Mary Pix

01 January 1666 - 19 May 1709

Standard Name: Pix, Mary

Birth Name: Mary Griffith

Married Name: Mary Pix

MP , writing and publishing at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, was the most prolific female playwright since Behn . Her comedies, full of fun and acute observation of human vagaries, depend more on stagecraft, situation, and plotting than on verbal wit, and are unusually sympathetic to the non-upper classes. As well as both comedies and tragedies, MP wrote poems and a novel.

Full profile

Connections

Connections Sort descending	Author name	Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships	Viola Tree	Throughout her life, VT took direction from her father, the actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , who had abandoned his job in the family corn-trading business to pursue a career on stage, and had changed...
Friends, Associates	Susanna Centlivre	SC 's friends included the dramatist George Farquhar , the actress Anne Oldfield , the writers Abel Boyer , Tom Brown , Sarah Fyge , Sarah, Lady Piers , and all the other women writing...
Friends, Associates	Delarivier Manley	The early years of Queen Anne 's reign found DM bitterly divided by politics from most of the women she had written and collaborated with: Centlivre , Pix and Trotter , as well as Fyge. Manley, Delarivier. “Introduction”. New Atalantis, edited by Ros Ballaster, Pickering and Chatto, 1991, p. v - xxviii. xiii
Intertextuality and Influence	Susanna Centlivre	SC is said to have received help and support in the writing of her early plays from Mary Pix .
Literary responses	Delarivier Manley	This was a humorous rather than a vicious attack; but of the three women targeted (Trotter and Pix as well as DM ), she took the heaviest fire.
Textual Features	Delarivier Manley	The Lost Lover is remembered for its satirised learned lady, Orinda (whose role, however, is slight). This Orinda has been interpreted (probably wrongly) as a portrait of Katherine Philips , who had been famous under...
Textual Production	Delarivier Manley	She contributed two poems of her own: written as Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and comic muse. The other contributors were Sarah Fyge , Sarah, Lady Piers , Mary Pix , and Catharine Trotter .
Textual Production	Sarah Fyge	SF published her Poems on Several Occasions, with prefatory verses probably by Mary Pix and Susanna Centlivre . This text is available on line from the Women Writers Project , www.wwp.northeastern.edu. Foxon, David F. English Verse 1701-1750. Cambridge University Press, 1975, 2 vols. Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre. Duke University Press, 1952. 31-2
Textual Production	Catharine Trotter	CT contributed an epilogue to Mary Pix 's tragedy Queen Catharine; or, The Ruines of Love. Greer, Germaine et al., editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago, 1988. 411 The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968, 5 vols. 1: 496-7

Timeline

About 1349-1351

Giovanni Boccaccio worked at his cycle of tales entitled (from the fact that the stories are told over the course of ten days) the Decameron. It was first translated into English in 1620.

Bozman, Ernest Franklin, editor. Everyman’s Encyclopaedia. 4th Edition, J. M. Dent, 1958, 12 vols.

27 October 2009

In Washington, DC, the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Washington Shakespeare Company together launched a Sort-of-Jane-Austen Play Reading Festival presenting women playwrights.

“Sort-of-Jane Austen Play Reading Festival”. Washington Shakespeare Company.

Texts

Pix, Mary. Ibrahim, The Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks. John Harding and Richard Wilkin, 1696.

Pix, Mary. Queen Catharine; or, The Ruines of Love. William Turner and Richard Basset, 1698.

Pix, Mary. The Adventures in Madrid. William Turner, James Knapton, Bernard Lantot, and B. Bragg, 1706.

Pix, Mary. The Beau Defeated; or, The Lucky Younger Brother. W. Turner and R. Basset, 1700.

Pix, Mary. The Conquest of Spain. Richard Wellington, 1705.

Pix, Mary. The Czar of Muscovy. B.B. Lintott, 1701.

Pix, Mary. The Deceiver Deceived. R. Basset, 1698.

Pix, Mary. The Different Widows; or, Intrigue all-a-Mode. Henry Playford and Bernard Lintott, 1703.

Pix, Mary. The Double Distress. R. Wellington, 1701.

Pix, Mary. The False Friend; or, the Fate of Disobedience. Richard Basset, 1699.

Pix, Mary. The Inhumane Cardinal; or, Innocence Betray’d. J. Harding and Richard Wilkin, 1696.

Pix, Mary. The Innocent Mistress. J. Orme for R. Basset and F. Cogan, 1697.

Pix, Mary. The Spanish Wives. R. Wellington, 1696.

Pix, Mary. Violenta; or, The Rewards of Virtue. John Nutt, 1704.