Comparative Drama

604Comparative Drama vocative critical readings that illuminate traditional constructions of woman's space in the theater. But her volume is feminist in an experiential rather than a theoretical sense. "I did not start my investigation from a feminist position: that position was forced on me by my material," Scolnicov explains in her preface (xiii), which offers us the key to both the considerable strengths and most perplexing limits of Woman's Theatrical Space. Some readers may, in fact, applaud her decision to eschew contextualizing her work within the expanding spectrum of feminisms. However, in a volume that explores so extensively the difficulties with which women freed themselves both dramatically and culturally from enclosing spaces, it is disconcerting to find only the briefest mention of four recent women playwrights—Maureen Duffy, Pam Gems, Caryl Churchill, Charlotte Keatley—and that in a closeting, five-page coda. In her discussion of their plays, Scolnicov offers us a tantalizing but largely undeveloped thesis: that after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, home becomes, in the absence of the traditional mother, the space of the child. Indeed, she never compares the work of these female playwrights with that of their male contemporaries, nor does she address the fact that her observations about the work of these women fly in the face of her conclusions at the end of chapter 10. In preceding chapters, Scolnicov focuses exclusively on male playwrights; a forgivable sin, some would argue, for the early tradition (although recent work on women and production of late medieval and early modern drama suggests otherwise to this reader). But the omission is transparently unacceptable for discussion of twentieth-century theater. Scolnicov's book is either too short or too long. We need either a fuller assessment of whether women represent woman's theatrical space differently, or we need this volume to announce its theoretical boundaries (and concomitant strength) more explicitly: that it examines with intelligence and insight how canonical male playwrights have represented woman as space from classical Greece through the beginnings of the twentieth-century sexual revolution. REGULA MEYER EVITT Colorado College Stephen Orgel. Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare 's England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xv + 179. $44.95 (casebound); $15.95 (paperbound). In the development of this study, Stephen Orgel slides easily between cultural and theatrical applications of the key concepts of his title, "impersonations" and "performance." One may wonder whether the primary methodology of the book is reading plays through cultural records and discourses, or reading a culture in part through its drama and other forms of literature. It seems to me that the overall thrust of Reviews605 Orgel's study is to incorporate drama and literature as part of the documentation for interpreting the way of the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, albeit not without intrusions of postmodern interests or perspectives of our later twentieth century. In any case, the impersonations on and off the stage with which Orgel deals are centered in the particular gender issues of transvestitism, homosexuality, effeminate men, and masculine women. These concerns, placed in relation to central patriarchal assumptions that controlled or are thought to have controlled the social structures and behavioral practices of Shakespeare's England, lead in turn to a kaleidoscopic flurry of topics—e.g., antitheatrical polemics, theories about the homologous nature of the genitalia of the sexes, legal interpretations of sodomy, boy actors in working-class guilds, sumptuary laws regulating dress according to class, effeminate dress by military leaders, women successfully manipulating patriarchal norms, and what have you. A striking feature of the book is a collection of fascinating plates illustrating gender-crossing dress of the period. Orgel does begin the book with a question of theatrical convention, indeed with reference to what was his original and admittedly "graceless " working title for the study: Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women? (1). However, he soon turns this question into related questions , regarding, for example, the uniqueness of boys playing women on the English Renaissance stage, or a more basic matter: "The question, at its deepest level, is how gender was constructed by Early Modern cultures ..." (3). Such a procedure in the Introduction sets the...