SOURCE: Warren, Victoria. “Gender and Genre in Susanna Centlivre's The Gamester and The Basset Table.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 43, no. 3 (summer 2003): 605-24.

In the following essay, Warren disputes the categorization of Centlivre's comedies as “sentimental,” maintaining that in such plays as The Gamester and The Basset Table the playwright undercuts sentimental morality, and also drawing an analogy between her learned ladies and the uneasy social status of the playwright herself.

The play's the thing. 

—Shakespeare, Hamlet (II.ii.641)

Restoration theater—spanning the period from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 through the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14)—covers a diversity of dramatic styles. In addition to conventional forms of “comedy” or “tragedy,” other dramatic genres such as “heroic drama” and “tragicomedy” flourished as well. Moreover, within the category of “comedy” itself, critics—looking back in retrospect at the extant body of comic plays—have grouped the comedies...