[In the following excerpt, Bowyer discusses Centlivre's first period of success (1700-03), when the playwright began to attract public attention as an author. Bowyer highlights her adaptations of earlier plays and her efforts to establish herself as female author.]

At the end of 1700 Mrs. Centlivre was well established in London. Her friends included Tom Brown, Abel Boyer, William Ayloffe, George Farquhar, Mrs. Jane Wiseman, Mrs. De la Rivière Manley, Mrs. Catharine Trotter, Mrs. Sarah Fyge Egerton, Mrs. Mary Pix, Lady Sarah Peirce. She probably had already met William Burnaby, John Oldmixon, Richard Steele, Nicholas Rowe, Charles Johnson, and others with whom she was to be associated later. These names may not seem important in the whole history of English letters, but they were not to be scorned in the year following Dryden's death. She also knew the actors and actresses of the time, and her close friendship with Anne Oldfield and Robert Wilks had probably already begun.

Susanna's first play had been acted with moderate success. Surprisingly enough, the Prologue boasted that it was a lady's:

And here's To-night, what doubly makes it sweet,
A private Table, and a Lady's Treat:

It had been printed also with her name on the title page. But the promise of an easy road to a professional literary career was illusory. She was to be allowed immediate credit for her second play, The Beau's Duel: or, A Soldier for the Ladies, which was acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields, about June, 1702,¹ but after that she would have to accept varying degrees of anonymity for some years.

Before 1700 women dramatists had sometimes found it to their advantage to represent their plays as the work of men when presented in the theater, but for the first two years of the eighteenth century there seems to have been some relaxation of the hostility toward women playwrights. Then the propaganda for improvement in the status of women increased, some even believing that Queen Anne could be persuaded to found a college for women. The reformers were usually rationalists, often members of the growing number of Cartesians in England. The writers of plays, letters, essays, and poetry of wit and gallantry toyed with ideas affecting the status of women, sometimes gallantly, sometimes scornfully, but with an astonishing demonstration of equality and freedom between the sexes. But the net result was that immediately following Anne's accession to the throne in 1702 the dislike of the traditionalists for women writers was stronger than before. For the time being, the decision remained securely with the conservatives—the clergy, the educators, and the moralists—who accepted woman's traditional inferiority of mind and character and feared what would happen if she were given an education, a more nearly equal position in marriage, and a more prominent role in society.

Throughout her literary career Mrs. Centlivre fought a woman's battle for recognition. Undoubtedly she used hostility toward women to excuse the failure of some of her works when a better explanation would have been lack of merit, but her desire to establish herself as a writer in a man's world was the governing idea of her life from 1700 until her marriage to Joseph Centlivre in 1707. During these seven years she wrote eight dramas. Part of the time she also acted in the provinces. Since making a living was her chief problem, she was primarily concerned with her plays, dedications, and benefits.

The cast for The Beau's Duel was stronger than for The Perjur'd Husband, though it is unlikely that the play had a very long run. Pack, as Ogle, a fortune hunter, was the most significant actor. Cory and Booth acted Colonel Manly and Captain Bellmein, two gentlemen paired with Clarinda and Emilia, acted by Mrs. Prince and Mrs. Porter, the distinguished tragic actress. Powell, notorious for his own drinking, was Toper, “an Enemy to Matrimony, and a Friend to the Bottle,” Bowman was Sir William Mode, a fop, and Fieldhouse was Carefull, the father. Mrs. Lee acted Mrs. Plotwell, a former mistress of Bellmein.

The comedy was repeated at Lincoln's Inn Fields in the autumn. It is advertised for October 21 in the Daily Courant, where it is called the last new comedy, “With the Addition of a New Scene, and a new Prologue and Epilogue, with a Whimsical Song Sung by Mr. Pack.” Since all printed copies follow the first edition, there is no way to trace the additions.

The Beau's Duel was revived at Drury Lane on April 11, 1785, for the benefit of Baddeley, who took the part of Carefull, father of Clarinda. King, Dodd, Bannister, Jr., R. Palmer, Palmer, Miss Farren, Mrs. Brereton, Mrs. Ward, and Mrs. Wilson also participated. But except for the nonce presentation the play was dead within a year of its birth.

In the comedy Colonel Manly and Captain Bellmein both think themselves in love with Clarinda, whom her father, Carefull, wishes to marry to a foolish but wealthy fop, Sir William Mode. Sir William and Ogle, a conceited poet and beau who imagines every woman in love with him, are teased into a duel by Toper, but they arrange privately to fight with foils (“files”). Clarinda and her cousin, Emilia, with whom Bellmein is really in love, go to the duel disguised as men in order to get proof that Sir William is a coward. There they egg on the combatants, but they make off when Manly and Bellmein appear.

Carefull has meanwhile come upon a letter from Ogle to Clarinda, and, thinking his daughter in love with the beau, orders her to marry Sir William by six the following day or he will himself marry before twelve. Toper, a friend of Manly and Bellmein, offers his “cousin,” really Mrs. Plotwell, whom he introduces as a highly virtuous Quaker, to be Carefull's wife.

At her request, Manly and Bellmein rescue Clarinda from Sir William as he is taking her to church, and Manly marries her. (The trick is as old as Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday.) Carefull thereupon marries Mrs. Plotwell. After the ceremony, however, she lays aside her Quaker demeanor and begins her persecution. (The situation suggests that in Jonson's The Silent Woman.) Finally, Carefull agrees to forgive his daughter for having married Manly if Bellmein and Toper will free him from his wife. Mrs. Plotwell returns her settlement, and, since Bellmein rather than a parson had performed the ceremony, it is revealed that there had really been no marriage. Bellmein is to marry Emilia.

According to Genest (II, 262) that part of The Beau's Duel relating to “Mrs. Plotwell's marriage and subsequent conduct is stolen from the City Match.” Robert Seibt² points out the chief scenes borrowed. The main distinction between the borrowed scenes and their originals is that Mrs. Centlivre writes as prose what Mayne had written as blank verse. Yet the characterization of Mrs. Plotwell as a reformed mistress and the brains of the plot is new. Also in The City Match (1639) it is the nephew rather than the daughter who is to be disinherited. The changes suggest that Mrs. Centlivre was giving more prominence to the nature and problems of women than Mayne had done.

The greater part of The Beau's Duel is Mrs. Centlivre's own. Her satire on beaux and fops is freshly handled, though the use of cowards who will not fight is not new, as readers of Shakespeare, Jonson, and Congreve know. In some respects the play reflects ideas and situations which had already appeared in her correspondence. For example, Sir William gives it as his opinion that the use of another man's oath is “as indecent as wearing his Cloaths.” He is very proud of his “Affirmatives” like “Impair my Vigour,” “blister me,” and “enfeeble me.” Bellmein says that he and his mistress pass for Celadon and Chloe, and Emilia, like Astraea in the letters, explains how she met Celadon and was so much entertained by his pretty discourse while sitting next him in the pit that she promised to write to him and could not help keeping her word if she was to be hanged for it. Also, Bellmein's description of himself to Emilia as the pale, wan, and skeleton-like lover is much like that of Celadon to Astraea. In short, similarities between the expressions in the letters and those in the comedy lead us to conclude that Mrs. Centlivre probably borrowed only the marriage of Carefull and Mrs. Plotwell.

Except that the various plots are never completely integrated, The Beau's Duel is an acceptable comedy, with realistic comments upon contemporary London life and allusions to popular topics like the prognostications of the astrologers and philomaths. The character of Mrs. Plotwell is well done, and the use of her to unify the action, though not completely satisfactory, shows a genuine dramatic sense. Three brief scenes are worth remembering: one in the first act where Sir William corrects Le Reviere, his supposed French valet, for speaking English without an accent (“Blister me if you don't speak plain English!”), another at the beginning of Act II where Sir William in a nightgown, before his mirror, conducts both parts of an imaginary conversation with a lord at the playhouse, and Act II, scene 2, in which Ogle describes his conquests over women's hearts, commenting on the fact that a tradesman fails to appreciate the honor a gentleman does him in making love to his wife and demonstrating how his mistress looks longingly down upon him from her window. These are not so crisp as similar scenes from Congreve, but they are well above the Restoration average in the comedy of manners. Elsewhere the emphasis is predominantly on disguises, mistaken identity, and trickery.

One of the most interesting differences between The Beau's Duel and the Restoration comedy results from the new emphasis which Mrs. Centlivre puts on men and women of sense. Both a man and a woman of sense are capable of frankness, truth-telling, and genuine affection. The woman of sense is unlike her Restoration predecessor in that she does not make herself difficult and does not take pride in being pursued. In fact, she is as much the pursuer as the man, but only to learn whether her servant really loves her or to escape a second man who is being forced upon her against her will. She admits that she is in love and that she would like to be married, and she believes that no man of sense would take advantage of a virtuous woman. Men and women of sense would not think of marrying for money or of making love without feeling it regardless of the stakes, though they admit that riches are “the common Chance of Knaves and Fools” and “Fortune is rarely favourable to a Man of Sense.” Clarinda and Emilia hesitate to don breeches as a means of showing up Sir William, for they fear that “this masquerade will not be reputable for Women of nice Honour,” but they do it as a means of securing justice for themselves. Like the man of sense, the sensible woman is generous, courageous, judicious, and constant in love. She is capable of making her own decisions, and she regards love far more highly than obedience to her parents, a view very disagreeable to the moralists of the time.

The Prologue, by a gentleman, is interesting for showing the early eighteenth-century attitude of the dramatists toward their audience:

          What Hazards Poets run, in Times like these,
Sure to offend, uncertain whom to please:
If in a well-work'd Story they aspire,
To imitate old Rome's or Athen's Fire,
It will not do; for strait the Cry shall be,
'Tis a forc'd heavy piece of Bombastry.
If Comedy's their Theme, 'tis ten to one
It dwindles into Farce, and then 'tis gone.
If Farce their Subject be, this Witty Age
Holds that below the Grandeur of the Stage.

The dramatists sometimes, as here, charged the audience with a lack of taste and judgment and so accounted for the popular desire for farce, pantomime, and opera. In their view, the audience lacked a proper respect for the sober forms of tragedy and comedy and in its oversophistication condemned genuine emotion and poetry for flashy wit and superficial adornment. Undoubtedly the audience was changing. The people were becoming more interested in politics, science, and trade. In their interests they had been shifting from the court to the town, from court amusements to party controversies, from leisure to business. The small and select audience had given way to a larger but less cohesive one. Perhaps to this very fact was due the popularity of Mrs. Centlivre's busy comedies of intrigue.

Mrs. Centlivre had a third play ready for production before the year was out. The Stolen Heiress: or The Salamanca Doctor Outplotted was acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields for the first time on Thursday, December 31, 1702,³ and was published anonymously on January 16, 1703,⁴ with a dedication to Sir Stafford Fairborn, rear admiral of the fleet. The lady says that she is proud to be the first to make him an offering of this kind.

With The Stolen Heiress begins for Mrs. Centlivre the attempt to conceal the sex of the author. Her prologue, spoken by Mrs. Prince, begins:

          Our Author fearing his Success to Day,
Sends me to bribe your Spleen against his Play, …(5)

Though, as we shall see, such deception rankled with her, she could do little to counter the demands of the players and the publisher.

The cast of The Stolen Heiress included several players who had acted in The Beau's Duel. But it was a far better cast than she had had earlier, for the younger players were becoming more experienced and better known, and, for the first time, Mrs. Barry took a part in one of her dramas. Powell had the part of Palante, the hero of the tragic plot, and Pack was Francisco, the protagonist of the comic plot. Dogget acted Sancho, a ridiculous scholar from the University of Salamanca. Mrs. Barry was Lucasia, the tragic heroine, and Mrs. Prince was Lavinia, the comic heroine. The Epilogue was spoken by Dogget, who, as Sancho, indicates his intention of burning all his books and using his shape, dress, and smiles to gain the ladies' favor.

The story of the play may be briefly summarized. Palante, foster son of Euphenes, is in love with Lucasia, daughter of Gravello. Gravello has circulated a false report of the death of his son Eugenio in order to make it appear that his daughter is an heiress, so that the rich Count Pirro will marry her. But Palante and Lucasia elope and are married. Thereupon Pirro uses his influence with his uncle, the governor of Palermo, to have Palante sentenced to death for stealing an heiress. Irus, really Eugenio himself in disguise, informs Gravello that Eugenio is alive, and then, suspecting the secrecy which his father enjoins upon him, gives the information also to Pirro, who employs him in writing to poison Eugenio. The Governor offers Lucasia Palante's life if she will marry his nephew, and, on her refusal, swears never to pardon him. Palante is discovered in the meanwhile to be the real son of Euphenes. As a last resort, Irus produces his contract with Pirro and then discovers himself in order to free Palante. Pirro is exiled, and Palante and Lucasia are accepted by their fathers, who bury an old feud between the two families.

In the subplot Larich tries to marry his daughter Lavinia to Sancho, but by pretending unchastity she succeeds in getting her father's consent to marry Francisco, though at the expense of being disinherited. Then Francisco receives an estate as a result of his uncle's death, Lavinia convinces her father that she is really virtuous, and all are happy except Sancho, who takes a philosophical view of the events.

The Stolen Heiress was advertised and printed as a comedy. Jacob, however, calls it a tragicomedy, perhaps the best name for it. The comic and the tragic plots are better integrated than in The Perjur'd Husband, because Gravello and Larich, the fathers of the two girls, are brothers, and because both plots show fathers trying arbitrarily to dispose of their daughters. To some extent the play is propaganda against the Sicilian (and English) law making it a crime punishable by death to marry an heiress against her father's wishes. In the last scene the Governor of Palermo promises that he will “solicit earnestly the King to mitigate this cruel Law, and make the Thefts of Love admit of Pardon.”

Although some writers say that The Stolen Heiress was probably taken from one of the old Spanish romances, Genest (II, 263) names the real source as Thomas May's The Heir, acted by the Company of the Revels in 1620 and printed in 1633.⁶ Sometimes Susanna follows her source in the use of blank verse; at other times she writes the speeches, frequently with no other change, as prose. Nevertheless, she makes some alterations with the obvious intention of strengthening her original. She links the two plots somewhat more closely than May does. She also tries to motivate some of his unreal situations and to humanize his improbable characters. Thus, for instance, she replaces Shallow, who is stupidly persuaded that Lavinia is to bear him a child, with Sancho, who is willing to marry the girl but is under no illusions as to the child's parentage.

Philocles and Leucothoe in The Heir develop a sudden passion at first sight, but Palante and Lucasia are in love at the opening of the play. The rich count is also more plausible. The chief objection to Virro in The Heir is his age; in The Stolen Heiress it is Pirro's ugly passion, reflected in his appearance, that makes him distasteful.⁷

Much of May's play is in turn based on Shakespeare. The enmity between Polymetes and Euphues comes from Romeo and Juliet, as does the story of Philocles and Leucothoe's falling in love at first sight. Mrs. Centlivre shifts the emphasis, however, from the family feud to the stealing of the heiress. The offer of the Governor to pardon Philocles if Leucothoe will give herself to him is from Measure for Measure.⁸ The arrival of Leucothoe in the grove and her apprehension of ill comes from the Thisbe episode of A Midsummer Night's Dream; and the scene of the constable and the watch at the end of Act IV, from Much Ado about Nothing.

The Stolen Heiress seems not to have been revived, but Mrs. Cowley used the subplot, The Salamanca Doctor Outplotted, in Who's the Dupe?, a farce acted with considerable applause at Drury Lane in 1779 and the years following. There are no close verbal parallels. Doiley wants his daughter Elizabeth to marry a scholar named Gradus, but she prefers Granger. With her approval, Granger teaches Gradus the ways of the world and makes him drunk. Doiley, horrified, gladly considers another scholar for his daughter's hand. Following a word combat in which Granger, the new scholar, uses learned English and Gradus uses Greek, Doiley pronounces Granger the better Greek scholar and rewards him with his daughter. Gradus consoles himself with the witty servant Charlotte.

So far Mrs. Centlivre's plays had been presented at bad times of the year—very early or very late in the season or at vacation time. Her luck did not change with Love's Contrivance: or, Le Medecin Malgre Lui, which was first acted anonymously at Drury Lane on Friday, June 4, 1703. It was not unusual in the advertisements of a new play for no author to be mentioned, but when Love's Contrivance was published, on June 14, the initials “R. M.” were signed to the Dedication. Two days later the following notice appeared in the Daily Courant:

Whereas the last New Comedy, call'd, Love's Contrivance, or, Le Medecin Malgre Luy, has the two letters R. M. to the dedication. This is to give Notice, that the Name of the Author (who for some Reasons is not willing to be known at present) does not begin with those two Letters. The true Name will shortly be made known.

The real name of the author seems not to have been announced in the newspapers, but in the dedication of The Platonick Lady (1707) Mrs. Centlivre complains that the publisher of Love's Contrivance, realizing the contempt in which female authors were held, “put two letters of a wrong name to it; which tho' it was the height of injustice to me, yet his imposing on the Town turn'd to account with him; and thus passing for a Man's, it has been play'd at least a hundred times.”⁹ The only possible deduction is that Bernard Lintot, the publisher, played her a scurvy trick.

Mrs. Centlivre's embarrassment was no doubt due in part to the awkwardness of having her dedication falsely initialed. The inscription of a play was a recognized source of income for the playwright, and she chose her patrons with some care. In this dedication to the old Earl of Dorset, who had a reputation for generosity to writers, she mentions “the courteous affability” with which his Lordship “once received a trifle” from her hand. But the style is so notoriously bad that one is tempted to charge the publisher with altering more than the signature.

The cast of Love's Contrivance was strong enough to please the dramatist herself. Wilks had the part of Bellmie, an attractive one for an actor because it provides him with three distinct roles—Bellmie, the “angry doctor,” and the “doubting philosopher.” Mills was Octavio, Bellmie's friend; Norris (better known as “Jubilee Dicky” from his astounding success in Farquhar's The Constant Couple: or, A Trip to the Jubilee) took the part of Martin, formerly the servant of Bellmie, now a fagot maker, and soon to pass for a famous doctor; Johnson played Sir Toby Doubtful, the superannuated lover of Lucinda; Bullock was Selfwill, father of Lucinda; Mrs. Rogers, Lucinda; Mrs. Oldfield, Belliza, her cousin; and Mrs. Norris, Martin's wife. Wilks probably spoke the Epilogue, since it refers to “this Fortune-telling Play” and suggests that he end it by telling the fortunes of the audience, presumably as he had told the fortune of Sir Toby.

The comedy ran for three nights, Susanna receiving her benefit on June 7. It was repeated on June 14 for the benefit of the boxkeepers, Lovelace, King, and White, with additions: “In which the Famous Gasperini will perform several Italian Sonatas. Entertainments of Singing by Mr. Leveridge and others, and Entertainments of Dancing by the Famous du Ruell and others, as express'd in the Bills at large.” It was also repeated on June 18 and 22, on the second occasion for the benefit of Mrs. Campion and for the entertainment of the Envoy Extraordinary from the King of Denmark and several other foreign ministers and ladies of quality. On July 7 the last act, “the comical Scenes of The Angry Doctor, and, The Doubting Philosopher,” was part of a hodgepodge entertainment at Drury Lane, including a comedy, The Comical Rivals, the fourth act of The Old Bachelor, and a variety of singing and dancing.

Our chief source of information about the early performances is Mrs. Centlivre's preface. She says that the play “met a Reception beyond [her] Expectation” and she attributes its success to the players:

I must own myself infinitely obliged to the Players, and in a great Measure the Success was owing to them, especially Mr. Wilks, who extended his Faculties to such a Pitch, that one may almost say he out-play'd himself; and the Town must confess they never saw three different Characters by one Man acted so well before, and I think myself extremely indebted to him, likewise to Mr. Johnson, who in his way I think the best Comedian of the Age.

During the following season it was acted on October 20, February 16, and April 28. On the last occasion it was given at the desire of several persons of quality for the benefit of the author. This second benefit for what was no longer a new play seems unusual, but, since the author had to pay the charges of the house, the theater probably did not lose a great deal. In addition, the last act was used as an afterpiece on January 21, March 28 (for Mrs. Oldfield's benefit), and July 5, and again on June 7, 1705, and February 14, 1706. Tony Aston included it also in a medley which he produced in taverns about London in 1723 and 1724.

Lincoln's Inn Fields revived the full play on July 14 and 17, 1724, and twice in 1726. Apparently Love's Contrivance was never produced again. The presentation of Henry Fielding's The Mock Doctor, a rather close adaptation of Le Médecin malgré lui, in 1732, ended any further usefulness it may have had for the stage.

Yet the list of characters in The Mock Countess, an unprinted farce first presented at Drury Lane on April 30, 1733, shows that Love's Contrivance had not been forgotten. The farce probably included from Mrs. Centlivre's play the early scene in which Octavio gives Sir Toby advice about matrimony and the scenes between Sir Toby and the philosophers, and added the trick of the mock countess—Betty Kimbow in disguise—from The Play's the Plot (1718), by John Durant Breval.

The success of her comedy encouraged Mrs. Centlivre to write a preface in which she explained her method of working and her attitude toward the rules of the critics. It is her most fully developed statement of a dramatic theory:

The Criticks cavil most about Decorums, and cry up Aristotle's Rules as the most essential part of the Play. I own they are in the right of it; yet I dare venture a wager they'll never persuade the Town to be of their Opinion, which relishes nothing so well as Humour lightly tost up with Wit, and drest with Modesty and Air. … I do not say this by way of condemning the Unity of Time, Place, and Action; quite contrary, for I think them the greatest Beauties of a Dramatick Poem; but since the other way of writing pleases full as well, and gives the Poet a larger Scope of Fancy, … why should a Man torture, and wrack his Brain for what will be no Advantage to him.

For the time being, too, she acknowledged the necessity of modesty in style:

The following Poem I think has nothing can disoblige the nicest Ear; and tho' I did not observe the Rules of Drama, I took peculiar Care to dress my Thoughts in such a modest Stile, that it might not give Offence to any.

Her last three plays, it must be admitted, are relatively clean in comparison with the drama that had gone before, but Love's Contrivance is far more objectionable than the other two.

Mrs. Centlivre says that she intended to write a farce and so divided her material into three acts, but “some very good Judges,” considering what she had added to the farcical scenes borrowed from Molière, divided it, in spite of her, into five acts, “believing it might pass among the Comedies of these Times.” In her subtitle she acknowledges one of her sources, but Genest (II, 273) thinks that she tried to “conceal that she has borrowed the scenes, in which Sir Toby is concerned, from Molière's Forced Marriage.” It seems unlikely, however, that she expected to hide borrowings from Molière; and, in any case, she deserves some credit for combining several plays into one.¹⁰

The opening scene of Love's Contrivance bears a close resemblance to the first scene in Molière's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire, where the father Gorgibus, asserting his absolute power over his daughter Célie, commands her to give her hand to the rich Valère, leaving her heart, if she pleases, with Lélie. But Mrs. Centlivre does not use any of Molière's language. Furthermore, Lucinda is much more impudent to her father than Célie, and Selfwill is much more tyrannical than Gorgibus. Here the Englishwoman is trying to bring her characters into accord with the contemporary types of the comedy of intrigue. A little later in Sganarelle Célie defends her lover from the doubts of her maid. Mrs. Centlivre, on the other hand, makes the maid into a friend, Belliza, whom she uses for her second pair of lovers.

Much of Love's Contrivance is literally translated from Le Mariage forcé and Le Médecin malgré lui. Mrs. Centlivre makes a characteristic alteration of the wife-beating scene from Le Médecin malgré lui. Molière's husband asks forgiveness of his wife and goes to the woods to make fagots for her. But Martin, despite his wife's plea not to spend the money for which her bones have suffered, starts for the alehouse:

MARTIN.
But it was my Friend gave the Money tho'.
WIFE.
But if I had not cry'd out, your Friend might not have come this way tho'.
MARTIN.
That's right———well, Wife, I won't stand with you for little Matters, you shall beat me now, and I'll cry out, if you think that will get you a Guinea; if not, if you'll come to the Alehouse, I'll make you drunk; and so good b'w'ye.

Mrs. Centlivre again employs this method of turning the argument in the second act. There Belliza comes to Bellmie's lodgings with a message for him, finds a man reading, and strikes him on the shoulder with her fan. She is surprised to find that he is not Bellmie, but she likes him at once. He addresses her as Bellmie's mistress, for whom he takes her. The scene is sprightly—the kind of thing Mrs. Centlivre could do well—with some sparkle, a bit of philosophizing, and a touch of the casuistry and lust of the Restoration rake in Octavio. The method is seen in these two selections of dialogue, which turn upon the current arguments for free trade:

OCTAVIO.
Ah! Madam, he's the most generous Man in the World; his Mistress and his Pocket are still at his Friend's Service.
BELLIZA.
Let his Friends share his Mistress! I'm afraid if his Friends applaud his Generosity, they condemn his Sense.
OCTAVIO.
Quite to the contrary, Madam, they admire his Morals! he's a Wellwisher to his Country, and knows that the engrossing any Commodity ruins Trade.

But Octavio is so much taken with Belliza that he finds himself in love, and believes he will be to the end of his life.

BELLIZA.
And how many Friends have you to share, pray?
OCTAVIO.
Faith, Madam, none at all. I fancy I should play the Monopolist, were you once at my Disposal.
BELLIZA.
But that would be a Ruin to Trade, you know; you would be reckoned an Enemy to your Country.

Mrs. Centlivre uses the Octavio-Belliza scenes to connect the borrowings from her two chief sources. Octavio, believing Belliza a jealous mistress of his friend, tells her that Bellmie does not really love Lucinda. It then becomes necessary for him to rectify his error. This he does by persuading Sir Toby to seek counsel on marriage from a learned doctor and a philosopher, both acted by Bellmie in disguise.¹¹

During the summer of 1703 the players from Lincoln's Inn Fields went to Oxford for a period of vacation merrymaking called the “Act.” It is satirically described in The Players turn'd Academicks: or, a Description (In Merry Metre) of their Translation from the Theatre in Little Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, to the Tennis-Court in Oxford (1703). Mrs. Centlivre (Carroll) would have liked to accompany them but could not afford the trip:

          The first that took Coach, and had often took———,
Was the fam'd Mrs. B———with P——x at her A———,
A Tool of a Scribe, and a Poetress great,
Who was said to Write well, because well she could Treat,
And for her sake had written her husband in Debt.
While Carrol, her Sister-Adventurer in Print,
Took her Leave all in Tears, with a Curt'sie and Squint,
And would certainly take the same Journey as she,
Had she not giv'n away Medecin Malgre Lui.

Mrs. B———is the unquestionably famed but notorious actress, Elizabeth Barry, and P——x is the fat (“great”) Mary Pix. Susanna's squint, because of the wen on her left eyelid, was her hallmark among her enemies.

Mrs. Centlivre's giving away her play sounds like an ironical reminder of the false initials signed to the Dedication, but John Nichols in Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century (VIII, 294) notes that Bernard Lintot on May 14, 1703, paid Mrs. Knight ten pounds for Love's Contrivance. Apparently Susanna gave her friend the actress the publication rights. Ten pounds was a common but minimum fee for drama manuscripts at the time.

Notes

1. Advertised in the Post Boy for July 4-7, 1702, as to be published on the morrow.

2. “Die Komödien der Mrs. Centlivre,” Anglia, XXXIII (1910), 83 ff.

3. Daily Courant, Dec. 29, 1702.

4. Post Boy, Jan. 16-17, 1703.

5. The prologue to Mrs. Pix's The Conquest of Spain, acted in May, 1705, is equally positive:

             How bold a Venture does our Author make?
   And what strange Measures do his Wishes take?
   How cou'd he hope the Tragick Scene shou'd please …

6. Hans Strube has made a textual comparison of the two plays in S. Centlivre's Lustspiel “The Stolen Heiress” und sein Verhältnis zu “The Heir” von Thomas May (Halle a. S., 1900).

7. Strube (ibid.) thinks that Mrs. Centlivre had Cibber's Love Makes a Man (acted at Drury Lane in Dec., 1700) in mind when she created Sancho. It is Cibber's scholar Carlos, however, who wins Angelina from his foppish brother despite the fact that the latter has the support of both their fathers. Cibber, who got the story of Carlos and Sancho from that of Charles and his servant Andrew in Fletcher's The Elder Brother, probably took the name of the servant from Don Quixote, and Mrs. Centlivre may have done the same, for at the end of Act I she says that Sancho “makes as odd a Figure, Sir, as the famous Don Quixot, when he went in Search of his Dulcinea.”

   At one point Mrs. Centlivre changed May's “As if 'twere writ in Gallobelgicus” to “as if they had been Spectators of his End.” Disregarding dates, Strube suggests that here Mrs. Centlivre is punning on the title of Addison and Steele's Spectator.

8. In keeping with her attempt to make the character of the Governor more generally consistent, Mrs. Centlivre has him offer Lucasia a pardon for her lover if she will marry his nephew, apparently forgetting that Lucasia and Palante are already married.

9. The “hundred times” included acting in the provinces as well as in London.

10. Cf. Albert Wüllenweber, Mrs. Centlivre's Lustspiel “Love's Contrivance” und seine Quellen (Halle a. S., 1900), and Richard Ohnsorg, John Lacy's “Dumb Lady,” Mrs. Susanna Centlivre's “Love's Contrivance,” Henry Fielding's “Mock Doctor” in ihrem Verhältnis zu einander und zu ihrer gemeinschaftlichen Quelle (Rostock, 1900). Wüllenweber denies the charge of H. van Laun in “Les Plagiaries de Molière” (Le Moliériste, Jan., 1881, pp. 304-5) that Mrs. Centlivre was a pure and artless plagiary.

11. Wüllenweber (ibid.) believes than an incident about the middle of Act III may have been suggested by John Lacy's The Dumb Lady, or the Farrier Made a Physician (1672), a compounding of Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui and L'Amour médecin. In Act IV, scene 3, of The Dumb Lady Olinda says:

    And at the boot of your coach must be running an orange wench, presenting your lady a sweet lemon with a love letter in't.

    This may have given Mrs. Centlivre the idea for the scene in which Martin enters Selfwill's house as a vendor of oranges, the cheapness of which attracts Sir Toby. When Martin insists that Lucinda try an orange and pretends to cut it for her, she strikes it down and a letter drops out.