ABSTRACT
Following the remarkable success of her first comedy, Runaway, Cowley immediately began to experiment with a number of dramatic genres, one of which was the venerated high art form of tragedy. 3 She was writing in a genre which would give her the higher status in her profession that had been denied to her as a woman writer of commercially popular plays. 4 Despite having achieved success with Runaway, for instance, she disguised her name and sex when she had her new play presented to Thomas Harris at Covent Garden ‘by a Lady of Rank’, a friend of Lady Harrowby, the wife of her patron. 5 Cowley wrote her Gothic drama Albina in 1777, and although tragedy was relatively unmarketable at the time, two years later it was performed at the Haymarket Theatre. 6 Reviews were mixed: the critic ‘Hospes’ in the Morning Chronicle wrote five hostile reviews, branding the villainous Editha a ‘bedlamite’ and the whole a burlesque on tragedy, to which ‘LS’ responded by callingit a ‘beautiful and highly poetic tragedy’. 7 One review suggested that Dr Johnson (‘a person of no less rank in the literary world than Doctor —’) was at a performance and spoke out loudly from the stage box that he thought the tragedy ‘beyond all comparison, the best that any living author has produced’. 8 A review in the London Evening Post noted the versatility of Cowley, ‘who has now reached a degree of excellence in the three stages of dramatic writing, tragedy, comedy and farce’. 9
