"Then I cannot but take the Freedom to say
... you impose upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness of
manner and purpose which must have given Catharine a certain air of
priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, perhaps, but very strange in that
loose theatre of William III.

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her complaining to the
Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that she has become "the mark of ill
Nature" through recommending herself "by what the other Sex think their
peculiar Prerogative"--that is, intellectual distinction. Catharine
Trotter was still only nineteen years of age when she produced her
tragedy of _Fatal Friendship_, the published copy of which (1698) is all
begarlanded with evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a
succession of "applausive copies" of verses. In these we are told that
she had "checked the rage of reigning vice that had debauched the
stage." This was an allusion to the great controversy then just raised
by Jeremy Collier in his famous _Short View of the Immorality and
Profaneness of the Stage_, in which all the dramatists of the day were
violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter has the
courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do so without quarrelling
with her male colleagues. She takes the side of the decent women.

"You as your Sex's champion art come forth
To fight their quarrel and assert their worth,"

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds:--

"You stand the first of stage-reformers too."

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with virtue and at
vindicating the right of woman to assume "the tragic laurel."

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career of our
bluestocking. _Fatal Friendship_ enjoyed a success which Catharine
Trotter was not to taste again, and of all her plays it is the only one
which has ever been reprinted. It is very long and extremely
sentimental, and written in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries
said that it placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in
company with Congreve and Granville "the polite," who had written a
_She-Gallants_, which was everything that Miss Trotter did not wish her
plays to be. _Fatal Friendship_ has an ingenious plot, in which the
question of money takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost
every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. Felicia,
sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain he