This essay is called The unnatural learned woman: an examination of patterns in the portraying of the learned woman in theatre history and it examines what patterns in the portraying of learned women that can be found in theatre history, by looking at a few selected dramatic plays, with a time span that goes from ancient Greece to the 1980s. The term "learned woman" includes women with knowledge that is comparable with educated knowledge, such as philosophy, science and mathematics, law, politics and so on, and knowledge that gives the woman social power, like wit or strategic thinking. I also discuss how the concept of knowledge is looked upon, and how eligible knowledge is a social construction, by using Foucault’s Power/knowledge: selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977. The plays I have read are the following: Antigone (442 BCE) by Sophocles, Medea (431 BCE) by Euripides, The Learned Ladies (1672) by Molière, True women (1883) by Anne Charlotte Leffler, Hedda Gabler (1890) by Henrik Ibsen and Top Girls (1982) by Caryl Churchill. Given the macro-historic perspective that I am using, it follows that I am not doing an in-depth survey that covers every part of the history, but rather a search for long-term trends or patterns that are used when establishing the learned woman in relation to prevailing gender structures. My theoretical question is the following: What patterns can be found in the portraying of "the learned woman" in the history of Western theatre, and what do they say about the connection between gender and knowledge and power and knowledge? I discuss the results of my analyzes in three aspects: the contrast of the "learned woman" and the "natural woman", the rise and fall of the learned woman and whether the learned woman is forced to start acting like a natural woman in the end of the plays.