The Aesthetics ofthe Marketplace Women Playwrights …市场女性剧作家的美学.pdfVIP

The Aesthetics of the Marketplace: Women Playwrights, 1770-1850 Katherine Newey From the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century some 520 women writers produced around 1,200 plays for the theatre in all its forms. Surprisingly, given the way that feminist and cultural studies have been so active and invigorating in the last twenty years in recuperating lost or forgotten texts, there is little work done in this field. Most, if not all, of these writers and their plays are now unheard of, as indeed is much of the entire dramatic and stage literature of the nineteenth century. And this obscurity is part of the significance in the histories of women playwrights. Not only were they women, who were not supposed to write-or if they did, they were not supposed to take it seriously, if we remember Southeys advice to Charlotte Bronte: Literature is not the business of a womans life, and it cannot be. 1 But the theatre of the nineteenth century is also generally seen as a lost era-canonical literary opinion suggests that there is nothing of note in the English language produced for the stage for the century between Sheridan and Shaw. I am interested in how women writers fared in this convergence of silences in our literary and cultural history. How did they survive in a field of writing which was not usually considered by their contemporaries to be literature, and certainly is not today, in which success was usually very crudely measured by box office receipts and audience applause? How did they operate as professionals in a business which was public, collaborative, gossipy, and club-like, when women were constrained by views of feminine behaviour which required them to be private, domestic, pure of mind and behaviour, and dependent, with very real difficulties if they contravened these cod