Mary Pix

-
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.
Painting of Mary Pix by an unknown artist, c. 1690. She wears a beige gown, loose and low on her bare shoulders, and a brown shawl. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections 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 Catharine Trotter
CT contributed an epilogue to Mary Pix 's tragedy Queen Catharine; or, The Ruines of Love.
Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, editors. Kissing the Rod. Virago, 1988.
411
The London Stage 1660-1800. Southern Illinois University Press, 1960–1968.
1: 496-7
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.
Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs Centlivre. Duke University Press, 1952.
31-2

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.
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.

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.