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A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE ON RENAISSANCE DRAMA. By Alison Findlay. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1999; pp. v + 206. $55.95 cloth, $20.95 paper.
In A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama, Alison Findlay takes the familiar problem of how contemporary scholars might approach the absence of women in the production and performance of drama on the English Renaissance stage in an unusual direction. This author uses period writing by women to "create a doorway through which a historicist feminist perspective on drama can be constructed" (5). Findlay compares the ideas in women's texts on several key topics of the period to the same themes found in plays by mainstream writers such as Shakespeare, Ionson, and Middleton, as well as less famous male playwrights. She has also included discussion of two plays by women that were never performed on the public stage: Elizabeth Gary's The Tragedy of Mariani and Lady Mary Wrofh's Love's Victorie.
The study is divided into five subject areas which Findlay describes as "pressure points ... in which traditional definitions of woman and her position in Renaissance culture are being challenged" (7) by women writers: biblical authority and the staging of Christian beliefs; the revenge tragedy and the fear of female agency; sexual desire, romance, and the trope of urban liberty; the household space and female confinement; and feminine interventions into masculine history. In each case, she uses the topic to establish broad cultural ideas of the English Renaissance against which she can compare excerpts from the era's plays and a variety of primary documents by men and women. Via this methodology, Findlay extends her analysis...