ABSTRACT
The British drama produced between 1737 and 1832 has undergone a considerable critical revival in Great Britain and throughout the English-speaking world. A number of distinguished critics have expressly recognized the roles women played in this age of dramatic experimentation, their centrality in professionalizing relations among authors, actors and managers, and their position as technical innovators, bringing about revolutions in acting theory and staging techniques. For Marshall, Wallace, Carstairs, Dods and Wright, as for many other women writing between the passing of the Licensing Act and the Dramatic Literature Act, the stage became a space for conveying underlying political ideas and a new historical consciousness, in which the conflict between ‘public’ ethics and the ambiguous and contradictory ‘domestic ideology’ plays a fundamental part. Frances Wright is somewhat exceptional within the panorama of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Scottish women playwrights.
