ABSTRACT
For playwrights of the early modern period, a remarrying widow was a subject for comedy. In one of the earliest surviving English comic plays, Ralph Roister-Doister (written in the 1550s), the widow Christian Custance was the object of Ralph's ridiculous attentions. She had many successors. In the early Stuart period she emerged as Lady Plus in The Puritaine or Lady Allworth in Philip Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and re-emerged in the many comic widows of the Restoration stage, of whom Widow Blackacre in William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer and Lady Wishfort in William Congreve's The Way of the World are only two of the best known. 1 They made the old woman who would remarry a stock character of the comedy of manners.
