The Busybody

by Susanna Centlivre

Overview

The Busybody is the most popular comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Susanna Centlivre. The play centres on two couples trying to form a relationship against the wills of their guardians, and in a battle of wits, playing with many conventions from theatre traditions across the continent, a conclusion is eventually reached.

Like her predecessor Aphra Behn, Centlivre was immensely successful in her day, drawing huge crowds to extended runs of her numerous plays, but the stabbing male pens of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries decried her work as being louche and dangerous, and her name slowly sunk into obscurity.

This edition, published with William Hazlitt's prefatory note and extra material on Centlivre's life and writing, seeks to highlight the dexterity with which she took on the stage.

'Acted a thousand times in town and country, giving delight to the old, the young and the middle-aged.' (William Hazlitt)

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160797991
Publisher:	Renard Press Ltd.
Publication date:	02/14/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	606 KB

About the Author

Susanna Centlivre (c.1670–1723) was a wildly successful playwright, actress and poet. Her play The Busybody was an overnight success on the London stage, and remained one of the few comedies in the common repertoire besides Shakespeare’s until the end of the nineteenth century. Like her predecessor Aphra Behn, whose nom de plume, ‘Astrea’, Centlivre borrowed in her early years, her work fell into obscurity for much of the twentieth century, but, thanks to the work of feminist scholars, is returning to the page and stage.