“What Harm Can There Be in a Little Fresh Air, Sir?”: Reintroducing Circulation to Early-Eighteenth-Century Drama

In Susanna Centlivre’s The Busybody (1709), the playwright stages two women, Miranda and Isabinda, whose theatrical practices and devices enable them to escape the control of their guardians. However, their lovers are the ones who most threaten their theatricality as they opt for older genres or try to seize theatrical props. Their attempts to limit the theatre appears to echo the recent renovations to the Drury Lane theatre. In particular, these renovations harden the boundaries between the theatre and the audience and, overall, put more emphasis on stage business, relegating and minimizing the offstage and its registers. The audience’s negotiation between onstage events and offstage registers diminishes and, therefore, as Jonathan Walker elucidates their cognitive “engagement with the drama” (9). Centlivre’s famous character Marplot whose curiosity about but inability to comprehend the “drama” onstage bespeaks this befuddlement. The women, though, seek “open air” or access to natural stimuli that seem integral to stage business and reignite exchange. The phrase “open air” not only emphasizes how the natural world inspires Miranda and Isabinda but also underscores how Centlivre enmeshes the physical world with cultural forms, such as drama. Centlivre establishes the “open air” as a vanishing medium because when a playgoing public stops conceptualizing the theatre as a venue of exchange, then its grasp of the ceaseless change of environmental systems erodes as well.