Dramatizing the Sexual Contract: Congreve and Centlivre

This essay interprets Susanna Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718) as an implicit critique of the sexual contract as it is dramatized in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700). Congreve’s proviso scene adopts a masculine language of law in order to exert control over a highly theatrical female subject, establishing the male suitor as the play’s moral center. Contrarily, Centlivre’s comedy eschews strict legality in favor of a metatheatrical venture by the play’s pair of lovers. A Bold Stroke for a Wife, therefore, positively revalues theatrical performance and in so doing offers a new model of egalitarian marriage.