Susanna Centlivre (1667?–1723)
Heather Ladd, University of Galway
January 2025
In “humbly” dedicating her 1707 comedy The Platonick Lady “To all the generous encouragers of female ingenuity” (292), eighteenth-century English writer Susanna Centlivre both bows to convention and subverts it; she did so throughout her brilliant career as a comic dramatist. Active as a professional writer from 1700 to 1722, she wrote for London’s major theatres: Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Drury Lane, and the Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Incredibly popular in her lifetime and well into the nineteenth century, Centlivre is arguably the eighteenth century’s most important playwright. Four very successful comedies, The Gamester (1705), The Busybody (1709), The Wonder (1714), and A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), secured her place in theatre history and the history of women’s writing.
Centlivre’s background has long been the subject of speculation and contradictions are common among the playwright’s biographies. While William Rufus Chetwood mentions her “Reputable Family” (140), her obituarist Abel Boyer refers to her “mean parentage” (qtd. in Milling 7). Some of the biographical information Giles Jacob provides in The Poetical Register (1719) cannot be confirmed by official documents. There is persuasive evidence that her parents were William and Anne Freeman, and she was baptised November 20, 1669, in Whaplode, Lincolnshire. Although there is only a record of her second wedding in 1707, she likely married twice. Her first husband, Mr. Carroll, was a soldier, and her second, Joseph Centlivre, was a cook (his official title, the Yeoman of the Mouth) in Queen Anne’s court. Details about her early years are clouded by anecdotes. Many of these largely unverifiable stories about her family, education, and love life emerge in the eighteenth century and are uncritically repeated thereafter. Boyer’s obituary for Centlivre alludes to “several gay Adventures” (qtd. in Milling 8), which subsequent anecdotalists elaborated upon. The escapades of cross-dressing and extramarital sex connected to her are likely fabrications given how women in the public eye were/are objectified in print media.
Centlivre began her theatrical career as an actress, appearing in touring productions and performing for many years with the company at London’s Drury Lane Theatre. As with others before her, acting led to writing, and in 1700, her first works, fictional epistles (a fashionable genre at the time), were published in Familiar and Courtley Letters. In the same year, she made her debut as a dramatist with The Perjured Husband, a tragicomedy staged at Drury Lane. This play, as well as her next, were published under her first married name, Susanna Carroll; her subsequent five plays appeared without attribution, but her name returned to title pages with The Busy Body, printed for Bernard Lintott in 1709. Well-connected and prolific as a published professional writer, Centlivre is credited with penning nineteen plays, all well received and therefore published shortly after their run. Although most talented at stage comedy, she experimented with other forms and genres, including a tragedy that ends happily, The Cruel Gift (1716). She wrote some poetry, particularly encomiums to titled aristocracy and royalty; in 1715, Thomas Woodward printed Centlivre’s “A Poem. Humbly presented to His most Sacred Majesty George, King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. Upon his accession to the throne.” These coronation verses were typical of Centlivre, who made no secret of her life-long allegiance to the Hanoverians. Her oeuvre also includes non-fiction prose, including political essays that were published in The Weekly Journal, or British Gazetteer in 1720.
Influenced by Aphra Behn and Mary Pix, the latter her mentor, Centlivre faced similar challenges as a woman writing for the English stage. Dramatic writing was already viewed with suspicion, evident in Jeremy Collier’s anti-theatrical pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698) and the resulting print debate. Female playwrights were especially subject to scrutiny, and Centlivre highlights and decries these double standards of authorship, documenting the economic consequences of being a woman writer. In her dedication to The Platonick Lady, she complains of booksellers offering less for a publishable work when they find out “It’s a Woman’s” (qtd. in Finberg xxi).
As was the norm in her profession, Centlivre occasionally recycled elements from earlier plays, reworking continental material for English audiences. For example, Jean-François Regnard’s Le Joueur (1696) served as the basis for her 1705 comedy, The Gamester. As in her early hit, The Basset Table, Centlivre satirizes gambling as a social ill, and presents social climbing negatively. Her gender, as Laura Rosental argues, rendered her vulnerable to allegations of plagiarism, although writers like Colley Cibber took their borrowings further and with less, if any, backlash. Centlivre contested these aspersions, however, and “constructed her authorship in terms of originality” (Rosenthal 205).
Interested in representing and querying social behaviour in contemporary settings, Centlivre is an important figure in the development of the comedy of manners. Centlivre’s comedies are notable for their witty dialogue—intelligent repartee among engaging characters such as Miranda, the enterprising heroine of The Busybody, considered by many critics her best play. Marplot, the meddling fop in The Busybody and its 1710 sequel, Marplot, is one of Centlivre’s most famous characters and the subject of critical interest as a queer figure. Her comedies are more tightly plotted than those of her Restoration predecessors, usually containing fewer speakers and side-plots. Many of the comic situations in her plays are still derived from intrigue or Spanish comedy, particularly popular in the late seventeenth century. Disguise, an important element of this genre, is integral to A Bold Stroke for a Wife, which premiered on February 3, 1718, at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This play’s hero, Fainwell, is aptly named as he adopts four personas to manipulate his beloved Anne Lovely’s four guardians.
“A consummate actors’ writer” (xvii) according to Melinda C. Finberg, Centlivre had a knack for creating memorable characters tailored to star performers such as Anne Oldfield and Robert Wilks, both of whom she singles out in her preface to The Wonder. Between its premier and 1800, The Wonder was performed 232 times in London, according to Richard Frushnell and if regional English and North American theatres were included, this number would be much higher (O’Brian 9). This play was also a favourite of David Garrick, the century’s most famous actor, and its character of Don Felix was the last role he played. In his capacity as theatre manager, Garrick regularly staged this comedy, as well as The Busybody. Although she extols in this play’s preface “those excellent Comedians” (41) who enliven her script, her relationships within the playhouse were not always so collegial. Yet buoyed by commercial success, she persevered, and her comedies entered the English repertoire for their appeal to actors and audiences alike.
A supporter of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and unstinting champion of English liberty, Centlivre was a Whig in her political leanings. Her party politics aligned her with a set of writers that included George Farquhar, Tom Brown, and Richard Steele, who complimented her playwriting in his Whiggish periodicals The Tatler and The Lover. Politics are sometimes embedded in her paratextual materials, like the epilogue of The Perplexed Lovers (1712), and in the plays themselves. Her most overtly political play, A Gotham Election, which satirized electoral corruption, was understandably not licenced, although still published in 1715. Centlivre’s political views are nonetheless implicit in the comic plotlines that feature young characters cleverly wresting financial autonomy from their tyrannical elders. Women are often active agents in courtship narratives that end in emotionally and economically satisfying marriages. Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, exploring Centlivre’s political investment in the comic end, shows how comedy is for her, “the formal fulfilment of the Whig social promise” (85).
Although many of Centlivre’s plays—some undeniably progressive in their emphasis on female creativity and independence—foregrounded strong, sprightly women characters who take romantic matters into their own hands, “Centlivre’s feminism,” as Nancy Copeland notes, “is not expressed consistently” (11). Scholars regularly acknowledge the complexities and contradictions of Centlivre’s staged gender politics, as patriarchy is challenged but not overturned, and queer spaces only temporarily opened up within her comedies. While some of her character constructions challenge gender stereotypes, others reinforce them. The Basset Table includes a caricature (albeit a sympathetic one) of a female scientist, Valeria, but also punishes the widowed gambler Lady Reveller, who is terrorized into reform after a pretended rape attempt.
After a long and productive theatrical career, Centlivre died on 1 December 1723 and was buried in St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, later known as the actor’s church. Her final play was The Artifice (1722), another comedy starring Wilks and Oldfield. Her comedies continued to be staged well into the Victorian period, falling out of favour in the early twentieth century, only to be rediscovered by feminist scholars like Fidelis Morgan who recognized her as “the most successful female playwright until Agatha Christie” (xvii).
Benefitting from the growing attention given to eighteenth-century theatre in the field of eighteenth-century studies, evidenced by initiatives like the R18 Collective, Centlivre has been the subject of many articles and book chapters; her plays are increasingly anthologized and studied at the undergraduate and graduate levels. In Female Playwrights of the Restoration, she is grouped with Aphra Behn, Mary Pix, and the pseudonymous “Ariadne.” Tanya Cadwell’s Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century likewise links her to Behn and Pix, but also Centlivre’s contemporaries Hannah Cowley and Catherine Clive. Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists includes her alongside Pix and Cowley, but also Elizabeth Griffith, whose plays reflect the artistic influence of Susanna Centlivre on the next generation of comic dramatists.
Works Cited
Centlivre, Susanna. “Dedication, The Platonick Lady: A Comedy,” Popular Plays by Women in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. Ed. Tanya Caldwell. Broadview Press, 2011, pp. 292–4.
—. The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret. Ed. John O’Brian. Broadview Press, 2004.
Chetwood, William Rufus. The British Theater: Containing the Lives of the English Dramatic Poets : with an Account of Their Plays : Together with the Lives of Most Principal Actors, as Well as Poets: to which is Prefixed, A Short View of the Rise and Progress of the English Stage. London: Printed for R. Baldwin, 1752.
Copeland, Nancy. “Introduction, A Bold Stroke for a Wife,” The Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, p. 903.
Finberg, Melinda, C. “Introduction,” Eighteenth-Century Women Dramatists. Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. ix–xlvii.
Milling, Jane. “Introduction,” The Basset Table. Ed. Jane Milling, Broadview Press, 2009, pp. 1–30.
Morgan, Fidelis. The Female Wits: Women Playwrights of the Restoration. Virago Press, 1981.
O’Brian, John. “Introduction,” The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret. Ed. John O’Brian, Broadview Press, 2004, pp. 9–28.
Rosenthal, Laura. Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property. Cornell University Press, 1996.
Tierney-Hynes, Rebecca. “Emotional Economies: Centlivre’s Comic Ends.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 45.1 (2016): 83–106.
Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900)
CENTLIVRE, SUSANNAH (1667?–1723), actress and dramatist, is said to have been the daughter of a Mr. Freeman of Holbeach, Lincolnshire, a man of some position, who suffered on account of his political and religious opinions after the Restoration. After the confiscation of his estate he went with his wife, the daughter of a Mr. Marham or Markham, a 'gentleman of good estate at Lynn Regis in Norfolk,' who was also obnoxious to the authorities, to Ireland, where Susannah is by some supposed to have been born. At this early point her biographies commence to be at issue. The account generally accepted is that of Giles Jacob, which states that her father died when she was three years of age, and her mother when she was twelve. Whincop, or the author, whoever he was, of the list of dramatic poets appended to 'Scanderbeg,' who wrote while she was still living, asserts that her father survived her mother, and married a second wife, by whom the future dramatist was so ill-treated that she ran away from home, with little money or other provision, to seek her fortune in London. Biographers have recorded various supposed exploits—one of which consisted in dressing as a boy and living in Cambridge under the protection of Anthony Hammond, then an undergraduate of St. John's, and subsequently commissioner of the navy, the 'silver-tongued Hammond' of Bolingbroke. They also mention a marriage (?), which lasted one year, with a nephew of Sir Stephen Fox. They have neglected a biographical record supplied after her death in Boyer's 'Political State,' xxvi. 670, a portion of which runs as follows: 'From a mean parentage and education, after several gay adventures (over which we shall draw a veil), she had, at last, so well improv'd her natural genius by reading and good conversation, as to attempt to write for the stage, in which she had as good success as any of her sex before her. Her first dramatic performance was a tragi-comedy called "The Perjur'd Husband," but the plays which gained her most reputation were two comedies, "The Gamester" and "The Busy Body." She writ also several copies of verses on divers subjects and occasions, and a great many ingenious letters, entitled "Letters of Wit, Politics, and Morality," which I collected and published about twenty-one years ago.' In presence of this statement, which commands respect, the origin assigned her in the 'Biographia Dramatica,' and accepted in later compilations, seems more than doubtful. The same writer states that 'her father's name, if I mistake not, was Rawkins.' A connection lasting a year and a half, and rightly or wrongly styled a marriage, subsequently existed between her and an officer named Carroll, who died in a duel. Her early plays, when not anonymous, are signed 'S. Carroll.' 'The Busy Body,' printed in 1709, is the first that bears the name of Centlivre, the previous play, 'The Platonic Lady,' 1707, being unsigned. Her first appearance as an actress was made, according to Whincop or his collaborator, at Bath in her own comedy, 'Love at a Venture,' which was produced in that city after being refused at Drury Lane. She then joined a strolling company, and played in different country towns. While acting at Windsor, about 1706, according to the same authority, the part of Alexander the Great in the tragedy of that name, or, more probably, in the 'Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great' of Lee, she captivated Mr. Joseph Centlivre, principal cook to Queen Anne and George I, whom she married, and with whom she lived till her death. This took place on 1 Dec. 1723 in Buckingham Court, Spring Gardens, where, according to the rate-books of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, her husband resided between 1712 and 1724. Pope, in 'An Account of the Condition of E. Curll,' calls her 'the cook's wife in Buckingham Court.' She is usually stated to be buried close at hand, in the parish church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields; but Mr. Peter Cunningham discovered in the burial register of St. Paul's, Covent Garden, the entry: '4 Dec. 1723, Susanna, wife of Joseph Centlivre, from St. Martin-in-the-Fields' (Gent. Mag. 1850, pt. ii. p. 368). No record of her acting in London is preserved, and it is supposed that her histrionic efforts were confined to the country. In spite, accordingly, of the romantic stories associated with her name, her life, like that of most of her contemporaries, is practically the history of her works and her literary friendships. She enjoyed a certain amount of intimacy with Rowe, Farquhar, Steele, and other dramatists, some of whom wrote prologues for her plays, and with Budgell, Dr. Sewell, Nicholas Amhurst, &c., with all of whom she corresponded. Of her plays, nineteen in number, fifteen were acted, generally with success. The list is as follows: 1. 'The Perjur'd Husband, or the Adventures of Venice,' tragedy, 4to, 1700, acted the same year at Drury Lane. 2. 'Love at a Venture,' comedy, 4to, 1706, refused at Drury Lane, and acted by the Duke of Grafton's servants at the New Theatre, Bath. It is taken from 'Le Galant Double' of Thomas Corneille. Cibber, by whom the play was refused, is accused of incorporating it into his 'Double Gallant.' 3. 'The Beau's Duel, or a Soldier for the Ladies,' comedy, 4to, 1702, acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields 21 Oct. 1702, taken in part from Jasper Mayne's 'City Match.' 4. 'The Stolen Heiress, or the Salamanca Doctor outplotted,' comedy, 4to, no date (1703), acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields 31 Dec. 1702, and taken from 'The Heir' by Thomas May. 5. 'Love's Contrivance, or Le Médecin malgré lui,' comedy, 4to, 1703, acted at Drury Lane on 4 June 1703, and taken from the comedy of Molière of the same name, and from 'Le Mariage forcé;' this play is signed R. M. in the dedication to the Earl of Dorset. 6. 'The Gamester,' comedy, 4to, 1705 and 1708, acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields, not for the first time, 22 Feb. 1705. In the 'Biographia Dramatica' the play is said to be borrowed from 'Le Dissipateur.' This is impossible. 'Le Dissipateur' of Destouches, acted in 1753, was in part taken from Mrs. Centlivre, whose 'Gamester' is an adaptation of 'Le Joueur' of Regnard, played 1696. 7. 'The Basset Table,' comedy, 4to, 1706, acted at Drury Lane 20 Nov. 1705. 8. 'The Platonick Lady,' comedy, 4to, 1707, acted at the Haymarket 25 Nov. 1706. 9. 'The Busy Body,' comedy, 4to, 1709, acted at Drury Lane 12 May 1709. This play, one of the most successful of its author, first introducing the character of Marplot, was so coldly regarded by the actors, that Wilks is said to have thrown down his part of Sir George Airy, and to have been with difficulty induced to resume it. A portion of the plot is taken from 'The Devil is an Ass' of Ben Jonson. 10. 'The Man's bewitched, or the Devil to do about her,' comedy, 4to, no date (1710), acted at the Haymarket 12 Dec. 1709. This clever farce is said, without much justification, to be indebted to 'Le Deuil' of Hauteroche, which name is in the 'Biographia Dramatica' erroneously supposed to be a pseudonym of Thomas Corneille. 11. 'A Bickerstaff's Burial, or Work for the Upholders,' farce, 4to, no date, acted at Drury Lane 27 March 1710, afterwards revived at Drury Lane 5 May 1715 as the 'Custom of the Country.' This play is said to be founded on one of Sinbad's voyages in the 'Arabian Nights.' The publication of 'Les Mille et une Nuits' by Galland, 1704–1717, had very recently commenced, and this source seems doubtful. A curious coincidence, hitherto unnoticed, is that 'Le Naufrage ou la Pompe funèbre de Crispin' of Lafont, produced in Paris on Saturday, 14 June 1710, is all but identical with the work of Mrs. Centlivre, who, however, is at least earlier in date. Parfaic frères, the historians of the French stage, suggest an origin for the plot earlier than the 'Arabian Nights.' 12. 'Marplot, or the Second Part of the Busy Body,' comedy, 4to, 1711, Drury Lane 30 Dec. 1710, afterwards altered by Henry Woodward and called 'Marplot in Lisbon.' 13. 'The Perplex'd Lovers,' comedy, 4to, 1712, Drury Lane 19 Jan. 1712, from the Spanish. 14. 'The Wonder! A Woman keeps a Secret,' comedy, 12mo, 1714, acted at Drury Lane 27 April 1714, and owing something to 'The Wrangling Lovers' of Ravenscroft. 15. 'A Gotham Election,' farce, 12mo, 1715, never acted, a dramatic satire on the tories, dedicated to Secretary Craggs, who sent the author by Mrs. Bracegirdle twenty guineas. A second edition of this, 12mo, 1737, is called the 'Humours of Elections.' 16. 'A Wife well managed,' farce, 12mo, 1715, supposed to have been acted at Drury Lane in 1715, taken from the 'Husband his own Cuckold' of John Dryden, jun. 17. 'The Cruel Gift, or the Royal Resentment,' tragedy, 12mo, 1717, drawn from the first novel of the fourth day of the 'Decameron,' acted at Drury Lane 17 Dec. 1716. 18. 'A Bold Stroke for a Wife,' comedy, 8vo, 1718, acted at Drury Lane 3 Feb. 1718; in this piece she was assisted by a Mr. Mottley. 19. 'The Artifice,' comedy, 8vo, 1721, acted at Drury Lane 2 Oct. 1722. These works were collected in three volumes, 12mo, 1761, and reprinted in 1872. The comedies of Mrs. Centlivre are often ingenious and sprightly, and the comic scenes are generally brisk. Mrs. Centlivre troubled herself little about invention, 'A Bold Stroke for a Wife' being the only work for which she is at the pains to claim absolute originality. So far as regards the stage, she may boast a superiority over almost all her countrywomen, since two of her comedies remain in the list of acting plays. More than one other work is capable, with some alterations, of being acted. A keen politician, she displays in some of her dramatic writings a strong whig bias, which was in part responsible for their success. Steele in the 'Tatler' (No. 19) speaks of 'The Busy Body,' and says that 'the plot and incidents are laid with that subtlety of spirit which is peculiar to females of wit.' Some of her most successful works were translated into French, German, and other languages. The volume of letters to which allusion is made in Boyer's 'Political State' (see above) has not been discovered. A supposition that it might be a work, 'Letters and Essays on several subjects, Philosophical, Moral, Historical, Critical, Amorous,' &c., 1694, mentioned by Lowndes (Bibl. Man. p. 1348), must remain conjecture, as the work is not in the British Museum. She left at her death many valuable ornaments presented to her by royalty or the aristocratic patrons to whom she dedicated her dramas.
[Life of Mrs. Centlivre prefixed to her works, 3 vols. 1761; List of English Dramatic Poets affixed to Whincop's Scanderbeg; Boyer's Political State of Great Britain, 1711–40, vol. xxvi.; Genest's Account of the English Stage; British Essayist, vol. i. (ed. Chalmers); Peter Cunningham's Handbook to London; Pope's Dunciad; Notes to Poetical Register (Giles Jacob), 1723.]
J. K.