Reception
Centlivre's plays show a strikingly liberal point of view, and she wrote frankly in the face of strong sexual mores that discouraged women playwrights. Centlivre managed to push the boundaries of contemporary social norms, and yet she was widely appreciated only as a comedic writer. She did not garner much positive critical reputation; even while her plays enjoyed success in theatres, critics such as William Hazlitt wrote condescendingly of them. Alexander Pope found her writings offensive for political and religious reasons, and also thought them threatening to greater dramatists by pandering to popular taste. He even went so far as to assume that she had helped with Edmund Curll’s pamphlet The Catholic Poet: or, Protestant Barnaby’s Sorrowful Lamentation. For those reasons, she was lampooned as having a supposedly mannish appearance (among other faults), most famously by Alexander Pope in several pieces. Regardless of her peers’ opinions, her plays continued to be performed for over 150 years after her death.
Overall, Centlivre was a powerful influence on society as a female intellect, and works encouraged female writers to continue to push the limits of traditional feminine roles by publicly treating the theme of equality between sexes.
Read more about this topic: Susanna Centlivre
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)