A Bold Stroke for a Wife - Softcover

Susanna Centlivre

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1551110210 ISBN 13: 9781551110219

Publisher: Broadview Press, 1995

Synopsis

Though critics and literary historians have always had to admit that Susanna Centlivre’s comedies were extremely popular, they have tended to devote themselves to a search for evidence in them of supposed deficiencies of ‘the female pen,’ and to pay as much attention to the playwright’s marriages and amorous liasons than to the plays themselves. Only in recent years has Centlivre come to be recognized quite straightforwardly as one of the most brilliant playwrights of her time.

A Bold Stroke for a Wife is perhaps the finest example of Centlivre’s masterful plotting of comic intrigue. The soldier Fainwell and Anne Lovely are in love, but their path to the altar is blocked by her guardians, each of whom has a different view of what sort of husband would make the right match. Fainwell resorts to disguises of social types. The play thus provides a wide range of opportunity for Centlivre to satirize Tory respectability, religious propriety and capitalist speculative greed―and to give voice to tolerance: ‘tis liberty of choice that sweetens life.’ Yet in the end it is Centlivre’s comic muse that gives enduring life to the play as one of the most entertaining of eighteenth-century comedies.

About this title

From the Publisher

The Broadview Literary Texts series is an effort to represent the ever-changing canon of literature in English by bringing together texts long regarded as classics with valuable, though lesser-known literature.

About the Author

Nancy Copeland is a professor in the Drama Department at Erindale College the University of Toronto, and has written widely on eighteenth-century drama.

About this edition

• Publisher: Broadview Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1551110210
• ISBN 13: 9781551110219
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 158
• Editor: Nancy Copeland