Overview

Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century-a period when for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the social fabric by marrying similarly lighthearted gentlemen, but the heroines of tragedy suffered for their sins, real or perceived. That suffering served the dual purpose of titillating and educating the theater audience. Marsden discusses such plays as William Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife (1697), Thomas Otway's Orphan (1680), Thomas Southerne's Fatal Marriage (1694), and William Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The author also addresses tragedies written by three female playwrights, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley, and sketches developments in tragedy during the period.

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9780801444470

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Reviews

This book provides an accessible and useful introduction to a body of dramatic texts often overlooked by modern criticism. -Alice Eardley, H-Women, H-Net Reviews, January 2007

Women acting, women writing, women watching Jean I. Marsden's book is a wonderful guide to the presence of women everywhere in the theater after 1660. From heroines to the stars who played them, from the playwrights to the political implications of production, Marsden's analysis is always fresh, assured and engaging, making us think anew about the place of women in theater then and now. Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame

Author Information

Jean I. Marsden is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut; author of The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory; and editor of The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth.

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