Conor McPherson and Martin Mc-Donagh that appeared during this period, articulating how their stories and styles from the margins deconstructed traditional “kitchen sink drama,” with its patriarchal Irish values and their attendant gendered stereotypes. Singleton uses a spectrum of interdisciplinary analyses—including gender [End Page 178] performance studies by R. W. Connell and Judith Butler, the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon and Declan Kiberd, and Irish theatre scholarship from Nicholas Grene and Patrick Lonergan—to scrutinize the “canonized” representations of masculinity in Ireland. In his rich analysis, contesting the canon becomes an act of remaking the traditional subjectivities of Irish identity into variations that embrace Other masculinities that do not simply conform to the stereotypes of white, male, Catholic. Singleton begins by moving chronologically through Ireland’s theatrical history since the Irish literary revival of the early twentieth century, examining the creation and distillation of a patriarchal masculinity that dominated the stage in Ireland for nearly a hundred years. In particular, he attends to notable productions (including Garry Hynes’s re-envisioning of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars and several re-stagings of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World) that dispelled sentimental myths about a singular Irish national masculinity. Singleton argues that recent cultural trends in modern Irish society resist the pastoral idyllic or nationalistic traditions and finally join a globalized discussion of identity. Singleton is particularly strong when he unpacks the conflicted patriarchal narratives of performances like Sebastian Barry’s Hinterland and Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce. He contends that staging father/son relationships poses metaphors for Irish culture and its gendered international perception, renouncing its place under the patriarchal colonizer Britain. Here, Singleton identifies Ireland’s history of performing the masculinist social order while simultaneously staging “theatrical patricide.” He notes, however, that this move is often critiqued as the “arrested development of the son”; that is, Ireland may have killed the father, but the nation remains cyclically emasculated (61). Singleton finds similarly self-abnegating trends in monologue plays where recent male playwrights stage the antithesis of (dominant) masculinity, presenting “socially subordinated males . . . performing their own abjection in a society in which they have lost their place” (71). He notes that these personal acts of revelation fall within a much-lauded storytelling tradition, but with tales full of self-loathing, alienation, and an inability to cope with the expectations of society. Singleton argues that this refusal to perform normativity represents a major shift in Irish theatrical history...

Prostitutes, Nuns, Actresses: Breaking the Convent Wall in Seventeenth-Century Venice

While the tradition of convent theatre in various parts of early modern Italy has been well-documented, this essay seeks to elucidate the heretofore unsurveyed performance tradition by nuns in seventeenth-century Venice. Just around the corner from opera houses and carnival performances in the piazza, female monastics performed sacred and secular plays, often written by secular male playwrights and dedicated to specific nuns, before diverse audiences. the particular case of a convent for repentant prostitutes known as the “Convertite,” on the historical reality of prostitutes turned nuns-as-actresses.

Women's Contribution to the Development of Anglophone Cameroonian Drama: The Plays of Anne Tanyi-Tang

This article explores the plays of Cameroonian female playwright Anne Tanyi-Tang, arguing that they make a significant contribution to anglo phone Cameroonian drama, particularly in the representation of women and articulation of female concerns. The plays analyzed in this article reveal that, although trapped in deeply patriarchal cultures, women draw on their inner strengths and female networks to create spaces for themselves—spaces through which they attain empowerment and self-definition. Tanyi-Tang’s female characters are strikingly self-willed and independent, relying on their intellect to combat familial and social challenges. They stand in stark contrast to the stereotypical characters portrayed by male playwrights, such as Bole Butake, in whose drama women often resort to sexual favors or mischief to achieve set goals. By depicting urban women contending not only with patriarchy in all its forms, but also with postcolonial disillusionment, Tanyi-Tang infuses anglophone Cameroonian drama with a new vision, one that embraces powerful, self-actualized women and celebrates women’s achievements in the public and private spheres.

Male Violence against Women and Hybrid Identities in Post-Apartheid South African Black Theatre

Post-apartheid black South African playwrights of both sexes claim the need to destroy apartheid's legacy and construct new spaces where wo men stop suffering violence at the hands of men and where they are not discriminated for being exponents of hybrid identities. However, since wo men are the central characters of the plays by both male and female play wrights, it seems evident that black wo men are portrayed as indisputable agents of social change in contemporary South Africa wh ile demanding men's imp lication towards reaching the same goal. Therefore, this essay will analyze the pivotal role o f contemporary b lack wo men p laywrights in creating audience awareness geared towards social change; the depiction of black wo men's main concerns on suffering male abuse and violence and society's racist discrimination; and the ensuing struggle of black wo men to find their o wn space and dignity as women wh ile asserting their identity as exponents of a new hybridized society in contemporary South Africa.

DECONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY: Works of Korean Male Playwrights around 2000: Yoon Dae-sung, Jang Jung-il, Park Keun-hyung, Yoon Young-sun-

DECONSTRUCTION OF MASCULINITY: Works of Korean Male Playwrights around 2000: Yoon Dae-sung, Jang Jung-il, Park Keun-hyung, Yoon Young-sun-

‘Death never used to be for the young’: Grieving Teenage Murder in debbie tucker green's random

debbie tucker green is the most high-profile Black British woman playwright of the first decade of the twenty-first century, with productions of her plays seen at mainstream London venues including Hampstead Theatre, Royal Court, Soho Theatre and Young Vic. Her innovative voice moves away from the explicit concerns with identity and diaspora of predecessors from the 1980s and 1990s, to address issues of global significance in the world today. These include poverty, child soldiers and the Aids crisis in Africa, female sex tourism, domestic violence, sexual abuse and incest. This article explores how random (Royal Court, 2008) stages a poignant response to the epidemic of teenage knife murders in London in 2007 and 2008. Using analysis of the text, the production and theatre critics’ reactions, I demonstrate how tucker green's focus on the grief of a family affected by the murder of a child provides a unique perspective distinct from representations of similar themes in plays by Black British male playwrights. random is narrated primarily through the perspectives of the black female characters, epitomising tucker green's tendency to place (black) women at the centre of plays that deal with urgent themes in the contemporary world. I argue that, whilst women's perspectives are paramount, the narratives also incorporate strategies that imply a broad collective social responsibility for eradicating violence and abuse, and show how her unique writing style foregrounds her successful presence in mainstream contemporary British theatre.

Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat by Stephen Miller (review)

MLR, 98.4, 2003 967 sentiment, a mode largely underwriting conventional patriarchy, with farce, usually eschewed by established male playwrights for reasons of finance and prestige, but offeringopportunities to ridicule postures and absurdities; her ambivalent refutation of accusations that the play was 'political'; the use of orientalism as a perspective on imperialism, national identity,and sexual politics. The problem is that the choice of subjects seems arbitrary and their connections are overstretched. Bolton frequently prologues, recapitulates, restates her programme, draws in more characters, but this has the effectof complicating every section. The book refuses either the satisfaction ofa simple moral tale, or the charm of a discursive narrative. Guildhall School of Music & Drama Diana Devlin Three Deaths and Enlightenment Thought: Hume, Johnson, Marat. By Stephen Miller. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press; London: Associated Uni? versity Presses. 2001. 219pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8387-5481-3. Stephen Miller's intention in this book is to look at 'three main currents of Enlight? enment thought that are implicit in the deathbed projects of David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Jean Paul Marat'?respectively representing, in Miller's words, 're? formist and moderately hostile to traditional religion; reformistyet strongly in favour of traditional religion; and transformist [. . .] and strongly hostile to traditional reli? gion' (p. 9). Explicit in this 'project' is the wish to provide a focus fora wide-ranging comparison of the expressed views of a series of Enlightenment figures, including Adam Smith, Burke, Paine, Priestley, Richard Price, Gibbon, and Rousseau, on the significant issues of late eighteenth-century thought: religious and political freedom, authority and subordination, luxury, commerce, patriotism, scepticism, tradition and the past, and the nature of human goodness. Here are the books strengths, and its weaknesses. The wide-ranging comparison, while hardly breaking new ground (indeed, the constant fillingin of contextual infor? mation comes up with a sequence of commonplaces, including the information that 'Paine assumed Burke would look favourably on the French Revolution because Burke had befriended him and had supported the American revolution' (p. 149)), neverthe? less makes interesting reading and also underlines some of the ironies of coinciding views. Johnson and Hume, forexample, while finding each other personally offensive and, respectively, fanatical and dangerous in terms of religion, still held closely simi? lar opinions on a significant number of major contemporary issues, including luxury, labour, money, patriotism, and slavery. As a review ofEnlightenment thinking through several of its leading intellects, then, the book is useful, and economical, and readable . However, the focus through the three deaths, while superficially attractive, fails to hold up, not least because it is very difficultto accept Miller's claim (it is one that even he finds himself faltering to sustain) that each figure, in dying, is undertaking a 'deathbed project'. While acknowledging that Hume was concerned to 'face the prospect of death serenely' (p. 45) and without recanting on his views, and that John? son's frequently expressed terrorat the prospect of dissolution made his approaching demise a matter of public fascination and personal anguish, to describe these events as 'projects' sounds a distinctly wrong note, both an overstatement in terms of an individual's capacity forpresentational pre-planning and an understatement in terms of emotional involvement in the imminence of one's own death. Of Marat, moreover, while he was an ill man, he was not actually expecting death, and while his agreeing to see Charlotte Corday was indeed part of a plainly political project (' "Good," replied Marat a minute before he was murdered, "in a few days I will have them all guillotined "' (p. 123)), itwas by no means one that had any connection with his own death. 968 Reviews Miller himself asks: 'How seriously did Hume regard his deathbed project?' (p. 63); he concedes that 'Marat did not have a deathbed project but his reason for admitting Corday can be called one' (p. 123); and he provides the evidence that Johnson did not think deathbed scenes should be taken seriously. If these undermine the seriousness of his own project, they also point to a certain lack of attentiveness to the propriety of misusing individuals' deaths as a way of organizing an essay on Enlightenment think? ing. Charlotte Corday, whose act made Chapter...

Female playwrights and eighteenth-century comedy: negotiating marriage on the London stage

Misty G. Andersen. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York and Hampshire UK: Palgrave, 2002. x + 262 pp. ISBN 0-312-23938-6. Cloth. $55. Indexed. Dust-jacketFunny women on the London stage usually steal the show. Misty G. Anderson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and co-editor with John P. Zomchick of the journal Restoration, has written an important book on four successful English women playwrights of the Restoration and 18th century who evidently were funny and surely wrote funny. Over six chapters supported by 27 pages of endnotes and a 16-page bibliography, Anderson shows that her small cluster of women dramatists cleverly exploited the comic potential of contemporary marriage law and social beliefs about marriage, while also layering into their scripts bold feminist commentary on women's constraints in early-modern English law and society. Playgoers, one imagines, would leave the theatre both delighted and instructed. What they viewed on the stage would have the requisite comedic response, but there was also an intellectual impact; for behind the play's artifice, laughter was balanced by troubling questions about the conduct of real life.The principal strength of Anderson's inquiry is its economy and manageable focus. Her subject is four English women playwrights-Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald-who collectively achieved prominent commercial success during a 130-year timeframe, 1670-1800, as entertaining yet astute commentators on English marriage law and English marriage conventions. Wisely benefiting from the spadework of Lawrence Stone, Susan Staves, et al., Anderson has assembled an exposition on a complex social and legal subject, which she smartly approaches from a comedic angle. And how refreshing is this, especially against the humorless and severe feminist essays of Anna Maria Van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Poulain de la Barre, Mary Astell, et al. Anderson's focus takes readers to a lively comic literature on women and marriage, an approach which makes her overall treatment all the more readable and entertaining. As Anderson writes at the outset:These playwrights and their heroines measure the disparity between idealized marriage narratives and the real circumstances of characters in history through the gendered scripts of comedy. They found in comedy a narrative where the economic future, erotic possibilities, and public visibility of women merge, and they were able to engage generations of theatergoers in their versions of that story... .1 treat comedy both as a generic market that describes a story about marriage and as a designation of a performance that the audience expected to find funny. My study examines the relationship between comic closure, which tends to be predictable, and comic events, where the more-local jokes and comic conflicts of the comedies play out. (1,2)Surprisingly unmentioned by other reviewers of this book is the perhaps understated motif of women's career formation at this time as public figures in the London theatre market. This was a new role for women writers, one which left them fully exposed and vulnerable to comparison with some of the best male playwrights in the early English theatre. Yet, in addition to the commercial success of Katherine Philips during the early years of the Restoration, Andersen's four women playwrights (especially Inchbald) did handsomely well on the boards for a time, and their plays have seen an energetic revival in recent years for new generations of theatergoers.Of Andersen's six chapters, four merit special attention. In Chapter Three, whose title, You Irreplaceable You, bows to a musical classic of 20th-century ballad repertory, Anderson considers Aphra Behn's comedic representations of marriage in four commercially successful plays: The Rover, The Emperor of the Moon, The False Count, and The Feign d Courtesans. …

HAGHER AND WOMEN': A GENDERED EXCURSION INTO AISHATU AND ANTIPEOPLE

Recent Nigerian drama of ideological concerns bring to the fore issues of women-centredness. This means that plays by male and female playwrights often delimit themes that portray the strengths and weaknesses of women in texts. Iyorwuese Hagher made his entrance into the Nigerian theatre scene many years ago. This means his focus in his dramaturgy is an all-embracing one, where the ideology of women-centredness is concerned. His plays AISHATU and ANTIPEOPLE reveal identity themes that are engendered. This gendering of playtexts is not a recent phenomenon where Hagher is concerned. The women in both plays are women of flesh and blood or real women we encounter everyday on the streets. They are not imaginary women, rather we experience them in interpersonal relations that leave them dispossesed of the initial strengths and the opportunities they had. Therefore, this paper evolves a gender stance from a reading woman .Any alternative from a masculinist stance may present further openings to the texts. (Humanities Review: 2002 2(1): 22-29)