White, Willow. <i>Feminist Comedy: Women Playwrights of London</i>

In this carefully researched and clearly argued book, White argues that the Licensing Act (1737) dampened women’s production of comic plays. In 1750 the appearance of Catherine Clive’s The Rehearsal; or, Bayes in Petticoats heralded a “renaissance” in women’s comedy that lasted through the second half of the century. Female writers, nonetheless, were constrained by the generally held opinion that writing plays of any kind was unfeminine; comedies were considered marginally more acceptable because women’s inferior education was believed to hamper their approach to the elevated strains of tragedy. The central argument of the book “identifies the comic stage as an essential site of liberal feminist discourse and practice in the eighteenth century.” White also argues that women playwrights’ achievements have been overlooked because of the critical emphasis on the five-act comedy; the appendix demonstrates the varied forms in which women wrote, including afterpieces, farces, and musical comedy.White surveys the second half of the eighteenth century through chapters on five different writers: Clive, Frances Brooke, Frances Burney, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald. Of the five, Brooke is in many ways the most interesting. In this century she is best known for her novels, including The History of Emily Montague (1768), often called the “first Canadian novel,” which was inspired by her five-year stay in Quebec with her army chaplain husband. A hint of her experience with the stage and her contentious relationship with David Garrick is evident in her novel, The Excursion (1777). White fleshes out Brooke’s theatrical career, including the feud with Garrick that shut her out of the legitimate theater in London for years. Unlike many authors, she was disinclined to “grovel” at the great man’s feet, and instead, “in 1773 . . . became the part owner and manager of the King’s Theatre, London’s opera house.” She was one of a five-person partnership that included her husband, her brother-in-law, and Mary Ann and Richard Yates, the actors. The men were silent partners; the women managed the theater, a situation that White describes as “extremely unusual.” Five years later, they sold the theater for a profit of £14,900. After Garrick’s death (1779), Brooke used her experience to get one of her own plays produced at Covent Garden. Her burletta, Rosina (1782), was “the second-most-performed afterpiece of the late eighteenth century, staged more than 200 times by 1800.” This work has received little attention, White posits, because a musical afterpiece was considered lightweight fare. Her discussion of Brooke’s two popular musical works rectifies that neglect, pointing to the extent to which they critique “the challenges women face within England’s social and economic systems.”If Brooke represents the full flowering of the emancipation that women experienced in writing comedy, Burney, whose story is the best-known of the five, presents its opposite. She was encouraged to write a comedy by Arthur Murphy, who felt it was a natural progression from the comic scenes in Burney’s debut novel, Evelina. Her father and Samuel Crisp, the influential family friend known as “Daddy,” stopped the production of The Witlings because they were concerned that, if it should fail, she would be crushed. There is also evidence that they were concerned that the play’s satire of a group of aspiring literary women might offend Elizabeth Montagu, the “queen” of the bluestockings. White, however, argues that Crisp, who had earlier staged an unsuccessful comedy, did not want Burney to succeed where he had failed. The analysis of the play draws attention to the scenes in the milliner’s shop and argues that, as the daughter of a woman who ran a fan-making business, Burney emphasizes the dignity and importance of women’s work.White makes interesting choices when it comes to the specific plays on which she focuses. Of Clive’s four afterpieces, she analyzes The Rehearsal, which looks back to the popular Restoration form. While Cowley’s The Runaway and The Belle’s Stratagem are better known, she chooses instead to discuss A Day in Turkey because “it is irreverent, political, and experimental,” an irresistible combination. This focus draws attention to both a satiric work by a woman and the popularity of orientalism in England at the time. In the chapter on Inchbald, White discusses Lover’s Vows, the play that the young people in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park attempt to stage. Its status as a comedy emphasizes how Henry Crawford’s manipulation of it into a means of seduction skews its actual form. White also notes that Inchbald was criticized for its unfeminine political overtones. The conclusion examines the way that, two hundred years after Inchbald’s death, the stage continues to be a site of feminist argument and protest.Monographs like White’s are of great scholarly interest because they group collections of writers who otherwise might not have been associated with each other in critical studies. Feminist Comedy, however, would have a wider influence if there were inexpensive, scholarly editions of these plays. Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (2011), edited by Tanya Caldwell, includes Clive’s The Rehearsal, but none of the other plays in this study; it does contain Cowley’s The Runaway. Not all institutions have access to databases like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, and not all undergraduates are equipped to read eighteenth-century texts without at least some editorial assistance. Until we can introduce our students to these and other women’s texts, our conversations will be limited to conference presentations and publications. The absence of most of these plays in anthologies and collections is a mark of White’s innovative approach. Her work is to be commended for drawing our attention to them.

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