The Faithful Virgins New

The present volume is the first printed edition of Polwhele’s first play, The Faithful Virgins, until now extant only in an unsigned manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. A tragicomedy apparently performed in London by the Duke’s Company ca. 1669–1671, The Faithful Virgins is altogether different in tone from Polwhele’s later prose comedy, The Frolicks; or, The Lawyer Cheated (1671), first printed by Cornell University Press in 1977. The introduction to this modern-spelling edition of The Faithful Virgins discusses the play in terms of radical changes in English stage practices following the restoration of the monarchy after England’s civil war and situates Polwhele’s play within the social and political life of seventeenth-century London.

This fine volume makes available a play long overlooked in Restoration drama studies: Polwhele’s The Faithful Virgins (ca. 1669–1671). Ann Hollinshead Hurley’s informative introduction and carefully edited text disclose Polwhele’s imaginative response to rapidly changing theatrical tastes in the 1660s. The stage directions show Polwhele skillfully using the spectacular effects of which Restoration stagecraft was capable, while the text reveals a fascinating mélange of dramatic forms. The Faithful Virgins marries in a singular manner tragicomedy to masque and includes a dumb show, proving once again, that the phrase “Restoration drama” is by no means synonymous with comedy of manners. The editor’s introduction also provides for scholars and students alike useful information on the Restoration stage, and the most thorough biographical material on Polwhele to date.
-Deborah C. Payne, Professor of Literature, American University

ANN HOLLINSHEAD HURLEY is Professor of English Emerita at Wagner College. Her publications include John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (2005), Women Editing/Editing Women: Early Modern Women Writers and the New Textualism (co-edited with Chanita Goodblatt 2009), So Rich a Tapestry: The Sister Arts and Cultural Studies (co-edited with Kate Greenspan 1995), and journal articles on Donne’s poetry and on early modern women writers.