SOURCE: “Marriage and Marrying in Susanna Centlivre's Plays,” in Papers in Language and Literature, Vol. 22, Winter 1986, pp. 16-38.

[In this essay, Frushell surveys the theme of marriage throughout Centlivre's corpus, arguing that her plays reflect major shifts in theatrical style and audience composition from the late Restoration through the early eighteenth century.]

Susanna Freeman Carroll Centlivre was the premiere woman dramatist of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Her reputation and influence in comedy reached through her own century and the next. If her more famous contemporary dramatists, including Aphra Behn of the previous generation, had been alive in 1800 and looked back over the stage successes of their plays, none could boast of four plays so favored as The Busie Body (1709) with 475 London performances, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) with 236, The Wonder (1714) with 232, and The Gamester (1705) with 75. And if the year were moved to 1890, none could claim three plays still performed, and not only in England.¹

When Centlivre wrote her nineteen plays between 1700 and 1722, the Restoration stereotypes were still discernible along with a changed comedy. Her plays use Restoration comedic traditions in plot and theme, intermixing them with that strain of the “new” comedy today called risible and humane. Traditions of the “last age” were largely dead by the time Centlivre died in 1723, and laughing, affable comedy was in the ascendancy during her career. Since she wrote so many plays during these decades, the last years an English audience would tolerate Restoration materials, her dramatic works are a barometer of changing taste and emphasis. The following discussion appraises these changes through an examination of her iterative theme of marriage and marrying, which leads to a new assessment of her proper place in English drama.

Centlivre is the best example of an early eighteenth-century playwright treating marriage problems arising from forced marriage, incarceration of a wife or marriageable daughter, and men who hinder the marriage chase. Centlivre's male leads are basically amiable, regenerate. While their conversion from a mild rakishness is embarrassingly quick and improbable—she is not very concerned with causality—they are never banished from the comic world at play's end, but are part of the reconciliations and festivity. The cynicism of earlier Restoration drama is gone. Most of her young men are like the well-meaning but erring Valere of The Gamester (1705) rather than the more conventionally rakish Belair, the “Rover” of Love at a Venture (1706), a play and characterization Colley Cibber used in his Double Gallant (1707). Yet Belair and his counterpart Ned Freeman in The Artifice (1722) are not of the cynical mold of Carolean comedy, those plays of the first three decades of the Restoration.

Centlivre's women are generally bright, good-hearted, believable, even those with a strong lust for learning, wealth or title. Mrs. Plotwell in The Beau's Duel (1702) is as wordly and jaded as her sisters in Carolean drama but with the difference that she is out to do someone else a favor. Among the few who have a colt's tooth, such as Lady Cautious in Love at a Venture (1706), Lady Pizalta in The Perjur'd Husband (1700), Lady Pizalto in A Wife Well Manag'd (1715), and Mrs. Watchit in The Artifice (1722)—all the same character really—lust is the straightforward attitude of the Wife of Bath and not of Wycherley's Lady Fidget, Centlivre's most charming female, Anne Lovely, has difficulty with sexual urges for Colonel Fainwell near the end of A Bold Stroke (1718), but the matter is tastefully handled. The epilogue to the play, not by Centlivre, has Anne wishing the colonel good in bed. No such sentiment is explicit in any of her plays after the first one, The Perjur'd Husband.

Her women are also a practical lot, who know a good jointure when they see one and who say “Hold!” to lovers wanting to elope, as does Learchus in The Cruel Gift (1717) until Antimora puts the brakes of economic reason on his ardor. Centlivre was personally and professionally attracted to the institution of marriage, but she never allowed her principals to live merrily and merely on love. For Centlivre, who herself joyously gathered in presents of plate, cash, watches, and jewels from friends and dedicatees, the marriage honeymoon ends soon enough.² Lovers must eat, preferably well; her own marriages must have taught her that. Being well married in her works means two things, co-equally: love and a good settlement. At times the task is active pursuit of these, at other times, keeping from being cut off from one's inheritance. Forgiveness, the settlement of financial affairs, and marriage are emphasized at the finale, no matter how improbably.

By far the most significant and ubiquitous personages in her plays are the fathers, guardians, and brothers who stand in the way of young lovers. The outwitting of such obstructing characters is a major activity in her comedies, more than the wooing of a young lady. Wooing here is not fundamental dramatic material as in many earlier Carolean dramatists. Her love-chases center on getting the lovers physically together; they are already emotionally joined. For the young lovers, mutual consent based on love is an accepted premise. The trick, most often, is to get them to the altar with the blessing of the authority figures who hold the purse strings and demand obeisance from their charges whom they keep in a kind of thralldom. Of course the wishes of the lovers themselves figure not at all in the proceedings. A second category of marital problems involves the already married. The usual situation has a young wife subjugated—at times locked up—by an old, foolish husband deserving of being duped. Wayward wives, too, are chastened in the process. In accordance with the old formula, marriage is jail, the husband the jailer. As was the case in early Restoration comedy, Centlivre's plays have palaver over matrimonial woes and the happinesses of money and land within and outside marriage. There is, however, a uniform telos in Centlivre: happiness through married love with financial security. Her tone is upbeat, buoyant.

While her plays have many of the formal features of the drama of the early Restoration, they extend the range and configuration to suit her ambivalent audiences, who, according to Robert D. Hume, “refused to tolerate in new plays what they apparently continued to enjoy in old ones.”³ In technical virtuosity, variation of characters and dramatic types, and good-humored attitude toward her subjects, Centlivre's plays appealed to audiences already leaning toward opera, farce, and that new fiction just on the horizon, the novel. There are many operatic effects in Centlivre's plays (see the opening scene of The Perjur'd Husband and the close of act 2 of The Cruel Gift); and while occasionally capable of rather grand opera in comedy, if that is not oxymoronic, she was equally able to write first-class recitative. For at least these reasons, then, she is remarkable. Her handling of the theme of marriage, the basic stuff of her plays, contributed substantially to the old appellation for her, “Celebrated.”

All the plays are concerned with marriage, eighteen of the nineteen centrally so. Only her one-act, and never performed, Gotham Election (1715) has a different emphasis, politics; but even there we have Lady Worthy, a Tory married to a Whig, who campaigns against her husband. The greatest enemies to marital bliss remain custom, law, and their dramatic embodiments in fathers, guardians, brothers. In a few instances, men are blocked from their freedom in choosing a mate, but usually women are victims, who nonetheless are in rebellion.⁴

In her study of authority in the Restoration, Susan Staves, while explaining sovereignty in the family, gives reasons for the rise of women as persons to be reckoned with. Centlivre, not treated therein, inherited such notions of familial authority as those discussed in Staves's book, which offers then-contemporary evidence from law, philosophy, and literature. The theme of forced marriage is, of course, common in drama from the Renaissance forward. More pertinent to Centlivre, Le mariage forcé (1664) is one of three Molière plays she borrowed from in writing Love's Contrivance. Aphra Behn anticipated Centlivre in several ways, including the use of the theme; Behn's first play in fact was a tragicomedy titled The Forc'd Marriage (1670). A later Behn effort The Town Fop (1676) had as its source George Wilkins's The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1605). As Hume has observed in “Marital Discord,” Behn used the theme in at least ten plays. One of the “petticoat authors” hated in The Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702), Mary Pix, close friend and fellow playwright of Centlivre, in 1696 anticipated her brand of forced marriage in the farce The Spanish Wives. And while he published his Conjugal Lewdness: or, Matrimonial Whoredom many years later (1727), Defoe was just about the time of Centlivre's plays formulating his views of forced marriage, views consonant with those reflected in Centlivre (and some of which Defoe himself anticipated in his early Essay on Projects).

The thwarting of individual choice is Centlivre's major recurring theme, although one not ponderously treated. Each case of marital infidelity, or near-infidelity, is caused by marriages forced by imperious relatives. Most problems involve a woman blocked, at times closeted away, from her beloved. The blocking character is invariably a man who mindlessly, selfishly orders her immediate marriage to a stranger or dolt, often both. “Bequeathed” daughters and forced marriages are everywhere in Centlivre. As Gravello says at the end of act 1 of The Stolen Heiress (1703), “We'll not consult the Women, but force them to their Happiness.”

Beliza in act 1 of Love at a Venture (1706) speaks for all the trapped women: “Tis an unjust Prerogative Parents have got, from which I see no deliverance without an Act of Parliament,” an allusion returned to twice below. Don Lopez of The Wonder (1714) would counter with “it is not a Father's business to follow his Childrens Inclinations till he makes himself a Beggar.” In act 2 of this play Isabella, forced to marry against her will, expresses this plea: “Father, do not force me.” To this, Sir Richard Plainman in act 4 of The Basset-Table (1705) would retort in disregard of his daughter Valeria's mind or feelings, “Tis the Flesh Huswife that must raise Heirs,” and he will name the husband for this to occur. In act 2 of The Busie Body (1709) Isabinda warns her father Sir Jealous Traffick, who keeps her locked away from men, “Confinement sharpens the Invention,” a sentiment echoed by several wives. Anne Lovely in act 2 of A Bold Stroke (1718) complains about her humorous father-assigned guardians: “I cannot think my father meant this tyranny.” While all Centlivre's heroines in distress want to be free to choose mates, they also want marriage with a proper settlement. None of them lets passion get the best of this reason. One wonders what there was in the times to allow for such a group of responses.

In “Marital Discord in English Comedy from Dryden to Fielding,” Hume reminds that “no matter how impossibly bad the marriage, divorce was for practical purposes impossible. It was available only through parliamentary decree, [and] … only six such divorces were granted between 1660 and 1714.” Not until 1701 does a commoner win through to one; no woman won a case until 1801. This explains Beliza's reference to “no deliverance without an Act of Parliament.” And one recalls that Lady Catharine Darnley, later Duchess of Buckinghamshire (Atossa in Pope's Epistle to a Lady), was separated from her first husband, James Annesley, third earl of Anglesey, by an Act of Parliament in 1701 because of his cruelty. Even though legal separation and annulment were other possibilities for the wretchedly married, each was under the purview of ecclesiastical courts and difficult to obtain unless infidelity or cruelty could be proved. And while one could lawfully live under separate maintenance contracts (see Beau's Duel below), a woman badly married was in a pickle. Even if dramatically acceptable, the Sullen's divorce by consent at the end of Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) is out of the question, given the legalities of the times. Most perquisites and powers were by law and custom in the hands of the husband, including the wife's personal property, not otherwise settled, which passed to him upon marriage. “Only a marriage settlement could guarantee a wife an income of her own from her own property,” says Hume, but even then the husband had to cooperate for her to succeed (250). Thus settlements are often part of the plays with marriage as a theme during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Hume also shows that many plays around 1700 have marital discord as a major focus. As reasons he cites the topicality of the “rising debate about the legal status of women and reform of the divorce laws.” After 1700, “‘reform’ comedies focusing on marital reconciliations become increasingly common” (248). Repeating the burden of his discussion in The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1976), Hume points out that just before the turn of the century “both cuckoldry and the gay couple diminish drastically,” and a shift to emphasis on married couples is discernible (249). While Hume only mentions a few of Centlivre's plays, it is soon clear to one studying her work that what he says generally about marital discord is applicable specifically to her. Since this theme is so much a part of her plays, since her work covers many years, and since she holds to much in the older “hard” comedy while tenderizing received materials into either a humane, reform, or exemplary comedy,⁵ Centlivre's plays are a good index, so far as drama can be, of the changing attitude toward marriage.⁶ It is important to realize, however, that relatively few of her plays concentrate on discord in marriage. The majority are concerned with problems in getting the principals to the altar, not away from its obligations. These, then, are the crucial generalizations to be made about the theme of marriage in Centlivre. A particularizing of them from her plays will elucidate the progress of the theme and show something of the shape of her plots and, incidentally, career.

Married love and infidelity are the subjects of her first play The Perjur'd Husband (1700). In blank verse Bassino rails against marriage (1.2), for he is husband to Placentia, yet in love with Aurelia. He sees women as relief for men through sexual intercourse. In the serious plot of this flawed tragicomedy the struggle within Bassino is between love and marital duty, an old warhorse of a theme in drama and other fictions. For her part, Aurelia is betrothed to Alonzo, but in love with Bassino. Before her father died, he bequeathed her to Alonzo; this “willing” of a daughter becomes a commonplace in the plays. In the manner of Dryden's All for Love (1677), this play shows vacillations toward and from love and duty, with advocates for both positions advising on which way to turn.

In a discussion reminiscent of Restoration comedy of the 1670s, Lady Pizalta and her maid Lucy talk about men, sex, and reputation. Pizalta is young and lusty, but married to an “old, impotent, rich, covetous, noble Venetian.” Lady Pizalta's discussion of reputation with Lucy is much like that in Wycherley's The Country-Wife (1675). She is a female Horner, and Centlivre was criticized for her. In her preface to the play, Centlivre retorts, “I fear there is but too many hit by the character.” Earlier in the preface she takes the reformer Jeremy Collier to task, but she appears to have been instructed by criticism of her play. She is never again so sexually explicit. Sex is the only point of contact between the comic and serious plots which never meet structurally. The former ends with Lady Pizalta slipping away in fear that Lucy will tell of her infidelities. Not much is resolved, no uniting of husband and wife. At the end, all principals die in one red ruin, but not before forgiving one another. On the penultimate page of the first and only edition, “pardon” is used six times, followed by an insipid moral by Armando: “The Gods are just in all their Punishments.” Notwithstanding the infelicities, and one lone performance of record, the play is important. First, it showed Centlivre that split-plot plays were not her strong suit and that she was better at comedy than tragedy. Next, it demonstrates her indebtedness to earlier Restoration drama, a mark of her early plays. Moreover, it introduces themes and situations iterated in her career, among them near-infidelity, daughters as legacies, unhappy January-May marriages, adventuresome wives, and poor repentance scenes.

By 1705, the year of both The Gamester and The Basset-Table, her fifth and sixth plays, Centlivre had codified the major marriage materials she would use. In her 1702 The Beau's Duel, her first full-dress comedy, she experimented with the blocking father motif and the theme of forced marriage. Careful at the end of act 3 tells his daughter Clarinda that Sir William (not her choice) will “make a swinging Jointure, and if you don't like him, you may live apart.” Her third play, The Stolen Heiress (1702), shows that she liked the forced marriage scheme well enough to have a pair of blocking fathers, Gravello and his brother Larich, whose sternness is abetted by a Sicilian law of death to “him that Weds an Heires against her parents Will / Tho' with her own Consent.” Gravello vows to marry off the daughters the next day (an overused device designed for compression and a sense of urgency): “We'll not consult the Women, but force them to their Happiness.” In her fourth work, Love's Contrivance (1703), which Centlivre describes as a “Medley” and a “hodge podge Dish serv'd up in China Ware,” farcical marital discord à la Molière between Martin and his wife is emphasized, as suggested by the play's second title, Le médecin malgré lui. The threat of disinheritance, trick marriage, and courting problems are seen in The Gamester (1705), one of her four major comedies, but with the difference that young Valere's gambling is the main impediment to union with his father Sir Thomas and his beloved Angelica.

With its women gamblers, The Basset-Table (1705) is a companion piece to The Gamester. The sequel play proved a less successful but more ambitious and serious play in its treatment of gaming. Both efforts are in part “reform” plays although their tone is not heavy, their treatment of gaming as a vice is not lingered over, and the conversion of the gamblers is not sentimentalized. Despite the evaluations of some critics over the years and Centlivre's own statements about gaming in her dedications, she is not a reformer and reform comedy is not what she wrote in these plays. Instead, we have the familiar blocking father, forced marriage, and marital discord. Every scene takes place in Lady Reveller's lodgings in Covent Garden, and in this turnabout of The Gamester it is she who must be knocked out of her humor, by Lord Worthy, an enemy to the sport. Part of the plot is Sir Richard Plainman's design to marry his daughter Valeria to Captain Hearty, a sea officer loved by Sir Richard for his occupation. Valeria, whom the nautical Hearty calls “A Tite little Frigate,” loves Ensign Lovely, who returns her love. A virtuosa, Valeria is attractively presented. The captain wants to wed her immediately, until hearing her learned mumbojumbo, when he backs off. With Lady Reveller, Mrs. Sago is an inverterate gambler, but a commoner who cannot afford it, even after hocking her husband's presents. It is the Sagos, then, who have the marital problems in the play.

In act 3, Lovely appeals to Valeria to pay more attention to him and less to such projects as experimenting with a dog's tapeworm. Her father enters, discovers Lovely, and forthwith orders her marriage that very night. Dreaming of grandchildren sired by a warrior son-in-law whose progeny will “make France a Tributary Nation,” Sir Richard promises Valeria his estate and 20,000 pounds if she will obey his matchmaking, preaching “'Tis the Flesh Huswife, that must raise Heirs.” In act 5, after Lord Worthy saves her from a staged rape, Lady Reveller finally commits herself to him and asks forgiveness. She thus rescinds her earlier vow that the man to win her must hope “not to Controul, but readily to Obey.” At the end, Mrs. Sago, out of pocket and in serious debt, swears off gaming while pledging to be the domestic wife back in her proper “citizen's” element. Lady Reveller and Worthy marry, as do the projecting Valeria and Lovely. Sir Richard is won over to the match and all ends well, with Mrs. Sago telling wives to “Remain contented with your present State,” surely a sentiment Centlivre was not comfortable with personally.

Yet one more element is added to the marital mix in her ninth and most popular play, The Busie Body (1709). In it are two blocking fathers (one of a man, one of a woman), a forced marriage, and a trapped woman. Written, performed, and printed within two years of her apparently happy marriage to Joseph Centlivre, cook to Queen Anne, The Busie Body has potential of being a serious problem play. And while it is indeed an intrigue play, it is a happy piece of “benevolent good will,” to borrow Hume's phrase. But entrapment is a darker note, and one is hard put to find a reason for its advent just at this point in her career. Perhaps the incarcerated woman is just a logical progression in her treatment of marital problems, given her experimenting with the theme in plays before this one.

Perhaps Centlivre was beginning to see something in the father-daughter relationship as Shakespeare treated it in many of his plays, provocatively elaborated recently by Lynda E. Boose. She generalizes that “consciously or unconsciously, overtly or implicitly, the father of the bride in most of Shakespeare basically wants, like Brabantio, to retain, withhold, lock up, and possess his daughter. Prevented by law, custom, and ritual injunction from taking any of these actions, the only satisfaction available to him is to arrogate to himself the choice of her husband, most often insisting on someone she does not want, lest a desired husband usurp the father's primary position in the daughter's life. But in spite of the paternal preference … Shakespeare always stages the defeat of the father's choice, in both comedy and tragedy.”⁷ That Centlivre's play-fathers or Centlivre herself are so deep in their understanding or intentions is doubtful. But the effects in her plays are similar to Shakespeare's—an author she knew well—except that (1) the money motive rather than possession of the daughter's self seems to predominate, and (2) her fathers “hold” their daughters abetted by law, custom, and ritual injunction. These exceptions point up nicely two important differences between early eighteenth-century dramatic treatments of the father and the bride and Shakespeare's treatment.

In The Busie Body (1709), Sir Jealous Traffick, admirer of things Spanish including obedient women, blocks his daughter Isabinda's designs on Charles; for Traffick “design'd [her] for a Spanish merchant” and to this end keeps her from the sight of men. Miranda, an heiress worth 30,000 pounds, is blocked in a different way by her guardian, Sir Francis Gripe, who has plans for her for himself. Sir George Airy is in love with Miranda and employs the bumbling Marplot to help him win her (Sir Francis is also Marplot's guardian). Sir Jealous literally keeps Isabinda locked away in the manner, he tells us, of Spanish romances, with their requirements of veils and attendant Duenna (Patch), here appointed to be her “Jaylor.” Sir Jealous and Sir Francis early in the play seem to be from the same cloth, but Francis proves the worst of the two. Since he wants his son Charles, who loves Miranda, to marry Lady Wrinkle, the mistress of 40,000 pounds, he is both a blocking father and blocking guardian. The misadventures of Marplot are of first interest through the play's middle, which includes the inadvertent thwarting of Isabinda and Charles' elopement.

Having a time of it keeping his daughter locked in, Sir Jealous in act 4 bemoans the lot of fathers of teenage daughters. But predictably, the marriage of Isabinda and Charles takes place, as does that of Sir George and Miranda. After the fathers argue, Sir Francis exits with “Confound you all.” Sir Jealous, however, becomes genial and generous, even asking Marplot to forgive his pummeling of him. It is Sir Jealous who suggests a toast and utters the final triplet of advice to parents not to interfere with their children's love but rather “submit that Care to Providence above.” The reference is a throwaway line; Centlivre is simply fleshing out a rhyme, not making a philosophical statement. Her plays have little intellectualizing; values in them lie elsewhere. In allusions to gods, fate, providence, and such, she is merely perfunctory; there is no dramatic development or re-use of them. While she refers to the religious, political, and scientific concerns of her day, she never loses sight of what she is about as comic dramatist.

Even though much in her work concerns love and marriage, her treatment of both is realistic, clear-eyed, unsentimental. Katherine M. Rogers is accurate in noting that Centlivre's plays are “notably unsentimental for her period.”⁸ Lip-service is paid at times to virtuous thoughts and actions, but such passages occur because of the requirements of characterization and a concession to the times. She is not unlike her intimate friend George Farquhar in this regard. Richard Steele was also her friend and mentor, but she, unlike him, never did “introduce a joy too exquisite for laughter” (Preface, The Conscious Lovers, 1722). Farquhar was much more congenial as a dramatic theorist and practitioner. Many years ago, Allardyce Nicoll pointed out the incompatibility of sentiment and intrigue.

Her sixth comedy in five years, Love at a Venture (1706) presents a blocking father to a son and another to a daughter as well as discord in a couple wretchedly married. Aside from these slight variations on the marital configurations depicted in earlier plays, this one has an interesting application of the divorce law to parent and daughter rather than husband and wife. Camilla's cousin Beliza says, “'Tis an unjust Prerogative Parents have got, from which I see no deliverance without an Act of Parliament.” At the end of the play Beliza will marry Sir William if he will just “Leave … Spanish Airs—and put the true English Husband on, that is the only way to have a Virtuous Wife.” Allusions to Spain in several of her plays are most often comic hits at English life. By contrast, Centlivre's allusions to things French are intended as political, social satire of the French. Although a writer of intrigue plays, she does not write Spanish intrigue, at least not in the manner of English playwrights of the early seventeenth century or those of the 1660s. The mixed farce-intrigues of Aphra Behn in the 1670s are more Centlivre's practice. Her allusions within those plots, however, are understandably influenced by developments after Behn's time: the rise of a more bourgeois, Whig sensibility; pressure for the reformation of “manners” in drama; the War of the Spanish Succession; and the movement for more serious attention to women's rights. Although three of her plays are set in Lisbon, one on the island of Cosgar, and three in either Sicily or Italy (the remainder in England), all are “Englished.”

Arranged marriage is again a theme in The Platonick Lady (1706), her eighth play and immediately preceding The Busie Body. Nothing new is added to the marital permutations, save for a different reason for the father's directing his daughter's choice in a husband: fear she might marry a Catholic. One other point of interest is the daughter Isabella's unconsidered attitude about love and marriage: “I have a whimsical Heart not to be touch'd with Jointures and Settlements”—the only such naive line in Centlivre. More typical by far is Maria's “I will not marry … without a Portion” in act 3 of The Man's bewitch'd (1709). The dedication to The Platonick Lady “To all the Generous Encouragers of Female Ingenuity” shows the play's author not at all sympathetic with Isabella's position.

After the solid success of The Busie Body, the blocking father, blocking guardian, and hidden-away woman are repeated in her next play, The Man's bewitch'd (1709), a good piece deserving of more attention than it has received. It could serve as an epitome of previous plays for familial and legal problems in marriage and marrying. In this, her tenth play, Centlivre is feeding heartily upon her earlier plots and characterizations. Since this is so, mention need be made only of Sir David Watchum. Constant's friend Faithful is in love with Laura, an heiress in love with him, who has as guardian Watchum, Centlivre's crabbiest character and perhaps her most repugnant. As a lascivious guard, Watchum is like Sir Francis of The Busie Body; and as jailer he has much in common with Sir Jealous of that same play. Wanting her for himself and fearful she will be stolen away, Watchum has kept Laura locked away for a whole year. As Patch did in The Busie Body, Laura's maid upbraids Watchum: “We wou'd have Liberty, Sir.” Unimpressed, he goes off to the coffeehouse ordering the doors locked. Later, in act 4, he barricades the house. And at play's end, with everything and everyone in harmony, Watchum, like Sir Francis Gripe in The Busie Body, and Malvolio long before that, leaves the play with curses and threats. It is as though Centlivre banishes the darkness from her cheery comedy.

Centlivre began the second half of her career with a one-act petite pièce she called A Bickerstaff's Burying (1710), set on the island of Cosgar. The four scenes of this funereal farce—the subtitle of which is Work for the Upholders (undertakers)—concern marriage, with satire of English customs through those of the Cosgarians. In her playful dedication “To the Magnificent Company of Upholders,” Centlivre explains that she first thought of dedicating her play “to all those young Wives who had sold themselves for Money and been inter'd with Misery, from the first Day of their Marriage”; but she decided against them since “they had rather gratifie their Ambition in the Arms of a Fool, or Fourscore, than wed a Man of Sense of narrower Fortunes.” Rather than dedicate her play to such, she depicts them therein. The main conceit is the “barbarous” law that the surviving mate in a marriage must die when the partner dies. When Lady Mezro, an Englishwoman, hears that her old, ill-tempered, insecure Cosgarian husband, the Emir, is dying (he is not, but just testing her), she wants off the island.⁹ In a play on words she asks, “Can I be well when you are dying?” Mezro wants his wife kept in subjection, for he fears she will flee as soon as he is “well.” He complains, “If all English wives are such Gadders, Heaven help their Husbands.” Centlivre's comparison of English marriage practices to those of Cosgar would have been funny to an English audience, and an alternate title for the play in some stage mountings was The Custom of the Country. Little else is noteworthy except the fact that Centlivre's concern for treating marital problems is uninterrupted in all her plays, including this one-act farce.

In the sequel to The Busie Body, whose central comic figure, Marplot, was a hit, Centlivre in Mar-Plot (1710) succeeds less in giving further adventures of Marplot, this time in Lisbon, than she does in giving a more serious dramatization of problems in marriage. Mar-Plot is her most ambitious play in this regard, and once more she slightly changes the focus. Here it is the husband, not the guardian, who is the jailer of his lady. Another shift in pattern is her presentation, for the first time in her comedies, of a philandering young husband. Dona Perriera, wife to a rich, jealous “Spanish” merchant, loves Charles Gripe, a carryover from The Busie Body, who is in Lisbon as executor of his father-in-law's estate. Don Perriera suspects his wife of unfaithfulness and warns her. Yet, following a well-fixed Centlivrean type, Perriera finds it permissible to try to bed Margaritta. In act 2, Charles and Dona Perriera are together for the first time when he calls the “dimples in her Cheeks … Cupid's bathing Tubs.” She warns him to be discrete, for “Favours in Portugal must not be boasted off [sic].” They are just about to retire to the bedroom when down the chimney comes Marplot, still the unwitting spoiler he was in The Busie Body. Don Perriera is warned that his wife is untrue, or trying to be, and the remainder of the play shows his attempts to catch her.

In act 3, Charles's wife Isabinda arrives from England in disguise, her mission to deliver a packet Charles forgot to carry with him to Lisbon. Not recognizing her as his wife, Charles complains of his marriage to all gathered there, including Isabinda. He says that his wife is a “Poor good natur'd Tit and I lov'd her heartily till I married her,” whereupon he leaves to intrigue with Dona Perriera. Don Perriera overhears his wife and Charles's plan to copulate after they dine and sends for two priests to shrive them before he has them executed. Both males are despicable, one dangerously so. It is the wronged Isabinda who saves her husband from Don Perriera; it is she, as priest, who shrives him. Centlivre presents her as absolver, healer, reconciler. The predictable contrition and reconciliation at the conclusion is effected largely by the resourceful Isabinda, a foil to the play's other wife and an exemplar to the play's men. Married women can have power and control, Centlivre seems to be saying here. Charles sentimentally declares to his impressively forgiving wife, “Thou are all Goodness,” and the speaker of the final lines sermonizes, “Our kind Indulgence [of roving husbands] wou'd their Vice o'ercome, / And with our Meekness strike their Passions dumb.” The speaker is Isabinda, whose sentiments here are somewhat at odds with her assertiveness in the play per se. Surely she does not speak for the realistic, experienced Centlivre. Isabinda's final lines could serve seriously, however, as closure for several plays of the period, including Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696), The Careless Husband (1705), and The Provok'd Husband (1728), and Charles Johnson's The Country Lasses (1715), both playwrights discussed later.

The Perplex'd Lovers (1712), Centlivre's thirteenth play, is overripe with mistaken identities in the darkened first four acts. The play is of some interest here for its blocking father and brother and for the most trapped wife of all. The high jinks in the play include an attempted rape, lovers almost in the jaws of ruin and Codille, and the actions of Constantia, a sort of female Marplot, misreading events and character. By the end of act 3, however, Constantia decides that her duty to father and brother must give way to her love for Bastion, a decision similar to Antimora's later in The Cruel Gift (1717). For this, Constantia is nailed into her room by Belvill. After machinations of several sorts, though, the marriage of Bastion and Constantia wins paternal blessing and is grudgingly approved by Belvill, much the heaviest brother in Centlivre. This play can boast, however, the jolliest of fathers, Camilla's, one Colonel Merryman who favors his daughter's match with Belvill, to whom he offers her 10,000 pounds “unencumbered” and “the cracking of my Daughter's Pipkin.”

Centlivre returns to the theme of forced marriage in her next play, The Wonder (1714), one of two fine comedies of her artistic maturity and one of her most popular plays. The familiar fathers are there also, one favoring a man for his daughter, the other a nunnery. Don Lopez wants to marry off his daughter Donna Isabella to Don Guzman. Frederick, one of Centlivre's several admirable merchants—who become more admirable as her career progresses and the Whigs gain more control—bristles at this, for Guzman is old, avaricious, foolish. To Frederick's question about Isabella's wishes, Don Lopez admits to never consulting her: “No, no, Sir, it is not a Father's business to follow his Childrens Inclinations till he makes himself a Beggar.” He vows strictly to govern her. Isabella inveighs against forced marriage, saying even English women are better off than those like her from Lisbon, the play's setting. To avoid marrying Guzman she will enter a convent. Pledging to die, she is offered a sword for that purpose by her chuckling father. The act ends with Lopez's locking her in her closet until the arrival of old Guzman the next day. In the spine of the plot, Don Felix loves Violante, Don Pedro's daughter designed by him for the nunnery, another variation on the forced marriage theme by the anti-Catholic Centlivre who would have viewed any sort of monastic life as unnatural, as imprisonment. Most of the remainder of the play has Violante keeping Isabella's secret (she is hiding her), thus the play's second title A Woman keeps a Secret. Highlights of the piece include Violante's steadfastness in this and the scene between Felix and Violante, the best comic love encounter in all Centlivre (see Plays 1: xlvii-lvi).

One of Centlivre's two 1715 one-act farces, A Wife Well Manag'd, is about marital discord, but lightly handled. (The other farce, The Gotham Election, discussed above, is not mainly concerned with matrimony.) Despite her calling him Pudsey and his calling her Figgup, the Pisaltos are at odds. Don Pisalto is old and possessive, Lady Pisalto lustily in love with her lecherous confessor Father Bernardo. With farcial beatings like those of much earlier drama, Molière, and her own Love's Contrivance (1703), the play has husband and wife at a shaky truce at its conclusion. But Lady Pisalto is still in her marriage prison, and one has the impression she will go on looking for other ways to get her fill and her freedom from her jailer.

Only brief mention need be made of her best tragicomedy, The Cruel Gift (1717), the seventeenth play, with its blocking father, blocking brother, blocking law, and secret marriage at its center. Not much is new regarding marriage not already seen, just talk about “authority” and “forcing” and “obedience.”

A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) is her masterwork, in part because of the memorable characterizations and structural variations in the plot of Colonel Fainwell's trying to match with Anne Lovely, who is scrutinized and controlled by a quadruple protectorate of very humorous fellows. A Bold Stroke is a major “Augustan” play about the marriage chase. The four guardians, appointed by Anne's misanthropic father before he died to be trustees of her 30,000 pounds, are the impediments to the marriage of Anne and Fainwell. Since each guardian has a humor, Fainwell, with the aid of Freeman the merchant and Sackbut the taverner, must win them over by impersonating, in turn, a fop, a virtuoso, a Dutch merchant, and Simon Pure the Quaker. Fainwell, then, is the most physical male role in any Centlivre play. There is no courting of Anne, since her love for Fainwell was already communicated to him at the start of the play. Not unlike Centlivre herself, Anne loves soldiers, for, she says, “They command regard.” The main action has nothing to do with wooing. Fainwell wants Anne's great fortune, but loves her for herself, too. Betty, the maid, advises her mistress to give up her inheritance and thereby render the guardians powerless over her happiness. But Anne will have none of that, since poverty, she states, is not good in marriage. Centlivre would have definitely agreed with that wisdom.

Anne sees her guardians as types of “foppery, folly, avarice, and hypocrisy” and muses, “I cannot think my father meant this tyranny.” In act 2, Fainwell's quest for Anne begins with his working on the foppish Sir Philip Modelove, whom he readily wins over. All of act 3 is given to the duping of the antiquarian Periwinkle. As Sir Philip did earlier, Periwinkle carps at marriage (there is more talk of matrimony in this play than any of her plays) and thanks God that his wife and daughter died early. The tricking of Tradelove, the stock-jobber, follows, and by the end of act 4 three of the four guardians are bit. Act 5 is devoted to the comeuppance of Prim, the hypocritical Quaker. All the guardians assemble and argue over their choices for Anne, who threatens to go to the senate with her case. In the end Fainwell reveals himself to all, and except for Tradelove each guardian takes the ruse played on him in good spirits, the tone of the play. Fainwell addresses Anne in verses on liberty of choice and on freedom, both, he says, constituting the good life.

Centlivre's final and longest play, The Artifice (1722), is a reprise of most of her major themes and techniques, including her treatment of marriage. Once again there are the hindering fathers, a locked-away wife, and a wash of marital troubles. There is one quite good seriocomic scene involving the rascally Ned and Louisa in act 4. Most of the act is taken up with the Dutch “wife”—she is considered so by Dutch law in the play and also by custom and law in England—Louisa's encounter with Ned. Bored by her story of being out of money and unable to support their bastard son, in an aside, Ned refers to her and the boy as “this Heifer and her Calf.” He tries to get Louisa to be mistress to his friend, and even as she protests this he tries to bed her himself. Distraught, Louisa poisons him (a trick), to which Ned screams “Murder'd by my Whore.” Ned is, in brief, not an example of the male romantic lead of the “new” comedy but rather a bona fide vestige of the high Restoration rake. Louisa launches into verses on how God married them through Ned's promise and her consent. In an unexpected turnabout, Ned repents, kneels, begs forgiveness, and resigns himself to dying (none of this sentimentally presented). Louisa tells him that since she too drank the poison, they will die together. Ned calls for a “holy man” and a lawyer before he dies, wanting to get right with God and the world. They go off to bed “to rest” while Flora fetches the holy man who will formally marry them.

In other parts of the play, Sir John Freeman is at odds with his brother Ned over their inheritance and over their both loving Olivia; Olivia bucks her father Sir Philip Money-love over forced marriage; Fainwell tries to marry the rich Widow Headless who loves no one beneath a Lord; and Watchit attempts to keep his lusty young wife from the likes of Ned. While overlong and quite complex, The Artifice is a better play than usually assumed, though not one of Centlivre's best. In terms of the treatment of marriage discussed above, the play is a nice compendium of what her marital concerns were over some 20 years of playwriting. In this play she has plundered her own works for notions of plot, characterization, and theme. It seems as though at the end of her career—and near the end of her life—she tried to pack a bit of everything she ever wrote into this final effort.

No mere highlighting of selected subject matter, such as referred to herein, can demonstrate the gifts of Susanna Centlivre as dramatist. She is often a brilliant even if formulaic plotter who frequently imitated her own plays. The conceptual schemes are not very new, and often her material is similar to that used by earlier dramatists. Invention was an achievement by her second to execution.¹⁰ This is equally true of her treatment of marriage. Yet, while realizing that real-life marriages of convenience were still common and that, according to P. F. Vernon, “personal affection was generally the very least consideration,” just as it was in the previous century, and that “marriage was normally a family business matter on which more depended than the domestic happiness of two individuals,” Centlivre chose to make tyrannic and managed marriage lose out in every case in all her works.¹¹ This, too, is not wholly new, but her emphasis on the prolongation of the theme is new. If Vernon is correct in assessing Restoration drama, as I believe he is, then Centlivre is a Restoration dramatist, although she is not mentioned in Vernon's treatment of the marriage of convenience. She did not write heroic plays, but the familial conflicts in her tragicomedies are indebted to Restoration heroic drama, as are parts of her comedies. Excise “disastrous” from the following statement and Centlivre's practice in her plays could well be Vernon's subject: Restoration heroic plays “often seem obsessed with the question of the rights of children to disobey their parents in matters of love, and with the disastrous effect of forced marriage and thwarted love.”

Vernon's appraisal of Restoration comedy is even more applicable to her plays since the “most popular type of action concerns the attempts of a young pair of romantic lovers to get married, despite the active opposition of mercenary relatives. A second popular theme, often appearing concurrently with the first in the same play, scoffs at a marriage which has already taken place.” Vernon's statement on Restoration literary libertinism is likewise applicable: “Usually the dramatists try to demonstrate that the promiscuity of the libertine cannot be successful as a way of living because it is ‘unnatural’”; that is, not natural since it is not desiring a “permanent emotional relationship with a member of the opposite sex based on more than mere lust.” Vernon decidedly concludes that “Money came first in real life; love always triumphed on the stage” (375, 377, 386). In Centlivre's plays, however, love is more triumphant with money. Her dramatic works are then partly Restoration, including their presentation of marriage.¹²

They are early eighteenth-century plays, as well, that are in ways markedly different from plays written before the turn of the century. In Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding, John Loftis recognized some of these differences, indicated by his very titles for chapters 3 and 4, “The Survival of the Restoration Stereotypes 1693-1710” and “The End of the War and Change in Comedy 1710-1728,” years during which Centlivre wrote and produced her plays. Students of this drama can only agree with much of Loftis's comparison of her plays with those of Colley Cibber: “Her plays, like his, reveal perhaps more clearly than plays of superior merit the interaction of a strong dramatic tradition with the new forces in drama. The new ethical thought occasioned an intensified moral earnestness in some of her plays and an intermittent sentimentality; … a greater restraint in the treatment of sexually suggestive subjects; and the increased importance of merchants in English society occasioned, not an abandonment of the dramatic stereotype, but, progressively in her plays, some modifications of it.”¹³ Something of just how Centlivre is concomitantly old and new as a dramatist is in this assessment.

The yoking of Cibber with Centlivre makes sense also in that both were prolific and popular writers of comedy.¹⁴ While Cibber wrote plays over a much longer span of years and was involved in more aspects of the theater than Centlivre, he, during the years of her career, wrote intrigue comedies such as Love Makes a Man (1700) and She Wou'd and She Wou'd Not (1702).¹⁵ Unlike Centlivre, Cibber soon left that sort of playwriting for more “genteel” and sentimental plots and tonalities. His plays' emotional range and types—tragedies, heroic plays, comedies, farces, masques, tragicomedies, interludes—were much more varied than Centlivre's. She specialized in the one dramatic genre.

In many ways the Whig playwright Charles Johnson is closer to Cibber than the latter is to Centlivre, especially in dramatic experimentation and range. And a brief comparison of these men is instructive in placing Centlivre in early eighteenth-century drama, for the three playwrights are the most prolific in this quarter century, with Johnson and Cibber the most representative of currents in drama as a whole and Centlivre the most representative in comedy.

Cibber and Johnson wrote some nine or ten comedies or farces between 1700 and 1722, the years of Centlivre's career.¹⁶ While Johnson was not nearly so popular or successful as Cibber, he was equally fecund and almost as adventuresome theatrically.¹⁷ Johnson wrote a farce afterpiece typical for the period, Love in a Chest, in 1710; and two rather good comedies the following year: The Generous Husband, a partial Spanish intrigue set in London, and The Wife's Relief, the latter a good example of Johnson's sincere feminism. The wife Cynthia says to her husband Riot, “I arise to tell the World I am a Woman, a Wife, an English free-born Wife.” Johnson ranged from tragedy, pseudo-classical plays, and heroic drama to adaptations (particularly of Shakespeare and Racine), ballad opera, and entertainments he called “Plays.” In brief, the curve of his dramatic career, while not quite parallel in time, was much like Cibber's. Also, like Cibber, even though not a conscientious reformer, he wrote plays aimed at reform, both men having a problem-solving, sermonizing streak in their work. Neither was an enemy to sentiment. A considerable portion of their best (non-adaptation) comedies is earnest, emotional depiction of the victory of virtuous love in language, as characterized by Maureen Sullivan while writing about Cibber, that is “essentially the language of religious ecstasy and religious conversion.”¹⁸ None of this predominates in Centlivre's work.

The differences between these playwrights and Centlivre are, then, fairly obvious. Her range was narrower, but as in Pope's couplets, there is within the insistent beat much satisfying multeity. Centlivre wrote intrigue, laughing comedies primarily. Cibber and Johnson did not. She centered her material on marriage and marrying from a no-nonsense, pragmatic woman's point of view. Their comedies tended to idealize women and to convert wayward husbands and to remark on the efficacy of both in a tone more sober than sunny. Her romance intrigue plots leavened by farce constituted plays that were not the dominant form Augustan comedy took, but their good-humored, humane characterizations, themes, and tone would dominate particularly in non-sentimental mainpieces and afterpieces. Edward Shuter, one of the century's best performers of the role of Fainwell in A Bold Stroke, while puffing his own benefit (at Covent Garden on 3 April 1758) in the 28 March Public Advertiser, says, “Mrs Centlivre's Comedies have a vein of pleasantry in them that will always be relish'd. She knew the Genius of the nation, and she wrote up to the spirit of it.” That vein of pleasantry influenced the work of such imitators as Cibber, Hannah Cowley, John O'Keeffe, Gotthold Lessing, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and several anonymous adapters.

As a woman living largely by her wits and hard work since childhood, and as a life-long, active Whig, Centlivre was naturally concerned in her life and writing with individual freedom, which included or led to self-determination, human rights, personal wealth, and whatever happiness possible. It would be unthinkable for such a person, such a writer, to give unflattering portrayals of soldiers and, in her mature plays at least, merchants; or to give complimentary portraits of authoritarian fathers and guardians; or to miss the dramatic possibilities of marital discord whether between those already in that state or in couples trying to attain it. Not an aristocratic playwright but a commoner writing mainly about the city and its ways, Centlivre's tensions between the landed and moneyed have to do with more than land versus new cash. Her works reflect some new attitudes about life and the values and powers of some new ways of conducting it. But the old ways are still there and measurable.

One wonders how biographically rooted are the many scenes, in almost every play, of women who are literally imprisoned, trapped, locked up by men. One suspects that the sometimes brutal slapping and punching that occur in almost every play is a biographical cranny to look into. Her statements, some quite attractive, on friendship—in The Stolen Heiress or Cardono's affecting speech in act 4 of The Cruel Gift—take us back to biographer John Mottley's comment about her good, her benevolent nature.¹⁹ And there may be something of Centlivre in Valeria, the woman projector of The Basset-Table who is treated affectionately for her love of learning and steadfastness in what she believes. And perhaps part of Centlivre figures in the resolution of all those forced marriages that eventually turn out well. One wonders what Centlivre's marriages were like before she married Joseph Centlivre, Yeoman of the Mouth to Queen Anne, on 23 April 1707. Surely, part of her speaks through Lucinda who in act 4 of The Platonick Lady (1706) ruminates on women's lot in life: “Good Heavens, who wou'd wish to be a Woman? Nature's unerring Laws are still the same as when she form'd the Order of the World—————But Custom has debauch'd her Rules, and given Tyrant Men pretence to glory in their Falshood.” Centlivre is a feminist, political activist, and ardent patriot, as any reader of her prefaces, dedications, poems, essays, and plays will know. But one should not view her as first a social reformer or satirist, even in The Gamester and The Basset-Table. She saw herself much more as a mirror than a lamp, a playwright mostly interested in stage fame for her works. She was not writing for a coterie audience; her plays are democratized and balanced with the old and new.

All her plays were published during her lifetime and all but one performed, some plays given numerous times. The content of her work reflected what audiences wanted, thought, knew, what worked on earlier stages, and what was au courant. Since she succeeded so well in this combining in so many comedies over so many years, Susanna Centlivre may well be the last Restoration dramatist as well as the first of the moderns.²⁰

Notes

1. See The Plays of Susanna Centlivre, ed. Richard C. Frushell, 3 vols. (New York: Garland, 1982) 1:xi. The general introduction is more concerned with stage history than the plays as literature. All citations below are from this edition, hereafter cited as Plays. For biographical and career information as well as influences on her plays from Shakespeare, Jonson, Mayne, May, Lacy, Fane, Dryden Jr., Ravenscroft, Molière, Corneille, and Regnard, and the influence of her plays on later authors, see John Wilson Bowyer, The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1952), F.P. Lock, Susanna Centlivre (Boston: Twayne, 1979), and Plays.

2. For an early example of many references to such objects, see The Gamester (1705) with its emphasis on money, the diamond-studded picture case, and young Valere's litany of the beauties of gaming. See also A Bickerstaff's Burying (1710) in Plays.

3. Robert Hume points to this “disconcerting anomaly” in “Marital Discord in English Comedy from Dryden to Fielding,” Modern Philology 74 (1977):249-72, remarking that “Despite the turn toward ‘purity,’ the bawdy plays of the seventies continued to hold the stage. Similarly, a play like [Vanbrugh's 1697] The Provok'd Wife remained long popular, despite the overwhelming predominance of tidy reform solutions in new plays after 1700” (269). Below, I am indebted to several of Hume's insights.

4. I am indebted to the PLL reader for cogent remarks on eighteenth-century marriage law and several structural suggestions. See Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979) 156-60, for backgrounds for this legal matter; for interesting parallels in France, see James F. Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980).

5. Shirley Strum Kenny's term in “Humane Comedy,” Modern Philology 75 (1977):29-48. “Humane” has entered the lexicon for one strain of comedy written during the early years of the century. The classifications are by Hume, in “Marital Discord”: the kinds of “new” comedy written about the time of Centlivre's plays are “reform” or “exemplary comedy.” Hume surveys plays and playwrights on both sides of the year 1700, his centerpoint, while tracing the changing attitudes toward marriage; that is, problems in the already married. I use discord more broadly in discussing the theme of marriage. See also Hume's discussion of “The Multifarious Forms of Eighteenth-Century Comedy” in The Stage and the Page: London's “Whole Show” in the Eighteenth-Century Theatre, ed. George Winchester Stone, Jr. (Berkeley: U of California P, 1981) 3-32, wherein Centlivre's Busie Body (1709) is considered a good example of humane comedy where hoped-for audience reaction is “benevolent good will.” The Busie Body becomes an “excellent illustration of a play whose characters and plot devices simulate those of Carolean plays, but whose cheery high spirits rob it of the gritty ugliness an earlier writer might have found in similar elements” (15).

6. Centlivre's Whiggishness exemplifies her keeping to what works from the old and employing the more promising of the new. Just as she was both and at once an Old Whig and a New Whig, so she was a Restoration dramatist and a new. An Old Whig in her adherence to principles of the 1688 revolution and her belief in the efficacy of popular government, she was, too, a New Whig in her support of trade, new money, the war, and self-determination of one's affairs. In her dramatic and non-dramatic works this shows forth as anti-Jacobite, non-jurors, high-flyers, Catholic clergy, and Tories categorically. On the other side, it figures forth as pro-Church of England, the house of Hanover, the merchant class, military, national defense, patriotism, the Queen (or King), and women's rights, especially their artistic rights.

7. “The Father and the Bride in Shakespeare,” PMLA 97 (1982): 325-47.

8. Katherine M. Rogers, Feminism in Eighteenth-Century England (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982) 100.

9. The newly arrived English sailors feel the same way once they learn of the law. Their previous ardor for the women islanders quickly evaporates. The ship's captain muses that “If it were the Custom all over the World, we young Fellows should live deliciously; Women would be as plenty as Blackberries; we might put forth our Hands and take them without Jointures, Settlements, Pin-money, Parson, and so forth.”

10. The prologue to The Perplex'd Lovers (1712) calls the play “Business on the Stage” where the author “plots, contrives, embroils, foments Confusions,” a statement on method applicable to all her plays. The most often quoted document in this regard is the prologue to The Artifice (1722), which advises not to look for too much wit, for “Plot, Humour, Business form the Comick Feast, / Wit's but a higher-relish'd Sawce, at best; / And where too much, like Spice, destroys the Taste.”

11. “Marriage of Convenience and the Moral Code of Restoration Comedy,” Essays in Criticism 12 (1962): 373.

12. In “Enforcement of Marriage in English Drama (1600-1650),” Philological Quarterly 38 (1959):459-72, Glenn H. Blayney theorizes that earlier treatments of marriage problems in English drama are not very different.

13. In an overall assessment somewhat complementary to mine above, Loftis goes on to say that Centlivre's later comedies “show an assimilation of Whiggish views in her appreciative portrayal of merchants. … Her growing emancipation from the traditionalism of her early comedies, evident in her turning away from the characters and situations of Restoration comedy, probably owes something to her increased command of her art. But the modification in implied social judgments can plausibly be associated with the Whig propaganda campaign” (86). Hume, “Multifarious Forms,” comments on the changing “norms” of English comedies during that part of the “Augustan” period coinciding with Centlivre's later plays: “By 1708 or 1710 … the hard, satiric, mostly Tory comedy of the Carolean period has gradually given way to … a humane and reform-minded comedy whose ideology tends to be bourgeois and Whig”; he reminds further that “by 1708 Congreve, Southerne, and Vanbrugh have fallen silent, and Farquhar [whose career is a minipattern of the change] is dead” (4,5). Of the substantial dramatists, Cibber, Johnson, and Centlivre remain, however.

14. Also, Cibber and Centlivre were professional theater people who, while not fast friends, had professional intercourse. Cibber borrowed extensively from her Love at a Venture (1706) in writing his 1707 Double Gallant, and she may have used some ideas from his plays for several of her own. Cibber was the first to attempt the role of Manage in her Man's bewitch'd (1709)—for which he wrote the epilogue—and the first to play Sharper in The Platonick Lady (1706). Both wrote important parts for Anne Oldfield, who was the first personator of nine new Centlivre roles. Oldfield was equally important to Cibber's success, one instance of which was her rendering of Lady Betty Modish in The Careless Husband (1704). Some additional points of contact: both were Whigs, significant in their plays and careers; both were masters of theatrical “business” and lively plots; both wrote about matrimonial and gambling woes; and both were actors, though Cibber for a much longer time and at the center of things in London.

15. Cibber, of course, wrote well-received, influential plays before 1700; and after the time of Centlivre was still writing, well into the late 1720s: for example, a pastoral ballad opera and a “theatrical dialogue.”

16. Cibber composed eight of his twelve comedies during the 1700-1708 period; Johnson wrote six of his nine comedies in 1710-1715.

17. Like Cibber, Johnson borrowed from Centlivre's plays: his 1719 Masquerade is indebted to her Basset-Table (1705). Also like Cibber, he wrote an epilogue for one of her plays, The Gamester (1705); but unlike Cibber, he was her close friend.

18. Colley Cibber, Three Sentimental Comedies, ed. Maureen Sullivan (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973) xxvi. See also Rodney L. Hayley's argument that Cibber is not sentimental too often but rather witty, bawdy, and cynical in The Plays of Colley Cibber, ed. Hayley (New York: Garland, 1980) xxiv. For Johnson, see M. Maurice Shudofsky, “Charles Johnson and Eighteenth-Century Drama,” ELH 10.2 (1943):131-58.

19. John Mottley wrote a florid but generally accurate biographical account of Centlivre in “A List of all the Dramatic Authors, with some Account of their Lives … to the Year 1747,” part of the edition of Thomas Whincop's Scanderbeg: or, Love and Liberty (London, 1747) 188.

20. Although George Farquhar (1677-1707) is often considered the last Restoration playwright as well as the first of the new dramatists, his small output of seven mainpiece plays (albeit two of them masterpieces) and his brief writing career (1698 to 1707) make him to my mind a weaker candidate for that distinction than Centlivre, whose candidacy I have argued for at length herein. It is, though, important to note that Farquhar was her (more gifted) mentor who did combine, before she did, Restoration as well as humane, affable elements in his art.