Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights

This six-volume anthology documents the history of women's drama throughout the 18th century, starting with the emergence in 1695-6 of the second generation of women dramatists in succession to Aphra Benn. Containing a representative selection of newly edited and annotated texts by leading woman dramatists of the period from 1696 to 1800, the anthology reflects the changes in Britain's global realignment in class models and perception of other peoples.

If women's drama quickly ceases to express the raw rage at the oppression of female sexuality that is evident in Behn and Manley, it continues to show women controlling their lives through manipulation of an increasingly complex and intellectually diverse society. In the 1690s, dramatists were meditating on the 1688 revolution (and its implications for the man's authority within marriage) and Britain's international horizons were defined by its war with France and by its transatlantic colonial possessions. At the end of the period, Britain was the dominant world power, ruling India, apprehensively contemplating the aftermath of another revolution, in France.

From 1670 until her death in 1689, Aphra Benn had established herself as one of the leading dramatists of her time, having far more new plays performed during these years than any competitor, and paving the way for the surge in women's playwriting towards the end of the century: between 1695 and 1700, six new women dramatists had plays premiered, and from then on women consistently made an important and diverse contribution to the stage.

Those included in this collection include Catherine Trotter (1679-1749), Mary Pix (1666-c.1720), Delarivier Manley (1663-1724), Eliza Haywood (c.1693-1736), Susanna Centlivre (c.1670-1723), Elizabeth Griffith (c.1720-93), Elizabeth Inchbald (1753-1821) and Hannah Cowley (1743-1809). Catherine Trotter, Mary Pix and Delarivier Manley formed an important trio of women dramatists at the end of the 17th century. Catherine Trotter was the first woman to adapt a work of Behn's for stage (the novel Agnes de Castro).

Manley, who like Trotter has never appeared in a complete scholarly edition, was probably the most talented of the trio and also an important writer of fiction. Her best play, The Royal Mischief, portrays the patriarchal suppression of female desire with a frankness unique in the 1690s. Eliza Haywood - a disciple of Manley in the writing of scandalous prose fiction - wrote two original plays, of which A Wife to be Lett (1723) is particularly notable for its harsh portrayal of the commodification and near-prostitution of women.

Writing about Susanna Centlivre, in his Lectures on the English Comic Writers, William Hazlitt remarked: "Her plays have a provoking spirit and volatile salt in them which still preserves them from decay". Elizabeth Inchbald and Hannah Cowley were perhaps the most successful female dramatists of the late 18th century. Both were admired by Sheridan for their original work and adaptations.