Percy: A Tragedy

Hannah More's 1777 tragedy unfolds in a world where love is weaponized and duty becomes a prison. Elwina, torn between her heart and her father's command, has been forced into marriage with Earl Douglas while her soul belongs to Earl Percy. What begins as a triangle of longing curdles into something far darker: jealousy, misunderstanding, and the fury of two powerful families locked in feudal feud. The play crackles with the tensions of its age, a critique of paternal authority disguised as classical tragedy, where a woman's choices are made for her before she can speak. More, a founder of the Bluestockings and one of the most celebrated women writers of her era, subverts the conventions of her dramatic form, using the machinery of tragedy to examine what happens when society demands the impossible from those it refuses to empower. The deaths come quickly, as they must in any proper tragedy, but they feel less like poetic justice than like a system devouring its own children.