ABSTRACT
About Mrs Weddell (fl. 1737–42) nothing is known, not even her first name. Her existence is even disputed. There are two plays – The City Farce (1737) and Irtele and Yarico (1742) (and perhaps a third, A Voyage Up the Thames [1738], mentioned on the title page of Irtcle and Yarico) – that she is credited with writing, but Halkett and Laing attribute these anonymous plays to one Wedderburn, a journeyman printer (even though their supposed source, the Biographia Dramatica, cites Weddel [sic] as the author). Noting that the author is referred to as male in prefatory material, Jacqueline Pearson, in The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (1988), finds no evidence that a Mrs Weddell wrote these plays and concludes that in any event: ‘Neither play was staged and neither adds anything of interest to contemporary images of women’ (p. 284, n4). Still, the great theatre historian Allardyce Nicoll assigned these two plays to Mrs Weddell, and since there is to date no evidence that these anonymously published plays were written by a Mr. Weddell (or by anyone else for that matter), we will do just as well to follow Nicoll. Most who have considered the plays-including Nancy Cotton in Women Playwrights in England c. 1363–1750 (1980) and David D. Mann and Susan Garland Mann in Women Playwrights in England, Ireland, and Scotland 1660–1823 (1996) – treat Mrs Weddell as part of the tradition of women dramatists. In any event, I do believe Incle and Yarico has something of interest to add to contemporary dramatic treatments of slavery and to our sense of women’s response to the trade.
