Close on the heels of her much admired Closet Stages: Joanna Baillie and the Theater Theory of British Romantic Women Writers (1997), Catherine Burroughs has drawn together, in Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and Society, 1790-1840 (Cambridge U. P., 2000), a dozen provocative and, at times, intriguingly interlaced chapters (included in that count is her own substantial introduction) by various scholars about the complex and—so the arguments often have it—controversial involvement of women in the scene of British theatre during the Romantic period. For students of the period with an interest in drama, this collection is, to be sure, far from an outing; the last decade has seen a number of major forays into the previously largely overlooked territory of women playwrights and critics in the era of British Romanticism. (Online readers will appreciate how extensively online availability of primary texts and scholarly research has fostered this breakout of previously closeted—and libraried—materials.) Burroughs' own work, as well as other major studies and essays by many of the contributors to this volume, have done much to open up a field of inquiry—dramatic writing and writing about drama—that had for long focused chiefly on Shakespearean adaptations and on unperformed dramatic work by the canonical male Romantic poets. As Burroughs herself claims, drawing on her own account of Joanna Baillie's career, "this collection follows the lead of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British theatre theorists—many of them female—who were presciently interested in negotiating the closet/theater division that has so problematically characterized discussions of romantic theater and drama in our own era and which has caused 'romantic theatricality' to be misrepresented as antitheatricalism throughout the twentieth century." Altogether, it's a notable achievement and, one imagines, a catalyst to further work.

In the lead-off chapter, "Baillie, Siddons, Larpent: gender, power, and politics in the theatre of Romanticism," Jeffrey Cox addresses an inability he finds, even in some revisionist and feminist histories, to see women in theatre "as possessing significant aesthetic, cultural, or institutional power." Dissenting from accounts that see "the power to control the theatre and discourse about the theatre remain[ing] . . .firmly in male hands," Cox suggests there is "finally something troubling in our insistence on reading and judging women writers primarily in relation to gender issues." He rehearses the careers of three women, Joanna Baillie, Sarah Siddons, and Anna Larpent, to argue, with considerable force, that they acquired extensive power, which they "most often exercised within the theater of romanticism, that is on the actual stage, in support of a conservative ideology." Details of Baillie's elite conservative alignments follow. He sees this by way of contrast with the "more radical vision in (and of) the theatre" offered by Byron, Kean, Shelley, or Hunt." On social and political matters—aside from issues of gender—Cox's own sympathies are clearly with liberal and radical viewpoints. He minces no words when, for example, he insists that "while Baillie may not have been trapped by gendered roles, she was certainly an ally of ugly reactionary social and political forces, and her works could be praised and used by those forces." One may detect in this emphasis a resistance to prevailing contemporary feminist ideologies; as an opening performance it nonetheless sets the stage for the provocative variety of approaches the collection comprises.

Katherine Newey's chapter, "Women and History on the Romantic Stage," focuses on plays written by Hannah More, Ann Yearsley, Frances Burney, and Mary Russell Mitford. She argues that, far from participating in the relegation of women to the domestic sphere of the household, they wrote historical tragedies that "claim both aesthetic and political seriousness . . . using history and the high cultural form of tragedy to appropriate a role in public debate." Her emphasis is on how these writers use remote English history to disguise their engagement with controversial political issues alive in the late eighteenth century because of the American and French Revolutions. The most interesting discussion is of Hannah More's Percy, a highly successful play set against the background of the state sponsored violence of the Crusades, where, as she puts it, "the central female figure protests clearly and passionately against the linked powers of the Church and patriarchy in the figure of her powerful aristocrat father," who forces her for political and dynastic reasons to marry one man though she loves his enemy, making, in the tragic heroine's lament to her lover, "his child / An instrument of vengeance on thy head." Newey notes that this early play by More, "inflected by her apparent political nonconformism," calls for a more complicated and transgressive sense of her public intervention than her reputation today, based on later conservative writings, as the "bad fairy" of feminism suggests.

Jeanne Moskal's contribution, "English National Identity in Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace: India, Abolition, and the Rights of Women," complements her "Introduction" to Thomas Crochunis' and Michael Eberle-Sinatra's online edition (BWP1800; January 2000) of the comedy, which is set in the India of the East India company and obliquely addresses the controversies around the Hastings trial. Readers of Moskal's chapter and Marjean Purinton's immediately following chapter will find there outcroppings of the sort of dizzying scholarly engagements—with some skirmishing—fostered in the thick and fast world of web and print publications. Arguing that Starke represents Anglo-Indian women "as agents who can embrace or eschew mercantilism by their marriage choices," Moskal contends that the two young female cousins, "wealthy aristocrats" at the center of the marriage plot, are "posited as avatars of unsullied English womanly virtue" who, after a "detour of advocacy for women's rights" in their marriages circle back to a Burkean ideal of women's [domestic] silence and passivity." In a footnote, Moskal registers her disagreement with Marjean Purinton's discussion of the play in her chapter. Though Purinton's chief focus is on Joanna Baillie's comedy "The Tryal," in a brief digression she contends that Starke's Sword of Peace "challenges the valuations and spaces assigned to women" as the cousins "cleverly script their own 'civilizing' mission to India, boldly asserting their sovereignty and presence in masculinized public spaces." Online readers will also know, however, that Purinton had already rebutted the critique in Moskal's chapter—before its publication—in her "Response to Quinn's Essay: Dancing and Dueling in Mariana Starke's Comedy" (BWP1800; September 2000). There, disputing Moskal's claim that the play "demonstrates Starke's conviction that the proper patriarchal authority will guarantee women's rights," Purinton argues that her own reading of "the play and its play-acting suggests something more radical about the performativity and artificiality of gender hierarchies, racial categories, and class structures, meta-dramatically performed upon the stage of India." Meanwhile, O'Quinn's immensely resourceful essay, "The Long Minuet Danced at Coromandel:Character and the Colonial Translation of Class Anxiety in Mariana Starke's The Sword of Peace" (BWP1800; 1 September, 2000), explores various political, artistic, and military contexts that Starke's play invokes. O'Quinn impressively extends the possibilities for interpreting both the language and action of Starke's play. Along the way, he stakes out a position that, with perhaps inadvertent authority, mediates the issue between Moskal and Purinton, finding in The Sword of Peace an important "kind of femininity enacted by [the cousins] and by Starke herself—a femininity that partakes of a limited amount of masculinized public agency to dramatize the necessity of restraining male homosocial desires in the realm of politics, of commerce, and of love."

In "Women's sovereignty on trial: Joanna Baillie's comedy 'the Tryal' as metatheatrics," Purinton reads Baillie's comedy as a "drama about playwriting and performance," exposing "the ways in which women and men resist and participate in a social system that commodifies women as objects of the marriage contract." She cites an abundance of prominent political trials that had piqued the curiosities of British readers, and invoking a number of recent studies exploring "the powerful connections between scripted, staged female performances and socially determined gender performatives" in which women were treated as commodities, with marriage serving as a financial contract. Purinton's astute analysis frequently gestures toward speech-act theory, especially as elaborated by Judith Butler; her elaborations of what she calls the "pedagogical strategies" of the comic trials that make up the fabric of Baillie's comedy and establish women's "sovereignty" compel assent, though at the price of the reader's wading through some difficult stretches. The contrast with Baillie's own spare prose is instructive:

Her dramas about passions seek to create a relationship of empathy and identification between characters and reader/spectators from which they may garner edification, but the identificatory process generated by the drama involves critical thinking and connected knowing, not a linear mimetic relationship. Baillie's 'Introductory Discourse' delineates the pedagogical relationship her dramas engender theatrically: 'The Drama improves us by the knowledge we acquire of our own minds, by the natural desire we have to look into the thoughts, and observe the behaviour of others" (37). Her dramaturgy invites readers/spectators to participate in the cognitive and analytical process stimulated by the drama, an exercise in problem-solving and application which invests the authority of meaning-making and knowledge construction in readers/spectators.

The Inchbald who emerges in Marvin Carlson's deft account of her pioneer undertaking in composing prefatory "remarks" for the 125 plays eventually gathered in the twenty-five volumes of Longman's landmark publishing venture The British Theatre,is a canny, incisive judge. Perhaps most significantly, she could claim authority not only on her own experience as playwright but also on her "solid insider's knowledge of the theatre" to discuss plays as both read and performed experiences—and here Carlson emphasizes that the Longman collection included only past and present plays, in the versions actually "in current repertory in one or more of London's major theatres." What also emerges in his profile of Inchbald's thoughtful versatility as critic is the sense that, while she generally finds things to praise substantially in every play, she could be severe not only on other playwrights' works but also on her own. In composing what can be appreciated as his own prefatory "remarks" on Inchbald, Carlson demonstrates easy professional critical authority but stops short of probing the dynamics implicit in Inchbald's often aversive comments on her own plays, comments that Thomas Crochunis, for one, takes a more substantial analytical purchase upon, suggesting that Inchbald's craft distances, yet at the same gives renewed circulation to, elements of a potentially radical (and censorable) political nature from her own earlier days. Inchbald's Such Things Are, produced in 1787 and published in 1788 at the time of the Hastings trial and exposing harsh prison conditions in colonial India, is a case in point. Crochunis finds in her Longman remarks a canny use of distance both to call attention to her youthful brashness and to the subject matter of the play, the abuses of colonial culture.

In his lengthy chapter called "Authorial Performances in the Criticism and Theory of Romantic Women Playwrights," Crochunis—among the most active and knowledgeable of the new generation of internet scholarship performers—argues against what he calls "imagination—and genius-based paradigms of authorship that . . . often still govern our styles of reading, evaluating, and teaching texts." He examines how Baillie and Inchbald themselves perform in various ways, through prefaces and letters and through management of publications and productions, to affect the ways in which audiences receive their work. Citing Kristina Straub's speculations about the sexualization of the woman author who wrote for the theater, he asks "how women playwrights used or resisted the highly charged context the theater provided even for their published dramas." Political scrutiny and censorship, he argues, "provided women playwrights with a highly charged mise en scène amidst which to enact their authorial performances." His painstaking pursuit of the possibilities for reading plays and prefaces against the complex cultural "systems" of their time pays off, though one could wish for a more lively and limpid prose.