SOURCE: Kreis-Schinck, Annette. “‘What pleasant Lives Women lead in England, where Duty wears no Fetter but Inclination’: Dramatic Representations—Susanna Centlivre.” In Women, Writing, and the Theater in the Early Modern Period: The Plays of Aphra Behn and Suzanne Centlivre, pp. 71-82. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Kreis-Schinck considers the nexus of Centlivre's gender politics and her Whiggish nationalism, finding the playwright inconsistent in her treatment of women and liberty. Kreis-Schink suggests that Centlivre's popularity owed much to her dramatization of the tension between progressive politics and conservative gender roles—a tension she could uniquely experience as a female dramatist.

It would be tempting to read cultural history and its implications in gender politics as a seamless story of progress and success, one that describes a linear development from the dark ages of women's oppression to the bright present or future of...