Claire Bowditch
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Claire Bowditch’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
She was the most successful, but yes, by the time that she started writing for the stage in 1670, 1671, there were at least two other women around at that time.
The first was Frances Boothby, who wrote a tragicomedy.
As Ros said, that's where Ben started her dramatic career.
The one who came either slightly after or about the same time as Ben was Elizabeth Polwill.
But as far as we know, they both only had one play performed, whereas Ben ran for two decades nearly.
Indeed, she started with tragicomedy.
And in 1673, for her third play, she moved to comedy.
The third play was definitely a trial in comedy.
She hadn't quite got the sense of space and how the stage worked down at that point.
And she really continued with comedy right the way through her career until just before her death when she returned to one tragicomedy.
And Ravenscroft as well.
I think amongst her immediate colleagues, she does command their respect.
They write prologues and epilogues for her plays, which might be indeed interpreted as some kind of professional compliment.
Even when we get into her prose and some of her translations, she's receiving dedicatory verses from her peers that are extremely complimentary.
That's not to say that everybody was complimentary about her, but...
We don't know exactly where she was living.
We do know that she could keep a servant.
So she had about enough money to keep a servant.
But in terms of her location, we assume she's immediately London-based and probably somewhere near the theatre on the Thames.
But we don't have a location for her.
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