Mary Pix (1666–1720)

Heather Ladd, University of Galway
June 2024

A playwright, poet, and one-time novelist, Mary Pix (1666–1709) is worthy of closer examination as a professional women writer working in London during the late Restoration and early eighteenth century. Minimal details about her personal life are available, but we know something of her professional activities from her publications and the period’s limited theatrical records. She was most active as a dramatist, writing at least eight and as many as twelve plays. Several unsigned works in her style have led to disagreement among scholars regarding authorial attribution. Most concur that she penned four tragedies: Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks (1696); Queen Catharine; or, The Ruines of Love (1698); The False Friend; or, the Fate of Disobedience (1699); The Double Distress (1701); and four comedies: The Spanish Wives (1696), The Innocent Mistress (1697), The Deceiver Deceived (1697), and The Beau Defeated; or, the Lucky Younger Brother (1700).

Pix did not hail from London, where all her plays premiered, but lived at least part-time in the metropolis when actively writing for the stage. She was born in 1666 in Nettlebed, a village in Oxfordshire, England. Her father, Roger Griffith, was a clergyman and educator who died before his daughter married. According to Giles Jacob’s Poetical Register, her mother, Lucy Berriman, was “descended from a very considerable Family” (203), although much about her family is unverified. From our limited knowledge of Pix’s background, we can surmise she came from respectability but not affluence. Although her father is sometimes identified as the headmaster of The Royal Latin School in Buckingham, we know nothing of Pix’s formal education. Her plays, however, suggest a knowledge of and interest in history and literature for which she was rarely credited. Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of Turks, a historical tragedy, was her first play to be produced, premiering in 1696 at the Dorset Garden Theatre. While Pix apologizes in her preface for mislabelling her eponymous hero, who should be Ibrahim the Twelfth, she defends the play’s content in the prologue, declaring, “This Play on solid History depends.” Pix may have had writerly ambitions prior to this debut, as her dedication to The Spanish Wives, also produced in 1696 at Dorset Garden, advertises her early affinity for letters. She addresses Colonel Tipping of Whitfield, presumably an old family friend, who had “known me from my Childhood, and my Inclination to Poetry.” Her learning included continental works such as Giovanni Boccacio’s Decameron (1353) either in its original Italian or in translation, as she drew on the second book’s eighth day to produce a narrative poem in heroic couplets, Violenta: or the Rewards of Virtue (1704). The prologue of her Queen Catharine, a tragedy centred on the women of the War of Roses, references both Holinshed and Shakespeare, positioning Pix among other writers of history.

Pix’s marriage preceeded her playwrighting career. She wed at eighteen to George Pix, a Kentish merchant tailor, on 25 July 1684 at St. Benet Fink Parish in London. As was her protégé Susanna Centlivre after her, Pix was deeply interested in marriage, a life-changing institution for women of all social classes. Lorna Sage notes the thematic prevalence of “forced or unhappy marriages” (500) within Pix’s comedies, several of which were quite successful with London theatregoers. Although we have minimal information about Pix’s household, we do know that she had at least one child with her husband. Their first son, George Pix, born in 1689, was buried in 1690 at the cemetery in Hawkhurst in Kent. The couple returned to London shortly after and a second son, William, was baptized at St. Andrew Holborn on 12 November 1691. The Pixes were living in Southampton Buildings at this time, a short distance from Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre. No further record of son William has been found. On 6 June 1709, shortly after his wife’s death, George Pix, widower of St. Clement Parish, would sign an allegation of his intention to marry Sarah How of the same parish. Mary Pix was buried at St. Clement Danes 19 May 1709. Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body was chosen for a benefit night at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in support of her will’s executor (according to the Daily Courant, 28 May 1709), or in support of the family (according to the Post Boy, 28 May 1709).

Pix wrote for the stage at a time when female authors were regularly contributing to the English repertoire, and even standing together in print; mutual support rather than competition characterized the relationship between the women playwrights alongside whom Pix worked. Pix wrote the dedicatory verses “To Mrs. Manley, upon her Tragedy call’d The Royal Mischief,” using heroic couplets to underscore her fellow playwright’s authorial heroism, and praising as her as “the Pride of our Sex, and Glory of the Stage.” Such endorsements in print were traded among Pix and her allies, who included Catherine Trotter and Delariver Manley; this trio of influential female playwrights were infamously immortalized in the anonymous satiric rehearsal play, The Female Wits (1696). Unfortunately, conclusions about Pix’s habits, appearance, and personality have been uncritically drawn from her caricature, Mrs. Wellfed. Valerie Rumbold notes that Pix appears in a draft version of The Dunciad and theorizes sources of Alexander Pope’s poetic ire.

Pix was a great supporter of her performers, and understanding her artistry is dependent on an awareness of England’s expanding culture of stage celebrity. Her successful plays were star vehicles, and when she moved playhouses to Lincoln’s Inn Fields, she repeatedly showcased the talents of Elizabeth Barry and Anne Bracegirdle, accommodating the age of this professional pair by centring narrative interest on older women, often widows, rather than young ingenues. Barry’s Bellinda/Marianne and Bracegirdle’s Mrs. Beauclair are characters in The Innocent Mistress who challenge stereotypes of female sexual rivalry. Pix created some of Barry’s best-known roles, including the comic heroine Mrs. Rich in The Beau Defeated. Mining this play’s potential for feminist humour, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged an adaptation of this play in 2018, rechristening it The Fantastic Follies of Mrs. Rich.

As did most of her contemporaries, Pix adopted multiple forms and genres and reworked earlier texts. The Beau Defeated, for example, is an intelligent restyling of Florent Carleton Dancourt’s 1687 Le Chevalier a la Mode. She was proficient in the art of poetic encomia, a genre to which she consistently returned. Her first publication, under the initials M.P., was prefatory verses to Sylvia’s Revenge; or, A Satyr against Man (1688), attributed to Richard Ames. In 1700, she joined Trotter and Manley in The Nine Muses to celebrate the life and works of the late poet laureate John Dryden. Again signing her lines as M.P., Pix writes as Clio, the “historick Muse.” Her only known work of published prose fiction is The Inhuman Cardinal; or Innocence Betray’d (1696), a novella set in Rome. Featuring a series of love stories told in aid of seduction, and melodramatic events including a false wedding, poisoning, and final repentance, Pix’s book looks backward to Renaissance tragedy and forward to developments in the novel form. She begins with a dedicatory epistle to Princess Anne of Denmark, which Laura R. Runge reads as reflecting “the changing attitude towards the ideals of femininity” (370).

Pix’s allegiance to Queen Anne, whom she celebrates as a powerful maternal figure, is explicit in her last published work, “A Poem, Humbly Inscrib’d to the Lords Commissioners for the Union of the Two Kingdoms” (1707). Unlike these adulatory verses, her plays were less straightforward politically, containing both Whig and Tory perspectives. Pix was often explicitly didactic in her paratexts and implicitly so in her plots; in her storyworlds, she blended public and private action. Sonia Villegas observes how in Pix’s writing, “sexual corruption mirrors political corruption” (235). Susan Staves identifies a strain of anti-libertine masculinity in her dramas, which generally champion middle-class English values. Her protofeminism is a debated point, as some literary critics regard Pix as less progressive than her female playwrighting peers. Jacqueline Pearson notes Pix’s “assuming of male viewpoints and stereotypes” (201) while others, like Jean Marsden, who analyzes Pix’s commercial appeal, recognize both anti-feminist elements in her writing and her sympathetic portray of women characters.

Her writing regularly returns to southern Catholic countries, this region a longstanding hotbed of passion in the English cultural imagination. Pix sets her 1699 tragedy The False Friend; or The Fate of Disobedience on the Italian island of Sardinia. Following in the footsteps of Aphra Behn, she set her first comedy, The Spanish Wives, in the home of intrigue comedy, Spain. Kathyrn Lowerre distinguishes this three-act farce for its many musical interludes. Pix incorporated dance and songs, several by the prolific composer John Eccles (1668–1735), into her plays. Pix’s Anglocentric representations of foreign people are formulaic, and in the case of Ibrahim, racist, associating as she does the exoticized “East” with sexual profligacy.

The quality and morality of Pix’s writing was doubted in her own time, her gender attracting undue scrutiny of her style and content. She is criticized in a fictional dialogue, A Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702), published anonymously but attributed to Charles Gildon. One speaker, “Critic,” dismisses Pix to his interlocutor “Sullen” as a bad poet with a poor ear; he also refers to her “bawdy Ibrahim” (82), echoing Jeremy Collier’s recent moralistic attack on the theatre. She was personally involved in a fight over intellectual property with George Powell, a playwright, manager, and actor who had appeared in The Innocent Mistress. After rejecting her comedy The Deceiver Deceived, he plagiarized it as The Imposture Defeated, or, A Trick to Cheat the Devil (1697). Many theatre people, including William Congreve, took Pix’s side in this dispute; without recourse to the law, she had her own original play produced and published, adding a scathing prologue that tells the story of “Our Authoress who shew'd her Play / To some, who, like true Wits, stole’t half away.”

Pix’s plays—particularly her comedies, regarded as superior to her tragedies—were not much revived in the decades following her death, but are now often included in anthologies of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama. Pix is especially important as a transitional figure, connecting both periods of theatrical production. Generically and stylistically, she arguably belongs to the Restoration; several of Pix’s plays were “she-tragedies,” a popular subgenre at the turn of the century. These include Queen Catherine (1698) and The Double Distress (1701), the latter play signed by Pix; both tragedies foregrounded heroic female suffering, as did Ibrahim, which includes an offstage sexual assault and onstage self-inflicted violence. Pix’s comedies, such as The Beau Defeated, considered by James E. Evans alongside Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), mark a transition to eighteenth-century comic sensibilities. Pix retains the verbal sparring of the Restoration “gay couple” while moving away from explicit Carolean sexuality and towards cleaner reform plots. Theatre scholars now appreciate her artistic acuity, namely her grasp of dramatic trends and clever use of her “best theatrical resource” (Evans 22)—the Barry and Bracegirdle acting partnership.

The National Portrait Gallery in London holds the only known image of Mary Pix, a painting circa 1690 by an unknown hand, and acquired with a portrait of George Pix, “on the grounds that husbands should not be separated from their wives.”