SOURCE: 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.

In the following essay, Herrell reads The Gamester in terms of the tension between the older land-based economy and the emergent cash-based economy. Herrell traces the stability of honor alongside the stability of social class, eventually concluding that the play's critique of fluid status undercuts any interpretation of The Gamester as a typical reform comedy.

John Dennis, in a 1704 response to yet another of Jeremy Collier's attacks on the immorality of the stage, criticizes Collier for neglecting to discuss what he sees as a more tangible and therefore more serious vice:

But how does [Collier] propose to himself, to bring [reform] about? Why, not by suppressing Vice, but the Stage that Scourges and exposes it. For he meddles...