Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage
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- ISBN 9781644534380
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 156 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 13 Oct 2026
- Publisher: University of Delaware Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage explores the overlooked, gendered challenge posed by heroines and villainesses in comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies through who displayed their wit through repartee, plotting, and disguise, combining verbal skill with physical action to produce a feminized perspective. The chapters showcase the portrayal of women's wit in the works of Frances Boothby, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Polwhele, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, Delarivier Manley, and Susanna Centlivre, in which female characters criticize authority and address female spectators in the theater, including them as part of an emerging critical discourse on the public stage. As the first-ever scholarly monograph about women's wit in drama before the twentieth century, this book draws attention to the cultural and social role that wit played in the public sphere as a mode of critique, empowerment, and play for women both on and offstage.
Beth Rebecca Cortese is an Associate Professor in English Literature at the University of Iceland, focusing on the Restoration and eighteenth century. She has been published in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research journal, Law and Literature, and in the Nordic Journal of Renaissance Studies, and is preparing a new edition of William Wycherley's The Country Wife.
