Mary Pix
Mary Pix was a notable playwright in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, recognized for her contributions to the theatrical landscape of London. Over her brief career, she produced thirteen plays, demonstrating a strong ability to craft both comedies and tragedies. Pix was one of only three women whose works were staged in London during this period, and she gained prominence partly due to the support of the well-known playwright William Congreve, who defended her against allegations of plagiarism. Born around 1666, she was the daughter of a clergyman and likely received a solid education at home, which is reflected in her sharp characterizations and authentic female portrayals in her plays.
Among her most celebrated works is "Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks," which was well-received and revived multiple times, as well as the farce "The Spanish Wives," noted for its memorable comic characters. While her later tragedies did not achieve the same acclaim, her earlier successes reveal her talent and the impact she had in a male-dominated field. Pix's legacy is significant in the context of female playwrights of her time, marking her as an important figure in the evolution of English drama.
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Mary Pix
Writer
- Born: c. 1666
- Birthplace: Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, England
- Died: 1709
Biography
In a lifetime that spanned just forty-three years, Mary Pix, against all odds given the gender discrimination of the time in which she lived, became a quite well-recognized playwright. She is known to have produced thirteen plays, six of them comedies, seven tragedies. She was one of three women who had their plays produced in London during the last half of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. She fared better than the other two, Delariviere Manley and Catharine Trotter, probably because the celebrated playwright William Congreve became her mentor and defended her publicly when another playwright, George Powell, plagiarized her work.
Public documents indicate that in 1684, Mary Griffith, with the consent of her widowed mother, Lucy Griffith, married George Pix, a London tailor. This places Pix’s birth date around 1666. Apparently her father, Roger Griffith, was a clergyman. Pix’s writing suggests that she was quite well educated, presumably being taught at home by her parents. She was keenly observant and created sharp and authentic characterizations in her plays, showing a special aptitude for creating believable female characters. She did not produce sparkling dialogue, but her plot construction was strong and her plays pleased contemporary audiences. Her writing was not met with the scorn sometimes heaped upon female writers.
An admirer of the dramatic writing of Aphra Behn, Pix often used Behn as a model in writing her own plays. In 1696, at age thirty, Pix published a novel, The Inhumane Cardinal: Or, Innocence Betrayed, and brought two plays to the London stage, a comedy and a tragedy. The latter, Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks, is generally considered her most polished and most popular play. It was performed at Drury Lane in May or June,1696, and must have been well received because revivals of it were mounted in 1702, 1714, and 1715.
In August, 1696, Pix’s farce, The Spanish Wives, played in the Dorset Garden Theatre and was sufficiently popular that revivals of it were staged in 1705, 1711, and as late as 1726. This play, an adaptation of Gabriel de Bremond’s novel, The Pilgrim (1680), is notable for two of its comic characters, a street merchant who sells fruit and a religious friar who is quite corrupt and competes with the fruit merchant in his profitable pimping enterprise. Another Pix play, The Innocent Mistress, was presented in 1697, this time at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This play began well and sustained its conspiratorial plot almost to the end, but Pix’s resolution depends upon the facile, overused device of mistaken identity, so the play’s ending is less than convincing. Pix’s later tragedies, The Czar of Muscovy and Zelmane: Or, The Corinthian Queen, were disappointing, although The Czar of Muscovy is of historical interest because it is the only play that Pix wrote in prose rather than in the blank verse that typified her other plays.