matrimony were extremely limited. A stage career, connected with a
certain degree of infamy, had been open to the sex since Restoration
times, and writing for the theatre had been successfully practiced by
Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Centlivre, Mrs. Pix, and Mrs. Davys. The
first two female playwrights mentioned had produced beside their
dramatic works a number of pieces of fiction, and Mrs. Mary Hearne, Mrs.
Jane Barker, and Mrs. Sarah Butler had already gained a milder notoriety
as _romancières_. Poetry, always the elegant amusement of polite
persons, had not yet proved profitable enough to sustain a woman of
letters. Eliza Haywood was sufficiently catholic in her taste to attempt
all these means of gaining reputation and a livelihood, and tried in
addition a short-lived experiment as a publisher. Beside these literary
pursuits we know not what obscure means for support she may have found
from time to time.

Her first thought, however, was apparently of the theatre, where she had
already made her debut on the stage of the playhouse in Smock Alley
(Orange Street), Dublin during the season of 1715, as Chloe in "Timon of
Athens; or, the Man-Hater."[7] One scans the _dramatis personae_ of
"Timon" in vain for the character of Chloe, until one recalls that the
eighteenth century had no liking for Shakespeare undefiled. The version
used by the Theatre Royal was, of course, the adaptation by Thomas
Shadwell, in which Chloe appears chiefly in Acts II and III as the maid
and confidant of the courtesan Melissa. Both parts were added by Og. The
rôle of Cleon was taken by Quin, later an interpreter of Mrs. Haywood's
own plays. But if she formed a connection with either of the London
theatres after leaving her husband, the engagement was soon broken off,
and her subsequent appearances as an actress in her comedy of "A Wife to
be Lett" (1723) and in Hatchett's "Rival Father" (1730) were due in the
one case to an accident and in the other to her friendship for the