Hannah Cowley - Controversy With Hannah More

Controversy With Hannah More

Who’s the Dupe? and Albina encountered difficulties in production. The new manager of Drury Lane, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, shelved The Runaway for most of the 1777 season. Miffed, Cowley sent Albina to Drury Lane’s rival theatre in London, Covent Garden, but it met with no better reception there, and the script alternated between the theatres for the next two years. Meanwhile, Sheridan agreed to produce Who’s the Dupe? but delayed its 1779 première until late spring, an unprofitable time for a new play to open.

The production of Albina generated public controversy for Cowley. At the same time this play was bouncing between Drury Lane and Covent Garden, writer Hannah More’s plays Percy (1777) and ‘’Fatal Falsehood’’ (1779) opened at Covent Garden. While watching Percy aroused Cowley’s suspicions, Fatal Falsehood confirmed Cowley’s belief that More plagiarized from Albina.

As Cowley later wrote in her preface to the printed edition of Albina, hers and More’s plays do indeed have “wonderful resemblances.” Fatal Falsehood’s opening on 6 May 1779, was followed by charges (perhaps written by Thomas Cowley) in the press that More stole her ideas from Cowley. On 10 August, More wrote to the St. James Chronicle to protest that she “never saw, heard, or read, a single line of Mrs. Cowley’s Tragedy.” In her preface to Albina, Cowley allows that the theatre managers, who in those days also acted as script editors, may have inadvertently given More her ideas: “Amidst the croud of Plots, and Stage Contrivances, in which a Manager is involv’d, recollection is too frequently mistaken for the suggestions of imagination” .

Although she continued to enjoy a brilliant literary career, More did not write for the stage after her paper war with Cowley. Albina finally opened on 31 July 1779, at the Haymarket, a summer theatre more practiced in staging comedies. It was neither a financial nor a critical success.