Module Information

1. Introduction: women, performance, and spectatorship theory
Staging women: sex, prostitution and immorality
2. Restoration comedy and making the private public: George Etheredge, The Man of Mode (1676)
3. Politicising women: Aphra Behn, The Feigned Courtesans (1679)
4. Women and the anti-theatrical debate: selections from Jeremy Collier, Short View of the Immorality and Profaness of the English Stage (1698)
5. Dramatising feminine power: Susanna Centlivre, The Busy Body (1709)
6. Commodification and Prostitution: Eliza Haywood, A Wife to Be Lett (1723)
Staging the nation: women and Britishness
7. Women making the national poet: selections from Thompson and Roberts (eds.) Women Reading Shakespeare 1660-1900
8. Re-writing comedy, re-writing women: Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
9. National identity and the domestic matron: Elizabeth Griffith, The Times (1779)
10. Cosmopolitan Women and feminine conduct: Hannah Cowley, The Belles Stratagem (1780)

This module will examine plays from the period 1670-1780 focusing on the representation of women on stage after the legitimization of women's public performance during the Restoration.

In the first half of the module students will explore contemporary anxieties regarding public women and the voyeuristic potential of female bodies on stage. They will consider the ways in which contemporary commentators defined women's place in society in relation to the increasing opportunities for women's public presence. By examining dramatic texts and philosophical writings concerned with women's place in society, their education, marriage and appropriate conduct, this module aims to illustrate a transition from the objectification of female bodies on stage to the de-sexualisation of women's public presences which many scholars have associated with domestication and disempowerment.

The second half of the module will move away from such assertions by reading these texts alongside contemporary interpretations of women's public roles. Students will discuss the theatrical potential of the female body, not as an object of titillation but as an icon with a propagandistic political function. They will consider the ways in which playwrights created women who represented contemporary notions of the ideal Briton. The module aims to challenge the assumption that women's dramatic roles during this period were increasingly restricted to domestic duty. Students will read these texts as contributions to broad debates concerning British national identity and they will consider the role played by women in publicising and promoting nationalism.