SOURCE: Weber, Harold. “The Female Libertine in Southerne's Sir Anthony Love and The Wives Excuse.” Essays in Theatre 2, no. 2 (May 1984): 126-39.

In the following essay, Weber claims that Sir Anthony Love and The Wives' Excuse illustrate Southerne's fascination with and fear of female libertines.

Men have rarely accepted with equanimity women's attempts to participate in the freedoms and pleasures of the male world. The prospect of women usurping the roles of men has usually produced the most emphatic accents of male rage. Juvenal has few kind words for women at any point in his sixth satire, but some of his most severe censure falls on those women who as athletes, intellectuals, or politicians attempt to deny their sexual stereotypes and adopt masculine poses and activities. Yet men have been excited by that which ostensibly repels them: the legends of the Amazons, those female warriors who must remove one...