This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Women shows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.

This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to please diverse audiences, who were notoriously fickle as well as predisposed to oppose them. Accessible to both graduates and undergraduates, Popular Plays by Women shows how these playwrights captured audiences through wit, social awareness, and dramatic dexterity. As well as including the prologues and epilogues of the four plays presented, this anthology provides additional materials in which female playwrights discuss the prejudices and special difficulties they face.

This extraordinary edition includes seven full-length plays from the era, including an unproduced play by Frances Burney, unavailable for centuries. Women playwrights of the Restoration and eighteenth century were bawdy and proper, apologetic and defiant, often derided and occasionally praised. The seven women represented in this groundbreaking anthology—the only collection of Restoration and eighteenth-century plays devoted exclusively to women—had but one thing in common: the desire to ignore convention and write for the stage. In 1660, when theatres in England reopened after years of Puritan repression, women trod the boards as actors for the very first time. By the end of the century they had stormed and breached another bastion of the male domain and become dramatists as well. Most available collections of plays from the period exclude them; traditional criticism overlooks or diminishes them. But their works, as seen here, hold their own against the most popular productions for the theater from 1678 to 1787, and do it with a distinctively female spirit. Each of these women—Aphra Behn, Frances Burney, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, Elizabeth Inchbald, Mary Griffith Pix, and Mercy Otis Warren—legitimized the profession of playwright for their sex. They were the genre's prolific women pioneers whose body of work has remained unmatched until the twentieth century.

The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, Concise Edition, with twenty-one plays, is half the length of the full anthology without compromising its breadth. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it focuses on Restoration drama proper and Revolution drama, with a selection from the early Georgian period and the later Georgian period's "laughing comedy." Seven of the nine sub-genres (personal tragedy, tragicomic romance, social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, menippean satire, and laughing comedy) of the full anthology are represented, with the preponderance of exposure given to the jewel of this theatre, its comedy. Each play is fully annotated and prefaced with an historical introduction. Also included are a general introduction, a statement of procedures, and a glossary.

These four plays, written by women dramatists during the Restoration, are now available in a single edition. This volume includes Mary Pix's The Innocent Mistress, Susanna Centlivre's The Busy-Body, Elizabeth Griffith's The Times, and Hannah Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem; thereby introducing readers to some of the earliest published women dramatists. The text is freshly edited using modern spelling. The critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation, and informative bibliography illuminate the plays' cultural context and theatrical potential for reader and performer alike.

Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald were the only four female playwrights in England with multiple comic successes from 1670-1800. Behn's interest in the body, Centlivre's fascination with written contracts, Cowley's nationalism, and Inchbald's discussion of divorce emerge in the comic events that are animated by the psychological mechanisms of humor. Attending to the dialogue between these comic events and the plays' more predictable comic endings illuminates the philosophical, political, and legal arguments about women and marriage that fascinated both female playwrights and the theatergoing public.