The most original character is Valeria, who is described as a Philosophical Girl. See The Works of George Farquhar, ed. Plot 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. 202-3. As Catherine Gallagher says in Who Was That Masked Woman? Calling up the powers of Cupid seems to work for the lovers, and Colonel Fainwell's final speech also suggests his martial prowess and his duty to his king, his religion, and his lady: I must beg Sir Philip's pardon when I tell him that I have as much aversion to what he calls dress and breeding as I have to the enemies of my religion. Although Mrs. Centlivre ridicules the guardians and Mrs. Prim, her primary aim is not didactic; unlike Shadwell, she does not even pretend to use humors characters to laugh men out of their follies.
In The Wonder, Felix's jealousy is treated not satirically but sympathetically. 
Press, 1964), pp. As the action speeds forward, the gulling of the last guardian, Prim, takes place like that of the first, in one continuous episode which terminates successfully (V.i). 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. Or seek a Reconciliation, with what I did not love? Centlivre explicitly acknowledged this when she dismissed literary prescriptions in her preface to Love's Contrivance, saying the criticks cavil most about Decorums, and cry up Aristotles Rules. While producing popular plays that both appealed to their audiences and stayed within the conventional cultural boundaries of accepted drama, these two playwrights were attempting subtly to modify and reform established attitudes concerning accepted behavior for and the control of women. Frushell's net is cast more widely. This play within the play, however, is deconstructed when she does finally speak to him after she has managed to get rid of the guardian. For Centlivre, the act of appropriating Behn's poetic name implies her own desire to be like Behn, to share in the nominal and monetary rewards associated with being a successful woman playwright. One often gets the feeling, for example, that in Etherege or Congreve characters meet just so the author can see what will happen, can watch the displays of wit. He went on to say that Females of Wit could write such a play better than a man.32 Although his praise includes a stereotypical view of women, his notice of the play was of immense service to Centlivre. It simply fosters delight and a tightly developed plot. These conflicting desires do not let the characters really explore the metaphor of woman as commodity. Pearson, Jacqueline. The early eighteenth-century stage was reeling under the loss of fashionable patronage, the assaults of Collier and his followers, and the influx of audiences with different cultural imperatives and agendas; the successful dramatist had to negotiate and reconcile contradictory audience demands, delivering the bodily pleasure of laughter within the grip of repressive sensibility. Sexual commodification threatens both characters, but gender differences nevertheless remain apparent through Valere's capacity symbolically to sell Angellica. Perhaps Centlivre's most blatant feminist ideology becomes apparent at the end of the play. "Susanna Centlivre - Patsy S. Fowler (essay date winter 1996)" Drama Criticism 8.
He had been restrained in his use of the stereotype even in his early plays; yet in those written before the death of Queen Anne, he expends little sympathy on characters not members of the landed gentry or nobility. Jacob, however, calls it a tragicomedy, perhaps the best name for it. WebStep 5 - I nterpreting the Findings The final step involves the interpretation of the findings and generalisation of the conclusions to the larger body of knowledge about the phenomenon. I know not what they call Whigs, or how they distinguish between them and Tories: But if the Desire is to see my Country secur'd from the Romish Yoke, and flourish by a firm, lasting, Honourable Peace to the Glory of the best of Queens, who deservedly holds the Ballance of all Europe, be a Whig, then I am one, else not. Some Scenes I confess are partly taken from Moliere, and I dare be bold to say it has not suffered in the Translation: I thought 'em pretty in the French, and cou'd not help believing they might divert in an English Dress. Familiar and Courtly Letters Written by Voiture. It signals that there is a dimension of her successits long durationthat cannot be accounted for as merely shrewdness and observation of her market; he is content to ignore the challenge this presents to his account, and dub her unwittingly prescient. In 1929, in her study of women and literature A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf marks Aphra Behn's career as a very important corner on the road, a turning point. What Fidelis Morgan sees in The Wonder! Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Instead of reading these two characters as failures as so many critics have in the past, I suggest we read them as examples of what Elin Diamond calls a feminist version of Brechtian Gestus: a moment in a feminist text where the contradictory meaning of both theatrical and social conventions for female fictions and historical women become apparent to the spectator or reader (524). Mundus Mulierbris: Or, the Ladies Dressing-Room Unlock'd, and her Toilette Spread in Burlesque (London, 1690), 4-5. Characters like Wou'dbe were usually treated with amused or dismissive contempt. Sybil Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces, 1660-1765 (Cambridge, England, 1939), p. 221. The two questions are intimately related because competing models of authorship lie behind attitudes to literary evaluation that continue to split the academy. 101 pages. The tension relaxes. Edna Steeves calls her a feminist before feminism became trendy (272). 359-383. Dis gentleman sal hold de gelt (4.1.97-98). They have to listen to the sentences of Henley and the verses of Sir Richard Blackmore without nodding off. Needless to say, this impregnation by the feminine spirit would in due course cause the pejoration of the term.15Sentiment and sentimental thus received the satirical treatment that became such a well-known feature of the epoch that followed. But by the end of Fainwell's second visit, when they last appear, he has resourcefully overcome their discord. Mottley tells us that when it was first offered to the Players, [it] was received very cooly, and it was with great Difficulty that the Author could prevail upon them to think of acting it. During rehearsals Robert Wilks, who was to play the leading role of Sir George Airy, had so mean an Opinion of his Part that one Morning in a Passion he threw it off the Stage into the Pit, and swore that no body would bear to sit to hear such Stuff. The play was reported to be a silly thing wrote by a Woman, that the Players had no Opinion of it.1. Knowing that publication of their names could result in serious personal consequences, bothwithout successtried to publish plays anonymously. Obviously, Centlivre also uses the language of stockjobbers to poke fun at the profession. Administration and Adjunct Listing. Susannah Centlivre. In The Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration, pp. 81-98. Instead, their presence and function recall Sir William Temple's belief that the richness of English comedy derived from native humors types who were to be tolerated.22 Far from being benevolent, the four guardians cannot evoke the affectionate laughter accorded to eccentrics in later eighteenth-century literature. Yet, despite these considerable successes in creating a tradition of their own in comedy, there are, as I pointed out in the beginning of this essay, considerable problems as well. 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. The Guardian, 2 vols., London, 1714, no. Tradelove loses a large bet to Colonel Fainwell, but rather than lose the money, he gives up the hand of his ward, Mrs. Ann Lovely, instead. Susanna Centlivre, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, ed. Most disturbingly, these figures quite often refuse to join in the happy ending. All references to Centlivre's plays, henceforth cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number, derive from this edition. J. G. A. Pocock, The Mobility of Property and the Rise of Eighteenth-Century Sociology, in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 103-124.
There is no real reform for Lady Reveller; instead, unlike Valere or Florindo, she is shown as thoroughly self-possessed, competent, and winning. In 1706 she was without funds and again joined a company of strolling players.
Determinedly individual as the guardians are, they are also unified, by their common ward and their fundamental eccentricity. The Poetical Entertainer (1712), No. This makes for greater variety of comic effects than in Centlivre's earlier plays. The play is considered to be both clever and comedic in its interpretation of love and marriage. His ambiguous sexuality functions as comic relief in the play itself. The name Lopez is of course a reference to Queen Elizabeth's Jewish physician, who was convicted of attempting to poison her. Genest says that Mrs. Centlivre imitated Newburgh Hamilton's Petticoat Plotter in creating Simon Pure, the visiting Quaker whom Fainwell impersonates in order to outwit Prim.15 Like the Colonel, Hamilton's True-love poses as a Quaker, Ananias Scribe, to gain entrance to Thrifty's house in order to court his daughter. Quoted in Cheryl Turner, Living by the Pen: Women Writers in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1992), 44. Lady Reveller renounces gambling, not because she realizes it is morally wrong, but because she is threatened with rape. The action of the play is certainly not probable, but it is well motivated according to the conventions of its genre. Pearson, Jacqueline. Nor is Marplot a static or subsidiary character: he is the mainspring of the greater part of the action of the play. nicole greenberg northwestern; iridescent telecaster pickguard; o2 arena detailed seating plan seat numbers boxing The Lady's Last Stake, however, forces the feminized George himself down to his last stake: he gives himself (albeit in marriage) after a frightening encounter with men who would rob and strip him. The neoclassical principle of decorumarticulated by literary theorists like Rymer, Dennis, Gildon, and Popereinforced the tendency to see social and occupational groups in terms of uniform characteristics.
16), and Defoe's Anatomy of Exchange-Alley (1719). New York: St. Martins, 1988.
Signatures: 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. She was later married or something like it to a Mr. Fox, then to a Mr. Carrol (who was killed in a duel), and finally and indisputably in 1706 to Joseph Centlivre, a Huguenot refugee who became Queen Anne's cook. Thus, the period from the accession of James II to the defeat of Jacobitism at Culloden can be framed as such a micro-narrative. In her Preface to The Platonick Lady (1706). The scene in Charles's lodgings at the end of the act (pp. And here, my Lord, the Occasion seems fair for me to engage in a Panegyrick upon those Natural and Acquired Abilities, which so brightly Adorn your Person: But I shall resist that Temptation, being conscious of the Inequality of a Female Pen to so Masculine an Attempt; and having no other Ambition, than to Subscribe my self. In a more recent edition of Farquhar's works, Kenny makes reference to but does not reprint Centlivre's Letter to Boyer and her Epistle to Mr. Farquhar cited below. Both uses of disguise in the gulling of Periwinkle (III.i and IV.iii) recall Sir Martin Mar-all. 202-28. Word Count: 1971. 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. Vol. "Susanna Centlivre - Elizabeth Inchbald (essay date 1806)" Drama Criticism Thomas Wright, The Female Virtuoso's (London, 1693), 26. Sybil Rosenfeld records them as the staple of British provincial circuits and strolling companies;28 Frushell documents that General Burgoyne's soldiers played her first in America, and the theatre in Sydney mounted her work as early as 1796; the records of theatres large and small in Ireland, Canada, Australia and the USA show her plays as standard repertoire well into the next century. 65; Literature Resource Center; and Reference Guide to English Literature, Ed. Valeria, however, insists on the inalienability of her heart and soul, distinct from her body: From the perspective of paternal authority, Valeria can do anything she wants with her heart and soul. On the whole, those of Centlivre's women of the reforming or reformed type are, more often than not, wives. Tricking Tradelove, the stockbroker, requires three partsalthough the Colonel's plan, in this case, goes without a hitch. In fact the quotation from Centlivre's The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) that forms the title of this chapter seems to suggest that such a streamlined version of cultural history could be manufactured from the history of women, marriage, the growth of the nuclear family, and the dramatic representations of all these, from the late seventeenth to the early eighteenth centuryeven if only for English theater.1. In the opening scenes of The Busie Body, which was written in 1709 by Susanna Centlivre, we meet Isabinda and Miranda, two young women who are desperate to escape situations that will prevent them from marrying the young men they have chosen. The polyphonic nature of the opening scene emphasizes a change of perspective and introduces a different gambling figure, Lady Reveller. 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). That Centlivre's decision to clean up her language is motivated by her belief that this was what the audience wanted is apparent from her comments about the unities in the same preface. A general election gave the Tories an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons, a majority consisting mainly of country squires who were determined that the war should be brought to an end. Despite her early successes, however, she was forced to supplement her income by acting. More importantly, it contributes to the characterization of Marplot. The presentation of Henry Fielding's The Mock Doctor, a rather close adaptation of Le Mdecin malgr lui, in 1732, ended any further usefulness it may have had for the stage. Vol. Such a neat distinction would gain considerable weight in the light of Centlivre's personal allegiance to the social groups on the rise, her staunch support of mercantilism, Whig politics, and constitutional monarchy. The young man, Anthony Hammond, secreted her away in his college rooms, according to Mottley's narrativean arrangement that allowed her to get a brief, second-hand university education before venturing on to London to establish herself in the theater. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold Publishers, 1965), pp. Sir George is trying to arrange for Sir Francis to let him speak with Miranda. Essays of John Dryden, ed. Bateson begins his chapter on Centlivre with a quotation from an eighteenth-century source: What a Pox have women to do with the Muses?22. He is a minor character, much occupied with ferreting out state secrets. SOURCE: Inchbald, Elizabeth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Hammond argues that Centlivre demonstrates Whig political sympathies with respect to specific political figures and events, but that she writes with a worldview correspondent with her Tory contemporaries.].
London: Virago Press, 1981. The erudite Periwinkle cuts a similar figure in her Bold Stroke for a Wife. See also, for example, The Wonder. The resumption of trade with France, he believed, would strengthen sentiment in England for the French-supported Pretender; and it would embarrass the English merchant classes by removing the protective tariffs that sheltered them and by interfering with their profitable trade with Portugal. Thus Centlivre adapts another familiar pattern of Baroque drama: while the main female character is restricted by social conventions, it is her pert maid who speaks and acts out much more freely against gender restriction. Abigail Williams, Whig Literary Culture: Poetry, Politics and Patronage, 1678-1714, unpublished University of Oxford PhD dissertation. Like Hellena, she relentlessly pursues her rover, but like Angellica Bianca, she fully comprehends sexual commodification and attempts to establish a relationship outside of it. Bernbaum identifies confidence in the goodness of average human nature as the mainspring of the sentimental and asserts that the essence of sentimental drama was to portray virtuous redemption in the everyday world through an appeal to the emotions (pp. In the Preface to An Evening's Love; or the Mock Astrologer (1671), he defines the difference between these genres with reference to natural and unnatural behavior: Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designs, as are to be found and met with in the world. Chiefly biographical study of Centlivre as one of five professional female authors, relying heavily on legend and conjecture; emphasizes her struggle for legitimacy. The focus here is on the word canon in my title. Perhaps the authority of aristocratic rank opens up these possibilities more readily. Centlivre's Platonick Lady appropriates and revises the popular trope of the learned lady, possibly responding to Thomas Wright's Female Vertuoso's. 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. Jean H. Hagstrum, Sex and Sensibility: Ideal and Erotic Love from Milton to Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 10. Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men: Collected from Conversation, ed. 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 Molire, 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 Molire's Forced Marriage. It seems unlikely, however, that she expected to hide borrowings from Molire; and, in any case, she deserves some credit for combining several plays into one.10. It is your Praise, Sir, to have acted a most noble Part on this Account, in the Irish Senate, a Country more than once the Scene of the most dreadful Massacres, but now, by the Actions of YOU and your fellow PATRIOTS, happily recover'd from the same threat'ning (and oh! 1715; first performed 1724, The Cruel Gift: or The Royal Resentment 1716, The Masquerade. Centlivre died on December 1, 1723, and was buried at St. Paul's in Covent Garden. Following Behn's lead, these two early feminists wielded the only weapons they possessedtheir pensto criticize cultural injustice and force society to reevaluate accepted attitudes about women. 
In her understanding of the scene (which, as we will see, is not the only one available), Sir Richard never humbles her, she chooses her own husband, and her virtue remains inalienable. Drury Lane, 16 May 1776. Whatever the intention of the Licensing Act, its repercussions for women were long-felt: women playwrights were scarce between the periods when Behn and Centlivre wrote and the beginning of the twentieth century. 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 inscription of a play was a recognized source of income for the playwright, and she chose her patrons with some care. Centlivre has thus slowed the pace of her action and set up the Colonel's contest with the Prims which continues throughout the play. With cries of No Pope; no Perkin on one side, and No Tub-preaching; no Liberty and Property on the other, the two factions set about one another and violence ensues.18 To measure the distance in party terms between Centlivre and Pope, one need only read her dedication to Eustace Budgell in the published edition of her second tragedy, The Cruel Gift (1716). When George arrives to fight John Conquest, robbers seize him and attempt to strip him of his clothes and money. The Stolen Heiress was advertised and printed as a comedy. In her earlier Busy Body, as we have seen, the children of merchants are appreciatively introduced as the gay friends of members of the gentry; but the two fathers are but lively versions of the stereotype. Second, there is nothing sentimental about the portrayal of the gamester. Thus she has Imbezell'd, as Mr. Sago accuses her at the end, from the household accounts. Centlivre denied ever making such statements, but the damage was done. The political debates soon had their effect on dramatic criticism, notably in more frequent allusions to the exhaustion of the merchant stereotype. Disguised as a steward, Fainwell uses similar tactics against Periwinkle in their second encounter. Her uncle, Sir Thomas, insists, Faith and Troth but thou shalt not (67); soon after revealing Belville's identity, he and Belville agree to advance the interest of Sir Charles with Lucinda. After their wedding the couple lived at Buckingham Court, Spring Gardens, which was Centlivre's home for the rest of her life. Reviewing a production of The Wonder! Mrs. Sago, who is vulnerable to Sir James's trifling because of her class and gender, is portrayed as a person with no alternatives. A lord's household is the scene of the action, and, with one exception, all of the principal characters are members of the nobility or gentry. 14-15) between Sir Francis and Miranda.
By 1782, this discourse had firmly taken hold, and had been internalized so thoroughly that Elizabeth Griffith's Essay, Addressed to Young Married Women presented the relationship between husband and wife thus: A love of power and authority is natural to men; and wherever this inclination is most indulged, will be the situation of their choice. Centlivre theatricalizes the pure pleasure Lady Reveller takes in manipulating money, and even though Sir James slips her extra money when she loses her own, Lady Reveller never actually gambles down to her last stake. Cibber's Lady Gentle knows she has staked her virtue; Lady Reveller, on the other hand, refuses to recognize her virtue as vulnerable to being staked. Although Shadwell employs no disguises that anticipate Mrs. Centlivre's, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack is a guardian; like Mrs. Lovely, the virtuoso's two wards lament their fate (I.ii). This departure from dramatic tradition is remarkable since the tone of English literature around the turn of the century is intensely urbanemore so, perhaps, than during any other period: this was the time of the literary importance of the coffee houses, when Dryden held forth at Will's and Addison at Button's; and this was the time when the Kit-Cats (Whig poets and politicians) dined at Christopher Cat's, and when the Scriblerus Club met in Dr. Arbuthnot's apartment in St. James's Palace. In true platonic fashion, she vows to renounce Mankind (67). Prince and Mrs. Porter, the distinguished tragic actress. 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 countessBetty Kimbow in disguisefrom The Play's the Plot (1718), by John Durant Breval. How do the plot and action speak to 2021? Of the two handsome young women who are pursued by suitors, the wittier and more attractive is the wealthy widow of a London merchant. 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.
"Susanna Centlivre - F. P. Lock (essay date 1979)" Drama Criticism She declares that she is bound to good Behaviour because she almost lost her husband's Favour (1:258). Thus farin the surreptitious entry, the serious conversation between the lovers, and the interruptionthe scene parrallels the sequence in Act III with Charles and Isabinda (pp. Powell had the part of Palante, the hero of the tragic plot, and Pack was Francisco, the protagonist of the comic plot. Erastian Parliamentary constitutionalism underwrites the British balance that has enabled trade, commercial prosperity, industrial progress, empire, all of which has ensured that even in post-imperial decline the British nation punches well above its weight in global terms. Shirley Strum Kenny, Humane Comedy, MP 75, 1 (August 1977): 29-43. Part of the time she also acted in the provinces. Download the entire Susanna Centlivre study guide as a printable PDF! She reforms, but she also loses her autonomy to a man who is less than worthy, and the method of bringing her down is a rather dirty trick. 2023
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