[Gutenberg 37546] • The Female Wits

THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

THE FEMALE WITS

(Anonymous)

(1704)

Introduction by

LUCYLE HOOK

GENERAL EDITORS

George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles

Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles

Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles

Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

ADVISORY EDITORS

Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan

James L. Clifford, Columbia University

Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles

Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles

Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

James Sutherland, University College, London

H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

THE PREFACE.

THE PROLOGUE.

THE EPILOGUE.

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ.

ACT 1.

ACT 2.

ACT 3.

INTRODUCTION

The Female Wits; Or, The Triumvirate of Poets at Rehearsal, published anonymously in 1704 with “written by Mr. W. M.” on the titlepage, was played at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane around October, 1696. [1] A devastating satire in the manner of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal, it attacks all plays by women playwrights but Mary de la Riviere Manley’s blood and thunder female tragedy, The Royal Mischief (1696), in particular. The Female Wits resembles The Rehearsal in that the satire is directed not only at the subject matter and style of a particular type of drama but supplies searing portrayals of recognizable persons--in this case, of Mrs. Manley herself, and to a lesser degree, of Mary Pix and Catherine Trotter (later Cockburn). It also follows Buckingham’s satire in that the actors play double roles--that of the characters assigned to them and their own--and in so doing, reveal their own personalities with astonishing clarity.

Colley Cibber tells the best stories of the chaos that ensued after the secession of Betterton and most of the veteran actors in 1695 from the dominance of Christopher Rich at Drury Lane. [2] Since Betterton had been virtual dictator in London since 1682, he was able to command the efforts, at least at first, of most of the well-known playwrights who had written for the company before the establishment of his theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Young playwrights scrambled to ingratiate themselves with one or the other of the two London managements. Among them, there had been three women with four plays in less than a year.

When Mrs. Manley arrived upon the dramatic scene with her first play, The Lost Lover; Or, The Jealous Husband, in March, 1696, she bore the brunt of a growing criticism against a surfeit of female plays. But when she protested in the preface of the printed version that “I think my Treatment much severer than I deserv’d; I am satisfied the bare Name of being a Woman’s Play damn’d it beyond its own want of Merit,” she took upon herself the combined animus of the masculine critics. In the same preface, she challenged them boldly with “Once more, my Offended Judges, I am to appear before you, once more in possibility of giving you the like Damning Satisfaction; there is a Tragedy of mine Rehearsing, which ‘tis too late to recall, I consent it meet with the same Fortune.