Hannah Cowley

English playwright and poet

• Born: March 4, 1743
• Birthplace: Tiverton, Devonshire, England
• Died: March 11, 1809
• Place of death: Tiverton, Devonshire, England

Cowley excelled in writing farce, comedy of manners, and tragedy. In addition to being a poet, she was a key figure in the transition of the London stage from the neoclassic to the Romantic period.

Early Life

Little is known about Hannah Cowley’s early life. Her father, Philip Parkhouse, was a bookseller and student of the classics, whose literary interests and extensive family library provided Hannah with an independent education rare for girls and women of the time.

In 1772 she married Thomas Cowley, several years her junior and a newspaper writer and clerk in the Stamp Office. Soon after marriage, the couple moved to London, where Cowley lived until her retirement from the London stage. It seems the couple lived happily, and they had three, and possibly four, children. However, they evidently suffered financially, as Thomas’s annual salary of œ50 from the Stamp Office and another œ50 from hack writing hardly sufficed.

Three years into the marriage, Cowley determined to supplement the family income. In the preface to her posthumous The Works of Hannah Cowley (1813), Cowley audaciously boasted to her husband, during one tedious evening at the theater, that she could write a better play than the one they had just watched. Encouraged by Thomas, a theater critic, she did just that, producing three weeks later The Runaway (1776) and thereby increasing the family’s income.

Life’s Work

Hannah Cowley’s theatrical career was a long one, 1776 to 1801, and included fifteen plays, but her reputation has been based primarily on five plays: The Runaway (1776), Albina (1776), Who’s the Dupe? (1779), The Belle’s Stratagem (1780), and A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783). These plays represent a broad range of Cowley’s art and include first-rate farce, comedy of manners, and tragedy.

Probably no one was more surprised than Cowley when the great theater manager and actorDavid Garrick responded to a draft of The Runaway with encouragement. The play premiered on February 15, 1776, and had a very respectable run of seventeen performances and three benefits. Cowley earned a surprising œ500 from the play, which was the only new play produced by Garrick in his final season. It featured Sarah Siddons in her first role.

The runaway of the play is a young woman of position fleeing a tyrannical father and the man, George, he chose for her to marry. By wonderful comic chance, she is the same young beauty with whom young George was smitten upon seeing her once before at a masquerade. George, too, is the victim of a tyrannical father planning to wed him to a much older woman, Lady Diana. Three parallel plots follow, involving pairs of lovers who overcome objections from their parents and prove they are socially and economically worthy of each other. The star of the play for a twenty-first century audience would be, no doubt, Bella, the delightful, worldly cousin who facilitates the various romantic relationships. Cowley’s first play shows her skill, developed early in her career, in working comic contrivances and delightful coincidences to significant artistic effect.

Despite her success in 1776, a new theater manager, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, had less enthusiasm for playwrights who were women and refused to restage The Runaway in 1777. He further delayed staging Cowley’s second play, Albina, a tragedy.

The eighteenth century was a great age for tragedy despite its lack of appreciation by twentieth century modernist critics. Cowley’s tragedy Albina was one of the best of her time. It naturally follows the basic neoclassic norm for regularity and unity, ensuring the rewarding of goodness and the thwarting of evil. What the original audience perceived from the tragedy and what postmodern audiences perceive, however, are quite different.

Albina, a young widow devoted to the memory of her husband killed in battle, is persuaded by her father to accept a profitable proposal from the rich, handsome young hero of the wars, Westmoreland. She does not need much convincing. What makes the play appealing especially to twenty-first century audiences, however, is the secondary plot. Editha, a young woman of equal rank to Albina, has lost her fortune in the war. Albina has undertaken to be Editha’s protector, but her unmotivated goodness and her unmerited fortune understandably smother Editha. Desperate, Editha, along with Egbert, another victim of Albina’s virtue, plots her means for justice. Cowley’s contemporary audience would have called Editha’s plot revenge. The play ends with a plot twist worthy of Hollywood. Editha and Egbert perish whereas Westmoreland and Albina live happily ever after, but a later audience would consider with horror that Albina’s innocent oppression of Editha was an oppression forced by the flawed social norms of the day. The blank verse is competent and majestic, and, while not necessarily intentional, it ennobles the plight of those oppressed by social propriety. Albina surely ranks as one of the great tragedies of the century alongside such earlier plays as James Thomson’s Tancred and Sigismunda (pr. 1745) and Edward Young’s The Brothers (wr. 1724, pr. 1753).

Cowley’s next play was delayed by Sheridan so that she could not profit from it, but ultimately it became one of her most popular, being performed 126 times between 1779 and 1800. With Who’s the Dupe? Cowley showed that she had learned much from the master of English farce, Garrick, for the play surely rivals such Garrick farces as The Lying Valet (pr. 1741) and Miss in Her Teens (pr. 1747). Farce works by denying its intellectual significance through dehumanizing all characters into mere mechanical props for producing laughter, and Who’s the Dupe? meets these expectations perfectly. Once again, Cowley develops a strong female character, Elizabeth, who is being forced to marry the pedantic Gradus by a father desperate for a son-in-law who is highly learned, unlike him. Of course, Elizabeth manipulates matters so that her true love, Granger, earns the father’s approval. The best scene in the play occurs as Granger fools the father by displaying his impressive but utterly bogus learning while outwitting Gradus.

The Belle’s Stratagem proved to be Cowley’s most popular comedy, and it is often rated as her best play. Indeed, along with A Bold Stroke for a Husband, The Belle’s Stratagem should have secured Cowley’s reputation along with the other great playwrights of the age—George Colman Senior, Oliver Goldsmith, and Sheridan. The fortunes of gender, though, precluded scholars in the past from seriously considering the works of eighteenth century women playwrights.

The belle in this comedy is Letitia Hardy, betrothed to the honorable Doricourt since childhood, though she has not seen him in years. When he returns from abroad ready to perform his honorable duties with his betrothed, he finds that Letitia is, however, dull and unexciting. She is in fact a lively young girl who is testing him by developing a stratagem for capturing his love. The stratagem carries the plot and the laughter as Doricourt is smitten deeply by an exciting beauty who turns out to be the erstwhile insipid Letitia herself. A delightful subplot keeps the comedy lively throughout.

After the success of The Belle’s Stratagem, Cowley experienced a series of failures, one play actually being hissed off the stage during a performance. By 1783, however, she was regaining her reputation as one of the top comic playwrights of the day with the production of A Bold Stroke for a Husband. The bold stroke consists of bold strokes by two of Cowley’s best scheming comic heroines. The traps each sets for her respective lover are not original, but Cowley’s sense for comic timing and ingenuity makes them effective. Victoria’s philandering husband has pursued an affair with Laura in which he condemned his family to financial ruin by deeding to Laura his property, and thus his fortune. Victoria determines to make him fall in love with her again and reclaim the property from Laura. Earlier critics often condemned such plot schemes as sentimental. At the same time, Olivia is being forced by her father to choose among various suitors, none of whom is the one she truly loves. Her stratagem consists of imitating the character of Kate in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (1594) and driving her suitors away while gaining her father’s approval for her own true love. Thus the play provides two strong women, comic characters who dominate the men for their own purposes.

Significance

While Hannah Cowley often professed disinterest toward the theater, she was closely connected with theater business and theater affairs throughout her long career. Among other things, she carried on a lengthy rivalry with fellow playwright Hannah More, accusing More of plagiarism on at least two occasions.

While her work at one time was dismissed along with much of the rest of eighteenth century drama as being sentimental, a postmodern sensibility provides for a reevaluation of one of the most significant and popular playwrights of the eighteenth century. Later centuries have responded to Cowley’s plays not in ways she or her audience intended but by looking for what she could not intend. While she would never be considered a revolutionary feminist, she created strong women characters forced to work within the unjust status quo to survive. Cowley’s dramatic art, then, lives on, and it is not merely a series of artifacts from a bygone era.

Bibliography

Anderson, Misty G. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Anderson examines the marriage conventions depicted in the comedies of female playwrights.

Bolton, Betsy. Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in Britain, 1780-1800. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Bolton explores the political themes in Romantic theater of the last twenty years of the eighteenth century.

De la Mahotière, Mary. Hannah Cowley: Tiverton’s Playwright and Pioneer Feminist, 1743-1809. Tiverton, England: Devon Books, 1997. A brief account of Cowley’s life and work in the light of her early, implicit, feminism.

Donkin, Ellen. Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829. New York: Routledge, 1995. Donkin examines the proliferation of women playwrights in London between 1776 and 1829.

Feldman, Paula R., ed. British Women Poets of the Romantic Era: An Anthology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. In addition to her plays, Cowley wrote poetry. This anthology includes some of her poems.

Folger Collective on Early Women Critics, ed. Women Critics, 1660-1820: An Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. A comprehensive collection that includes discussion of Cowley’s writings and the work of her contemporaries.

Link, Frederick M., ed. The Plays of Hannah Cowley. 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1979. A collection of reprints of Cowley’s complete plays.