The Basset Table
The Basset Table follows the fortunes of Lady Reveller, who runs a table where her friends play the card game basset, and her struggle to avoid marrying Lord Worthy. Meanwhile, Lady Reveller’s cousin, Valeria, spends her time conducting scientific experiments and dissections, but her father intends to marry her off to the bluff sea-captain Hearty.…
A Bold Stroke for a Wife
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.…
The Wonder
Susanna Centlivre’s play The Wonder (1714) was one of the most popular works on the eighteenth-century English stage. Set in Lisbon, the plot interweaves two romantic intrigues around one “secret”: the heroine Violante is hiding her best friend, Isabella (who is the sister of her own lover, Don Felix) from Isabella’s father who wishes to…
“I would take a little pains to make him know how much he errs…”
Tanya Caldwell’s anthology Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, published in 2011, includes a selection of lively criticism by women dramatists along with four plays by Aphra Behn, Hannah Cowley, Catherine Clive, and Susanna Centlivre. Aphra Behn’s “Epistle to the Reader,” from her play The Dutch Lover, is a humorous but powerful defense of women playwrights. Not incidentally, it contains this hilariously scathing description of a theatregoer who questions women’s abilities as dramatists:
Restoration and 18th-Century Literature
RESTORATION AND 18TH-CENTURY LITERATURE Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader (1660s) Bell in Campo and The Sociable Companions (1662) Margaret Cavendish Sociable Letters (1664) Margaret Cavendish The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing World (1666) Margaret Cavendish Grounds of Natural Philosophy (1668) Margaret Cavendish The Rover, second edition (1677) Aphra Behn Oroonoko (1688)…
Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century
This anthology offers a selection of popular dramatic works by female playwrights from Aphra Behn in the 1670s through Hannah Cowley in the later eighteenth century. These plays were successful as plays of their time, not just as plays by women, together providing evidence that women dramatists often managed better than their male counterparts to…
The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama
This is the first new full-scale anthology of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama in over sixty years. Concentrating on plays from the heyday of 1660-1737, it focuses especially on Restoration drama proper (1660-1688) and Revolution drama (1689-1714), with a smaller selection of plays from the early Georgian period (1715-1737) and a glimpse at the later Georgian…