Women playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland, 1660-1823

Abstract

David D. Mann and Susan Garland Mann, with Camile Gamier. Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland 1660-1823. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv + 417.This dictionary of and their plays from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries is valuable and muchneeded resource that should, as the authors hope, help to stimulate research in this area. It is an accessible compendium of information, much of it hard to find and even obscure, that will be of use both to experts and those new to the field.The authors rely on earlier scholarship, which ranges from The London Stage to An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers, edited by Paul and June Schlueter and The Feminist Companion to Literature in English, compiled by Virginia Blain, Isobel Grundy, and Patricia Clements. Drawing on these and many other sources they have produced over seven hundred entries, organized primarily by playwright and play. They have attempted to be comprehensive, within the limits imposed by working in sparsely explored field of early dramatists (ix). They therefore interpret their mandate broadly. The terminal date of 1 823 is stretched to include later plays written by such authors as Joanna Bailie, whose collection Plays on the Passions was published in 1798 and two of those late plays were staged in 1836. In dealing with individual they choose to be as inclusive as possible: for example, their list of Behn's plays (379-80) contains all those attributed to her, including The Woman Turn 'd Bully (1875), which their entry makes clear is very doubtful ascription (365-68).The designation women playwrights is also interpreted flexibly. The authors include not only major figures of the professional theatre, such as Behn, Centlivre, Cowley, and Inchbald, but any woman to whom play can be attributed, even anonymously, and any play to which female authorship can be ascribed, whether or not it is extant, whether or not it was performed or even intended for performance. Alongside staples of the repertoire such as Cenlivre's The Wonder or Inchbald's A Mogul Tale, there are entries for The Cry, Sarah Fielding's and Jane Collier's 'novel done in dramatic form' (97) and The Disguise, 'dramatic novel' by a woman unknown (112).This breadth indicates that the authors are not solely concerned with drama as an aspect of the theatre, although this component is not neglected; for example, number of their entries concern actresses, such as Susanna Cibber and Catherine Clive, who wrote or adapted plays for their benefits. Their comprehensiveness increases their potential audience, which they describe in their preface as being made up of students of the Restoration, the Eighteenth Century, and the Romantic Era; theatre historians; feminist scholars; researchers of drama; theatre directors; analyzers of popular culture; as well as general readers (ix).Their entries provide this wide audience (ix) with an accessible and reliable collection of up-to-date information about and their plays. …