“Safely then She Ventures”: The Discourse of Credit, Female Dramatists, and Risk-Free Investment on the Restoration Stage

“The Art of laying out your Money Wisely must be one of a woman’s greatest cares.”

—The Whole Duty of a Woman . . . Written by a Lady (1696)

The goal of this essay is to move beyond a discussion of individual female investors or money in literature and instead offer a nuanced understanding of the ways female dramatists were influenced (directly and indirectly) by the rise of paper credit outside of and prior to fiction. She Ventures and He Wins (1695) has heretofore received almost no scholarly attention, and it is my hope to provide a critical reading of the play within the historical and economic context of its performance and publication. At stake in this project is a more thorough account of the way early modern women—as readers, writers, and theatergoers—responded to 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.

The pseudonymous Ariadne entered London’s theater world after Aphra Behn and was a contemporary of the Female Wits (Manley, Pix, and Trotter).¹ We know nothing about her, and she left just one published play, She Ventures, and He Wins, a 1695 comedy that shows the influence of Behn and draws on the marriage plot typical of city comedies in Restoration drama. No contemporary descriptions of its production have been found, but the general conclusion has been that the play failed to attract a large enough audience to secure a second performance. Max Novak speculates that this failure caused the theater to shut down until December (51).The only reference to the play’s reception after performance is a manuscript news report attached to The Post Boy issue for 17–19 September 1695, which reads, “The new playhouse in Lincoln Inns Fields is Shut up the last New play Not taking brot. In by Mrs Barry called She ventures and he Wins” (cited in Novak 51–52). With this contemporary reference to Barry, one might think other papers would have mentioned the play as well, but this is unfortunately not the case.

If we are to understand that the failure of the stage performance was enough to shut down the theater for several months afterward, then it is important to remember that the play still managed to get published the following year in at least three separate runs.² That is, these two facts point to some sort of discrepancy in the reception of the playwright’s work. By contemporary standards of performance, the play failed to “take in” an audience big enough to warrant a repeat production. However, the printer deemed it worth publishing the next year. The seeming inconsistency in the reception of the play by theatergoers and readers reveals the difficulty we face in discussing the success or failure of dramatic writing during this period.

Despite the play’s alleged inability to please audiences at the theater—or quite possibly the reason it did not please them—was that it provided a powerful image of a kind of woman not yet seen on the stage: an economically independent woman who is young, attractive, virtuous, and has the freedom to choose her own husband. ³ Focusing on the connection between women’s economic agency and the speculative discourse of credit, I will show how Ariadne’s work constitutes an aspect of what Marc Shell has described as “larger literary structures of exchange that can be comprehended in terms of economic form” (7). I argue that women’s economic agency and the discourse of credit were inextricably linked in women’s dramatic writing in the late-seventeenth century and that this connection is seen most clearly in the representation of women working together to ensure financial competence and a working knowledge of monetary functions.

The 1690s witnessed the first large wave of texts that concerned themselves with the rise of credit and made use of its discourse. The Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the subsequent succession of William of Orange engendered a...