Gender, Theatre and the Origins of Criticism from Dryden to Manley provides a historical account of criticism's emergence between 1660 and 1714 by looking at the critical writings of John Dryden and those of the women of the following generation whose writings his example shaped. Aphra Behn, Catharine Trotter and Delarivier Manley are not the usual figures through whom the history of criticism has been charted; but Dryden himself, while often mentioned, is equally often relegated to the margins in those histories that have taken the periodical essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele as criticism's point of discursive origin. The first part of this book examines the critical enterprise as Dryden undertakes it when he rewrites his Jacobean precursors, in order to argue that, in Dryden's hands, criticism is historical in orientation; this historicism serves in his production – itself an intensely theatrical affair – of a national literary tradition that is transmitted as a lineal inheritance in the vocabulary of poetic genealogy. The second part then looks at the writings of Behn, Trotter and Manley as they claim access through Dryden to this native literary tradition and to the critical discourse whose subsequent histories have written them out. I would thus reconfigure our sense of who contributes to the early development of criticism, and, by redefining the conditions of its emergence, make accessible to observation hitherto overlooked aspects of criticism's legacy.