The Female Wits

In Short

This sharp, anonymous comedy is a "rehearsal play"—a meta-theatrical satire modeled after Buckingham’s The Rehearsal—that targets the specific excesses of women dramatists in 1696 London. It centers on a frantic, self-absorbed poetess named Marsilia and her disastrous efforts to stage a bombastic, incoherent tragedy. By blending biting character studies of real-life writers like Mary de la Rivière Manley with a chaotic backstage narrative, the work serves as a caustic critique of contemporary literary pretensions, gendered rivalries, and the sheer absurdity of the heroic drama genre.

The Story

The narrative unfolds during the high-pressure rehearsal of a new play written by Marsilia, a woman characterized by her colossal arrogance and thirst for adulation. As the actors of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane gather to prepare, the atmosphere is thick with professional friction and personal animosity. Marsilia arrives, acting the part of a tortured genius, constantly reciting her own inflated lines and berating her maid, Patience, for failing to adequately fuel her artistic ego.

Her colleagues, Mrs. Wellfed and Calista, join the fray. While Wellfed is portrayed as a sociable, bulky figure who values good company and drink over technical craft, Calista prides herself on her supposed classical learning. Throughout the rehearsal, the actors—including the talented but weary Mrs. Cross and the dissipated "honest" George Powell—struggle to make sense of a script that is a tangled mess of excessive sentiment, sudden plot twists, and high-flown, ridiculous language. The play-within-a-play features absurd scenes of incestuous desire, improbable rescues, and a bizarre "world in the moon" sequence that leaves the cast bewildered.

As the rehearsal progresses, the distinction between the actors’ real-world exhaustion and their roles in the play collapses. Marsilia, obsessed with being the center of attention, constantly interrupts the process to demand more "spirit" or "dreadful" expressions, even as the stage machinery fails and her own clothing begins to fall apart. Her suitor, Awdwell, watches with a mixture of infatuation and disdain, periodically pointing out the folly of her ambitions. Meanwhile, the actors openly mock the script, complain about their lines, and share cynical asides about the state of contemporary theater.

The crisis reaches its peak during the final, most outlandish scene in the "moon-world," where the performers, tasked with crawling on all fours, finally revolt against the physical strain and the sheer stupidity of the direction. They stand up in defiance, shattering the illusion and ruining the carefully constructed aesthetic of Marsilia’s "masterpiece." In a fit of performative rage, Marsilia destroys the manuscript and turns on her collaborators. The play concludes not with the triumphant premiere she envisioned, but with a humiliating collapse of her artistic pretenses, leaving the audience to witness the total disintegration of her fragile, ego-driven fantasy.

How It Unfolds

The vanity of the author The story opens in a dressing room where Marsilia establishes her frantic, self-congratulatory persona while preparing for a rehearsal. She treats her maid with utter disdain, equating her own artistic "thoughts" with worlds of value while preparing for the day’s production.

The gathering of the cast Actors arrive at the theater and begin to openly express their confusion and frustration with the incoherent script. The professional divide between the performers and the demanding playwright becomes immediately apparent as they critique the absurdity of their assigned roles.

The rehearsal chaos Marsilia takes the floor, forcing the actors to perform increasingly ridiculous scenes involving incest and high-flown rhetoric. Her insistence on grand, unnatural acting styles causes tension with the lead performers, who struggle to maintain their dignity amid the script's idiocy.

The final collapse The production descends into farce as the stage crew and actors fail to execute a bizarre scene set on the moon. When the frustrated cast refuses to continue crawling, the play-within-a-play falls apart, leading to an explosive, ego-driven meltdown by the author.

The People

Marsilia is the driving engine of the play, a vain, demanding, and utterly self-deluded poetess who believes her work is a revolutionary contribution to the stage. Her inability to recognize that her colleagues are mocking her behind her back—or even to her face—drives the conflict.

Awdwell serves as the cynical, clear-eyed observer. He is deeply in love with Marsilia but simultaneously suffers from her erratic behavior and arrogance. He acts as a tether to reality, often stepping in to point out the absurdity of the situations she creates.

The actors, including Mrs. Cross and Mr. Powell, are the exhausted victims of the production. They oscillate between professional tolerance and biting, behind-the-scenes sarcasm. Mrs. Cross, in particular, represents the pragmatic, skilled professional who resents being forced to deliver such nonsensical dialogue.

Praiseall is the sycophantic fop who attempts to flatter Marsilia at every turn to secure his own standing. He is a coward and a buffoon, acting as a foil to Awdwell and highlighting the shallow nature of the circle surrounding the poetess.

In Its Own Voice

Marsilia expresses the frantic, grandiose nature of her artistic vision to her long-suffering maid, Patience:

"Speak to me whilst I'm Repeating! Interrupting Wretch! What, a Thought more worth Than worlds of thee!"

During the rehearsal, the actor playing Amorous reveals his contempt for the ridiculous, high-flown language he is forced to speak:

"Pox of this Heroick; I shall tear my Lungs. (Aside. But brave thy Fate."

Marsilia reacts to the total failure of her grand vision when the actors finally refuse to crawl on all fours during the moon scene:

"Oh! the Devil; you have spoilt my Plot! you have ruin'd my play, ye Blockheads! ye Villains, I'll kill you all, burn the Book, and hang my self!"

What It's Really About

The work is a biting examination of the ego’s relationship to the creative process. It poses sharp questions about the value of art when it is decoupled from human experience and tethered instead to personal vanity. By parodying the "heroic" drama of the time, the author questions whether literature is truly about the expression of human emotion or merely a performative act designed to solicit public applause. Furthermore, the text explores the volatile social dynamics of the theater, suggesting that artistic production is always at the mercy of the interpersonal tensions, professional pride, and the very real, often messy, personalities of those behind the curtain.

Why Read It Today

Readers who enjoy the sharp, cynical humor of Restoration-era comedy or those interested in the history of theater will find this a fascinating, if sometimes prickly, experience. It functions as a time machine, offering a raw, unfiltered look at how writers were treated and how they viewed one another in the late 1600s. The prose is fast-paced, full of the period's colorful, often biting, linguistic flair, though modern readers may find the relentless mockery of the "female wits" to be a stark reflection of the harsh, exclusionary gender attitudes of the 1700s.

The experience of reading it feels like eavesdropping on a heated, chaotic argument in a dressing room that has been going on for three centuries. You will likely walk away struck by the timelessness of the artist’s struggle: the desperation for recognition, the terror of public failure, and the way professional environments can turn into theaters of the absurd. While the specific targets of the satire—Manley, Pix, and Trotter—are no longer household names, the archetype of the "conceited author" remains universally recognizable. It is a dense, demanding, and occasionally jarring read, but for those who value historical precision and the biting wit of a well-aimed critique, it offers a deeply rewarding, if unapologetically mean-spirited, window into a vanished world.