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 fundamen...
| Published in: | Eighteenth Century Fiction Vol. 27; no. 3/4; pp. 451 - 479 |
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| Format: | Article |
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University of Toronto Press
Spring/Summer2015
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| Online Access: | View this record in EBSCOhost |
| Summary: | 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. |
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