Elizabeth Cooper's The Rival Widows, or Fair Libertine provides a unique opportunity to restore to scholarly and pedagogical attention a neglected female writer and a play with broad and significant implications for studies of eighteenth-century history, culture and gender. Following the adventures of Lady Bellair, a "glowing, joyous young Widow," the storyline regenders standard expectations about desire, marriage, libertinism and sentiment. The play has not been reprinted since 1735; therefore this old-spelling edition gives scholars access to an important but neglected resource for studies of women writers and eighteenth-century theatre. In an original and extensive introduction, Tiffany Potter presents cultural and historical information that highlights the scholarly implications of this newly available play. She offers a brief biographical sketch of the playwright; a summary of sources for specific elements of the play; an overview of the theatrical climate of the time (with particular focus on the conditions leading to the Licensing Act of 1737); a discussion of the place of women in eighteenth-century society; a summary of symbiotic cultural discourses of libertinism and sensibility in the early eighteenth century; and a discussion of the general cultural significance of Cooper's demonstration of the malleability of prescriptive gender roles. Further value is added to this edition through its appendices, which reproduce documents relating to the playwright Elizabeth Cooper and to the Licensing Act of 1737 (including the text of the Act itself).

'This edition also offers relevant and useful historical materials, such as an early review of The Rival Widows, arguments for and against the Licensing Act, the actual text of the Act, and Cooper’s preface to the anthology of poetry she edited, etc. The explanatory footnotes accompanying the comedy are painstakingly thorough; the elucidation of allusions provides a trove of information about eighteenth-century daily life. [...]Potter’s editorial approach to presenting this comedy to contemporary readers is to preserve absolute fidelity to the first and only printing of The Rival Widows.' Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research

Tiffany Potter teaches English at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her research addresses issues of gender, sexuality, and race in the eighteenth-century, with special interest in cultures of libertinism in England and ideas of femininity and indigeneity in North America.