Virginia Scott begins her study with an examination of the use of the definite article la with the last name of actresses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While today, la indicates the “mythic” status of the actress (e.g., “la Moreau”), in the early modern period, its usage connoted the actress’s involvement in dishonorable activities, one of which was her profession (1, 2). Scott is determined to approach the subject of actresses with respect: therefore, she only identifies women on the stage by referring to them in the way they were addressed within the theater, as “Mademoiselle.” She seeks “to provide detailed and relatively credible information about the personal and professional lives of the women who performed tragedy and comedy (and sometimes farce) in France and in Paris for some two hundred years [and tries] insofar as possible to challenge the constantly iterated and reiterated stereotype, or at least to temper one set of images with another” (286). In order to achieve this goal, Scott explains the tradition of contempt for women on the stage, tempers the anecdotes of scandal mongers (such as the oft-quoted Tallemant des Réaux) and the reports of the morals police, while building an alternative, more realistic image of these women using documentation from public records as well as historical accounts that describe what actresses actually did for a living.

Aside from the first two chapters in which she examines how anecdotes and antitheatricalism have contributed to negative images of actresses in the early modern period, Scott structures her book chronologically. Chapter 3 teases out the sparse details available regarding the first early modern actresses, while chapter 4 turns to women on the baroque stage, and so on. Scott features the lives and professions of individual actresses — Mesdemoiselles de Villiers, Baron, Du Parc, Champmeslé, Clairon, and Lecouvreur, for example — as well as the impact that these women made on theater during their careers. The book’s structure emphasizes the rapid development of theater and the acting profession in a relatively short time period: from the sixteenth century, when many French actresses worked with their husbands in relative anonymity and acted in farce and possibly Roman plays (59, 61), to the stars of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries who “owned” categories of roles known as emplois and led campaigns “to regularize the civil status of the actor” (207, 266).

Women on the Stage in Early Modern France includes a range of fascinating discussions for those interested in French theater. In chapter 5, for example, Scott gives us an account of the lives and careers of several stars including that of Mlle Du Parc, who, with her husband, acted in Molière’s plays, and then went on to attain stardom as “a tragedy queen and the mistress of an ambitious and increasingly celebrated poet [Racine]” (169). Scott brings to life the mechanics of theater operations and the métier of actors: she discusses at length the emergence and evolution of emplois after 1680, as well as an explanation of “[t]he actor’s expressive tools” such as “the face and body in action, as well as the act of speech,” particularly historical evidence regarding how actors and actresses declaimed their lines (220). Scott’s source for much of this material is Mlle Clairon’s biography, Mémoires de Mlle Clairon actrice du Théatre-Franc¸ais, écrits par elle-mˆeme, first published in 1798. While informing us that Mlle Clairon’s private life was also documented by the so-called morals police and was the subject of a vicious libelle, Scott makes clear that these scurrilous materials give us just one prejudiced version of a single aspect of the great actress’s life: “Actresses led remarkably interesting, if not easy, lives in early modern France. They were courageous women, and their courage deserves our attention and our best efforts to document their lives, both personal and professional, as individuals, not as symbols of depravity, nor as icons of grandeur” (36–37). In Women on the Stage, Virginia Scott demonstrates the respect that is due Mlle Clairon and all the remarkable actresses she studies through the three-dimensional portraits she paints of them. This engaging volume is highly recommended for scholars interested in women’s history in the early modern period.