Introduction to the Ambitious Step-Mother, Tamerlane, and the Fair Penitent

When Nicholas Rowe became a playwright at the very beginning of the eighteenth century, London playhouses were under significant cultural and financial pressure. Calls for reform of the stage, led by the nonjuring clergyman Jeremy Collier, formed part of the broader movement for the ‘reformation of manners’ that gained momentum through the final years of William’s reign and the first years of Queen Anne’s. ¹ The movement used practical action as well as the publication of tracts and pamphlets to achieve its ends: actors were arrested for uttering indecencies and blasphemous oaths on stage, prosecutions based on the evidence of informers who infiltrated the playhouses. ² Government interference in the business of theatre – for instance, proscribing the use of masks by women in the audience – cannot have helped the playhouses’ already precarious financial position. ³ Competition for audience share had recently led both Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Drury Lane to invest heavily in expensive theatrical entertainments. ⁴ The experiment was not a success and by the spring of 1701, just after the first performance of The Ambitious Step-mother, Lincoln’s Inn Fields ‘reached its lowest point’ and seemed on the brink of dissolution. ⁵