Women on Stage in Stuart Drama

Description

Women on Stage in Stuart Drama provides a 'prehistory' of the actress, filling an important gap in established accounts of how women came to perform in the Restoration theatre. Sophie Tomlinson uncovers and analyzes a revolution in theatrical discourse in response to the cultural innovations of two Stuart consort queens, Anna of Denmark and the French Henrietta Maria. Their appearances on stage in masques and pastoral drama engendered a new poetics of female performance which registered acting as a powerful means of self-determination for women. The pressure of cultural change is inscribed in a plethora of dramatic texts which explore the imaginative possibilities inspired by female acting. These include plays by the key royalist women writers Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and Katherine Philips. The material explored by Tomlinson illustrates a fresh vision of theatrical femininity and encompasses an unusually sympathetic interest in questions of female liberty and selfhood.

Sophie Tomlinson is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published essays on female performance and women's drama in early modern England, and has edited John Fletcher's comedy The Wild-Goose Chase for the forthcoming Revels Companion Library volume of Three Seventeenth-Century Plays on Women and Performance.

'Sophie Tomlinson enriches the field of women's theatre history with this fascinating study of the 'prehistory' of the actress. A light-hearted reference to the refrain 'sisters are doin' it for themselves' introduces a serious work of revisionist history that uncovers the layers of female influence and action at the early Stuart courts.' Journal of New Theatre Quarterly