"Sometimes silly and sometimes mad": Powerful women in the English theatre, 1670-1707.

The characterization of women in the English theatre during the late seventeenth century shows female rebellion against a male-dominated society. In the drama, female characters attempt to determine their own identity and achieve sexual autonomy. In reality, actresses often assumed power with their roles on stage, and learned to manage power in their own lives. Actresses established the profitable benefit nights for individual performers. Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle gained managerial authority and helped decide who was hired and what plays were performed at Lincoln's Inns Fields in the 1690s. Female playwrights proved themselves in the male literary world, ostensibly by imitating men. Aphra Behn, Catherine Trotter, and Susanna Centlivre actually made their female characters more independent than the men did, however. Female characters achieve autonomy by manipulating language, developing supportive relationships with other women, and adopting male behavior. Yet many plays conclude with the independent female character losing her power to legal restrictions, social pressure and , in tragedy, to madness. In comedy, women's rebellions are not always repressed; they show the audience potentially viable ways for women to become independent. In tragedy, however, the punishment for female revolt is severe. Insanity represents the ultimate curtailment of a woman's identity in the plays: madness destroys even her conventional roles as wife, mother, or daughter. Some of the tragedies make the female characters sympathetic, however, and encourage the audience to question women's traditionally oppressed status in society. Jeremy Collier's reactionary attack in A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaneness of the English Stage (1698) was, in part, a backlash against women's increasing importance and independence in the theatre. Playwrights and critics responded to Collier by arguing for continued portrayals of powerful women, but Collier's continued charges of immorality on the stage resulted in a gradual retreat from the problem of women's autonomy. Playwrights began to ignore women's need for self-determination or, like George Farquhar in The Beaux Stratagem (1707), resolved their problems fatuously, minimizing the problem by offering an impossible solution. The powerful women in the English theatre of the late seventeenth century began an exploration of women's independence that remains important today.PhDBritish and Irish literatureTheaterUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/162392/1/9001746.pd