the busie body summarythe busie body summary

Opening up the canon by giving a voice to writers who had been on the receiving end of summary justice, women writers prominent amongst them, was one of the book's endeavours, but this entails a very difficult methodological challenge. At one point, Lissardo calls attention to the comparison between his predicament and that typical of heroic tragedy la Dryden and Lee (specifically here to Lee's The Rival Queens), where the hero is torn between two lovers: The emotional dynamic of this scene is precisely imitated by Gay in The Beggar's Opera, II.xiii, though transposed to the minor key of the condemned hold; and the comparison with heroic tragedy is rendered not by explicit allusion but by Polly Peachum's affected idiom. All of Cibber's fops, as Kristina Straub argues, express fluid sexual identities; George Brilliant, however, makes the most explicit declaration of homoerotic desire when he returns the greeting kisses of Lord Wronglove: And kiss, and kiss again, my Dear, he responds, By Ganymede there's Nectar on thy Lips.26 As Straub further observes, at an historical moment of the emergence of bipolar oppositions between hetero- and homosexual identity, as well as the bipolar reification of masculine and feminine identity, Cibber's Brilliant comically destabilized both oppositions.27 Like other fops, George's self-consciousness associates him with feminine consumer vanity. Vol.

Sir Francis enters with Marplot. The opening scene is probably the most effective. Her plays consistently protest fathers or guardians who treat women as property and celebrate the men and women who outmaneuver them. James Kinsley (Oxford, 1958), I, 461. As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, by Her Majesty's servants. Miranda vividly expresses how it must feel to be forced to marry an old man when she describes Sir Francis, What a delicate bedfellow I should have! (327). Though common Prudence sometimes makes us act against it, as I am now oblig'd to do, for I intend to marry my Daughter to Don Guzman, whom I expect from Holland every Day, whither he went to take Possession of a large Estate left him by his Uncle (3:8). Valere is not ready to give up gaming until he is penniless and his father threatens to disinherit him. In about two pages of text (pp. These dramatists, several of them actors by profession, who wrote one, two, or three indifferent comedies or farcical afterpieces, turned variations on the stereotype, making no dramatic acknowledgment of the distinctions between occupations and levels of attainment in business life. Sybil Rosenfeld, Strolling Players and Drama in the Provinces 1660-1765 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1939), passim. In her desperation to win Belville, Centlivre's Isabella (disguised as Donna Clara) tells Lucinda that she had married, and been abandoned by, Belville, after which she gave birth to his son. In a widely known essay, J. G. A. Pocock argued that the Augustan inheritors of this tradition are better comprehended under the rubric Country theorists or apologists.7 My concern is not primarily with political theorists, however, but with imaginative writers. It is not what the Town commonly calls virtue, a mere Name, she says (1.206), but an innate Virtue (5.68); that is, not the appearance, but the real substance of virtue. The happy effect of the moral dramas of this ra, in impressing those persons with just sentiments who attend no other place of instruction but a theatre, has not yet erased from the mind of the prejudiced former ill consequences from former plays. W. P. Ker (Oxford, 1900), I, 135-136. Not only does she control her own future, but through her actions, she influences the destiny of every other character in the play. Any analysis of them, however, exposes a number of contradictory dramatic elements and goes some way to explaining why studying her work is less satisfactory than reading, for example, Behn. The dramatist's social judgments, as they appear in the handling of characters, intrigue, and satire, are more subtle than usual, at times even ambiguous, but still fundamentally conservative. Both follow linear plots constructed on the desire of two young couples to marry and focus on the ways that their desires are acheived. Pat Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 488. David Norbrook's Writing the English Republic argues that an entire corpus of Interregnum republican writing has been lost to us because history is written by the victors, and the Royalists won.9 He redeems from obscurity several writers with whose work this reader, assuredly, was unfamiliarbut he keeps running into the problem of literary value. See also Kristina Straub's chapter on Colley Cibber's daughter, Charlotte Charke, in Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chap. WebThe Busie Body, first performed at Drury Lane on 12 May 1709, is the most theatrically and culturally fertile of the plays in this study. The company comprises three powerful retail brands, Macys, Bloomingdales and Bluemercury.

See also Roger Lund's convincing account of Pope's indebtedness to Thomas Newcomb in From Oblivion to Dulness: Pope and the Poetics of Appropriation, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 14 (1991), pp. Each criticizes a patriarchal society that strove to control and dominate women physically, emotionally, and financially. Consistently, Behn and Centlivre imagine strong, witty, and active women, women who are capable of setting goals and making them a reality. She, however, remained long enough at the college to learn experience, and to improve her taste for literature.

These would all have been actual changes of scene, effected by changing the sliding flat scenes at the rear of the stage. Mrs. Sago clearly owns none of the marital property, nor does she have inalienable property in her sexuality: For that Fair Face, Mr. Sago declares after he has been arrested for debt, if I turn you out of Doors, will quickly be a cheaper Drug than any in my Shop (62). Indeed, to modern eyes, it often degenerates into a reckless defiance of realism. In his assumption that personal and socially contingent judgments of taste determine the proprietary status of a text, Cibber contributes to the emergent eighteenth-century distinction between the status of an artifact signified as an aesthetic object and one signified as merely commercial. Aesthetic sensibility was crucial here. "Susanna Centlivre - Elizabeth Inchbald (essay date 1808)" Drama Criticism 9-10), Miranda eight times peeps out of hiding and makes a remark aside. See the account given by Peter Dixon, ed., George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), pp. Astonished at Belville's previous marriage to Donna Clara (Isabella), his apparent initial refusal to acknowledge this marriage and Isabella's deceit of her, Lucinda cries out, What, am I then a Property, am I a Person fit to be Abus'd? (67). Writing (as) the Lady's Last Stake: Susanna Centlivre. In Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property, pp. Second, there is nothing sentimental about the portrayal of the gamester. The Wonder is one of the best of our acting plays. The writing that Womersley valorises in the introduction to his anthology is writing that enshrines this way of seeing things, and he appears to argue that it is good writing because it does sobecause his favoured writers obey this ideological imperative. The thin Audience were pleased, and caused a full House the Second; the Third was crowded, and so on to the Thirteenth, when it stopt, on Account of the advanced Season; but the following Winter it appear'd again with Applause, and for Six Nights successively, was acted by rival Players, both at Drury-Lane, and at the Hay-Market Houses.

The management evaded the Licensing Act by presenting it gratis during intermissions at concerts or with tumbling and dancing.6 In this same period, theatrical booths at the fairs produced the comedy as a two-act droll, The Guardians over-reached in their Own Humour: or, the Lover Metamorphos'd.7 In the provinces, a company visiting Ipswich staged the play in January, 1741, and the Bristol company performed it in 1745.8, By the middle of the century, A Bold Stroke for a Wife had been staged about eighty times in London theaters. Lucy takes pleasure in trapping Witless, who does not object even when he discovers Lucy's identity. These conflicting desires do not let the characters really explore the metaphor of woman as commodity. Nevertheless, using Angellica's portrait as capital erases any difference between their relationship and Valere's potential prostitution to Lady Wealthy after accepting and losing her money. In fact, Centlivre allows her to have passion for both her husband and her philosophy, thus insisting that women can achieve both. In the play, the concept of forced marriage is often seen in terms of slavery (as Florinda points out). His presence helps prevent the two parts of the play from moving too far apart. Mrs. Centlivre, quite rightly, has not fared well at the hands of the critics. Liberty is the Idol of the English, under whose Banner all the Nation lists; give but the Word for Liberty, and straight more armed Legions wou'd appear, than France, and Philip keep in constant Pay (3:8). The Rover, for instance, was produced 70 times between 1700 and 1725. As Perry argues elsewhere, however, Astell more fully recognized the place of women in possessive individualism. Despite the Tory majority in Commons, the Whigs ultimately defeated the measurechiefly because they convinced a substantial body of the squires in Commons that it was unsound in terms of mercantilist economic theory.6. Sybil Rosenfeld records them as the staple of British provincial circuits and strolling companies;28 Frushell documents that General Burgoyne's soldiers played her first in America, and the theatre in Sydney mounted her work as early as 1796; the records of theatres large and small in Ireland, Canada, Australia and the USA show her plays as standard repertoire well into the next century. Miranda tells Sir Francis positively this is my Wedding Day (p. 60).

He goes on to say that there is a fundamental difference in aesthetic values, literary genres, themes and writing procedures between Whig and Tory writers by the first decade of the eighteenth century, because they are speaking for distinctly different sections of the social elite, who ground their authority with respect to different eventsTories to King Charles's Restoration in 1660 and Whigs to the Glorious Revolution in 1688and who require their cultural products to do different kinds of ideological work. During Fainwell's first visit, he has remarked, How charming she appears (II.ii.111-112). Octavio, believing Belliza a jealous mistress of his friend, tells her that Bellmie does not really love Lucinda. The play's audience, however, must rely on the testimony of other characters since the evidence is too thin for us to judge.

Gestus and Signature in Aphra Behn's The Rover. English Literary History 56 (1989): 519-41. 25. As Victoria Warren suggests, the unsettling combination of women and money in those plays spoke directly to Centlivre's predicament as a woman compelled for much of her life to write for her livelihood. Reflecting upon the convictions of the English, the old grandee offers this comment: I like their Principles; who does not wish for Freedom in all Degrees of Life? The company comprises three powerful retail brands, Macys, Bloomingdales and Bluemercury. Furthering this ambiguity about Marplot's sexuality is his function in the plot. In order to prevent Sir George discovering that she is his incognita of the park, she proposes to Sir Francis that she should remain dumb throughout the interview. Aphra Behn may have cracked the glass ceiling of the male-dominated Restoration theatre, but the patriarchal attitudes of English society continued to make survival and success difficult for early eighteenth-century female playwrights. All of the Colonel's victims are vain; all prey on society in some way. 25. They are the railway reading of Georgian England. This masculine lack of consideration for the wants and desires of women is presented as cruel and uncivil, and Centlivre attempts to create empathy for women suffering from such oppression. Webthe busie body summary the busie body summary. A little over a decade later, with Richard Steele's Tatler (1709-11), and Steele's and Joseph Addison's Spectator (1711-13), the desirable domestic woman became central to the program of periodicals, whose most striking characteristic was the creation of a consistent rhetoric to and about women that, self-consciously progressive, claimed to defend and elevate women's status by defining femininity in a privileged way and designating an area of perception and experience as female.13 It goes without saying that this female area of influence was under strict male control, and that household and family arrangements reinforced patriarchal relations of authority and submission between husband and wife. By contrast, her virtuous daughter Charlotte never falls for the trap of learning; even Sophronia, who at first indulges in learned literature, eventually gives it up for plain, naked, natural Love (4:93). New York: AMS Press, 1968. Thus Centlivre adapts another familiar pattern of Baroque drama: while the main female character is restricted by social conventions, it is her pert maid who speaks and acts out much more freely against gender restriction. The action of the play is certainly not probable, but it is well motivated according to the conventions of its genre. It is doubtless, the great business of a woman's life to render his home pleasing to her husband; he will then delight in her society, and not seek abroad for alien amusements. Whether it is for consent to marry (as is the case with Miranda and Isabinda), or for payment of an inheritance (as is the case with Marplot, Miranda, Isabinda, and Charles) most of the characters in this play must rely upon the protection and support of these two domestic tyrants. Miranda's ascendency over both men has been confirmed: neither knows what she is really about. Apparently Love's Contrivance was never produced again.

In this relationship, roles are swapped; Lady Reveller defies Lord Worthy: Dare you, the Subject of my Power arraign my Pleasures, (3.370-1) and he, after some resistance, gives in: Oh! This convinces me that not only that barbarous Custom of denying Women to have Souls, begins to be rejected as foolish and absurd, but also that bold Assertion, that Female Minds are not capable of producing literary Works, equal even to those of Pope, now loses Ground, and probably the next Age may be taught by our Pens that our Geniuses have been hitherto cramped and smothered, but not extinguished, and that the Sovereignty which the male Part of the Creation have, until now, usurped over us, is unreasonably arbitrary: And further, that our natural Abilities entitle us to a larger Share, not only in Literary Decisions, but that, with the present Directors, we are equally intitled to Power both in Church and State. Herein the genius of Mrs. Centlivre consistedthe dialogues of her dramas might be given by a common writer, but her fable and events are proofs of a very extraordinary capacity. He beats Marplot for his pains and goes into the house. Although Mrs. Centlivre ridicules the guardians and Mrs. Prim, her primary aim is not didactic; unlike Shadwell, she does not even pretend to use humors characters to laugh men out of their follies. no Faith; if a man is born to be a Cuckold, 'tis none of his Wife's Fault (2:142). But that she might be sure never to do so, he left her in the care of four men, as opposite to each other as light and darkness (1968, 2.1.82-86). To the modern reader Valeria is a rather pathetic figure. Science is Valeria's stake, her own form of investment (Where Fortune in my Power, she says, she would be ready to bestow her capital to found a college where women could study Philosophy) towards sexual self-ownership and inalienable individuality. Her success, then, is the entertainer's success, in matching her offering to the taste of the time. She tells him that this is merely to prove that she marries him freely. 357-70, p. 357. Cibber [An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. Instead of reading these two characters as failures as so many critics have in the past, I suggest we read them as examples of what Elin Diamond calls a feminist version of Brechtian Gestus: a moment in a feminist text where the contradictory meaning of both theatrical and social conventions for female fictions and historical women become apparent to the spectator or reader (524). : Gordon and Breach, 1994.

In the course of the play, when both Florinda and Hellena extricate themselves from the control of their father and assert their love and sexual attractions to their respective prospective husbands, the audience approves their triumph. The particular Whigs are those who enable the transmission of general Whig ideas at the historical juncture when all might have been lost.

The comedy remained popular in the nineteenth century, when Charles Kemble, Charles Mathews, and Robert Elliston appeared in it, enhancing its reputation as an acting play. The table is the pivotal point around which Lady Reveller's enlarged and whimsical family revolves and from which a number of unforeseen spin-offs, in terms of gender definitions and social relations, are produced.

The Tatler was an influential tastemaker.

One other temptation, therefore, would be to associate conservative attitudes toward gender politics in Centlivre's plays with those social and political classes that embodied and upheld past aristocratic ideals of behavior while conversely associating the emerging middle classes with more progressive and liberal convictions. If the most celebrated dramatization of Whig argument, The Conscious Lovers is by no means the only one. such a Son-in-Lawhow shall I be Blest in my Posterity? It could be argued that her texts incarnate the divergent speaking voices I have discussed in connection with Mary Astell's essay on marriage. 1-2; F. W. Bateson, English Comic Drama, 1700-1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), p. 20; Joseph Wood Krutch, Comedy and Conscience after the Restoration (New York: Columbia Univ. Start your 48-hour free trial to get access to more than 30,000 additional guides and more than 350,000 Homework Help questions answered by our experts. One of his primary functions is to subvert male sexuality (Pearson 210): he, like Willmore, continually interferes with the sexual intrigues of his friends. Our poets have in a great measure the Springs of Thought and Inclination in their Power. The woman of sense, a contradiction in terms, is hard to represent. Having defined Centlivre's efforts as common (in both senses), however, Cibber immediately backs off from any claims to cultural capital, comparing himself to a cobbler who may be allow'd to be useful though he is not famous: And I hope a Man is not blameable for doing a little Good, tho' he cannot do as much as another? Cibber closes this case by returning to his self-representation as a hack, resigning himself to the fact that Twopenny Criticks must live as well as Eighteenpenny Authors.7 In spite of their profoundly entangled professional careersCibber, for example, acted in Centlivre's next playthe laureate never mentions Centlivre's name in regard to The Double Gallant, as if to reject the possibility that one could benefit from a woman writer.