Location: BSECS 2025, Pembroke College, Oxford

Susanna Centlivre’s The Gamester (1704-5) and The Basset Table (1705) are both adaptations of earlier, French works about gambling games. In both her plays, however, Centlivre chooses to do two things differently: she brings the gameplay onto the stage in a pair of unusually long game-within-a-play scenes; and she complicates these games by having one of their players weaponize the game to achieve an ulterior goal. Angelica disguises herself as a young man to beat Valere at hazard and cure him of his ruinous addiction to gaming; Sir James Courtly bends the rules of basset to bankrupt Lady Reveller and open her heart to Courtly’s friend, Lord Worthy.

This paper analyses the antics of Courtly and Angelica as a particular kind of staged game. If we think of any game as a kind of performance, then a game-within-a-play, like (but not identical to) a play-within-a-play, is a kind of compound performance-in-a-performance. Centlivre’s weaponized staged games, however, are, properly speaking, triple compounds of performance: Anne Bracegirdle plays Angelica, who plays a young man, who plays at hazard. This tripling effect, I argue, not only allows Centlivre’s characters to use a game against each other, but also Centlivre herself to hold up early eighteenth-century gambling culture for critique.