Why is the play The Busie Body by Susanna Centlivre still relevant today? However, with respect to the women, the ambivalence does not derive from the fact that the audience would have found their prereformation life attractive, for the women's reformation is consistent with the dominant ideology of the time. WebeBook ISBN 9781315242507 Share ABSTRACT The Busie Body, first performed at Drury Lane on 12 May 1709, is the most theatrically and culturally fertile of the plays in this study. At the same time, a discourse on femininity developed that, by idealizing women's position, aimed at a strict observance of gender difference and gender hierarchies. Prince was Lavinia, the comic heroine. He alluded to her in his attacks on the publisher Edmund Curll, another member of the Whig literary circle, and lampooned her in the character of the playwright Phoebe Clinket in the farce Three Hours after Marriage (1717), which he wrote with John Gay and John Arbuthnot; five years after her death he included her in his catalogue of dullards, The Dunciad (1728). So the text, transformed and redirected by Centlivre's work, was also deeply embedded in other writings; and on a second axis, in the performances of actors. hillary clinton height / trey robinson son of smokey mother Her treatment of familiar comic types shows her debt to Restoration comedy, but also points toward the sentimental comedy of the eighteenth century, making her a transitional figure in the development of English comic drama. She and Charles go out on a happier note (p. 51). Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. It is hard to believe that a man could not have written The Busy Body. But Marplot has a final plot to mar. 3, 1872. But it is this characteristic structuring to convince and amuse scene by scene, rather than according to an integrated unity of plan, that gives the plays their powerful malleability, and makes themas Stathas herself concedesideal vehicles for the actor. Future developments are foreshadowed but not revealed in detail. The Half-Pay Officers (1720), a farce that is little more than a pastiche of several earlier plays (Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, and Davenant's Love and Honour),17 includes as one of several lines of action a competition between two absurd citizens, Meagre, a Scrivener, and Loadham, a Hamburgh Merchant, for a handsome young heiress, who laughs at them and will have neither of them. And the audience knows immediately who will dupe them (Colonel Fainwell) and why (to win Mrs. Lovely). Perhaps the audience, at this point, expects the Colonel to move to the next guardian, but, instead, Centlivre gives us a preview of the challenges that lie ahead, as Sir Philip accompanies the Colonel (still in his fop gear) to the house of Obadiah Prim to get sanction from the rest of the guardians. Sir Francis enters with Marplot. She uses her mastery of masculine language to pursue and attain her goal. In Centlivre's play, however, Lucinda realizes that, in spite of her attempts to reject all men in favor of philosophy, a real Passion cannot be disguis'd (67), which humanizes her and endears her to the audience. My points are not made in the spirit of the ungenerous reviewer determined to pillory a book for its faults rather than to celebrate it for its virtues; on the contrary, I am deeply indebted to Norbrook's ideas in the later section of this article. Can it ever be handled so? The end leaves us not so much with the specific anxiety that Valere will return to the gambling table, but with an uneasiness about Angellica's marriage to a man who was willing to stake her picture, her reputation, and thus her very self. Frushell, Plays, vol. For the husband, on the other hand, the sexual/marriage contract clearly has at stake more than a woman's body, for Lord Worthy responds to Sir James's suggestion to rape Lady Reveller not with indignation over the violation of her personhood, but with the observation that rape simply would not satisfy his desire. Despiteor perhaps because ofthe difficulties inherent in defining sentimental comedy, the question of definition formed a principal focus of twentieth-century criticism. Like their Restoration predecessors, Fainwell and Mrs. Lovely find love without money impractical, but unlike the gay couples of earlier comedy, they engage in no verbal sparring.29 Bold as Fainwell may be, he is not a rake; nor is he referred to as a reformed rake. The delight springs first from our recognizing an old, familiar action. Complication by disguise is a salient characteristic of Restoration comedy. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis says in Writing Beyond the Ending, social convention is like a script, which suggests sequences of action and response, the meaning we give these, and ways of organizing experience by choices, emphases, priorities (2). Meanwhile Isabella, who had been contracted by her father to marry Sir Charles (who loves Lucinda) but had also made her own contract to marry Belville, returns in various disguises to tempt Belville back into her arms. Lady Lucy in The Basset-Table (1705) is the interesting exception to the rule. of Chicago Press, 1981), Jacques Derrida writes: I have attempted to systematize a deconstructive critique precisely against the authority of meaning (pp. See The London Stage: 1660-1800, Part Three: 1729-1747, II, the entry for Goodman's Fields, April 16, 1745. See examples given in ibid., p. xciv, n. 68. A husband's possession, however, must be more profound. Press, 1924; rprt. His actions are laughable, but he is never the butt of satire; in many ways he is the hero of the play, making possible the happy resolution. Webwhy did boone leave earth: final conflict. 9 Shuter's choice proved sound; the receipts for his benefit were the largest of the season.10, In 1762, Henry Woodward returned to London theater after an absence of several seasons. 25. These aspects of the plays undercut the seriousness of the stated moral. Was not science or natural philosophy, as it was then called, condemned as a social deviation as much as gambling? Party allegiance is only one aspect of a much wider cultural programme that puts politeness, sublime self-expression and appreciation of art, including sublimity in the natural world, into a complex and at times near-paradoxical relationship. Not only is the conversion of character in the plays not a moral one, but it is also not an unmixed reformation. All stage puritans, like the Prims, hide their own lust or greed by pointing out the sins of others. While this sexual innuendo would be amusing to the audience, it paints a clear picture of the sexual dysfunction inherent in such forced marriages. The poor Lady was beat out of her Design; but as our Corrector had the Play left sometime in his Hand, he culled out this very Character, mix'd it with some other Felonies of the same Nature, which he had committed, and had it acted as his own the very next Year.4. In this scene, the peeping asides function as comic punctuation. The writers of plays, letters, essays, and poetry of wit and gallantry toyed with ideas affecting the status of women, sometimes gallantly, sometimes scornfully, but with an astonishing demonstration of equality and freedom between the sexes. Thus the term English wife, frequently found in her work, points in two mutually exclusive directions. In The Devil Is an Ass, Fitzdottrell stands close by; Centlivre improved the theatrical possibilities of the scene by making Sir Francis run backwards and forwards. Before The Busy Body, Centlivre had used characters like Marplot to provide broader comic fun than the stratagems of the lovers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. But the trend was clear, and as early as 1715, we find signs in comedy of the preference for country over urban life that is common in English poetry of the 1740's. Sturdy, self-reliant characters win their fortunes and future mates by virtue of their own clevernessand some good luck. Word Count: 708. She gives Marplot a message for Sir George: that his suit is hopeless and that he should keep from the Garden Gate on the left Hand; for if he dares to saunter there, about the Hour of Eight, as he used to do, he shall be saluted with a Pistol or a Blunderbuss (p. 38). Bernbaum identifies confidence in the goodness of average human nature as the mainspring of the sentimental and asserts that the essence of sentimental drama was to portray virtuous redemption in the everyday world through an appeal to the emotions (pp. Jelena O. Krstovic. 2005 eNotes.com Mrs. Lee acted Mrs. Plotwell, a former mistress of Bellmein. One of the most remarkable aspects of The Rover, for instance, is its opening scene; this play is one of the few in Restoration drama that opens with a woman-only scene. nicole greenberg northwestern; iridescent telecaster pickguard; o2 arena detailed seating plan seat numbers boxing The Stolen Heiress was advertised and printed as a comedy. When Martin insists that Lucinda try an orange and pretends to cut it for her, she strikes it down and a letter drops out. 2023. Who are the experts?Our certified Educators are real professors, teachers, and scholars who use their academic expertise to tackle your toughest questions. As they wrote on subjects of crucial importance to women, they transformed them, represented them differently, and contributed to significant changes in the way the culture saw women, courtship, marriage, and family relations. Two more or less parallel plots make up the play. 25. As a soldier for the Crown, the Colonel resists the tyranny that the Jacobites would impose on England. L, sans distinction, on voit aller de pair le laquais d' un commis avec un duc et pair; et quoi qu' un sort jaloux nous ait fait d' injustices, de sa naissance ainsi l' on venge les caprices (200). Neither Sir George nor Charles has a very good part. She is talking about Sir Jealous, for instance, when she tells Patch, Suppose he could introduce his rigid Rulesdoes he think we cou'd not match them in contrivance? The Celebrated Mrs. Centlivre. Uncharacteristically, Charles offers Marplot his company home: the unwonted attention makes Marplot suspect that there is more to the affair of the garden gate than he had supposed. Yet, the cultural politics that operate in Centlivre's plays are not, as they have sometimes been said to be, straightforwardly Whiggish in supporting the capitalist aspirations of merchants, manufacturers and financiers.21 There is not in fact a positive portrait of a merchant anywhere in her oeuvre prior to that of the sensible and decent Frederick in The Wonder: a Woman Keeps a Secret (1714). The play ran but for one night and has been seldom performed ever since. Some are selections or cut versions for small playhouses, some open adaptations by actors, while others are by dramatists who tried to pass off the results as their own, as in the case of Colley Cibber's The Double Gallant (1707), which is clearly taken from Centlivre's Love at a Venture (1706), which he had read and rejected in his role as manager. . Humbly Inscribed to his Grace the Duke d'Aumont (poetry) 1712, An Epistle to Mrs. Wallup Now in the Train of Her Royal Highness, The Princess of Wales. The longevity of the merchant stereotype in early-eighteenth-century comedy owes something to the concurrence of satirical intent with neoclassical emphasis on generalized characterization. Just as significant an area of neglect is pointed out by Sarah Prescott in her study of Elizabeth Singer Rowe, who worked outside the competitive, financially motivated and market-led circles emphasised in PIW. Here is my hand, if you want it (3.18.19). Mrs. Carrol became an actress; but, notwithstanding her youth, her wit, and her beauty, she was unsuccessful in that profession. 3-14; F. P. Lock, Susanna Centlivre (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1979), pp. As in The Platonick Lady, Centlivre finds feminist possibilities in the same mind/body opposition that provides for Locke the basis for several forms of self-alienation. Freeman initiates the latter before the third game commences, and the Colonel wins his second contest with Periwinkle while that with Tradelove is in progress. Of all the things on earth, nature's disruption is what we know we can depend on, as it is essentially uncontrolled by men. Criss Jami, Killosophy She writ many plays, and a song (says Mr. Jacob, vol. But all of these sources still see Centlivre as a successor to Behn, one of a group of lesser dramatists; and the only single-author study, F. P. Lock, Susanna Centlivre (Boston, Twayne, Publishers, 1979), is purely literary in its approach, and concludes that in the wider perspective of English drama as a whole, Centlivre can rank only as a minor figure (p. 134). Yet it is Lady Landsworth who gets the last laugh, because she accomplishes her goal and marries just such a hero. It was repeated on June 14 for the benefit of the boxkeepers, Lovelace, King, and White, with additions: In which the Famous Gasperini will perform several Italian Sonatas. London, 1905. Vol. This is clear from comparisons with the notable busybodies in restoration comedy who have been proposed as prototypes of Marplot. In his second visit to the Prims', he, too, echoes his earlier words, adding significantly to them: How charming she appears, even in that disguise (V.i.158-159). She trusts him when he claims he will mend his ways, in spite of the proof to the contrary that the play offers, and she agrees to marry him to prevent him from being disinherited. Lock, Susanna Centlivre, p. 134; Pearson, The Prostituted Muse, pp. She, however, remained long enough at the college to learn experience, and to improve her taste for literature. Gale Cengage This has amounted to a programme of spiritual hegemony whereby sensibility became the foundation of moral life and the rational education of desire became an active, transformative force that teaches us pleasure in the material world is wrong.19 The peculiar dangers involved in finding art in the setting of the theatre are vividly described by Centlivre's contemporary, Jeremy Collier: The business of Plays is to recommend virtue This design has been oddly pursued by the English Stage. Barreca, Regina. Instead, their presence and function recall Sir William Temple's belief that the richness of English comedy derived from native humors types who were to be tolerated.22 Far from being benevolent, the four guardians cannot evoke the affectionate laughter accorded to eccentrics in later eighteenth-century literature. (Carbondale, Ill., 1960-). The Basset Table, produced on 20 November 1705, and published later in November, had a much shorter run. The people were becoming more interested in politics, science, and trade. It must be the Lady's fault, if she does not wear the unfashionable Name of Wife easie, when nothing but Complaisance and good Humour is requisite on either side to make them happy (p. 58). I would point out that Centlivre's choice of naming her heroine Angelica is a comment on the character Angellica in Behn's The Rover (1677). In that chapter, I take a severe view of Blackmore's epic, Prince Arthur (1695), because it is all too easily reducible to a philistine, anti-artistic ideology that reflects the climate of opinion so perfectly caught by Jeremy Collier in his A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698). When the Colonel tries to win Periwinkle, the motif is magic. Mr. The comparative situations of the two women are discussed, as those of the men had been earlier. Chief among these similarities is the fact that the plays of Behn and Centlivre were attacked because they were written by women. It is notable that although Centlivre's critics frequently accused her of excessive borrowinga practice all playwrights participated in, but one that was easy to criticize in a womanher most successful plays were her most original. 6. Centlivre, however, also satirized the learned man. Isabinda, whom I have just mentioned, is a case in point. The weakness of this position is that Norbrook can point to very few material spaces, rather than discourse spaces, in which this project was forwarded. Carlo Goldoni wrote in his Mmoires that the Piece tombe sans ressource and that the reason was to be found in the fact that C'toit mal propos de mettre dcouvert les consquences de cet amusement dangereux, et encoure plus la mauvaise foi de certains joueurs, et les artifices des courtiers de jeu. Quoted from Goldoni's Mmoires in the introduction to Il Giocatore, p.82. Frederick M. Link. The opening scene of Love's Contrivance bears a close resemblance to the first scene in Molire's Sganarelle, ou le cocu imaginaire, where the father Gorgibus, asserting his absolute power over his daughter Clie, commands her to give her hand to the rich Valre, leaving her heart, if she pleases, with Llie. There is a Sir James Courtly, an airy Gentleman; a Sir Richard Plainman, a great Lover of a Soldier, and an inveterate enemy to the French; a bluff Captain Hearty; a Buckle and Alpiew, the pert footman and the perter waiting woman; and a Mr. and Mrs. Sago, a city couple who call each other Puddy and Keecky and indeed conduct all their conversation in a kind of baby language. Although the play is by no means pure farce, it abounds in farcical situations generated by Lovely's unnatural will. Both the concealment and the disappearing trick develop Miranda's character as resourceful and elusive. Oh! Ed. Dogget acted Sancho, a ridiculous scholar from the University of Salamanca. At this time, women writers in the theatre became even more rare. Focusing on The Basset Table and The Busie Body, Fowler views Centlivre as the inheritor of a feminist agenda promoted earlier by Aphra Behn as well as the beneficiary of Behn's efforts to create a space for women playwrights.]. They were the best possible argument against a Petticoat-Author. Playing the "clown" role of the Busie Body himself is a character named Marplot, who keeps cluelessly stumbling into scenes throughout the play. He had been restrained in his use of the stereotype even in his early plays; yet in those written before the death of Queen Anne, he expends little sympathy on characters not members of the landed gentry or nobility. All subsequent quotations from Pope are taken from this edition. Younger. Following a word combat in which Granger, the new scholar, uses learned English and Gradus uses Greek, Doiley pronounces Granger the better Greek scholar and rewards him with his daughter. Now my chief pleasure lies in knowing every body's Business. It is a demon which possesses him, and the itch of his curiosity makes him the burden of his friends, while the goodness of his heart, reinforced by the weakness of his head, is always delivering him into the hands of their enemies. For example, Sir William gives it as his opinion that the use of another man's oath is as indecent as wearing his Cloaths. He is very proud of his Affirmatives like Impair my Vigour, blister me, and enfeeble me. Bellmein says that he and his mistress pass for Celadon and Chloe, and Emilia, like Astraea in the letters, explains how she met Celadon and was so much entertained by his pretty discourse while sitting next him in the pit that she promised to write to him and could not help keeping her word if she was to be hanged for it. The two prostitutes, Lucetta and Angellica, represent what Pearson calls the most extreme examples of female power and male powerlessness in the play. In the years 1695-96, for example, as Paula R. Backscheider notes in Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. One should not, on this dogma, prefer some texts to others. Thus, Mrs. Sago's combined status as citizen's wife and married woman keep her from even the compromised individuality that Lady Reveller and Valeria achieve. Wright's play has the servant scheme for her lady's sake, leaving Marianna herself relatively passive; in Centlivre's version, the lady herself risks her reputation and puts her faith in the good will of another woman.15. thinks that Mrs. Centlivre had Cibber's Love Makes a Man (acted at Drury Lane in Dec., 1700) in mind when she created Sancho. The comedy of The Busy Body, which has survived one hundred years, was, by the actors who performed in it, expected to die on the first night. Miranda tells Sir Francis positively this is my Wedding Day (p. 60). Now to avoid the impertinence and roguery of an old man, I have thrown myself into the extravagance of a young one; if he should despise, slight, or use me ill, there's no remedy from a husband but the grave; and that's a terrible sanctuary to one of my age and constitution. in The Tatler, ed. Jacqueline Pearson is self-consciously bolder: Her best comedies are the most brilliant of the century: I would not myself exclude even Goldsmith or Sheridan from this. That the comedy is stylistically and thematically consistent from beginning to end tends to support her statement. and of our Oratory, I call to Witness both Europe and America which have heard Mrs. Drummond, with her New Light, leading Mankind from Darkness. Is it merely a coincidence that Angellica Bianca shares Aphra Behn's initials, that hers is the only name from Thomaso that Behn leaves unchanged? (536). In the closet, Centlivre's work reads as incomplete, as indeed it is; she wrote for performance. It was only after these extraordinary experiences that Behn decided to become a writer. Centlivre explicitly acknowledged this when she dismissed literary prescriptions in her preface to Love's Contrivance, saying the criticks cavil most about Decorums, and cry up Aristotles Rules. The intention of this legislation was to bring the theatre under very firm government control and to limit the production of legitimate drama to two patent houses and place the licensing of plays under the Lord Chamberlain. The Act was particularly troublesome to women like Charlotte Charke who were working in alternative theatres and dramatising anti-establishment views; but by increasing the legal control over drama, it may have offered a more general deterrent to women, who were already nervous about appearing in public as writers. They are the railway reading of Georgian England.17, This attractive passage captures the evaluation of her work as entertainment that asserts its essential difference from art. In one of his most insidious acts, he becomes Miranda's pimp; he sells her timeone hour for 100 poundsto Sir George as if she were a prostitute. At the same time, I look at the texts of the plays themselves, arguing that the concept of play within Centlivre's plays functions as a subversive counter-movement in the texts, deconstructing the dominant ideology of her audience and its demand for a comforting moral. Diamond, Elin. 25. In order to understand the truths that might be abstracted from the plays, we need to look at the economic and social factors that underlie the discourse, that is, the context within which the plays were written.7 Second, even if we agree that there is a moral to be abstracted from the plays, can we be certain of what that moral is and do we know whether or not it is an unmixed dictum? In the next section, I will suggest that the Whiggish thinking of this Oxford school presents some difficulties, and I will try to clarify the central terms of the debate about politics and cultural politics in this era: the focus is now on the word Whig.8 Finally, homing in on Centlivre, I will deploy her playwriting career as a test case for the positions taken in the earlier sections. Straub, Sexual Suspects, 59. But Martin, despite his wife's plea not to spend the money for which her bones have suffered, starts for the alehouse: Mrs. Centlivre again employs this method of turning the argument in the second act. During Fainwell's first visit, their dissension quickly leads to his dismissal. The comparisons are interesting irrespective of the question of source.11 The two are Sir Martin in Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-All (1667) and Intrigo in Sir Francis Fane's Love in the Dark (1675). Cultural politics has a broader sweep than, for example, a writer's opinion on the succession problem or the shortest way with dissenters, but it is more specifiable, one hopes, than Zeitgeist. In this it was an interesting forerunner of her masterpiece, indeed the only one of her comedies which is still almost readable, The Busie Body. It is an experiment in the Cibberian manner with an abundance of ethical and sentimental motives, and as such is only moderately successful. The intersection of gender and political themes has brought renewed attention to The Gamester and The Basset Table, which contain some of Centlivre's most progressive female characters. Marplot is anxious to meddle with Charles's affairs, but Miranda and Sir George keep him with them. Pearson's observations could just as easily apply to Susanna Centlivre, for a similar resistance to the status quo is represented in The Busie Body. With her approval, Granger teaches Gradus the ways of the world and makes him drunk. Pearson, Jacqueline. Sir Jealous Traffick is a retired merchant who lived for many years in Spain. This fact alone seems to indicate that the containment female conduct experiences throughout the century is first represented for those women who are placed under the regime of a husband. He is something of a snob and would give ten guineas to be introduced to a Man of Wit. Luckily Marplot manages to save the awkward situation that he has precipitated. 
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