Plotting the “Female Wits” Controversy: Gender, Genre, and Printed Plays, 1670–1699

Mattie Burkert
About the author(s)

Mattie Burkert is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Utah State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where her doctoral research was supported by a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. She is currently at work on a book project that examines the relationship between public nance and the London theater in the decades following the 1688 Revolution Settlement. This project draws on insights from a prototype database of late-seventeenth-century performance records, which she is expanding across the long eighteenth century. Her work on George Eliot has appeared in Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, and she has an essay on Colley Cibber forthcoming in Modern Philology.

Figure 1. The 272-text corpus color-coded by genre, where the x-axis represents PC1 and the y-axis represents PC2. Comedies, labeled blue, group on the right side of the plot, while tragedies, labeled green, group on the left side. Tragicomedies, circled in red, tend to hover around the y-axis.
Figure 2. The subset of 109 plays published 1670–1679, color-coded by genre as in Figure 1.
Figure 3. In the 1690s, tragedy (orange) and comedy (light blue) are still separated along PC1, but more loosely.
Figure 4. A passage from Love’s Triumph that pushes the play low on the PC2 axis, as seen in the single-text viewer tool. The line graph on the right charts the strength of what we might call an “anti-PC2 signal” over the course of the play. The weights on the left are a mask of “anti-PC2” weights. The passage in the middle pane illustrates the kind of language against which PC2 selects and therefore exemplifies the language of heroic drama that helps pull the play lower on the y-axis in Figure 3.
Chapter number
2