Mrs. Susannah Centlivre, 1667[?]–1723. Born [Susanna Freeman? or Rawkins?], in Ireland [?] 1667 [?]. Is said to have run away from home on father’s second marriage, and lived in Cambridge with Anthony Hammond; in London, for about a year, with a nephew of Sir Stephen Fox; and subsequently with a Capt. Carroll, for about eighteen months. Plays produced at Drury Lane, 1700–22; others occasionally at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Haymarket. First appeared as an actress at Bath, in her “Love at a Venture,” 1706. Joined company of strolling players. Married to Joseph Centlivre, head cook to Queen Anne and George I., 1706 [?]. Died in London, 1 Dec. 1723. Buried in St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, and afterwards transferred to St. Paul’s Covent Garden. Works: “The Perjur’d Husband,” 1700 (produced at Drury Lane, 1700); “Love at a Venture,” 1706 (prod. at Bath, 1706 [?]); “The Beau’s Duel,” 1702 (prod. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1702); “The Stolen Heiress” (anon.), [1703] (prod. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1702); “Love’s Contrivance” (anon.), 1703 (prod. Drury Lane, 1703); “The Gamester” (anon.), 1705 (prod. Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1705 [?]); “The Bassett Table” (anon.), 1706 (prod. Drury Lane, 1705); “The Platonick Lady” (anon.), 1707 (prod. Drury Lane, 1706); “The Busy Body,” 1709 (prod. Drury Lane, 1709); “The Man’s Bewitched,” [1710] (prod. Haymarket, 1709); “A Bickerstaff’s Burial,” [1710?] (prod. Drury Lane, 1710); “Marplot,” 1711 (prod. Drury Lane, 1710); “The Perplex’s Lovers,” 1712 (prod. Drury Lane, 1712); “The Wonder!” 1714 (prod. Drury Lane, 1714); “A Gotham Election,” 1715 (not acted; 2nd edn., called “Humours of Elections,” 1737); “A Wife Well Managed,” 1715 (prod. Drury Lane, 1715 [?]); “A Poem, humbly presented to … George, King of Great Britain, upon his Accession to the Throne,” 1715; “The Cruel Gift” (with Rowe), 1717 (prod. Drury Lane, 1716); “A Bold Stroke for a Wife” (with Mottley), 1718 (prod. Drury Lane, 1718); “The Artifice,” 1721 (prod. Drury Lane, 1722). Collected Works: in 3 vols., with life, 1761 (2nd edn., 1872).
Personal
The world seemed disposed to take Susannah’s word; but even good-nature must grant, that there are many breaks and chasms in her story. Indigent and friendless, lively and engaging, we reluctantly excuse where it is impossible to approve. It would, perhaps, be very difficult to find the marriage certificate for her second union.
In Spring Gardens, originally a place of public entertainment, died Mrs. Centlivre, the sprightly authoress of the “Wonder,” the “Busy Body,” and the “Bold Stroke for a Wife.” She was buried at St. Martin’s. She is said to have been a beauty, an accomplished linguist, and a good-natured friendly woman. Pope put her in his “Dunciad,” for having written, it is said, a ballad against his “Homer” when she was a child! But the probability is that she was too intimate with Steele and other friends of Addison while the irritable poet was at variance with them. It is not impossible, also, that some raillery of hers might have been applied to him, not very pleasant from a beautiful woman against a man of his personal infirmities, who was naturally jealous of not being well with the sex.
A sad lot were all these early feminine intruders into the field of letters,—Aphra Behn, Mrs. Manley, Mrs. Pilkington, and the rest. Mrs. Centlivre was the best of them. Almost the first of her sex to adopt literature as a calling, she may well be regarded as an unconscious reformer, the leader of a forlorn hope against that literary fortress which was so long defended by the cruel sneers of its masculine garrison. She fell upon the glacis. But over her body the Amazons have marched on to victory.
The place of Mrs. Centlivre’s burial has been for many years undetermined, many of the older authorities—among others, the “Biographia Dramatica”—placing it in the Church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, in which parish she died. But search of the Register of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, shows that she was buried in that church, “Decemb’r 4th, 1723.” The date of her birth or the position of her grave is not recorded.
The Busy Body, 1709
On Saturday last was presented the “Busy Body,” a comedy, written (as I have heretofore remarked) by a woman. The plot and incidents of the play are laid with that subtlety of spirit which is peculiar to females of wit, and is very seldom well performed by those of the other sex, in whom craft in love is an act of invention, and not, as with women, the effect of nature and instinct.
“The Busy Body” is inferior, in the interest of the story and characters, to the “Wonder,” but it is full of bustle and gaiety from beginning to end. The plot never stands still; the situations succeed one another like the changes of scenery in a pantomime. The nice dove-tailing of the incidents, and cross-reading in the situations, supplies the place of any great force of wit or sentiment. The time for the entrance of each person on the stage is the moment when they are least wanted, and when they arrive make either themselves or somebody else look as foolish as possible. The laughableness of this comedy, as well as of “The Wonder,” depends on a brilliant series of mistimed exits and entrances. Marplot is the whimsical hero of the piece, and a standing memorial of unmeaning vivacity and assiduous impertinence.
“The Busy Body” still keeps the stage; for, though many years have elapsed since its performance in London, where various circumstances combine to limit the regular stock pieces within very narrow bounds, it continues to find favour in the country, being not unfrequently acted at some of the most distinguished of the provincial theatres.
The Wonder, 1714
The “Wonder” is one of the best of our acting plays. The passion of jealousy in Don Felix is managed in such a way as to give as little offence as possible to the audience, for every appearance combines to excite and confirm his worse suspicions, while we, who are in the secret, laugh at his groundless uneasiness and apprehensions. The ambiguity of the heroine’s situation, which is like a continued practical equivoque, gives rise to a quick succession of causeless alarms, subtle excuses, and the most hair-breadth ’scapes. The scene near the end, in which Don Felix, pretending to be drunk, forces his way out of Don Manuel’s house, who wants to keep him a prisoner, by producing his marriage-contract in the shape of a pocket-pistol, with the terrors and confusion into which the old gentleman is thrown by this sort of argumentum ad hominem, is one of the richest treats the stage affords, and calls forth incessant peals of laughter and applause.
The busy, bustling nature of the plot, the excellence of the situations which it affords, and the skilful portraiture of the characters, have, in themselves, without much assistance from the dialogue, which, though pertinent and lively, has little or no pretensions to wit, enabled this play to keep the stage down to the present day.
In the elegance and brilliancy of its dialogue, and in the effectiveness of its situations, no comedy of Mrs. Centlivre’s approaches “The Wonder.” This is perhaps best shown by the fact that its chief character, so often played by him, was chosen by Garrick for his last appearance on the stage. He had thought of making his farewell in Richard III., but he dreaded the fight and the fall, and on reflection preferred to be remembered associated with the mad gayety of the jealous and choleric Don Felix, rather than with the sombre villainy of the crook-backed king.
A Bold Stroke for a Wife, 1718
A truly excellent comedy.
The “Bold Stroke for a Wife” is entirely her own, and has had a wonderful succession of Colonel Feignwells, from C. Bullock down to Mr. Graham! This piece, however, was but moderately successful; but it has such vivacity, fun, and quiet humor in it, that it has outlived many a one that began with greater triumph, and in “the real Simon Pure,” first acted by Griffin, it has given a proverb to the English language.
General
From a mean parentage and education, after several gay adventures (over which we shal 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.
Almost the last of our writers who ventured to hold out in the prohibited track was a female adventurer, Mrs. Centlivre, who seemed to take advantage of the privilege of her sex, and to set at defiance the cynical denunciations of the angry puritanical reformist. Her plays have a provoking spirit and volatile salt in them, which still preserves them, from decay. Congreve is said to have been jealous of their success at the time, and that it was one cause which drove him in disgust from the stage. If so, it was without any good reason, for these plays have great and intrinsic merit in them, which entitled them to their popularity … and besides, their merit was of a kind entirely different from his own.
Mrs. Centlivre had unobtrusive humor, sayings full of significance rather than wit, wholesome fun in her comic, and earnestness in her serious, characters. Mrs. Centlivre, in her pictures of life, attracts the spectator. There may be, now and then, something, as in Dutch pictures, which had been as well away; but this apart, all the rest is true, and pleasant, and hearty; the grouping perfect, the color faithful, and enduring too—despite the cruel sneer of Pope, who, in the “Life of Curll,” sarcastically alludes to her as “the Cook’s wife in Buckingham Court.”
Her comedies, whether original or not,—for several of these borrow their plots from foreign sources,—bear all an unmistakable family likeness to one another. Their authoress needed no indulgence as a playwright on the score of her sex; for not one among the dramatists contemporary with her better understood the construction of light comic actions, or the use of those conventional figures of comedy which irresistibly appeal to the mirthful instincts of a popular audience. Inasmuch as she had no hesitation in resorting to the broadest expedients of farce, she was sure of the immediate effect which was all that her ambition desired; for she never flattered herself, as she confesses, “that anything she was capable of doing could support the Stage.” In one instance, however, she virtually invented a personage of really novel humour; and in another she devised a character to which the genius of a great actor ensured a long-enduring life on the boards. Marplot in “The Busy-Body” and Don Felix in “The Wonder” are creations upon which any comic dramatist might look back with satisfaction; and on the former, indeed, Mrs. Centlivre relies as conferring a real title to popular favour. As a rule, however, her characters are little more than thin outlines left to the actor to fill up. This cavil applies particularly to those of her comedies which are to all intents and purposes mere pictures of manners.
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.
The best of her plays are “The Busy-body” and “A Bold Stroke for a Wife,” from the last of which comes at least one universally known and quoted phrase, “the real Simon Pure.” They are nearer literature than Cibber’s, but they are chiefly interesting because they show the change of taste. The theme is still intrigue, but it is almost always unsuccessful.
