The Perjur'd Husband or, The Adventures of Venice. A Tragedy

Susanna CentlivreProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
86K words
Chapters
9

Tags

English Originals Dramatic Literature Adventure JourneyFate and FortuneMoral DilemmaExotic CultureFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today. The Perjur'd Husband; or, The Adventures of Venice. A Tragedy by Susanna Centlivre. Author: Centlivre, Susanna, 1667?-1723. Language: English. Class: PR: Language and Literatures: English literature. Release Date: Feb 19, 2012

Editor's review

This is a tragedy by Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667–1723), its subtitle locating the story in Venice. Centlivre is best known for her comedies on the English stage of the Restoration and the early eighteenth century; here she turns to tragedy to explore betrayal, marriage, and honour. The title's "Perjur'd Husband" points directly to a husband who breaks his oath, and the play unfolds through emotional entanglements and moral conflict, combining dramatic tension with the ideas of its age. As a public-domain text prepared by Project Gutenberg, it suits courses in English literature, research in theatre history, or thematic reading on Restoration-era women's writing. Readers may attend to the rhetoric and moral judgements in the characters' speeches, or compare the play with works by contemporaries to understand how the stage of the time represented marital ethics. The English retains period language and calls for some patience, but its length makes it suitable for reading straight through as a complete play.

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Reading tips

  1. Start with some background on Restoration theatre and ideas of marriage, then move into the play itself.
  2. Read act by act, reviewing character relationships and the development of conflict after each act.
  3. Note the moral language in key soliloquies and dialogues, reading with annotations.
  4. After finishing, compare the play with Centlivre's comedies to appreciate her shift in genre.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9

FAQ

What themes does this play mainly address? Judging from the title and genre, the play centres on a husband who breaks his oath, marital betrayal, and emotional conflict set in Venice; it is a tragedy exploring honour and moral questions, and the specific plot requires close reading of the text.
Centlivre is mainly a comedy writer—is this tragedy worth reading? Yes. It offers a chance to see how this playwright handles marriage and betrayal in tragedy, and it is valuable for understanding the full range of her work and the theatre of the period.
What background knowledge is needed to read this book? It helps to know the basic forms of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English theatre, the atmosphere of the Restoration stage, and contemporary ideas of marital ethics; this makes it easier to understand the characters' motives and the moral judgements in their speeches.

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About the author

Susanna Centlivre Author · English · 1667–1723

Susanna Centlivre (c. 1667–1723) was an English playwright and actress, and one of the most celebrated women dramatists in early eighteenth-century England. She was born in Lincolnshire (though some sources say Ireland) and in 1707 married Joseph Centlivre, cook to Queen Anne. Public records on her early life are limited, and later accounts differ considerably. She was known for witty, lively comedies: The Busy Body turns on love and scheming, with playful dialogue and a tightly knit plot, while the tragedy The Perjured Husband, or The Adventures of Venice and the comedy The Stolen Heiress, or The Salamanca Doctor Outplotted also appear in library records. Her plays held the London stage for more than a century and a half, leaving a lasting mark on the English comic tradition.