19 Hannah Cowley.Pdf

J{annah Cowley (1743-1809) Hannah Cowley was born on 14 March 1743 in Tiverton, Devonshire, but little is known of her early life except that her father was the classical scholar and bookseller Philip Parkhouse. At about the age of twenty-five, when she married Thomas Cowley, she moved with him to London, where he was a Stamp Office clerk, newspaper writer, and editor of the Gazetteer. Accord ing to one of her contemporaries, "The lady herself paid no great deference to the opinion of her husband. Indeed, she was a being of a superior cast; and, though they passed their time happily enough together, thanks to her discreet and compliant spirit, there did not seem to be any thing congenial in their dispositions. She was lively, open, and engaging; he was sententious, close, and repulsive." 1 The couple had four children, the eldest of whom died early; in 1783 Thomas Cowley left for India with the East India Company, never to return to England. From that time forward, Hannah Cowley lived essentially as a single mother, writing to supplement her family's income. Cowley's writing career began with a chance remark. While attending a play, she observed, "Why I could write as well myself." Her husband laughed. In reply, the next morning she began composing the first act of a comedy. A couple of weeks later she sent a draft of The Runaway to David Garrick, who was encouraging and suggested revisions. On 15 February 1776 he opened the play at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and it had a successful run of seventeen performances. One of the villains is the learned Lady Dinah, but the play also features Bella, a witty and independent heroine whose type would become a staple in Cowley's dramas. The Critical Review marveled at the "untutored genius" of the work, which was extraordinarily successful and established Cowley's reputation as a dramatist. The play was frequently revived. According to an early biographer, "She was accustomed to say that [in r. Antijacobin Review 46 (February 1814): 135. Hannah Cowley 205 composing her works] she always succeeded best when she did not herself know what she was going to do, and suffered the events, and even the plot, to grow under her pen. It is this that has so often given an air of real nature to her works." 2 Cowley's next produced play, Who's the Dupe?, a farce targeting pedantry and vulgarity, premiered on IO April r779. In her prologue to the r8r3 edition she explained that just as learned male authors have satirized female faults and ridiculed their "whims and vanity," so, as a woman, she felt called upon to subject to their due share of laughter learned men "whose sarcastic pen" has spared neither "Matron Maid or Bride." Her witty heroine cleverly foils her father's plans to marry her to an Oxford pedant by outfox ing both the father and the pedant; in the end she marries the man she loves, while her father never understands that he has been duped. This play was to become one of Cowley's most popular, with a total of 126 performances recorded in r779 and r780 alone. George Colman the elder produced Cowley's tragedy in blank verse, Albina, which opened at the Haymarket on 31 July 1779; but despite its spec tacular mad scenes, it was not as enthusiastically received as her previous plays and closed after a nine-day run. When she saw Hannah More's The Fatal Falsehood, Cowley publicly accused More of having plagiarized the plot from her Albina. The disagreement was so unpleasant that More never staged another play; and it was nine years before Cowley hazarded another pro duction, a tragedy, The Fate ef Sparta, with Sarah Siddons playing the female lead, Chelonice, a woman torn between her husband and her father. Arthur Murphy, writing in the Monthly Review, contended that "the general charac ter of Mrs. Cowley's style may be given in her own language: 'Words, whose sounds vibrate on the ear,/ But cannot raise ideas in the mind.'" 3 The English Review damned it even more harshly, but it had a good run.4 The Belle's Strategem, a comedy of manners centering on courtship and marriage in which the heroine cleverly demonstrates that an English woman can be as appealing to a fashionable man of the world as a Continental woman, opened on 22 February 1780 and was eventually to become one of Covent Garden's standard repertory pieces. It played for 28 nights in its first season and had been acted on the London stage n8 times by 1800. In 1782 the Critical Review called The Belle's Stratagem the "best dramatic production of a female pen ... since the days of Centilivre, to whom Mrs. Cowley is at least equal in fable and character, and far superior in easy dialogue and purity 2. Quoted in ibid., 137, from the memoir to The Works of Mrs. Cowley, Dramas and Poems, 3 vols. (London, 1813). 3. 78 (May 1788): 404-5. 4. II (1788): 250-53. 206 Hannah Cowley of diction." 5 But her next three productions were failures and survive only in manuscript. Cowley's comedy of manners Which is the Man?, set in London, opened on 9 February 1782 and was more successful. One of the play's characters is Lady Bell Bloomer, who "is mistress of her whole situation, and cannot be surprised." By this time Cowley had established the nature of her unconven tional heroines, who are generally the leading characters. Her plays stress the importance of women's minds and the need to treat women as responsible human beings.' Cowley's typical heroines tend to be spirited, witty, and re sourceful women capable of outfoxing men and foiling their designs. They have respect for their own integrity as well as inner strength, which helps them to resist victimization at the hands of fathers or husbands; frequently they help each other. In 1780 Cowley published The Maid ef Arragon, a long poem in blank verse whose action takes place in Spain during the occupation by the Moors. Cowley dedicated the poem, whose subject is filial affection, to her father. Although Cowley intended to extend the poem to two books, she completed and published only one. Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife suggested the title of Cowley's next play, A Bold Stroke for a Husband, produced on 25 February 1783, but the two plays bear few other resemblances. Departing from the typical formula for English comedy of romantic intrigue, she made women rather than men the main intriguers. With resourcefulness and, of course, bold strokes, the two heroines, one involved in a serious plot and another in a comic plot, rescue themselves from the unhappy situations the men close to them have created. The play ran successfully for eighteen nights and was revived during the next three seasons. More Ways Than One, a poetic comedy, opened at Covent Garden on 6 December 1783, dedicated to Cowley's husband, who had left England that year for India. The two heroines, Arabella and Miss Archer, together foil the plot of Arabella's guardian and the old man he has chosen to be her husband; both men treat Arabella as merely a piece of property at the center of their financial negotiations, but Arabella ends up with the man she loves. The play received mixed reviews, though it played for eighteen performances. A Schoo/for Greybeards (produced on 25November1786), inspired by Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance (1686), continues the satire of old men who covet beautiful young women who do not love them and condemns arranged mar riages without love. The opening-night audience found the play indecent, 5. 53 (1782): 314. Hannah Cowley 207 and it ran for only nine performances. In her preface to the printed ver sion, Cowley notes ruefully that a woman playwright can portray vulgar characters, but only if they speak with politeness and elegance. In 1786 Cowley published The Scottish Village, or Pitcairne Green, a long narrative poetic romance that portrays the vices and virtues of civilized life through the eyes of a philosopher. But her greatest poetic notoriety would come the following year, when she replied to a poem she had read in the World for 29 June 1787 entitled ''Adieu and Recall to Love," signed "Della Crusca," pseudonym of Robert Merry. "I read the beautiful lines and with out rising from the table at which I was sitting answered them;' recalled Cowley, whose reply, "The Pen," published two weeks later in the World, was signed ''Anna Matilda." 6 Thus began a two-year poetic correspondence, attracting widespread public attention, in which the principals, though ex pressing ardent enthusiasm for each other in print, were kept ignorant of each other's identities by the editors of the World. Eventually John Bell pub lished Cowley's contributions in The Poetry of Anna Matilda (1788), and some selections were printed in The Poetry of the World (1788) and The British Album (1790). Finally, on 31 March 1789, the platonic "lovers" met and found each other disappointing. By the next day Cowley's identity was public knowl edge. Merry said farewell to her in "The Interview," published on 16 June, and three days later Cowley returned the favor in "To Della Crusca, who said, 'When I am dead, write my Elegy;" a poem that imagines his death. Although William Gifford in The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795) ridi culed what became known as the "Della Cruscan" style of poetry practiced in this correspondence by Merry and Cowley, it was widely imitated.

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