Susanna Centlivre

• Born: c. 1667
• Birthplace: Whaplode(?), England
• Died: December 1, 1723
• Place of death: London, England

Other Literary Forms

In addition to her plays, Mrs. Susannah Centlivre published literary letters and some verse celebrating state occasions.

Achievements

From 1700 until her death in 1723, Mrs. Susannah Centlivre was probably the most prolific and popular playwright in England. In her first ten years as a professional, she turned out a dozen plays for the stage; in the second half of her career, another seven.

Some of her plays closed after one or two nights, but others became exceptionally popular. The Busie Body, The Wonder, and A Bold Stroke for a Wife were major successes for Mrs. Centlivre, although these pieces had their longest runs after 1750. The Busie Body, her most popular play, was mounted at least 475 times between its premiere and 1800. David Garrick, the greatest actor of the century, gained at least part of his fame by his frequent portrayal of Marplot, the good-natured bungler in The Busie Body. For the last role of his career, Garrick chose Don Felix, a jealous lover in The Wonder. The Busie Body and The Wonder even survived the doldrums of Victorian theater, becoming repertory pieces on the modern stage in Great Britain and the United States.

Mrs. Centlivre never became rich writing plays, but she did achieve some celebrity in literary circles. As a woman playwright, she was something of a novelty. Other women published plays, but very few. In her lifetime, Mrs. Centlivre had only two serious female rivals, Mary Manley and Mary Pix. Neither woman wrote so much or so well. Mrs. Centlivre also competed with male writers, becoming a friendly rival to such accomplished dramatists as George Farquhar, Nicholas Rowe, and Sir Richard Steele. Modern critics generally view Mrs. Centlivre as a competent professional whose plays make great theater, if not great literature.

Biography

The life of “celebrated Mrs. Centlivre,” as she is commonly known to stage history, is poorly documented. A Susannah Freeman, born in Lincolnshire, probably to William and Ann Freeman of Whaplode, who had her baptized on November 20, 1669, is thought to have become Mrs. Susannah Centlivre. She was educated at home, but she left in her teens, evidently to escape a stern stepmother. Legend has it that she had some “gay adventures” during her early wanderings. One contemporary of Mrs. Centlivre related that when she left home, she stopped by the side of the road one day to rest, where she was spotted by a passing student from Cambridge University, Anthony Hammond, who—as the story goes—took pity on the fatigued and tearful girl and brought her to his quarters at the university. Disguised as Hammond’s cousin Jack, Mrs. Centlivre is said to have studied at the university for two months, after which she left with Hammond’s letter of recommendation. The story is probably apocryphal, but it exemplifies the kind of mythology that contemporaries used to explain Mrs. Centlivre’s mysterious early years.

Mrs. Centlivre joined a company of strolling players around 1684. By most accounts she was always attractive to men, including, some sources say, a Mr. Fox, who either married her or simply shared the same quarters with her for a while. Fox apparently died, and she seems to have married a Mr. Carroll, an army officer, in 1685. Carroll died within a year and a half from wounds sustained in a duel.

By 1700, Mrs. Centlivre had settled in London, where she began life as a professional playwright. Her early plays were not well received. Not until The Gamester was produced in 1705 did she have a genuine success.

After three more failures, Mrs. Centlivre enjoyed another success with The Busie Body, which, premiering in 1709, became her most popular play ever. Still, the kind of success that she enjoyed with The Gamester and The Busie Body did not provide an adequate living. For her income, Mrs. Centlivre, like most playwrights, depended on three sources: gifts from patrons of the arts, sales of play copies, and author benefit nights at the theater, during which she would receive all the ticket receipts, less the house’s operating expenses. None of these sources was reliable, and there is evidence that between 1700 and 1707, Mrs. Centlivre spent some time as a strolling actor in the provinces, presumably supplementing the income she made from playwriting.

The burden of supporting herself was relieved considerably when, in 1707, she married the man with whom she would live for the rest of her life, Joseph Centlivre. As a cook for the Crown, Joseph could expect to make at least fifty-five pounds per annum, not a negligible income at the time.

After The Busie Body, Mrs. Centlivre was never to see another true success. She tried to take advantage of the play’s popularity by writing the sequel, Mar-Plot, but like most sequels, it had a short run, lasting only six days during the 1710-1711 season. The Wonder in 1714 and A Bold Stroke for a Wife in 1718 had respectable runs, but they did not achieve real popularity until after 1750. Mrs. Centlivre died on December 1, 1723, in her house in London’s Buckingham Court, where she had lived the last ten years of her life. She was buried in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden.

Analysis

If Mrs. Susannah Centlivre became the most popular playwright of her time, there was good reason for it. As a professional playwright, she wrote to eat, and thus to please. She gave the audience what they wanted, and she gave them plenty of it. Writing to please the audiences of the early eighteenth century was no easy task. In the preface to Love’s Contrivance, Mrs. Centlivre complains that “Writing is a kind of Lottery in this fickle Age, and Dependence on the Stage as precarious as the Cast of a Die; the Chance may turn up, and a Man may write to please the Town, but ’tis uncertain, since we see our best Authors sometimes fail.” If audiences were notoriously fickle, playwrights were careful also not to anger the moral reformers, who needed only the scantest traces of profanity or bawdy language to brand a play licentious.

Mrs. Centlivre’s solution was to write entertaining plays that would offend very few theatergoers and, with any luck, please most of them. Thus, she avoided tough satiric material. Her plays may poke fun, but they rarely abuse; they mock, but rarely malign. In English drama written between 1660 and 1685, so-called Restoration drama, comedy was often savagely satiric—and there was a good stock of comic butts: merchants, Puritans, fops, pedants, coquettes, and old lechers. Mrs. Centlivre adopted many of the comic types of the Restoration stage but treated them with a tolerance uncharacteristic of her models.

Indeed, the stock character is a major component of Mrs. Centlivre’s drama and is usually found in formulaic plots, often variations on the boy-gets-girl theme. Mrs. Centlivre created characters not for the ages but for the Friday-afternoon show. She expected that her audience would recognize the character types and take delight in the predictable action, as the greedy merchant loses his money or the resourceful maid wins her beau. Indeed, in a play by Mrs. Centlivre, plot is often preeminent, featuring disguises, chance meetings, lovers’ assignations, schemes, and counter-schemes—all the elements that could be expected from a busy play of intrigue. Centlivre’s characters never stop to ponder aloud the ethics of their actions; rather, they pursue their aims until they are either fulfilled or frustrated. Much of Mrs. Centlivre’s art, then, depended on giving new life to old characters and old plots, and in this she was very successful.

The Gamester

In The Gamester, she wrote a didactic play showing the reformation of a compulsive gambler. The main action concerns Valere, who is in love with Angelica. Angelica returns his love but will not marry him unless he gives up gambling. Valere has another reason to forsake the dice when his father, Sir Thomas Valere, announces that he is tired of paying his son’s debts and that he must marry Angelica or lose his inheritance. Therefore, Valere asks Angelica’s forgiveness one more time, which she bestows, giving him a diamond-studded portrait of herself to seal the bargain.

Predictably, Valere still cannot resist the gaming tables, and he loses all his money to a pert young gentleman who turns out to be Angelica disguised in breeches; she has come to verify a rumor that Valere has broken his promise. Having won all his cash, Angelica convinces him to stake the precious portrait, which she also wins, and she dashes out before he has a chance to win it back.

When Valere goes to Angelica to claim her hand, she demands the portrait as proof of his faith. When he cannot produce it, she reveals it herself, making Valere believe that their relationship is over. Indeed, the situation looks desperate: When Sir Thomas enters the scene and learns what has happened, he disinherits his son. Sir Thomas’s severity seems to shock Angelica, though, and she takes Valere back, recognizing, perhaps, her own hand in his downfall. Convinced that the couple will marry, Sir Thomas restores his son’s fortune.

In writing The Gamester, Mrs. Centlivre was trying to capitalize on the vogue for didactic comedy that developed in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Didactic comedy, in which a character is reformed from vicious ways, never dominated the stage, but professionals such as Colley Cibber, Sir Richard Steele, and Sir John Vanbrugh all wrote plays of this type, with various degrees of success. Steele’s The Lying Lover: Or, The Lady’s Friendship (pr. 1703) was a failure, but as noted above, The Gamester enjoyed a successful run. Steele wrote a ponderous, preachy play; Mrs. Centlivre wrote something quite different.

Unlike The Lying Lover, The Gamester does not take itself too seriously. In his play, Steele works in a sermon on the evils of dueling, but Mrs. Centlivre never rails against gambling. Her prime interest is in the gamester, not in gaming itself. By reclaiming a gambler, she gives her play a moral pretext and a handy plot formula. Shocking people into giving up gambling was not her purpose; in fact, as a compulsive gambler, Valere does not have a bad life. He must occasionally avoid his creditors, and his dealings with Angelica and Sir Thomas are sometimes a bit awkward, but ultimately, his vice causes him relatively little hardship or distress. At the end of the play, he is a bit richer, and he has the girl.

In one sense, Valere’s gaming works as Angelica’s rival for his attentions. Because Mrs. Centlivre does not portray the life of a gamester as a difficult one, Valere’s prime motive in giving up the dice is to win Angelica (and his inheritance). Mrs. Centlivre is, in effect, giving us another version of the boy-gets-girl plot. As in many dramatic versions of this old story, the couple must overcome some difficult elders, represented by Sir Thomas, who threatens disinheritance, and his brother Dorante, a minor character with amorous designs on Angelica.

In keeping with the spirit of the play, Mrs. Centlivre makes neither her characters nor any of their fates very nasty. Perhaps she was worried that her play could be considered immoral if she portrayed vice too graphically. Valere is not Vice incarnate, nor is he even vicious—he simply has a vice, gaming. His habit is like a disease, and the audience is free to hate the disease while sympathizing with Valere himself. The audience forgives him and celebrates his happy end.

The Busie Body

In The Busie Body, a different kind of play, Mrs. Centlivre produced what some critics have called a romantic intrigue. Sir George Airy, a rich young gentleman, is in love with Miranda, who lives with her amorous old guardian, Sir Francis Gripe. Miranda wants no part of her guardian’s romancing, but she is also rather coy with Sir George, whom she does fancy. The situation has a parallel in the plight of Isabinda, who is sequestered by her father, Sir Jealous Traffic. Traffic wants to save his daughter for a Spanish merchant, but Charles, the poor son of Sir Francis, provides some competition. The young lovers do eventually marry, but not before having many of their best-laid plans dashed by ill luck and by the good-natured but witless bungling of Marplot, the “busie body” of the title.

After viewing The Gamester, Mrs. Centlivre’s audience could conceivably debate whether Valere deserved such good fortune at the end of the play. He does very little to earn it. The Busie Body does not pose the same kind of question. The play exhibits plot with a vengeance, and the characters are all familiar types, preventing the audience from taking any of them seriously. Sir Francis and Sir Jealous, for example, are typically stubborn, overbearing fathers who hinder true love by proposing and championing unsuitable matches for their children. In the rebellious lovers of The Busie Body, the audience recognizes more stock characters. Miranda is the familiar resourceful woman who seems to control much of the play’s action and wins her man as much as he wins her. Miranda does not immediately express her love for Sir George: She keeps him dangling for a while. (The type is coy as well as cunning.) For all her schemes, though, the resourceful woman is generally a sympathetic character. So, too, is the sequestered maiden, the damsel in distress, of which Isabinda is a prime example. Locking up fair maidens for inevitable rescue was a staple of Spanish romance, but playwrights such as William Wycherley and Mrs. Centlivre put the device to good use on the English stage.

Mrs. Centlivre’s rescuers, Sir George and Charles, would also have been familiar to the audience of 1709. As in many comedies with two pairs of lovers, the gentlemen are good friends. Both characters resemble the male component in Restoration comedy’s “gay couple.” Typically, the man and woman that make up the gay couple, while trying to outmaneuver scheming elders, engage in battles of wit as they guardedly measure the depth of each other’s affection. Contests of wit were not Mrs. Centlivre’s strong point, but there is a sparring match of sorts in the first meeting between Miranda and Sir George.

In Marplot, Mrs. Centlivre presented to her audience a character type less familiar than the others but still not entirely original. As the well-meaning bungler, Marplot has forebears in, for example, John Dryden’s Sir Martin in Sir Martin Mar-All: Or, The Feign’d Innocence (pr. 1667). Of all the characters in The Busie Body, Marplot may be the most attractive. Although his mere presence is ruinous to the plans of the couples, his good heart and feeble wit keep one from really blaming him. In trying to delay Sir Jealous, Marplot succeeds only in confirming the father’s suspicions that Charles is in his daughter’s bedroom. At one point in the play, Sir George, to escape the eyes of Sir Francis, hides behind the chimney board. The fastidious Sir Francis wants to throw an orange peel in the chimney, so Miranda tells him that she is keeping a monkey there, a monkey that should be released only when the trainer is present. Sir Francis accepts this story and walks off, but Marplot cannot contain his curiosity and reveals George behind the board. Marplot yells out, and Sir George must bolt out of the room to remain undetected by the returning Sir Francis. Perhaps the audience never really becomes emotionally attached to Marplot—after all, he remains a type—but he is fresher than the other characters, charming and amusing.

No character, however, overshadows the action of The Busie Body. The play offers virtually a smorgasbord of comic plot devices. Secret meetings between lovers are interrupted by the unseasonable return of parents. Charles dispatches a letter to Isabinda, but the woman servant, Patch, accidentally drops it for Sir Jealous to find. Miranda gets rid of Sir Francis by telling him that he must attend the funeral of Squeezum the Usurer, but her guardian meets Squeezum on the street, hastening his return. There is little suspense—the audience knows that young love will conquer parental tyranny—but great pleasure in seeing the complex plot brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

A Bold Stroke for a Wife

Mrs. Centlivre’s last great success, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, is a comedy with some scenes that border on pure farce. The business of the play is to get Colonel Fainwell, a soldier, married to his lover, Ann Lovely, whose dead father has left her the ward of four eccentric guardians: Sir Philip Modelove, an aging fop; Periwinkle, an antiquarian; Tradelove, a stockbroker; and Obadiah Prim, a Quaker. Ann cannot claim her fortune unless she marries a man agreed on by all four of her guardians—a requirement that, given their radically different dispositions, appears to be impossible to satisfy. The couple could not live on a soldier’s wages; therefore, Fainwell must find a way to trick all four into accepting him as Ann’s match. This he accomplishes through disguise and deception.

Unlike The Busie Body, A Bold Stroke for a Wife does not give the audience an endless series of comic devices. Fainwell uses one basic tactic throughout the play: impersonation. He appears as a fop to Sir Philip, as a collector of odd facts and curios to Periwinkle, as a Dutch trader to Tradelove, and as a Quaker to Prim. After winning the confidence of each guardian, he uses transparent tricks to gain their consent. For the most part, his ploys run smoothly, although there are some predictable complications. In general, the plot of A Bold Stroke for a Wife is not very compelling. The audience enjoys seeing the guardians duped, but its pleasure comes from the justice, not the methods.

The play works, in part, because some comic butts get their richly deserved rewards. Fops, stockbrokers, antiquarians, and puritans had long been targets of satire when Mrs. Centlivre wrote her play. Rarely, however, had so many types of butts appeared in one play. If tricking one kind of butt was funny, tricking four kinds would be even funnier—the more, the merrier.

The audience laughs because each of the butts, in his own way, is prideful and narrow-minded. Sir Philip affects French dress and the French language and disdains anything associated with his native England. Periwinkle is obsessed with the unauthentic artifacts of ancient history. The prime mover of Tradelove’s existence is money, while Prim cares only for parading his piety and condemning the wicked ways of others.

In Restoration comedy, such figures would be abused and ridiculed. In contrast, Mrs. Centlivre does not treat her butts ruthlessly. Refusing to heap scorn on them, she laughs good-naturedly at their follies and invites us to do the same. She may have realized that there is a bit of Prim and Periwinkle in everyone.

Bibliography

Bowyer, John Wilson. The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952. The standard biography and literary analysis. Provides a thorough survey of Mrs. Centlivre’s life and writings. Portrait, bibliography of Mrs. Centlivre’s writings, and index.

Collins, Margo. “Centlivre v. Hardwicke: Susannah Centlivre’s Plays and the Marriage Act of 1753.” Comparative Drama 33, no. 2 (Summer, 1999): 179-198. An analysis of the social function of plays, focusing on The Busie Body and A Bold Stroke for a Wife.

Herrell, LuAnn Venden. “‘Luck Be a Lady Tonight’ or at Least Make Me a Gentleman: Economic Anxiety in Centlivre’s The Gamester.” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32, no. 2 (Fall, 1999): 45-61. An examination of Mrs. Centlivre’s moralizing against gambling as an attack on the wider social system. Provides an in-depth analysis of the play.

Kreis-Schinck, Annette. Women, Writing, and the Theater in the Early Modern Period: The Plays of Aphra Behn and Suzanne Centlivre. Cranbury, N.J. : Associated University Presses, 2001. An examination of the dramatic works of Mrs. Centlivre and Aphra Behn. Bibliography and index.

Lock, F. P. Susannah Centlivre. Boston: Twayne, 1979. Lock’s focus on Mrs. Centlivre’s plays is literary and critical as opposed to biographical and historical. He analyzes the plays in their historical context and concludes that her work fluctuates broadly. When at her best, she wrote amusing, light comedy of distinction. Chronology, bibliography, and index.

Rosenthal, Laura J. Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996. Includes a discussion of Mrs. Centlivre in relation to her male critics.