The Perplex'd Lovers: A Queen Anne Comedy of Courtship, Mistaken Motives, Marriage, Money, and Social Intrigue

The Perplex'd Lovers is a deft comedy of courtship, mistaken motives, and social negotiation, shaped by the lively theatrical intelligence of the early eighteenth-century London stage. Centlivre works within the inheritance of Restoration comedy-its wit, reversals, and erotic bargaining-while tempering it with the more pragmatic moral atmosphere of Queen Anne's reign. The play's perplexities expose love as both feeling and strategy, especially where marriage, money, and authority intersect. Susanna Centlivre, one of the most successful women dramatists before the nineteenth century, wrote from intimate knowledge of performance, patronage, and the commercial theatre. Her uncertain early life, probable experience as an actress, Whig sympathies, and repeated attention to women's constrained choices all inform her dramatic imagination. Like her better-known comedies The Busie Body and The Wonder, this play reflects her alertness to how cleverness becomes a form of survival. Readers interested in women's writing, Restoration and Augustan drama, or the history of comic form will find The Perplex'd Lovers richly rewarding. It offers not merely theatrical amusement, but a sharp account of desire under social pressure, written by a dramatist whose wit deserves renewed scholarly attention.