ABSTRACT
About the turn of the nineteenth century, Garrick's ethos of gallantry toward women playwrights began to break down. Frances Plowden's opera (yet another Virginia), which played for only one night at Drury Lane in 1801, was hissed off the stage by an unruly audience. It was later revealed that there had been a cabal organized by Michael Kelly, a singer and composer of operas at Drury Lane, whose “opposition to the claims of all musical candidates for fame at Drury Lane except his own” was well known. 1 There had been no organized public demonstration against a woman playwright since Richard Cumberland's attack on Charlotte Lennox's The Sister in 1769. The Kelly incident sparked an indignant pamphlet in Plowden's defense, but there were no serious repercussions for Kelly Garrick's injunction to the public in 1777 to “protect” rather than “hurt” women playwrights had lost its potency, at least among members of the theatre profession. The Plowden incident was closely followed by another in 1802, in which Mary Berry's play, Fashionable Friends, was summarily hissed off the Drury Lane stage for “loose principles.” 2 Change was in the air.
