The Stage Career of Eliza Haywood

Abstract

Female playwrights of varying degrees of quality were reasonably plentiful in late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England; but, except for Eliza Haywood, few of these playwrights doubled as actresses, at least with sufficient success for us to be aware of their talents. Even the stage career of Mrs. Haywood, one extending at least from 1715 to 1737, has not been documented in its entirety before now. It deserves attention because it adds some details to the scanty biography of this woman who is best known as a novelist, a novelist who turned out scandal chronicles long before Richardson made the novel morally acceptable, and who in 1751 produced what may be the first domestic novel in English,The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless. Along the way she had some success as a publisher, as the first woman writer of a periodical for women, as a poet, and as a playwright and actress. It was her efforts in the theater that drew the attention of such men as Jonathan Swift and Richard Savage and brought her into a rather lengthy association with Henry Fielding. And it was her theatrical experience that contributed much to her eventual skill as a novelist. She liked the stage, and much of what we like in her later work she owed to the stage.