Women’s Wit on the Early Modern Stage – University of Delaware Press

by Beth Cortese

Cover: Women’s Wit on the Early Modern Stage

Author
Beth Cortese

Hardback
October 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-438-0 • $130.00

Paperback
October 2026 • ISBN 978-1-64453-437-3 • $39.95

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Series
Early Modern Feminisms

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.

About the Author

Beth Rebecca Cortese is an associate professor in English literature at the University of Iceland, focusing on the Restoration and the eighteenth century. She has been published in the journals Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research, Law and Literature, and in the Nordic Journal of Renaissance Studies. She is preparing a new edition of William Wycherley’s The Country Wife.

Reviews of Women’s Wit on the Early Modern Stage

“

A investigation of how women’s wit was represented onstage by actresses and female dramatists [. . .] Beth Cortese’s analysis is invaluable for both scholars and practitioners.

”

- Marion Wynne-Davies, author of Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance: Relative Values (2007)