Beginning Again in Heroics: The Waste of Rhetoric in Centlivre’s The Busy Body

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that Susanna Centlivre’s The Busy Body (1709) actively concerns itself with the very distinctions between literature and theater, art and entertainment, mind and body, and the verbal and the visual that would ultimately result in Centlivre’s cultural eclipse. What became apparent to me while working on the play with a company of professional actors was not only the different registers of the comedy’s theatrical language—we might almost say its different genres—but also the manner in which the recurrent and bathetic discordances between these competing registers work to disclose their varying orientation to the body’s capacities and presence. Its comedy unfolds through the repeated ludic collision of, on the one hand, an ornate and avowedly male rhetoric that seeks chiefly to advertise its own virtuosity, and, on the other, the inventive, practical, and somatically centered mode of interacting and reacting consummately modelled by the play’s heroine. The Busy Body may not exhibit the kinds of word play so often (and problematically) regarded as the quintessence of Restoration comedy and indeed the basis of its literary value, but it does play with words and the very idea of what they do or don’t do. In short, it is a play about what we have come to call “literariness.”