Women's Wit on the Early Modern Stage

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

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Setting the Scene of Women's Wit Onstage 1. Skeptical Subjects: Voicing Autonomy Through the Comic Heroine's Wit 2. Sisters "Shifting" for Themselves: Wit in Action 3. Witty Villainesses on the Tragic Stage: Rereading Women's Revenge Through Wit 4. The Witty Women of She-Tragedy: Upstaging Authority Through Visual Dissimilitude 5. Wit "shall assist thee [. . .] with my help": Women's Collaborative Wit Onstage Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

"A path-breaking 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))