SOURCE: “Marriage and Marrying in Susanna Centlivre's Plays,” in Papers in Language and Literature, Vol. 22, Winter 1986, pp. 16-38.

In this essay, Frushell surveys the theme of marriage throughout Centlivre's corpus, arguing that her plays reflect major shifts in theatrical style and audience composition from the late Restoration through the early eighteenth century.

Susanna Freeman Carroll Centlivre was the premiere woman dramatist of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Her reputation and influence in comedy reached through her own century and the next. If her more famous contemporary dramatists, including Aphra Behn of the previous generation, had been alive in 1800 and looked back over the stage successes of their plays, none could boast of four plays so favored as The Busie Body (1709) with 475 London performances, A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) with 236, The Wonder (1714) with 232, and The Gamester (1705) with 75. And if the year were moved to 1890, none could...