Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama

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Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama University of Kentucky UKnowledge Literature in English, British Isles English Language and Literature 12-12-1996 Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama Katherine M. Quinsey Click here to let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Thanks to the University of Kentucky Libraries and the University Press of Kentucky, this book is freely available to current faculty, students, and staff at the University of Kentucky. Find other University of Kentucky Books at uknowledge.uky.edu/upk. For more information, please contact UKnowledge at [email protected]. Recommended Citation Quinsey, Katherine M., "Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama" (1996). Literature in English, British Isles. 5. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/5 Brokerz Boundaries Broken Boundaries Women & Feminism in Restoration Drama Katherine M. Quinsey Editor The University Press of Kentucky Frontispiece: Nell Gwyn rising from the dead to speak the epilogue to Dryden's Tyrannick Love, published as the frontispiece to A Key to the Rehearsal (1714) in The Dramatick Works of his Grace George Villiers, late Duke ofBuckingham (1715), vol. 2. By permission of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries. Copyright © 1996 by The University Press of Kentucky Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine College, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Club, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University. Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky 663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008 00 99 98 97 96 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Broken boundaries : women and feminism in Restoration drama / edited by Katherine M. Quinsey. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8131-1945--6 Calk. paper). -ISBN 0-8131-0871-3 Cpbk. : alk. paper) 1. English drama-Restoration, 1660--1700---History and criticism. 2. Feminism and literature-England-History-17th century. 3. Literature and society-England-History-17th century. 4. Women in the theater-England-History-17th century. 5. Women and literature-England-History-17th century. 6. Theater-England­ History-17th century. 7. Gender identity in literature. 8. Sex role in literature. 9. Women in literature. I. Quinsey, Katherine M.,1955- PR698.F45B76 1996 822'.409352042--<ic20 96-5329 This book is printed on acid-free recycled paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Manufactured in the United States of America Contents List oj Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 PART 1 Instruments ofPropagation: Plays by Women Blacker Than Hell Creates: 13 Pix Rewrites Othello Jacqueline Pearson Unmanned with Thy Words: 31 Regendering Tragedy in Manley and Trotter Rebecca Merrens In the Carnival World 54 ojAdam's Garden: Roving and Rape in Behn's Rover Dagny Boebel Closure and Subversion in Behn 's Comedies 71 Peggy Thompson Lady Fulbank and the Poet's Dream in Behn 's Lucky Chance 89 Robert A. Erickson PART 2 Chased Desire: Women and Feminism in Plays by Men Tupping Your Rival's Women: Cit-Cuckolding 113 as Class Warfare in Restoration Comedy ]. Douglas Canfield Almahide Still Lives: Feminine Will and 129 Identity in Dryden's Conquest of Granada Katherine M. Quinsey Resisting a Private Tyranny in 150 Two Humane Comedies James E. Evans The Way of the Word: Telling Differences 164 in Congreve's Way of the World Pat Gill PART 3 The Gaze Reversed: Theory and History of Performance Rape, Voyeurism, 185 and the Restoration Stage Jean I. Marsden Reading Masks: The Actress and the 201 Spectatrix in Restoration Shakespeare Laura]. Rosenthal Sticks and Rags, Bodies and Brocade: 219 Essentializing Discourses and the Late Restoration Playhouse Cynthia Lowenthal Contributors 235 Index 237 Illustrations Nell Gwyn frontispiece Almeria in The Mourning Bride 34 Mrs. Siddons as Zara 39 Aphra Behn 90 Frontispiece to The Rehearsal 130 Anne Quin 202 Anne Bracegirdle 225 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments ("'pecial thanks go to my research U;ssistant, Maria Magro, for her ex­ haustive, precise, and intelligent proofreading of this volume in manuscript, and to Mrs. Lucia Brown and her team at the University of Windsor for their admirable efficiency in preparing it for press. Above all, as editor I should like to express my deep appreciation for the grace, efficiency, and professionalism shown by each of the contribu­ tors to this collection, in every stage of our working together: they have embodied scholarship in all its best senses. This page intentionally left blank Intrcxluctian Katherine M. Quinsey estoration drama is overwhelm­ Ringly concerned with questions of gender identity, sexuality, and women's oppression, to a degree and a depth not seen in a comparably popular form of entertainment before or since. It stands out among the mainstream literary and artistic forms of its time in its unusually direct, probing, and fluid way of engaging certain radical questions: questions about the place of women in social and familial structures, about male/female relations, about the nature of women-and men-themselves. It is a remarkable index to the centrality of the "woman question" in this period that this most popular verbal form of entertainment, a peculiarly self-conscious form that blurs, even erases, the boundaries between its fiction and the social world of the audience, should be dominated by gender issues. Restoration drama is deeply embedded in its social matrix, yet in both its authorship and its production, as well as in its challenge to fictionality and its unresolved dialogic interplay, it continually sepa­ rates itself from that matrix, reflecting and generating social change. The late seventeenth century is a pivotal period in women's social history and feminist awareness, to some extent culminating a process of ontological questioning of gender begun much earlier, and thus differing significantly from later eighteenth-century vindications of women's rights. It is now a commonplace that the seventeenth century spans the shift from an earlier concept of gender as a variation in an essentially unified human nature to a hardening of gender categories, which theorized female as distinct in essence from male in all levels of existence-biological, spiritual, intellectual, and social. It has also been generally observed that the cataclysmic changes in the intellectual, political, socioeconomic, and religiOUS frameworks of seventeenth-century England were not extended to matters of gender; as old frameworks of authority were fundamentally altered, those supporting patriarchal social and economic structures were merely reconfigured. Indeed, within seemingly more egalitarian socio­ economic and political models, the equation of women and property- 2 / Introduction women's status as chattels and as passive channels of property exchange­ was entrenched, and female power and autonomy were markedly les­ sened. The Restoration period, however, which saw traditional order outwardly restored but conceptual and discursive frameworks radically and permanently altered, is characterized by its discursive instability: a volatile mixture of question and (sometimes violent) reassertion, action and reaction, searching skepticism and conservative affirmation. This period bridges the differing essentialisms of the Renaissance and the eighteenth century with a fluid and dynamic questioning of the assump­ tions underlying both. Such questioning-which in its cutting through to the roots can only be called feminist-both springs from and itself promotes the unsettling of frameworks of perception in all areas of intellectual and social life. Consideration of the feminist questions in Restoration drama, then, should promote a reexamination of all the intellectual, political, and socioeconomic shifting taking place in the period. Restoration drama is perhaps the most telling popular expression of these radical uncertainties. It probes, shifts, and juxtaposes frameworks of value, exposing the arbitrary nature of certain social structures even in the act of affirming them. Encouraged by the physical presence of women onstage as actresses, the increased and varied representation of women in the audience, and the entry of women into the public sphere as writers, and driven by the larger and deeper ideological shifts underlying these phenomena, this drama enacts a deeply ambivalent engagement with questions of female subjectivity, greatly expanding speaking roles for women and playing almost obsessively on the presence of women in the theater. The depth and extent of its interest in sexual roles, relationships, and identities can be seen in its adaptations of Renaissance models, such as John Dryden and William Davenant's Tempest, which multiplies the number of women characters and alters Shakespeare's plot substantially to play with notions of sexual identity, sexuality, and sexual roles. In all its modes, tragedies and comedies alike, Restoration drama focuses on the sexual basis of social structures-marriage, family, patrilineal succession­ in a representation characterized by the unsettling and reexamination of assumptions.
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