Other editions of book The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret

Susanna Centlivre’s play The Wonder (1714) was one of the most popular works on the eighteenth-century English stage. Set in Lisbon, the plot interweaves two romantic intrigues around one “secret”: the heroine Violante is hiding her best friend, Isabella (who is the sister of her own lover, Don Felix) from Isabella’s father who wishes to marry her off to a rich but decrepit old merchant. Because she is sworn to secrecy, Violante cannot reveal Isabella’s whereabouts, nor can she explain to Felix why Isabella’s new lover, a dashing British soldier, happens to be about the house, prompting Felix’s intense jealousy. Centlivre’s critique on the tyrannical patriarchs in the world of the play is at the same time a veiled critique of similar conditions in Augustan-era Britain. This Broadview edition includes contemporary responses (by Richard Steele and Arthur Bedford), biographical accounts, selections of Centlivre’s poetry, and early nineteenth-century criticism (by Elizabeth Inchbald and William Hazlitt).

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

:A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.

A comedy of manners set in Lisbon, with many hallmarks of a farce: multiple characters leap out of windows, hide in closets and bedrooms, and are almost discovered; suitors wrongly suspect their lily-white lady-loves of betrayal, while the women are locked up by grasping fathers, at risk of being married off to decrepit money-bags or walled away in a nunnery. Add the usual complement of canny maids and man-servants orchestrating the intrigue and good-humoured mockery of the Portuguese, balanced by praise for the Scots and the English -- who of course represent the audience. The absurd situations repeat and escalate until the resolution brings weddings all around.