Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830.

Abstract

Laura Engel and Elaine M. McGirr; eds. Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660-1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2014. 274 pp. $90.00 USD (hardback). ISBN 7881611486032.Perhaps more remarkable than the fact that pregnant eighteenth-century actresses, even well into their third trimesters, appeared on stage as heroines prepared to sacrifice their lives for their chastity, is the fact that it so often went unremarked. Representational realism seems to have been less important to the audience than affective virtuosity. The carefully selected, richly various, and rewarding essays in Elaine McGirr and Laura Engel's edition not only bring this kind of information about the stage mother into view, but they often shift our angle of vision too.Helen Brooks' lively opening essay, "The Divided Heart of the Actress," reminds us that actresses paid by performance could rarely afford to miss an appearance; more often than not, maternal duty entailed providing for one's family through dramatic labor rather than domestic retreat. Actresses thus sought to turn to their advantage the flying in the face of received wisdom about pregnancy-not to be overstimulated by passion, to avoid crowds, to undertake only light duties-by associating themselves with the maternal devotion they were often required to perform on stage.In their fine, brisk, and stimulating introduction, McGirr and Engel lay out their stall. The book "attempts to analyse the performance and representation of maternity from the Restoration through the Regency periods" on the English stage and "to document the lived experience of both celebrity and supporting actress-mothers" (8). The collection reevaluates and re-values the significance of maternity in the major stage successes of the long eighteenth century. Further, it brings theatre and literary history into productive dialogue by paying attention to the relation between role and player, offering a series of fascinating case studies across the entire range of the period and of private and public theatricals.The book is divided into three parts. The first explores and assesses the success of actresses in exploiting their performance to massage their questionable sexual and reproductive histories. J. D. Phillipson and Elaine McGirr draw attention to the ways in which Anne Oldfield, in the early decades of the century, and Susannah Cibber, in the mid-1740s, vindicated dubious sexual reputations in performances of virtuous mothers that drew attention to their own commitment to their children (Andromache in Ambrose Philips' The Distrest Mother for Oldfield and Constance in her ex father-in-law's Papal Tyranny of King John for Cibber). Ellen Malenas Ledoux comes to the surprising (but surprisingly convincing) conclusion that of the two young mothers acquiring a reputation on the stage in the 1780s, it was Mary Robinson whose public-relations strategy (of charting her maternal devotion in print) was to prove more enduring than Sarah Siddons' practice of promoting her image as tragic queen through visual presentation on stage and in portraits-a practice that was increasingly subject to ridicule as she aged.The second part addresses the significance of mothers in plays and operas, without losing sight of the ways in which those parts are woven into the complex relationships of kinship and friendship within the playhouses. Among the five essays here, Emrys Jones' piece stands out with an insightful re-appraisal not only of Frances Sheridan's significance in the works of her offspring, but also of the apparently uncomplicated mockery of misguided maternal or pseudo-maternal influence in the character of Mrs Malaprop (which Richard Brinsley Sheridan took from his mother's creation, Mrs Tryfort in her A Journey to Bath). Jones points to a "camouflaged, inalienable inheritance" (172) that derives from the mother, closing his fine piece by alerting us to the peculiar appropriateness of Mrs Tryfort's substitution of "progeny" for "prodigy" (173). …