Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage

By Beth Cortese

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 164453438X
• ISBN13: 9781644534380
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher