Contents: About the Collection | Introduction | Historical Background | My Intervention | About the Creator | Tech

About the Collection

Introduction

In 1989, Tracy C. Davis set the pace for revisionist strategies of feminist scholarship and called for new approaches to the practices of theatre historiography in her essay “Questions for a Feminist Methodology in Theatre History”. Many feminist historiographers have risen to this challenge over the years to contest the old narratives around the early female theatre professionals of Restoration England, that are underpinned by certain binaries—of art and entertainment, male and female, playwright and actress—leading to the erasure of much of these women’s histories. They argue that what remained has adhered to the hegemonic attitudes that seek to distance the female playwright from other women and masculinize her writing to prove her genius, and that label the work of playwrights as literature while the contributions of the actresses are relegated to the realm of bawdry, entertainment or historical gossip. In my scholarship, I explore how these playwrights related themselves to the legacy of their female literary forerunners, as well as how male backlash to women’s playwriting influenced their work, lives, and afterlives, including the emergence of the closet playwrights (as an antithesis to the commercial).

The field in general has focused on male playwrights and has only begun to recover the stories of the female playwrights and actresses in the last thirty years or so. Most of the scholarship surrounding this field has worked to obfuscate ideas of female literary collaborations, and has, instead, lauded individual women (such as Aphra Behn) as examples of masculinist “isolated” genius. Moreover, the relegation of actresses to the realm of “bawdry” or prostitution has led to their stories mostly surviving in the form of historical gossip. All of this has led to huge gaps in the histories that we have inherited about these theatre professionals—in fact, most of what we know about the Restoration theatre is what has been passed down from the Romantic period (about a century after the Restoration), meaning that our ideas of the Restoration theatre are retrospectively applied attitudes from the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Historical Background

In May 1660, after the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, the playhouses reopened after eighteen years, and the patents for all the “stock” plays were divided between two companies—Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company (1660-1682) and William Davenant’s Duke’s Company (1660-1682). It was also mandated that the companies would hire actresses and would perform their plays in indoor playhouses. By 1668, the Duke’s Company was managed, for all intents and purposes, by Davenant’s widow, Lady Mary Davenant. Jacqueline Pearson explains that, despite having set up the company and recruited its first actresses, William Davenant was the manager for only eight years. Upon his death, contrary to popular histories which suggest that the managerial control of the company went to the leading actors Thomas Betterton and Henry Harris, Pearson asserts that Lady Davenant was not merely a figurehead, but also a working manager. She oversaw the company’s finances and the completion of a new theatre, Dorset Gardens, in 1671. Though rarely credited as a theatre entrepreneur, it was during her management of the Duke’s Company that a new play by Aphra Behn, the “first” professional female playwright, was performed on the public stage—The Forc’d Marriage (1670) (Pearson 32). Over the next twelve years, the Duke’s Company was the exclusive producer for twelve plays by Behn.

In 1682, the Duke’s Company of Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the King’s Company of Drury Lane’s Theatre Royal merged to form the United Company, which in 1693 split up to form the Actor’s Company, with the actress Elizabeth Barry as one of the original patent holders. It was around this time that three new female playwrights, Catherine Trotter (1679-1749), Delarivier Manley (1672-1724) and Mary Pix (1666-1709), entered the public stage in 1696. The first plays of all three were produced within six months of each other and their printed play-texts reveal that these three women were writing supportive prefaces to each other’s plays. Trotter’s first play, Agnes de Castro was first performed in 1695 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. It was published the following year in 1696. In that same year, Pix came out with two plays—Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks and The Spanish Wives—both staged in 1696 at the Drury Lane theatre. However, after the anonymous play, The Female Wits—a scathing mockery satirizing the three dramatists—was staged at the same venue, she moved to the Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Manley’s first play was The Lost Lover, or, The Jealous Husband was performed in 1696 at the Theatre Royal, and was published in the same year. Paula Backsheider argues that now that the newly constructed playhouses were enjoying the patronage (and sometimes the presence) of the King, the female playwrights would consciously experiment with ways to enter and influence public discourse on the great national questions as well as on domestic concerns (Backsheider 70). The playhouse was an emerging social space that represented the possibility for new socio-cultural discourses.

My Intervention

This collection provides research and exhibition materials that illuminate the issues within one such discourse—the emerging conversation about women’s political identity in the 17th Century and the forms of consent represented in early modern and 17th century literature, particularly focusing on the question of consent at the intersections of gender and politics. The two threads that interweave through the materials in this collection are: Gender and Genre. I argue that the genre of theatre—whether private or public, closet or commercial, discursive spaces all—presented an avenue to negotiate women’s political and gendered identities. However, this history of women’s political and theatrical writing cannot exist in a vacuum. For this reason, my criteria for selection was to find a wide range of texts that could touch upon as much of the spectrum of the topic as possible. I have tried to sample in my collection political treatises against the “tyranny” of women and on the construction of the state and political subjecthood, poems and early fiction that reveal the ways in which the rhetorics of the political contract theory could be harnessed for women’s political objectives, closet drama which allowed women to participate in a specialized genre of political discourse, commercial drama that allowed women to collaborate and participate in a greater identity-making within mixed audiences, a handbook on the “finest” prostitutes of the age, satires and lampoons against women and against women dramatists, responses to the same, and texts that illuminate the ways in which marginalized identities were conceived of in the popular imagination at the time, revealing the real-world manifestations of particular ideologies. In fact, the varied status of these items in the canon can be telling in their own right: they are a window into what was considered to be worth preserving and what not, and therefore, reveal what has been passed down to us in the form of inherited histories and ideologies, and what has been occluded.

This is an important topic because many of the considerations that were being grappled with in these texts are pertinent to this day. The legal and linguistic rhetoric found in these materials to rationalize various forms of enslavement—of women, of children, of political others, of people of colour, to rationalize the basis of the political contract as inherently excluding certain kinds of human beings, and to rationalize the marriage contract as a type of political contract of governance that enslaves the wife and, conversely, femininizes the slave—reveals recognizable ideas of the role of political consent in modern understandings of race and gender. However, the historical and ideological upheavals of the period also reveal the emergence of an oppositional, but often similar, legal and linguistic rhetoric through which attempts were being made to negotiate and forge consent and political rights. An exhibition of these materials can thus be useful in tracing a past to our current understandings of these issue, while also offering the opportunity to discover options not yet pursued, through scholarly research using the frameworks of contract theory, feminist theory, and genre studies.

About the Creator

Shataparni Bhattacharya (she/they) is a PhD student in Literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. They work on Restoration and Eighteenth Century drama, with a focus on women’s theatrical collaborations, their personal and professional networks, and their negotiation of a political subjectivity and identity in play-texts and on stage. They are also interested in how inherited histories contribute to our critical perceptions of early theatre women, and how hegemonic structures serve to create, obfuscate, or maintain certain types of attitudes, assumptions, and binaries pertaining to these early female theatre professionals.