Restoration Women’s Drama

Aphra Behn (1640–89) was the most prolific female playwright of the Restoration and the first Englishwoman to make a living as a professional writer. Best known for her 1677 comedy The Rover and for Oroonoko, her 1688 novella of Atlantic slavery, she also published lyric poetry and translations from works in Latin and French. Abdelazer, her only tragedy, draws from existing early modern treatments of stage Moors, and offers a blend of received notions about black masculinity with a portrait of besieged royalty. Frances Boothby is known only by her play, Marcelia, and by a poem lamenting its apparent lack of success on the stage. However, Marcelia displays high levels of theatrical skill, and in 1669 her play was the first professional production by a woman on the London stage. Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) was a prolific author of poetry, prose fiction, letters, essays, natural philosophy, and plays. As a young woman, Cavendish was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Henrietta Maria. During the English Civil War, she accompanied the Queen to Paris where she married the prominent royalist general William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle with whom she lived in exile until the Restoration of Charles II. Cavendish sought fame through her writing and used the medium of print to comment on the most pressing cultural, political, and philosophical issues of her day. Katherine Philips (1632–64) was a celebrated writer in her own time, a central figure in a literary coterie who was known by her coterie name Orinda. Her poetry ranged from poems addressed to her close female friends to those expressing her royalist sympathies. Pompey, her translation of Pierre Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée, was supported by prominent political figures in Ireland and successfully produced in Dublin. It was published in both Dublin and London and was featured in the posthumously published folio edition of her works. Lara Dodds is professor and head in the department of English at Mississippi State University. Her most recent book, coauthored with Michelle M. Dowd, is Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Future of Literary History. Joyce Green MacDonald is professor of English at the University of Kentucky, where she teaches courses on Renaissance literature. Her publications include work on Katherine Philips, Lady Mary Wroth, and Aphra Behn. Paul Salzman is emeritus professor at La Trobe University, Australia. He has published widely on early modern women’s writing. Mihoko Suzuki, professor emerita at the University of Miami, has published most recently Antigone’s Example: Early Modern Women’s Political Writing in Times of Civil War from Christine de Pizan to Helen Maria Williams.

"This edition of four seventeenth-century plays is an excellent contribution to the ongoing scholarly discourse on women’s contributions to early modern theatre in England, showing the continuities of women’s involvement in dramatic writing through the seventeenth century, and helping to debunk the long-held idea that early modern women didn’t write plays. Each play has been carefully selected for this collection with a clear rationale as to its importance, and when the plays are read sequentially, the generic, thematic, and characterizational connections between them are clear. Moreover, by choosing to foreground plays that were either intended for print and/or professionally staged, the editors show how the involvement of female playwrights in theatre ranged far beyond the seclusion of the “closets” in which scholars long believed them to be sequestered."

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Restoration Women’s Drama, 1662–1677, by Paul Salzman Margaret Cavendish, Unnatural Tragedy (1662), edited by Lara DoddsIntroduction Text Katherine Philips, Pompey (1663), edited by Mihoko SuzukiIntroduction Text Appendix 1: “To the Right Honorable the Countess of Cork” Appendix 2: “To my Lady Elizabeth Boyle, Singing—‘Since Affairs of the State &c.’ ” “To the Countess of Roscommon, with a Copy of Pompey” Appendix 3: “The Earl of Orrery to Mrs. Philips” Abraham Cowley, “Upon Mrs. K. Philips her Poems” Philo-Philippa, “To the Excellent Orinda” Thomas Flatman, “To the Memory of the incomparable Orinda: A Pindarick Ode” Frances Boothby, Marcelia (1669), edited by Paul SalzmanIntroduction Text Aphra Behn, Abdelazar (1677), edited by Joyce MacdonaldIntroduction Text Bibliography Index