August 27, 2012

Susanna Centlivre’s The Perjur’d Husband



Centlivre, Susanna. The perjur’d husband: or the adventures of Venice. A tragedy. As ’twas acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, by His Majesty’s servants. London: Bennet Banbury, 1700. Quarto. Wing C1671.

The perjur’d husband, first performed and printed in 1700 (a second standalone edition followed in 1737), was Susanna Centlivre’s debut play. The ODNB describes it most succinctly, as “a strange play with a tragic main plot set in Venice at carnival time and a bawdy comic sub-plot.” And it is indeed strange, but not without moments of genuine humor and wit. Although the play did not quite make it to a sixth night during its run on the stage of the Theatre Royal, Centlivre claims in her preface to the reader that it nevertheless “went off with general Applause.” Notably, the prologue delivered by Mrs. Oldfield (who played Aurelia) and written by a “Gentleman” confidently introduces the play as one authored by a woman:

And here’s to night what doubly makes it sweet,
A private Table, and a Ladys treat:
At her reflections none can be uneasy,
When the kind Creature does her best to please ye.
. . .
Whate’re’s her fate, she’s sure to gain the Field,
For Women always Conquer when they yeild.

As a writer of more straightforward comedies, Susanna Centlivre became the most popular female playwright in the generation after Aphra Behn. She died in 1723, but her reputation remained such that publishers collaborated to issue the collected works of “the celebrated Mrs. Centlivre” in a three-volume duodecimo collection in 1761, almost forty years later. Editions of individual plays were still being published well into the 19th century; in performance, they stayed in repertory for at least 150 years. Her most popular play, The Busybody, saw the stage more than 450 times before 1800 and was even counted among David Garrick’s favorites.

Centlivre’s second husband, Mr. Carroll, died before she became involved in the theater, but it was his surname that she used during the early phase of her career: it is with “Susanna Carroll” that she signs her dedication to the Duke of Bedford in The perjur’d husband. And although she was a successful playwright overall, Centlivre surely had her detractors, especially because as the politics of her plays became more transparent. In later plays, “[Tory] party fervour forms another obstacle to the happiness of the young lovers—always whiggishly inclined.” An unsympathetic annotator of a first edition copy of The perjur’d husband at the Huntington Library even felt it necessary to add to the dedication that Centlivre was not only “Your Grace’s most Obedient and Devoted Humble Servant,” but that she was also a “Whore.”

The present copy of The perjur’d husband collates complete, with its title page trimmed and mounted on newer stock. For whatever reason, a small section of the title page that includes the attribution to “S. Carroll” has been removed from the title page. As mounted, there is a seam below the horizontal rule and above the imprint. Margins throughout the playbook are quite ample, with only one exception: trimming and small chips to the upper margin encroach into the headlines “To His Grace” and “The Epistle Dedicatory” on sigs. A2r and A2v (see photo). The paper is also quite bright, with only occasional light stains and toning. The play is currently bound in what appears to be an old quarter binding from a library; both boards are cleanly detached.

Although it is doubtful that any of her plays will ever achieve the status of Behn’s The Rover, scholarly interest in Centlivre is nevertheless on the rise. The Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography records some fourteen studies (articles, book chapters, and dissertations) on Centlivre in the past dozen years, and her plays are increasingly taught at the graduate and even undergraduate levels. Assuming that Centlivre continues to gain popularity, her early quartos will become more and more of an asset in collections—institutional as well as private—of early modern and Restoration drama. UNAVAILABLE

March 6, 2012

The Book of Sports


James I and Charles I of England. The Kings Maiesties Declaration to His Subiects. Concerning lawfull Sports to bee vsed. (London: Robert Barker and John Bill, 1633). Quarto. STC 9254.7.

Best known as the Book of Sports, this proclamation was first issued at the order of James I in 1617. Originally, it applied only in Lancashire, but in 1618, the next year, James extended it throughout the nation more generally. And it was at this point that it was first printed. Much to the chagrin of many Puritans, the Book of Sports demanded the reversal of any and all policies that prohibited sports and several other leisure activities on Sundays. James specifically allowed “dauncing, [for] either men or women, Archery for men, leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmelesse Recreation, […] having of Maygames, Whitson Ales, and Morrisdances, and the setting vp of Maypoles & other sports therewith vsed,” but still banned “all vnlawfull games […] as Beare and Bullbaitings, Interludes, and at all times in the meaner sort of people by Law prohibited, Bowling.” In 1633, Charles I again issued the proclamation, reportedly at the behest of the new Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The 1633 printed edition, the second, adds to the original text a new preface and conclusion. When issued under both James and Charles, the Book of Sports faced strong opposition from those who wished to preserve the austerity of the Sabbath. Indeed, in 1643, the Puritan-leaning Parliament ordered it publicly burned.

The present copy, secured in an older marbled wrapper with endpapers, collates complete, including both A1 and the final blank, C4. Trimming at the top occasionally encroaches into page numbers, but the margins are otherwise quite ample. The coat-of-arms impression on the title page verso is bold and clear, as are the text and ornaments throughout.

All said, this is a nice, complete copy of an important entry by the Crown into the religious debates of seventeenth-century England. It is relevant not only to students and collectors of religious and political history, but also those interested in the Early Modern stage. SOLD

February 18, 2012

Reading Shakespeare and the Bible

On April 5th, I will be participating in the seminar, “Reading Shakespeare and the Bible,” at the 2012 annual conference of the Shakespeare Association of America in Boston. Organized and led by Thomas Fulton, Professor of English at Rutgers University, the seminar will consider the relationship between Shakespeare’s aesthetic production and the Christian Bibles and New Testaments that played such a major role in Early Modern literature and culture. Each of the participants has been asked to contribute a short paper addressing this relationship, a paper that will then be distributed to the group in preparation for the discussion during the seminar meeting itself.

Although my own work on the production and circulation of Bibles in Early Modern England has not dealt specifically with Shakespeare, I have been asked to participate in the panel because it does attempt to better define the broad cultural context necessary for asking more specific questions about the role of Scripture in the works of any author. I have not yet completed my paper, which will ultimately develop into an anthology chapter that I am slated to write later this year, but thought I would go ahead and post my abstract here:

Buying and Reading the Bible in Shakespeare’s England: A Polemic

Roughly five years before Shakespeare died in 1616, Robert Barker published the first edition of the King James Bible. It quickly became a runaway bestseller, purchased in its various editions and formats by the entire socioeconomic range of English readers. For most modern historians and literary critics, James’s decision to sponsor the translation project initially proposed by John Rainolds was designed, quite against the intentions of Rainolds and his Puritan coreligionists, to produce a Bible that would in fact be free of their fringe theology and politics, free of the beliefs that had hitherto been disseminated in the margins of the Geneva Bible. In this view, the King James Bible, with its comparatively sparse margins, was intended as an antidote to the densely annotated Geneva. This dominant narrative suggests that the Geneva Bible has from its beginning been an icon of Puritanism, a material testament to the radical Calvinism of the “hotter sort” of Protestants, at the same time that it, somehow, also became the most popular Bible version in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. This paper seeks, quite simply, to reject the idea that English Protestants tended to see religious debate in the pages of their Bibles and New Testaments, to complicate—or, as it turns out, radically simplify—the caricatured and often convoluted story about the reception of English Bibles that has motivated decades of scholarship. James I, indeed, did object to what he saw as “some notes very partiall, vntrue, seditious, and fauouring too much, of daungerous, and trayterous conceites,” but it is far from obvious that his comments should be taken as generally representative of English Protestants, as reflecting much more than the views of an obviously interested party, a monarch wary of treason. Unfortunately, however, these and the other statements made by James at the Hampton Court Conference have very much colored our understanding of how English readers interacted with and thought about their Bibles, not only in the Jacobean years, but also in the Elizabethan ones before them. By looking at the actual bibliographical record for evidence of readers’ and publishers’ preferences, I follow some recent critics in arguing that the Geneva Bible was not necessarily charged to the extent traditionally supposed, and, perhaps more controversially, I argue that early modern readers and publishers appear to have been quite inattentive to (or, perhaps, even unconcerned with) the differences between translations and the politics of their various paratexts. For them, the different translations were, just as they are for most believers today, essentially indifferent versions of the same thing: the Word of God. Whatever differences there may have been between them, English Bibles in Shakespeare’s England did more to unify their Protestant readers than they did to divide them.