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ROBYN ASLESON, ed. Notorious Muse: The Actress in British Art and Culture, 1776-/812 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2003). Pp. xix + 212.
Cynthia Lowenthal. Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2003). Pp. x + 270.
These are thrilling times on the boards for Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, with at least one New York theatre company devoted to producing staged readings of eighteenth-century plays by women and a full-scale revival of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's Rivals running at Lincoln Center from December 2004. These high-profile theatrical projects are mirrored by no less exciting developments in the realm of Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre criticism. Perhaps because of the widespread sense of exhaustion that currently surrounds critical discourse on the novel, more and more scholars have turned to the drama in recent years with a renewed sense of interest, taking it up as a dynamic locus of literary and cultural ferment during the long eighteenth century. And the impact on drama criticism has been quite significant, as new studies in the field have brought about a marked departure from the established tradition of exhaustive historical accounting and a move toward more theoretically informed, though no less historicized, readings of dramatic texts and the sites of their performance.
The two works reviewed here offer exemplary instances of those efforts to take the study of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama in new and conceptually rich directions. Most refreshing is the fact that each treats the drama not merely as a textual medium but also as a living art form that involves, and indeed requires, the presence of actual bodies. In both Cynthia Lowenthal's sustained study and in the essays that make up Robyn Asleson's expertly edited volume, every effort is made to take into account the complications that arise when one is dealing with a medium where the boundaries between the fictional lives of characters and the lived lives of performers are not always clear. In this respect, both works provide us with a better understanding of the central role of the playhouse and its players in a political and social world that was intensely theatrical.
In Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage, Cynthia Lowenthal takes up the identity categories of gender, class, and nation and...