"Percy's" prologue: from gender play to gender panic in eighteenth-century England - 18th-century tragedy composed by Hannah Moore

Past & Present, May, 1998 by Dror Wahrman

If Hannah More had not existed, historians of late eighteenth-century England might have been tempted to invent her. For few figures can claim to be such convenient personifications of most key stories that historians tell about English society at that crucial juncture. Whether these narratives are centred on politics (the conservative reaction to the French Revolution), religion (the rise of Evangelicalism), class (the new challenges posed by the working class, and the rise of a middle class), or -- of particular interest to the present essay -- the emergence of a new world of gender characterized by separate spheres and domestic ideology, More, supposedly, embodied them all. Relentless educator, prolific publicist and indefatigable bellwether of moral conservatism, More comes across as a rock of stability in the midst of the tumultuous waters of late eighteenth-century society as well as in those of twentieth-century historiography.

What follows suggests another late eighteenth-century narrative in which Hannah More will be made once again to stand as emblematic of broader social patterns, but one in which she is less a stable rock than a floating vessel, herself engulfed by the maelstroms of cultural change. This exercise, it will be seen, might then offer some different perspectives on developments during this period, both in terms of their precise chronology and the specific nature of the transformation that was distinctive to this particular point in time.

To begin, let me restate More's current reputation. Hannah More, Catherine Hall writes, `had played a vital part in defining and articulating the boundaries of a new domesticated morality', itself a key component of the identity of the emerging middle class and of the values shaping a nascent modern, `bourgeois' society. More's familiar image is that of the prim paragon and prophetess of a properly gender-divided view of the world, in which `men and women occupied separate spheres by nature as well as custom and propriety'; separate spheres in which each sex had its essential role, and between which there could be no crossing whatsoever. `For More', Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall assert, `the emphasis [wa]s on sexual difference'.(1)

But this in fact had not always been Hannah More's proclaimed persona. Consider More's public image as occasioned by her tragedy Percy, performed more than twenty times in the first two months following its premiere in Covent Garden in December 1777, and whose first published edition in 1778 sold 4,000 copies in a fortnight. The unusual fact that this hugely successful tragedy was written by a woman prompted the doyen of eighteenth-century English theatre, David Garrick, to write a prologue to the play that was dedicated to singing the praises of crossing gender boundaries. Percy's prologue addressed itself to the women in the audience with the following words:

I'll prove, ye fair, that let us have our swing,

We can, as well as men, do any thing; ...

Mount the high horse we can, and make long speeches;

Nay, and with dignity, some wear the breeches;

And why not wear `em? -- We shall have your votes,

While some of t' other sex wear petticoats.

Did not a Lady Knight, late Chevalier,

A brave, smart soldier to your eyes appear?

Hey! presto! pass! his sword becomes a fan,

A comely woman rising from the man.

The French their Amazonian maid invite --

She goes -- alike well skill'd to talk or write,

Dance, ride, negociate, scold, coqet (sic), or fight.(2)

Garrick's prologue to Percy was nothing less than an ode to gender transgression, whose light tone should not obscure its genuine intention to celebrate Hannah More's thespian feat. To appreciate the singularity of this association, in light of More's later reputation, let us juxtapose these lines with a far from atypical passage in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education of 1799. In this passage, More inveighed vehemently against the models for womanhood set by `self-complacent heroines' or `Amazons' who adopted `masculine manners': namely, `the bold and independent beauty, the intrepid female, the hoyden, the huntress, and the archer; the swinging arms, the confident address, the regimental, and the four-in-hand'.(3) These, of course, were precisely the same images of female `masculine' prowess formerly evoked by Garrick's prologue to Percy which, predictably, incurred More's wrath at the turn of the century. And yet in 1778, Garrick, a close personal friend of More's who had taken an active role in the production of her play, could associate her with these same images, indeed with the very success of such a gender crossing, and, moreover, get away with it without making it seem particularly loaded, discomforting or threatening. Quite the contrary, the Hannah More of the late 1770s had actually thought that Garrick's verses were `excellent', and had noted with much satisfaction on Percy's opening night that `the prologue and epilogue were received with bursts of applause'. As this applause might indicate, moreover, these verses did not jar with More's public image at the time: enthusiastic spectators found it proof -- just as Garrick had suggested -- that `the fair had won the cause'.(4)