Kathy Fang - 2020 Mitra Scholar

2019-20 Mitra FAMILY GRANT Recipient “But a Woman”: Reassessing Portrayals of Women and Sex in the Restoration Tempest Kathy Fang

“But a Woman”: Reassessing Portrayals of Women and Sex in the Restoration ​Tempest

Kathy Fang 2020 Mitra Family Scholar Mentors: Dr. Beth Wahl, Mrs. Lauri Vaughan April 15, 2020

Fang 2 On December 8, 1660, a new character was introduced to the English theater: the 1

professional actress. For the first time in British history, William Shakespeare’s famed tragedy Othello​ saw a female actor bring Desdemona to life, revolutionizing the course of British theater 2

with her very presence on stage. While critics continue to debate her identity and the particulars of her appearance, the cultural significance of her performance stands without argument. Within months, the two dominating playhouses of the time, the King’s Company and the Duke’s Company, began hiring actresses to play female roles, and the gender barrier that had kept women off the British public stage for centuries fell to the forces of change.

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An examination of the sociopolitical context of this cultural watershed reveals the immediate impact of the professional actress on English drama, as well as the close ties between their role in the theaters and the reinstatement of the Stuart monarchy. The year 1660 saw the return of the British monarchy after the Interregnum, and with the restoration of King Charles II 4

came a revival of British theater, which the Puritans had banned in 1642. Inspired by what he had seen in Continental Europe and driven by his own libertine inclinations, Charles and his courtiers inaugurated a new era of English theater, reinvigorating the work of playwrights, managers, and actors and, most importantly, bringing women to the stage.

5

​Elizabeth Howe, ​The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700​, 1996 ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992), 19.

1

​Lois Potter, "Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1660-1900," in ​The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare,​ ed.

Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 183.

2

3

Howe, ​The First,​ 1, 23-24.

Barbara A. Murray, ​Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice​ (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 15-16.

4

​Deborah Payne Fisk, "The Restoration Actress," in ​A Companion to Restoration Drama,​ ed. Susan J. Owen (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 72.

5

Fang 3 The rise of actresses, however, challenged traditional hierarchies of male authority. After eighteen years of civil war and insurrection, the Stuart monarchy had lost even the illusion of 6

absolutism. The reigning theory of early seventeenth-century politics linked a monarch’s power to the patriarchal order, and with instability in monarchical sovereignty, an accompanying 7

instability in gender roles emerged.​ Because the king was no longer guaranteed to wield absolute power over his subjects, British men lost one of the central justifications for their 8

dominance of sexual relations. Regicide had undermined a monarch’s divine right to absolute power and, as a result, patriarchal dominance over women came into question. The erosion of the traditional gender hierarchy thereby necessitated a new order that would not only provide grounds for the subordination of women but also shore up male sovereignty.

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These shifting power dynamics played out on the Restoration stage. As much as the theater offered actresses a position of influence, it also enabled a new expression of patriarchy to 10

dominate cultural perceptions of women both on and off the stage. After all, the novelty of actresses as a career gave dramatists the power to define the place of professional women in society. Restoration playwrights created female character roles that emphasized and exploited the actresses’ sexual differences from their male counterparts to undermine their influence in the

​Paulina Kewes, "Dryden's Theatre and the Passions of Politics," in ​The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden​, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, The Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 133.

6

​Laura J. Rosenthal, "Reading Masks: The Actress and the Spectatrix in Restoration Shakespeare," in ​Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama,​ ed. Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996), 205.

7

8

Rosenthal, 205.

9

​Rosenthal, 205.

10

Rosenthal, 206.

Fang 4 11

public sphere. Their portrayals of women and of female sexuality, in particular, became a tool of patriarchy that, by putting women on display for a mostly male audience, perpetuated not only 12

patriarchal but also, by extension, monarchical ideas about the subordination of women.

The emergence of this model of sexual power dynamics reveals itself most clearly in another phenomenon of late seventeenth-century drama. In the early years of the Restoration, theater companies relied heavily on adaptations of earlier works, such as William Shakespeare’s 13

plays. These adapted versions present an insightful case study of evolving gender norms as expressed in British theater, for they reveal the necessity of adapting the texts to align with new social standards. In 1667, John Dryden and William D’Avenant adapted Shakespeare’s ​The Tempest,​ a play that seemed to speak directly to the major social and political issues of the era because of its central figure, Prospero, who is a literal father-king, and its interrogation of 14

absolute power and sexual relations. Dryden and D’Avenant’s retelling of ​The Tempest​ exhibits drastic modifications that not only underscore the suppression of female agency but also express a desire to make the play resonate with Restoration audiences and court values, as proven by the 15

adaptation’s immense popularity. An examination of Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​Tempest​ will thus illuminate the ideologies that lay at the heart of the relationship between gender roles in the public sphere and the voyeuristic reception of female actors on the Restoration stage. As

11

Howe, ​The First,​ 36.

Howe, 36; ​Susan J. Owen, preface to ​A Companion to Restoration Drama​ (Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), xii.

12

13

Fisk, “The Restoration Actress,” 80.

14

Howe, ​The First,​ 63.

15

​Montague Summers, introduction to ​Shakespeare Adaptations​ (London: Jonathan Cape, 1922), xl-xli.

Fang 5 dramatized in Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​Tempest​, Restoration playwrights reimagined the role of women in Shakespeare’s plays to curry the favor of Charles II and his royalist court, employing increasing numbers of women in the theater while degrading their status as actresses by confining them to playing oversexualized female characters.

The Restoration Theater, Charles II’s Court, and a New Patriarchy Charles II’s restoration to the English throne in 1660 marked the beginning of a turbulent era in English history, one characterized by cultural, political, and social upheaval in all aspects of public life. The Puritans’ victory in the English Civil War of 1642-1649 had struck a profound blow to the institution of the British monarchy, undercutting the centuries-long ideal of the divine right of kings, and with the execution of Charles I on January 30, 1649, the power of the 16

British throne was irrevocably weakened. By the late 1650s, the Puritan Protectorate had been ruling England for more than a decade, replacing monarchy with military dictatorship, but the 17

Cromwell dynasty was rapidly declining in power. With no viable heir to Cromwell in sight, Parliament finally invited Charles II, then a prince in exile, to return and restore the British monarchy in 1660.

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At the same time that Puritan opposition weakened the monarchy, London’s theaters, which had a long and close-knit relationship with the court, suffered a similar fate as the Stuart dynasty. On September 6, 1642, merely weeks after Charles I rose the battle standard that signaled the beginning of the Civil War, the Puritan Parliament issued an order to cease the

16

“English Civil Wars and the Commonwealth,” ​Gale in Context: World History​, last modified 2019.

17

“English Civil.”

18

“English Civil.”

Fang 6 19

performances of all staged plays, effectively shutting down the theater industry in London.

Dramatic culture and literature largely vanished from British society until the return of monarchy 20

in 1660 reopened the public theaters’ doors and revived the genre.

The restoration of London’s theaters and their subsequent development aligned closely with the English Restoration as a political tool designed to fortify royalist sentiments. Charles II had developed a fondness for the theater during his exile to Continental Europe, and when he 21

returned to England, he brought his artistic sensibilities back with him. In the same year that he reclaimed the English throne, Charles II established a two theater system by issuing exclusive patents to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William D’Avenant to open theater companies and build 22

public playhouses. From 1660 until 1709, the King’s Company, headed by Killigrew, and the Duke’s Company, headed by D’Avenant, monopolized London’s theatrical scene, and given their dependence on the court for patronage, Charles II could effectively censor all public performances such that most of Restoration drama bore a “distinctly pro-Charles flavor,” as critic 23

Jean I. Marsden observes. Charles II maintained a frequent presence at the two theaters, more so than any previous English monarch, for he preferred the public theater to the court theater.

24

​“September 1642: Order for Stage-plays to Cease,” accessed February 16, 2020, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp26-27.

19

20

Howe, ​The First,​ 1.

​Allardyce Nicoll, ​Restoration Drama 1660-1700​, 1965 ed., vol. 1, ​A History of English Drama 1660-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 8.

21

​"Copy of Davenant's Patent Granted by King Charles II," January 15, 1663, MEPO 2/8688, The National Archives, Kew. 22

Howe, ​The First,​ 2; ​Jean I. Marsden, “Radical Adaptation,” in ​The Re-Imagined Test: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory​ (Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), 41.

23

24

Howe, 23.

Fang 7 Following the lead of their king, Charles II’s court also visited the theaters regularly, constituting 25

a significant portion of their audience. The court’s influence thus extended from the theaters’ founding patents to the plays performed and the patrons themselves, thereby marking Restoration drama as royalist in both origin and expression.

At the same time that Charles II revived London’s theaters to reassert royal dominance, a wave of social and political shifts redefined traditional understandings of public life, complicating the Stuarts’ royalist agenda. Even after Charles II’s restoration, the British throne suffered from the consequences of civil war. The experience and aftermath of regicide had irrevocably damaged faith in absolutism as a political doctrine and, consequently, eroded the 26

influence of the monarch. While the return of the king was welcomed with public eagerness, the execution of Charles I in 1649, the turbulence of the Civil War, and the dictatorial rule of Oliver Cromwell remained fresh in the British people’s memory, rendering any hope of returning 27

to the old absolutist political order impossible. Instead, ideological division reigned in the Restoration court, and despite Charles II’s efforts to enforce royalist censorship in the theater, political commentaries and implicit criticisms of the monarchy nevertheless emerged.

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The decline of the British monarchical power in the 1660s was coupled with a fundamental adjustment in the traditional gender order. Patriarchy and monarchy had long dominated British society as the two prevailing power structures of the sociopolitical sphere, and in Robert Filmer’s ​Patriarcha,​ written in 1680, they are explicitly linked to justify and defend an 25

Nicoll, ​Restoration Drama,​ 8.

26

​Kewes, “Dryden's Theatre,” 133.

27

​Owen, preface, xiv.

28

Owen, xiv.

Fang 8 29

absolutist government. According to Filmer, a monarch wields the same natural and absolute 30

authority over his subjects that a patriarch holds over his wife and daughters. In that manner, Filmer writes, “all the Duties of a King are summed up in an Universal Fatherly Care of his People,” and the monarch’s power is thereby justified as an application of patriarchal 31

expectations to the political realm. Filmer’s theory articulated an argument for royalism that had dominated British political culture since Shakespeare’s time, but by the late seventeenth 32

century, this argument had lost much of its validity. Just as civil unrest and regicide had weakened the power of the monarchy, the political turmoil of the Interregnum also undermined 33

faith in the established patriarchal system.

At the same time, social ideas about gender hierarchy were gradually replaced by the 34

concept of gender polarity. New social attitudes towards gender roles characterized women not as fundamentally inferior to men but rather as their opposites, reversing a centuries-long tradition 35

of female subordination based on inherent power dynamics between the two genders. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, an emerging middle class saw increasing numbers of men take jobs that were traditionally considered women’s professions, and middle-class women

​Robert Filmer, “Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings,” 1680, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/filmer-patriarcha-or-the-natural-power-of-kings.

29

30

Filmer.

31

​Filmer.

​Katharine Eisaman Maus, “Arcadia Lost: Politics and Revision in the Restoration Tempest,” ​Renaissance Drama​, n.s., 13 (1982): 201-202, JSTOR. 32

33

Rosenthal, “Reading Masks,” 205.

34

Howe, ​The First, 2​ 1.

35

Howe, 21.

Fang 9 36

looked towards marriage and domestic life as their primary economic role. The social structure of separate spheres thus took hold in British society and redefined the economic roles of the two 37

genders. Men were expected to dominate the public sphere, while women were relegated to the 38

private and domestic sphere, which was equally vital to maintaining social order. Women were no longer viewed as intrinsically inferior to men, and the two genders were related not by 39

hierarchy but by the assumption of distinct yet complementary roles. This shift in gender relations had political implications that further exacerbated Charles II’s struggle to reestablish royalist sovereignty over Britain, for as critic Katherine Eisaman Maus notes, “The hierarchical model of sexual relations becomes less and less plausible, and less and less frequently invoked.

Theories which depend upon it, like the political theory which derives the king's power from the 40

power of the father and the husband, come increasingly under attack.” As much as the Stuart monarchy clung onto patriarchal monarchy to defend their reign, Filmer’s “father-king” ideal became “increasingly nostalgic—an attempt to recover the lost monarchical privilege enjoyed by 41

the early Stuarts.”

Katharine Eisaman Maus, “'Playhouse Flesh and Blood': Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress,” ​ELH 46, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 600-601, JSTOR; Elizabeth Susan Wahl, “Incompatible Relations: The Problem of Companionship and Hierarchy in the Evolution of Attitudes toward Marriage,” in ​Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment​ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 88, accessed April 13, 2020.

37 Wahl, 88.

36

38

Howe, ​The First,​ 21.

39

Maus, “Playhouse Flesh,” 613.

40

Maus, 612-613.

41

Maus, “Arcadia Lost,” 202.

Fang 10 The new uncertainties surrounding monarchy and patriarchy found their way into the 42

theaters, which were actively involved with the politics of the era. Though Restoration playwrights were expected by the court to profess allegiance to the ideal of political royalism, expressions of political instability, doubts concerning the restoration of royal power, and other 43

post-regicide anxieties crept into the drama of the age. For instance, in Dryden and D’Avenant’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s ​The Tempest​, which was renamed ​The Enchanted Island​, the role and influence of political usurpation in the story is drastically reduced in order to 44

uphold absolutist ideals. In the Restoration text, both Antonio and Alonso are revealed to be usurpers of the dukedoms of Milan and Mantua, respectively, yet unlike Shakespeare’s Antonio, who feels justified in his usurpation at first, the Restoration usurpers are characterized by guilt from the beginning. Alonso’s first line in the play, during the opening shipwreck scene, is notably marked by remorse and regret: “O name not me, I am grown old, my Son; I now am tedious to the world, and that, by use, is so to me: but, ​Ferdinand,​ I grieve my subjects loss in 45

thee: Alas! I suffer justly for my crimes, but why thou shouldest—O Heaven!” Given that this Alonso already recognizes his “crimes” from the start of the play, Dryden and D’Avenant’s Antonio and Alonso do not undergo the same journey of expiation that Shakespeare’s Antonio 46

does. Shakespeare’s entire discussion of usurpation, authority, ambition, and repentance is

​Nancy Klein Maguire, ​Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671​ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3.

42

43

Maguire, 3.

​William D'Avenant and John Dryden, ​The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island: a Comedy. As It Is Now Acted at His Highness the Duke of York's Theatre​, 1667, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. 44

45

D’Avenant and Dryden, 4.

46

D’Avenant and Dryden, 4.

Fang 11 reduced to a dramatized show of Antonio and Alonso’s guilt before they recede into the background for most of the play, only returning to repent and receive Prospero’s reluctant 47

forgiveness at the end. Though there are two cases of usurpation in the adapted ​Tempest​ as opposed to one in the original, the fact that the Restoration usurpers have already recognized their sin when the play begins dampens the gravity of their actions, and the addition of Alonso as 48

a second remorseful usurper only amplifies the royalist message. The play characterizes these past instances of political subversion as clear sins that even the perpetrators themselves recognize, leaving no room for any expression that they might have been justified. At the end of the play, Antonio and Alonso, with obsequious expressions of remorse, relinquish their titles completely, reinstating Prospero and Hippolito to their rightful dukedoms in a scene that bears echoes of the restoration of Charles II. Dryden and D’Avenant’s unequivocal portrayal of political usurpation as an undeniable sin aligns with a restored monarch’s sensitivity to and fear of rebellion, reflecting the political attitudes of the era.

While it appears, at the start of Act 2, that the rest of this reimagined ​Tempest​ will also champion the new political culture of the Stuart monarchy, Dryden and D’Avenant transition to a comedic scene between the sailors whose banter undermines models of authority. Ironically, Dryden and D’Avenant’s inebriated sailors exercise political agency more assertively than the noblemen do, for when Stephano, Trincalo, Mustacho, and Ventoso, who are all sailors in the adapted ​Tempest​, land on the island and find it deserted, they decide to proclaim their own rule

47

48

D’Avenant and Dryden, 14-17.

In Shakespeare’s original play, Prospero’s rule of the island is technically a second case of usurpation, given that Caliban claims to be the rightful ruler. However, Shakespeare does not use the word “usurpation” explicitly to define this transition of power, leaving the justifications for Prospero’s rule morally ambiguous.

Fang 12 49

over the land, naming themselves dukes and viceroys. Mirroring Shakespeare’s original play, their comedic squabbles over meaningless titles and their pretentious assumptions of authority satirize the court system and the arbitrariness of absolutism, although the mockery is ultimately softened by the eventual failure of their governments.

The collapse of the sailors’ self-proclaimed governments suggests another critique of power in the Restoration court, for it implies that the assumption of total political control is an ideal that can no longer be sustained. Even the successful, legitimate rulers of the play fumble in their control, unable to fully realize the authoritarian model. Prospero, the usurped duke of Milan, takes power over the island in the same fashion that the sailors try to claim theirs: After Antonio seizes his title, Prospero is banished and stumbles upon a seemingly deserted island, of 50

which he makes himself ruler. In Shakespeare’s play, he is accompanied only by Miranda, his daughter, but in the Restoration version, he is accompanied by both Miranda; Dorinda, his second daughter; and Hippolito, the young heir to the dukedom of Mantua whose birthright has 51

been usurped by Alonso. Given that the island is occupied by only his daughter, Caliban, and the airy spirit Ariel, Prospero is quite literally a father-king. Shakespeare’s Prospero is portrayed as an absolute ruler of the island, with extensive magic and his two slaves, Ariel and Caliban, to bolster his reign. Dryden and D’Avenant’s​ ​Prospero, however, wields no such inherent absolute power. Rather than manipulating the affairs of the play from behind the scenes as Shakespeare’s Prospero does, the Restoration Prospero directly imposes his power on Miranda, Dorinda,

49

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest, ​19-22.

50

D’Avenant and Dryden, 6-7.

​William Shakespeare, ​The Tempest,​ ed. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, paperback ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016), 17-23;​ D’Avenant and Dryden, 6-7, 24​.

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Fang 13 Hippolito, and the shipwrecked newcomers, interfering in almost every situation on the island.

Maus describes the Restoration Prospero as “kin to the neurotic and domineering father of a 52

farce.” This Prospero’s overbearing assertion of control reveals insecurities that are unique to the political climate of the Restoration: Post-regicide Prospero fears the loss of power more than Shakespeare’s Prospero and, consequently, exerts it both physically and forcefully. He does not wield natural sovereignty either as a father or as a king, and instead, he must constantly reinforce his dominance.

Sex and gender roles also play a part in Restoration Prospero’s insecurities. To combat the possibility that sexual relations between his daughters and the men of the island may undermine his authority as a father, he insists on separating Hippolito from Miranda and Dorinda, warning the young prince of the dangers of women while frightening his daughters with 53

stories about the dangers of men. Such determination to isolate his daughters from men personifies the model of separate spheres in a literal sense, and Prospero tries to maintain his power as a father-king by taking charge of and enforcing this model, suggesting a new potential source of patriarchal authority. Even so, Prospero cannot keep Miranda and Dorinda away from Hippolito and Ferdinand, and at the end of the play, his power is ultimately undermined by the romantic attractions that form between the four young characters, which overpower Prospero’s attempts to separate the sexes. Such a weakened, inept Prospero also reflects Restoration anxieties, for in the aftermath of regicide, traditional models of patriarchal-monarchical sovereignty no longer upheld the power of father figures or ensured customary sexual relations.

52

Maus, “Arcadia Lost,” 196.

53

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest​, 25-27​.

Fang 14 Faced with the same challenges as Prospero, in order to truly restore the power of the monarchy in post-regicide Britain, the Stuart court needed to reestablish patriarchal dominance and rebuild the foundations of political authority. The rise of actresses in Restoration theaters provided the perfect opportunity to question, discuss, and reconstruct social standards for gender relations and patriarchal power dynamics.

“The Storm, the desart Island, and the Woman who had never seen a Man”: Female Sexuality on the Restoration Stage Actresses were formally introduced to the British stage in the same patents that granted 54

Killigrew and D’Avenant the right to their theater companies. In the patent issued to D’Avenant, Charles II stipulates specific expectations for the legalization of actresses: We do likewise permit and give leave that all women’s parts to be acted in either of the said two companies for the time to be may be performed by women, so long as these recreations (which by reason of the abuses aforesaid were scandalous and offensive) may be such reformation be esteemed, not only harmless delight, but useful and instructive representations of human life, to such of Our good subjects as shall resort to the same.

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The purported intent of the court was to rid the theaters of boy-actors, to which the “abuses aforesaid” refers, and to replace them with women whose acting would serve as “instructive” 56

examples of accepted social behavior. At first glance, Charles II seems to view the legalization

54

“Copy of Davenant’s.”

55

​“Copy of Davenant's.​”

56

“Copy of Davenant’s.”

Fang 15 of actresses as a chance to institute moral reform in the theaters, purging playhouses of any potential homoerotic undertones in the transvestitism of casting boys to play female roles. The actor and playwright Thomas Jordan, who wrote the prologue for the December 1660 production of ​Othello​, affirmed this view when he introduced the first English actress to step on the public 57

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stage. In the prologue, he notes, “I saw the Lady drest / The Woman playes to day.” He continues by characterizing this “Lady” as “vertuous” and arguing that with the admission of 59

women onto the public stage, the production had “intents to civilize the Stage.” Jordan also evokes an idealized notion of female purity, chastity, and morality, tying the presence of an 60

actual woman acting female roles to the “reforming age” of the Restoration. In the same breath that Jordan draws attention to the true femininity of the actress playing Desdemona, he also 61

criticizes boy-actors of the Renaissance theaters, calling the cross-dressed actors “defective.”

Both Jordan and Charles II framed the advent of actresses as a civilizing, “vertuous,” and

reformative influence on the theater, especially in contrast to the boy actors of the Renaissance.​

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To a certain extent, Restoration courtiers shared the same mindset, and having spent the Interregnum in exile abroad at Charles II’s side, they welcomed the actresses as an aesthetically and morally corrective force that would, in theory, modernize London’s theaters by following the

​Thomas Jordan, ​A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie​, 1664, accessed December 6, 2019, https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2016/05/who-was-the-first-shakespearean-actress.html, 21-22.

57

58

Jordan, 21​.

59

Jordan, 21​.

60

Jordan, 22​.

61

Jordan, 22​.

62

​Fisk, “The Restoration,” 73.

Fang 16 lead of theaters in Continental Europe, particularly French theaters, who had employed female 63

actors since the first half of the seventeenth century.

In the same patent that legalized actresses as a “reformation,” however, Charles II also briefly mentions that the “instructive” examples acted by women should also provide “harmless 64

delight.”​ Here, Charles II preemptively recognizes the role that female sexuality and sex as a whole would play in English theater, for in spite of his wish that actresses serve as a “reformation” to the theaters, Restoration drama proved to be “sexually more explicit and 65

morally more subversive” than earlier English drama. Now that boy actors did not complicate the authentic portrayal of female characters, expressions of femininity were no longer criticized 66

and suppressed on the stage. Rather, female sexuality was “positively relished” in the theaters, where, for the first time in British stage history, women were legally allowed to publicly display 67

themselves for male spectators in a supposedly “instructive” setting. After all, the physical presence of a woman embodying female roles opened the door for discussions about the relation 68

between the female body and sexual relations. Scholar Katherine M. Quinsey postulates, “a female voice and body informed what was said and touched off in male spectators an intricate complex of response, interpretation, construction, and constraint,” suggesting that the position of

63

​Fisk, 72-73; John Harold Wilson, ​All the King's Ladies​ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 6.

64

“Copy of Davenant’s.”

65

Maus, “Playhouse Flesh,” 598.

66

Howe, ​The First,​ 21.

67

Howe, 21.

​Katherine M. Quinsey, introduction to ​Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama (Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996), 7.

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Fang 17 the actress reevaluated gender roles by bringing the female body under the spotlight of societal 69

consideration. On the one hand, Restoration women found a certain empowerment in the theater, both in performing onstage themselves and in seeing their conflicts and stories elevated 70

in the public sphere. On the other, Restoration drama became obsessed with the actress and with the sexual titillation that her physical presence brought to the stage, and dramatists at the time played heavily on the female body and sex in their plays, subjecting actresses to eroticized perceptions of femininity.

71

The first appearance of an actress onstage was thus followed by an expansion of female roles in Restoration plays as well as more sexualized female characters. Playwrights and actresses alike were now safe from the danger of unintentional comedic differences that boy 72

actors faced. Female sexuality could now be both truthfully represented and thoroughly enjoyed onstage, and playwrights drew inspiration from the possibilities for erotic spectacle that the physical presence of the actress offered. Desdemona’s femininity could finally be emphasized without reservation, adding a new layer of sexuality to the final bedroom scene in Othello.​ In many of the tragedies written during the Restoration, scenes that featured female characters lying on a couch or a bed, often half-dressed or ​déshabillée​, became a popularized motif, appearing in plays like John Crowne’s ​The History of Charles the Eighth of France​ and 73

Thomas Southerne’s ​The Fate of Capua.​ These “couch scenes,” as critic Elizabeth Howe terms 69

​Quinsey, 7.

70

Rosenthal, “Reading Masks,” 205-206.

71

Quinsey, Introduction, 2.

72

Howe, ​The First,​ 49.

73

Howe, 39-40.

Fang 18 them, drew particular attention to the sensual beauty of the actress and aroused desire in both the 74

male characters of the scene and the male spectators of the audience. Restoration drama’s fascination with female sexuality also engendered the less innocuous tropes of rape and sexual 75

violence.​ Marsden remarks, “the proliferation of rape scenes coincides with the appearance of actresses upon the British stage, linking the representation of rape on stage to visible femininity.”

76

Though Shakespeare’s plays rarely feature attempted rape or sexual violence, rape scenes were

frequently added as an erotic, provocative element in Restoration adaptations, among which include Nahum Tate’s controversial ​King Lear,​ Thomas D’Urfey’s ​Cymbeline​, and Edward 77

Ravenscroft’s ​Titus Andronicus. In these scenes, physical signs of sexual violence such as “loose hair” and “disordered garments” allow for the presentation of rape as “erotic spectacle” such that “rape becomes the physical manifestation of the desire perpetrated by the rapist but 78

implicit in the audience’s gaze.” The audience is allowed to indulge in the same sexual delight of the actress’s body that the rapist feels, a delight that is far from the “harmless delight” Charles II prescribed in his initial patent. Above all, rape scenes play obsessively on the sexuality and sensuality of the actress, whose physical presence is exploited for erotic pleasure of the play’s male characters and the men of the audience alike.

74

Howe, 39.

​Jean I. Marsden, “Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage,” in ​Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama​, by Katherine M. Quinsey (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 185.

75

76

​Marsden, 185.

77

Marsden, 185-186.

78

Marsden, 186.

Fang 19 Beyond the occasional addition of couch and rape scenes, the preoccupation of Restoration drama with female sexuality emerges prominently in Restoration adaptations that completely alter the storylines of earlier Renaissance plays to concentrate focus on the actress and her femininity. For instance, the drastic modifications that Dryden and D’Avenant made to the characters in ​The Tempest​ betray the Restoration era’s fascination with the female body and 79

female sexual identity. Shakespeare’s ​Tempest​ is characterized by a noticeably sparse female cast: The island has only one female inhabitant, Miranda, and though some other female 80

characters are mentioned by name, no other woman physically appears during the play. When Dryden and D’Avenant revisited Shakespeare’s original play, they expanded the number of 81

female characters from one to four. The two Restoration dramatists also readjusted the focus of the play and transformed Shakespeare’s exploration of power, usurpation and self-discovery into 82

a mere love comedy, choosing to elevate romance above all the other elements in the play. In Dryden’s preface to the play, which was written in 1669, he describes the process of adaptation, and while speaking of previous versions of ​The Tempest,​ he writes, “Those who have seen [Fletcher’s] Sea-Voyage, may easily discern that it was a Copy of Shakespear's Tempest: the Storm, the desart Island, and the Woman who had never seen a Man, are all sufficient 83

testimonies of it.” While the first two elements with which Dryden characterizes Shakespeare’s

79

Quinsey, Introduction, 2.

80

Shakespeare, ​The Tempest​, 3.

81

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest​, n.p.

Lori Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine: Staging Female Characters in the Late Plays and Early Adaptations​ (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 68-69.

82

83

​D'Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest,​ n.p.

Fang 20 Tempest​ figure prominently in the premise of the story, the “Woman who had never seen a Man” is only one descriptive detail of Miranda’s situation, one that is never even mentioned explicitly, before her father raises a tempest that shipwrecks his enemies and brings Ferdinand into her 84

world. The fact that Dryden and D’Avenant focus on this aspect of Shakespeare’s story and elevate Miranda’s innocence above all the other political conflicts reveals not only the era’s royalist aversion to the subject of usurpation but also its fascination with the ideal of female chastity. To further play upon the ideal of sexual innocence and the possibilities that it presents for romantic comedy, Dryden and D’Avenant replicate Miranda’s situation with the addition of Dorinda, Miranda’s sister who also “never saw man,” and Hippolito, a young duke also trapped 85

on the island who is “one that never saw Woman.” The central plot of the Restoration ​Tempest then revolves around the romances and misunderstandings that emerge between Miranda, Dorinda, Hippolito, and Ferdinand, who is the only sexually experienced character among the four lovers, and the question of sex, expressed through irony and innuendo, dominates Dryden and D’Avenant’s play.

Not only were actresses obliged to play into Restoration tastes for the not-so-harmless “harmless delight” of female sexuality, but in doing so, they brought financial success for the 86

men who wrote, directed, and produced the shows. Because they were fresh to the stage, actresses drew curious spectators to the box office, and even after the opening night of a play, 87

ticket sales still kept growing. Actresses were financially profitable for the box office, not just

84

Shakespeare, ​The Tempest​, 13,43.

85

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest​, n.p​.

86

​Wilson, ​All the King's Ladies,​ 90.

87

Wilson, 90.

Fang 21 because of their performance skills but also because of the allure of their presumed sexual availability. As critic John Harold Wilson notes, “the women continued to attract spectators by their acting skills, by their beauty, by the often daring display of their persons, and especially by 88

their demireputations [as public, or sexually available, women].” After performances, male audience members were commonly known to visit actresses in the dressing rooms, and the public nature of an actress’s profession, in combination with her vulnerability to sexual advances 89

backstage, gave rise to their “demireputations” as the theatrical equivalents of prostitutes. In this respect, Restoration audiences’ perception of actresses as sexually available and libertine added a layer of irony to Dryden and D’Avenant’s interpretation of Miranda and Dorinda as sexually inexperienced and ignorant, for the innocence and chastity of those two characters 90

“become a huge suggestive joke, [their] naiveté merely an opportunity for innuendo.” Howe concludes that Dryden and D’Avenant’s emphasis on the concept of “the Woman who had never seen a Man” demonstrated an effort to ironically highlight Restoration understandings of the actress’s social status, portraying the female characters in ​The Tempest​ not as the “chaste ideal” of the Renaissance but rather “with a cynical recognition of the nature of the real women who 91

would be playing them.” Therefore, from the scenes they played to their backstage interactions, the appearance of women in the theater brought dramatized, complex expressions of female

88

Wilson, 90.

89

Howe,​ The First,​ 32.

90

Howe, 64.

91

Howe, 64.

Fang 22 sexuality to the forefront of societal attention, and Restoration theaters and audiences alike became captivated with the physical presence of a woman on display.

A new preoccupation with female sexuality was not restricted to the theaters alone. The “delight” of actresses that Charles II’s patent demanded correlated with a growing social 92

awareness of and even obsession with female sexuality during the Restoration. With the erosion of the traditional patriarchal order came new understandings of femininity. In the late seventeenth century, as the hierarchical model of sexual relations gave way to the belief that men and women were opposites by nature, British women came to be defined by their “seductive 93

difference” from men. Sexuality became a primary vehicle of differentiation between the two sexes, but rather than being liberated by it, women were increasingly defined as purely sexual 94

beings, which became a new interpretation of femininity that reinforced patriarchal dynamics.

Defining women by their sexuality ultimately led to the objectification of their bodies, especially onstage, for by perceiving an actress through the lens of her sexual appeal alone, Restoration theaters found “a cultural strategy for recapturing the eroded masculine authority in a different 95

form,” especially in the theater. The reduction of the female sex to the status of a mere object of desire allowed men to regain their dominance on the basis of sexual superiority and “delight” in the physical attractions of women.

Therefore, while the physical presence of women on stage added a new dimension of gender representation to Restoration drama, the women in the theaters captured public interest 92

Howe, 21.

93

Maus, “Playhouse Flesh,” 613.

94

Howe, ​The First,​ 21.

95

Rosenthal, “Reading Masks,” 203.

Fang 23 not so much for their skill in portraying female characters but rather for the opportunities they offered predominately male playwrights and audience members alike to view, enjoy, and objectify the female sex. By legalizing actresses on the joint condition that women bring “harmless delight” as well as “instructive representation,” Charles II, whose own sexual promiscuity played no small part in the shifting social attitudes towards female sexuality, 96

allowed for a liberal, though slightly contradictory, reading of his patent’s guidelines. In the theater, “instructive representations” and “harmless delight” were no longer exclusive. Rather, one came with the other, and the dramatic representation of women became its own form of social instruction as female sexuality was exploited to provide a new basis for patriarchal dominance, one rooted in the objectification of women.

“If once I see her I shall love her”: Voyeuristic Perceptions and the Male Gaze In addition to theatrical expressions of female sexuality, Restoration drama was characterized by a new artistic aesthetic. When Killigrew and D’Avenant rebuilt London’s playhouses, they transformed the look of English theater. Abandoning the model of performances in the round, they adopted the proscenium structure of the “picture stage,” which 97

had become fashionable throughout Continental Europe and especially in France. As a result, 98

Restoration drama focused on what was seen onstage rather than what was heard. Theater managers maneuvered this transition to visual drama by creating a “theater of illusion,” building moveable scenery flats and elaborating on costumes to draw audiences into the world of the play.

96

Owen, Preface, xiii.

97

​Summers, Introduction, cvii.

98

Murray, ​Restoration Shakespeare,​ 205.

Fang 24 99

Part of the illusion depended on the actresses, whose “specularized” beauty, as critic Laura J.

Rosenthal terms it, added to the picture of the scene and stimulated visual pleasure among the 100

audience.

Female characters were often portrayed as the object of sexual desire, and

consequently, the physical appearance of the actresses who played these characters onstage 101

aroused similar erotic titillation among the audience members.

The voyeuristic dynamic of the

female performer and the male spectator thus placed women under the constraints of sexualized objectification while handing the power and the pleasures of the spectator to the male audience.

102

The objectification of women onstage reflected larger socioeconomic trends at the time.

In the late seventeenth century, middle-class women suffered from economic marginalization as previously female-dominated jobs such as nursing and teaching came to be taken over by 103

professional men.

Additionally, the enclosure of land meant that women contributed less to the

family’s economy while men found more jobs outside the domestic sphere, reinforcing the 104

dynamic of separate spheres.

For unmarried women with little to no dowry, the viable options

for economic stability were slim: Besides marriage, women could only rely on domestic service 105

and prostitution to make a living.

99

An imbalanced gender ratio further compounded the

Rosenthal, “Reading Masks,” 204.

100

Rosenthal, 204.

101

​Marsden, “Rape, Voyeurism,” 186.

​Laura J. Rosenthal, "Masculinity in Restoration Drama," in ​A Companion to Restoration Drama,​ ed. Susan J. Owen, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 96.

102

103

Maus, “Playhouse Flesh,” 600-601.

104

Rosenthal, “Reading Masks,” 206.

105

Maus, “Playhouse Flesh,” 600-601.

Fang 25 challenges faced by middle-class professional women, who increasingly saw marriage as their 106

primary economic purpose and were consequently objectified by social standards of beauty.

As Rosenthal suggests, socioeconomic marginalization “may further have placed more pressure 107

on women to cultivate their beauty, thus to reinforce their status as objects.”

With the legalization of actresses, the theaters provided another means by which middle-class women, especially those who were from less reputable or financially struggling families, could make a living.

108

While increasing opportunities for women to pursue a

profession in acting were a clear exception to the overall economic trends of the time, the same social pressures of objectification persisted. The characterization of actresses, as well as the costumes that they were dressed in, lent itself to voyeuristic reception, for as Marsden observes, “‘Displayed’ on the Restoration stage, often in sexually revealing costumes, the actress was presented as sexual object and thus the locus of voyeurism. Her ‘to-be-looked-at-ness’ defined 109

her function as object of desire.”

Encouraged by the context of the stage and the scene,

objectified displays of female sexuality often enraptured the male gaze.

Jordan’s prologue to the 1660 ​Othello​ reflects both the intention behind dramatized objectification and the effect of voyeurism on social perceptions of the actress. In the same prologue that advocated the civilizing effect of actresses, Jordan anticipates reactionary,

106

Rosenthal, “Reading Masks,” 206; Wahl, “Invisible Relations,” 87-88.

107

Rosenthal, 206.

108

Maus, “Playhouse Flesh,” 601.

109

​Marsden, "Rape, Voyeurism,” 186.

Fang 26 conservative protests at such a deviation from traditional gender roles, and he urges the audience to receive her with an open mind: Do you not twitter Gentlemen? I know You will be censuring, do’t fairly though; ’Tis possible a vertuous woman may Abhor all sorts of looseness, and yet play; 110

Play on the Stage where all eyes are on her.

Here, Jordan articulates the contrast between intention and reception: As much as Charles II and the theater managers marketed actresses as a “reformation” to the theaters, the audience already viewed the stage as an indecent place for women, who would be put on display for the “delight,” 111

harmless or otherwise, of spectators.

Jordan himself even draws attention to the voyeuristic

aspect of theater and implies that the art of playing was a sort of “looseness,” one in which “all eyes are on” the actress.

112

In fact, Jordan’s allusion to the voyeuristic perception of actresses

evokes the social connotation of a “public” woman, for a woman who displays herself in public 113

was viewed in the same light as a prostitute and evoked the same “delight.”

In Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​Tempest​, voyeuristic tastes shape both the play’s and its characters’ attitudes towards women. Prospero forbids Hippolito and his daughters, Miranda and Dorinda, from seeing each other, for as he warns Hippolito, he believes that “those who once

110

Jordan, ​A Royal, 2​ 1-22.

111

“Copy of Davenant’s.”

112

Jordan, ​A Royal,​ 21-22.

113

​Rosenthal, “Masculinity,” 95.

Fang 27 behold ’em [women], / Are made their slaves for ever,” placing clear emphasis on the power of 114

sight to spark sexual attraction.

In fact, Prospero tells his daughters that the sight of men alone

could result in their impregnation, claiming that “no woman can come / Neer ’em but she feels a 115

painfull nine Months.”

His daughters, overpowered by sexual curiosity, humorously disregard

this warning, as Miranda declares: “I had rather be in pain nine Months, as my Father threaten’d, 116

than lose my longing.”

Prospero’s exaggerated fear of intersexual contact by sight speaks to

the perceived power of seduction by sight, especially in the appearances of women, for Miranda, Dorinda, and Hippolito were all played by actresses at the time.

117

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the inciting incident for the romances, which construct the central plot of Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​Tempest,​ is Miranda and Dorinda peeping 118

into Hippolito’s cave.

Upon Dorinda’s first sight of Hippolito, she finds herself immediately

drawn to his allure, and she decides to approach Hippolito in spite of Prospero’s interdiction, 119

solely on the basis of his looks: “He’ll not hurt me, I see it by his looks.”

Upon sight, Dorinda 120

is overcome by desire and resolves that “Though I dye for’t, I must have th’other peep.”

When

she finally approaches him, Hippolito is also immediately enraptured by the visual charm of Dorinda’s appearances and exclaims, “my sight is dazl’d, and yet I find I am loth to shut my 114

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest, ​26.

115

D’Avenant and Dryden, 27.

116

D’Avenant and Dryden, 28.

117

Howe, ​The First,​ 56-57.

118

Ironically, this scene, which plays heavily on the idea of seduction by sight, turns the two female characters into voyeurs, a position that is customarily male, especially in the theater.

119

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest, ​29.

120

D’Avenant and Dryden, 29.

Fang 28 121

Eyes.”

Their relationship is built entirely on the trope of love at first sight, underscoring the

power of looks to evoke erotic infatuation. Later, Hippolito explicitly characterizes his newly awakened sexual desire, which is comedically insatiable, as one founded in sight: “I know I’m made for twenty hundred Women. / (I mean if there so many be i’th’World) / So that if once I see her I shall love her.”

122

The frequent references to love that is engendered at first sight allow

the audience to indirectly experience the same voyeuristic seduction, for by highlighting the physical attractiveness of Miranda, Dorinda, and even Hippolito, Dryden and D’Avenant explicitly draw attention to and objectify the appearance of the actresses, displayed on the stage for the audience’s visual titillation.

Representations of women as the object of voyeuristic desire thus diffused the substance of female characters, especially in romantic scenes, for on the picture stage of the Restoration, a woman’s looks drew more attention than her words. The exhibition and exploitation of an actress’s appearance eliminated the threat of granting women a voice in the public sphere by diverting attention from her speech to her body. Any potential influence that the actress held in her presence onstage was employed to the ends of sparking romance and temptation, both among male characters and the male audience. Consequently, Restoration actresses not only saw their characters reduced to their sexuality but also experienced the objectification of their physical qualities for the delight of the male gaze.

“I am but a Woman to him”: Female Agency and the Female Transvestite

121

D’Avenant and Dryden, 29.

122

D’Avenant and Dryden, 58.

Fang 29 In the rare instances when an actress was not subjugated to the confines of her sexualized appearance, she still did not enjoy the freedoms and influence of speaking and acting on a public stage. Responding to the potential of actresses to incite social upheaval, Restoration theater curbed the amount of agency that was accorded to female characters as a whole. As a matter of fact, Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays proved to be less feminist than Shakespeare’s plays overall, even if women were given more opportunities to participate in them, for the portrayal of women and female sexuality in particular on the post-regicide stage sought to reduce female agency and impose new limits on the roles that women played in these fictive worlds.

123

Women in Restoration drama were often defined by their relation to, desire for,

or seduction of male characters, and their sole purpose was to love men, demonstrating a clear break from Shakespearean works, in which female characters had motivations for action that were independent of romantic interests.

124

Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays thus

reshaped each female character to revolve around the concept of love and romance, and many of Shakespeare’s strongest heroines, such as Cordelia of ​King Lear,​ Portia of ​The Merchant of Venice​, and even Isabel of ​Measure for Measure​, are simplified to serve solely as loving, 125

affectionate companions to their male counterparts.

Marsden notes that love transformed the

role of women in Shakespeare’s plays by diminishing the female characters’ independence from men and saturating their stories with romantic sentiment instead:

123

Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied​, 9.

124

Marsden, “Radical Adaptation,” 34.

125

Marsden, 34-35.

Fang 30 [L]ove becomes the ruling characteristic for virtuous women. It motivates all proper female action. … The emphasis on love as a defining characteristic erases many more active qualities and, because love acts as the general cause of female suffering, its prominence suggests the heroines’ ability to suffer passively, once again provoking pathos. Moreover, emphasizing a woman’s role as loving and beloved defines her in 126

relation to a man and de-emphasizes her autonomy as well as her political significance.

Women played the same roles in Restoration drama that they did in society, and despite their

involvement in the public sphere as professional actresses, they were nevertheless governed by the social standards of separate spheres. The agency accorded to actresses was limited to 127

domestic purposes alone: to love, to marry, and to maintain harmony within their families.

Exceptions to this trend certainly existed, for at the same time that actresses were

admitted to the stage, female writers and playwrights also began to gather an audience. Notably, the works of Aphra Behn, the first professional female writer and a notable playwright of the era, provides a rare, if not the only, glimpse into the attitudes of women towards dramatic 128

representations of female sexuality.

In Behn’s plays, which were widely popular and

performed in the later years of the Restoration, she recognizes the sexualization of women in 129

theater, but she does little to resist it.

Her portrayals of female characters and their struggles

with love and marriage offer notions of women’s independent desire and entertain possibilities of

126

Marsden, 35.

127

Even if a female character expressed a strong sense of will or impassioned feelings of sexual desire, she was more than often limited to the harmless, domestic world of Restoration comedies, and her struggles were quickly resolved with the simple fortuity of marriage. (See Marsden, “Radical Adaptation,” 38).

128

Marsden, “Rape, Voyeurism,” 196.

129

Marsden, 196.

Fang 31 women in positions of agency, but they do provide any actual solutions to the plight of women 130

with ambitions that diverge from the domestic sphere.

Another more prevalent exception to the trend of female disempowerment lies in the phenomenon of female-to-male cross-dressing, which emerged quickly after the admission of women to the theater. As much as the presence of women onstage provided a fresh, more concretely authentic medium for the representation of female sexuality, the Renaissance practice of cross-dressing did not come fully to a close. Rather, in the same moment that young male actors who played female characters took their final bows, dramatists and theater managers shoved their newly cast actresses into roles for male characters, continuing the age-old tradition of cross-dressing and giving rise to a new brand of female sexualization and voyeurism.

These male roles played by female actors, called breeches parts, differed notably from the Renaissance boy actors in one respect: While the boy actors were meant to embody their feminine persona as realistically as they could, masking as much of their true gender as possible, 131

Restoration actresses found their gender and sexuality emphasized in their breeches parts.

In

fact, these breeches parts were created with the intention of showing off the actress’s femininity rather than masking it, for as Howe postulates, “Breeches roles seem to have been designed to 132

show off the female body—there was no question of the actress truly impersonating a man.”

Restoration dramatists played heavily on the visual irony in the display of an actress’s hips and

130

Marsden, 196.

131

​Howe, ​The First,​ 56.

132

Howe, 56.

Fang 32 legs, which were no longer hidden by skirts and petticoats but rather clearly outlined in male 133

costume.

Breeches parts proved fairly popular in English dramatic culture: 89 out of the 375 plays and adaptations performed in the period 1660-1700, which amounts to just under a quarter, 134

included one or more breeches parts.

Actresses who played these breeches parts did enjoy the

chance to experience more freedoms than most women in the Restoration would have ever known, such as the ability to don a man’s clothes and wield a sword, and these freedoms 135

provided cross-dressing actresses “a considerable sense of liberation.”

However, the breeches

parts’ popularity can hardly be seen as a challenge to traditional gender roles by granting female actors the agency to act as men, for these cross-dressing actresses were defined not by their ability to assume a masculine persona but by the exposure of their femininity and sexuality.

Restoration plays with breeches parts were often characterized by constant references to the true gender of the actress, whose character was often portrayed in an emasculating light, and such instances of cross-dressing became yet another cultural tool employed by Restoration dramatists 136

that exploited visual irony to reinforce patriarchal perceptions of female sexuality.

Therefore,

though it appears, at first glance, that Restoration actresses were given the opportunity to exercise the freedoms men have in society, albeit in a fictive world, the creation of breeches parts

133

Howe, 56.

134

Howe, 57.

135

Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied,​ 13.

136

Howe, ​The First, 5​ 6, 59.

Fang 33 offered actresses little to no chance of truly stepping into a man’s shoes, as actresses who played 137

male characters only saw their femininity and their sexuality further objectified onstage.

Following the trend of female cross-dressing, among the added female characters in Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​The Tempest​ is Hippolito, the male equivalent of Miranda on 138

Prospero’s island who critics agree was played by a woman, likely Jane Long.

From the start

of the play, Dryden and D’Avenant pointedly highlight the presence of a woman in a man’s part.

The prologue forewarns the audience of a breeches part in the play, boasting in particular of the production’s ability to transform a female actress into a man, yet at the same time, Dryden and D’Avenant suggestively draw particular attention to that actress’s sexuality: “We for our Theatre shall want it more Who by our dearth of Youths are forc'd t'employ One of our Women to present a Boy. And that's a transformation you will say Exceeding all the Magick in the Play…

All you shall see of her is perfect man.

Or if your fancy will be farther led, 139

To find her woman, it must be abed.”

As much as the actress is purported to portray “perfect man,” the playwrights purposefully undermine the illusion by drawing such attention to the upcoming appearance of a woman

137

​Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied​, 13.

138

Howe, ​The First,​ 56-57.

139

D’Avenant and Dryden​, The Tempest,​ n.p.

Fang 34 disguised as a man.

140

It is also telling that the prologue ends on a provocative innuendo that

appeals to the male “fancy” by crudely alluding to the actress’s sexual availability, and such a suggestive remark sets both the tone of the play and the audience’s perception of the actresses onstage.

Any masculinity in the characterization of Hippolito is gradually undermined over the course of the play, with constant references to his sexual ignorance, a quality often associated with feminine chastity, and to his emasculated persona as a whole. Once Hippolito has discovered the “delight” of women, his erotic passions are satirized to a farcical end: In Act 4, he declares to Ferdinand, whose lover, Miranda, intrigues Hippolito, “I know my inclinations are to love all Women,” humorously hyperbolizing masculine desire.

141

Ferdinand, feeling threatened

by Hippolito’s profession of insatiable lust, challenges to Hippolito to a duel, and the exchange takes a turn that pointedly undermines Hippolito’s masculinity: Ferd.​ Then since you have refused this act of friendship, Provide yourself a Sword; for we must fight.

Hip.​ A Sword, what’s that?

Ferd.​ Why, such a thing as this.

Hip.​ What should I do with it?

Ferd.​ You must stand thus, and push against me, While I push at you, till one of us falls dead.

Hip.​ This is brave sport, 140

In fact, the prologue states that the actress will “present a Boy” rather than a man, implying that at best, a woman can only attempt to fill the role of a boy.

141

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest,​ 59.

Fang 35 142

But we have no Swords growing in our World.

Hippolito’s ignorance of a sword, which carries the implicit sexual innuendo of the male phallus, and Ferdinand’s explanation of sword-fighting are clear erotic jokes that play on Hippolito’s true sex as a female player in disguise. Every one of Hippolito’s declarations of masculine desire, most of which are impossibly overblown, is negated by a comment on his sexual inexperience and lack of true masculinity, and even Hippolito’s exaggerated, insatiable desire for women carries the undertones of female-female eroticism.

The illusion of Hippolito’s perceived masculinity is further dismantled by his death from his duel with Ferdinand and his subsequent resurrection. Not only is Hippolito proven to be inept at sword-fighting, a traditionally masculine activity, but he is brought back to life by a collection of herbs that carry symbolic undertones of femininity. Hippolito’s restoration to consciousness is roused by “the healing juice of vulnerary Herbs” that Ariel concocts, among which include “Moly” from “the Isles of our Hesperides,” “trickling Balm” from Palestine, and “purple Panacea” from the British Isles.

143

Ariel explains that these herbs stopped the loss of blood, but

to a Restoration audience, these herbs bear the connotation of their medicinal usage to encourage 144

menstruation.

The choice of herbs betrays, once again, an allusion to the actual gender behind

Hippolito’s masculine pretense, and the allusions to menstruation especially elevate the sexuality of the actress above the disguise of her breeches part. Consequently, Hippolito’s resurrection, which brings resolution to the play’s conflicts, is met with “a mixture of cynical knowingness

142

D’Avenant and Dryden, 59.

143

D’Avenant and Dryden, 74.

144

Murray, ​Restoration Shakespeare,​ 86.

Fang 36 and sentimental reassurance,” which describes the reception of the character of Hippolito throughout Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​Tempest​ at large.

145

Therefore, the cross-dressing of women as men posed no real danger towards patriarchal gender norms, for the creation of breeches parts only furthered the sexualization of women on the Restoration stage, reinforcing the dominance of the male sex in the public sphere.

146

Breeches

parts offered “little more than yet another means of displaying the actress as a sexual object,” as Howe writes, and as shown in Dryden and D’Avenant’s ​Tempest​, playwrights do not give the 147

audience the chance to forget the true gender of an actress, no matter her character role.

These

comedic portrayals of women attempting to pass as a men yet falling short ultimately fortified the fundamental sexual polarity of the two genders and reassured men of their status in the gender power structure: Because of their sex, women could never truly be men or wield the same power in the public sphere as men.

If the opportunity to play a man did not allow actresses the freedom to exercise true agency, the female roles that most actresses played offered even less hope of empowerment. The effects of objectification, voyeurism, and oversexualization at large curbed any possibility to exercise female agency onstage. Female roles during this era were sharply limited in variety and scope: In Restoration plays, most women are characterized in relation to men, either by their romances, their marriage, or their maternal responsibilities, and the few who are independent of 148

men are presented as villains.

The liberation and social acceptance of female sexuality

145

Murray, 86.

146

Howe, ​The First,​ 59.

147

Howe, 59.

148

Marsden, “Radical Adaptation,” 34.

Fang 37 presented little true freedom: Female characters who profess sexual desire still operate under the limits of their sex, for their outspoken passion resides in the domestic realm and is accordingly 149

harmless to the new patriarchal order.

Dryden and D’Avenant portray Miranda and Dorinda’s

sexual desires not as expressions of their agency but rather as comedic representations of female innocence in the face of masculine desire.

Even the women who remain chaste and do not express sexual desire are subjected to the constraints of oversexualization and objectification, for these idealized women are more than 150

often victimized for their purity and virtue.

These roles, which align most closely with the

original goal of employing actresses to “useful and instructive representations of human life,” 151

still cannot escape the consequences of sexualized gender norms.

Ultimately, they are left

“defenseless against the world” of a play that appears to idealize their morality while “actually 152

camouflaging their ultimate victimization,” as Marsden affirms.

No actress or woman in

general is exempt from the enforcement of the new sexual order, which completely transformed social and cultural understandings of the female gender.

In the Restoration ​Tempest,​ although the number of female roles increased from Shakespeare’s original play, the agency accorded to each female character was drastically diminished. Given the adaptation’s attenuation of political themes involving rebellion and its reinterpretation of gender dynamics, the emphasis of Miranda’s ignorance of men and the added

149

Marsden, 38.

150

Marsden, 40.

151

“Copy of Davenant’s.”

152

Marsden, “Radical Adaptation,” 40.

Fang 38 characters of Dorinda, Sycorax, and Milcha—all of whom are characterized by their sexual ignorance in relation to the men of the island—attest to a rewritten play that has little resemblance to its original in its treatment of female power and female sexuality. Sycorax and Milcha are solely created to serve as romantic partners for Caliban and Ariel, respectively, with 153

no notable traits other than the opportunities for sexual innuendo that their presence affords.

Milcha is given one line at the end of the play to answer Ariel when he summons her for the 154

closing dance.

Meanwhile, Sycorax, who ironically bears the same name as Caliban’s

sorceress mother, bears the same status as a lowly courtesan in the sailors’ self-professed kingdom, for she is defined by her ignorance of social customs, her improperly forward desire 155

for Trincalo, and the allure of sexual temptation that she wields.

Neither characteristic grants

her individual agency, and instead, Sycorax’s entire purpose seems crafted purely to reinforce patriarchal sexual dynamics.

The difference between Shakespeare’s Miranda and the Restoration Miranda is unmistakable: Whereas Shakespeare’s Miranda possesses wit, freedom, and autonomy, even under Prospero’s oversight, Dryden and D’Avenant diminish their Miranda to a foolishly innocent and hopelessly naïve girl whose only purpose in the story is to function as an object of 156

desire.

Her education is given to Hippolito, who functions as Prospero’s son on the island and 157

is given his books to read.

Miranda’s most poignant lines, namely “O brave new world, that

153

D’Avenant and Dryden,​ The Tempest,​ n.p​.

154

D’Avenant and Dryden, 82.

155

D’Avenant and Dryden, 38-42.

156

Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied​, 73.

157

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest, 26.

Fang 39 has such people in’t!” are given to others in the play, like Hippolito, instead.

158

She is stripped of

her ability to take independent action: On the Restoration island, no longer does Miranda dare to question the tempest that Prospero raises more than a simple remark, nor does she successfully 159

subvert Prospero’s rule.

160

cave.

Instead, she is caught and admonished for peeking into Hippolito’s

She no longer demonstrates unconventional autonomy and confidence in her sexuality by

proposing to Ferdinand; rather, it is Prospero who sets both couples’ engagements at the end of 161

the play.

Her individuality and strength of character, which are her most notable and distinctive attributes in Shakespeare’s ​Tempest​, are suppressed in the Restoration adaptation. While Shakespeare's Miranda is the sole female on the island, the lack of other women on the island 162

gives Miranda unconventional freedoms.

Without a society of women to support a gender

hierarchy on the island, Shakespeare’s Miranda enjoys considerable independence and 163

self-government, unrestricted by social norms.

With Dryden and D’Avenant’s choice to give

Miranda a sister, Dorinda, Miranda’s liberty of action is sharply limited and undermined by the 164

gendered expectations that Dorinda’s presence brings.

158

D’Avenant and Dryden, 79.

159

D’Avenant and Dryden, 5.

160

D’Avenant and Dryden, 31-32.

161

D’Avenant and Dryden, 79-80​.

162

Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied​, 69.

163

Leigh, 69.

164

Leigh, 69.

Miranda is defined in relation to her

Fang 40 sister and held accountable for Dorinda’s actions, and together, they form a female society that can be subjugated and exploited to enforce patriarchal power dynamics on the island.

Above all, the Restoration Miranda does not demonstrate any individual willpower or sense of self. In Shakespeare’s play, one of Miranda’s most powerful moments lies in the “Abhorrèd slave” rebuke that Shakespeare’s Miranda launches at Caliban for his past attempt at 165

raping her.

This moment, which occurs in the scene of Miranda’s first appearance onstage,

establishes Miranda’s strong-willed independence as well as her acute awareness about her own sexuality, which later allows her to also maintain an upper hand over Ferdinand until she is finally forced to submit to traditional gender norms at the end of the play.

166

However, in the

Restoration ​Tempest,​ this moment, along with the independence and sexual awareness that it illuminates in Miranda’s character, is lost, for the “Abhorrèd slave” line is delivered by Prospero 167

instead, leaving Miranda silent throughout their exchange with Caliban.

Because Miranda does

not speak out or even recognize Caliban’s sexual aggression, Dryden and D’Avenant implicitly 168

highlight her ignorance of sex and, consequently, of her sexuality.

Caliban’s attempted rape of

Miranda goes virtually unacknowledged by the victim herself, implying that female sexual innocence enables rape.

The Restoration ​Tempest​ represents Miranda and all four women on the island as innocent, sexualized characters who, by the virtue of their ignorance and defenselessness, are

165

Shakespeare, ​The Tempest,​ 39.

166

Shakespeare, 39.

167

D’Avenant and Dryden, ​The Tempest,​ 11-12​.

168

Leigh, ​Shakespeare and the Embodied​, 74.

Fang 41 exploited by the men of the island for their pleasure and “harmless delight.” Given Dryden and D’Avenant’s success with their rendition of ​The Tempest​, these adapted portrayals of women 169

resonated with its audience’s values, the majority of which aligned with traditional royalism.

By capitalizing on opportunities to diminish the actress’s influence via sexualization and play to the male gaze, the inclusion of women in the Restoration theatrical scene thus exacerbated patriarchal subordination of the female sex.

In consequence, the oversexualization of female characters in Restoration theater denied actresses of any liberation or empowerment that they might have found in performing on a public stage. Instead, Restoration drama served as a vehicle for perpetuating traditional gender power dynamics and, in doing so, restoring the patriarchal sovereignty of the Stuart court. By reducing female agency in their plays and substituting characterization with sexualization, Restoration dramatists eliminated the danger of allowing women to perform on the public stage, thereby 170

creating a means of restoring patriarchal power in a post-regicide society.

Since monarchy

relied on patriarchal foundations to justify natural sovereignty, a reinforcement of male dominance also bolstered the newly restored authority of the Stuart court.

The effects of Restoration interpretations and perceptions of actresses ultimately set the tone for centuries of dramatic culture, for in the eras that followed, women continued to experience the limits of sexualized female characters in the theater and eventually on the screen.

A 2018 study conducted at the University of Southern California found that across the 100 top films of 2017, 28.4% of women onscreen were depicted in “sexy attire” in contrast to only 7.5%

169

Maus, "Arcadia Lost," 189;​ Howe, ​The First,​ 23.

170

Howe, 36.

Fang 42 of men onscreen.

172

are female.

171

At the same time, of all the total speaking roles in these films, only 31.8%

Even today, women are nearly as likely to be cast in an explicitly sexualized part

than to be cast in a part at all, demonstrating the continuity of Restoration-era ideas about the dramatic representation of women. After all, the treatment of actresses in the Restoration laid the foundation for the role of women, both in dramatic culture and in the public sphere as a whole, and normalized the oversexualization of idealized female characters, tracing centuries of sexualized gender norms back to the “harmless delight” and desires of patriarchal monarchism.

Stacy L. Smith et al., ​Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT and Disability from 2007 to 2017​, 3, July 2018, accessed February 16, 2020, http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inequality-in-1100-popular-films.pdf.

171

172

​Smith et al., 1.

Fang 43 Bibliography "Copy of Davenant's Patent Granted by King Charles II." January 15, 1663. MEPO 2/8688. The National Archives, Kew. Davenant, William, and John Dryden. "The Tempest; or, The Enchanted Island." Edited by Jack Lynch. Literary Resources on the Net. Accessed June 13, 2019. https://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/tempest.html.

D'Avenant, William, and John Dryden. ​The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island: a Comedy. As It Is Now Acted at His Highness the Duke of York's Theatre​. 1667. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Dryden, John. ​The Prologues and Epilogues of John Dryden​. Compiled by William Bradford Gardner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.

“English Civil Wars and the Commonwealth." In ​Gale World History Online Collection.​ Detroit: Gale, 2020. https://link-gale-com.puffin.harker.org/apps/doc/TFSXNS839270067/WHIC?u=harker&s id=WHIC&xid=3adccac0.

Filmer, Robert. "Patriarcha, or the Natural Power of Kings." ​Online Library of Liberty​. Accessed April 13, 2020. https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/filmer-patriarcha-or-the-natural-power-of-kings.

Fisk, Deborah Payne. "The Restoration Actress." In ​A Companion to Restoration Drama,​ edited

by Susan J. Owen, 69-91. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Deborah Payne Fisk, an associate professor of literature at American University, has written and edited books about Restoration literation. She examines the nuances of actress' professions and lives in the Restoration, when they first came to the stage.

Contrary to my argument, she argues that acting jobs gave women in the late seventeenth century an avenue to exercise agency because they had the chance to earn money and to enjoy the power of speech, although she also does acknowledge that actresses were often subjected to sexualized representations onstage.

Howe, Elizabeth. ​The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660-1700.​ 1996 ed.

Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992.

Elizabeth Howe was a professor of English and drama at Oxford University and Open University who specialized in seventeenth-century drama. Her book ​The First English Actresses​ explores the sexual exploitation of actresses in the first forty years that women were allowed to perform on the public stage in England. Howe argues that as much as the stage offered limited opportunities for female expression, actresses' agency and influence were subdued, often through oversexualization, to bolster pre-existing patriarchal power dynamics.

Fang 44 Jordan, Thomas. ​A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie​. 1664. Accessed December 6, 2019. https://blogs.bl.uk/english-and-drama/2016/05/who-was-the-first-shakespearean-actress.h tml.

Kewes, Paulina. "Dryden's Theatre and the Passions of Politics." In ​The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden,​ edited by Stephen Greenblatt, 131-55. The Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

A scholar and professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, Paulina Kewes writes about the political context of Restoration drama and of John Dryden's works in particular. She argues that Dryden, a committed supporter of the newly restored Stuart regime, actively engaged with political quandaries and propagated royalist ideas in his plays. Kewes also connects the themes expressed in the royalism in Dryden's drama to the loss of "dramatic royalism" that characterized absolutist monarchs of previous eras, linking theatrical propaganda to a last resort by the Stuart court in the face of sociopolitical challenges.

Leigh, Lori. ​Shakespeare and the Embodied Heroine: Staging Female Characters in the Late Plays and Early Adaptations.​ Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Lori Leigh, a lecturer at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, explores representations of shifting attitudes towards gender in Shakespeare's works and their Restoration counterparts. She argues that though Dryden and Davenant's ​The Enchanted Island​ grants the actress playing Hippolito a limited amount of agency in the form of a breeches part, the majority of Dryden and Davenant's changes to Shakespeare's The Tempest​, including the addition of more female characters, weakened the power of women on the island, diminishing them to objects of voyeuristic titillation and misogynist judgment. Leigh thereby concludes that Miranda's centrality, as portrayed in Shakespeare's play, is stripped away in the Restoration adaptation to make way for a new focus on the sexual dynamics between men and women of Dryden and Davenant's era, which, in more ways than one, granted women less agency and dimension than Shakespeare did.

Maguire, Nancy Klein. ​Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660-1671.​ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Nancy Klein Maguire, who has written numerous books on the relationship between seventeenth-century theater and politics, writes about themes of regicide in Restoration drama. She notes that during the Restoration, the form of tragedy gave way to tragicomedy and other drama forms that attempted to bolster the newly reinstated monarchy by erasing ambiguity and division from the stage. Maguire's argument demonstrates the reliance of monarchy on theater for propagandistic support.

Marsden, Jean I. "Radical Adaptation." In ​The Re-Imagined Test: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory​, 13-46. Lexington, KT: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Jean I. Marsden, a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, specializes in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, drama, and theory. She

Fang 45 addresses the reasons for adaptation in the Restoration and the cause of their disappearance a century later. She writes that only when eighteenth-century critics adopted a quasi-religious worship for the written word do Shakespeare's work acquire the untouchable sanctity that it bears today, and prior to that, Restoration dramatists valued substance, plot, and message over language. Marsden identifies pervasive feminine ideals during the Restoration that confined women to domestic, passive, and victimized parts on stage, thereby limiting their agency and submitting actresses to patriarchal expectations, even in their character roles.

———. "Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage." In ​Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama,​ by Katherine M. Quinsey, 185-97. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Marsden (see “Radical Adaptation”) analyzes the rise of rape scenes as related to the voyeuristic reception of actresses during the English Restoration. She examines the proliferation of pornographic scenes containing sexual violence or near sexual violence that followed closely in the wake of the first English actress's appearance onstage, and she postulates that Restoration actresses were viewed as sexual objects to be displayed onstage and looked at, thus defining their theatrical role to be provocation of male desire and submission to polarized gender dynamics of masculine aggression and feminine passivity.

———. ​The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory​. Lexington, KT: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Marsden (see “Radical Adaptation”) discusses the literary theories that underlay Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare, and she also analyzes eighteenth-century theory as a response to these adaptations. She writes that because Shakespeare was revered in the Restoration for his stories' plot and characters rather than his words themselves, as modern scholars now do, Restoration dramatists felt that their efforts to keep Shakespeare's stories alive and relevant through adaptation was the highest form of flattery. Marsden also points out that Restoration dramatists felt certain changes to be necessary in order to improve the texts and modernize them to a new social climate, and they often sacrificed poetic ambiguity for political certainty.

Maus, Katharine Eisaman. "Arcadia Lost: Politics and Revision in the Restoration Tempest."

Renaissance Drama​, n.s., 13 (1982): 189-209. JSTOR. Katharine Eisaman Maus, the James Branch Cabell Professor of English at the University of Virginia, has written extensively about Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. This essay discusses the loss of the pastoral ideals in Restoration versions of Shakespeare's The Tempest as well as the redefinition of Prospero's sovereign authority on his island. Maus writes that as a result of the unstable sociopolitical context of the Restoration and the blow that regicide left on the perceived authority of monarchy, Dryden and D'Avenant's Prospero must reinforce his status as the ruler of the island through more repressive tactics than Shakespeare's Prospero and thereby bolster the ideal of father-king sovereignty.

Fang 46 ———. "'Playhouse Flesh and Blood': Sexual Ideology and the Restoration Actress." ​ELH​ 46, no. 4 (Winter 1979): 595-617. JSTOR. Maus (see “Arcadia Lost”) has written extensively about Shakespeare and Renaissance drama. She discusses the various shifting cultural attitudes towards gender in the Restoration and their effects on Restoration drama, particularly on the advent of female actresses. Maus draws attention in particular to the decline of traditional hierarchical gender norms and the erosion of patriarchal power, both of which contributed to the development of the female personality as represented and perceived onstage. She argues that the early actress embodied the link between provocation disguise and female sexuality and was subjected to the limitations of cultural perceptions regarding sexual relations and gender roles in the late sixteenth century.

Murray, Barbara A. ​Restoration Shakespeare: Viewing the Voice.​ Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.

Barbara A. Murray, who wrote extensive volumes on Restoration Shakespeare, describes the theatrical revolution of the Restoration as one that shifted from oratory to visual focus. In her view, the transition to the "picture" or proscenium stage, the addition of female actors to play female parts, and the use of vivid stage effects all served to create a scene for the eyes to behold. Therefore, she argues, there is greater emphasis on what is perceived through the eyes than what is understood through any other sense, which led many Restoration playwrights to look unsatisfactorily on Shakespeare's vivid poetry and change it for their own purposes. This transition also led the court to treat theater with a different measure of regulation than before, and with the power to manipulate what people experience by changing what they see, the theater quickly became a tool of propaganda for the court to wield in these uncertain times.

Nicoll, Allardyce. ​Restoration Drama 1660-1700​. 1965 ed. Vol. 1 of ​A History of English Drama 1660-1900​. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.

A literary and drama history professor who has lectured at Yale University and King's College, among other schools, Allardyce Nicoll presents a comprehensive look at Restoration theater. Describing the specifics of the audience, the audience's influence on the playwrights, the stage, and the actors, Nicoll unpacks the complexities of this period in English drama history. He especially underlines the importance of the audience's demographics, who were namely courtiers and their notorious companions, and he draws attention to the extensive influence of the court's traditions over the theater, from French styles of scenery that Charles II brought back to England upon his return to the female actresses who served the male gallant spectators' desires on the side. Nicoll's writing sustains the argument that the Restoration stage was modified and made "fitt" for these newly re-empowered aristocrats and monarchists, who, upon their return, now held full control over the cultural and social scene of the theaters.

Owen, Susan J. Preface to ​A Companion to Restoration Drama​, xii-xvi. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

University of Sheffield professor Susan J. Owen introduces this collection of critical essays by providing a background of the politics, social composition, and gender

Fang 47 theories during the Restoration era. In her analysis of the context in which Restoration theater was set, Owen connects the era’s drama to the affairs of Charles II’s court, establishing the close relationship between theatrical tastes and political trends. She argues that the perception of gender on the Restoration stage reflected post-Interregnum anxieties and the lingering effects of regicide on understandings of patriarchy and monarchy.

Potter, Lois. "Shakespeare in the Theatre, 1660-1900." In ​The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare,​ edited by Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells, 183-98. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.

A former professor of English and scholar specializing in Renaissance literature and theater, Lois Potter discusses the reforms and modifications made to Shakespeare's texts in the centuries following his lifetime, starting from the Restoration. She examines various adaptations and versions of his plays as well as the cultural trends that influenced the changes made to the original Folio, trends such as the rise of the female actress.

Potter's analysis of the factors that influenced dramatists after Shakespeare, such as John Dryden and William D'Avenant, lend insight onto the political, cultural, and social motivations that called for the modernization of Shakespeare's works.

Quinsey, Katherine M. Introduction to ​Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama​, 1-10. Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Professor at the University of Windsor and scholar Katherine M. Quinsey introduces a collection of essays about women and feminism in Restoration drama by detailing the revolutionary effect that women had on the English stage. She writes that the entrance of women into the theatrical and professional sphere prompted discussions of gender roles, female sexuality, and sex relations that dominated the thematic content of many Restoration plays, including Dryden and D'Avenant's ​The Tempest​. Her introduction provides context for the essays that follow in the volume, setting the stage for a number of critical perspectives on changing attitudes towards gender and sex during the era of the first actress.

Rosenthal, Laura J. "Masculinity in Restoration Drama." In ​A Companion to Restoration Drama,​ edited by Susan J. Owen, 92-108. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture.

Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001.

Laura J. Rosenthal, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, discusses the various cultural shifts that transformed societal understanding of masculinity during the Restoration, specifically in the theaters. She discusses the effect of regicide, the development of a male social identity, and threats to male sexuality as a result of political trends, and her argument further substantiates the connection between the re-imagination of patriarchy and Restoration drama.

———. "Reading Masks: The Actress and the Spectatrix in Restoration Shakespeare." In ​Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama​, edited by Katherine M. Quinsey, 201-18. Lexington, KY: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1996.

Fang 48 Rosenthal (see “Masculinity in Restoration Drama”) writes that upon the arrival of women on the Restoration stage, public perception of the feminine identity shifts to openly view women, actresses in particular, as objects of sexual desire. As Rosenthal reasons, this shift is in part due to an underlying insecurity in the established authority of patriarchy after the collapse of Charles I's reign. With women gaining more and more of a role in public affairs as well as more and more independence in their own affairs, the men of the theater actually exploited this newfound "freedom" of women to perform on stage, and male playwrights and spectators alike framed women in an increasingly sexual light, putting them onstage to be objectified and subjected to the scrutiny of the male spectatorship. In this way, though women were given more freedom of employment in the Restoration, their social role remained the same—that is, to serve the men of society, specifically the high-ranking men who frequented the theater.

"September 1642: Order for Stage-plays to Cease," in ​Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642-1660​, ed. C H Firth and R S Rait (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1911), 26-27. ​British History Online,​ accessed April 13, 2020, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp26-27.

Shakespeare, William. ​The Tempest.​ Edited by Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. Paperback ed. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2016.

Smith, Stacy L., Marc Choueiti, Katherine Pieper, Ariana Case, and Angel Choi. ​Inequality in 1,100 Popular Films: Examining Portrayals of Gender, Race/Ethnicity, LGBT and Disability from 2007 to 2017.​ July 2018. Accessed February 16, 2020. http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inequality-in-1100-popular-films.pdf.

Researchers at the University of Southern California Annenberg School dissect cinematic representations of gender, race, LGBT, and disabilities in films from 2007 through 2017. Their research finds a disproportionate amount of female representation in contrast to male representation, for not only do women figure less in speaking roles across the top 100 films of 2017, but they are more likely to be sexualized onscreen than men. The results of this modern study demonstrate the continuity of Restoration-era gender standards, which normalized the sexualization of women in drama.

Summers, Montague. Introduction to ​Shakespeare Adaptations,​ xvii-cviii. London: Jonathan Cape, 1922.

English author and clergyman Montague Summers provides historical and cultural context to five Restoration adaptations of Shakespeare's works. He analyzes the effect of a number of factors on Restoration dramatists' decisions to alter Shakespeare's texts as well as context for their respective production histories, and in particular, he argues that the shift to the picture stage during the Restoration drove many adapters to add a quality of "theatrical attractiveness" to Shakespeare's texts and rewrite the plays to fit the new trend of spectator-based theater, and it is this new style of visual presentation that helped these adaptations persist on the English stage until the nineteenth century. He thus concludes that Restoration adaptations merit critical respect and attention, for as flawed as these adaptations appear today, they were successful in their own right.

Fang 49

Wahl, Elizabeth Susan. "Incompatible Relations: The Problem of Companionship and Hierarchy in the Evolution of Attitudes toward Marriage." In ​Invisible Relations: Representations of Female Intimacy in the Age of Enlightenment​, 79-96. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Accessed April 13, 2020. https://books.google.com/books?id=h91WTMwf98QC&printsec=frontcover&dq=bibliog roup:%22Invisible+Relations:+Representations+of+Female+Intimacy+in+the+Age+of+E nlightenment.

Literary critic and English teacher Elizabeth Susan Wahl explores representations of intimacy between women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wahl examines the social role of female relationships, both sexual and nonsexual, in gender dynamics of the era, notably those involving shifting middle-class ideals of separate spheres and companionate marriage. Wahl describes the gendered division of the public and private domains as a trend that reshaped social expectations of female companions, and she writes that women of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries found themselves more tightly bound to the institution of marriage as their sole economic means and purpose.

Wilson, John Harold. ​All the King's Ladies​. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.

John Harold Wilson was a professor of English at Ohio State University who wrote a number of books about Restoration drama. He discusses the various dramatic developments around the rise of actresses, and he argues that actresses who played to the male gaze were beneficial to the theater companies' eventual business success, thereby demonstrating the popularity of seeing women play oversexualized roles among Restoration audiences.

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