The World as It Goes: A Comedy

By William D. Brewer

During the Romantic period, Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) achieved fame both as a playwright and a poet, composing popular comedies and, as Anna Matilda, amorous Della Cruscan verse. But despite a recent surge of scholarly interest in her works, her controversial comedy The World as It Goes; or A Party at Montpelier (performed 1781) has never been published. During its premiere, audience members loudly objected to the play’s bawdy content, and it closed after a single performance. The comedy’s catastrophic failure provides insights into the theatrical tastes, anxieties and mores of late eighteenth-century audiences and influenced the manner in which Cowley handled controversial issues in her subsequent plays. This edition of The World as It Goes is based on the Larpent licensing holograph manuscript held by the Huntington Library (LA 548). The transcription of the play is supplemented with an introduction providing cultural, theatrical, historical and biographical contexts; contemporaneous reviews; and a note on the text.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839980503

Book preview

The World as It Goes

The World as It Goes

A Comedy

By Hannah Cowley

Edited by

William D. Brewer

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2022

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © By William D. Brewer 2022

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the editor of this work.

Original author: Hannah Cowley

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021949838

ISBN-13: 978-1-83998-048-0 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-83998-048-6 (Hbk)

Cover image: The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This title is also available as an e-book.

For

Frederick Burwick

and Marilyn Gaull

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The World as it Goes

Note on the Text

The World as It Goes: A Comedy

Reviews of The World as It Goes

Reviews of Second Thoughts Are Best, a Revised Version of The World as It Goes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks are due to The Huntington Library and its staff for housing and preserving the Larpent licensing manuscripts—which include Hannah Cowley’s unpublished comedy, The World as It Goes; or A Party at Montpelier—and making them accessible to scholars. Natalie Russell, the library’s assistant curator of the literary collections, kindly offered to double-check an unclear word in the manuscript for me during the pandemic, and I also received assistance from Gayle M. Richardson, catalog librarian/archivist, and Lisa Caprino, reference services assistant.

Thanks to Sara Martínez, rights sales assistant at Springer Nature, for permission to reuse material from my book chapter: Fluid Identities in Hannah Cowley’s Universal Masquerade, in Staging Romantic Chameleons and Imposters, Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 111–33 (114–21). The cover image, Portrait of Hannah Cowley (née Parkhouse), is provided by courtesy of The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This edition is dedicated to two preeminent Romantic-period scholars and mentors, Frederick Burwick and the late Marilyn Gaull. Along with countless other Romanticists, I have greatly benefited from their feedback and encouragement.

INTRODUCTION

The World as it Goes

*

Hannah Cowley (1743–1809) grew up in the small town of Tiverton, Devon, the daughter of Hannah (née Richards) and Philip Parkhouse (ca. 1712–1790). An excellent scholar, her father had been educated for Holy Orders, but with scant prospect of securing a church living, he became a Bookseller, as the nearest approach he could then prudently make to a life of some degree of literary enjoyment and a member of Tiverton’s corporation.¹ As Angela Escott points out,

[Cowley] was indebted to her father not only for a knowledge of local politics, but also for the education of classics that he gave her, based on his own education at Blundell’s School. […] Cowley’s works reveal, both in references and use of sources, a knowledge ranging from classical literature and rhetoric to French drama and moral tales and English and French philosophical works.²

Philip Parkhouse befriended Lord Harrowby, a Member of Parliament, who provided Cowley with contacts in London during the early stages of her career and subsequently helped her husband, Thomas Cowley, obtain a position with the East India Company.

The anonymous author of the preface to The Works of Mrs. Cowley (1813) describes the genesis of Cowley’s first play:

a sense of mental power for dramatic writing suddenly struck her whilst sitting with her Husband at the Theatre.—So delighted with this? said she to him—why I could write as well myself! His laugh, without notice, was answered in the course of the following morning by sketching the first Act of The Runaway, and, though she had never before written a literary line, the Play was finished with the utmost celerity.³

Cowley sent her comedy to the renowned actor David Garrick, the manager of Drury Lane Theatre, who generously "tightened the text without damaging the charm and ingenuousness of the characters and situations, and helped her structure into the text moments that are clearly performable."⁴ The Runaway premiered on February 15, 1776, and was an instant success, playing for seventeen nights. Unfortunately for Cowley, Garrick retired from the stage on June 10, 1776, and his successor as manager of Drury Lane, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, treated Cowley more like a theatrical rival than a protégée. He "shelf’d" The Runaway and put off producing Cowley’s farce Who’s the Dupe (1779) until late in the season (mid-April) by which time it could not have a regular run because of end-of-season benefits.⁵ She ended up paying 100 guineas for the chance of a Benefit, at a time when the current business of the Theatre would not produce that Sum.⁶ Ellen Donkin informs us that Cowley’s "tragedy Albina went unperformed for three years after its original completion in 1776 while it was passed from Sheridan to [Thomas] Harris [the manager-proprietor of Covent Garden] with spurious promises of production."⁷ Albina was finally staged by George Colman the Younger at the Haymarket (July 31, 1779, premiere) during the unremunerative summer season and ran for seven performances. It only earned her £30. Having detected significant similarities between Albina and tragedies penned by another Garrick protégée, Hannah More’s Percy (1777) and The Fatal Falsehood (1779), Cowley accused More of plagiarism. Betsy Bolton notes that the ensuing writers’ quarrel, conducted in letters and Cowley’s preface to Albina, effectively discouraged More from any further writing for the stage, and Cowley herself avoided further tragedy for nearly a decade.⁸

Produced at Harris’s Covent Garden rather than Sheridan’s Drury Lane, Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (February 22, 1780, premiere) became her most popular and frequently revived play. Escott estimates that Cowley received £400 from the comedy’s initial run of 28 nights, including three benefit performances, and an additional £100 for delaying publication.⁹ On April 4, 1780, her unpublished interlude titled The School of Eloquence, satirizing debating societies, had its first and only performance at Drury Lane. As we shall see, her next comedy, The World as It Goes; or a Party at Montpelier (1781), was a highly controversial flop. Cowley went on to compose six more comedies—Which Is the Man? (1782), A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783), More Ways than One (1783), A School for Graybeards (1786), A Day in Turkey (1791), and The Town before You (1794)—and a second tragedy, The Fate of Sparta; or The Rival Kings (1788). In her preface to her last comedy, The Town before You, she announced her retirement from playwriting and decried the fatuity of late eighteenth-century theatergoers, who preferred action over dialogue: "a great Actor, holding a sword in his left hand, and making aukward [sic] pushes with it, charms the audience infinitely more than he could do, by all the wit and observation which the ingenious Author might have given him."¹⁰ Cowley dedicated More Ways than One to her husband, an official at the Stamp Office and a sometime drama critic for the Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser who had ardently championed her theatrical career.¹¹ To provide much-needed support for their family (they had either three or four children), Thomas Cowley relocated to India before 1784 to work for the British East India Company.¹² He died there in 1797.

Cowley achieved fame as a poet as well as a dramatist. On June 29, 1787, the newspaper the World published Adieu and Recall to Love, a sentimentally amorous poem signed Della Crusca, and Cowley, under the pseudonym Anna Matilda, responded with To Della Crusca. The Pen (The World, July 10, 1787). For the next two years, Della Crusca (aka Robert Merry) and Anna Matilda exchanged impassioned verses, which were gathered together in The Poetry of the World (1788). Other poets joined what came to be called the Della Cruscan movement, adopting various Italianate pen names. In 1789, Merry met Anna Matilda in person and, disillusioned, quickly brought their poetic correspondence to a close: when [Merry] stood in the presence of the ideal goddess of his idolatry, and saw a plain respectable matronly lady—simply poetical and platonic, he walked away in sad dudgeon, and endeavoured to conceal his disappointment, by concealing her name—in vain—for Anna Matilda was soon discovered to be no other than Mrs. Cowley.¹³ Along with her fellow Della Cruscans, Cowley was viciously mocked by William Gifford in his satirical poem The Baviad (1791), in which he accuses her of weekly cuckold[ing] her poor spouse in rhyme (l. 24).

In 1801, Cowley retired to Tiverton, where she completed an epic poem, The Siege of Acre (1801), and revised her works. Emphasizing her respectability, the preface to the posthumously published The Works of Mrs. Cowley, Dramas and Poems (1813) depicts her as a modest, retiring, and religious woman: "her deportment was easy and unassuming, there was nothing in her Manners that indicated an Author. In the liveliness of the Characters in her Dramas, she was pourtraying [sic] others not herself."¹⁴ The portrait in the preface contrasts sharply with accounts by journalists, reviewers, and memoirists of the ambitious and sometimes pugnacious dramatist and poet who attained celebrity in late eighteenth-century London.

The Damnations of The World as It Goes and Second Thoughts Are Best

Before the premiere of The World as It Goes; or a Party at Montpelier, Cowley’s comedies The Runaway and The Belle’s Stratagem and her farce Who’s the Dupe had all been theatrical hits. Staged at Covent Garden on February 24, 1781, The World as It Goes was performed by some of the era’s most celebrated comic actors: John Edwin, the diminutive John Quick, Charles Lee Lewes, William Thomas Lewis (aka Gentleman Lewis), Ralph Wewitzer (who specialized in stereotypical foreigners), Isabella Mattocks (who excelled at portraying vulgar characters), and the famously rotund Lydia Webb.¹⁵ Elizabeth Younge, acclaimed for her portrayals of sentimental wives and daughters, played Lady Danvers, and the future novelist and playwright Elizabeth Inchbald appeared in the role of Sidney Grubb. While Lewes, who possessed some talent as a deliverer of prologues, epilogues, and occasional pieces, delivered the comedy’s prologue, Lewis, an eminently attractive actor of fashionable and flippant characters, performed the part of the fatuous Sir Charles Danvers.¹⁶

However, despite its popular cast members, Cowley’s new play was damned and closed after a single night. The American diarist Samuel Curwen noted that [m]‌any came for the express purpose of supporting or damning [the comedy]; [Cowley’s] husband, a writer in one of the daily papers, employs his pen in criticising works of all other stage writers, and has, by the severity of his remarks, raised up a host of determined foes to crush whatever proceeds from his quarter.¹⁷ Audience members loudly objected to a ribald scene in a bedroom antechamber and repeatedly interrupted Younge as she attempted to deliver the epilogue, which included a risqué reference to the transgender Chevalière D’Eon. Amid the tumult, the actors valiantly maintained their composures. The St. James’s Chronicle reported that [t]he Performers stood every Insult; and behaved with uncommon Resolution and Propriety (February 24–27, 1781). According to the London Courant and Westminster Chronicle, the actors

exerted themselves to the utmost; and even those of them who never appear but to be applauded, bore the groans and hisses of the house for ten minutes together, and went through their parts. Miss Younge left no effort untried to save the piece. When she found that the audience would not hear the conclusion, she came forward, and made repeated and artful attempts to say, that great alterations would be made, if the audience would permit it to be repeated on Tuesday evening. (February 26, 1781)

Reviews of The World as It Goes were harsh. For instance, the Aurora and Universal Advertiser declared that the play is a mixture and medley of a dozen different comedies and tragedies, and put together without taste or judgement, or the least regard to time, place, or character, totally destitute of incident, of situation, or one original idea; and the dialect so low, vulgar, and obscene, that it shocked ears not the most delicate (February 26, 1781). Cowley revised her comedy, cutting out a provocative and incongruous episode in which a Monk attempts to rape Lady Danvers in a convent garden and excising much of the bawdy language. She also made changes in the female cast: Inchbald, who wrote in her diary entry for February 22, 1781, that she had been angry with Mrs. Cowley at Rehearsal, was replaced by Elizabeth Satchell;¹⁸ Younge was recast against type as the uncouth Molly Grubb; Mary Ann Yates, one of the great tragediennes of the period, acted Younge’s former role, Lady Danvers; and Sarah Maria Wilson took over the part of the French Countess.¹⁹ According to reviewers, Cowley enlisted a contingent of her friends to applaud during the performance, but this strategy apparently backfired when her allies’ mistimed applauses distracted from the production and annoyed other spectators. Much to Cowley’s disappointment, the drama’s second incarnation as Second Thoughts Are Best (March 24, 1781, premiere) experienced the fate of the first version. The Theatrical Intelligence column of the London Courant and Westminster Chronicle claimed that in modifying rather than abandoning her condemned comedy, Mrs. Cowley has shewn a masculine resolution and boldness, which operated against her (March 26, 1781). In the opinion of the Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, every attempt to ornament and embellish, served […] (like white silk stockings worn by a bandy-legged chimney-sweeper,) rather to expose than to conceal the deformity of the whole (March 26, 1781). Cowley withdrew Second Thoughts Are Best after its initial performance.²⁰

The World as It Goes is Cowley’s most bawdy, topical, multi-generic, and socially subversive comedy. It features a valet impersonating his master and vowing to take a seat at Westminster; French and German swindlers; a seductress masquerading as a Countess; a lecherous, nouveau-riche London Citizen and his vulgarian daughter; a woman antiquarian; a fatuous aristocrat who neglects the wife he adores to be seen as fashionable; corrupt nuns; and a lascivious Monk. Among the contemporaneous issues and cultural products addressed in the play and its prologue and epilogue are English tourism on the continent, the pantomime Harlequin Free-Mason (1780), the January 1781 French raid on Jersey Island, the Chevalière d’Eon’s androgyny, the Gordon riots and Lord George Gordon’s acquittal in the ensuing treason trial, the recent performances by the French ballet dancer Gaëtano Appoline Balthazar Vestris at the King’s Theatre, anxieties about ambitious and oversexed male servants, bluestocking antiquarianism, the pretensions of the London merchant class, the pro-American revolution Bill of Rights Society and the London Association, James Graham’s Celestial Bed, and prison ships (hulks).²¹ In fact, Cowley crammed so many subplots and topics into her play that it confused the audience and reviewers.

The comedy’s catastrophic failure provides insights into the theatrical tastes, anxieties, and mores of late eighteenth-century audiences and influenced the manner in which Cowley handled controversial issues in her subsequent plays. The World as It Goes was omitted from The Works of Mrs. Cowley, and the only surviving copy of the comedy is the Larpent licensing manuscript in