SOURCE: “Writing to Please the Town,” in Susanna Centlivre, Twayne Publishers, 1979, pp. 31-45.

In this excerpt, Lock examines Centlivre's first four plays, The Perjured Husband, The Beau's Duel, The Stolen Heiress, and Love's Contrivance. The critic judges these works “experiments” which show “an inexperienced dramatist gradually working toward the kind of play that would satisfy both her artistic conscience and her desire for popular success.”

Centlivre was a pragmatic dramatist: not for her Ben Jonson's defiant “By—'tis good, and if you lik't, you may.”¹ Instead, she would have agreed with Samuel Johnson that “The drama's laws the drama's patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.”² In the Preface to Love's Contrivance, Centlivre recognized 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...