Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage

Abstract

Misty G. Andersen. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York and Hampshire UK: Palgrave, 2002. x + 262 pp. ISBN 0-312-23938-6. Cloth. $55. Indexed. Dust-jacketFunny women on the London stage usually steal the show. Misty G. Anderson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and co-editor with John P. Zomchick of the journal Restoration, has written an important book on four successful English women playwrights of the Restoration and 18th century who evidently were funny and surely wrote funny. Over six chapters supported by 27 pages of endnotes and a 16-page bibliography, Anderson shows that her small cluster of women dramatists cleverly exploited the comic potential of contemporary marriage law and social beliefs about marriage, while also layering into their scripts bold feminist commentary on women's constraints in early-modern English law and society. Playgoers, one imagines, would leave the theatre both delighted and instructed. What they viewed on the stage would have the requisite comedic response, but there was also an intellectual impact; for behind the play's artifice, laughter was balanced by troubling questions about the conduct of real life.The principal strength of Anderson's inquiry is its economy and manageable focus. Her subject is four English women playwrights-Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald-who collectively achieved prominent commercial success during a 130-year timeframe, 1670-1800, as entertaining yet astute commentators on English marriage law and English marriage conventions. Wisely benefiting from the spadework of Lawrence Stone, Susan Staves, et al., Anderson has assembled an exposition on a complex social and legal subject, which she smartly approaches from a comedic angle. And how refreshing is this, especially against the humorless and severe feminist essays of Anna Maria Van Schurman, Bathsua Makin, Poulain de la Barre, Mary Astell, et al. Anderson's focus takes readers to a lively comic literature on women and marriage, an approach which makes her overall treatment all the more readable and entertaining. As Anderson writes at the outset:These playwrights and their heroines measure the disparity between idealized marriage narratives and the real circumstances of characters in history through the gendered scripts of comedy. They found in comedy a narrative where the economic future, erotic possibilities, and public visibility of women merge, and they were able to engage generations of theatergoers in their versions of that story... .1 treat comedy both as a generic market that describes a story about marriage and as a designation of a performance that the audience expected to find funny. My study examines the relationship between comic closure, which tends to be predictable, and comic events, where the more-local jokes and comic conflicts of the comedies play out. (1,2)Surprisingly unmentioned by other reviewers of this book is the perhaps understated motif of women's career formation at this time as public figures in the London theatre market. This was a new role for women writers, one which left them fully exposed and vulnerable to comparison with some of the best male playwrights in the early English theatre. Yet, in addition to the commercial success of Katherine Philips during the early years of the Restoration, Andersen's four women playwrights (especially Inchbald) did handsomely well on the boards for a time, and their plays have seen an energetic revival in recent years for new generations of theatergoers.Of Andersen's six chapters, four merit special attention. In Chapter Three, whose title, "You Irreplaceable You," bows to a musical classic of 20th-century ballad repertory, Anderson considers Aphra Behn's comedic representations of marriage in four commercially successful plays: The Rover, The Emperor of the Moon, The False Count, and The Feign d Courtesans. …