Table Of ContentFemale Playwrights
and Eighteenth-Century Comedy
Female Playwrights and
Eighteenth-Century Comedy
Negotiating Marriage
on the London Stage
M I S T Y G . A N D E R S O N
FEMALEPLAYWRIGHTSANDEIGHTEENTH-CENTURYCOMEDY
©Misty G. Anderson, 2002
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-1-312-23938-1
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
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quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2002 by PALGRAVETM
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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC
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Macmillan Press Ltd).
ISBN 978-1-349-38693-2 ISBN 978-0-312-29275-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780312292751
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Anderson, Misty G. 1967-
Female playwrights and eighteenth-century comedy : negotiating marriage
on the London stage / Misty Anderson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
1. English drama—18th century—History and criticism. 2. Women
and literature—Great Britain—History—18th century. 3. English
drama—Women authors—History and criticism. 4. Theater—England—
London—History—18th century. 5. English drama (comedy)—History
and criticism. 6. Courtship in Literature. 7. Marriage in literature.
8. Women in literature.
PR708.W6 A53 2002
822’.0523099287’09033—dc21 2001036573
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: February 2002
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Andy and John,
who laugh at my jokes.
C o n t e n t s
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter One Funny Women 9
Chapter Two Repetition, Contract, and Comedy 45
Chapter Three You Irreplaceable You: Behn’s Unalienable Bodies 73
Chapter Four Coming to Market:
Centlivre and the Promise of Contract 109
Chapter Five Rule, Britannia: Women and the
National Community in Cowley’s Comedies 139
Chapter Six Beyond the Law: Contract, Divorce,
and Community in Inchbald’s Comedies 171
Conclusion The Repetitive Future of Comedy 201
Notes 209
Bibliography 237
Index 253
Acknowledgments
This book was researched and written with the financial support of an NEH
Dissertation Fellowship, two International Scholar Awards from the P.E.O.
Sisterhood, a University of Tennessee Professional Development Award, and
a summer fellowship from the John C. Hodges Better English Fund. I thank
the librarians at Vanderbilt University’s Alexander Heard Library, the Uni-
versity of Tennessee’s Hodges Library, the New York Public Library’s Berg
Collection, and the British Library for their kind assistance over the years.
From the beginning of this project, Margaret Doody believed in my ability
to say something intelligent about women and comedy. She taught me to
think of the eighteenth century not as a period but as a periodical, which con-
tinues to publish. She also allowed me to transform her living room into a lit-
eral stage to bring some of these comedies to life through the
Eighteenth-Century Players reader’s theater company at Vanderbilt Univer-
sity. Thanks to all the fearless souls who took part in that project, especially
Marilyn Allison, Elaine Phillips, Phil Phillips, Phil Nel, Karin Westman,
Gary Richards, Roger Moore, Jonathan Rogers, Ted Mulvaney, Eric Bledsoe,
Arnold Schmidt, Julia Fesmire, Adrienne Stewart, Ann MacDonald, and
Allan Bourassa. As this manuscript evolved, Paul Helton, Steven Sparks,
Maria Bibbs, Darren Hughes, and especially Audrey Tinkham helped me
manage the thousands of tasks that cascade in the writing of books. Mark
Schoenfield offered his astute readings, his generous intellect, and his friend-
ship at the most crucial moments, for which I am forever grateful. Valerie
Traub taught me about the historical and theoretical terms of gender, lessons
that are exceeded only by what she taught me about being a colleague and a
teacher. John Zomchick has greatly enriched my intellectual life at the Uni-
versity of Tennessee and has given me sage advice on contract law, the eigh-
teenth century, and finishing books. I owe special thanks to Marilyn Gaull,
who took an interest in this project and helped me bring it to completion by
offering me her editorial experience, her timely insights about the profession,
and her warm and welcoming collegiality. Thanks to all those who have read
drafts, commented on talks, or challenged me through their conversation: Jay
x / FEMALEPLAYWRIGHTSANDEIGHTEENTH-CENTURYCOMEDY
Clayton, Vereen Bell, Nancy Walker, Robert Mack, Steve Miskinis, Kenny
Mostern, John Evelev, Emma Lipton, Heather Hirschfield, Jay Dickson,
Randi Voss, Allen Dunn, Stanton Garner, Elizabeth Sutherland, Julie Craw-
ford, and Devoney Looser. Thanks also to the friends and family who have
sustained me and mine in myriad ways throughout this project: Jen Shelton,
Julia Fesmire, Paul Alexis, Michael Phillips, Trevor Jefferson, Sandra Mout-
sios, Frank Tirro, Charlene Tirro, Kelli Anderson, Chris Anderson, Charles
Anderson, and Gale Anderson. Anderson Tirro, whose life has been spanned
by this project, has enlivened my work with his joyful and loving ways. My
greatest debt, though, is to John Tirro, partner, spiritual guide, and bard. He
has negotiated a commuter marriage with panache while weaving the gar-
lands of work and home, proofreading and childcare, and theory and prac-
tice, with the steady understanding that these things are all part of our very
good bargain.
The text of the Sylvia cartoon “Gender Based Differences in Humor” ap-
pears with the kind permission of Nicole Hollander.
Introduction
In a Nicole Hollander cartoon entitled “Gender Based Differences in
Humor,” which prefaced the 1988 volume Last Laughs: Perspectives on
Women and Comedy,the heroine, Sylvia, composes the following quiz while
lounging in a bathtub: “Are you a man or a woman? Check the things you
find funny: Larry, Moe, and Curly; Men dressed up as women, but with
their unshaven legs showing; The disparity between the ideal and the real.
Send quiz and stamped self-addressed envelope to find out.”1 To “pass”
Sylvia’s test as a woman, one must think like a comic theorist. The first two
choices in the cartoon present a Hobbesian position of superiority over
someone who has failed to master the terms of social interaction, physical
discipline, or gender performance. In the tripartite joke structure of the car-
toon, these options are tagged as wrong answers. The third choice, the
punch line, is the contradiction of all comedy that William Hazlitt called
“the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.”2The
“correct” answer points the reader to a gendered perspective on comedy
within a world of contradictions, rather than a seemingly objective position
of mastery. This cartoon, with its comic theorist in the bathtub, provides an
anachronistic point of departure for my study of stage comedies by women
in the long eighteenth century.
In Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Mar-
riage on the London Stage,I explore the popular comedies of Aphra Behn, Su-
sanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald, the most
commercially successful Restoration and eighteenth-century British women
playwrights. These playwrights and their heroines measure the disparity be-
tween idealized marriage narratives and the real circumstances of characters
in history through the gendered scripts of comedy. Behn, Centlivre, Cowley,
and Inchbald found in comedy a narrative where the economic future, erotic
possibility, and public visibility of women merge, and they were able to en-
gage generations of theatergoers in their versions of that story. Marriage held
out the promise of sexual fulfillment and social adulthood to women, in
spite of the legal and economic inequalities between men and women that
2 / FEMALEPLAYWRIGHTSANDEIGHTEENTH-CENTURYCOMEDY
marriage and property law reproduced. The successes of these playwrights’
careers outline a cultural conversation about marriage and rights that corre-
sponds to the liberalization of marriage law through the principles of con-
tract and then to the subsequent return to coverture at the end of the
century. Susan Staves has traced these changes in her study of marriage and
property law, which provides the legal framework for my argument about
stage comedy.3The historical changes in marriage law over the course of this
period put female dramatists in a unique position to negotiate women’s new
relationships to the old scripts of courtship and marriage. These two cate-
gories, gender and genre, frame my study as they framed the reception of
plays for Restoration and eighteenth-century audiences.
I treat comedy both as a generic marker that describes a story about mar-
riage 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. Playwrights use the tension
between comic events and comic structures to navigate between an ideal plot
that the genre reiterates and the impediments or alternatives to that plot
along the way to the comic destination, marriage. At the risk of ruining
jokes, I take these comic events seriously as the crisis moments within com-
edy’s overdetermined representation of marriage. These are not plays about
resisting marriage, but about negotiating the terms, literal and figurative,
under which Restoration and eighteenth-century women existed within the
institution. The audience’s and the playwright’s conflicting investments in
both conservative endings and more progressive models of modern marriage
animate these comedies. Comic events establish positions of authority for
the negotiating heroines of these plays, while comic closure assures the au-
dience that marriage will survive these negotiations.
The patterns that emerge in the comic events of these plays articulate the
terms in which women might represent themselves as subjects rather than ob-
jects in marriage negotiations. Scenes of circulating contracts and letters in
Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body allow heroines to write themselves into
their married futures, rather than to disappear under coverture. Her couples,
who trick their way around the will of bad guardians, contract with each other
for more equitable terms that allow them to share in the financial benefit of
their marriages. Similarly, Hannah Cowley invokes national identity as the
basis for the legal agency of her heroines. The art auction in The Runaway,in
which no one knows the provenance of or the stories portrayed in a series of
continental historical paintings, is a joke on the collapse of identity without
nationality. Cowley imagines a British nationalism that trumps foreign deca-
dence and guarantees the place of married women as citizens who share in the
liberties of civil society. These comic events are in dialogue with the plot, but
