Download 455 Book Reviews its failures and reconstitutions as it does through

Book Reviews
455
its failures and reconstitutions as it does through its attempts at constancy.
The English Civil War was marked more than anything else by the way
that it divided and tore apart social relationships. This book attends to
those breaches, practically speaking, but it resituates the problem of social
rupture through friendship’s capacity for change and transformation rather
than destruction, its focus on process rather than on permanence.
Megan Matchinske
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
English Women Staging Islam, 1696–1707. Ed. with an introduction by
Bernadette Andrea. The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The
Toronto Series, 17. Toronto: Iter Inc. and Centre for Reformation and
Renaissance Studies, 2012. 533 pp. $37.00. ISBN 978-0-7727-2120-4.
Tragedy of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century inclines to
the mawkish, uneven, and eccentric: in this respect the plays collected here
do not disappoint. However, printed together and carefully annotated by
an editor who has already published a comprehensive monograph about
the treatment of Islam in the writings of early modern British women
writers (Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature, Cambridge
University Press, 2007), these works provide insight into how, why, and
what was known about Muslim beliefs and the history of Islamic territories in the period. Moreover, the fact that these accomplished female
writers chose in the last decade of the seventeenth century to make their
first ventures into playwriting in the field of oriental tragedy indicates the
attraction of this field of “knowledge” to them even without the twin benefits of a training in classical scholarship or oriental languages or experience as diplomats and traders in the Levant.
And they make for a good read also since the plays are full of descriptions of improbable incident: a miscreant is shot from a canon, and his
widow, maddened with grief, collects his burning body parts and attempts
to immolate herself on the pile in Delarivier Manley’s The Royal Mischief
(1696); a distracted wife mistakenly persuaded of her husband’s bigamy
almost succeeds in murdering his traducer, though the fatality is prevented
456 EMWJ 2013, vol. 8
Book Reviews
by her husband in Mary Pix’s The Conquest of Spain (1705). Oriental
courts provide opportunities to exploit the moving scenery and flats of the
enhanced stage with extravagant tableaux of black eunuchs, mutes, and
dwarfs, as well as discoveries of dishevelled half-dressed actresses portraying women subjected to violent rape at the hands of “eastern” tyrants. There
are opportunities for songs, comic and sentimental, delivered by boys or
the newly popular Italian castrati opera singers who play with the expectations of the “breeches part” for women; Susannah Verbruggen, famed for
taking cross-dressed roles, took the part of the eunuch Achmat in Pix’s
Ibrahim (1696). Here and in the case of references to the castrato singer,
women writers are unafraid to exploit innuendo concerning the known
“lacking” part beneath the theatrical costume.
Comic and tragic registers are heard comfortably together in these
plays. Pix proves herself a mistress of the rhetoric of female distress (her
raped heroines Morena and Jacincta are both given fine moving rants),
and Manley is equally skilled at rendering speeches for the female player
that communicate lustful “warmth.” Both provide us with heroines of
unusual intellect to challenge the popular contemporary stereotype of
the luxurious and ignorant harem woman: Manley in the character of the
eponymous heroine Almyna (1706) — her name a near anagram of her
author’s — versed in “Whatever Greek or Roman eloquence, / Egyptian
learning and philosophy can teach” (165) and Morena in Pix’s Ibrahim
(1696), whose father has educated her in “Philosophy, history, those rough
studies” in his attempt to “mend the sex” (310, 319).
Andrea has selected four plays, two by each playwright, and provided
each play with an appendix containing the relevant narrative sources. This
enables fruitful contrasts and connections. Her introduction draws our
attention to the context of the London theatrical season (mid September
to late May) of 1695–96 for women playwrights. With only two (and
for a period one) patent companies and the majority of playscripts tried
and tested rather than newly-authored, playwrighting was a competitive
field, despite evidence that it was rarely lucrative and unlikely to provide
a subsistence, in which women rarely succeeded. Indeed until this season,
Aphra Behn was the only female playwright who had enjoyed consistent
presentation on the Restoration stage. However, in March 1695, frustrated
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457
by the monopoly established by the United Company in 1682 and cuts
to salaries initiated by the manager Christopher Rich, the actor Thomas
Betterton led a walkout from the Duke’s Company to found a new company at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As Andrea writes, “the need to bolster revenues for this new venture facilitated a series of plays by women intended
to attract audiences through their sheer novelty” (25). Manley’s The Royal
Mischief was the third of these five debut plays by novice women writers,
and it was performed from late April to early May 1695 at Lincoln’s Inn
Fields Theatre. Pix’s Ibrahim, presented in late May and early June 1696 at
the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, may, Andrea suggests, have been designed
“to capitalize on, and perhaps exceed, the stir created by Manley’s tragedy”
(261).
Both plays present Islamicate regimes. Manley’s play is set in mid-seventeenth-century Colchis and Abcas, the modern regions of Georgia and
Abkhazia under Persian control, and describes disturbances at the court
of “Libardia” owing to an affair between Homais, Princess of Libardia,
with her husband’s nephew, Levan Dadian, Prince of Colchis. Pix’s play
addresses a similar period, the mid-century insurrection and execution, in
1648, of Ibrahim, the Ottoman emperor, which the play describes as the
outcome of outraged response to his rape of the Mufti’s daughter, Morena.
English audiences were encouraged to see the parallels between their own
(still recent) Civil War and regime change and the accounts in these plays
of Islamic and oriental regimes threatened by rulers overly swayed by
women and associated with absolute and intolerant religious despotism
that was also vulnerable to the whim of a powerful army. Parallels are
perhaps more explicitly drawn in both authors’ later pair of plays whose
time frame coincides with heated debate between Whigs and Tories (Pix
is a Whig and Manley a Tory) over the cost and motives of the War of the
Spanish Succession (1701–14) in the reign of Queen Anne.
Pix’s The Conquest of Spain was presented at the Queen’s Theatre,
Haymarket, in May 1705, and its epilogue makes specific reference to
Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim in 1704. The play describes
the fatal alliance of Spanish forces with Moorish invaders, prompted by the
rape of a general’s daughter by the Spanish king Roderique (Roderic, the
last Visigothic king of Spain, who was killed in 711). The play’s concern
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Book Reviews
with the king’s ingratitude to a successful military commander ( Jacincta’s
father Julianus) leads to conspiracy on the part of her lover Theomantius
with the Moorish invaders, led by the dastardly Mullymumen. Figuratively,
the play celebrates English robust heroism and Whiggish defense of the
mutual support of Parliament and Crown in contrast to their French and
Spanish enemies, who are associated with despotism and effeminacy, making them vulnerable to invasion and defeat.
A different kind of parallel is drawn in the near contemporary play by
Delarivier Manley, Almyna, performed at the Queens Theatre Haymarket
in December 1706. It is set in the period of the Islamic North African
Caliphate in Spain subsequent to the invasion of the eighth-century second Caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, Abu Ja’far Abd Allah Al-Mansur ibn
Muhammad (754–775). The historical parallel is perhaps purposely weak,
and the stronger connection is to the highly successful Arabian Nights
Entertainments (1704–1717). Almanzor, like the frame sultan of Antoine
Galland’s famous “translation,” vows to execute each new wife after one night
of marriage in order to ensure he is not cuckolded. The vizier’s daughter,
Almyna, courageously refuses the demand for her hand from Almanzor’s
brother and heir, Abdalla. She is aware that he has previously pursued and
won the heart of her sister Zoradia and instead presents herself as wife to
Almanzor. He is captured by her physical beauty but also persuaded by
her powerful words. This “Scheherazade” does not use stories to defer her
execution but rather employs persuasive arguments demonstrating to her
husband that he is in error in his conviction that, according to Mahomet,
women do not have souls and will not go to paradise as Muslim men do.
According to Andrea, Manley, likely sharing the Tory perspective that the
English should withdraw from the costly and mistaken War of the Spanish
Succession, uses the Spanish Islamicate context to contest the rise of an
“orientalist,” anti-feminist mindset in England and to portray the reaction
against emergent proto-feminist claims for women’s intellect and reason as
a type of orientalist despotism in distant lands. Andrea points to the argument here and in her monograph that “Manley subversively identifies with
her title character, a Muslim woman who stands as the prototype of the
educated and efficacious defender of women’s rights. Manley consequently
counters the trend toward ‘feminist orientalism’ by [re]locating the source
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of gender despotism in England rather than displacing it onto exoticized
cultural others” (38).
Andrea’s edition provides thorough and detailed annotation for each
play as well as an insightful general introduction and shorter introductions
to each text. Her attention to the context of prejudices, misunderstandings, and stereotypes of Islam — as well as unusual pockets of knowledge
and insight — sometimes displaces other valuable information. Readers
are referred to other scholars for information about the majority of actors
and actresses who took parts in the first performance of these plays. The
contexts of other aspects of theatrical history than that of its players and
indeed other oriental plays by women or men are glossed over. Elsewhere,
she does provide useful summaries of the critical and scholarly consensus and disputes to date, especially with regard to the still fairly obscure
biographies of her authors, so that such scholarship, along with her own
distinguished research, can be made available in a text modernized and
annotated and priced at a level “for classroom use.”
Ros Ballaster
Mansfield College, University of Oxford