decided trend in England toward sentimental drama, shows Mrs. Centlivre
a strong supporter of laughing comedy. She had turned for a time to
sentimental comedy and with one of her three sentimental plays, _The
Gamester_ (1704), had achieved a great success. But her true bent seems
to have been toward realistic comedies, chiefly of intrigue: of her
nineteen plays written from 1700 to 1723, ten are realistic comedies.
Three of these proved very popular in her time and enjoyed a long stage
history: _The Busie Body_ (1709); _The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret_
(1714); and _A Bold Stroke for a Wife_ (1717). _The Busie Body_ best
illustrates Mrs. Centlivre's preference for laughing comedy with an
improved moral tone. The characters and the plot are amusing but
inoffensive, and, compared to those of Restoration drama, satisfy the
desire of the growing eighteenth-century middle-class audience for
respectability on the stage.

The theory of comedy on which _The Busie Body_ rests is a traditional
one, but Mrs. Centlivre's simple pronouncements on the virtues of
realistic over sentimental comedy are interesting because of the
controversy on this subject among critics and writers at this time. In
the preface to her first play, _The Perjur'd Husband_ (1700), she takes
issue with Jeremy Collier on the charge of immorality in realistic
plays. The stage, she believes, should present characters as they are;
it is unreasonable to expect a "Person, whose inclinations are always
forming Projects to the Dishonor of her Husband, should deliver her
Commands to her Confident in the Words of a Psalm." In a letter written
in 1700 she says: "I think the main design of Comedy is to make us
laugh." (Abel Boyer, _Letters of Wit, Politicks, and Morality_, London,
1701, p. 362). But, she adds, since Collier has taught religion to the
"Rhiming Trade, the Comick Muse in Tragick Posture sat" until she
discovered Farquhar, whose language is amusing but decorous and whose