Hannah Cowley achieved particular public success as a comic dramatist in the final quarter of the eighteenth century. (1) The London Stage records that of the five new mainpieces most frequently performed in this period, Cowley's The Belle's Stratagem (1780) was the fourth. (2) She is the only woman writer whose work features in the list of the twelve most frequently performed mainpieces at that time. According to Judith Stanton's statistics, Cowley follows Behn and Centlivre in the list of the most popular plays by women staged. (3) Although achieving her reputation with comedy, Cowley experimented with a wide range of dramatic genres. She also published a number of long poems and conducted a romantic verse correspondence through the pages of The World with Della Cruscan poet Robert Merry. As a member of the Della Cruscan school of poetry, she had an indirect influence on the canonical Romantic poets.

Descended from John Gay, whose ballad opera The Beggar's Opera held the stage throughout the century, Cowley was born in Tiverton, Devon, where her father, bookseller Philip Parkhouse was keenly involved in local politics. He had been educated for the church, and gave his daughter a limited classical education. Hannah married Thomas Cowley who worked in the Stamp Office and who wrote theatre criticism and became editor of The Gazeteer after they moved to London. His reviews caused Hannah some problems in relationships with actors and with sister dramatist, Hannah More. (6) A writer in The Anti Jacobin Review of February 1814 noted that Cowley 'paid no great deference to the opinion of her husband'. Sources differ as to whether the couple had 3 or 4 children.

Cowley's first comedy was written, as were her subsequent works, to support her family because her husband was not earning enough. According to the Preface to her Works (1813), Cowley was convinced after an evening in the theatre that she could write a play as well as anyone and she composed her first play, The Cantabs; or the College Vacation, and sent it to David Garrick. Both her letter to Garrick and Prologue allude to her children ("Her Comic Muse—a little blue-eye'd maid, / With cheeks where innocence and health's display'd"). Playwriting was potentially more lucrative than any other form of writing for women, for income was generated both from performance and publication (although Judith Stanton notes that more plays by women were published than performed before 1800). (7) In the supplicating letters that Cowley's father wrote to Lord Harrowby, the local Member of Parliament and Lord of the Manor, asking for employment for Thomas or a pension for Hannah, he indicates that Cowley's earnings were supporting the family: "As to the fruits of her first comedy, former Engagements, Furniture and Cloaths[sic], absorb'd the whole—the Profits of the Farce and Tragedy (as brought out at Haymarket) did not clear fifty pounds—the Comedy of The Belles Stratagem is her present support." (8) In 1783 Lord Harrowby found work for Thomas as a Captain in the East India Company; he went to India never to return, thus leaving Hannah with sole responsibility for the children. Hannah wrote an affecting dedication to him in her play More Ways than One (1784):

Fly, comic scenes! where distant Ganges laves
     Hindostan's golden shores, with hallow'd waves;
     ...
     Bid him not think, because I gaily write,
     That heavy hours to him, to me, are light:

While Cowley's financial situation was probably the initial incentive for her attempts at playwriting, self effacing remarks about her lack of professional skill have to be understood in the context of eighteenth-century notions about the role and position of women within the public and domestic spheres of life. In her accompanying letter to Garrick she apologises for having "stept out of that province which is prudently assigned to my sex." (9) She writes in her Prologue to The Runaway;

Our Poet of to-night, in faith's a - Woman,
     A woman, too, untutor'd in the School,
     Nor Aristotle knows, nor scarce a rule
     By which fine writers fabricate their plays...

While denying her professionalism and removing herself as a threat to other dramatists, she subtly engages in the debate between Voltaire and Johnson with Elizabeth Montagu, a conflict opposing French drama with its adherence to its own interpretation of classical rules to the freer English drama exemplified by Shakespeare.

She spent some time in France superintending a daughter's education during 1789, the year of the start of the French Revolution, and her oriental melodrama A Day in Turkey (1792) makes references to the Revolution. Miniaturist Maria Cosway, whose husband Richard was also born in Tiverton, gave Hannah a letter of introduction to Thomas Jefferson. At the height of her success Cowley abandoned playwriting. She retired to Tiverton in 1803, where she continued to write some poetry and hold weekly salons for women, and where, after editing her plays for a publication of her complete works, she died in 1811. It is likely that the same factors that resulted in Joanna Baillie's writing of closet dramas, persuaded Cowley to end her dramatic career: increased size of the patent theatres, the vociferous audiences from a wider class spectrum, and the resulting demand for spectacle and extravagant gesture at the expense of subtle emotions conveyed through language. Cowley expressed as much in her Prologue to her final play, The Town before You (1794):

An acute Critic lately said... "A Comedy to please, in the present day, must be made, not written"...the truth of which I am equally ready to acknowledge, and to deplore: ...should it want illustration, it may be found every week in a popular Piece, where a great Actor, holding a sword in his left hand, and making awkward pushes with it, charms the audience infinitely more than he could do, by all the wit and observation which the ingenious Author might have given him; and brings down such applauses, as the bewitching dialogue of CIBBER, and of FARQUHAR pants for in vain!

Like Foote and Murphy, Cowley wrote traditional comedy of humours or of manners, with occasional sentimental characteristics. Her biting satire of society in her comedies, in her scene Lady Fashion's Rout written for Dibdin's pantomime The Touchstone; or, Harlequin Traveller (1779), and in her interlude The School of Eloquence (1780) places her in Foote's tradition, and before him the great satirical dramatists, Jonson, Wycherley, Gay and Fielding.

The comedy contains hints of future themes. Mr. Drummond, who shows compassion for the poor in a confrontation with the cynical Justice acts as the moral centre, and represents Cowley's version of civic virtue, which was to be the central theme of her tragedy The Fate of Sparta (1788), in which the good citizen or ruler possesses feminine qualities of love and philanthropy (a word employed in this speech in the first edition, along with 'virtue'):

I like to see a man romantic in Love and Friendship: he who is not an Enthusiast in those noble passions, has not a Mind of sufficient Strength - to rise hereafter into flights of Honour, Fortitude, and Patriotism. (Act IV/3)

He voices disapproval of the court life which would be the fate of George if he married Lady Dinah:

She would make him a Court Dangler - an attendant on Ministers levees - one whose ambition is to be foster'd with the Cameleon food of Smiles and Nods, and who would receive a familiar squeeze with more rapture - than the Plaudits of a Nation! - You would transform an independent English Gentleman into such a Being, and fancy you had made him - GREAT! (Act IV/3)

Thus is Lady Dinah, her pedantic interest in classical Greece and her disreputable attempts to defame Emily, associated with the 'town' values that are conventionally opposed to country values in plays with such a setting. Her equivalent in Burgoyne's The Maid of the Oaks (1774), is Lady Bab, whose debased values are contrasted to Maria, the maid of the oaks' simple but staunchly moral values.

A passage about the controversial political matter of common land, which is in the first edition of The Runaway, was not used in performance and was omitted from the 1813 edition:

Mr. Hargrave:
     I foresee how it will be as soon as I'm gone—my fences will be cut down—my meadows turned into common—my corn-fields laid open—my woods at the mercy of every man who carries an axe.… (1st edition, Act IV/3)

There are differences between the autograph manuscript, which has many alterations and additions in David Garrick's hand, and the first printed edition. (15) The edition which Cowley published as her final version of the play for her complete Works, 1813, and which is used here, is different again. Opinions vary as to whether Cowley improved on her plays. Frederick Lock is of the opinion that 'there is evidence of revision of a literary rather than theatrical kind' (Lock v). However, Catherine Burroughs' work has brought about a reassessment of closet drama, or play texts for reading. Cowley was clearly concerned for her future reputation in revising her plays for the complete edition, and she has cut any lines which may have been regarded as 'improper' or 'low' (Link xlvii). (16) It is problematical to attribute sole intellectual responsibility for a play text at this time, particularly in the case of an inexperienced woman dramatist. In addition to the theatre manager's alterations, a patron might have some input. Cowley's patron, Lord Harrowby, expected to make decisions about the artistic content of her tragedy, Albina, for example. (17) Actors, too, had a hand in the creation of the script. Crompton Rhodes notes that Mr. W. Bates, the actor who played Silvertongue in the auction scene of Cowley's most successful play, The Belle's Stratagem (1780), would have been allowed to invent his own speeches, and that the dialogue is different in the three early editions of the play. (18)

Notes

1. Tracy Davis has argued that alternative criteria should be applied to measure achievement in the case of women playwrights, particularly those working in the nineteenth century: "though it matters when women playwrights did successfully take their work into the public realm, it matters equally that many plied the craft within their homes or schools" (Tracy C. Davis, "The Sociable Playwright and the Representative Citizen", Romanticism On the Net 12 [November 1998] (15/5/2000) <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/bwpcitizen.html> n. pag.). (back)
2. Charles Beecher Hogan et al., eds., The London Stage, part 5: 1776-1800, vol. I: 1776-1783 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980) pp. clxxi-clxxii. (back)
3. This is calculated by the number of years produced. Judith Philips Stanton, "' This New-Found Path Attempting': Women Dramatists in England, 1660-1800", in Mary Anne Schofield & Cecilia Macheski, eds., Curtain Calls: British and American Women and the Theater,1660 - 1820 (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1991) p. 333; hereafter abbreviated as Stanton. (back)
4. Cowley's play The World as it Goes (1781) was condemned in a review in The Morning Herald, 26 February, 1781: "as to the language, it exceeds in gross ribaldry, the productions of the notorious Mrs Behn" (cited in Joyce East, "The Dramatic Works of Hannah Cowley", unpublished dissertation [Kansas University, 1979] pp. 121-122; hereafter abbreviated as East). (back)
5. Jane Austen, The Works of Jane Austen, Vol. VI Minor Works, ed. R.W. Chapman (London: Oxford University Press, 1954) p. 65. (back)
6. Thomas Cowley was accused of puffing his wife's play, Albina, (1779) according to a letter in The Morning Post of September 8, 1779, of bribing friends to support Albina and of insulting Hannah More. (East 62). (back)
7. Stanton 327. (back)
8. Letter to Lord Harrowby from Philip Parkhouse, December 11, 1780, Tiverton. Harrowby-Tiverton Mss III/95. (back)
9. Letter to David Garrick from Hannah Cowley, June 18, 1776. National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Forster Collection, F.48.E.20, no. 29. (back)
10. Forster, 29. (back)
11. Ellen Donkin speaks of Garrick's "literary daughters," recording that Garrick was mentor to a number of women dramatists, including Hannah More, Dorothy Celisia and Elizabeth Griffith. It is to the loss of their mentor, David Garrick, at his death in 1779 that Donkin attributes in part the public feud between Cowley and More, conducted in the pages of the press, a feud which Donkin concludes had to do with anxieties about authorship more than with plagiarism (Getting into the Act [London: Routledge, 1995] p. 75). See also Betty Rizzo for a description of the professional relationship between Elizabeth Griffith and Garrick ("'Depressa Resurgam': Elizabeth Griffith's Playwriting Career", in Schofield & Macheski pp. 120-142). (back)
12. Letter to Garrick, Forster, 29. (back)
13. Letter to Garrick, Forster, 29. (back)
14. Hannah Cowley, The plays of Hannah Cowley, ed. Frederick Link, 2 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1979) vol. I, p. x; and David D. Mann & Susan Garland Mann, with Camille Garnier, Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland 1660-1823 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996). (back)
15. According to Ellen Donkin, approximately sixty differences are to be found (Getting into the Act, p. 62). (back)
16. Catherine B. Burroughs, Closet Stages, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Frederick Lock, "Mrs Cowley's Comedies," upublished dissertation (McMaster University, 1972). (back)
17. Letter to Lord Harrowby from Hannah Cowley, May 27 1777 Corporation Row, London. Harrowby-Tiverton Mss Vol VII (General correspondence 1776-1803). (back)
18. R. Crompton Rhodes, "The Belle's Stratagem," Review of English Studies (5 April 1929): 129-142. Rhodes is of the opinion that Silvertongue would have been "allowed to patter or make up his own speeches after the manner of Christie or Langford, the auctioneers" (137). (back)
19. Hopkins Diary, cited Charles Beecher Hogan et al., eds. The London Stage, part 5, vol. I, entry for 15 February 1776, Drury Lane, The Runaway. (back)
20. Westminster Magazine February, 1776; cited The London Stage, 4. III. (back)
21. The Critical Review, 41, 1776 p. 239; cited East 23. (back)