Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre

Felicity Nussbaum. Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 383 pp. $55.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-4233-1

Over twenty years ago Felicity Nussbaum reinvigorated eighteenth-century studies when she championed the application of New Historicism to the field in her The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature (Routledge 1988), co-authored with Laura Brown. Since then she has brought her refreshing perspective to bear on many of the period's issues related to race, gender, monstrosity, the body, and empire. In her latest book, Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre she tilts at a critical commonplace when she "attempts to extricate the discussion of the actress from the restrictions that the familiar proper lady/prostitute opposition imposes upon women players" (9). Instead, Nussbaum argues that eighteenth-century actresses "with loyal fans in tow participated significantly in [a] shifting of public/private boundaries" (16). In seeking "to reinsert celebrity firmly within its inaugural moments" (17), Nussbaum asserts that these actresses "figured as spectacular examples of women capable of autonomous actions...[they] were among those who constituted the first female subjects in the public arena" (17). Instead of being powerless victims of definitions imposed upon them by others, Nussbaum contends that these actresses "were self-reflexive economic agents who actively shaped their identities to make celebrated properties of themselves in an historical period marked by increasing privatization of property and identity" (17). She notes that this economic self-marketing by actresses was particularly remarkable as it took place "in a period when .. . women were seldom able to possess property or to...