The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. <i>Vol. 1</i>, Early Manuscript Books

Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, was an aristocratic woman whose devout Jacobitism was at odds with political circumstances in England following the Glorious Revolution. Therefore, for reasons of politics as well as status, she could not be a public author in the same way as her contemporaries Aphra Behn, Delarivièr Manley, and Susanna Centlivre were. But she wrote both beautifully and voluminously, and The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch at last gives this major writer the serious scholarly treatment she has long merited. The editors, Jennifer Keith and Claudia Thomas Kairoff, not only present the entirety of Finch’s confirmed oeuvre but also treat her as a “poet” in the seventeenth-century understanding of that term, as opposed to the narrower twenty-first-century version. That is, they have devoted substantial space and resources to restoring and making available her dramatic work alongside her poetry. Recognizing the significance of her drama, they wisely partnered with Jean Marsden, who wrote the commentary on the plays and also provided context in the general introduction to volume 1. Together, the three editors have taken pains to show Finch’s exposure to theatre and performance and, most importantly, have provided well-edited reproductions of her plays and other theatrical materials.A brief overview of Finch’s life shows the many ways in which drama was a significant presence. Finch spent several years during the 1680s at court, where she was exposed to court performances and likely also attended public ones. Many of her writings indicate her engagement with the theatre: both “The Preface” and “Ardelia’s Answer to Ephelia” reflect her taste in drama (she quotes from Francis Beaumont and embeds commentary on several contemporary playwrights). Moreover, her two plays bear significant likenesses to English plays written both before and after the English Civil Wars as well as to theatre techniques of the day. She also conveys some of the harrowing events of her life as a Jacobite following the Glorious Revolution through her two closet dramas, The Triumphs of Love and Innocence (date unknown) and Aristomenes (date unknown). Volume 1 features all her theatrical writing, with two exceptions: a translation of a selection from Racine’s Athalia and an epilogue (likely never performed) to Nicholas Rowe’s The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714). The material covered—two plays, a prologue, twenty songs, and translated pieces from Torquato Tasso’s The Aminta (1573)—represents a significant body of theatrical writing at a time when major Restoration dramatists such as William Wycherley and George Etherege wrote only four and three plays, respectively. Together, Finch’s dramatic writing constitutes nearly half of volume 1 (193 of 398 pages).Both the general introduction and the textual endnotes offer rich and productive discussions of Finch’s relationship with the theatre. The general introduction provides a pleasingly expansive discussion of drama and performance in her life. It details her exposure to the theatre, describes the sources for and influences on her two plays, and provides thoughtful assessments of them, significantly augmenting the limited criticism to date. It nicely articulates the balance she struck as an aristocratic female playwright. Finch chose the scholarly Katherine Phillips rather than the professional author Aphra Behn as her model and also claimed, like her fellow closet dramatist Margaret Cavendish, that she did not want her plays performed. Yet her writing sometimes did find its way onstage, such as when “A Song” (“Love, thou art best of human joys”) was set to music by Henry Purcell and performed in Thomas Wright’s comedy The Female Vertuoso’s (1693), and the edition breaks new ground in discussing her songs as performance pieces in others’ plays. The textual introduction discusses the history of the two manuscripts that make up volume 1 of this edition: the Northamptonshire manuscript and the Folger manuscript. The subsequent “Account of the Texts” provides a descriptive bibliography of each. Extensive endnotes pinpoint the plays’ Jacobite analogues, explore their relationships to staged dramas of the seventeenth century, and discuss the importance of Aristomenes to Finch. Finally, the “Works Excluded” section engages with James Winn’s hypothesis that Finch wrote the libretto for John Blow’s Venus and Adonis (c. 1683), explaining at length why that text is omitted from the volume.Two tiny wishes of mine are that the extensive chronology, which includes biographical events and first printings of her work, also indicated performance dates and that more information about these performances had been offered. Overall, this first volume is a groundbreaking contribution to Restoration and eighteenth-century literary studies and drama studies generally. The editorial treatment of Finch’s dramatic output at last makes accessible her plays and theatrical pieces, facilitating further scholarship on and teaching of these works. Four hundred years after her death, Finch has found editors who treat her work with the seriousness and care that it deserves.