Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage

Aphra Behn, Susannah Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald were the only four women in England who enjoyed career-long success as comicplaywrights from 1670-1800. Their respective approaches to the body, contracts, nationalism, and divorce animate their comedies and provide comic comment on the marriage plot. By attending to the dialogue between humorous comic events and the more predictable comic endings of these plays, Anderson illuminates the philosophical, political, and legal arguments about women and marriage that fascinated both female playwrights and the theatergoing public.