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Lowenthal, Cynthia. Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003. 270 pages. ISBN 0-8093-2462-8. $40.00.
By combining the theories of scholars such as Michel Foucault, Peter Stallybrass, Pierre Bourdieu, Mary Douglas, Norbert Elias, and Allon White with the analyses of a virtual "who's who" list of recent critics and then providing her own close readings of a varied selection of known and lesser-known plays staged between 1656 and 1707, Cynthia Lowenthal addresses what she calls the "constant manipulation of the signs of identity" that was taking place on the London stage during the second half of the 17th century (4). By breaking her analysis into four distinct categories-Imperial Identities, National Identities, Discursive Identities, and Monstrous Identities-Lowenthal situates the body as the locus for creating and distorting cultural notions of nation, gender, and status More specifically, these four categories examine savage bodies in contrast with British colonialism, unruly European national bodies in contrast with British mercantilism, discursive female bodies unable to represent desire, and female bodies controlled through acts of sexual assault. Moreover, Lowenthal investigates the ways in which numerous playwrights, both male and female, "disrupted, displaced, and transgressed a host of comfortable and commonplace assumptions about the stability of identity" (4), concluding that concepts of nationhood, gender, and status are "interinflected, each with its own early modern distinction but serving to support and contain the others" (19).
Chapter One, the introduction, places Lowenthal's argument in context with existing scholarship and outlines her methodology. She notes all the possible avenues that previous research makes available to her and situates herself within the previous discourse in a methodical and logical way. For a young student of the Restoration stage and Early Modern England, this positioning is necessary and exceptionally informative, and as I...