Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley. By Marcie Frank. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 175. $60 cloth.

Extract

Gender, Theatre, and the Origins of Criticism: From Dryden to Manley explores the role theatrical artists played in the emergence of literary criticism. Marcie Frank suggests that a study of this emergence should begin with John Dryden, and that it must also include the contributions made by female playwrights (such as Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley)—not merely as side notes worthy of attention in a feminist attempt to include women writers in the history of criticism but, more important, as writings that actively carried on the genealogical literary tradition that Dryden established. Frank makes the case that by figuring the transmission of a national vernacular canon “as a patrimony, [Dryden] drew the lines of access to a native literary tradition for subsequent writers and critics” (2). The essays in the book work to establish the presence of a critical legacy left to us by Dryden, Behn, Trotter, and Manley. In doing so, Frank hopes to restore the theatre's rightful place in the story of criticism's emergence, thereby allowing an acknowledgment of the “performativity of criticism, both in the sense of what it accomplishes—the establishment of a native tradition coded as filiation—and in the appreciation of the means by which it does so” (2).