Scholars have recognized for some time that aristocratic women appropriated theatrical forms for their own subversive purposes, but the two books under review here envision something wholly different and more complex. Alison Findlay's Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama advances our understanding of the relationships between space and power in two significant ways: first, by exploring how women utilized nontraditional spaces (and later more traditional spaces) as performance venues; and second, by introducing readers to some contemporary discussions of space that found their way into women's plays in the early period, along with a range of key issues emanating from them. Karen Britland's Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria moves biographical studies of Charles I's consort to a new place by offering a revisionary portrait of the Catholic queen as read through the cultural activities she patronized. Interestingly, both authors eventually end up coming together around issues of politics. Women were, they demonstrate, not only canny in creating and exploiting performance sites, but also clever in deploying their own personal histories in aid of larger purposes.

Alison Findlay's goals are fresh and thought-provoking. In her words, she hoped “to open up the playing spaces for women's drama as determinants of meaning and to show how women played with space in scripts and performances as a form of political intervention” (10). Five detailed chapters, dedicated to a cross section of locales, (together with the dramatic texts associated with them) ultimately suggest how early modern women reconfigured spaces and, in turn, transformed personal subjectivities. In Chapter 1 (“Homes”) Findlay illustrates the ways certain aristocratic houses provided not only safe spaces in which to perform plays but also, paradoxically, stages for carefully nuanced models of female heroism, models that attempted to transcend the constrictions of the traditional domestic setting (30). Chapter 2 (“Gardens”) demonstrates the ways in which gardens, living models of paradise (both earthly and salvific), offered different freedoms from more traditional domestic structures, allowing women dramatists to create spaces for “more independent, female-centred subjectivities” (70). The third chapter, “Courts,” traces the ways in which spaces that were already “theatricalized” by male playwrights and actors became places for new creations of power that moved outside of the “local politicized geography” (124). The penultimate chapter, entitled “Sororities,” examines the appeal of convents, academies, and separatist households, whereas the final chapter, “Cities,” studies the imaginative movement of women into the theatrical sector of London at a time when their influence in the social and economic arenas of the city was severely limited. Nevertheless, as Findlay deftly demonstrates, a “woman's theatre,” though aired mostly in private settings, emerged slowly, eventually running parallel to the public stages that had grown up earlier in London.

The strengths of Findlay's book are many, and this review can mention only a few of them. First and foremost, in the vein of traditional theatre histories, Playing Spaces provides the most significant and comprehensive survey of actual and potential ludic spaces available to women, ranging from much-thought-about venues, such as Penshurst Place and Whitehall, to those that have received much less consideration, such as Bolsover Castle and Barking Abbey. Hence, Findlay encourages readers and critics to think more spatially about women's drama in its physical context, instead of examining the texts either as early closet drama or as drama unattached to any particular space. (In reading the sections of Playing Spaces that deal with the specific locales available to women, readers will naturally think of the excellent model provided by Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean on the Queen's Men, which piloted this kind of study.) Second, Playing Spaces suggests some of the many ways in which early modern women manipulated space (both literally and literarily) in order to renegotiate their place within society, and, in this way, Findlay's book provides the much-needed groundwork for future critical and theoretical conversation. Not least of all, by placing the issue of physical space at the center of her discussion, Findlay complicates our understanding of the ways in which early modern women perceived some of the plays written by men and subsequently were able to recast theatrical conventions in innovative ways. Indeed, as Findlay ably demonstrates, having been denied access to traditional ludic venues, women dramatists (even the least feminist-minded among them) seem almost obsessively to have been adapting space, creating space, and discussing space throughout the plays they wrote.

In Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria, Karen Britland reminds us that courts are not only piles of bricks and mortar but also collections of human beings. Britland's primary purpose is to realign traditional conclusions that Henrietta Maria was neither “a frivolous and gay butterfly with no political understanding” (216–17) nor a mother with the warmth and sensitivity of Lady Macbeth. Here, Britland's intention is not merely to produce yet another commonplace biographical treatment, but rather to trace the political subtleties of the queen's entertainments, which, she demonstrates, were plangent with French Catholic associations and were meant—through a well-planned scheme that developed over time—to mediate English–French politics. In illustrating these claims Britland surveys a variety of entertainments—masques, pastorals, and wedding ballets—carefully dissecting the political allegories embedded in each.

She begins by comparing the English and French entertainments for Henrietta Maria's marriage, illustrating the manner in which the French pieces, representing Charles I as enriched by his relations with the French, are cleverly balanced by the English entertainments, which argue for the superiority of English powers. Thus, during the early years in England when she was entering a foreign culture (one whose Protestantism she essentially rejected), Henrietta Maria was concerned with the creation of a cultural place where she, as a Catholic, could maintain her own identity. How her attempts played out, in particular, is explored in Chapter 2, on Artenice, a pastoral performed by the queen and her French attendants. In Chapter 3, Britland attempts to recover the lost entertainments that the queen patronized in the 1620s. In so doing she elucidates the imagery of royal marriage, finally resituating the representations of Henrietta Maria in Jonson's Love's Triumph (1631) and Aurelian Townshend's Albion's Triumph (1632) within a context that suggests that the queen and her husband enjoyed a harmonious relationship. Chapters 4–6 center on individual plays—Ben Jonson's Chlorida (1631), Aurelian Townshend's Tempe Restored (1632), and Walter Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise (1633)—and relate to the queen's efforts to mediate family conflicts during the period after her mother had been forced into exile. In subsequent chapters Britland rewrites the queen's later history by exposing the political issues surrounding her final efforts, including The Temple of Love (1635), Florimène (1635), and two masques (Luminalia and Salmacida Spolia). The book concludes with a chapter on the queen in exile, where “even at the end of her life, Henrietta Maria continued to assist in political negotiations” (223–4).

Where Britland's book succeeds best is in the gathering of materials that allow her to map the French connections that undergirded Henrietta Maria's entertainments. Also on the positive side, Britland works through each dramatic text she invokes in scrupulous detail. By the end there can be no doubt that the queen's religion was the most significant influence in her life, guiding all that she commissioned and performed in, and that court drama allowed her—over time—to lay out an agenda that, she hoped, might eventually lead to the reconciliation of English Protestantism with Rome. In the course of her argument Britland offers an enhanced portrait of a queen who was more diplomatically astute than former commentators have allowed: “As the daughter of a French queen regent and as the wife, sister and sister-in-law of three monarchs, Henrietta Maria understood the role she had to play in both European culture and politics. Moreover, she exploited St François de Sales's religious teachings in order to promote women as the keystones of a devout and ordered society” (224).

Interestingly, “anatomizing women's politics” might be the subtitle for both Findlay's and Britland's books, even though each author adopts a very different approach to such matters. Karen Britland's impulse is to work a small garden with tiny strokes, until every square inch of sod has been overturned. In consequence, readers will learn much more than ever before about Henrietta Maria's theatrical patronage; but they will have to forgo a more broadly written cultural history in order to do so. (In fact, some readers will doubtless find the scope of this study to be too narrowly defined.) By contrast, Alison Findlay considers a much larger landscape in which the appropriation of theatrical forms and the spaces required for performances becomes a way to chart the politics of being upper class and female in the early modern period. To be sure, it was aristocratic women who reaped the benefits of all the activity discussed by both Findlay and Britland, despite the fact that Britland makes what some critics might argue is a rather frail argument for the queen and her ladies paving the way for women on the Restoration stage. Nevertheless, both Findlay and Britland appreciate the relevance of women's theatrical efforts to the political currents of their time; and both acknowledge the manner in which women worked—most often, in unusual spaces—to carve out political influence and to define female identity. In the case of Findlay's book the results are fascinating and even, occasionally, startling. In the case of Britland's book, the results offer an important adjustment to former portraits of an underappreciated queen. Much to their credit, both studies reconfirm our sense that books are often most engaging when they surprise us with new perspectives.