J{annah Cowley (1743-1809)

Hannah Cowley was born on 14 March 1743 in Tiverton, Devonshire, but little is known of her early life except that her father was the classical scholar and bookseller Philip Parkhouse. At about the age of twenty-five, when she married Thomas Cowley, she moved with him to London, where he was a Stamp Office clerk, newspaper writer, and editor of the Gazetteer. Accord­ing to one of her contemporaries, "The lady herself paid no great deference to the opinion of her husband. Indeed, she was a being of a superior cast; and, though they passed their time happily enough together, thanks to her discreet and compliant spirit, there did not seem to be any thing congenial in their dispositions. She was lively, open, and engaging; he was sententious, close, and repulsive." 1 The couple had four children, the eldest of whom died early; in 1783 Thomas Cowley left for India with the East India Company, never to return to England. From that time forward, Hannah Cowley lived essentially as a single mother, writing to supplement her family's income.

Cowley's writing career began with a chance remark. While attending a play, she observed, "Why I could write as well myself." Her husband laughed. In reply, the next morning she began composing the first act of a comedy. A couple of weeks later she sent a draft of The Runaway to David Garrick, who was encouraging and suggested revisions. On 15 February 1776 he opened the play at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, and it had a successful run of seventeen performances. One of the villains is the learned Lady Dinah, but the play also features Bella, a witty and independent heroine whose type would become a staple in Cowley's dramas. The Critical Review marveled at the "untutored genius" of the work, which was extraordinarily successful and established Cowley's reputation as a dramatist. The play was frequently revived.

According to an early biographer, "She was accustomed to say that [in

r. Antijacobin Review 46 (February 1814): 135.

Hannah Cowley 205

composing her works] she always succeeded best when she did not herself know what she was going to do, and suffered the events, and even the plot, to grow under her pen. It is this that has so often given an air of real nature to her works." 2 Cowley's next produced play, Who's the Dupe?, a farce targeting pedantry and vulgarity, premiered on IO April r779. In her prologue to the r8r3 edition she explained that just as learned male authors have satirized female faults and ridiculed their "whims and vanity," so, as a woman, she felt called upon to subject to their due share of laughter learned men "whose sarcastic pen" has spared neither "Matron Maid or Bride." Her witty heroine cleverly foils her father's plans to marry her to an Oxford pedant by outfox­ing both the father and the pedant; in the end she marries the man she loves, while her father never understands that he has been duped. This play was to become one of Cowley's most popular, with a total of 126 performances recorded in r779 and r780 alone.

George Colman the elder produced Cowley's tragedy in blank verse, Albina, which opened at the Haymarket on 31 July 1779; but despite its spec­tacular mad scenes, it was not as enthusiastically received as her previous plays and closed after a nine-day run. When she saw Hannah More's The Fatal Falsehood, Cowley publicly accused More of having plagiarized the plot from her Albina. The disagreement was so unpleasant that More never staged another play; and it was nine years before Cowley hazarded another pro­duction, a tragedy, The Fate ef Sparta, with Sarah Siddons playing the female lead, Chelonice, a woman torn between her husband and her father. Arthur Murphy, writing in the Monthly Review, contended that "the general charac­ter of Mrs. Cowley's style may be given in her own language: 'Words, whose sounds vibrate on the ear,/ But cannot raise ideas in the mind.'" 3 The English Review damned it even more harshly, but it had a good run.4

The Belle's Strategem, a comedy of manners centering on courtship and marriage in which the heroine cleverly demonstrates that an English woman can be as appealing to a fashionable man of the world as a Continental woman, opened on 22 February 1780 and was eventually to become one of Covent Garden's standard repertory pieces. It played for 28 nights in its first season and had been acted on the London stage n8 times by 1800. In 1782 the Critical Review called The Belle's Stratagem the "best dramatic production of a female pen ... since the days of Centilivre, to whom Mrs. Cowley is at least equal in fable and character, and far superior in easy dialogue and purity

2. Quoted in ibid., 137, from the memoir to The Works of Mrs. Cowley, Dramas and Poems, 3 vols. (London, 1813).

3. 78 (May 1788): 404-5 . 4. II (1788): 250-53.

206 Hannah Cowley

of diction." 5 But her next three productions were failures and survive only in manuscript.

Cowley's comedy of manners Which is the Man?, set in London, opened on 9 February 1782 and was more successful. One of the play's characters is Lady Bell Bloomer, who "is mistress of her whole situation, and cannot be surprised." By this time Cowley had established the nature of her unconven­tional heroines, who are generally the leading characters. Her plays stress the importance of women's minds and the need to treat women as responsible human beings.' Cowley's typical heroines tend to be spirited, witty, and re­sourceful women capable of outfoxing men and foiling their designs. They have respect for their own integrity as well as inner strength, which helps them to resist victimization at the hands of fathers or husbands; frequently they help each other.

In 1780 Cowley published The Maid ef Arragon, a long poem in blank verse whose action takes place in Spain during the occupation by the Moors. Cowley dedicated the poem, whose subject is filial affection, to her father. Although Cowley intended to extend the poem to two books, she completed and published only one.

Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife suggested the title of Cowley's next play, A Bold Stroke for a Husband, produced on 25 February 1783, but the two plays bear few other resemblances. Departing from the typical formula for English comedy of romantic intrigue, she made women rather than men the main intriguers. With resourcefulness and, of course, bold strokes, the two heroines, one involved in a serious plot and another in a comic plot, rescue themselves from the unhappy situations the men close to them have created. The play ran successfully for eighteen nights and was revived during the next three seasons.

More Ways Than One, a poetic comedy, opened at Covent Garden on 6 December 1783, dedicated to Cowley's husband, who had left England that year for India. The two heroines, Arabella and Miss Archer, together foil the plot of Arabella's guardian and the old man he has chosen to be her husband; both men treat Arabella as merely a piece of property at the center of their financial negotiations, but Arabella ends up with the man she loves. The play received mixed reviews, though it played for eighteen performances.

A Schoo/for Greybeards (produced on 25November1786), inspired by Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance (1686), continues the satire of old men who covet beautiful young women who do not love them and condemns arranged mar­riages without love. The opening-night audience found the play indecent,

5. 53 (1782): 314.

Hannah Cowley 207

and it ran for only nine performances. In her preface to the printed ver­sion, Cowley notes ruefully that a woman playwright can portray vulgar characters, but only if they speak with politeness and elegance.

In 1786 Cowley published The Scottish Village, or Pitcairne Green, a long narrative poetic romance that portrays the vices and virtues of civilized life through the eyes of a philosopher. But her greatest poetic notoriety would come the following year, when she replied to a poem she had read in the World for 29 June 1787 entitled ''Adieu and Recall to Love," signed "Della Crusca," pseudonym of Robert Merry. "I read the beautiful lines and with­out rising from the table at which I was sitting answered them;' recalled Cowley, whose reply, "The Pen," published two weeks later in the World, was signed ''Anna Matilda." 6 Thus began a two-year poetic correspondence, attracting widespread public attention, in which the principals, though ex­pressing ardent enthusiasm for each other in print, were kept ignorant of each other's identities by the editors of the World. Eventually John Bell pub­lished Cowley's contributions in The Poetry of Anna Matilda (1788), and some selections were printed in The Poetry of the World (1788) and The British Album (1790). Finally, on 31 March 1789, the platonic "lovers" met and found each other disappointing. By the next day Cowley's identity was public knowl­edge. Merry said farewell to her in "The Interview," published on 16 June, and three days later Cowley returned the favor in "To Della Crusca, who said, 'When I am dead, write my Elegy;" a poem that imagines his death. Although William Gifford in The Baviad (1791) and The Maeviad (1795) ridi­culed what became known as the "Della Cruscan" style of poetry practiced in this correspondence by Merry and Cowley, it was widely imitated.

Cowley visited France in 1788 to oversee the education of her daughters and absorbed many of the ideals of the corning revolution. She contributed "Edwina, the Huntress;' a poetic tale set in the Lake District, to William Hutchinson's History of Cumberland (1794). In 1790 her seventeen-year-old daughter died, and in 1796 another daughter married in Calcutta. In June of the following year her husband died while journeying to visit this daughter.

A Day in Turkey: or, The Russian Slaves (produced by Covent Garden on 3 December 1791) is unlike any of Cowley's other works, featuring danc­ing, song, and extraordinary stage effects. This comic opera appealed to the popular taste for melodrama, spectacle, and exotic setting. As in all of Cowley's comedies, there are serious elements. For example, one of the hero­ines, Paulina, courageously protests the slavery in the seraglio, and in later

6. W. N. Hargreaves-Mawdsley, The English Della Cruscans and Their Time, 1783-1828 (The Hague, 1967), 16r.

208 Hannah Cowley

revisions Cowley highlights the degradation of women whose minds are ignored and whose bodies are exploited as sex objects. The play ran for four­teen performances despite mixed reviews, some of which criticized her for celebrating the ideals of the French Revolution.

The Town Before You (produced on 6 December 1794) is a comedy of man­ners full of intrigue. It was Cowley's theatrical swan song and ran for ten performances. A contemporary remarked that "those around Mrs. Cowley perceived, with surprize, that she never seemed to hold literature in much esteem. Her conversation was never literary. She was no storer up of her let­ters. She disliked literary correspondence .... It was still more extraordinary, that she never attended the first representation of her own pieces; and was never known to read a play or a poem written by another person. Travels were her favourite works." 7 A reviewer for the European Magazine recounted that "many were the instances in which she was known to compose quicker than a careful amanuensis could copy." 8 Contemporaries described Cowley as indifferent to fame and highly domestic.

Cowley's last major work was The Siege of Acre. An Epic Poem (r8or), cele­brating the recent defense of Acre by British troops led by Sir Sidney Smith against Napoleonic forces. Into the historic narrative, taken from Smith's letters and French accounts, Cowley incorporated two imaginary domestic episodes, one depicting a bride who follows her lover to war and another portraying two daughters who attempt to restrain their soldier father from a dangerous military mission. Set among the Christians of Syria, the poem includes affecting portrayals of the painful consequences of war. It was pub­lished in the Annual Register in four books in 1799 and was reprinted in six books in 1801 by the Oriental Press in London. In her preface Cowley ex­plains, "With trembling inquietude I venture to place in the hands of the Public, a Poem, on one of the most important passages of a War which has stretched its hideous form over two thirds of the globe. The subject forced itself to my pen- I could not resist it; and could I have communicated to my pen the glow with which the Siege impressed my imagination, I should have less to fear for the reception of the Poem." Elizabeth Moody criticized her in the Monthly Review for having chosen a theme that was not dignified enough for an epic nor worthy of such length and for having written a poem whose style was not sufficiently polished. The reviewer from the Gentleman's Magazine was of another mind, praising the vigor of the poem's language, the harmony of its versification, its "masterly" characterization, and its origi-

7. Antijacobin Review 46 (February 1814): 138.

8. 66 (September 1814): 232.

Hannah Cowley

nality. The reviewer remarks that "an Epic Poem by a lady is a new epoch in the literary world; the first, as far as we know, in any country .... Whilst we do not withhold our assent to Mrs. Cowley's superiority in all the walks of the Drama, we did not expect to find the nerve and strength of wing neces-sary to such an undertaking .... This work does honour not only to female genius but to the art itself .... We were a little surprised at some military reflections, and at the clearness with which a female mind comprehends the relationship between our modern implements of war and those used by the conquerors of Persia and Babylon." 9

In 1801 Cowley left London for her birthplace, Tiverton, in Devon, a place she had memorialized in "The Scottish Village" and at the end of her "Fireside Tour." There she continued to write poetry and to revise her plays. She died on II March 1809, at the age of sixty-seven. In 1813 a three-volume edition of her works appeared, including eleven of her thirteen plays in their revised states,10 a memoir, and nearly a full volume of her poems, some of which had never before been published. Cowley was always more popular with the public than with the critics, who found her writing both too romantic and not sufficiently polished. Still, the critic for the Antijacobin Review recognized "the fertility of her invention, and her knowledge of human life," and the critic for the Literary Panorama maintained that "the vivacity of her charac­ters insured success." 11 While her posthumous reputation rested principally on her comedies, one contemporary critic observed that her poems contain "sensibility always awake, description always vivid, a loftiness of mind, and a sweetness of measure, that will also assist in preventing her name from dying with her!" 12

MAJOR WORKS: The Runaway, A Comedy: As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury­Lane (London, 1776); Albina, Countess Raimond; A Tragedy, As it is Peiformed at the Theatre-Royal in the Haymarket (London, 1779); Who's the Dupe? A Farce (London, 1779);

The Maid if Arragon; A Tale. Part I (London, 1780); The Belle's Stratagem: A Comedy, if Five Acts: as it is Now Peiforming at the Theatre in Smock-Alley (Dublin, 1781); Which is the Man? A Comedy, As Acted at the Theatre-Royal in Covent-Garden (London, 1783); A Bold Stroke for a Husband, A Comedy (Dublin, 1783); More Ways Than One, A Comedy, As Acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden (London, 1784); A Schoo/for Greybeards; or, The Mourning Bride: A Comedy, In Five Acts. As Performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury­Lane (London, 1786); The Scottish Village: or, Pitcairne Green. A Poem (London, 1786);

The Fate if Sparta; or, The Rival Kings. A Tragedy. As It is Acted at the Theatre-Royal,

9. 71 (September 1801): 817-19. ro. Only The School for Eloquence and The World as It Goes are missing. rr. Antijacobin Review 46 (February 1814): 136; Literary Panorama 15 (July 1814): 889.

12. European Magazine 66 (September 1814): 234.

210 Hannah Cowley ------

in Drury-Lane (London, r788); The Poetry of Anna Matilda (London, 1788); A Day in Turkey; or, The Russian Slaves. A Comedy, As Acted at the Theatre Royal, in Covent Garden (London, r792); The Town Before You, A Comedy, As Acted at the Theatre-Royal, Covent­Garden (London, r795); The Siege of Acre. An Epic Poem. In Six Books (London, r8or); The Works of Mrs. Cowley, Dramas and Poems, 3 vols. (London, 1813).

TEXTS USED: Text of "Monologue" from The Maid of Arragon; A Tale. Text of "Invo­cation" from The Poetry of Anna Matilda.

Monologue

0 CHATTERTON! for thee the pensive song I raise, Thou object of my wonder, pity, envy, praise! Bright star of Genius! -torn from life and fame, My tears, my verse, shall consecrate thy name! Ye Muses! who around his natal bed Triumphant sung, and all your influence shed; APOLLO! thou who rapt his infant breast, And, in his daedal numbers, shone confest, Ah! why, in vain, such mighty gifts bestow

IO - Why give fresh tortures to the Child of Woe? Why thus, with barb'rous care, illume his mind, Adding new sense to all the ills behind?

20

Thou haggard! Poverty! whose cheerless eye Transforms young rapture to the pond'rous sigh; In whose drear cave no Muse e'er struck the lyre, Nor Bard e'er madden'd with poetic fire; Why all thy spells for CHATTERTON combine? His thought creative, why must thou confine? Subdu'd by thee, his pen no more obeys, No longer gives the song of ancient days; Nor paints in glowing tints from distant skies,

r Chatterton] Thomas Chatterton (1752- 70), laboring-class poet and playwright who left his native Bristol to make his living as a writer in London. After only four months he had published poems and essays in eleven of the leading periodicals. Still, he never earned enough to eat daily, and on the edge of starvation he committed suicide.

Hannah Cowley

Nor bids wild scen'ry rush upon our eyes­Check'd in her flight, his rapid genius cowers, Drops her sad plumes, and yields to thee her powers.

Behold him, Muses! see your fav'rite son The prey of WANT, ere manhood is begun! The bosom ye have fill'd, with anguish torn­The mind you cherish'd, drooping and forlorn!

And now Despair her sable form extends, Creeps to his couch, and o'er his pillow bends. Ah, see! a deadly bowl the fiend conceal'd, Which to his eye with caution is reveal'd­Seize it, APOLLO !-seize the liquid snare! Dash it to earth, or dissipate in air! Stay, hapless Youth! refrain - abhor the draught, With pangs, with racks, with deep repentance fraught! Oh, hold! the cup with woe ETERNAL flows, More-more than Death the pois' nous juice bestows! In vain! - he drinks -and now the searching fires Rush thro' his veins, and writhing he expires! No sorrowingfriend, no sister, parent, nigh, To sooth his pangs, or catch his parting sigh; Alone, unknown, the Muses' darling dies, And with the vulgar dead unnoted lies! Bright star of Genius! - torn from life and fame, My tears, my verse, shall consecrate thy name!

(1780)

2II

30

40

212 Hannah Cowley

Invocation

Written on a very hot day, in August 1783

Cooling zephyrs haste away, Round my humid temples play; Groves and grots in pity leave, On my fainting bosom breathe! Skim, as you pass, your silken wings O'er gurgling founts, and glassy springs. Oh! come from Greenland's icy plains, Where silver Winter constant reigns; Or from the Arctic, higher fly

IO Thro' the chill Norwegian sky-­Turn not to Gallia's sunny vales,

20

Nor mix with yours Italia's gales, Strait o'er the northern ocean sweep, Where pearls the frozen Nafads weep; But on high Grampia's fleecy top, Where kids, the gelid herbage crop, There zephyr touch!-then, with new wing Fresh from its chilly caverns spring. Oh! linger not, midst England's fields, Nor taste the sweets the garden yields; Heed not our meadows' gaudy charms, But dart, with vigour, to my arms!

(1788)

15 Grampia's] The chief mountain chain in Scotland, forming the boundary between the Highlands and Lowlands.