The Belle‘s Stratagem

Hannah Cowley‘s The Belle‘s Stratagem (1780) is a brilliant late-eighteenth-century comedy of manners that reworks the spirit of Farquhar‘s The Beaux‘ Stratagem for a world increasingly shaped by sensibility, female accomplishment, and the marriage market. Its heroine, Letitia Hardy, determines to win the indifferent Doricourt not by passive submission but through performance, disguise, and psychological acuity. Written in sparkling theatrical prose, the play combines Restoration wit with sentimental comedy, exposing the social rituals through which women must negotiate desire, reputation, and agency. Cowley, one of the most successful women dramatists of the Georgian stage, wrote for a competitive theatrical culture that often confined female authors to moral or domestic subjects. Her own alertness to gendered expectation informs the play‘s lively intelligence. Having entered drama with remarkable confidence, she understood both the pleasures of theatrical artifice and the precarious position of women seeking public authority, making Letitia‘s strategic self-fashioning especially revealing. This play is highly recommended to readers interested in eighteenth-century theatre, proto-feminist comedy, and the history of courtship as social performance. It remains amusing, elegant, and intellectually sharp.