The Scottish Play: Nationalism, Masculinity, and the Georgian Afterlife of The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret

This essay argues that Susanna Centlivre’s play The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) uses parody to help audiences imagine British identity in broad imperial terms, beginning with the identity of George i and Prince George on the eve of the Hanoverian succession. Religious identity was fundamental to the Hanoverian settlement, which cut off the Stuart line in the name of a reliably Protestant Great Britain. Centlivre uses parody’s modernizing temporal rhetoric to mediate anxieties about Scots, Roman Catholics, and patriarchalism and to stage the cultural triumph of a modern Great Britain that coincides conceptually with Protestant values.