Ariadne's adaptation of Alexander Oldys's "The Fair Extravagant in She Ventures and He Wins (original) (raw)
2009, SEDERI: yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies
In the preface to She Ventures and He Wins (1695), the young woman signing as "Ariadne" says that the plot of this play is taken from "a small novel," the title of which she does not mention. Neither the editors Lyons and Morgan (1991) nor any of the few critics that have recently commented on this piece have identified the text upon which the play is drawn. The answer to this riddle is to be found in The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1699). The main plot of that comedy is Alexander Oldys's The Fair Extravagant, or The Humorous Bride, a practically unknown text that has not been reprinted since 1682. The aim of this paper is to (re-)unearth that source, and to analyse how Ariadne adapted the male-authored original for her own purposes as a woman dramatist, combined it with a farcical subplot, and endeavoured to tailor it to the new tastes of the town.
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In the preface to She Ventures and He Wins (1695), the young woman signing as "Ariadne" says that the plot of this play is taken from "a small novel," the title of which she does not mention. Neither the editors Lyons and Morgan (1991) nor any of the few critics that have recently commented on this piece have identified the text upon which the play is drawn. The answer to this riddle is to be found in The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatick Poets (1699). The main plot of that comedy is Alexander Oldys's The Fair Extravagant, or The Humorous Bride, a practically unknown text that has not been reprinted since 1682. The aim of this paper is to (re-)unearth that source, and to analyse how Ariadne adapted the male-authored original for her own purposes as a woman dramatist, combined it with a farcical subplot, and endeavoured to tailor it to the new tastes of the town.
Alexander Oldys's Comic Displacement of Romance in The Fair Extravagant
webs.uvigo.es
In Alexander Oldys's The Fair Extravagant (1682), the male protagonist is anxious about his authority as a husband due to the heroine's superior social rank and wealth, her strong personality, and her free agency. This paper shows how this is presented in a kind of novel of trial that intends to test the protagonist's manly virtues through a comic displacement of chivalric romance. It draws on Bakhtin's concept of Prüfungsroman and his idea that the novel is a markedly dialogic genre, often permeated with irony and parody. This analysis also assumes that manhood is a social and cultural construction which is materialised in a status that men must achieve under the constant scrutiny and assessment of others.
In spite of being considered as a minor dramatist, with She Ventures and He Wins (1695) Ariadne reopened the tradition of female playwrights after Aphra Behn's death. In the main plot of the play, Charlotte, a young and rich heiress, makes a deliberate use of crossdressing and disguise in order to test the man she herself has chosen to marry. Through the acquisition of a new identity, the female protagonist plays a joke both on the patriarchal power over women as regards the choice of a husband and also on the conventional terms of marriage, like money and social class, usually settled by male figures. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to trace the features of the active and manipulative heroine that Behn had already established in plays such as The Rover and to check the way in which Ariadne complies with those principles.
Gender, Disguise and the Politics of Marriage in Ariadne's She Ventures and He Wins
In spite of being considered as a minor dramatist, with She Ventures and He Wins (1695) Ariadne reopened the tradition of female playwrights after Aphra Behn's death. In the main plot of the play, Charlotte, a young and rich heiress, makes a deliberate use of crossdressing and disguise in order to test the man she herself has chosen to marry. Through the acquisition of a new identity, the female protagonist plays a joke both on the patriarchal power over women as regards the choice of a husband and also on the conventional terms of marriage, like money and social class, usually settled by male figures. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to trace the features of the active and manipulative heroine that Behn had already established in plays such as The Rover and to check the way in which Ariadne complies with those principles.
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