The visit to the seat of Royalty was signalised by her acting of Alexander the Great, but from the atmosphere of Kings and Queens she passed without a murmur to the humbler air of a kitchen.

In other words, she married a Mr.Centlivre, chief cook to her well-fed Majesty Queen Anne; and the mean-livered Pope would refer to her, later on, as "the cook's wife in Buckingham Court." She might, indeed, be a cook's wife, but she knew how to write with vivacity, and produced many an entertaining play.

Among them were "A Bold Stroke for a Wife" and "The Wonder," that comedy which Garrick would so relish in after years.
The nature of the aforesaid "Wonder" was explained in the satirical reflection of the secondary title, "A Woman Keeps a Secret!" And Mrs.
Centlivre had this to say in her epilogue, upon the mooted question of feminine loquacity: "Keep a secret, says a beau, And sneers at some ill-natured wit below; But faith, if we should tell but half we know, There's many a spruce young fellow in this place, Wou'd never presume to show his face; Women are not so weak, what e'er men prate; How many tip-top beaux have had the fate, T'enjoy from mama's secrets their estate! Who, if her early folly had made known, Had rid behind the coach that's now their own." Mrs.Oldfield received fresh cause for nervousness, had she been of a timid temperament, when, some years later, during the season of 1717-18, Cibber's political play of "The Non-Juror" was brought out.
The comedy was a blow aimed at the Jacobites and the Pretender, who had met with such disastrous treatment in the rebellion of 1715, and was a skilfully-wrought laudation of the Hanoverian dynasty.[A] [Footnote A: The piece was published and dedicated to George I., who acknowledged his sense of the honour by paying to Cibber the sum of two hundred guineas.

That the good old prejudice against the stage was still in full force, despite the march of liberal ideas, is clearly shown in the author's address to the King: "Your comedians, Sir, are an unhappy society, whom some severe heads think wholly useless, and others, dangerous to the young and innocent.

This comedy is, therefore, an attempt to remove that prejudice, and to show what honest and laudable uses may be made of the theatre, when its performances keep close to the true purposes of its institution." Cibber also referred to himself as "the lowest of your subjects from the theatre," and thus mirrored the servility of the golden Georgian era.] "About this time," writes Cibber, telling of the play's presentation, "Jacobitism had lately exerted itself by the most unprovoked rebellion that our histories have handed down to us since the Norman Conquest; I therefore thought that to set the authors and principles of that desperate folly in a fair light, by allowing the mistaken consciences of some their best excuse, and by making the artful Pretenders to Conscience as ridiculous as they were ungratefully wicked, was a subject fit for the honest satire of comedy, and what might, if it succeeded, do honour to the stage by showing the valuable use of it.