1. Over the last few years, Alison Findlay, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams have done a great deal to draw attention to the richness and diversity of women's contributions to dramatic production in the early modern period. The publication of a co-authored critical study drawing on the experiences they have gained and the critical insights and scholarly information they have accumulated is very much to be welcomed. Their book showcases the diversity of women's participation in multiple forms of theatrical activity in early modern England. In doing so, it constitutes a useful work of reference as well as contributing to the debates, elaborated in the work of scholars including Clare McManus and Susan Wiseman, that have been transforming our sense of the very nature of gendered theatricality and performance in the period. Clearly and accessibly written, the book will be an invaluable resource for teachers and students as well as a significant contribution to research in this field.

2. Women and Dramatic Production 1550-1700 covers a very wide range of dramatic texts and theatrical events, beginning by defining such very different cultural phenomena as Lady Jane Lumley's translation of Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis (c. 1553) and the 'public self-staging activities' (16) of Catholic martyrs as inaugurating a tradition of female dramatic production. Lively introductory discussions of dramatic texts by increasingly familiar figures such as Elizabeth Cary, Mary Wroth, Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, Aphra Behn, and a sizeable cohort of Restoration playwrights, intertwine with accounts of women's participation in theatrical activity as patrons and performers. One of the most valuable aspects of the book's chronological coverage of women's participation in early modern dramatic production is its expansion of the range of activities evoked by that term, through the discussion of such diverse cultural moments as the domestic entertainments composed in childhood by Rachel Fane to be performed by her siblings, or public preaching by radical sectarian women during the Civil War. The implicit challenge this reconceptualisation of the nature of the theatrical poses to traditional, textually-oriented scholarship on early modern drama chimes with many of the concerns of contemporary performance theory, and has the potential in future work to expand and transform our sense of the dramatic in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

3. I have some reservations about the critical and historiographic framing of this project. The book is shaped as a progress narrative of the emergence over a century and a half of a distinctively female theatrical tradition, and this linearity is in tension with the diversity of the multiple different forms of theatricality described in it. At times, all three authors can appear unhelpfully defensive about the inherent performability and the theatrical and literary value of the plays they discuss, trapping the texts in a set of stultifying anxieties about 'quality' from which recent scholarship on women's writing has been moving away.

4. Finally, it does seem a shame that the valuable compendiousness of this overview sometimes seems to have been purchased at the price of analytic depth and theoretical nuance. Too often, discussions of individual writers or specific texts rely on a rather traditional, biographically-oriented criticism that is primarily descriptive and narrative in orientation. There are exceptions, but the overall dominance of this critical mode means that one comes away from the book feeling just that little bit less intellectually stimulated and excited than one might have hoped. However, the generosity of the authors in presenting so much material, and sketching out so many agendas for possible research without exhausting them, means that we can surely look forward to the development of a critically sophisticated, theoretically rich body of work on these fascinating dramatic texts and situations in coming years.

KATE CHEDGZOY
UNIVERSITY OF NEWCASTLE