Women on the Canadian Stage: The Legacy of Hrotsvit

R. Kerry White is the director of theatre arts at Laurentian University.

All students who have taken a course in Theatre History have heard of
Hrosvit, the mysterious nun of Gandersheim, a Benedictine monastery in
10th-century Saxony. We know this because she is not only the first
recorded (and thus first known) female playwright in the Western
tradition, but she is also the first known playwright of any gender in
the Romanesque period, when little liturgical dramas were first being
offered, anonymously, in monasteries. Hrosvit wrote a number of plays
based on the comedies of Terrence, but with Christian subjects. They
were published in 1501 and had an important influence on the development
of humanist drama.

Women on the Canadian Stage is a collection of critical essays by
Canadian women currently working in the professional or academic
theatre. The essays have nothing to do with Hrosvit directly, as the
general title indicates, but they are all concerned with the works being
written and produced on the Canadian stage that have recently emerged,
like Hrosvit’s in the 10th century, from a context of a male-dominated
profession. Rita Much’s introduction demonstrates how the work of
Canadian women playwrights is being “discussed, perceived and
understood.”

The essays are all thoughtfully and strongly written, and are worthy
contributions to the Canadian feminist oeuvre. Like the introduction,
however, many lean heavily on what are becoming the clichés of the
feminist theatre critique: every page, if not every paragraph, is
littered with stock phrases such as “male-dominated culture,”
“gender-biased critical reception,” and “patriarchal prescriptions
for female behaviour” (all from the introduction’s second page).
This is not only tiresome, it is a substitute for original thought. One
can only hope that Canadian feminist writing will soon grow beyond the
stage where every critical advance is accompanied by a backward
knee-jerk reaction.