Review: Nancy Copeland: Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre: Women's Comedy and the Theatre.

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the review: 

During the last decades, women writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century have almost made it into the canon: particularly thanks to second-wave feminist influences in academia and promoted by the rise of gender studies within literary and cultural studies, authors such as Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, or Mary Pix have been rediscovered, reread and revalued. Critics have long passed the stage when the dialogue in Margaret Cavendish's play Bell in Campo (1662) represented general opinion: "Why may not a lady write a good play? - No, for a woman's wit is too weak and too conceited to write a play."1 Plays by women dramatists are read in seminars and discussed in term papers and at conferences. However, most approaches still focus only on the texts themselves when they pose the question of feminist, anti-feminist or conservative attitudes towards gender roles and thus we still only read the play and the numerous studies on how such a play can be read. Nancy Copeland, however, goes beyond the dramatic texts themselves and in Staging Gender in Behn and Centlivre explores issues of intertextuality and intertheatricality in comedies by Behn and Centlivre: by tracing the adaptations made possible by a vast web of recurrent dramatic motifs, and by dealing with the performance history of each of the plays, the study illuminates what is lost by neglecting the performance aspect of a play. The various productions, alterations, adaptations shed light on changing cultural contexts and especially the plays' engagement with shifting ideas of gender roles and appropriate behaviour for men and women. By focusing 'only' on four plays - Behn's The Rover (1677) and The Luckey Chance (1686), Centlivre's The Busie Body (1709) and The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) - and of course on their many precursors and subsequent adaptations, this book seeks to offer detailed analyses and thus provides the reader with a wealth of information concerning the theatrical history of each play - a history that most readers will not be aware of.