SOURCE: Rigamonti, Antonella and Laura Favero Carraro. “Women at Stake: The Self-Assertive Potential of Gambling in Susanna Centlivre's The Basset Table.” Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research 16, no. 2 (2003): 53-62.

[In the following essay, Rigamonti and Carraro contend that Centlivre's Basset Table likely failed as a follow-up to the more successful Gamester because the playwright posed a more direct challenge to accepted social norms for women. Comparing the play to similar works by male playwrights, the authors highlight Centlivre's unique take on the empowering possibilities offered to women at the gaming table.]

Almost as a bet, Susanna Centlivre¹ wrote, in the same year (1705), two plays dealing with the same theme: gambling. The first, The Gamester, was also her first hit and established for her an identity as “the Author of The Gamester”; the following play, The Basset Table, was instead a flop, although its situations and characters were an improved version of the previous one.

The Gamester was largely derived from Jean Françoise Regnard's Le Joueur (1696), although Centlivre admits it only in part (“Part of it I own myself oblig'd to the French for, particularly for the character of the Gamester”²); she herself bases on it The Basset Table; either Regnard's or, more probably, Centlivre's work was to prompt Colley Cibber to write, a couple of years later, The Lady's Last Stake (1707). Much later, in 1750, Carlo Goldoni was to write for the Venetian Carnival Il Giocatore, which is also indebted to Regnard's play and which met with perhaps even less favor than Centlivre's The Basset Table.³

A clear line of continuity and orthodoxy runs through the plays directly based on the French comedy; apparently distinctive traits—some of the characters in Goldoni's play have names taken from the commedia dell'arte; in Venice faro (pharaoh) has replaced basset of which it is a simplified form—all but reinforce the common topoi of the servant's complaining about his master's callous behavior, of the fathers'/fathers-in-law's sermons against gambling and of the betrothed's self-delusion about the gambler's actual order of priorities. Along this straight line, however, the place The Basset Table finds is only apparently a comfortable one. Subtle deviances from established models and patterns of behavior make of the Basset Table a play in which gambling, more than the butt for customary reprimands, can be seen as the occasion for creating a social enclave in which ladies can venture into behaviors which are distinctively different from the dominant ones.

The cultural and social relevance of gambling cannot be underestimated. If one had only to judge by the number of laws which tried to regulate it, gambling would appear, in all its multifarious forms, as the common pastime of all layers of society, both high and low. We may wonder at the reason for this passion, but if we avoid the moral bait and give a closer look to the life of some famous gamblers, it can probably be discerned that as they mix their cards, gamblers seem to mix something more: social levels, genders and opportunities. They gamble because their own lives can receive an unforeseen spin from the gambling table. Carlo Goldoni, who was entering a steady career as a civil servant for the Republic of Venice, threw away this opportunity by forgetting his duty at a table around which four unknown men and a beautiful woman were playing hombre. Unwittingly or not, he staked more than his money. At that table, he staked his career against the chance of losing it so that he eventually could become what he really wished: compositor di commedie (playwright). As Giacomo Casanova (to whom we owe most for information on the games which were played all over Europe in the eighteenth century) witnesses in his Histoire de ma vie, (1789-98) gambling can well be considered as a condensed, symbolic version of the spirit of the century itself.⁴ This resemblance that can be explained by what Roger Caillois describes as the ingredients that make a game worth playing, that is: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (make-believe), and ilynx (vertigo)⁵, so that one may wonder if it was exactly this mixture of rules and hazard, calculus and chance, theatricals and thrill that made gambling so attractive to people in the eighteenth century. Wasn't gambling a closet version of that speculative inclination to risk which made this century particularly prone to philosophical, political and financial hazards and speculations? And, can a basset table bear the burden of this all?

THE DIFFERENCE OF THE BASSET TABLE

Mrs. Centlivre, neé Freeman, had already shown herself to be at stake when accepting the various turns of fortune that characterized her early years and with the Basset Table she tried to make, in the language of basset, a paroli; that is, she tried to double the win of The Gamester. She lost, however, as she had probably staked too high. As Katherine M. Rogers notes, “If women playwrights deviated from convention to express a distinctively female point of view, they took care to do it incidentally or indirectly.”⁶ (xiv). This is something Centlivre had done quite skillfully in the Gamester. Deviating from the French model, she changed Angelica from a rather passive bystander into an active “player”: she is disguised as a man, goes to the gaming house and outwits her fiancé Valere. It is with the Basset Table, however, that the extent of Centlivre's deviation comes to the fore.

From the very title, it is clear that this play is somewhat different from its models, as attention is centered on the gambling table rather than on the single gamester. Moreover, notwithstanding Centlivre's programmatic assertion that her play's “main Drift” was “to Redicule and Correct one of the most reigning Vices of the Age,”⁷ gambling (duly punished at the end of the play) seems rather to be the informing philosophy which governs the behavior of most characters—and of the ladies in particular. The table is the pivotal point around which Lady Reveller's enlarged and “whimsical” family revolves and from which a number of unforeseen spin-offs, in terms of gender definitions and social relations, are produced.

MIXING MORAL VALUES: LADY REVELLER STAKES HER VIRTUE

In both Regnard's and Goldoni's plays, gambling is shown from the opening scene as a personal obsession isolating the individual from even the simplest forms of social interaction: a sleepy servant awaits the return of his master, cursing his life and lamenting the loss of sleep and, perhaps, of good opportunities. His master arrives and is, invariably, in a foul mood, worn out, and dishevelled. It does not matter whether he has won or lost. Goldoni's Florindo, for instance, has won, but he can't stop thinking of the game, haunted as he is by his gambling demon. His servant, Brighella, observes “Gamesters are never satisfied. If they lose, they cry, if they win, they are dissatisfied because they might have won more. Thus, a gamester's life is always unhappy.” Valere, both in the French original and in Centlivre's rendering, has lost, with his money, also his good looks: “… with Arms across, downcast Eyes, no Powder in his Perriwig, a Steenkirk tuck'd in to hide the Dirt, Sword-knot untied, no Gloves, and Hands and Face as dirty as a Tinker” (1.46-50).

In the Basset Table we find an apparently similar situation: the servants waiting for their masters (or rather mistresses, as the players seem to be mainly ladies) are tired and cursing their life, but the scene shows a world of social interaction, where footmen and porters enter into dialogue and call one another by proper names (“Robin,” “Will”). The polyphonic nature of the opening scene emphasizes a change of perspective and introduces a different gambling figure, Lady Reveller. She has won “50 Pieces,” is in perfect good humour and health, and says to her woman, Alpiew, “Pr'ythee, what shall we do, Alpiew? 'Tis a fine morning. 'Tis pity to go to bed” (1.41-2). Lady Reveller, far from being exhausted, would even consider a stroll in the park, were it not too early to meet any of the Beau-Monde.⁸

Her woman, Alpiew, unlike Brighella or Hector, is unswervingly supportive and clearly admires her. Thus Lady Reveller is in full control of herself and mistress of the game. She is not obsessed with gambling. She plays for pleasure and to follow her inclinations, as she makes clear both to her uncle, Sir Richard, and her cousin, Lady Lucy. Like their counterparts Pantalone and Rosaura in Goldoni's Il giocatore and Sir Thomas in The Gamester, Sir Richard and Lady Lucy start their reprimands by reminding the gamester of her social duties. However, whereas both Florindo and Valere try to divert the moralists' attention by swearing they will quit (in the meantime racking their brains as to how they might raise some money), Lady Reveller defies both her uncle and cousin, laughs at them and strikes back, hitting at their sore points: Sir Richard's “philosophic” daughter and Lucy's love for Sir James, the other unrepentant gamester of the play.

There is no guilt and, apparently, no compulsive drive in Lady Reveller's gambling, as there is in Valere, Florindo or Cibber's Lady Gentle. Wherein consists then the attraction of the basset table for Lady Reveller? Lady Reveller enjoys gambling: she enjoys the personal risk involved, she believes she is lucky, she enjoys competition, and the feeling that she can make people believe what she wants them to. Her parodic mastery of nautical and scientific jargon, of the language of literature and drama, and her competent use of the language of gambling enable her to have the upper hand in the most varied situations and are, by the way, amongst the best instances of Centlivre's own ability of imitating and exploiting linguistic varieties and registers.

Lady Reveller likes gambling because it offers her the possibility of exploiting her talents, “a Face, a Shape, an Air for Dress, and Wit and Humour,” in order to subdue men, and strip other gamblers without losing her virtue. She has quite a clear and interesting notion of virtue. It is not what the “Town” commonly calls virtue, a mere “Name,” she says (1.206), but an “innate Virtue” (5.68); that is, not the appearance, but the real substance of virtue. This distinction is rather more than a fine point to have the last word in a verbal skirmish. Whereas the moral stand of Goldoni's Florindo and Regnard's Valère is shaky to say the least, hers is quite firm.

The moral steadfastness of this concept becomes clear when she has to face Sir James. Although she is said to love money most of all, when Sir James dares her to barter her virtue for it, thus implying that no values exist outside those established by the cash nexus, Lady Reveller doggedly refuses and still boasts the possession and sole control of her “innate Virtue” to the point of being ready to face a social scandal—“Raise the House! I'll raise the World in my defence” (5.84-85), rather than keep quiet and cover up her loss under the appearance of virtue.

How far her stand is from the typical morals of the gamester can be seen by comparing this scene to the scene in which Florindo in Il Giocatore is ready to sell himself to an old lady (“un cadavere,” a corpse, he calls her) in order to obtain the money which will allow him to continue his game.⁹

MIXING GENDERS: GAMBLERS AND LOVE

Gamblers love, as Valere says: “Love her! I adore her!” … “Don't you imagine whatever passion I have for Play, that I have Power to forget that amiable Creature!” (I: 124-5), but they love their cards better. Loves goes bankrupt when the gamester's purse is replenished, and a lover can not compete with a gambling table; thus Valère's servant, Hector, dryly comments in Regnard's play: “Ai-je tort quand je dis que l'argent de retour vous fait faire toujours banqueroute à l'amour? Vous vous sentez en fonds, ergo plus de maîtresse” (Am I mistaken if I say that a replenished purse always entails love's bankruptcy? You're flush again, therefore, no more mistress) (200). Gamblers find it very difficult to reconcile their two passions. They generally pretend they are just about to quit gambling in order not to lose the woman they love, but when they get caught in their lies, this game of make-believe collapses and they have to admit their defeat.

Lady Reveller's relation with Lord Worthy is much more straightforward. She does not pretend she is not gambling. On the contrary, Lord Worthy is even asked to sit at the basset table and, being unable or unwilling to play, he has to entertain the other players by reading some poetry. If, at times, Lady Reveller seems on the point of admitting she loves Lord Worthy, she is however constantly aware that she “must not be Friends with him” (3.377). Being friendly with him would mean changing her priorities and eventually giving up gambling. Not that she would be unable to stop, as Florindo or Valere are, she simply does not want to, as gambling is the way she can assert herself.

As Richard Steele observed (although in an ironic context), the female gamester's “chief passion is to emulate manhood.” (no. 174, 2:503).¹⁰ It is in her relationship with Lord Worthy that Lady Reveller makes her clearest statement that she is the one who leads the game. In this relationship, roles are swapped; Lady Reveller defies Lord Worthy: “Dare you, the Subject of my Power … arraign my Pleasures,” (3.370-1) and he, after some resistance, gives in: “Oh! You have tortur'd me enough, take Pity now dear Tyrant, and let my Sufferings end” (3.375-6). Mixing cards and roles, Lord Worthy ends up getting the role that, in the plays by Goldoni and Regnard was respectively Rosaura's and Angélique's; in fact, he assumes some traits which are generally considered typically feminine: the capacity of loving someone with total abandon to the point of forgetting oneself, and forgiving and justifying almost everything. Lord Worthy's feminization is noticed by various characters. To her husband, who asks what kind of man Lord Worthy is, Mrs. Sago answers, “a mere Woman, full of Spleen and Vapours” (2.467-8) and, later on, Lord Worthy's servant, Buckle, describes Lord Worthy's reaction to Lady Reveller's repeated rejections as an unmanly fit of hysterics. Lord Worthy is either made fun of or pitied, but there is one more voice which seems to hint at the possibility of judging him differently: Centlivre's own. Lord Worthy refuses Sir James's suggestion that he should try to “force” Lady Reveller; he refuses the suggestion as Lady Reveller's body is nothing to him without her heart. He therefore seems to be able to think of Lady Reveller as a person endowed with both a body and a mind/heart; moreover, he is also capable of putting everything he is at stake; that is, his social image as a man, to gain Lady Reveller's heart. He will be saved this ultimate stake by the intervention of Sir James, who keeps mixing his and the other players' cards with the competence and aplomb of the consummate player described by Mme de Sévigné in a letter written to her daughter on July 29 1676 after a day spent at Versailles: “Je voyais jouer Dangeau; et j'admirois combien nous sommes sots auprès de lui. Il ne songe qu'à son affaire et gagne ou les autres perdent, il ne neglige rien, il profite de tout, il n'est point distrait; en un mot, sa bonne conduite défie la fortune (II:155)¹¹ (I have seen Dangeau play; he makes us all look stupid in comparison. His attention never strays from the game, and he wins when all players are losing, he misses nothing, takes adavantage of everything, is never off his guard; in one word, he conducts himself so well that he seems to defy fortune itself).

MIXING SOCIAL CLASSES: MRS SAGO'S STAKE

Lady Reveller also enjoys the social risk gambling involves: getting in touch and dealing with mixed classes and people. As Valère says: “Le jeu rassemble tout; il unit à-la-fois le turbulent marquis, le paisible bourgeois. La femme du banquier, dorée et triomphante, coupe orgueilleusement la duchesse indigente. Là, sans distinction, on voit aller de pair le laquais d' un commis avec un duc et pair; et quoi qu' un sort jaloux nous ait fait d' injustices, de sa naissance ainsi l' on venge les caprices” (200). (The gambling table brings together all and sundry: the unruly marquise and the peaceful bourgeois; the banker's wife, bejewelled and triumphant proudly cuts for the impoverished duchess. There, the commissioner's footman mixes with the duke; there, if you have been unjustly treated by a jealous fate, you can avenge yourself of the arbitrariness of your birth). As Caillois observes, the basic rule of any game is that of creating an absolute, albeit fictitious, equality among the players, thus creating a world governed by rules that are different from those of the real world. This is, in a way, the same otherness Voltaire noticed when he visited the London Stock-Exchange, where investors divested themselves of their social or religious identity to enter the game as if they were all equals. It is, however, left to Sir Richard, a former merchant risen to the ranks of gentry thanks to his success in trade, to blame his niece for her lack of discrimination: “… your Apartment is a Parade for men of all Ranks, from the Duke to the Fidler; … every one has his several Ends in meeting here, from the Lord to the Sharper, and each their separate Interest to pursue” (1.66-71).

Sir Richard, like Pantalone, is the representative of a social group that has finally attained economical power and social esteem by professing such virtues as fairness, trustfulness, moderation and hard work. Money, as Pantalone says, is his “blood” and its increase is the tangible proof of the merchant's social worth. In the merchant's economy, strict obedience to rules is meant to minimize the risk element, but in the gambler's economy, risk maintains all its aleatory character. A fine example of the gambler's economy is given by Sir James when fending off Lady Lucy's tirade against gambling. It is true that “Coaches and Equipage [are] dismiss'd” because of cards, but, Sir James observes, “how many fine Coaches and Equipages have they set up?” (4.226-8). Unlike the merchant, whose economic goal is increase, the gambler's goal is a zero sum economy. It is the individual who is either impoverished or enriched, whereas the system itself registers neither loss nor increase. Moreover, gambling stands for the utopian dream of begetting money in pleasure, as Florindo in Goldoni's Il giocatore explains drawing up his economic plan: “If I can win ten thousand sequins, I'll play no more. Ten thousand sequins invested at 4٪ can yield an annuity of 400 sequins a year … This is what I call gambling like a man” (1.4.3-6).

In this “parade of men of all ranks” who strive to get a fortune, there are also those for whom becoming rich means, in the words of Regnard's Valere, “revenging the injustice of one's birth.” In the Basset Table, it is a woman, Mrs. Sago, who is not “content with her present State.” She is a drugster's wife but she has become acquainted with Lady Reveller and is Sir James's mistress. Apparently not noticing what his wife's social climbing involves, Mr. Sago is very proud of her social success. Mrs. Sago stakes high; she is staking her virtue and her husband's money to become part of Lady Reveller's world, but she will lose. However, the fact that Centlivre has a chastened Mrs. Sago close the play should not make us overlook the fact that while she is staging her defeat, Centlivre also shows how skilfully Mrs. Sago plays her cards and what deep awareness she has of the way a trading economy works.

Mrs. Sago has bought her admittance into Lady Reveller's circle—“she has sent … [her] … the finest cargo, made up of Chocolate, Tea, Montifiasco Wine” (2.194-5), but to keep the game going (Lady Reveller accepts her as a friend as long as she has money), she needs to “replenish her Purse” quite often. In order to do this, she sets up a maze of complex trade relationships with various people and what she does not actually own, she buys “on margin” for a value of a thousand Pounds. Her risky investment might have proved rewarding if she had won at the basset table, but, as in all commercial enterprises, failure is always possible. When trying to help Mrs. Sago convince her husband to buy a diamond ring which she will then resell, Alpiew explains: “… the Owner is my Relation and has been as great a Merchant as any in London, but has had the Misfortune to have his Ships fall into the Hands of the French, or he'd not have parted with it” (2.504-7), so, a few lines later, when Mrs. Sago (her purse full) pleads: “Oh! Cast me, Fortune, on the winning Shore: Now let me gain what I have lost before” (2.541-2) it is not easy to distinguish the merchant's from the gamester's fortune—a blurring of differences which Centlivre was to underline again in A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), in which stockjobbers at Jonathan's Coffee House are shown to trade indifferently “South Sea bonds” and “Class Lottery tickets.”

The basset table is therefore, for Mrs. Sago, a sort of Jonathan's Coffee House, both the place where she can access Lady Reveller's world and the means by which she plans to recover the investment she made to enter that world. Her frantic desperation when she realizes she is losing everything can be fully understood only if we clearly have in mind the value of her investment. The risk she is running is astonishingly high: if her husband were to turn her out of doors, as he seems likely to do once he has discovered the amount of his loss, “… that fair face … will quickly be a cheaper Drug than any in my Shop” (5.384-6). Mrs. Sago would be reduced to survival by investing in the only thing she actually owns: herself, a commodity which devaluates rapidly. Luckily, she is saved (again) by Sir James, who pays for all her debts and, in so doing, also pays her off.

MIXING LEARNING AND GENDER: VALERIA'S STAKE

In The Basset Table the daughter to be married is Valeria. In the criticism concerning the play, she is generally introduced as a character apart, as the “Philosophical girl” thanks to whom the issue of female education is brought to the fore in an unusually sympathetic way and at an early date. A more central position in the play's economy is given her by F. P. Lock, who counterpoints gambling and education, observing that “the educated either see nothing attractive in the card game, or if they do play they know when to stop” (54).¹² Detached though she may seem, however, she is still part of the game. Science is Valeria's stake, her own form of investment (“Where Fortune in my Power,” she says, she would be ready to bestow her capital to found a college where women could study “Philosophy”) towards sexual self-ownership and inalienable individuality. Like her cousin, Lady Reveller, she is thus trying to avoid the exploitation of patriarchal authority/economy and to negotiate the terms of the fraternal one that the play shows as emerging. Beyond the superficial differences, Valeria, the serious philosophical girl, and Lady Reveller, the frivolous gambler, are linked by structural and cultural ties stronger than family. Was not science or “natural philosophy,” as it was then called, condemned as a social deviation as much as gambling? Were not virtuosi criticised because they dissipated their money and their children's inheritance, forgot their familiar and social duties and neglected their personal appearance? Gamblers and scientists alike were considered social misfits because of the excessiveness of their passion. And were not female virtuosos abused because learning, besides making them unfit for wives and housewives, encouraged immoral behavior, providing them with occasions their devious natures could not resist?¹³

Besides thus evoking a general framework, Centlivre also suggests similarities within the play that become explicit when both Valeria and Lady Reveller have to resist the bullying—though inoffensive—methods of Sir Richard, who represents patriarchy¹⁴ and who considers his daughter as a form of “future” investment (she will breed heirs for him). Valeria, like Lady Reveller, is also given supremacy in the gendered power relation, as when calling Captain Firebrand “an irrational creature” and claiming for herself the superior rational quality. “The Philosophical Gimcrack I don't value of a Cockle-Shell” (2.384) retorts the Captain, voicing the general opinion and highlighting the amount of Valeria's scientific stake. Since Molière's Femmes Savantes (1672), or its English version (Wright's Female Vertuoso's, 1693), no substantial variation seems to have intervened. The flesh and bone learned lady is still ambiguous and suspect: Centlivre's learning is attributed to illicit contacts with men; her successful plays are stolen or at best given her “by some Gentl'men”¹⁵; she is variously satirized in Pope's Dunciad and in Three Hours after Marriage by Gay, Pope and Arbuthnot (1717); Centlivre herself laments the meagre consideration learned ladies are given by even their own sex; even her character, Valeria, is sometimes seen as a satiric portrait of Mary Astell. Against this background, Centlivre projects the utopian coordinates of the basset world inhabited by all of Lady Reveller's “whimsical family.” In the end, both the gambler and the virtuosa will be brought to more ordinary behavior but beyond the apparently orthodox conclusion we read Centlivre's painstaking enquiry into “A Lady”'s “proper Sphere of Activity.”¹⁶

In conclusion, it is necessary to hint, at least, at another revealing characteristic of The Basset Table: it is an original play only indebted to a previous work, Le Divorce, again by Regnard (1688), for the marginal (sub-)plot line of one character, Mrs. Sago, who retains the negative behavioral traits (a sum of Molière's and Boileau's different satires) of the original Dame Sotinet, while the aristocratic status of the lady gambler gives rise to the new character of Lady Reveller. What matters here, however, apart from traditional debates over English theatrical indebtedness, or more recent gender questions (when writing incognito Centlivre seems readier to admit to borrowings), are the distinctive features of the resulting characters. Mrs. Sago is the one who has to bear the burden of the orthodox reform plot that the play seems to emphasize, especially in its conclusion. There is no real reform for Lady Reveller; instead, unlike Valere or Florindo, she is shown as thoroughly self-possessed, competent, and winning. Purposely paired with Valeria, the other character who defies accepted norms, Lady Reveller does not have to reform; her problem is that in comic as well as in social constraints, she has to get married before the play is over. Centlivre's “feminist individualism” is thus not limited¹⁷; it is enormously amplified by the absolute, albeit fictitious, equality created by the alternative rules of the basset table and all it stands for. Centlivre's awareness of its utopian dimension (shown also in her poem “A Woman's Case” (1720), where she deals with the limits her own marriage imposed), does not diminish the breadth of her own speculations and suggests, beautifully capturing the best spirit of play, an entirely different form of a lady's last stake.

Notes

1. Susanna Centlivre, The Basset Table and The Gamester in The Dramatic Works of the Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre With A New Account of her Life, 3 vols. (London: John Pearson, 1872); Jean-Françoise Regnard, Le Joueur in Document électronique, INALF, 1961 reproducing the 1820 edition of Ouvres complétes de Regnard (Paris: J. L.Briére, 1820); and Carlo Goldoni, Il giocatore (Venezia: Marsilio 1997). Subsequent references will be to these editions.

   All translations from Italian and French into English are by the authors of the article.

2. Quoted in Laura J. Rosenthal, “Writing (as) the Lady's Last Stake: Susanna Centlivre,” in Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (Ithaca and London: Cornell U.P., 1996), p.208.

3. The play ran but for one night and has been seldom performed ever since. Carlo Goldoni wrote in his Mèmoires that the “Piece tombée sans ressource” and that the reason was to be found in the fact that “C'étoit mal à propos de mettre à découvert les conséquences de cet amusement dangereux, et encoure plus la mauvaise foi de certains joueurs, et les artifices des courtiers de jeu.” Quoted from Goldoni's Mémoires in the introduction to Il Giocatore, p.82.

4. See Giancarlo Dossena, “Elogio dell'azzardo e del Casinò” in AA. VV., Fanti e denari: Sei secoli di giochi d'azzardo (Venezia: Arsenale, 1989), p. 11-34.

5. Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes, le masque et le vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 1958).

6. Katherine M. Rogers ed., The Meridian Antology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Plays by Women (New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1994).

7. Unsigned Dedication to The Basset Table added to the 1706 edition.

8. Lady Reveller's dashing entrée is unusual even in comparison to other female gamblers. Lady Dealer in Etherege's The Man of Mode is, after a gambling session, as dishevelled as her male counterparts. “I have played with her now at least a dozen times, till she's worn out all her fine complexion and her tour would keep in curl no longer” (2.1. 95-97)

9. Florindo is in serious financial straits and Gandolfa (the elderly aunt of Rosaura, Florindo's fiancée) offers to help him. She wants him to marry her in exchange for a pension of 1,000 ducats a year. In his asides he curses her, hopes she will die soon, calls her a corpse, and, for a good measure, a stinking on his honour he will play no more and offers her his hand. “Here is my hand, if you want it” (3.18.19)

10. The Guardian, 2 vols., (London: J. Tonson, 1714).

11. Mme de Sevigné, Lettres (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, 1960).

12. F. P. Lock, Susanna Centlivre (Boston: Twayne, 1979).

13. To remain within the genre, and to quote only some of the best known examples, a whole gallery of satirical portraits comes to mind, starting with the three imported virtuosae of Molière's Femmes Savantes (1672), later adapted for the English stage by Thomas Wright as The Female Vertuoso's (1693); Sir Nicholas Gimcrack in Shadwell's Virtuoso (1676); Sir Formal Ancient in D'Urfey's The Fool Turned Critic (1676); Lady Knowell in Behn's Sir Patient Fancy (1678); the virtuoso imitation presented by Lawrence Maidwell in The Loving Enemies (1680), for which Shadwell wrote an epilogue; Doctor Boliardo of Behn's The Emperor of the Moon (1687); Sophronia in D'Urfey's The Richmond Heiress (1693); Bizarre in Farquhar's The Incostant (1702); Marsilia, Calista and Mrs. Wellfed in the anonymous The Female Wits (1704); Florida in Johnson's The Generous Husband (1711); Phoebe Clinket and Doctor Fossile in Three Hours After Marriage by Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot (1717); Lady Wrangle and her daughter in Cibber's The Refusal (1721); Lady Science in Miller's The Humours of Oxford (1727).

14. Rosenthal, p.237.

15. “Some have arm'd themselves with resolution not to like the Play they paid to see; and if in spite of Spleen, they have been pleased against their Will, have maliciously reported it was none of mine, but given me by some Gentleman.” Dedication to The Platonick Lady (1707).

16. The words pronounced by Frederick in D'Urfey's The Richmond Heiress (1693) reflect an increasingly common trope and are used by Centlivre herself when trying to understand men's dislike of women writers: “perhaps you'll answer, because they meddle with things out of their Sphere: But I say, no; for since the Poet is Born, why not a Woman as well as a Man?” Dedication to the Platonick Lady.

17. Rosenthal, p.206, p.240-1.