Search results for ""Author Susannah Centlivre""

The Busybody is the most popular comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Susanna Centlivre. The play centres on two couples trying to form a relationship against the wills of their guardians, and in a battle of wits, playing with many conventions from theatre traditions across the continent, a conclusion is eventually reached. Like her predecessor Aphra Behn, Centlivre was immensely successful in her day, drawing huge crowds to extended runs of her numerous plays, but the stabbing male pens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decried her work as being louche and dangerous, and her name slowly sunk into obscurity. This edition, published with William Hazlitt’s prefatory note and extra material on Centlivre’s life and writing, seeks to highlight the dexterity with which she took on the stage.

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Though critics and literary historians have always had to admit that Susanna Centlivre's comedies were extremely popular, they have tended to devote themselves to a search for evidence in them of supposed deficiencies of 'the female pen,' and to pay as much attention to the playwright's marriages and amorous liasons than to the plays themselves. Only in recent years has Centlivre come to be recognized quite straightforwardly as on of the most brilliant playwrights of her time.A Bold Stroke for a Wife is perhaps the finest example of Centlivre's masterful plotting of comic intrigue. The soldier Fainwell and Anne Lovely are in love, but their path to the altar is blocked by her guardians, each of whom has a different view of what sort of husband would make the right match. Fainwell resorts to disguises of social types. The play thus provides a wide range of opportunity for Centlivre to satirize Tory respectability, religious propriety and capitalist speculative greed—and to give voice to tolerance: 'tis liberty of choice that sweetens life.' Yet in the end it is Centlivre's comic muse that gives enduring life to the play as one of the most entertaining of eighteenth-century comedies.

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Staged in theatres by successive generations and proving relevant to contemporary audiences, the plays demonstrate the wit, theatrical skill and innovation of their creators in exploring timeless topics from marriage, morality and money to class conflict, rage and sexual desire. An essential resource for students, playwrights, colleges, universities and libraries, this collection also provides theatres with the opportunity to programme a range of theatrical classics by women. Plays from: 'Paphnutius' by Hroswitha (extract);'The Tragedy of Mariam' by Elizabeth Cary (extract); 'The Rover' by Aphra Behn; 'A Bold Stroke For A Wife' by Susanna Centlivre; 'De Montfort' by Joanna Baillie; 'Rutherford and Son' by Githa Sowerby; 'The Chalk Garden' by Enid Bagnold; 'Top Girls' by Caryl Churchill (extract); 'Stones in his Pockets' by Marie Jones.

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