ABSTRACT
The female playwright Marsilia’s parting curse to the playhouse and actors in the satiric rehearsal play, The Female Wits, marks a notable moment in the history of the London stage. The theatrical season of 1695-1696, the first full season after the United Company had split to form the Patent and Actors’ Companies, was a rather desperate scramble for new repertoire and audiences. Desperate times requiring desperate remedies, this season saw the performance of six new plays from four new female playwrights: Ariadne, Catharine Trotter, Mary Pix, and Delarivier Manley. Such an unusual amount of female writing was in fact little commented on by satirists at the time, but in the autumn of the 1697 season, a pseudonymous, satiric rehearsal play, The Female Wits, ‘by Mr. W.M.’, was staged at Drury Lane. With its central depiction of Marsilia, the poet, emotionally directing the actors and tyrannizing her entourage of fellow female poets and admirers, The Female Wits, has been read as straightforwardly misogynistic. For Laurie Finke, the play:
does not merely satirize women playwrights: it seeks to deny them authority to write. At the end of The Female Wits Marsilia’s voice has been effectively silenced when she angrily withdraws her play from rehearsal [… the play denies] them the authority to write, to author texts.2
