The two books reviewed in this essay are recovery projects that engage in methodological innovation in order to meet their feminist goals. Helen E. M. Brooks's Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage crosses over disciplinary boundaries for a historically grounded reading of actresses, whereas Fiona Ritchie's Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century expands upon what counts as evidence in literary study. Both books are satisfyingly feminist as well as being good examples of the best kinds of work in eighteenth-century theatre studies.
Brooks points out the tendency of feminist work to reduce the ragged outline of domestic ideology to a monolith, thereby relegating actresses to transgressive versus normative binaries. Her historical narrative is deliberately uneven and irreducible to a clear, developmental arch. Brooks describes her methodology as “speculative” (9), that is, reading together sources that are rarely studied in conjunction because they belong to different disciplines in order to construct histories of subjects, including women, difficult to find in the archives.
Chapter 1 investigates the economic status of actresses. Although certainly suffering from a gender gap, actresses could earn substantial salaries, and even the middling range could claim wages that were above average for other types of labor open to women. Brooks makes a strong case for actresses as businesswomen who emerge as members of a growing class based on wealth rather than birth. In Chapter 2, “Playing the Passions,” Brooks combines a close reading of the she-tragedy Jane Shore with eighteenth-century theories of acting and commentaries on actresses to point out a contradiction in female theatrical performance: women were understood as unable to control their passions, yet the actress's success in theatrical representations of the passions depended upon an exceptional degree of control. Positioning the female performer between a one-sex model that resists binary gender and an emergent two-sex model, Brooks shows us how the actress demonstrated her supposedly masculine professional control even as she acted out the feminine loss of that control. Brooks does not seek to resolve this contradiction, but rather sees it as part of the actress's performative power.
Chapter 3 on actresses playing male characters also leans on Thomas Laqueur's historical narrative of one- versus two-sex models. Brooks insists on the intermittent dominance and simultaneity of these models, but nonetheless her history of breeches roles, from Charlotte Charke to Dora Jordan, narrates a shift from “playful” approaches to gender supported by the one-sex model to a disciplinary regime of binary, oppositional, two-sex gender (82). This insistent regime, Brooks argues, increasingly excludes what she calls, borrowing from Eve Sedgwick, a “camp recognition” of gender travesty (90). Brooks excepts Jordan's 1797 performance of Sir Edward Bloomly in Cheap Living: in this case, the performance of boy—not man—complicates the oppositional model of gender without directly challenging masculinity's power.
Brooks analyzes Jordan's and Sarah Siddons's public images and theatrical performances as productions of an illusory perfect alignment between inner self and outward performance. She grounds this style of theatrical performance in acting theories of the period and shows us how these two artists—one known for comedy, the other for tragedy—developed “techniques of sincerity” (102) that cut against the perception of actresses and women in general as duplicitous. Both actresses cultivated an “authentic theatrical signature” that caused audiences to view their aesthetic performances as “natural”— as “expressions of their true selves” (109). The “authentic” (109) performances of these two actresses had implications that went beyond the stage: “in cultivating this impression of a coherent, stable, and authentic subjectivity through the exclusion and suppression of contradictory elements, they also revealed the tenuousness of the sincere, authentic subject itself, exposing it as an unavoidable product of artifice” (115).
A final chapter on how actresses incorporated maternity into their professional personae starts with the familiar story of Siddons's use of her children as justification for her professional ambitions. But Brooks complicates our picture of what maternity meant to actresses. Maternity “was not a monolithic identity but a contested term which was continually being reinvented” (131). Women like Siddons did not see their theatrical work solely as maternal duty, but as the source of pleasure and satisfaction as well.
Fiona Ritchie's Women and Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century narrows its focus to women's contributions to the canonization and worship of Shakespeare, while widening its range beyond actresses to include audience members and critics of Shakespearean performances and texts. Ritchie begins with the impact of women acting, starting in 1660, on adaptations of Shakespeare in the form of expanded and added female roles. She also points to the first essay on Shakespeare as the work of Margaret Cavendish, and looks at the theatre attendance of Elizabeth Pepys, as much a fan of the stage as her husband. Chapter 1, “Actresses in the Age of Garrick,” examines the careers of three actresses, Hannah Pritchard, Catherine Clive, and Susannah Cibber. The success of Pritchard and Clive was grounded, Ritchie argues, in their performances in the 1740–1 revivals of As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice, plays that included cross-dressing parts to which the concurrent rage for Peg Woffington in breeches contributed. Much of Ritchie's evidence for the success of these two actresses is financial as well as critical or autobiographical. Noting that the figure of David Garrick tends to overshadow the careers of women who performed with him in the Shakespearean revivals, Ritchie cannily turns to records of performances, benefit nights, and salaries to assess the success of Pritchard's and Clive's Shakespearean performances. To counter the Garrick-centric bias of theatre history is to change how we think of evidence.
Chapter 2 on Charlotte Lennox and Elizabeth Montagu similarly displaces Samuel Johnson from the center of the world of Shakespearean textual criticism. Ritchie defends Lennox's Shakespear Illustrated as the first detailed source study of the plays, positioning Lennox's much-maligned criticism of the plays within the standards of French neoclassical criticism and seeing Lennox as negotiating between current standards of learnedness and a critical appreciation for Shakespeare's “naturalness” (65). Montagu, Ritchie argues, fares better than Lennox in the wave of Shakespeare worship that came after the midcentury because she aligned herself with British nationalistic pride and anti-French criticism. Montagu also, unlike Johnson, grounded her moral criticism in performance rather than reading. She contributed to a critical focus on character as a vehicle for audiences to connect affectively with the plays' moral messages, expanding the importance of character criticism in literature and culture.
The following chapter, “Theatrical Women Respond to Shakespeare,” looks at the critical and editorial work of Elizabeth Griffiths and Elizabeth Inchbald, two professionals who acted in plays and wrote for the theatre. Griffith's The Morality of Shakespeare's Drama Illustrated (1775) and Inchbald's commissioned headnotes for Longman's The British Theatre (1806–9) bring their authors' knowledge of theatrical performance of Shakespeare to bear on his plays. Following Montagu, the morality of the plays, as well as character, are central to both writers. Their assessments, however, are filtered through the imperative for clear, effective performances. In the case of Griffiths, this imperative leads to footnotes and textual emendation; Inchbald directly discusses different actors' performances. Ritchie sees their work as consolidating a tradition of women writing about Shakespeare that fuses textual with performative concerns.
Chapter 4 on the respective acting styles of Jordan and Siddons in their most famous Shakespearean roles complicates the image of Jordan as a comic and Siddons as a tragic actress. In fact, contemporary accounts of their performances, along with the actresses' own reflections on them, suggest that both drew on mixed conceptions of dramatic character. Although both actresses owe more to Pritchard than has been previously acknowledged, Ritchie sees Jordan, as much as Edmund Keane, as the heir to Garrick's natural Shakespearean acting style—a status obscured by the relegation of Jordan to comedy.
The final chapter on women playgoers rewards its readers with an account of the Shakespeare Ladies Club of the 1730s that fits into larger narratives about the importance of women to the popularity of Shakespeare's history plays and the century-long cultivation of sentiment as part of the theatre's moral reform. By looking to evidence of the club's impact in performance histories and commentaries, Ritchie builds a strong case for their instigation of an early Shakespearean revival on which Garrick later capitalized. She positions women theatregoers as leaders not just of a new morality, but also of affect and sentimental response in both playgoing and reading practices.
These two books show us how expanding the archives of theatrical research can contribute to our assessment of eighteenth-century theatre. Grounding the words spoken on the stage and read on the page in the material evidence of reading and performance gives us a vision of eighteenth-century theatre as the powerful social medium it was, as well as a more complex and nuanced sense of how gender was both a part of and produced by that medium.
