The World as It Goes: A Comedy (1781) by Hannah Cowley

An “unnatural compound of pointless, tho’ ill-natured strokes of satire,” with not “one original idea” and so full of “shocking indelicacy, low ribaldry, and Billingsgate language” that it “shocked ears not the most delicate”: such were the reviewers’ comments on Hannah Cowley’s 1781 comedy The World as It Goes (111, 107). After an opening night punctuated by loud groans, hisses, and merciless heckling of the actors, Cowley’s play was roundly condemned as “by far the most despicable composition that ever insulted a British audience under the appellation of a Comedy” (110). Uncowed by the criticism, Cowley valiantly tried to salvage her play by tightening the plot and cutting out the bits that audiences as well as reviewers had found objectionable. Within a month of its spectacularly unsuccessful premier, Cowley returned to the theatre with The World as It Goes 2.0, aptly retitled Second Thoughts Are Best. Alas, this too was damned as merely an attempt to put “a bandy-legged chimney-sweeper” in “white silk stockings,” and the play disappeared from the stage after its first and only performance (119). The World as It Goes was even omitted from The Works of Mrs. Cowley (1813) and was, thus, essentially consigned to oblivion.But now it is available to literary and cultural scholars of the period in the form of a fine edition published by Anthem and edited by William D. Brewer. Based on the only surviving manuscript of the play (available in the Huntington Library’s Larpent Collection), the volume is a valuable contribution both to the oeuvre of Hannah Cowley and to the history of eighteenth-century theatre. A big flop, particularly by a playwright who had churned out many dramatic hits,1 can be a great source for insights into contemporary theatrical taste, the politics of literary history, and the rhetorical nuances of public morality. In the case of Cowley, her “highly controversial flop” (3), to use Brewer’s phrase, is also a window onto the experiences of being a female playwright in the late eighteenth century and the limits imposed on her comic ebullience as a satirist.Cowley’s comedy, subtitled “A Party at Montpelier,” is framed as a satire on the emergent trend of English tourism and boasts a diverse cast of characters. These include a Cit family (from the nouveau riche merchant class linked to the City of London, the business district) with a hilariously vulgar daughter trying her best to subvert her genteel half sister’s romance, a colonel with a pedantic antiquarian for his wife, a husband too foolishly fashionable to acknowledge that he actually loves his own wife, a valet disguised as his master, and an assortment of French and German rogues. By no means a well-wrought play, with its multiple plots and panorama of characters The World as It Goes can often be confusing. But its characters and situations can also be quite funny—though, of course, the scenes that might seem extremely entertaining to the modern reader were precisely those that offended Cowley’s contemporary audience and precipitated its catastrophic failure. Consider, for instance, the scholarly Lady Sparwell talking very seriously about the accuracy of the masculine parts of an “ancient” statue that is actually a man posing as masonry is a good example of such humor. In addition to the suggestively farcical scenes that garnered condemnation for their lewd humor, Cowley’s skill at re-creating low behavior and language for purposes of mockery also drew distaste because, as a contemporary reviewer wrote, unlike male dramatists, who could do so without eliciting “Disgust,” female playwrights who make the “slightest Approaches towards indelicacy will always be offensive” (103). This aspect of The World as It Goes is highlighted in an excellent introduction in which Brewer locates Cowley’s failed comedy in the gendered discourse underlying the well-known “weeping vs. laughing comedy” debate of the late eighteenth century. As he notes, the “hostile reception” given to The World as It Goes shows that, despite the Goldsmithian valorization of hilarity in comedy, women could be severely limited in the kinds of humor they could successfully include in their plays (9). And Cowley certainly “chafed against … having to write like a ‘Prudish Madam,’” though she “continued to write laughing comedies for the rest of her career.” Cowley may have been inspired by literary foremothers of yesteryears such as Aphra Behn,2 but the fate of The World as It Goes suggests how severely she was constrained in the type of humor she could use in her comedies owing to contemporary expectations of respectable femininity.In addition to arguing for the generic significance of Cowley’s flop comedy and its importance to literary history of the period, Brewer’s fine introduction also offers a nuanced, comprehensive, and lively overview of the audience’s tumultuously unfavorable response to the play’s premier despite a star-studded cast of actors. The rich historical contextualization of the play’s production, reception, and re-production (as Second Thoughts) is complemented by the inclusion of a robust selection of contemporary reviews in an appendix. These reviews, most of which are printed in their entirety, are a treasure trove of information for any scholar of eighteenth-century drama as they provide information not only about Cowley’s career but also about theatre culture as a whole. The descriptions of the various factions of viewers in the playhouse at the premier of The World as It Goes and their responses to different scenes, for instance, offer a fascinating snapshot of audience dynamics in the period. Similarly, the reviews mention the corporeal details and facial expressions of various performers, the actors’ desperate attempts to placate the heckling spectators, explanations for the casting changes in Cowley’s second iteration of her damned comedy, etc. Such details are of interest not only to scholars interested in The World as It Goes but also to any researchers interested in the theatrical culture in the period, making this edition a useful go-to for academics engaged in the field.The excellence of the scholarly apparatus in this edition is matched by its textual choices. Brewer balances faithfulness to the original manuscript (and its errors or inconsistencies) with modern expectations of reading ease. The notes offer judicious and helpful explanations for allusions, sociopolitical contexts, eighteenth-century word usage, etc. The return of Cowley’s banished comedy into the spotlight as a (comparatively) easily accessible, excellently edited modern text that includes a rich range of contemporary reviews will be particularly helpful to those of us who do not have institutional means to explore relevant databases for our research. Perhaps, it will even give The World as It Goes a third chance to succeed onstage in front of a modern audience that will probably find Cowley’s “indelicate” humor very much to its taste.