Introduction

This book presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is concerned with the comic reform plot as a mechanism realized in onstage performance. It discusses the emergence of reform comedy within the specific conditions of performance in the playhouse. The study opens with some basic questions about staging reform in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century theatre. The book focuses on Farquahar and Centlivre's reform comedies, The Inconstant and The Gamester, contextualizes the issues of performance and spectatorship within these contemporary debates about the impact of theatre on audience's moral values. The concern with spectacle and spectatorship in early reform comedy was but an extension of the new mechanisms of the gaze emerging in urban spaces outside the playhouse. The book examines a threat to that ideal which seems to have been especially worrisome to eighteenth-century playgoers, the husband's destructive jealousy and the obsessive fear of being cuckolded.