In Separation Scenes, Ann Christensen offers an interesting reading of four early modern domestic tragedies: Arden of Faversham, A Warning for Fair Women, Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, and Middleton’s Women Beware Women, and of Walter Mountfort’s The Launching of the Mary, or the Seaman’s Honest Wife. She concludes with a short epilogue, “John and Anne Donne and the Culture of Business.”

Christensen approaches the plays aslant, so to speak, focusing not directly on the errant wives at their center but on the largely absent husbands on the periphery, invariably drawn from home by business—which leaves their wives alone, hence sexually vulnerable, leading to the infidelity that fuels the plays. The close textual analysis that grounds her argument is enriched by her use of primary sources such as domestic conduct books, travel accounts, and English comedies, and by thoughtful reference to socioeconomic histories and literary criticism. She argues that the domestic drama “was a dynamic and critical cultural form that used householders’ disruptive commercial travel to resist the emerging ideology of the separation of the spheres” (4).

“Separate spheres,” focal for Christensen, pertains to the early modern separation of the husband’s external and wife’s domestic duties: “Men work and women consume” (27), a distinction that, she argues, shapes the plays. Dramatic conventions of particular interest include business-driven absent husbands, the plays’ “tragic catalysts” (28), and their “unpartnered wives” as consumers (11); thresholds, including doors, gates, courtyards, and windows, which dominate action and language and “stand for both the contact and division between homes and the commercial world” (14); and split scenes, “used to suggest the simultaneity of, yet distinction between, events occurring at home and abroad” (9).

“Housekeeping and Forlorn Travel in Arden of Faversham” (chapter 2) represents many of the strengths of Separation Scenes. Using a variety of primary and secondary sources, Christensen argues that Arden’s “routine” absence for business “permits a series of major breaches in hierarchy, order, and domestic content that climax in Alice Arden’s use of her extraordinary domestic authority to plot and execute his murder” (66). A substantive list of Alice’s housewifery tasks is typical of Christensen’s admirable marshaling of multiple pieces of evidence. In a detailed discussion of the murderers Will, Shakebag, and Green, she argues for “a leitmotif that comments on the play’s tense interactions between home and not home” (46). “Women, Work, and Windows in Women Beware Women” (chapter 4) is similarly strong, with Christensen’s analysis of the play’s many references to business in plot, character, and figurative language; typical is her study of the significance of “mercantile imagery” in Leantio’s speeches, listed at length, which “tellingly … also involve sexual transgression” (157). “One Man’s Calling in A Woman Killed with Kindness” (chapter 3), while offering much of the strong analysis found elsewhere, is less successful overall. A key problem is the scant attention paid to the Mountford-Susan subplot, where the economics of the play are centered, and Christensen’s comparison rather than the more important contrast between Anne and Susan. The “business” of the subplot offers a complex perspective on the Frankford-Anne plot, a juxtaposition that needed more study.

Other problems with this good book include Christensen’s multiple references to “ironic” and “irony,” often unnecessary, even inaccurate. More troublesome is the importance she allots to the husbands’ view of wives-as-consumers, which works better for some plays (Women Beware Women) than others (Woman Killed). And her argument that the absence of husbands reflected changing marital practices lacks adequate evidence. In a sense these absent husbands are similar to the kings in traditional tragedies—significant not so much for being reflective of social reality but for what they tell us about changing belief structures and how drama depicts them.

Christensen’s penultimate chapter is fascinating, on Walter Mountfort’s Launching of the Mary (1632). Her integration of didactic works, history, and the play itself produces a fine study of how the play’s halves negotiate between the two spheres, husband’s business and wife’s home—and of the use of domesticity to critique early modern economic practices. Overall, Separation Scenes is strong, and necessary, in the way that it “notices” and analyzes aspects of these plays that tend to be ignored in our focus on their erring female protagonists, but which are crucial to understanding those same characters.