The Female Wits

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Claudine van Hensbergen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Playwrights ◽  
Delarivier Manley ◽  
Mary Pix

Taking as its focus the satirical play The Female Wits: or, the Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal (1696) this chapter reconstructs the satirical milieu around female dramatists at the turn of the eighteenth century. The leading playwright Susannah Centlivre repeatedly claimed that female dramatists only found success where they obscured their gender, with discriminatory attitudes laying them open to ‘the carping Malice of the Vulgar World’. This chapter explores the extent to which this was true, examining whether we should read The Female Wits as a misogynistic silencing of women playwrights, or rather as a work that speaks to their commercial popularity. By contextualizing this analysis through the writings of Centlivre and her contemporaries Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, and Catharine Trotter, as well as considering their treatment in the stage reform debates, the chapter argues that scholars may have overestimated the power of satire to curtail the careers of female dramatists.

scholarly journals "Will you to my discourse vouchsafe an eare?" : women dramatists' negotiation of gender and genre on the public stage around 1700

2004 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 37
Author(s):  
Marguérite Corporaal
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Transformation ◽  
Women Playwrights ◽  
The Public ◽  
Delarivier Manley ◽  
Public Setting ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Gender And Genre ◽  
Public Voice ◽  
Women Dramatists

Despite the growing influence of women in the theatrical world during the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century, women dramatists working for the public stage were accused of lascivious behaviour, as a result of the public setting of the playhouse in which their self-expression could be heard. In their tragedies The Royal Mischief (1696), The Fatal Friendship (1698) and Antiochus the Great; or, The Final Relapse (1701) the female dramatists Mary Delarivier Manley, Catherine Trotter and Jane Wiseman negotiated female utterance in several ways. Moreover, these women dramatists' legitimisation of woman's public voice and their own public theatrical voices was accompanied by their revision of tragic generic conventions concerning error, closure, transgression and transcendence. In these respects these women playwrights contributed to processes of cultural transformation with regard to gender and genre.

Seen on Stage: English Operas, the Female Wits, and the ‘Reformed’ Stage

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret J. M. Ezell
Keyword(s):  
Delarivier Manley ◽  
Mary Pix

The final decade of the century saw changes and challenges to the London commercial stage, including Jeremy Collier’s attack on it for profanity and immorality. Dramatists including Dryden, Congreve, and Southerne defended their writings as promoting good morality, while a group of female dramatists comprising Mary Pix, Delarivier Manley, and Catharine Trotter became a target of satire, referred to as the ‘Female Wits’. Audiences were increasingly interested in new forms of plays called ‘operas’ that required more singers, dancers and stage effects.

Eighteenth-century women playwrights

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 461-484
Author(s):  
Gilli Bush-Bailey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Women Playwrights
Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document