Abstract
English women’s drama was crucially shaped by the city between 1660 and 1705, the period when female actors and playwrights first entered the professional theatre. This article uses selected scenes from the comedies of Elizabeth Polwhele, Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre to examine how women coped with the high-risk strategy of participating in commercial theatre and the vast circulation of trade which grew up around the City, a flamboyant sign of high capitalism. On one hand, the city represents movement, a crossroads of possibilities in which to redefine female agency. In plays such as The Rover, The Frolicks and The Gamester, female dramatists script movement across the city in a way that pre-empts De Certeau's model of ‘walking the city’ as a way for female characters and actors to inhabit public spaces of their own. On the other hand, scenes in these plays critically interrogate Raymond Williams’ classic distinction between discursive constructions of the city and the countryside in which the city’s blatant expose of social and economic processes is associated with dirt. The contaminating pollution is feminised in the trope of actress, playwright and whore. Actresses and playwrights were ‘playing for all’ in more than one sense, and gambling exemplifies the risks involved for women attempting to manipulate the urban and theatrical locations that attempted to commodify them.
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Notes
See Alison Findlay et al., Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (Pearson, 2000) and Alison Findlay, Playing Spaces in Early Women's Drama (Cambridge, 2006) for a survey of this theatre history and analysis of the different characteristics of these performance venues.
On the need to revive critical interest in Centlivre as an example of the early woman dramatist, see Bratton (2000).
There is no record of the performance of The Frolicks, but Polwhele's dedication to Prince Rupert, who was a good friend of Killigrew, and whose mistress Margaret Hughes had been a member of the King's Company, suggests that this is the performance destination she imagined when composing the play.
For a full discussion of female transvestites in plays by men and women, see Pearson (1988: 100–118).
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Anne Cronin and Liz Oakley-Brown as co-organisers of the conference where these papers were originally delivered, for their patience and support in editing them for this special issue.
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Findlay, A. playing for all in the city: women's drama. Fem Rev 96, 41–57 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2010.18