SOURCE: “‘Luck be a Lady Tonight,’ or At Least Make Me a Gentleman: Economic Anxiety in Centlivre's The Gamester,” in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. 32, No. 2, Fall 1999, pp. 45-61.

In this essay, Herrell contends that Centlivre's early comedy The Gamester “explores a fundamental economic anxiety brought on by the shift from a system based on land to one based on ready money.”

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 not with that Vice that is in the World, let it be never so flaming and outragious. For example, the crying Sin...