Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage

Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage examines how categories of identity that repeatedly appear on stage in British drama of that period actively engage debates concerning the relationship of the body to theories of identity formation; the relationship between gender, class, and status; and the establishment of national identity. Like Kristina Straub’s Sexual Suspects (1992) and Lisa Freeman’s Character’s Theater (2002), Performing Identities demonstrates that a reconsideration of Restoration and eighteenth-century dramatic writing and performance is necessary for a critical understanding of identity formation, particularly in performances of gender. Lowenthal contends that in this writing, “an emptying out of the substance of the heroic” (32) occurs in tandem with an equally significant “movement from love stories to rape stories, from controlled to uncontrolled violence” (33). Thus, both genre and gender are central to the book’s claim. Lowenthal argues that Restoration drama stages increasingly violent strategies of “containment” to maintain order among the “identity categories” of nation and self, in particular as they pertain to the “idea of an interior, consistent, and essential but unrepresentable self” (28).

The book is structured around four Restoration stage identities—the soldier-colonial, the merchant, the actress, and the monster. Dramatizations of the soldier-colonial and merchant reveal how “nation and performance, when viewed together…bolster a fragile status hierarchy” through performing “redefinitions of ideal British male behavior” (31). Clothing figures prominently in the second half of the book, which shifts to an emphasis on theatrical representations of female bodies “as uncovered and revealed, rather than clothed in the appropriate signals of status and gender, and as unruly and traumatized, rather than appropriately managed and contained” (32). All four stage identities exhibit a shared fascination with the physical body of the performer as a spectacle offered up for public consumption. Lowenthal grounds her readings in the interplay between (in)authentic identity and physical representation as it marches across the body of the Restoration actor. Then, she explores the way in which the body of the Restoration actor is figured as the matrix in which the generation of identity (via material signifiers like clothing) meets methods of containment (execution, public humiliation, rape).

In the first half of the book, Lowenthal’s investigates how “unruly savage bodies and British colonialism” (28) circulate in Dryden’s Indian Emperour. In this analysis and in that of Behn’s Widdow Ranter, she focuses on how the key figures of “the specular woman” and “the contested woman” (48) redirect audience attention away from questions of empire to questions of romance. Lowenthal claims that, “the love plots perform the fundamental ideological work of conquest” (48). If this is true, then the change from Dryden to Behn—a change from the characterization of inter-national romance as love to “a baser, illegitimate emotion, lust” (67)—represents a larger ideological shift in perceptions of national identity from licit to illicit and illustrates the means by which the theater polices this distinction. Lowenthal repositions her argument in relation to European-English identity relations in her readings of Behn’s The Dutch Lover, Wycherley’s The Gentleman Dancing-Master, and Pix’s Adventures in Madrid. Representing both gender and national identity as “especially theatrical” (99), these plays regulate the performance of identity in such a way “that nation overrides gender” (105) both in terms of its ability to induce anxiety and in its need to be regulated. The means by which “the foreign excesses of…cross-national dressers” (103) are mocked, primarily social performances of public humiliation, allow the displacement of worries surrounding the identity category of “Englishness” onto stage depictions of European “others.”

In the second half of the book, Lowenthal claims that representations of women in print and on stage commodify desire and violate the body in order to construct as external the idea of social identities like class. Presupposing “an essential female nature” (30) that is above all non-discursive, Lowenthal contends that these representations of female desire contain and control both the Restoration actress and the roles she played by denying her claims to interiority. Thus, a character like “Angellica Bianca is finally doomed because she proffers an authenticity that seeks to transcend the paint and the commodification…by locating it in an interiority that cannot be represented” (123). Lowenthal compares directly the experience of the Restoration actress with that of the female Restoration aristocrat in order to make a larger claim about class identity: “locating an essential female identity inextricably linked to the body, the discourse about actresses served to reinforce aristocratic claims to an equally ‘essential’ aristocratic identity” (112). Overwhelmingly, Lowenthal claims, female characters who resist this regulation through an insistence on interior, authentic selfhood are ultimately destroyed and made monstrous. Lowenthal demonstrates the crucial role stage machinery plays in making monstrosity visible by forcing the woman “to exteriorize her pain and attempt to perform her wounded interiority even as her body…becomes public spectacle” (145). These performances of “the traumatized self” (164) resist to the very end the violent assault which attempts to negate selfhood.

Lowenthal’s readings of the body as staged spectacle make a strong case for Restoration drama’s ability to theorize representation and identity in unique ways and are the main strength of the book. Likewise, Lowenthal makes a strong case for the vital contributions that an understanding of late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth-century theatrical performance can make not only to eighteenth-century studies, but to a number of critical discourses examining questions of gender, performance, nation, and identity formation. This can, at times, overwhelm readings of the plays and their performances. Instead, I would have preferred a less diffuse, more tightly focused approach with more in-depth analysis, especially a more nuanced treatment of the relationship between how the performance of gender engages important questions about Restoration constructions of sexuality. I also wished for more consistency in how chronological and critical terms were used—the apparent interchangeability of “English” and “British” is problematic, as is the lack of distinction between “early modern,” “seventeenth century,” “Restoration,” and “late seventeenth-century.” The capaciousness of Performing Identities pays off, however, when it is directed at connecting the theater of the period to larger literary movements of the time. Several of its claims—among them that “interest in the lives of the performers may be connected to the eighteenth-century interest in ‘consciousness’ or ‘sensibility’ and that ‘the project of negotiating properly gendered subjectivities for both men and women’ begins in the Restoration theater” (122)—promise exciting and productive areas of investigation for scholars at work in the field.