Displacing Female Bodies on the Eighteenth-Century Stage, is driven by a central question: why were women playwrights in the Romantic period obsessed with silencing their female characters, pushing them off the stage, and announcing the removal of their own texts to the closet?These playwrights were some of the most well-known and commercially successful writers of their era, but were paradoxically also among its most marginalised figures: they were mocked by largely conservative audiences, suffered intense criticism for placing their works on display before the public eye, and frequently found their plays rejected by theatre managers in favour of works by established male playwrights. This marginalisation has extended to the present as well: even while lamenting the exclusion of these writers from the canon, modern critics have implicitly or explicitly dismissed them as politically reactionary, and criticised them for failing to include positive representations of women in their works and for abandoning progressive gender politics in order to pander to their audiences.This book reorients this dominant critical mode, arguing that these writers did not simply craft plays that would please the crowd, but that they deftly incorporated the suppressions and subjugations to which they were subject into their works. It demonstrates that within their plays gaps in discourse and representation contain a productive capacity, denoting spaces of imaginative potential or drawing into focus the conditions by which such silencing and erasure takes place. I argue that the long-standing critical misapprehension of these works stems from precisely these strategies of resistance, which of necessity took non-traditional forms and thus have not been readily recognisable to audiences, then or now.
