SOURCE: Bratton, Jacky. “Reading the Intertheatrical, or, the Mysterious Disappearance of Susanna Centlivre.” In Women, Theatre, and Performance: New Histories, New Historiographies, edited by Maggie B. Gale and Viv Gardner, pp. 7-24. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In the following essay, Bratton contends that Centlivre's diminished importance in the canon of eighteenth-century theater results from a ideological bias toward texts that correspond with traditional Western literary values, including the autonomy of the artist, the primacy of the text over the collaborative performance experience, and the distinction between the commercial and the artistic.

The Disappearance

Susanna Centlivre (1667-1723) published twenty plays and had nineteen of them staged between 1700 and 1720; adding up the number of years in which each of her plays was produced in London during the eighteenth century, Judith Phillips Stanton arrives at the remarkable figure of 289. They were published or republished 122 times.¹ The popularity of Centlivre's three most...