Posterity has embraced eighteenth-century playwright Hannah Cowley as a “laughing feminist,” who couched in comic form an advocacy of women’s liberation — especially liberation from the potential tyranny of marriage — that Mary Wollstonecraft later advanced. Yet Cowley was also a realist, willing to adapt her plays to suit the tenor of the times and the anticipated mood of her audience. Her caution is evident in her biggest box-office hit, The Belle’s Stratagem, a witty reordering of George Farquar’s early eighteenth-century comedy, The Beaux’ Stratagem.

The Belle’s Stratagem ends with its hero, Doricourt, delivering a stilted paean to female modesty, couched in the language of patriotism:

“My charming bride! It was a strange perversion of taste that led me to consider the delicate timidity of your deportment as the mark of an uninformed mind, or inelegant manners. I feel now, it is to that innate modesty English husbands owe a felicity the married men of other nations are strangers to. It is a sacred veil to your own charms; it is the surest bulwark to your husband’s honour, and cursed be the hour – should it ever arrive — in which British ladies shall sacrifice to foreign graces the grace of modesty.” (Act Five, Scene Five)

The comment must have been reassuring to a male audience, but it runs counter to the play’s celebration of spirited women who seek equality with men, and for whom modesty, at best, was a minor virtue. Indeed, Letitia, the bride-to-be, has to put aside the veil of modesty to achieve her ends. The puzzle is not that Brock University Drama professor Gyllian Raby – who, assisted by Nicholas Leno, adapted and directed the play under review here – took the passage out, but that Cowley put the passage in.

The historical context suggests why she did. The Belle’s Stratagem was first performed at the Covent Garden Theatre on 22 February 1780 (Raby’s adaption is from a later version). To borrow a phrase from our current queen, 1780 was an annus horribilis. Britain was losing the war against its rebellious subjects in North America. There were lingering fears of a French invasion — not just of French manners and morals and venereal diseases (those were bad enough) — but a literal invasion of the French army. To support a war on several fronts required unprecedented government borrowing. As Britain’s national debt soared to dizzying levels, many predicted national ruin.

Economic hardship, caused by the disruption of trade, drove social conflict. Three months after the first performance of The Belle’s Stratagem, the Gordon Riots – the most violent episode of bloodletting in eighteenth-century Britain — erupted in London. Triggered and initially sustained by rabid anti-Catholicism, the riots tipped into class warfare, as the houses and business of the rich were plundered and set ablaze.

In such troubled times, theatre offered a kind of sanctuary and distraction. Anodyne sentimental comedy with a patriotic bent, not angry social and political satire, was what the theatre-going public apparently wanted. And although playwrights like Richard Sheridan and Hannah Cowley resisted the pressure, they were not immune from it. Or at least their resistance to it was carefully coded. In the rap finale of her adaption, Raby, compares their dilemma to that of the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Gyllian Raby is not bound by the same constraints. By re-historicizing Hannah Cowley, she is able to liberate her message. Cowley’s hesitant feminism is sharpened in Raby’s adaption. And shifting the play’s locale from eighteenth-century London to twenty-first century Toronto, Raby adds biting commentary – much of it delivered through choruses of rap music – on the ravaging cultural and economic effects of unfettered financial capitalism, which goes well beyond Cowley’s predictable tut-tutting about the vulgar spending displays of England’s nabobs.

Rapping squeegee kids set the tone in the prologue. (Some words of explanation for those readers of BSECS Criticks who don’t happen to live in Ontario. Squeegee kids are disadvantaged youngsters who clean the windscreens of cars stuck in Toronto’s notoriously sticky traffic, before demanding payment from the driver. Some condemn the squeegee kids as a criminal nuisance. Others praise them for showing entrepreneurial pluck in a city where it’s calculated that 30% of children live below the poverty line. One strongly suspects that Raby is in the second camp.)

Mixing rap music with formal eighteenth-century drama sounds depressingly like a sterile post-modern conceit. But it works wonderfully well in this instance, partly because Raby is the director of the play she adapted. She directs an exuberant student cast who seem just as much at home mincing through the formalities of a masqued ball as they do gyrating to the strains of Rick Ross, Lil’ Mama, and Salt ’n’ Pepa.

I have no bricks to chuck, only bouquets to the following:

Katelyn Lander, as the glamorous and cynical widow, Mrs Racket. Lander’s brilliance threatens to steal the show in the first act, but she mutes her performance in the second.

Emily Ferrier, as Letitia Hardy, whose stratagem to win the love of her fiancé Doricourt drives the plot. Her gymnastic contortions give bodily expression to her moral ones.

Chloe Coye, as Lady Frances Touchwood, that staple of eighteenth-century comedy: the Country Wife, encountering the corruptions of the big city. In the Raby version, she hails from Newfoundland (not Shropshire) and she has the accent to prove it.

Daryl Hunter, as Doricourt. Unconvincing at first as the young sophisticate, fresh from the Grand Tour, he grows into the part. His feigned madness scene is comedic gold.

Angelina Colosimo, as Kitty Willis. A marginal “woman of soiled reputation” in Cowley, she becomes in the Raby adaption, a self-confident, pole-dancing hooker with plenty to say about the sexual double standard.

Sean Cottrell, as Courtall, is creepily authentic as a vile (albeit ineffectual) seducer.

Finally, kudos to scenographer Kelly Wolf, whose set resembles a giant QR code, the perfect emblem for societies engaged in hectic getting and spending.

It’s a pity that this production is a piece of theatrical ephemera, limited to just four performances. It will, however, enjoy an afterlife on social media. (Check out http://keepingupwithmrsracket.com) One can only hope that others are inspired to explore dramatically just how invitingly Hannah Cowley’s concerns mesh with our own.

Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem ran from November 13th to November 15th at the Sean O’Sullivan Theatre, Brock University.

John Sainsbury is Professor Emeritus, History at Brock University.