An Elegy for the Restoration Playwright, E. Polwhele?

Very little is known of the seventeenth-century female playwright E. Polwhele, one of the first women to write for the professional stage. Manuscripts survive of two plays that vary in terms of genre and quality: The Faithful Virgins (c. 1670) is an old-fashioned rhymed tragedy that takes unsubtle satirical aim at Charles II’s promiscuity, while the modish comedy, The Frolicks (dated 1671), sparkles with wit and a raunchiness that seems to anticipate the libertine comedies that would come to characterize the decade’s dominant theatrical direction.1 There is no record of either being publicly performed, though it seems likely that at least The Faithful Virgins reached the stage. In the dedication to Prince Rupert that precedes The Frolicks, Polwhele claims authorship of another drama, now lost, called Elysium, which may have been a religious masque.2