Reviews for Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists

The average rating for Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-11-05 00:00:00 Tina Garrity This year my Old & New Challenge at GR group Catching Up on the Classics includes the four plays here in Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists edited by Melinda Finberg. In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes the wrongs that Shakespeake's imagined actor sister would have endured. I wondered when things changed. I knew women acted on stage in Restoration Period. I knew their experience well enough not not to be curious. But what about women writing for the theater? What were their writing and production experiences like? What were the stages they wrote for like? (I knew our stage to be a recent development.) What did they did women write? Has any of it store the test of time? Yes. Some were acted in major forums into the 19th century. All of these questions are answered in the book in a way anyone who has taken a required theater class or participated in local theater can understand. A general understanding of women's status in society and nature of marriage and how these things were changing in the 18th century will help. In this book are included • The Innocent Mistress by Mary Pix • The Busie Body by Susanna Centlivre • The Times by Elizabeth Griffith • The Belle's Strategem Hannah Cowley With in the growing interests in women's studies, these plays are becoming available to non-academics again, most often through online forums. While reading these plays, I enjoyed the humor. And I hope in time to enjoy some more plays by these and other women dramatists.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-04-15 00:00:00 Luis Aguirre The Innocent Mistress by Mary Pix is one of the plays we have to read for my English Lit module this term. Pix is an eighteenth century dramatist, and was selected because she is a woman. Seriously. The department though they should show us what women from that century were capable of (as far as playwrights go), and they chose her. I wish they hadn't. My God, she's a bore. Here are my shortcomings: I don't like plays that name characters with similar-sounding names, I don't like plays that are unclear about their purpose. She does both. I found myself flicking back to the characters page constantly, trying to figure out who she was talking about. I know that's my own short attention span, but come on. There are plenty of plays and novels that I follow without issue. The play is about a several love affairs in characters who are almost all aristocrats. The characters you are meant to sympathize with (Sir Charles and Bellinda) just come off as silly and somewhat mindless, and the "light relief comedy" characters irritate more than necessary. As much as I love theatre ' and I love it, a lot ' I have found that, for the most part, despite hopelessly wishing I were different: I can't visualize plays very well. Sometimes I can, when they're written brilliantly and once in a blue moon I'll read a play that'll make want to put on a production. But for the most part, I'm happy enough being tucked into a cushioned velvet seat waiting for the curtains to be drawn. This module has consisted entirely of plays (and we still have a few to go). I wish we could've had a student production of each of them ' it would've made learning this module much more enjoyable. As it stands, though, while I appreciate what we're being fed, I grumble at having to eat it. Bad metaphor, true sentiment.