낭만주의 여성 극작가의 웃음: 하나 카울리

Abstract

Comedy was treated as inferior to tragedy and attributed to women playwrights by the critics in the Romantic era. This essay, however, argues that Hannah Cowley’s comedy The Belle’s Stratagem brilliantly subverts sexual and social hierarchy by creating chaos on stage, a subversive space like Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival. He argues that carnival offers a world upside-down where all the established order is subverted. The masquerade in this play is a place not just for flirting young people, as we can see in the novel The Masqueraders by Eliza Haywood, but for all the male characters who are mocked regardless of their social status. While Letitia in her disguise achieves her goal by coquetting and winning Doricourt’s heart, her father Hardy poses as Issac, a character in Richard Sheridan’s drama The Duenna, who was played by the same famous actor, John Quick. Although Hardy belongs to highly respected position, posing as a ridiculous character Issac, he is continuously mocked by different characters. This subversion takes place in and outside of the masquerade. Even after the masquerade, Dorimenus and Hardy pretend to be mad and fatally ill respectively and their acting makes them ridiculous. This chaotic situation destroys the sexual and social boundaries and creates a carnival-like situation where everything is rendered playful and chaotic. Considering her radicalism as a playwright, it is not surprising that, as a woman poet, she was also a forerunner of Della Cruscanism, which was criticized harshly by male critics for its inversion of moral decorum.