"I Am a Woman, I Am Quite Aware of My Own Capabilities": The Distinctive Voice of Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa on Love, Marriage, and Freedom

Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa (1705-1753) wrote for her own theater, cast actors from her own family court, introduced tragedies, comedies, one-act plays and ballets and could be called "the mother of Polish theater." My focus will be upon the fact that she found her own voice by challenging traditional expectations, and that she advocated for personal freedom in her plays, poetry, and prose. She transgressed the limitations placed upon women of the time, since rather than being limited by conventional forms of expression and behavior expected of women in her place and time, she found a different form of private and public expression. Being a playwright was not her only contribution. Franciszka Urszula Radziwiłłowa founded the longest running courtly center of theater at Nieśwież and constructed the building housing the archive there. In the end, in the words of Karol Estreicher, "it is a remarkable thing that only one person, and a woman at that, should have made so bold a move as to override the conventions imposed on poets by the rigors of classicism. " She was a woman who had found her own voice and used it. She wrote, "I am a woman, I am quite aware of my own capabilities," and she used these capabilities to reject the patriarchal culture in which she was living, and to express her own ideas regarding love, marriage, and freedom.