I've previously blogged about Susanna Centlivre's play The Busie Body, which was one of the most produced English comedies of the 18th century.
Today, however, many critics prefer her play A Bold Stroke for a Wife, which pushes back against certain constraints on women while at the same time providing an amazing role for a (male) actor.
Obviously, the hero wants to marry Lovely. (Come on. Even her name is beautiful!) But in order to do so, he has to win the consent of four different guardians, each one of whom is opposed to what the other three want for the unfortunate woman.
In order to win her, our hero makes a bold stroke for a wife, hence the title. Fainwell decides he must fain well various different personalities, winning over each guardian in turn. This means the actor playing Fainwell portrays a character who constantly disguises himself and plays other characters. He easily wins over the first guardian, the fop Sir Philip Modelove, simply by dressing well and adopting French manners. Convincing the other guardians is not so easy.
To persuade the antiquarian Mr. Periwinkle to allow him to marry Lovely, Fainwell puts on "Egyptian dress" and pretends to be a traveler from far-off lands. He convinces Periwinkle he can do a number of fantastical things, including make himself invisible, which he does by means of a trap door. The plan is ruined, though, when a drawer in an inn recognizes Fainwell and calls him colonel. He then has to pivot and instead pretend that Periwinkle's uncle has died so that he can trick him into signing something without noticing what it is.
A third guardian, Tradelove, is a "City" type who loves nothing but... well... trade. Act IV opens in Jonathan's coffee house, which was a center for stock trading in the early eighteenth century, and was a forerunner of the London Stock Exchange. In fact, the first line of the act is "South Sea at seven-eighths! Who buys?" Not long later, Jonathan's would be at the heart of the South Sea Bubble, in which shares of the South Sea Company rose spectacularly high and then collapsed in 1720, only two years after the play premiered.
Fainwell pretends to be a Dutch merchant (because Dutch accents were hysterical in 18th-century Britain) and wins a bunch of money from Tradelove, then agrees to forgive the debt if he grants permission to marry his ward. Tradelove actually thinks he's the one doing the swindling, since three other guardians have to give their permission before anyone can marry Lovely. Little does he know, Fainwell has already concocted plans to get permission from two of them, leaving only the hypocritical Quaker, Obadiah Prim.
Act V takes place in Prim's house, where Fainwell pretends to be a Quaker to win Lovely's hand, taking on the name and identity of another man, Simon Pure. The plan works, and Anne Lovely gets to marry the man she wants. The play ends with Fainwell reciting a poem in praise of choice, concluding with the couplet:
'Tis Liberty of Choice that sweetens Life,
Makes the glad Husband and the happy Wife.
Centlivre is not nearly as famous now as she was in the eighteenth century, but her plays can still bring a smile to one's lips.
