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Hannah Cowley's best-known play was first performed at Sheridan's Covent Garden Theatre on 22 February 1780. It was an immediate success, and continued to be played regularly for many years. Despite its early popularity, however, it seems to have made no stage appearance since the nineteenth century: until, that is, a series of readings and workshops in New York in 2002-03 that led to a full-scale mounting in 2005 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland.
The play's reanimation is due not least to Melinda C. Finberg, who included the play in her copiously annotated anthology, Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists, published by Oxford University Press in 2001.1 In this notable venture she enjoyed the advice of Michael Cadden, head of the Program in Theater and Dance at Princeton, where he had also advised Finberg's doctoral dissertation on the same material. Cadden also worked with a Princeton undergraduate of the class of 1997 named Davis McCallum, who went on to study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and at the London Academy of Dramatic Art as a director before returning to Princeton to teach. This happy conjunction of persons, places, and dates led to McCallum's directing The Belle's Stratagem first as a student workshop at the New York Stage and Film Festival in 2002; then (in the following year) in a professional reading in New York for the Juggernaut Theatre's year-long project, "The First 100 Years: The Professional Woman Playwright"; and finally, also in 2003, as an Equity Showcase for the Prospect Theatre in New York, in a full (though shoestring) production which brought Melinda Finberg in as dramaturg and played to enthusiastic capacity houses and the plaudits of The New York Times. And yet not finally; for, as the 2003 Killiam Directing Fellow at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCallum was invited to direct a publicly staged reading. His choice of Cowley's play, in which by now he was extraordinarily well versed, turned out to be prescient. Not only was the reading a palpable hit with actors and audience, but the theatre management itself took the bold step of commissioning McCallum to direct a production with all the necessary bells and whistles in its principal indoor theatre, the Angus Bowmer, as part of its 2005 season. Once...