This dissertation shows that early modern female playwrights were shaped by and helped to shape commercial literary marketplaces that were increasingly affected by the rise of credit, shifting exchange values, and unstable notions of trust, interest, and economic motivation. By looking at how their plays appropriated and responded to financial language present in popular forms of publications such as pamphlets, ballads, and accounting guidebooks, we find that female playwrights understood the discourse of credit in ways that were particularly important for female readers and theatergoers and employed it in their writing for the stage. My study illustrates how their plays represent credit as always inherently tied to the potential risk involved in the “business” of being a woman on the marriage market, a mother with a fortune to pass on, or a widow with a business to maintain. In this project, I analyze the city comedies of Aphra Behn, the pseudonymous Ariadne, Mary Pix, and Susanna Centlivre and conclude that their works constitute a narrative bridge between the financial discourse that appears before them in conduct books and advice manuals of the Restoration and after them in the eighteenth-century novel. Making these women and their London comedies a focal point, we can see how they employed the period’s financial discourse to highlight the problems associated with broken promises, counterfeit wills, and the supposed power of contract. My research demonstrates how these playwrights and their works play a critical role in accounting for the trajectory of financial discourse in eighteenth-century culture and literature prior to the “birth” of the English novel. “Risky Business” moves beyond a discussion of female investors or money in literature and, instead, offers a more nuanced understanding of the ways women writers were impacted by the rise of paper credit outside of and prior to fiction. The research presented in this project offers a new account of the way early modern female readers, writers, and theatergoers, were influenced by an increasingly complex financial discourse, a more detailed understanding of the relationship between economic and literary history, and a new way of conceptualizing the commercial female playwright.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This thesis centers on a country that has produced some of the greatest and most important English language dramas of the past two centuries. Within this cultural context, this thesis is also about a feminine revival in Irish theatre and how this can be a powerful tool to incite change. Early in history, Irish writers, and specifically dramatists, recreated a type of theatre that captured the true essence of what it meant to be Irish by representing their struggles, frustrations and humor. The Irish talent for storytelling connects back to its Gaelic roots and has remained a constant in the life of a culture that has passed down this art form for centuries. The focus of this thesis is to examine three contemporary Irish plays by prominent playwrights who came to the world of theatre from very different backgrounds. Each play is written by a different hand, yet all share a vital common denominator: the interaction of female character groups – groups that are central to the action of each play. What incited my interest in these three plays – Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone and Marina Carr’s The Mai – was the playwright’s ability to expose what had been silenced in Irish history for so long. Each female character portrays one important aspect of Irish womanhood that has been tragically understated in the nation’s literature since the death of John Millington Synge: woman’s struggle between what she wants to be and who she is expected to be. These three plays will be scrutinized in terms of three elements of social control contributing to woman’s struggle in Irish society: myth, church and patriarchal tradition.