Reviewed by:

• Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865: Performance, Gender and Identity in a Golden Age of American theatre by Robin O. Warren
• Heather S. Nathans (bio)

What principally strikes the reader of Robin Warren’s recent monograph, Women on Southern Stages, 1800–1865, are the sheer distances covered by so many of the actresses she discusses in her work. In an era in which many women might expect to spend most of their lives in the same state (if not the same fifty-mile radius), the artists in Warren’s study trekked substantial distances, often burdened by transporting families, multiple times a year. Whether they made friends and admirers in their temporary communities, or continued to combat the opprobrium often heaped on female performers, they persisted in their determination to create successful careers.

Consisting of eight short chapters, plus a useful appendix of plays popular in the antebellum repertoire, Women on Southern Stages subdivides each chapter into sections that direct the reader to specific topics, such as particular theatres, actresses’ pay, and the performance of different racial stereotypes. The book’s structure will make it most useful to scholars and students new to the history of nineteenth-century American theatre.

While Warren’s goal is to explore the lives of regional actresses on the Southern performance circuit, the study seems somewhat unbalanced. The first chapter introduces the women Warren describes as the “main players” in the [End Page 156] book, but the brief synopsis of each performer’s biography feels perfunctory, and leaves the reader unsure of what roles the figures will play in the arc of the narrative (3). Moreover, while Warren hopes to recuperate the experiences of performers less familiar to scholars of American theatre, she has focused the study on comparatively well-known acting families such as the Placides, the Arnolds, the Ludlows, etc. By separating them into encyclopedia-style entries, she obscures some of the networks that drew these women together, as actresses apprenticed in companies or intermarried among reigning theatre families. The structure of the study also risks overlooking the work of women who never achieved leading-lady status or affiliations with powerful families, but who remained mainstays of troupes for decades.

Chapter 2, on Southern theatres, provides a useful chronicle of the origins of various sites in Virginia, Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, and elsewhere, but the material seems both general and largely factual, rather than a more penetrating analysis of the social, economic, cultural, and political currents that shaped the rise of early national and antebellum playhouses. The following chapter on repertoire may be helpful to scholars unfamiliar with the popular pieces of the antebellum era, and is complemented by the summaries offered in the appendix, but since the overview of plays is separated from a discussion of actresses or local communities, the reader remains unclear about how to apply the material in the chapter. A detailed exploration of theatre origins and development of repertoires may be beyond the scope of Warren’s project, but she misses an opportunity to build on the work of scholars such as Odai Johnson and Jeffrey H. Richards, who have already examined the complex genealogies of the early American repertoire as well as acting companies’ ongoing challenges in building playhouses and establishing themselves as respectable members of the community. Their work, along with that of noted American theatre scholars Lisa Merrill, Gay Gibson Cima, and Amelia Howe Kritzer, might have provided a useful foundation for Warren’s study, allowing her to bypass the task of reiterating these histories.

Additionally, studies by Daphne Brooks and Laura Mielke that focus on performances of African American and Native American identity (respectively) might also have nuanced chapter 7, in which Warren examines how actresses addressed the difficulties of playing African American, Native, or “Oriental” characters. In her discussion of race and performance, Warren has chosen to focus on one or two well-known examples of each type, such as the “tragic mulatto” character of Zoe in The Octoroon. Subdividing the chapter by racial types...

审核人：

• 1800-1865年，南方舞台上的妇女：美国戏剧黄金时代的表演，性别和身份，罗宾·沃伦（Robin O. Warren）
• 希瑟·纳特汉斯（生物）

罗宾·沃伦（Robin Warren）最近的专着《南方舞台上的女人》（1800-1865年）的读者最喜欢的是她在她的作品中讨论的众多女演员所涵盖的绝对距离。在这个时代，许多女性可能期望大部分时间都在同一州度过（如果不是相同的50英里半径），沃伦研究中的艺术家们跋涉了很长的一段路程，通常每年要搬家带路。无论他们是在临时社区中结交朋友和仰慕者，还是继续与女性表演者经常发生的仇视作斗争，他们都坚持致力于创造成功事业的决心。

《南方舞台上的女人》由八章组成，包括前战剧中流行的戏剧的有用附录，将每一章分为几个章节，将读者引导至特定主题，例如特定的戏剧，女演员的薪水和不同种族的演出刻板印象。这本书的结构将使其对19世纪美国戏剧史的学者和学生来说最有用。

沃伦（Warren）的目标是探索南方表演巡回赛上地方女演员的生活，但这项研究似乎有些不平衡。第一章介绍了沃伦（Warren）在[结束页156]中描述为“主要参与者”的女性。本书，但是每位表演者传记的简短提要都显得敷衍了事，并使读者不确定人物在叙事中将扮演什么角色（3）。此外，沃伦（Warren）希望恢复美国戏剧学者所不熟悉的表演者的经历，但她将研究重点放在了比较知名的表演家庭，如普拉提兹（Placides），阿诺德（Arnolds），拉德洛斯（Ludlows）等。当女演员在公司里结业或在统治剧院的家庭中结婚时，她掩盖了吸引这些女性的一些网络。这项研究的结构也有可能忽视那些从未取得过领导职务或与有势力的家庭有联系的妇女的工作，但这些妇女几十年来一直是团伙的中流main柱。

关于南部剧院的第2章提供了有用的纪事，记载了弗吉尼亚州，乔治亚州，肯塔基州，俄亥俄州和其他地方的各个地点的起源，但该材料似乎既具有一般性又是事实性的，而不是对社会，经济和社会问题进行更深入的分析。 ，文化和政治潮流，影响了早期国家和战前剧院的兴起。以下有关曲目的章节可能对不熟悉战前时代流行作品的学者有所帮助，并由附录中的摘要进行了补充，但是由于戏剧的概述与女演员或当地社区的讨论是分开的，因此读者尚不清楚如何应用本章中的材料。对剧院起源和曲目发展的详细探索可能超出了沃伦（Warren）的计划范围，我们已经研究了美国早期剧目的复杂家谱，以及代理公司在建造游戏场和使自己成为社区中受人尊敬的成员方面所面临的挑战。他们的工作以及著名的美国戏剧学者丽莎·梅里尔（Lisa Merrill），盖伊·吉布森·西玛（Gay Gibson Cima）和阿米莉亚·豪·克里特泽（Amelia Howe Kritzer）的著作，可能为沃伦的研究提供了有用的基础，从而使她可以绕开重申这些历史的任务。

此外，达芙妮·布鲁克斯（Daphne Brooks）和劳拉·米尔克（Laura Mielke）分别针对非裔美国人和美国原住民身份的表演进行的研究可能还细化了第7章，其中沃伦（Warren）研究了女演员如何解决扮演非裔美国人，原住民或“东方人”的困难。人物。在她的种族和性能的讨论中，沃伦选择着重于每种类型的一个或两个众所周知的例子，如佐伊的在“悲惨混血儿”字符的黑人血统有八。按种族类型细分章节...