SOURCE: Introduction to A Bold Stroke for a Wife, by Susanna Centlivre, edited by Thalia Stathas, University of Nebraska Press, 1968, pp. xi-xxvi.

In the essay below, Stathas gives full publication and production histories for A Bold Stroke for a Wife and discusses Centlivre's development and modification of eighteenth-century comic conventions.

First performed in February, 1718, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, “By the Author of the Busie-Body and the Gamester,” was published that year, probably in the same month, by “W. Mears, J. Browne, and F. Clay.”¹ William Mears was the principal partner in most early editions of Mrs. Centlivre's comedy. Publisher as well for Defoe, Dennis, Philips, and Theobald, he aroused Pope's wrath and appears in The Dunciad (A, III.20; B, III.28). In 1719, he assembled A Collection of Plays By Eminent Hands, including A Bold Stroke for a Wife in Volume III. Mears used pages left over from...