The Perjur'd Husband: or, The Adventures of Venice is a tragicomedy written by Susanna Centlivre and first performed and printed in 1700. It was Centlivre's first published play.
The play is set during the Venetian Carnival. Count Bassino, a rake, is married to Placentia but in love with Aurelia. Aurelia is betrothed to Alonzo, but falls in love with Bassino (whom she believes to be unmarried). Bassino's friend Armando is outraged at Bassino's behaviour, and fetches Placentia to Venice. Bassino promises to be faithful to his wife in future. However, he inadvertently drops a letter that suggests he means to marry Aurelia that very night.
Placentia disguises herself as Bassino's young brother-in-law in order to speak with Aurelia. She tries to persuade her against entering into a bigamous marriage with Bassino. She then reveals her true identity to Aurelia, but the younger woman remains defiant. Placentia draws her sword and stabs Aurelia. Bassino enters, sees Placentia and stabs her in turn. Alonzo then enters, fights with Bassino, and mortally wounds him. The dying Bassino, Aurelia and Placentia make peace with each other and with Alonzo.
The comic sub-plot has Lady Pizalta employ Ludvico, a male prostitute, in cuckolding her husband, Pizalto. Pizalto lusts after his wife's clever maid, Lucy, who agrees to sell him her virginity. He gives her a bond for 1,000 pistoles. Lucy persuades Ludvico to disguise himself in her clothes in order to sneak into Lady Pizalta's bedchamber, where he is discovered by Pizalto. Lucy defuses the situation and she also ends up keeping the bond that Pizalto had previously given her, without actually going through with sleeping with him. Both her master and mistress are forced to remain silent, in case Lucy reveals their secret infidelities.
The Perjur'd Husband was probably first performed at Drury Lane, in or before October 1700. It was reprinted twice during the eighteenth century. [1]
The play has been criticised as one of Centlivre's poorer quality plays, but Katherine Woodville suggests that it is nevertheless more interesting than it first appears, arguing that "I believe that critics do not look beyond the clunky verbiage. Beneath the dialogue Centlivre tackles feminist tribulations inherent within her society." [2]
Paul Kies, writing in Modern Philology asserted that The Perjur'd Husband influenced Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Miss Sara Sampson (1755). [3]
Elizabeth Woodville, later known as Dame Elizabeth Grey, was Queen of England from her marriage to King Edward IV on 1 May 1464 until Edward was deposed on 3 October 1470, and again from Edward's resumption of the throne on 11 April 1471 until his death on 9 April 1483. She was a key figure in the Wars of the Roses, a dynastic civil war between the Lancastrian and the Yorkist factions between 1455 and 1487.
Lady Arbella Stuart was an English noblewoman who was considered a possible successor to Queen Elizabeth I of England. During the reign of King James VI and I, she married William Seymour, 2nd Duke of Somerset, another claimant to the English throne, in secret. King James imprisoned William Seymour and placed her under house arrest. When she and her husband tried to escape England, she was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London, where she died at age 39.
"Restoration comedy" is English comedy written and performed in the Restoration period of 1660–1710. Comedy of manners is used as a synonym for this. After public stage performances were banned for 18 years by the Puritan regime, reopening of the theatres in 1660 marked a renaissance of English drama. Sexually explicit language was encouraged by King Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish style of his court. Historian George Norman Clark argues:
The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper.... The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.
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The Changeling is a Jacobean tragedy written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley. Widely regarded as being among the best tragedies of the English Renaissance, the play has accumulated a large amount of critical commentary.
Susanna Centlivre, born Susanna Freeman, and also known professionally as Susanna Carroll, was an English poet, actress, and "the most successful female playwright of the eighteenth century". Centlivre's "pieces continued to be acted after the theatre managers had forgotten most of her contemporaries." During a long career at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, she became known as the second woman of the English stage, after Aphra Behn.
Venice Preserv'd is an English Restoration play written by Thomas Otway, and the most significant tragedy of the English stage in the 1680s. It was first staged in 1682, with Thomas Betterton as Jaffeir and Elizabeth Barry as Belvidera. The play was soon printed and enjoyed many revivals through to the 1830s. In 2019, the Royal Shakespeare Company staged a modern adaptation, Venice Preserved, at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Anne Bracegirdle was an English actress.
Mr. Mulliner Speaking is a collection of nine short stories by P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in the United Kingdom on April 30, 1929, by Herbert Jenkins, and in the United States on February 21, 1930, by Doubleday, Doran. The stories were originally published in magazines in the UK and the US between 1924 and 1929.
Robert Wilks was a British actor and theatrical manager who was one of the leading managers of Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in its heyday of the 1710s. He was, with Colley Cibber and Thomas Doggett, one of the "triumvirate" of actor-managers that was denounced by Alexander Pope and caricatured by William Hogarth as leaders of the decline in theatrical standards and degradation of the stage's literary tradition.
The Recruiting Officer is a 1706 play by the Irish writer George Farquhar, which follows the social and sexual exploits of two officers, the womanising Plume and the cowardly Brazen, in the town of Shrewsbury to recruit soldiers. The characters of the play are generally stock, in keeping with the genre of Restoration comedy.
The Malcontent is an early Jacobean stage play written by the dramatist and satirist John Marston ca. 1603. The play was one of Marston's most successful works. It is widely regarded as one of the most significant plays of the English Renaissance; an extensive body of scholarly research and critical commentary has accumulated around it.
A Bold Stroke for a Wife is Susanna Centlivre's 18th-century satirical English play first performed in 1718. The plot expresses the author's unabashed support of the British Whig Party: she criticises the Tories, religious hypocrisy, and the greed of capitalism.
More Dissemblers Besides Women is a Jacobean stage play, a tragicomedy written by Thomas Middleton, and first published in 1657.
The Fatal Contract: A French Tragedy is a Caroline era stage play, written by William Heminges. The play has been regarded as one of the most extreme of the revenge tragedies or "tragedies of blood," like The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus, that constitute a distinctive subgenre of English Renaissance theatre. In this "most graphic Caroline revenge tragedy...Heminges tops his predecessors' grotesque art by creating a female character, Chrotilda, who disguises herself as a black Moorish eunuch" and "instigates most of the play's murder and mayhem."
The Busie Body is a Restoration comedy written by Susanna Centlivre and first performed at the Drury Lane Theatre in 1709. It focuses on the legalities of what constitutes a marriage, and how children might subvert parental power over whom they can marry. The Busie Body was the most popular female authored-play of the eighteenth century, and became a stock piece of most anglophone theatres during the period.
The Cruel Gift: A Tragedy is a tragedy written by Susanna Centlivre, first performed at Drury Lane in 1716. Nicholas Rowe wrote the play's epilogue.
The Man's Bewitched is a 1709 comedy play by the British writer Susanna Centlivre. It is known by the longer title The Man's Bewitch'd; or, The Devil to do about Her.
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