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Content "A Generation of Vipers": The Negative Masculinities of Restoration Comedy
by
Giles Slade
A Dissertation presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
August 1994
Copyright 1994 Giles Slade
U M I Number: DP23197
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ii
Table of Contents
Chapter One:
"I Sing of Times Trans-shifting": Porno-Political Rhetoric and the Crisis in
Masculinity, 1646-16531 ........................................................................................ 1
Chapter Two:
"Tragique Follies Brought to Comedy": Gender Ideology as the Common
Focus of Early Restoration Comedy, 1661-68 .................................................. 22
Chapter Three:
"To Barbarism Turn": The New Generation of Playwrights and the Changing
Comedy, 1669-1671 .............................................................................................. 143
Chapter Four:
High Restoration Comedy, 1675-1678 .............................................................. 264
Bibliography .................................................... 322
i
1
Chapter One: "I Sing of Times Trans-shifting":
Porno-Political Rhetoric and the Crisis in Masculinity, 1646-16531
In the seventeenth century, England experienced what David Underdown
has called a "crisis of order," a shattering ideological disturbance that worked
outwards into all aspects of society from its central focus on gender issues.2
This gender crisis, itself, originated in the social upheavals of the English
Civil Wars. We are now beginning to suspect that it affected men as
profoundly as it did women.
For over seventy years, historians have agreed that the civil wars were a
remarkable watershed in the history of women’s gender ideology and social
behavior.3 Writing on this topic in 1957, Keith Thomas casually speculated
that a similarly massive transformation must have occurred at the same
moment in the structure and ideology of English families.4 Thomas’s insight
resulted in a new body of studies concerning early modern families. Even the
most recent of these books follow Lawrence Stone’s seminal investigation of
early modern family institutions from 1500 to 1800, in that they indicate that
the transformations in gender ideology during the seventeenth century were not
confined to women’s roles alone.5
Most recently, sociocultural historians examining the pornography of the
Interregnum have expressed the view that, accompanying these changes in
ideas about the family (and women), were changes in early modern
2
conceptions of the masculine. These emanated from the massive insecurities of
English men, themselves a result of continuous— and acute— challenges to
patriarchy during the 1640s and 1650s. Susan Wiseman describes a "crisis
among men in which women were also participating. "6 Thinking along similar
lines, Roger Thompson emphasizes the sociocultural significance of the
overwhelming obsession with impotence peculiar to English men of the late
seventeenth century. Impotence, he writes:
stalks the pages of Restoration erotica, leaving a debris
of unsatisfied women. Plainly many late seventeenth-
century Englishmen shared an obsessive yet
apprehensive view of sexuality . . . they seem
profoundly inhibited and uncomfortable about the
subject . . . Their reaction is disproportionate,
discordant, distorted and disassociated . . . This attitude
seems to be new to the second half of the century.7
One specific source of the masculine insecurity underlying this obsession
with impotence was the challenge contemporary social changes levelled against
the fundamental, patriarchal metaphor of social organisation. Following the
outbreak of war in 1641, the commonplace comparison between society and a
family unit structured around a kinglike father with absolute authority began to
crumble.® Increasingly, parliamentary theorists questioned the rhetoric of this
model. In 1642, Henry Parker wrote describing the flaws in the Stuart
ideological equation between, on the one hand, a king and a husband or father,
and, on the other, a dutiful subject with a wife or son:
this holds not in relation between King and Subject, for
it’s more due in policy, and more strictly to be
challenged, that the King should make happy the
People, than the People make glorious the King.9
Although Parker’s observations appear in an explicitly political treatise,
by far the most frequent attacks on the patriarchal ideology of the Loyalists
appear in the much more popular forms of short books or in the pamphlet
literature. During the seven years (1646-1653), between the end of Charles I’s
reign and the beginning of Cromwell’s Protectorate, what has been called the
’porno-political’ discourse of the Interregnum proliferated. In a large body of
republican publications, patriarchy was challenged and deconstructed. Cavalier
women, in these tracts, became ’visible elements in the operation [or
dysfunction] of patriarchy’ who
took virtue, semen, money, out of the proper routes, no
longer recombining these elements so as to fuel the
patriarchal economy of status . . . the status and
significance of women [had become] radically
unstable.1 0
A central figure in this process of destabilising patriarchal ideology was
Republican polemicist, Henry Neville, author of three sexual satires modelled
on what was, in the 1640s, a popular form originating with Aristophanes’
Ecclesiazudsai.1 1 Neville’s ’Parliament of Ladies’ pamphlets depict women
who "have benefitted from social disruption and have gained socio-sexual
power."1 2 Following Charles I’s surrender, Cavalier wives and daughters are
described as revelling in the new freedoms and participating in "the breakdown
of agreement in the masculinist ordering of society."1 3 Neville continued
these attacks for three years. The following passage explicitly links these
sexual satires with the decline of patriarchy:
There was a time in England when men wore the
breeches, and debar’d women of their Liberty: which
brought many greivances and oppressions among the
weaker vessels: for they were constrained to converse
only with their homes and closets, and now and then
with the Gentleman-usher, or the Footman (when they
could catch him) for variety . . . In consideration
whereof, and divers other inconveniences, by the
tyrrany of men, the Ladies Rampant of the times, in
their last Parliament, knowing themselves to be a part
of the free people of this Nation, unanimously resolved
to assert their own Freedoms; and casting off the
intolerable yoke of their Lords and Husbands, have
voted themselves the Supreme Authority both at home
and Abroad.1 4
One source of the Cavaliers’ insecurity about their masculinity,
therefore, might easily derive from the well-known body of Republican satires
which deliberately focus on the scandalous behavior of Loyalist women in
order to ridicule their husbands. Furthermore, the cumulative effect of this
ridicule constitutes a challenge to the monarchical and patriarchal ideology of
Cavalier Loyalists, the political opponents of the Puritan or Republican
satirists. Before turning to another, less familiar, source for the Cavalier’s
enduring insecurity about their masculinity,— that of Republican anti-patriarchal
propaganda directed against contemporary male fashions in dress and manners-
-it is worth focusing more closely on Neville’s ’Parliaments of Ladies’ because
these tracts provide a useful index to an intensification in the prevailing
conflict in gender ideology after 1646.
In addition to the distinctive, anti-patriarchal rhetoric of these tracts,
their vicious misogyny reflects a culture wide intensification of men’s anxieties
about their own masculinity. The virulent misogyny of Neville’s infamous
tracts is not characteristic of comparably pornographic, though slightly earlier,
Loyalist propaganda. Misogyny is, of course, a common theme in much early
seventeenth century discourse, including the early pamphlet literature of the
1640s.1 5 But, as Mary Beth Rose indicates,the Puritan’s ambivalence towards
women in the early decades of the century marked a departure from— and an
improvement over— the overt, neoplatonic misogyny of the Renaissance.1 6 The
year before the king’s surrender to the Scottish Covenanter’s at Naseby, for
example, had seen the publication of Samuel Toreshell’s The Womans Glorie:
a Treatise First Asserting the Due Honour of that Sex . . . Secondly. Directing
Wherein that Honour Chiefly Lies . . . (1645). The year after 1646, on the
other hand, saw first publication of two of Neville’s most notorious tracts. In
the popular literature, the current of misogyny had suddenly intensified, and
this intensification derives from the extreme pressure exerted on men
throughout early modern England.
Cavalier polemicists probably originated the porno-political rhetoric of
these pamphlet wars with such anti-Roundhead tracts as The Parliament of
6
Women (1640), The Midwives Just Petition . . . (1642), The Virgins
Complaint for the Loss of The Sweet Hearts bv These Wars and their own
Long Solitude and Keeping Their Virginities against their Wills (1642), and
The Citv Dames Petition in Behalf of the Long Afflicted but Well Affected
Cavaliers (1647). But the earlier tracts use women only to target Roundhead
husbands who are so preoccupied by business or war that they cannot satisfy
their lusty, genuinely deserving, and genuinely attractive women. These
frustrated women, therefore, long for the return of manly Cavaliers who
"alwaies stood stiff to the city."1 7
After 1647, however, Henry Neville’s tracts become progressively more
hateful in their treatment of women, as do other cultural productions from this
same narrow period. In a new political environment where England’s father-
king— the traditional image of social stability— had suddenly been removed
following Charles I’s surrender to the Covenanters in 1646, women, who were
the seventeenth century’s favorite rhetorical image of social chaos, appear to
have become scapegoats. Early modern England’s constant undercurrent of
misogyny continued to intensify as male insecurities grew. Neville’s three
depictions of Cavalier women are an index to the progressive intensification of
misogyny. For feminist historians like Natalie Zemon Davis, who has
documented the ’woman on top’ theme in the cultural production of early
modern France, these anxieties are pointedly and specifically about obstacles to
7
women’s empowerment1 8 . They are equally, however, about the anxieties
attending men’s political, and social disenfranchisement.
The extent of male anxieties underlying this misogyny is suggested by
Moses a Vauts’ The Husband’s Authority Unvail’d which appeared in the same
year as the last, and most vicious, of Neville’s sexual satires. This
pseudonymous short book responds to the threat which the new female
freedoms posed to patriarchy using the precedent of scripture to justify the
domestic practice of wife beating. Women, it argues,
if they scorn or scant their Husband of that
Authority . . . which God gave and themselves grant
him . . . must not disdain a little scratch on their Body,
or to be deplum’d of a little Pride by their discreet and
conscientious Husband for their good.1 9
In this same year, Neville achieved a new depth in scurrility by publishing a
catalogue of the following misogynist sexual gossip:
so enter two more of our Worthies at once, Aunt and
Niece, my Presbyterian Lady Stapleton and my Lady
Campion the Cavalier, the one being drunk at the receit
of the newes of her husband’s death out of France; the
other very jolly, with Master Howard of Barkshire in
her arms, at the newes of her husbands death at
Colchester; and since that, she hath a Rubbers every
week with no less then five, for variety.2 0
— As society broke apart around them, therefore, the women of civil war
England had been driven to assume new roles and new responsibilities. At this
time, without men to rely on, empowerment became a necessity for many
English women. Judging from the popular literature, contemporary men felt
8
threatened by women’s increasing independence. Traditionally, such feminine
self-determination had been confused with dominance, and understood as the
precursor of a catastrophic social chaos which was bound to result when
patriarchal order was forced to relax its tenure. After 1646 these anti-feminine
feelings became so intense that the propagandists’ most vicious attacks now
concentrated on the wives and daughters of the defeated Cavaliers. No
contemporary strain of explicitly anti-masculine propaganda achieves the
polemical impact of Neville, a Vauts, and their cronies until 1650.
Shortly before the new decade, Republican polemicists began to pursue
other means of undermining the faltering authority of the Cavaliers. Although
this kind of discourse occasionally attacks Cavalier women— as is the case in
Thomas Hall’s Diverse Reasons and Arguments Against Painting Spots. Naked
Backs. Breasts. Arms. &c (1654)— these tracts overwhelmingly focus directly
on the social behavior— and self-presentation— of the disenfranchised Cavalier
gallants.
In the late 1640s, and early 1650s, a body of works criticizing Cavalier
fashion came into being. Although they enacted no sumptuary laws, the
Puritans resented the younger Cavaliers’ defiance and self-identification
through the wild trend of contemporary fashions. Puritan sensibilities were
offended because these fashions mocked Puritan esthetics which eschewed
vanity in all aspects of personal adornment.2 1 Not surprisingly, the discourse
9
against such fashions adapted the same sexual rhetoric as the proto-
pornographic political tracts to which they were kin. Works like William
Prynne’s A Gagge for Long-Hair’d Rattle-Heads who Revile all Civill Round-
Heads (1646), the anonymous Habit of an English Gentleman (1646), and
Thomas Hall’s Comarum Aksomia:The Loathesomeness of Long Haire (1654)
attacked young and fashionable Cavaliers for inadequacy and effeminacy of
which their long hair, their dress, and their affected manners were given as an
outward sign. Long hair, Thomas Hall wrote "notes effeminacy and
wantonesse . . . lascivious locusts are said to have hair like women. ”2 2
By far the most interesting of the books attacking the Cavaliers with
accusations of effeminacy is John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis: Man
Transform’d: or. The Artificial! Changling (1650). Bulwer’s express purpose
in this encyclopedic, illustrated, and extremely popular study of personal
adornment is to show
how sicke men (generally) are of the Fashions,
convincing the world of this Truth . . . And [it] may
serve as a Glasse for the pernitiously-affected Gallants
of our time to looke in, and see the deformity of their
Minds . . . who practise such phantasticall Emendations
of Nature, as dishonour her.2 3
In particular "An Appendix, exhibiting the pedigree of the English Gallant" is
careful to turn Bulwer’s compendious volume against the Cavalier gallants of
his day charging them with an effeminate preoccupation with the "vanity of
apparel."2 4 Like Adam’s original guilt, theirs had, according to this book,
10
"stained the face of nature and demasculated the seminal vertue of the
creation. "2 5 At the same moment, therefore, that contemporary women were
being blamed for breaking free from traditionally subservient roles, the
effeminate sons of Cavaliers and Loyalists were ironically blamed for the
destruction (or ’demasculation’) of the natural, patriarchal order by polemicists
of the same party who had defeated and disenfranchised their fathers.
Although specific discussion of the young generation of Cavaliers is
reserved for the final section of Bulwer’s book, their political existence is its
most constant motif. This is especially clear in two chapters devoted
respectively to "Strange inventive contradictions against Nature maintained by
divers Nations in the ordering of their Privy-parts," and to "Tailed Nations,
Breech Gallantry, and Abusers of that part. * ' 2 b Both chapters verge on
pornography, and are far removed from the book’s ostensible emphasis on
personal adornment. ’Breech Gallantry,’ in Bulwer’s exposition, frequently
appears to have more to do with homosexual sodomy than with the wearing of
pantaloons, and Bulwer extensively associates this practice with the monarchy
and the upper classes:
Vaschus found the King of Quaraquas house infected
with most abominable Leachery; for he found the Kings
Brother, and many other young men in womens
apparrell, smooth and effeminately decked . . . The
stinking abomination had not yet entered among the
people which was exercised only by the Noblemen and
Gentlemen.2 7
11
The political implications of this anecdote are especially useful in tracing
the rhetorical and political dimension of Interregnum proto-pornography.
Writing in 1650, Bulwer claims the common people of Caracus had long been
offended by the "unnaturall sin" of the courtiers, and as a result they
(lifting up their hands and eyes towards heaven) gave
tokens that God was grievously offended with such ugly
deeds, affirming this to be the cause of their so many
thunders, lightnings, and tempests, and diseases.2 8
Ultimately, Bulwer relates, the natives are overcome with disgust at the
aristocracy’s "most abominable Leachery." Accordingly, they rededicate their
political loyalty to Vaschus, the usurper who conquers the debauched regime,
and feeds its debauched courtiers to his dogs.2 9
The parallels between Bulwer’s historical account, and the trademark
corruption of the Stuart courts are transparent enough to convey an appropriate
political moral for the 1650s: that the English people were justified in
throwing off a morally corrupt, and weakened regime during the recent civil
wars. Simultaneously, however, this episode mirrors the destruction of
patriarchy, turning the blame this time, not onto the unfeminine (and therefore
masculine) women of the Neville tracts but onto "smooth and effeminately
decked" male courtiers one year after Charles I’s execution.
Interestingly, this particular passage can also be read as an ideological
preparation for the restoration of some form of patriarchy in the person of
Vaschus to whom "the people resorted . . . as it had been to Hercules. "3 0
12
Bulwer’s book was reissued in 1653, the year Oliver Cromwell dismissed the
Rump at gunpoint and reinstituted a centralized government on the model of
the monarchy through the office of the Lord Protector. Long before the
Restoration, therefore, patriarchy was rescued by the leading General of the
alliance that had brought about its destruction. Tellingly, for the next five
years, Cromwell was addressed as ’your Highness," and was in fact
indistinguishable in terms of power or dynastic ambitions from previous father-
kings.3 1
A knowledge of the basic kinds of Interregnum porno-political discourse
represented in these works by Henry Neville, and John Bulwer is very useful
to students of Restoration comedy for the following reasons. First, most
Interregnum porno-political discourse thematizes patriarchy by following either
Neville’s or Bulwer’s ideological pattern. Moreover, such discourse includes
the two most notable dramatic comedies to survive from the Interregnum
period. Each of these plays are a significant ideological proto-form of stage
comedy from the Restoration till the Popish Plot.
William Bentley’s The Ghost: or. The Woman Wears The Breeches
(1653), for example, follows the pattern of Neville’s ’Parliament of Ladies’
tracts. An aged, and inadequate patriarch is frightened off by his witty, young
wife who literally ’steals his breeches’, and seizes her own sexual freedom "to
get . . . lusty boys" (29) with the man’s younger, more virile, and more
13
obedient servant. Florimell and various other ’wild girls’ of Restoration
comedy, therefore, first appear during the Interregnum as a thematization of
what is perceived and figured as the contemporary attack on patriarchy by
women.
Like Anthropometamorphosis. the second ideological pattern of
Restoration comedy, seeks to restore patriarchal order by focusing on the
unworthiness of the men who brought about its downfall, and replacing this
with a more masculine— and therefore more worthy— alternative. As Susan
Staves has observed, Ladv Alimony (1659) is an unjustly neglected play with
important implications for Restoration comedy.3 2 In it three Knights are
divorced by their wives and sued for alimony on the grounds of such unmanly
deficiencies as sexual inability born of extreme youth, foolishness, or age.
Two other Knights are divorced for becoming unattractive to women as a
result of cowardice or obesity. A sixth Knight, Sir Reuben Scattergood, shares
none of these faults. Instead, his wife divorces him for ignoring her needs, and
for habitually pursuing casual liaisons with prostitutes.
The more worthy alternative, in this case, is not a usurper, as Vaschus
was. Duke Eugenio is instead the rightful ruler who has returned to restore
political and domestic order to his lawless state. The brand of comedy that
follows this ideological pattern into the Restoration seeks, as Robert Markely
14
has pointed out, to restore patriarchal order.3 3 It fulfills this program
whenever its heroes wrest domestic control from unruly women.
The second way in which Interregnum ’porno-politicaF discourse bears
Restoration comedy also moves us closer towards an explanation of how
Interregnum ideological structures persisted into the cultural productions of the
Restoration. It concerns the continuing effect that an abusive and
condemnatory porno-political discourse had on the masculine self-image of an
entire generation of Cavaliers.
If we follow the age parameters offered by contemporary medical
accounts, during the years, 1646-1653— the heyday of these sexually oriented
Republican attacks— most of the comic playwrights of the Restoration matured
sexually. Generally, as Sir Thomas Browne has it, the onset of puberty is
reckoned at 14 years.3 4 A French textbook of the period cautions us,
however, that some boys are late developers with
slow lagging Natures: but even their Tardiness extends
not beyond fifteen, sixteen, or at most seventeen. And
therefore the Civil Law has fix’d compleat Puberty at
eighteen.3 5
The flexibility of these dates is important to my discussion because of
developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson’s innovative description of how
the period of development attending puberty is crucial to the successful
formation of individual identity. At roughly the time of puberty, Erikson
claims, adolescents are face with the complex ’psychosocial dilemma’ of
15
integrating a number of conflicting self-perceptions and social roles into a
coherent pattern that provides a sense of inner continuity or identity. In an
environment where mixed, unclear or conflicting models vie for prominence,
the emerging adult will experience difficulty establishing a consistent, adult
identity. This may result, Erikson writes, in irresolvable and protracted "role
confusion."3 6 Researchers investigating Erikson’s model have found that such
developmental failure affects men’s ability to achieve intimacy.3 7 Such men’s
relationships resemble the ’priapic quests’ of Restoration rakes in which
partners are primarily objects to be consumed.3 8
The years of these intense polemical attacks, therefore, may have
constituted a critical moment in the formation of the masculine self-images of a
younger generation of Cavaliers which included such dramatic poets as:
Thomas Betterton, Thomas D ’Urfey, Sir George Etherege, Nathaniel Lee,
Thomas Otway, Edward Ravenscroft, Sir Charles Sedley, Elkanah Settle,
Thomas Shadwell, and William Wycherley. Republican accusations of
effeminacy levelled against this new generation were moralistic and abusive.
And, as a result, critical images of Restoration men proliferate in Restoration
comedy. In addition to the hypersexual or priapic rake, the figure of the fop is
an obvious expression of a joint, contemporary distaste for the masculine and a
pervasive insecurity about contemporary male roles. Whatever his peculiar
affectation or ’foppery’ might be in any given comedy, he is not necessarily,
16
as Robert Heilman and Susan Staves point out, a homosexual.3 9 (Perhaps
even, as some cultural historians claim, homosexuality itself was not as clearly
defined or as stigmatized at this time as it is in our own era.)4 0 Instead, the
fop is an exaggerated manifestation of any one of a wide variety of what, to
Restoration culture, were socially unviable masculine behaviors. The mere fact
of the fop’s ubiquity in Restoration comedy, then, is an important indication of
the significance that masculine ideology had during the Restoration.
Elsewhere I have demonstrated how the effects of this insecurity surface
in the most salient figure in Restoration comedy, that of the rake whose
misogyny, and hypersexuality can be understood as a reaction formation— an
overcompensation— to the male feelings of sexual inadequacy that pervade
Cavalier culture.4 1
I would like to end by discouraging the point of view that Interregnum
and Restoration societies, are cultural periods rendered forever separate and
distinct by the major political event of 1660. There is a demonstrable
continuum both in the ideological concerns, and in the literatures of both eras
as any detailed, historical study will show. Moreover, it has been my main
concern to show that the preoccupation of Restoration comedy with distasteful
images of masculinity is historically embedded and intelligible in context of the
sociocultural, and political events of the mid century. The comedy in which
contemporary men express their gender anxiety, therefore, should no longer be
17
seen as a marginal drama, of interest only as morally grotesque exotica. As a
genre, Restoration comedy is a cultural nexus, whose production was
overdetermined by the dynamic complexities of a society undergoing massive
ideological, political, sociological, and economic change. To read in this
pivotal genre is to enter the swirling waters of a period of Stuart Monarchy,
Civil War, and Protectorate; to read well then, is to plumb the depths of
England’s most troubled century.
18
Notes
1 Robert Herrick, Hesperides (London, 1648) 1.
2 David Underdown, Revel. Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and
Culture in England. 1603-1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)
37-40.
3 Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century
(London, 1919).
4 Keith Thomas, "Women and the Civil War Sects," Past and Present 13
(1958): 57.
5 Lawrence Stone, The Family. Sex, and Marriage In England. 1500-1800
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). Other, more recent books which
focus exclusively on the family in the seventeenth century include: Susan
Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Christopher Durston, The Family in
The English Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); G. R. Quaife,
Wanton Wenches and Wayward Wives: Peasants and Illicit Sex in Early
Seventeenth Century England (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press,
1979); Miriam Slater, Family Life in the Seventeenth Century: The Vernevs of
Clavdon House (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Susan Staves,
Plavers’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln NB:
University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
6 Susan Wiseman, "’Adam, the Father of all Flesh,’ Porno-Political
Rhetoric and Political Theory In and After the English Civil W ar," Prose
Studies: History. Theory. Criticism 14.3 (1991): 134-157.
7 Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic.
Obscene and Bawdv Works Written or Published in England in The Second
Half of the Seventeenth Century (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979) 212.
8 G. J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian
Family and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth
Century England (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971).
9 Henry Parker, Observations on Some of His Majesty’s Late Answers and
Expresses (London, 1642); cited in Wiseman, 142.
1 0 Wiseman 146.
19
1 1 Henry Neville, The Parliament of Ladies (London, 1647); The Ladies, a
Second Time Assembled in Parliament (London, 1647); Newes From the New
Exchange, or the Commonwealth of Ladies Drawn to the Life in their Severall
Characters and Concernments (London, 1650).
1 2 Wiseman 147.
1 3 Wiseman 148.
1 4 Henry Neville, Newes from the New Exchange, or the Commonwealth
of Ladies Drawn to the Life in their Severall Characters and Concernments
(London, 1650) 1-2.
1 5 Sharon Achinstein, "The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution,"
Prose Studies 14.3 (1991): 14-43.
1 6 Mary Beth Rose, The Expense of Spirit: Love and Sexuality in English
Renaissance Drama (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 35.
1 7 The City Dames Petition in Behalf of the Long Afflicted but Well
Affected Cavaliers (London, 1647); cited in Thompson, 103.
1 8 Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," Society and Culture in Early
Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985) 124-51.
1 9 Moses a Vauts, "The Husband’s Authority Unvaird" Wherein It is
Moderately Discussed Whether It be Fit or Lawfull for a Good Man to Beat
His Bad Wife (London, 1650) 95.
2 0 Newes from The New Exchange 19.
2 1 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (New York: Holmes and Meiier,
1986) 82-89.
2 2 Thomas Hall, Comarum Aksomia: The Loathesomeness of Long Haire
(London, 1654) 46.
20
2 3 John Bulwer, "A Hint on the Use of This Treatise,"
Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or. The Artificial! Changling.
Historically Presented, in the and Cruell Gallantry. Foolish Bravery.
Ridiculous Beauty. Filthy Finesse, and Loathsome Loveliness of Most Nations.
Fashioning and Altering their Bodies from the Mould Intended bv Nature: with
Figures of those Transfigurations. To which Artificial! and Affected
Deformations are Added. All the Native and Nationall Monstrosities that Have
Appeared to Disfigure the Humane Fabrick. With a Vindication of the Regular
Beauty and Honesty of Nature. And an Appendix of the Pedigree of the
English Gallant (London, 1653) unpaginated.
2 4 Bulwer 529.
2 5 Bulwer, unpaginated introduction.
2 6 Bulwer 345, 409.
2 7 Bulwer 413.
2 8 Bulwer 414.
2 9 Bulwer 413.
3 0 Bulwer 413.
3 1 Durston 5.
3 2 Staves 118.
3 3 Robert Moss Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the
Comedies of Etherege. Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1990) 149.
3 4 Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica. ed. Robin Robbins, Vol I
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) 500: "in the fourteenth year males are
seminificall and pubescent."
3 5 The Case of Impotencv Debated, in the Late Famous Triall at Paris I,
trans. John Ozell (London, 1714) 426.
3 6 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1968)
261-262.
21
3 7 J.E. Marcia, "Identity Six Years After: A Follow-Up Study," Journal of
Youth and Adolescence 5: 145-160; J. L. Orlofsky, J.E. Marcia & I. M.
Lesser, "Ego Identity Status and Intimacy versus Isolation Crisis of Young
Adulthood," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 27: 211-219.
3 8 James Wyly, The Phallic Quest: Priapus and Masculine Inflation
(Toronto: Inner City Books, 1989).
3 9 Robert B. Heilman, "Some Fops And Some Versions of Foppery," ELH
49.2 (1982): 363-395; Susan Staves, "A Few Kind Words for the Fop," SEL
22.3 (1982): 413-428.
4 0 Susan C. Shapiro, "’Yon Plumed Dandebrat’: Male ’Effeminacy’ in
English Satire and Criticism," RES ns 39 (1988): 400-412; Randolph
Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender
Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750," Hidden from History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Mark B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus & George
Chauncey (New York: NAL, 1989) 129-140.
4 1 Giles Slade, "The Two Backed Beast: Eunuchus and Priapus in The
Country W ife. " Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theater Research 2nd ser.
7.1 (1992): 23-35.
22
Chapter Two: "Tragique Follies Brought to Comedy"1 : Gender Ideology
as the Common Focus of Early Restoration Comedy, 1661-68
The aspiring young dramatist [of the 1660s] could be
pardoned some puzzlement about what sort of play to
try his hand at. No clear trend had emerged from the
multitude of new works.2
From the perspective of cultural poetics, it is clear that all Restoration
comedies thematize the same changes in gender ideology outlined in Chapter
One. Moreover, the earliest examples of the emerging genre do so
systematically, in ways calculated to reduce or dismiss the threat of
humiliation which such challenges to gender tradition represented for the
Cavaliers. Although in this first decade women became a formidable presence
on the stage as well as in theater management, the voices of female play
wrights had not yet emerged to counter or modify the predominant ideology
presented, created and reinforced by the early Restoration stage. The present
chapter will examine the manifestations of Cavalier ideas of masculinity and
femininity in fifteen successive works spanning the period 1661 to 1668 in
order to support the claim that a common impulse fuelled the apparent chaos
of early Restoration comedy.3 This chaos, in other words, is an eloquent
testimony to the Restoration cultural fact that the ’problems’ in gender
ideology which had arisen during the Interregnum pressed so heavily on
Cavalier men that they found their way into every comedy. It is possible to see
generic confusion of the period as evidence of a widespread experiment in
23
answering the cultural problematic posed by contemporary changes in ideas of
masculinity and femininity. Cavalier playwrights eagerly ransacked the Spanish
and French sources to create hybrid dramatic forms capable of coping with a
cultural threat identical to that which confronted Samuel Toreshell, Moses a
Vauts, John Bulwer and Henry Neville.
1661: The Cutter of Coleman Street.
Abraham Cowley’s The Cutter of Coleman Street (1661) was first
recognized as a transitional comedy by Charles Lamb who described the play
as "the link between the Comedy of Fletcher and Congreve. "4 In particular,
Lamb claims Cowley’s marriage negotiation or ’proviso’ scene (IV.viii) is a
generic innovation that looks forward to such characteristic Restoration
comedies as Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode (1672), and Congreve’s Wav of the
World (1700). Aside from the fact that playwrights recognized such marriage
negotiations as a generic staple at least as early as 1665 with the anti-proviso
scene between Philidor and Mirada in James Howard’s All Mistaken, or The
Mad Couple, the scene in Cowley’s play is also interesting for the
personalities of its participants. Prominent among these are Aurelia, the quick
witted, warm-natured intriguer, and Truman Junior, the idealistic young man
whose chastity could be played in a wistfully anachronistic manner.
24
Truman Junior’s apparent distaste for sex is ostensibly the logical
outcome of his disillusionment by Lucia, whom he believes has married
another man (Puny) in an uncharacteristic fit of "that Serpent, Lust"
(III. iii.30). Truman explains what their impending marriage will be like to
Aurelia, the woman his father is forcing him to marry to mend the family
fortunes. He vows that lust "will not insinuate itself/Into [our] marriage bed"
(66-7) and explains his emotional wound to her in terms of sympathy for other
men who might be wounded in love if he and Aurelia were to have children:
Besides too, if our Issue should be Female,
They would all learn to flatter and dissemble,
They would deceive with Promises and Vows
Some simple men, and then prove False and Kill ’em.
(69-72)
Throughout the play Aurelia has been extracting a painful revenge from Lucy
and Truman for being, as she puts it, "such a foolish Girl three years ago as to
be iii Love with him (IV.vii.2-5). In the proviso scene, however, she relents
following Truman’s unattractive vow to marry her,
And live with her according to the forms,
But . . . never touch her as a woman. (IV. iii. 1-3)
The audience’s relief at this final unblocking of the play’s main romantic
involvement is modified by its knowledge of Truman’s distaste for sex and
lack of compassion and faith. He was too readily gulled by a letter allegedly
from Lucy (but actually forged by Aurelia), requesting an assignation before
their marriage. Moreover, his reluctance to sleep with her hearkens back to the
25
neoplatonic drama of Henrietta Maria’s court. It is certainly unintelligible
behaviour for an early modern young lover. In the following lament over
Lucia’s fallen nature he describes himself as a "chast man" (III.iii.23) and
moans out loud that Lucy
Would . . . have had me be mine own Adulterer
Before my Marriage . . .
-O h Lust-O h Frailty. (37-8)
If we look back from the perspective of the sex comedy of the 1670s,
Truman’s sexual attitudes are certainly anachronistic. His earlier lines,
What shall I think hence-forth of Woman-kind?
When I know Lucia was the best of it,
And see what she is? (IV.i.1-3)
indicate an idealization of women more characteristic of Sidney’s time than of
Etherege’s. Even as early as 1661, Cowley was parodying an archaic male
image of women, the viability of which had been destroyed in the upheavals of
civil wars. This much is clear from the play’s structure. One of Cowley’s
great comic strengths in The Cutter of Coleman Street lies in the juxtaposition
of its scenes. The proviso scene is followed immediately by one in which
Cutter, the dissembling Cavalier of the play’s title, cozens, marries and
corrupts Tabitha, the strait-laced daughter of a rich and detestable Puritan
Widow.
26
Cutter’s sexuality is open, immediate and funny, and after Truman’s
sexual aloofness. It is also a genuine relief. As a character, Cutter has been
identified as new and distinctly Restoration dramatic type, that of
the disreputable adventurer who hung about London,
under the Commonwealth, preying on the charity of the
King’s friends: a variety of the miles gloriosus quite
distinct from Bobadil or Parolles . . . 5
Cutter’s courage and manliness (or the lack of them) are signalled as important
items to watch early in the play, when they are all called into question by his
rival Worm,
Worm: Thou a soldier? Did I not see thee once in a
Quarrel at Nine-pins behind Sodom-Lane disarm’d with
one of the Pins? (I.v. 125-7)
In the later scene with Tabitha, the Interregnum theme of equating a political
victory with a sexual one surfaces as clearly as it had in Henry Neville’s
Parliament of Women tracts. Cutter follows Colonel Jolly’s lead when Jolly
decides to trick the Widow into a marriage by feigning conversion after a
nearly fatal illness. Cutter, frustrated in his attempt to woo Lucy, fixes his
attentions on Tabitha and quickly convinces both her and her mother of the
sincerity of his profession and of the genuineness of his divinely inspired
visions,
Widow: . . . my brother Cutter here is grown the
Heavenliest man o’ the sudden . . . (III.xii.23-4)
Tabitha: The wonderful vocation of some vessels! (29)
27
In the scene that follows Truman’s marriage negotiations with Aurelia,
Cutter easily convinces Tabitha to marry him by telling her he has seen that
she will in one of his visions. After the marriage he uses the same ruse to
change her into a form more suited to the bedmate of a Cavalier,
thou shalt Dance, and Sing and Drink, and be Merry;
thou shalt go with thy hair curl’d, and thy breast open;
thou shalt wear fine black stars on thy face, and bobs in
thy ears bigger than bouncing pears; Nay, if though
do’st begin to look rustily— I’le ha’ thee paint thy self,
like the Whore of Babylon. (V.vi.32-7)
At first, Tabitha balks prudishly, saying, "Oh! that ever I was born to see this
day (V.vi.38). But after a few drinks she kicks off the shackles of her Puritan
upbringing and responds to Cutter in a more demonstrative and sexual way,
A fig for my Mother! I’l be a Mother myself shortly;
come Duckling, shall we go Home? (V.vi.84-5)
These different attitudes towards women, Truman’s and Cutter’s, are
clearly meant to be seen in opposition to one another. Truman’s is humorous
because it was recognizable as an anachronism in 1661. Cutter’s, on the other
hand, is humorous because it is current and because it effects a comic levelling
in which the humiliating losses of the Interregnum are emblematized and
overcome in his determined domination of Tabitha. He is a coward, a liar, a
cheat and a beggar, and it is also likely that he never was a soldier. Despite
these defects, however, he is a cunning and sexually effective Cavalier, and
28
ultimately, these qualities are enough to save him and to win him a final
victory over Puritan hegemony represented by Tabitha’s mother.
Cowley’s comic achievement here is to effect a reduction through
comedy of the painful social events preceding Charles II’s Restoration. This
reduction, one of the most characteristic tropes of the ’laughing comedies’ of
this early period, was explicitly emphasized when the play was performed at
Court,
The Madness of your People, and the Rage,
You’ve seen to long upon the Publique Stage,
’Tis time at last (great Sir) ’tis time to see,
Their Tragique Follies brought to Comedy. (1-4)
These lines appear after the play ends. During the drama, as we’ve seen,
Cowley focuses our attention on the follies he used the comic medium to
ridicule when he explores two opposed caricatures of contemporary male
’types.’ In addition to Truman and Cutter, Cowley also created the characters
of Worm, a completely worthless coward, and his sometime confederate,
Puny, who intrigues to win Lucia’s love and who has been identified as the
prototype of the Restoration fop.6 It is worth noting that in the fantastic
extravagance of Puny’s language lies a rich confirmation of the importance of
gender ideology to Cowley’s play. One of Puny’s characteristic linguistic
devices involves cross-gendering the person he is talking to or about. For
example, he calls Aurelia, "Heliogabalus" (III.iv.8), the name of a transvestite
Roman Emperor who declared himself a woman. Another occurrence of this
29
strange device appears earlier in the play when we first encounter Puny. Again
speaking to Aurelia he asks,
But where’s your father little Queen o ’ Diamonds? Is
he extant? I long like a Woman big with Twins to speak
with him! (II.iii. 14-5)
The effect of this device, in combination with Puny’s overall silliness, is to
emphasize his unmanliness, his unworthiness, in the play’s own terms for
dominance, power, and control. He is the comic scapegoat, on to which
Cowley projects the Cavalier fears of unmanliness, social powerlessness and
social humiliation which, as we have seen, are a legacy of sexually oriented
anti-Loyalist propaganda of the Civil War and Interregnum period. This
ridiculing of Puny, therefore, in The Cutter of Coleman Street is a reduction
through comedy of the threat posed to Cavalier males by the painful awareness
of their own recent experience of powerlessness, defeat and material loss, a
simultaneous ridiculing and purging of a single, extravagant example of
unmanliness.
Like Truman’s marriage, Puny’s appears in opposition to Cutter’s. It
occurs early in the play, but Cowley makes us wait until the ultimate scene to
reveal who it is that Puny has unwittingly wed. Unlike Cutter, he is sexually
ambiguous and has dominated neither his chosen woman nor the proceedings
of their courtship. Not surprisingly therefore, he becomes a sexual victim and
is manipulated into marriage by Aurelia, the daughter of a penniless Cavalier
30
Colonel who is interested in him for his money only. We are promised that his
married life will be fitting punishment for such an unmanly fool when Aurelia
responds to her father’s complaint that she has just married a total
incompetent,
Jolly: If we could but cure him of some sottish
affectations, but that must be thy task.
Aurelia: My life on’t, Sir. (V.viii.39-41)
Through his unmanliness Puny therefore has become a casualty of marriage
and of sex. He is now locked in a relationship with a controlling woman who
is more than an intellectual match for him. Her empowerment is accepted by
Cavalier men surrounding the new couple and this itself is emblematic of the
changes in gender ideology that derive from the exigencies of the civil wars.
Better that a Cavalier’s wife who knows what she’s doing should be in control
of things, than an ineffectual (and therefore vulnerable) Cavalier.
1662: The Committee.
The same trope of comic reduction that Cowley deploys through the
depiction of sexual relationships in The Cutter of Coleman Street is also at
work in Sir Robert Howards’ extremely popular comedy, The Committee, or
the Faithful Irishman (1662). Like the title of Cowley’s play, Howard’s sub
title emphasizes a relatively minor character who is, nonetheless, the focus of
Howard’s primary comic reduction. Howard uses Teg (or Teague) the model
31
for stereotypical Irish characters of the same name in two plays each by both
Thomas Shadwell and George Farquhar) to initiate the ridicule of two great
irritants to male Cavalier pride of this period: the taking of the covenant, and
Puritan political power (which is characteristically depicted as being in the
possession of women).7
The first of these is ridiculed through Teg’s classic comic ignorance. Not
knowing what the covenant is, he misunderstands completely when Colonel
Careless, his new master, refuses to take it, and Teg swears he will take it for
him in gratitude if that is possible:
Teague: Well, what is that covenant? By my soul, I
will take it for my new master, "if I could, that I
would."
Colonel Careless: Thank thee, Teague. (I. i.38-9)
His opportunity comes in the next act when a bookseller enters crying his
wares. Unaware that the covenant was a political tool in the form of an oath of
religious loyalty by which Puritans imposed "Fines . . . of ruinous
amounts . . . on the Royalists"8 Teg mistakes the bookseller’s "solemn league
and covenant" (II.i.41) for the one Careless is reluctant to take and, despite
the fact that he has no money, Teg boldly ’takes it’ for his master:
Teague: I ’ faith, I will take it now. (Oh that I will.
[Knocks him down] Now you’re paid, you thief of the
world. Here’s covenants enough to poison the whole
nation). (II.i. 18-20)
32
This scene prepares the ground for Colonel Careless’s own confrontation
with the obstacle of the Puritan oath. Together with his friend, the all-
important Colonel Blunt, Careless aggressively refuses to renounce his
allegiance despite the ’sequestration’ or forfeiture of his estate, which will
result:
2nd Committee-man: Well, gentleman, it remains
whether you’ll take the covenant?
(Teague: Why, he has taken it. (II.iv. 16-7)
. . . Careless: (Hold your tongue.) No, we will not
take it. Much good may it do them that have swallows
large enough; ’twill one day work in their stomachs.
(26-8)
The next object of comic reduction, Mrs. Day, the Puritan Committee
leader’s domineering wife who was once Colonel Careless’s father’s kitchen
maid is attacked in similar order, first by Teg then by his master, Colonel
Careless. Like other Puritan widows, she is unattractive across a broad
spectrum of behaviour. In the opening lines of the play we find out that she is
very tight with money:
Mrs. Day: Well, there’s something extraordinary to
make thee drink.
Coachman: [Aside] By my whip, ’tis a groat of more
than ordinary thinness.— Plague on this new gentry, how
liberal they are. (I.i.8-10)
She is also pretentious and answers Teg’s informality with a haughty phrase
unsuited to a former kitchen maid: "D’you know who you speak to, sirrah?"
(III.ii.38). (Earlier too, she forged a letter from the King to her husband in
33
order to defraud Arbella, the Cavalier orphan, of her estate, but in the letter
she could not resist flattering herself in the King’s name.) Most importantly
however she wears the breeches in her marriage to a dull-witted but influential
Puritan Committee man,
Mr. Day: . . . your counsel, good duck; you know I
depend upon that.
Mrs. Day: You may well enough; you find the sweets
on’t. And to say truth, ’tis known too well, that you
rely upon it. In truth they are ready to call me the
committee-man; they well perceive the weight that lies
upon me, husband. (I. ii. 15-19)
Mr. Day: Thou observest right, duck; thou canst see as
far into a millstone as another.
Mrs. Day: Pish! Do not interrupt me.
Mr. Day: I do not, good duck, I do not. (34-5)
It is to this woman then, that Careless sends Teg, requesting a private
audience on the strength of their old connection. Teg mocks all Puritan
authority in his insolent abuse of her. He also sets in motion a comic
complication which will force Careless to deal with Mrs. Day in the physical
manner which Moses a Vauts would claim she richly deserves.
During their meeting, whenever Teg reaches the part of his speech that
requires him to say "your ladyship," he cannot contain himself and openly
laughs in her face. Cursing, he leaves her without having delivered his
message. But, just as he did with the covenant, he has prepared the ground for
Careless now to confront Mrs. Day. Careless receives an unfriendly welcome
from the Puritan politician who herself admits "the rascal heated me"
34
(II.ii.22). Following Teague’s visit, the Colonel is chased into her house by
bailiffs and although he attempts to reassure her by calmly answering her
flurry of questions, Mrs Day is not to be placated. She raises an alarm saying
she’ll teach him "to abuse those who are in authority" (III.iv. 11) and, in
desperation, he does abuse her (in a mild way) by clapping his hand over her
mouth to her comic disbelief.
Mrs. Day’s double-comeuppance strikes at the root of male Cavalier
humiliations by condensing political and gender conflicts into a single
confrontation which a Cavalier Gentleman wins. It is not by accident, in other
words, that Careless answers M rs.Day’s demands to identify himself simply,
by saying, "I am a man ...” (III.iv.42). It is also significant that Mrs. Day’s
confrontation with Colonel Careless segues to the reintroduction of the
beautiful and wealthy Cavalier who answers this call for help, and Careless
who had already admired Ruth, the young woman, at the Puritan Committee
hearing where her friend resolutely refused to marry the Days’ unappealing
son. (At this point it is also useful to know that Mr. Day became Ruth’s
trustee when she was orphaned by her father, a rich knight, and that the Days
have designs on her family fortune and on that of Arbella, her courageous and
independent friend). From the perspective of contemporary gender ideology
however, the important points can be sketched in this way: Ruth, an emblem
of Cavalier tradition, independence, wealth, and power is unwillingly
35
controlled by an unprincipled, greedy Puritan couple and Arbella is in danger
of joining her. The Cavaliers, Careless and Blunt appear helpless, at first, to
come to the assistance of these admirable women, and in fact, it is the women
in The Committee who pursue and who rescue the men.
Arbella is principally important to The Committee in the fact that she is
in love with Colonel Blunt. Blunt is an underdeveloped "humours" character,
who is important to the discussion of gender ideology because of his
interesting fear of women.9
Blunt is a man of principle and a courageous soldier who is nonetheless
unused to and frightened of the company of women. At the Committee
meeting where he refuses to take the Parliamentary oath, he falls in love with
Arbella’s courageous defiance but he admits he does so "against my will"
(II.iv.31). No explanation is ever given of the origin of Blunt’s peculiar
humour. It does however make good comedy. In the scene in which Arbella
bails both him and Careless out of prison and in which he finally tells her he
loves her, Blunt does so with deep reluctance, certain that she will laugh at his
confession despite her promise not to. Characteristically, after he forces the
words from his lips, he runs away:
Blunt: Careless, have you done with your woman?
36
Stand thee ready, man; yet nearer the door— so. Now
my misfortune that I promised to discover, is, that I
love you above my sense or reason. So farewell, and
laugh. Come Careless.
. . . [Exeunt.] (IV.i.8, 13-15)
For our purposes, the theme of gynophobia is interesting in two ways.
Because it is always portrayed as the humour of a man who falls in love
despite it, it is a strong dramatic reflection of the same male ambivalence
towards women which resulted from the threatening increases to female
freedom during the Civil War period. In fact, in direct confirmation of this, all
of the female characters in this play are depicted as strong-willed, independent,
politically competent and an equal match for many, if not most, of the men
with whom they come into contact.
The second way in which the theme of gynopobia is of dramatic interest,
is in its connection to the theme of the female pursuit of the male (which, as
we will see elsewhere, is also connected toto the ’breeches roles’ that have
been long associated with Restoration comedy). In plays where a male
character experiences gynophobia, a strong female character is forced out of
her interest and his reluctance to reverse the pattern of courtship and pursue
her man. (This convention will raise interesting complications in the
transvestite courtship scene of John Lacy’s The Old Troop, or Monsieur
Raggou [1664]. Courtship reversal is certainly the case in Howard’s The
37
Committee. No sooner has Blunt fled from his confession of love, than Arbella
begins thinking about how to get him back,
Arbella: But d ’ye hear, Ruth, we were horribly to
blame, that we did not enquire where they lodged,
under pretence of sending to them about their own
benefits. (IV.i.27-9)
The semiotic importance of this feminine pursuit of the male is
connected to the threat of humiliation which newly empowered women
personified for vulnerable, dispossessed, disenfranchised and often exiled or
imprisoned Cavalier men at this time. As we have seen, the same forces which
robbed Royalist men of their social dominance also afforded the women of
both sides more freedom and opportunity than ever before. Not surprisingly,
for many men, resentment, suspicion and hostility accompanied these changes
and made the possibility of a romantic rejection a distinct possibility as well as
an overwhelming emotional risk. As Ruth observes in The Committee. Colonel
Blunt’s vulnerability to Arbella’s rejection is completely disproportionate:
it shows madly, I am sure: an ill-bred Fellow not
endure a woman to laugh at him. (IV.i.21-2)
His fear of women is explicable in terms of the cost which further losses
would have on his self-esteem. As he himself suggests, the deprivation and
shame of the Cavalier defeat have touched his pride; this makes it difficult for
him to deal with the new order of things:
38
Blunt: ’Tis pretty, that such as I have been, must
compound for their [the Committee members] having
been rascals. (I.i. 115-6)
Arbella must pursue him therefore to relieve him of the burden of a possible
rejection and, most importantly, to prove her personal worth, which, because
she is a woman (and therefore according to the stereotypes of the age a power-
hungry dissembler) is always suspect.
1663: Flora’s Vagaries. The English Monsieur. The Wild Gallant.
Although Blunt is interesting in that he initiates the theme of gynophobia
in Restoration comedy, he is, as indicated, a dramatically weak character from
the standpoint of motivation. No adequate explanation for his development as a
gynophobe is provided in the play. This is a dramatic flaw that will by
remedied in the character of Ludovico in Richard Rhodes’ Flora’s Vagaries of
1663,the year following the first performances of Howard’s The Committee.
Like Thomas Porter’s The Carnival (1663), Flora’s Vagaries, as Robert D.
Hume points out, is among the first comedies influenced by Sir Samuel Tuke’s
popular Spanish romance, The Adventure of The Five Hours (1663).1 0
Although it is a better ’laughing comedy’ than Tuke’s play, it does share the
Spanish setting and the central concern with personal honor.
Like Colonel Blunt, Ludovico has deeply ambivalent feelings about
women. He first wins Otrante’s affection by defending both she and Flora
39
from a violent abduction attempt by Francesco’s hostility to women is
significant in that it is countered, not by a hero with a wholly positive view of
women, but by Ludovico, who is o f two minds and who explains his rescue in
these words:
though I never was in Love, I do not like to see a
Woman abused, that does not deserve it. (11)
The terms of this explanation, of course, are ambiguous. He feels the
need to justify interfering in the beginnings of a coarse rape, and he seems to
feel implicitly that many women do indeed deserve abuse, or that, as Moses a
Vauts would have it, some abuse o f some women is not only defensible but
necessary to preserve male authority and peace of mind. Still, the main points
here are both that he has rescued two women and that immediately, he runs
away after refusing to introduce himself to the very alluring Flora, (originally
played by the very alluring Nell Gwynn):
Ludovico: Faith Madam, no Woman ever knew my
name but my Laundress, the truth is, I am unfit to be
known of Women, I care not much for any of them,
and I am sure they will not care for me (12).
Earlier in this scene, Otrante, the object of Francesco’s lust, prepares the
ground for Ludovico’s ambivalence by commenting explicitly on the double
standard by which women live, and which she perceives to be imposed by a
divine power:
O Heavens! how wretched you have made the state of
Women, you make us fair, but yet that Jewel Beauty,
40
you set so deep on foyls of misery, as if you strait were
angry at your selves, that you had moulded those your
features lovely, you make us suject to our Parents
humours, when Maids, when marryed, to our
Husband’s wills, and yet in either State such your
Decrees plant in us a will to disobey. (7)
This passage is complex because, of course, it is a male Restoration
playwright’s apology for what he perceives as women’s dual and contradictory
nature. Otrante does not deny the dichotomy of the male ideological version of
women’s natures. Instead she affirms it without bothering to unpack the power
struggle implicit in the parental-marital subordination of the feminine and the
resulting "will to disobey." Otrante excuses women’s dualistic nature as an
unintelligible paradox of divine origin which resembles (not surprisingly) felix
culpa, the Christian doctrine which explained Eve’s fall as fortunate guilt by
virtue of which mankind would be permitted to work its way back towards
God’s grace. The structure of this theological paradox concerns the connected
themes of gynophobia and female pursuit because, insofar as women are
innately as treacherous as Eve and possessed of her same "will to disobey,"
the natural and divinely bestowed patriarchal authority, they are also
proportionately frightening and dangerous to men, even to good, honorable,
courageous men like Colonel Blunt and Ludovico. As Ludovico puts it,
Women are Natures wonder, made for men,
First to be born of, then destroy’d agen. (46)
41
And in fact, Ludovico is in an admirable position to appreciate the treachery
inherent in women’s natures. When Otrante demands of his friend, Alberto,
D o’s he hate all the Sex? Was not his Mother a
woman? Has he no Sisters? (18)
Alberto’s response makes his friend’s behaviour intelligible,
[He] Never had any, and his Mother died in Childbed
of him; he hates them all perfectly. (18)
Ludovico, in other words, is emblematic of Cavalier males’ belief that
they had been deserted by their women at their most vulnerable moment.
Iconically, it might also be said that the Cavalier soldiers had been deserted by
Britannia in their defeat. Most important for this argument however, is the
idea that Ludovico and the Restoration male characters who follow him in this
dramatic tradition of gynophobia are emblems of men who refuse to adopt
Francesco’s complete and savage hostility towards women, but who also must
be coaxed back into heterosexual trust.
In order to compensate therefore, for their rebelliousness of character
and to prove themselves worthy to some man who has been frightened off by
the treachery, independence, and willfulness of the entire sex, one type of
worthy Restoration heroine pursues a man who has already proven his
masculine virtue prior to any act of courtship on his part. Colonel Blunt did
this when he stoutly refused to take the covenant. In Flora’s Vagaries.
Ludovico does the same when he ruins Francesco’s attempted abduction of
42
Otrante. A further development of this theme, the cross-gendering ’breeches
role’ came into full vogue after the all-female production of Thomas
Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding (1664). It is important to realize that by the
terms of contemporary Restoration gender ideology, such female pursuit of the
male was exactly akin to transvestism. It was definitely perceived as adopting
the ’habit’ of the opposite sex. It is no accident then, that Otrante explains her
love-suit to Ludovico in these words:
You see how I have transgrest the bonds of modesty,
and as I have chang’d Sexes, sollicited, wher I might
have expected an address. (54)
She has, in other words, proven her love and her worth by violating the
accepted codes of gender behaviour. The shy, retiring and obedient Otrante
has, with the help of Flora’s instruction, broken free of the confinement
imposed on her by received authority. Ironically, she develops and uses the
same strength which Ludovico finds so threatening, to pursue and win him.
Her expression of this is similar to the words of many male versions of early
Restoration heroines:
I was a fool, but will not be so still,
I am a Woman, and must have my will. (24)
This couplet, of course, is a dramatic thematization of the new
Restoration woman, of whom Otrante’s cousin Flora is an excellent example,
and she responds to these lines with a hearty "Well rimed Cosin." If Otrante
personifies faithfulness and integrity, Flora epitomizes feminine wit and
43
wildness at this most threatening extreme: (in one remarkable scene for
example, she sets her Uncle on fire simply in order to distract him [59]). Her
wildness, however, is also wildly attractive. Even the sullen Ludovico feels its
pull in the scene in which she blackmails her Uncle into allowing she and her
cousin to leave the house. "Rare W ench," he says, "I cou’d almost find it in
my heart to hate women no longer" (43). Here, Flora’s double-nature and
Ludovico’s ambivalent reaction, are eloquent testimony to the causal
relationship between Restoration men’s perceptions of woman and the
ambivalence they express about them in literary texts.
Although even today, Blunt and Ludovico appear as sympathetic
characters, in many cases the Restoration gynophobe is morally offensive. A
play from the summer of 1663, James Howard’s The English Monsieur,
combines the foppishness of Cowley’s Puny with the ’phobia’ of Sir Robert
Howard’s Colonel Blunt, in the strangely self-conscious character, Mr. Vain.
J. H. Smith first recognized the importance of this work for gender
ideology. The play establishes the "gay-couple pattern," which "emerge[d]
full-blown" in 1663 as one of the controlling motifs of Restoration comedy in
the characters of Wellbred and Lady Wealthy.1 1 In particular, Smith’s
examination of the play is useful for its insight into the "psychology of the
love-game players." In contrast with the "surrender of individuality"
44
characteristic of romantic plays in this period, Smith describes the dynamics of
the gay couple in this way
If impelled by an irresistible attraction, they must
engage in an action that amounts to courtship and
marriage, [and] they must . . . maintain a sense of
independence and submit on these terms or not at
all.1 2
It will be useful to compare two characters neglected by Smith’s 1954 study
for the purpose of exploring the male theme of gynophobia: Mr. Vain and a
second character, W ellbred’s friend, Mr. Comely, whose distaste for women is
comparable in its effects to the fear experienced by a genuine gynophobe. The
first scene of The English Monsieur finds Vain dispatching his boy on a false
errand to six non-existent women, in order to raise himself in the estimation of
Mr. Comely and Mr. Wellbred, who are within earshot. When they are gone,
he becomes tellingly reflective about his own humor:
Vain: Now, do I wonder at my self of all men living,
what kind of devil possesses me, to make me do these
things. I excuse my absence to six women, that know
not one . . . I told them too, I was drinking and
wenching last night . . . I can’t imagine how I first
came to be of this humour, unless ’twere hearing the
Orange Wenches talk of Ladies and their Gallants. So I
began to think I had no way of being in the fashion, but
bragging of Mistresses. (3)
As Comely has put it in the first lines of the play, Vain,
loves to be thought a debauch, in all kinds, and is none;
brags of his great acquaintance with women~and their
kindness to him, and yet he knows not one in the
Whole Town. (1)
45
In fact, Vain is such an unmanly character that he not only avoids women, but
is completely dominated by his witty young manservant, Jack, and backs off
from duelling with Frenchlove, an equally absurd and unmanly comic butt
when it seems that they have become rivals for Mrs Crafty. Like Puny, in
Cowley’s The Cutter of Coleman Street. Vain is a comic butt onto whom
contemporary male fears of unmanliness are projected in the form of a wide
variety of acts of cowardice and their complementary social humiliations.
Comely, on the other hand, is a socially presentable man, who has come
to despise not only women as he tells Lady Wealthy, but also the city where
love threatens him,
I thank fate, I ne’re had that perpetration of the heart;
yet a Disease— as malignant an’ as catching as the
Plague; and Reigns as the Plague does altogether in
London; so that for my future health, I’le retire into the
Country for Air . . . (37)
The song he composes for his intended departure from London is a perfect
expression of the characteristic ambivalence towards women in Cavalier male
gender ideology:
Ladies farewell, I must retire,
Though I your faces all admire;
And think you Heavens in your Kinds,
Some for Beauties, some for Minds:
If I stay and fall in Love
One of these Heavens, Hell will prove. (38)
An equal expression of this ambivalence occurs dramatically in Howard’s dry
mockery of Comely. Before the character can leave London, he sees and falls
46
in love with a milkmaid, Elsa Pritty. A contest of eloquence ensues between
Comely and her rustic beau, William. Elsa judges William to be the winner on
the evidence of such compliments as "I could lick thee all over as our Cow
does her Calf" (57). And Comely, who simultaneously acknowledges women’s
spiritual imperfections and physical beauty, is left confirming the audience’s
mixed opinion of women, their overpowering attraction and their inherent
fickleness.
1663 saw the first comedy by John Dryden produced on the stage. The
Wild Gallant premiered in early February and was an undisputed failure.
Dryden however, revised and revived it in 1667 and this revision that we now
know as The Wild Gallant. It is important to keep the reality that there were
two versions of the play in mind, while reading The Wild Gallant since, as
Susan Staves has noted:
some uncertainty enters into all the conclusions we
draw from the available text about the historical
significance of the play’s appearance in 1663 . . .
Many scholars have been content to assume that
any . . . changes Dryden might have made between
1663 and 1667 were minor, but we really have no
positive evidence that this is the case.1 3
Whatever the impact, however, of the possibility of extensive revision
might have on Dryden’s relative place in the genre of Restoration comedy,
certain aspects of this play do dovetail nicely with the ideological crisis in
masculinity described in the previous chapter. The witty female characters of
47
Constance and Isabelle achieve new heights of independence and strength.
There is a remarkable scene of gender confusion in which Isabelle convinces
Lord Nonsuch that he is pregnant. Finally, there is the confusion of Loveby,
the hero, who has recently been described as the outstanding weakness of the
play:
From a theatrical standpoint, Dryden’s first play suffers
because its wild gallant is not wild enough. If Mirabel
defies ’all order’, Loveby, Dryden’s hero, spends most
of his time trying to re-establish his position in
fashionable society by marrying Constance.1 4
Both Constance and Isabelle are strong female characters. Constance is a
witty variation on the theme of female pursuit. She continually tests Loveby,
the penniless gambler, by demanding jewels and monetary proof of his great
estate. At the same time however she steals from her father to support Loveby
and supplies him with the money surreptitiously without revealing that it came
from her. She is, in other words, as constant in her love for Loveby as her
name would imply. Isabelle, on the other hand, is a female wit in the mould of
Cowley’s Aurelia. Like Constance, she pursues her chosen man, but her
pursuit is a mass of trickery based not on love, but on the cool assessment that
Sir Timorous, her intended, is a rich fool whom she can marry and control.
Her pursuit of the male also proves her personal worth, but it is a personal
worth based not on the qualities expected of a caring lover as it is in
48
Constance’s case . . . Although it is possible she cares something for Sir
Timorous, she repeatedly professes other more practical motives to Constance:
the fool is a Handsome Foole, that’s somewhat; but ’tis
not that; ’tis a kind of fancy I have taken to a Glass
Coach, and six Flanders Mares; rich Liveries, and a
good Fortune. (IV.ii. 17-20)
Unlike Constance, Isabelle is worthy because, like Cowley’s Aurelia, and
Rhodes’ Flora, she is wittier and much more effective in the world than the
men who surround her. As Robert Markley observes,
for the female characters [in The Wild Gallant], wit
becomes a means to verbally maneuver in a patriarchal
society; they, rather than the hero, assume the
Fletcherian role of comically defying ’all order’.
Constance and Isabelle get the bulk of the play’s better
lines and are responsible for prolonging its farcical plot
with stratagems. Precisely because they are excluded
from patriarchal structures of power, they can challenge
more directly than the hero the ideological prerogatives
of their society.1 5
Nothing reveals this female challenge to patriarchal ideological
prerogatives more completely than Isabelle’s confident and brilliant cozening
of her uncle, Lord Nonsuch whom, she judges correctly,
has not Braines enough, if they were butter’d, to feed a
Black-bird. (IV.ii.53-4)
In order to convince him to allow Constance to marry the penniless Loveby,
Isabelle has Constance and all the serving men in the house feign pregnancy.
Because of Constance’s numerous undiscovered thefts of gold to supply
Loveby, Nonsuch has become convinced that his house is haunted. Now when
49
his daughter, his coachman, and his male chef present themselves to him as
though they were with child, Nonsuch allows Isabelle to convince him that it is
all the Devil’s work:
Nonsuch: Out impudence! a man with Childe! why ’tis
unnatural.
Isabelle: I, so is he that got it. (IV.ii. 113-4)
The best part however, is that Isabelle also convinces Nonsuch that he too is
pregnant and currently experiencing morning sickness,
Nonsuch: . . . nothing grieves me, but that in my old
age, when others are past childbearing, I should come
to be a disgrace to my family.
Constance: How do you Sir? your eyes look wondrous
dim: is not there a mist before ’um?
Isabelle: Do you not feel a kicking in your belly? . . .
Nonsuch: Uh, uh! me-thinks I am very sick o ’ th’
sudden.
Isabelle: What store of old shirts have you against the
good time? shall I give you a shift Nuncle? (IV.ii. 177-
86)
In his distracted state, Nonsuch bewails the fact that he must see
Constance’s dishonor before he undergoes "the labour and the peril of Child
bearing!" (IV.ii.201-2) and he asks Isabelle for her counsel, which is
predictably simple. "Send," she says,
for honest Jack Loveby . . . he’s a fellow without a
fortune and will be glad to leap to the occasion.
(IV .ii.203-5)
Aside from the interesting possibility of a parallel existing in this plot of
marrying Loveby to Constance and Dryden’s own penniless and quick
50
marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard, this scene is fascinating for the image of
female empowerment that it conveys. In this, Dryden is possibly relying on the
well-known story of the early Restoration hypochondriac, Dr. John Pell, who
also suffered from the delusion he was pregnant and who had an overpowering
wife.1 6 Whatever the source however, when Isabelle convinces Lord Nonsuch
he is expecting, she also deprives him of the characteristically patriarchal
power of engineering a suitable match for his daughter, Constance. In so doing
she manifests a voracious will-to-power that makes the later development of
sexually unscrupulous male heroes like Dorimant and Horner intelligible as
late reactions to the extreme image of femininity evolving, as we have seen,
through Aurelia, to Flora and now to Isabelle. Dryden’s The Wild Gallant
however, is remarkable for the completeness of its depiction of this
Restoration male image of the feminine. Isabelle overwhelms and cozens every
male in the play. In the well-developed proviso scene, she proves herself much
more than a match for Sir Timorous, who begins their exchange by asking her,
What have I to do with you, you know I care not this
for you (III.i. 175-6),
but who agrees to marry her less than 90 lines later after she has bargained
him out of his fortune, his life in the country, and his ability to control her
"companie, hours, and actions" (III.i.261-2).
Isabelle also overcomes the appropriately named Failer, who refuses to
help her in her plan to marry his friend, Sir Timorous, unless he and Burr are
51
allowed to "enjoy" (II.i.62) her first. After his crude advances are refused,
Failer swears she shall never marry Sir Timorous, to which Isabelle
confidently answers,
I’ll marry him in spight of you; and which is worse you
shall both work my ends; and I ’ll discard you for your
pains. (II.i. 120-2)
Once again, she accomplishes her ends easily, and wittily, by the end of the
scene, and has Failer beaten, cast out, and left in such a state that he observes,
I am so much amaz’d, I Vow to Gad I do not
understand my own condition. (II. i.380-1)
From the perspective of gender ideology, this is a particularly important
confession because this entire scene concerns women’s oppression (and
consequently women’s empowerment). The male character left humiliated and
confused at the scene’s ending is the same man who sneered at the idea of
women’s oppression:
Constance: Women are ty’d to hard, unequal Laws: the
passion is the same in us, and yet we are debarr’d the
freedom to express it . . .
Failer: Come, come: I Gad I know the whole Sex of
you: your Love’s at best but a kind of blind-mans-bluff,
catching at him that’s next in your way. (II.i.305-11)
The point of Isabelle’s conquest of these male characters, is also, I
believe, the point behind the weakness that was previously observed in the
play’s supposed hero, Loveby. "Dryden’s first play suffers," Markley
observes, "because its wild gallant is not wild enough."1 7 This is, of course,
52
true. But Dryden’s title does go a long way to convincing us that Loveby is
the central focus of the play which, of course, he is not. His deficient wildness
then, is somehow highlighted by Dryden’s choice of title, and because of this,
Loveby should be seen and judged in the context of the masculine failures of
all the other male characters in the play. Dryden is writing, in other words,
during a point of crisis in masculine gender ideology, when no version of a
male character is competent or powerful enough to stand against the image of
the "new" Restoration woman. Cavalier men are at a point where, like Failer,
they "do not understand [their] own condition," and whether Dryden intended
the wildness of his title ironically, we can only wish he had found some means
to cross-gender gallantry and apply it to a woman in much the same way as he
cross-gendered pregnancy in the play and applied it to three men. The Wild
Gallant is a play, in other words, about men’s contemporary inadequacies and
their envious and frightened perception of women’s empowerment. As such, it
serves as a useful backdrop against which to measure the progress of the male
type between 1663 (or possibly 1667) and 1675 when the most cynical
reactions to female empowerment began to appear on the comic stage in the
characters of Dorimant and Horner. It should also be noted explicitly at this
point that both the gynophobe and the later morally hardened rake are
reactions to the contemporary male image of the feminine.
53
1664; The Comical Revenge. The Old Troop. The Parson’s Wedding.
If 1663 saw Dryden’s first exercise in Restoration comedy, the following
year saw that of the man whom Dryden would later describe as "the best
author of [prose] our nation has produced."1 8 Sir George Etherege’s The
Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub (1664), is interesting as a skilful
ideological success in an era when weak male characters like Dryden’s
Loveby, Sir Robert Howard’s Colonel Blunt, or Cowley’s Truman Junior
dominated the stage. Sir Frederick Frollick does, as J. H. Smith has
indicated,1 9 owe something to James Howard’s character, Wellbred, in The
English Monsieur of the previous year. But where the younger Howard’s first
play is disjointed, clumsy, and top-heavy with the farce surrounding both of its
fop characters, Etherege’s play is a virtuoso combination of high, witty, and
low comedy, in which Frollick’s personal ability to move between (and often
control) actions in the multiple plots reflects Etherege’s wit in the play’s
conception and his deftness in its dialogue. Together, this clever marriage of
form and content creates a highly conscious emblem of male competence and
deft Cavalier control. We know from John Downes’ account early in the next
century, that this play was immensely popular. It got "the Company more
reputation and profit than any preceding Comedy. "2 0 It seems reasonable to
expect that what was most likely a majority male audience found in this play a
refreshing alternative to the weak fops and tame gallants of earlier Restoration
54
comedies.2 1 It is also interesting to speculate whether or not the popular
reception of Etherege’s first hero reinforced that playwright’s exploration of
the theme of male gender ideology which led, eleven years and two plays
later, to the appearance of the cynical, competent, self-aware and controlling
Dorimant in The Man of Mode (1675).
Harold Weber dismisses Sir Frederick Frollick almost out of hand,
referring to him as a
regular hooligan, roaring drunk through the streets,
breaking heads and windows and instruments.2 2
But clearly this ignores his cameo but vital appearances in the heroic plot in
which the allegiance of a young lady, Graciana, is contested by two honorable
suitors, the brave Colonel Bruce who has been imprisoned for his Royalist
allegiance, and Frollick’s cousin Beaufort who has since replaced Bruce in
Graciana’s affections. When Bruce is unexpectedly freed from prison, he
returns to Graciana and, discovering he is disappointed, angrily challenges
Beaufort to a duel which is temporarily deferred because of Graciana’s
presence:
Bruce: Beaufort, I hope y ’ave courage to appear,
Where sacred sanctuary is not near.
I’ll leave you now within that happy state
Which does provoke my fury and my hate. (III.vii.38-
41)
Frollick now enters the contest as Beaufort’s second, but his is a dormant
presence, which has the express dramatic function of preventing a tragic
55.
ending from intruding on the comedy of the other plots. In the meantime,
Bruce and his second are ambushed by a gang of Puritan villains seeking
revenge for one of Bruce’s victims at the Battle of Naseby:
First Man: He murdered my father . . . since which
I’ve watched for an opportunity, without the help of
seeming justice, for my revenge. (IV.iv.7, 14-15)
When Frollick and Beaufort enter during the ensuing attack, they come to
Bruce’s aid and chase the revengers off. Afterwards, Bruce has second
thoughts about using his weapon on his rescuer, but Beaufort insists on
continuing the duel:
Beaufort: I come to conquer bravely in the field,
Not to take poor revenge on such as yield.
Has nothing pow’r, too backward man, to move
Thy courage? Think on thy neglected love:
Think on the beauteous Graciana’s eyes;
’Tis I have robbed thee of that glorious prize.
(IV. iv.69-74)
Here, the second mention of revenge in this scene is significant. As in
all the other plots of The Comical Revenge, wild or talionic justice is a central
concern. Etherege is concerned to use the theme of revenge in a way similar to
his use of what a recent critic has described as the "language of moral
absolutism" present in Etherege’s heroic plot.2 3 For the pre-Restoration
Cavaliers, Bruce and Beaufort, revenge is clearly involved in a complex of
word-concepts which also include honor and injury. The contradictions
inherent in these verbal postures make, as Robert Markley observes, an
56
"unsuccessful strategy for coping with the demands of upper-class
existence. ”2 4 The dramatic representation of just such an unsuccessful
strategy occurs when, Bruce does the ’honorable thing’ and falls on his sword
after being disarmed and re-armed by his rescuer and rival. At this point,
Lovis, his second, also attempts to fall on a sword, but he is prevented from
this excess by Frollick who, significantly, puns on his own name while he
disarms the idealistic young man:
Sir Frederick: Forbear, sir; the frolic’s not to go round,
as I take it. (IV.iv. 108-9)
When taken in context of the lower plots, this upper heroic plot is a
sophisticated variety of what I have previously called comic reduction.
Markley has pointed out how the entire play "acknowledges implicitly that the
civil war had radically challenged the presumptions of aristocratic culture. "2 5
He also notices how the play:
foregrounds the parodic, subversive and destabilizing
tendencies of comic discourse but exploits them as
strategies to dramatize the ironies within dominant
modes of discourse.2 6
The effect of the comedy then, on the serious drama of the heroic plot is one
of destabilization and reduction. The use of the revenge theme as a
representative constituent of the kind of Cavalier honor that leads to Bruce’s
misguided attempt to take his own life is undermined by the word ’frolic’; and
the conflict between he and Beaufort seems arch, artificial and even impossible
57
in the context of Frollick’s own battle for the Widow, Cully’s nonsense, or
Dufoy’s farcical assaults on his venereal disease, the English language, his
master’s fiddlers or various comic butts. In other words, Etherege is eager to
demonstrate both the proven historical inadequacy of Cavalier moral
absolutism and the fact that a new social order was needed, one that would
have a new generic order capable of addressing its issues. Sir Frollick, who
moves easily and effectively, among all levels of society and among all of the
play’s generic sub-types, is an emblem of both kinds of new order. Similarly,
the various ’revenges’ which are reduced here through comedy are emblems of
the old ideological order which must be and is being replaced. In The Comical
Revenge, one-third of of this ideological order concerns the antiquated
concepts of honor we have just seen, the other two-thirds of the plot structure
concern sex. Beaufort uses a phrase in another context which neatly describes
the types of ideological confusion which serve as the basis of the three, most
fully developed, plots. He talks of "some extreme of honor, or of love"
(II.ii.58) and while the first half of this phrase neatly describes the thrust of
the heroic complication, the second part of the phrase describes the other plots
of Etherege’s The Comical Revenge, which have a more direct bearing on
gender ideology.
Norman Holland was the first to write about the new element of
"hostility" which characterizes Frollick’s love-making with the widow.2 7
58
When Sir Frederick tricks her into ’owning her love’ by rescuing him
financially from a group of fiddlers impersonating money-hungry bailiffs, he
mocks and punishes her for her weakness, taunting her with the fact that he
intends to spend her money on wine and women. When she rejects him with
the words, "Avoid my house, and never more come near me" (V.ii.83), Sir
Frederick unconcernedly gloats to his manservant, Dufoy,
She’s gone; impatience for these two hours possess her,
and then I shall be pretty well revenged. (187-89)
Further evidence for this hostility is easily provided. Sir Frederick’s ’revenge’
in the aforementioned scene is payment for the W idow’s discovery of his
previous ruse to make her confess she loves him. At a point in the plot where
Bruce is still believed to be dying or dead, Frollick makes romantic capital of
his role in the conflict, and fakes his own death, so that the Widow will reveal
herself by mourning over him. The mawkishness and grotesque quality of this
device raise serious doubts about Frollick’s sensibility, about his affection for
the Widow and about his feelings about women in general. But these questions
are forestalled by the failure of the device. All at once his hand is tipped by
Dufoy’s untimely entrance which surprises him into revealing himself to the
W idow’s intense relief:
How lucky was this accident! How he would have
insulted over my weakness else! (IV.vii.55-6)
59
The immediate point here is that the widow expects Frollick’s misogynist
mockery. Markley notes that the raw material of [Frollick’s] wit is often a
comic version of seventeenth-century misogyny.2 8 The grotesque
inappropriateness of this scene appears to bear him out. But the failure
accompanying Frollick’s ruse gives this misogyny a more nuanced meaning
than simply that its author hates women. The scene of the lover’s faked death
in the coffin, is a generic allusion to such Jacobean city comedy as The Knight
of The Burning Pestle. The comic failure of the later play, like the failure of
the heroic plot, symbolizes the failure of generic forms which underlies
Etherege’s experimentation in the genera mista of The Comical Revenge.
As we have seen was the case with Etherege’s heroic plot, the existing
forms of the drama were inappropriate to the kinds of issues that were now
raised in a society made worldly by Civil War. The widow is not a virginal
heroine, she is instead a knowing equal, rich in terms of wealth and in terms
of sexual experience. In order to win her, and in order to appeal to an
audience of mixed gender and of a mindset completely different from their
Jacobean ancestors, Frollick must invent new devices and new forms. To
accommodate his characteristically Restoration attitude towards women, his
simultaneous desire and hostility, he had to give us fiddlers disguised as
bailiffs. Markley too, describes Frollick’s program in terms of a similar
60
Restoration ambivalence when he examines the language of Frollick’s witty
descriptions of women:
Sir Frederick uses his characterizations of women to
position himself ironically between Petrarchan idealism
and misogynistic cynicism. In this regard, his libertine
assertions about women articulate a patrilineal culture’s
ambiguous, tension-filled responses to feminine
sexuality.2 9
Why did Etherege’s first hero succeed where, one year before, as we
have seen, Dryden’s Loveby, did not? This difference is especially surprising
when we consider that Dryden was a more experienced writer by far than
Etherege, having worked for an indeterminate but substantial number of years
as Herringman’s chief copywriter. Instead of offering this, and instead of an
explanation which would rely on historical occurrences between Dryden’s
dates of composition and those of Etherege, I would like to put forward a
more novel approach which takes into consideration fundamental details of
each playwright’s biography as they relate to the historical context of the
Interregnum.
John Dryden was born in 1631 and would therefore have reached
puberty sometime before 1646. George Etherege, on the other hand, was born
in 1635, and would have reached puberty, the period of the formation of an
individual’s sexual behaviour and sexual beliefs sometime before 1650. As we
have seen in the preceding chapter, the years 1647 and 1653 bracketed a
period of intense discourse revising gender ideology and criticizing male
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Cavaliers variously for effeminacy, affectedness, inadequacy, and impotence.
Unlike Dryden, Etherege grew to be a man in a highly pressurized ideological
crucible. The strength of the male character in his earliest work may easily be
a reflection of this early training during a crisis in male gender ideology which
Dryden was lucky enough to confront as an already maturing adult male.
Equally interesting is the knowledge that the same period, 1635 - 1653, also
saw the sexual development of Aphra Behn, Thomas Betterton, John Crowne,
(Elizabeth Pohwhele), Charles Sedley, Thomas Shadwell, and William
Wycherley, the cream of the practitioners and proponents of early Restoration
sex comedy who are neglected here only temporarily because their work
occurs later than the mandate of this chapter. In this gifted company, Etherege
is remarkable for being the first to write staged comedies, a fact which may be
due both to the earliness of his birth and to the same exceptional dramatic
ability that allowed him to create a popular, socially relevant and generically
innovative comedy on his first outing.
1664 was a year for extremes in comedy. If the year saw the
sophistication of Etherege’s first attempt, it also saw the full flower of the
breeches role which was to become a staple of early Restoration sex comedy.
Two plays are relevant here: the famous actor, of which John Lacy’s "bawdy,
satirical, farcical," Old Troop, or Monsieur Raggou is the first.3 0 The second
is an extremely important, highly salacious and funny play by Thomas
62
Killigrew called The Parson’s Wedding which is still unfairly neglected
because it was morally offensive to critics whose sensibilities are offended by
the moral extremes of Restoration society. As recently as 1930, for example,
Alfred Harbage describes the moral defensiveness experienced by critics who
examine Killigrew’s very fine, if very broad, laughing comedy:
when one is discussing The Parson’s Wedding, one is
constantly forced into an apologetic vein for the
questionable morality of the play.3 1
We have already seen the connection between the breeches role and the
themes of both gynophobia and female pursuit. Another important point about
this type of role however, is its historical connection to the Interregnum. Both
Lacy’s play and Killigrew’s are set during the Interregnum, and Killigrew’s, at
least, was probably revised in Switzerland during his period of exile with
Prince Charles. Moreover, the breeches theme (treated by both productions in
very different ways) was a very popular one during the Parliamentary period.
A little known, anonymous, play written at that time makes this connection
obvious. The Ghost, or The Woman Wears the Breeches (1653) thematizes the
same changes in femininity discussed in chapter one.3 2 Aurelia, married
against her will to Philarchus, an impotent old merchant, turns Amazon, and
takes her husband’s manservant Engin into her bed "to get . . . without
grunting . . . lusty boys (10). Together the pair control Philarchus through a
combination of humiliation and intimidation. They strip his breeches off and
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Engin carries them before Aurelia on a pole, until Philarchus, who has had
enough, tries to steal into their bedroom, retrieve his pants, and escape. At
this point Aurelia becomes indignant and calls for the breeches which she now
intends to wear to prevent Philarchus from escaping. She is stopped from
completing her intention only by Philarchus’ generous warning, which creates
an interesting variation on mainstream breeches themes,
Dear Imperious wife take heed.
If you do wear ’urn you are quite undone,
Alas, I was cur’d of the dry scab last moon. (15)
Whatever its form, this occurrence of the r61e is sufficient to indicate its
currency during the Interregnum. Its revival in 1664 may have been a reaction
to the same intensifying theatrical competition that caused both plays to contain
other mildly sensationalist material like the suggestions of the cannibalism in
Monsieur Raggou ("Lieutenant: Do but talk as if we us’d to eat children"
[32]), or the eating of puppies in The Parson’s Wedding which appears in
Baud’s memorable account of the Parson’s parsimony,
his miserableness . . . is one of the chief Exceptions I
have have against him; he reared up a puppy once, till
it was ten dayes old, with three hap worth of milk, and
then with his own Dagger slew it, and me dress it, blest
myself to see him eat it and he bid me beg the litter,
and swore it was sweeter and wholesomer than suckling
Rabbits. (II.v.44)
Despite its sensationalist qualities, the breeches role is always connected
to the themes of female empowerment (like that of Aurelia) or of female
64
pursuit; it is clear Restoration audiences found both very sexy. In Lacy’s The
Old Troop, both themes are combined in an interesting way. The Cornet’s
boy, Biddy, with whom the troops’ now pregnant prostitute has fallen in love,
is "in plain terms, a Girl" (II.i.15). Biddy herself explains her predicament in
words that recall the familiar theme of female pursuit:
I cannot choose but cry to see how false you [The
Cornet] are, and how they talk at home of me, she’s
run away with a soldier and the rascal will not marry
her. O the Devil take you, I shall never recover that
credit again! (II.i. 151)
Interestingly, Biddy’s transvestism is used to cozen Dol, the troop’s
prostitute, who is busily extorting money from every man in the company to
support the child she is expecting whose father could be anyone. D ol’s
empowerment through the act of emotional blackmail is underdeveloped causal
trigger in this play. Characteristic male anger and male revenge are provoked
by her attempt to cozen the men of the troop, and anger is both a moving
force of the action and an acute thematization of male responses to women’s
empowerment:
Captain Ferret Farm: Why, faith, our Dol’s with Child
and lays it to me.
Quartermaster Burn Dorp: Pox on her, she was with
me this morning, and I compounded with her for five
pound. (I.i. 135) r
Burn Dorp’s ensuing anger is characteristic of the male rage which
Harold Weber observes in his general discussion of the breeches role:
65
Men have rarely accepted with equanimity women’s
attempts to participate in the freedoms and pleasures of
the male world. The prospect of women’s usurping the
rdles of men has usually produced the most emphatic
kind of male rage.3 3
And it is worth noting that Biddy, the faithful transvestite who thematizes
women’s changing roles through her pursuit of the Cornet, is somehow set in
opposition to the emblem of women’s empowerment the faithless and
manipulative Dol. Biddy is an agent then, of male rage and male revenge
despite her seemingly liberated pursuit-in-drag of her lover. (This mechanism
incidentally, is repeated some twelve years later in William Wycherley’s The
Plain-Dealer, in the similar opposition of Olivia and Fidelia).
Ironically, the guarantee of Biddy’s femininity and personal worth is not
her willingness to cross-gender herself and follow Herman into battle, or even
her gameness in cozening Dol. Instead, it is her feminine reluctance to initiate
the lovemaking in the generically characteristic proviso scene with her
intended wife:
Cornet: Why do you not begin and Court her then?
Biddy: Nay, by my faith, let her begin first.
Lieutenant: That’s not the mode for the woman to woo
the man.
Biddy: That is, if the man love the woman, but that’s
not my case; for ’tis she love me not I her.
Lieutenant: O, but in complaisance, you must begin. It
is not civil to put a woman to’t.
Biddy: Not I faith; pray forsooth you do begin.
Dol: Indeed, it shall be yours. (III.i. 164)
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In other words, Biddy’s unwillingness to initiate love-making, even as a
jest, is a dramatic sign of the femininity that she retains despite her cross-
gendering disguise. Given the seriousness of female transvestism outlined in
the discussion of Otrante’s pursuit of Ludovico in Flora’s Vagaries (above),
visible vestiges of Biddy’s femininity are dramatically necessary to sustain the
sympathies of the male members of Lacy’s audience who would otherwise
believe the character’s own words,
I’ll do all the Offices of a man: I would I had the
wherewithal to perform; for, by my troth, I am weary
of our own Sex. (II.i. 149-50),
and find her a genuinely threatening Amazon, instead of a merely titillating
wild girl or the manifestation of a homoerotic fantasy.
One further aspect of The Old Troop explicitly concerns the
thematization of changes in gender ideology and the historical origins of these
changes. The commander of the Parliamentary forces, is discovered in bed
with some ’Sisters’ by the Royalists who stand by listening to the following
sexual hypocrisy by the double-speaking Puritan, Captain Tub-text:
Wipe your tears; if they were Cavaliering burthens
[children] you went with, your case were mournful; but
as they are my offspring, repent not; for your infants
(be assured) will be babes of Grace.
Captain: What a damned Rogue is this!
1 Sister: Why, then, it seems we religious lambs may
play with each other without sinning?
Captain: Was ever such blasphemous rogues and
whores? I tremble to hear ’em. Let in the bear upon
’em! (V.i. 197-8)
67
Here we have more than the familiar way of condemning of the political
opposition by depicting them as sexually inadequate or sexually distasteful.
This orgy scene is unique in Restoration comedy both for the sexually explicit
depiction of a man in bed with several women, and for the voyeuristic quality
of four Royalists, who stand by unobserved, commenting on the dialogue that
is taking place in the bed: its bawdiness is comparable only to that of
W ycherley’s china-scene. The Captain’s discussion of Tub-text’s sexual
ideology and sexual performance (which is depicted metaphorically by the
good Captain’s feeding all of his bedmates from a single spoon) is a wonderful
example of what David Foxon has called the "intellectualization of sex" which
underlies the proliferation of pornography in the late seventeenth century.3 4
This intellectualization is characterized by the explosion of discourse about
sex, the proliferation of thinking, talking and theorizing about sex, looking at
pictures of sex, using the mind to apprehend sex instead of doing sex, or
instead of merely doing sex. It is the enjoyment of sex from an intellectual and
judgmental distance which probably results from a knowledge that sex,
following the beginnings of the empowerment of women, was threatening and
potentially hazardous. Sex could leave men dependent or vulnerable, exposing
them both to the manipulation of women’s rampant will-to-power, to the pox
which raged through England and the Continent, following every international
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war, and to the dangers of cuckoldry, which included public humiliation and
the possibility of not being father to your own heir.
This same intellectualization of sex is thematized in various ways in
Killigrew’s The Parson’s W edding. The first scene for example, contains the
Captain’s reflective and dispassionate rejoinder to his mistress, Wanton, when
she asks him to keep her,
I know not why men are such Fools to pay? We bring
as much to the sport as Women. (I.i.72)
Instead, the Captain asks this woman if she will allow herself to be
"instructed" and despite her ’misery’ over his rejection, they plot together first
to marry her to another man, then to force him to give her the freedom
necessary to continue as the Captain’s mistress. Their joint efforts to these
ends comprise the main plot of the play; the man Wanton marries is a Parson.
If this early scene presents a good example of two committed libertine’s
intellectual detachment from their pleasure, The Parson’s Wedding also
thematizes Interregnum changes in the theoretical discourse about sex which
will seem familiar from my discussion of Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis.
One of the Cavaliers, Jolly, describes a woman known as Lady Freedom, a
female physic who has converted her husband’s home into a hospital:
She converses with naked men, and handles all their
members though never so ill-affected, and calls the
Fornication Charity; all her discourse to me was flat
bawdry, which I could not chide, but spake as flat as
she, till she rebuked me, calling mine beastliness, and
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hers Naturall Philosophy; By this day if I were to
marry, I would as soon have chose a drawn Whore out
of mine own Hospital, and cure the sins of her youth,
as marry a she-Chirugeon; one that for her sins in her
first Husbands dayes cures all the crimes of her Sex in
my time. (I.iii.82)
This passage is a gold mine for examples of the kinds of shifts taking
place during the Interregnum, when the play was written. First there is the
she-Chirugeon, a woman who clearly wears the breeches, but who is also a
woman who takes on herself the immodest and unfeminine profession of
physic. Jolly would say the Freedom of her name is not characteristic of the
new freedoms opening to women as a result of the exigencies of war. Instead
this usage of freedom describes the woman’s liberties with her charges’
members, or her insistence on talking openly about sex, or her absence of any
subjection to her husband.
Next, there is the matter of Jolly’s own hostility to the woman whose
aberrant behaviour he is determined not to accept. He accuses her of hypocrisy
in the phrases she "calls the Fornication, Charity" and "she calls mine
beastliness and hers Naturall Philosophy." Also, in his epithets, "Fornication"
and "flat bawdry," Jolly effectively accuses the woman of libertinism. He also
explains away her unusual behaviour as misguided guilt, ("For her sins in her
first husband’s days cures . . . "). Taken in conjunction, all of these mutually
exclusive descriptions of Lady Freedom’s motives indicate only Jolly’s fierce
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opposition to a woman who is usurping a man’s position and a man’s
freedoms.
There is also the matter of how long Jolly stays to talk with Lady
Freedom. When he finishes his description of her, Sadd remarks,
You had a long discourse with her, Jolly, what was it
about? (I.iii.82)
Despite his disgust for the woman, in other words, Jolly stays to enjoy (in
some way) his bawdy conversation with her. Most significant however, is
Jolly’s intellectualization of sex in dwelling on the titillating details of the
passage: the "members" of the "naked men," etc. The audience too, enjoys his
narration of this woman’s behavior in the same safe, detached way they would
have enjoyed an account of some bizarre native behavior in Bulwer’s treatise
on "Naturall Philosophy." It is interesting that the emergent rational and
scientific approach to sex, discourse about sex (its intellectualization in other
words), is explicitly and self-reflexively mentioned by Jolly in this passage,
and that in telling his story of the hypocrisy inherent in Lady Freedom’s
rationalization for her behaviour, he is engaging in a similarly detached,
similarly secure apprehension of sex. It is also clear that Wanton has Jolly’s
measure. She rejects his advances, exchanging her refusal to lie with him for
her permission for him to say that he has enjoyed her. Once again,in other
words, real sex is juxtaposed to a discourse about sex,
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Jolly: . . . Wanton, I will lye with thee for thy
Roguery; what are you dumb, you will not refuse me, I
hope?
Wanton: Not if I thought thou desiredst it; but I hate to
have it desired indifferently, and but so so done neither
when ’tis done.
Jolly: I hope you will not disgrace my work, will you?
Wanton: Faith, they say thy pleasure lies in thy
Tongue; and therefore, Though I do not give thee leave
to lie with me, yet I will give thee as good a thing, that
will please thee as well.
Jolly: Some Roguery, I expected.
Wanton: No Faith, I am Serious; and because I will
please you both, master Wild shall lie here, and you
shall have leave to say you do, which will please you as
well.
Jolly: Faith, and my part is some pleasure. (IV.i. 122)
The motif of self-reflexivity seen at work in the mention of "Naturall
Philosophy" now deserves attention since it such self-reflexivity is one of the
outstanding dramatic characteristics of Killigrew’s play. We are told in the
Prologue that all the actors are women, so, in fact, although there are no
explicit breeches roles in The Parson’s Wedding, all the roles are breeches
roles:
After so many sad complaints to us,
The painful labouring Women of this house,
We with our Poet have prevail’d again,
To give us our Revenge upon the men. (Prologue 1-4)
(In the Epilogue, this same theme of Revenge is repeated, "We have this day
expell’d our Men the Stage" [Epilogue 12]). The auditors now are not simply
confronted with women acting as women or men, but since they are alerted
before the play begins, to the very unusual event (especially for 1664) of an all
72
female cast, during the performance these same auditors see women dressing
as women dressing as men, and women self-consciously dressing as women
dressing as women. The result is perpetually self-reflexive alarm to all issues
of gender in a play, that to begin with, is very much about sex, about sexual
intrigue, sexual manners and yes, sexual ideology.
Two further examples of the intellectualization of sex deserve mention.
One is the wonderfully funny speech concerning Wanton’s law, which shows
how sex and the practice and pursuit of sex had become not only a topic of
theoretical discourse during the Interregnum but also a topic capable of
delivering high entertainment. The second example is a more practical
illustration of the new distinction between physically and intellectually oriented
sex.
Late in the play, Wanton the female trickster, outlines her plan to
preserve women’s reputations under the new regime,
in this age of zeal and Ignorance, would I have
you . . . present a Petition to both Houses, and say,
you are men touched in Conscience for your shame in
that wickedness which is known to their worships by
the pleasure of Adultery, and desire it may be death,
and that a law may be pased to that purpose; How the
women will pray for you, and at their own charges rear
Statu’s in memory of their Benefactor . . . pray and
present you and Court the sanguine youth, for the sweet
sin secured by a such a law; none would lose an
Occasion, nor churlishly oppose kind Nature, nor
refuse to listen to her summons when youth and Passion
call for those forbidden sweets; when such security as
your lives are at stake, who would fear to trust . . .
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one rogue hanged, for Example, would make a
thousand kind Girls: If it take it shall be called my law,
W anton’s Law; then we may go in Petycoats again, for
women grew imperious and wore the Breeches only to
fright poor cuckolds, and make the Fools digest their
horns. (IV. i. 123)
The central idea of this scheme is to guarantee women’s reputations by
making it death for men to claim they have enjoyed a woman sexually, a deft
maneuver which would make women completely willing for sexual liaisons by
rendering them absolutely safe. The amount of wit contained in this passage is
striking, and it is because of her wit, her intellectual acuity, (not because she
is a prostitute of great physical attraction) that Wanton is as memorable and as
wild as the character of the wild girl gets.
A final example of the intellectualization of sex concerns the second plot,
and it returns us explicitly to the issues of male gender ideology, in that it
depicts two men’s conquest (no other word is accurate) of two originally
unwilling women who had earlier sworn to "abuse all the Sex [men], till they
put a true value on us" (I.ii.77). With the help o f the Captain, Wanton and
their wild troop, Careless and Jolly lure these women to spend the night in
Careless’ house. The men give it out around the neighbourhood that they have
just married. The unsuspecting women are merry that evening, and in the
morning the men slip into their chamber and shout greetings to fiddlers and the
74
neighbours at the women’s window and then produce a parson and witnesses
who will swear they saw both couples marry the evening before.
Careless begins to reveal the plot to his victim, Pleasant, by wishing her
joy and so confusing her. He then outlines the men’s resolution to continue in
the faked marriages and, in so doing, reveals its intellectual rather than
physical source of pleasure:
Pleasant: Joy of what? What do you mean?
Careless: Madam this is visible and you may coy it and
refuse to call me Husband; But I am resolved to call
you Wife, and such I ’ll bring as shall not be denied.
Widow: Promise your self that; see whether your fine
wits can make it good; you will not be uncivil?
Careless: Not a hair but what you give, and that was in
the Contract before we undertook it; for any man may
force a Woman’s Body, but we have laid that we will
force your mind.
Widow: ’Tis a new way of wooing.
Careless: ’Tis so Madam . . . (V.ii.142)
The women’s resistance here is as interesting to our appreciation of male
gender ideology as is the dramatic necessity of the inevitable male conquest.
Pleasant objects, and urges her companion, the Widow, not to give in,
protesting,
not that I mislike them [the men], but I hate that they
should get us thus— (V.ii. 143)
The reason given for her distaste in the marriage is a classic example of the
contemporary Cavalier view of women, and of sexual relations. Pleasant
75
reveals herself as an eager participant in the same sexual power-struggle that
was causing men to revise their versions of themselves. At first, she refuses
marriage on the men’s terms, saying,
No, Sir, not to be half a Queen; if we should yield now
your wit would domineer for ever; and still in all
disputes . . . this shall be urged as an argument of your
master wit to confute us. (V.ii. 142)
Killigrew repeats this same male characterization of women’s will-to-
power throughout the play. It is a characteristic male ideological stereotype of
the Interregnum English woman. The most blatant example comes from
Wanton, in a discussion with her maid:
Baud: any thing that may get Rule: I love to wear the
Breeches.
Wanton: So doe we all wench, Empire? ’Tis all our
aim. (Il.iii.p 93)
Female stereotyping in The Parson’s Wedding has interesting
implications for the later sex comedy of the 70s and 80s, first because of the
striking similarity in the male views of women depicted after what appears to
be a thirty year gap. Second, these stereotypes are interesting because the
similarities are causally and historically connected. Killigrew’s Interregnum
views of women, the lust, fickleness and will-to-power, anticipate such
seventies playwrights as Dover, Durfey, Ravenscroft, Sedley, Shadwell and
Wycherley as well as much of the work of Aphra Behn. The relationship
between these later plays and Killigrew’s salacious comedy is causal, since
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Killigrew wrote and revised The Parson’s Wedding during the Civil War and
Interregnum; it is clear that the extreme sexual attitudes he explores in the play
are a phenomenon which achieves widespread currency in those times.
Killigrew’s Widow explains some of these changes as a destruction of the
Henrietta-Maria’s Court-sponsored of Platonic love in favor of a pragmatic and
more modern sexuality intended to win influence from the Committee men by
exchanging it for sexual attention:
Widow: Faith, Niece, this Parliament has so
destroyed . . . the Platonick Humour . . . your leading
members in the lower House have . . . cow ’d the
Ladies . . . Their [the Ladies] whole endeavours are
spent now in feasting, and winning close Committee
men, a rugged kind of sullen Fellows with implacable
stomachs and hard hearts, that make the gay things
court and observe them, as much as the foolish Lovers
use to do. (V.ii.140)
It is in the sociological context of these new values that the writers of
early Restoration sex comedy reached puberty and formed their own sexual
attitudes, then found in their plays. In addition to thematizing the changes in
women’s attitudes towards sex, Killigrew’s comedy expresses an open,
secularized, defiance in the era of Puritan political control. These Puritanical
sexual values are the same ones ridiculed by the cuckolded Parson; and this
sexual defiance was the patrimony handed from Killigrew’s next generation of
Cavaliers who came to sexual maturity at the time o f the Cavaliers’ greatest
defeat and greatest need to fly in the face of Puritan hypocrisy.
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It is especially interesting to observe that The Parson’s Wedding
constituted an abrupt shift in Killigrew’s theatrical writings. Alfred Harbage
has observed,
the most surprising feature of The Parson’s Wedding is
the shocking contrast it presents to the dramatist’s
earlier plays. In his tragi-comedies, Killigrew did
nothing if not ascend to idealistic heights, in his
comedy he descended to corresponding depths . . . one
explanation of it [this phenomenon] rest in the fact that
the tragi-comedies were written by a hopeful youth of
24— and a lover— while the comedy was written by a
temporarily defeated man of 29.3 5
And elsewhere Harbage mentions that an interval of at least five years
separated the first draft of The Parson’s Wedding from Killigrew’s earlier
plays.3 6 And the tone of the first play was forgotten by the Restoration,
which saw Killigrew as the devout libertine whom Richard Flecknoe attacked
in his The Life of Thomaso the Wanderer: an Attack upon Thomas Killigrew.
in which Flecknoe describes the playwright’s efforts as
so scurrilous and prophane, as for less Heathens banisht
their Writers formerly, and the Christians burn their
writings by the hand of common Hang-men, for less
Martials Poet was damn’d, when forc’d by the Furies to
confess his crime . . . 3 7
This abrupt shift in the playwright’s sexual attitudes and beliefs is, of
course, partly indicative of a natural process of maturation. But also, the
extremity of the shift from the idealistic heights of the tragi-comedies to the
sexual cynicism o f The Parson’s Wedding, reflects, once again, the abrupt
78
changes in sexual ideology which occurred as a result of the pressures of The
Civil War.
1665: All Mistaken.
Following an early suspicion by James Sutherland, Robert D. Hume
argues persuasively that James Howard’s All Mistaken, or the Mad Couple
was performed late in the spring of 1665, and that therefore, its split plot must
have been a prototype for Secret Love (1667).3 8 Harold Weber has remarked
that the libertine Philidor "recognizes . . . a version of the male self . . . when
he first sees the female rake Mirada. ”3 9 The present derivative argument
claims that Philidor’s recognition in the new and distinctive comic sub-plot is
an exact mirror of the Duke’s recognitions of both Amphelia and Artabella in
the main, heroic plot. These plots thematize the alienation of the masculine
from the feminine which, we have seen, is a characteristic of Restoration
culture manifested in the many forms of men’s suspicion and distrust of
women.
In the heroic plot of All Mistaken, a Duke returns victorious from
wartime convinced by a maliciously forged letter that Amphelia, the woman he
planned to marry, had left him for Ortellus, his cousin, the widely-
acknowledged heir to his Duchy. She too, had received a letter in his absence
indicating a similar breach of faith. Although they both still love each other,
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they cannot admit it. Too proud to show her true feelings or to confess her
hurt, Amphelia pretends to love Ortellus, the very man who engineered her
breakup out of lust for her. The Duke too, cannot admit to Amphelia that he
loves her, so instead he brings another woman, Artabella, home from the war
with him promising to marry her. But he is really using her as a petty goad to
Amphelia,who pretends not to care:
Duke: What Amphelia, did you believe
The World so barren of good faces, that
Yours only does enrich it? or did you think
It was men’s fates only to doat on yours?
Look on this lady, and you’ll see your error;
Mark well her face, and you will find
In every line beauty sits empress there.
These are the eyes, Amphelia, now, that dart
Obedience through my heart; are you not vex’d
To see I am no constant fool, and love
You still?
Amphelia: Vexed at what? to see a man I hate
Love another? a very great vexation!
Know, sir, this breast has only room for joy
And love to brave Ortellus— . (1.326)
It is reasonable to think that one or the other character would eventually
find the necessary courage to risk emotional injury and reveal the true feelings
of love being impeded by some highly unrewarding emotional strategies,
especially considering the depth of their respective suffering:
Amphelia: How has my tongue belied my too true
heart,
In speaking hate unto
The Duke and love to Ortellus! I hate the Duke?
So eyes do sleep, that long have known no rest.
How could my lips give passage to such words,
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And not have clos’d for ever? (1.329)
Duke: [Amphelia’s] gone, and after my heart has
flown,
’Tis well it has no tongue to make it moan;
Then ’twould discover what my pride conceals,
A heart in love (though slighted) love reveals.
Yet though I love her still, we shall not know;
Her hate shall seem my joy, which is my woe. (1.330-
1)
But, despite their deep emotional wounds, the world Howard establishes
in All Mistaken, is one which rewards the intrigue and deception embodied by
Ortellus. It is not a world which values courage or emotional candor. In the
same scene in which the Duke goads Amphelia with Artabella’s presence, he
punishes the prisoner of war, Lorenzo, for speaking his mind too openly.
When the Duke offers the man his life on the simple condition that he thank
his countrywoman Artabella, Lorenzo curses her instead, to the Duke’s
amazement. Lorenzo explains himself in this way,
Know, sir, my soul is
Prompter to my tongue, and gives it courage to say
Anything that Heaven will not frown at. (1.328)
For his emotional foolhardiness here, Lorenzo is condemned and thrown in a
dungeon where he spends his time longing for Amarissa, his own incarnation
of the feminine,
0 Amarissa, wert thou here with me,
1 would not see these bonds for liberty.
Ransoms that prisoners give to be set free,
I’d give as much to lie in chains by thee.
Here is her picture. O, thou too like shade
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[Pulls out her picture]
To look on it my eyes are half afraid,
It so presents my joy and misery; (11.337)
A lot is happening in and around this passage. It is important to realize
that Lorenzo is a profoundly masculine presence whose courageous defiance of
the Duke won him immediate admiration by Amphelia. It is also important to
notice that he carries with him at all times the image of Amarissa, his
incarnation of feminine beauty and of femininity, and that, most important, not
only is he inescapably separated from this femininity, but he simultaneously
yearns for it and is so frightened of it that it is difficult for him to look on its
image. Lorenzo in prison, in other words, is a clear emblem of the Restoration
man’s alienation from what Jung has called the feminine principle, or the
Anima. It is very interesting for our exploration that this separation is
accompanied by the ambivalent feelings of fear and desire, the base-emotions
that also typify the Restoration Rake’s attitude to women. It is also very
significant that at this moment of longing for the feminine, Amphelia appears
to him, not as a lover, but as a compassionate and admiring woman who
attempts to free him. In Amarissa’s absence, in other words, Amphelia
answers Lorenzo’s appeal to the feminine, and so represents the Anima, in
much the same way that Lorenzo himself represents the Animus or masculine
principle.
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Amphelia’s visit has immediate unpleasant consequences. Ortellus
discovers her leaving the prison. When she lies to him transparently about her
reasons for being there, he realizes she does not really love him and never
will. In revenge he styles her visits to the prisoner as treason, and betrays her
to the Duke, who jealously imprisons her and condemns her to die with
Lorenzo. In All Mistaken therefore, James Howard is acutely reading the
predicament of his culture and depicting the joint Restoration condemnation of
both the masculine and the feminine in the dramatic emblem of Lorenzo and
Amphelia in chains. There is no more eloquent testimony to the constraint of
the gender ideology of the period than this image of a male and female linked
together by joint condemnation and yet inescapably prevented from union,
consummation, or wholeness.
In the meantime, Ortellus has cleverly recognized the Duke’s jealousy
and Amphelia’s spite as love. He decides to use this knowledge to further his
ambitions to the Duchy and tells Arbatus, Arbatella’s brother, who is too
concerned about his sister’s honor, that the Duke is just using her to spite
another woman. Together that night, Arbatus and Arbatella go to kill the Duke
in his chambers. Arbatella realizes however, that she loves the Duke in spite
of his treachery and she prevents her brother from killing him. At this point,
the Duke confesses his true feelings for her which are not those of a lover, but
which are not dishonorable either,
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O Arbatella, thou wert
My sister!
Nothing but brother’s love were then
Thy due; and I could richly pay thee in
That coin, a million more than ever brother did.
(IV. 369)
W hat the Duke has done is to intuitively recognize and accept an aspect
of the feminine. Artabella is, in fact, his sister through a design Ortellus made
long ago to put himself in line for the Duchy. The Duke, of course, has no
way of apprehending this before the completion of the next act. But this partial
resolution prefigures and promises the reconciliation with Amphelia that is the
whole basis of the play. When this reconciliation happens, it is accompanied
by another pair of reconciliations that also emphasize the reintegration of the
masculine and feminine principles. It is also parodied in the comic subplot by
two antilovers, Philidor and Mirada, the mad couple of the play’s subtitle.
Like the Duke’s recognition of Artabella, Philidor recognizes Mirada as
a representation of some aspect of himself. Hiding while being pursued by six
women, all of whom he has promised to marry, Philidor overhears Mirada’s
boast to herself and is overcome with an admiration comparable to that
Amphelia earlier developed for Lorenzo,
Mirada: I ’ll lay my head, ne’re a girl in Christendom
Of my age, can say what I can: I’m now
But five years i’th’teens, and I have fool’d
Five several men.
Philidor: A brave wench, by this light!
Sure, it is I in petticoats.
Mirada: My humour
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Is to love no man, but to have as many
Love me as they please, come cut or long tail.
Philidor: A most divine wench! (11.345)
Their proviso scene soon follows this initial meeting, and although the
scene is too long to quote in its entirety, it shows that Howard once again
draws our attention towards the similarity and the connectedness of these
characters, and, by association, the similarity and connectedness o f the heroic
characters whose actions Philidor and Mirada repeat in parody and farce,
Philidor: Faith, you and I sing very well; we are
Alike in that too: I see either nature
Or the devil, somebody or something, made
Thee and me for one another. Well,
But let us
Remember our conditions: imprimis, I
Will love you.
Mirada: Item, so will I you.
Philidor: I Will not say for how long.
Mirada: Nor I neither.
Philidor: Item, it may be I can love you but
A week.
Mirada: I don’t care if’t be but a day.
Philidor: I ’ll ne’er be tied to any thing.
Mirada: Item, thou shalt be tied to what thou
wilt
But me. (II.348-9)
Throughout the play, Howard highlights and relieves the heroic action,
by mirroring the heroic events through the actions of the mad couple. When
Amphelia and Lorenzo are chained together, for example, Philidor and Mirada
are bound together by his angry former lovers. Their release in the comic plot
promises Amphelia and Lorenzo’s release in the main plot.
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Finally, at the play’s end, three couples are united, but when the Duke
attempts to convince his friend Philidor to marry Mirada also his suggestion is
met by their joint horror,
Mirada: . . . O that dull, dull
Name of Husband.
Duke: Indeed you two are well met,
The world has not two more such,
I am confident.
Mirada: The more the pity, sir.
Philidor: No, sir, if you please, never propose
Marrying to us, till both of us have
Committed such faults as are death
By the law; then instead of
Hanging us, marry us. (V.396-7)
This refusal, I believe, represents Howard’s comic admission that, for the time
being, the longed for reunion of masculine and feminine enacted and fulfilled
in the heroic plot is also, simultaneously, left unfulfilled in the comic plot as it
was outside the theater in the streets and parlors of Restoration London. The
knowledge that the longing for such a reconciliation was left unfulfilled
prepares us to examine a second treatment of the theme, two years later in
Dryden’s first two-plot tragicomedy.
1667: Secret Love, Sir Martin Mar-All. Wealth Outwitted.
Following the outbreak of plague and the closing of both theaters in June
1665, very little happened in the way of drama until the year after the Great
Fire. The theaters were reopened as early as October 1666, but the country
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was either not in a mood for new comedies or the theaters were unprepared to
provide them until Dryden’s tragicomedy Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen
was mounted in February 1667.
The play’s structural similarity to All Mistaken has already been noted.
Dryden’s divided plot however, is not a wholesale copy of Howard’s play. In
fact, the resolutions are exactly reversed. It is the mad couple who marry at
the end of Secret Love and the state’s leader who is left unmarried. There are
however, many similarities, including a set of resemblances between the mad
couple in both Howard’s and Dryden’s subplot. The most obvious of these
similarities is the "legal formality" of all three of Dryden’s proviso scenes
between Celadon and Florimell.4 0 Often these scenes resemble the legalistic
phrasing of the anti-proviso scene in what is probably the earlier play by
James Howard:
Celadon: By this light a necessary clause.— But if I pay
in all the foresaid services before the day, you shall be
obliged to take me sooner into mercy.
Florimell: Provided if you prove unfaithful, then your
time of a Twelve-month to be prolong’d; so many
service I will bate you so many dayes or weeks; so
many faults I will add to your
’Prenticeship . . . (II.i.98-103)
Celadon: Imprimis, for a Treat:
Item, For my Glass Coach:
Item, For sitting bare and wagging your Fann:
And lastly, and principally, for my Fidelity to you this
long hour and half . . . (III. i.362-366)
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Celadon: Item, I will have the liberty to sleep all night,
without your interrupting my repose for any evil design
whatsoever.
Florimell: Item, then you shall bid me good night
before you sleep. (V.i.512-16, 540-543)
In addition, there are a number of other similarities between the behavior
and dialogue of the mad couples in both plays, including a psychological
recognition between Florimell and Celadon, that recalls the recognition of
Mirada by Philidor in All Mistaken:
Flavia: Which of us would you serve?
Celadon: Either of you, or both of you.
Flavia: Why, could you not be constant to one?
Celadon: Constant to one! I have been a Courtier, a
Souldier, and a Traveller, to good purpose, if I must be
constant to one; give me some Twenty, some Forty,
some a Hundred Mistresses, I have more love than any
one woman can turn her to.
Florimell: A pretty kind of fellow this; he fits my
humour rarely. (I.ii.4-10, 16-17)
Florim ell’s aside reminds us of Philidor’s description of Mirada: "Sure
’tis I in petticoats." It is worth observing however, that in Dryden’s play, the
recognition occurs in the female character and that this recognition mirrors the
empowerment of the feminine in the play’s heroic plot. Although this plot is
also set in Italy, it is dominated by a Queen not by a Duke. With the emphasis
these plays share on psychological recognition in mind, I would like to claim
that the structural and local similarities between Secret Love and All Mistaken
are not accidental and that Dryden is repeating his brother-in-law’s earlier
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exploration of the same theme of the alienation of the masculine and feminine.
Moreover, he does so in a way consistent with a salient fact from our
examination of The Wild Gallant: that Dryden’s early comic male characters
are less effective and less prominent than his female ones.
Dryden’s discomfort with the masculine appears to be a developmental
pattern in his early comedy (a fact that does not deny the earlier point that
Dryden’s ineffectual male characters were chronologically bound to the early
Restoration period). From the perspective of such a pattern, it is no accident
and, in fact, it is eloquent testimony to Dryden’s ability to grow as a
dramatist, that Sir Martin Mar-all, his enormous success later in 1667, turns
this ideological weakness against itself by focusing on and defeating the
completely ineffectual male character of the play’s title. (This, incidentally,
may explain Dryden’s close line-by-line reliance on Quinault and Moliere, his
French sources, who had already turned this defect to advantage in L ’Amant
indiscret and in L ’Etourdi respectively).
In Secret Love, male characters do not possess or want political,
domestic or emotional power. The only thing Prince Lysimantes, Celadon or
Philocles want is the love of their chosen woman, who is in each case more
powerful than they are. (The male characters do revolt at the excesses of their
Queen, it is true, but they are quick to restore her to power afterwards.)
Philocles, the Queen’s favorite, whom she secretly loves, is unable to guess
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the identity of her lover when she tells him "I love like you" (II.i. 175), or
even when she elaborates this confession in a later scene. This lack of
understanding is very clearly an inability to recognize himself,
Philocles: . . .You have some quarrel to him [her
lover]?
Queen: Yes, a great one.
But first to justifie my self
Know, Philocles, I have conceal’d my passion
With such care from him, that he knows not yet
I love, but onely that I much esteem him.
Philocles: O stupid wretch
That by a thousand tokens could not guess it! (III.i.47-
52)
Similarly, in the comic subplot, Florimell goes unrecognized by Celadon
twice. Once in an early scene when he realizes she is the woman he had
previously seen masked, but fails to recognize her as the famous Florimell
whom he has never actually seen,
Celadon: . . . did I not say you were infinitely
handsome: they may talk of Florimell, if they will, but
i’faith she must come short of you.
Florimell: Have you seen her, then?
Celadon: I look’d a little that way, but I had soon
enough of her, she is not to be seen twice without a
surfeit.
Florimell: However you are beholding to her, they say
she loves you.
Celadon: By fate she shan’not love me: I have told her
a piece of my mind alread: pox o’these coming women:
they set a man to dinner before he has appetite.
Flavia at the door.
Flavia: Florimell you are call’d within.— [Exit.]
Celadon: I hope in the Lord you are not Florimell.
(II. i. 36-46)
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Later, Florimell goes unrecognized by Celadon again when she dresses
as a man to drive off two young rivals for Celadon’s affections. Finally, when
she accomplishes her end, she is revealed by an accident and her exchange
with Celadon forces a recognition which effects a change in her rake-gallant,
Florimell: Come Celadon, shall we make accounts
even? Lord what a hanging look was there: indeed if
you had been recreant to your Mistress, or had
forsworn your love, that sinners face had been but
decent, but for the vertuous, the innocent, the constant
Celadon!— Celadon: This is not very heroick in you now
to insult over a man in his misfortunes; but take heed,
you have robb’d me of my two Mistresses; I shall grow
desperately constant, and all the tempest of my love
will fall upon your head: I shall so pay you. (V.i.133-
41)
Florim ell’s strength rests in her ability to reconcile the masculine and
feminine parts of her nature. Like Celadon, she originally possessed what was
in terms of Restoration gender ideology the same "male inconstancy" that
Celadon personifies.4 1 Unlike Howard’s Mirada however, at one point in the
course of her pursuit of Celadon, she puts this inconstancy aside and at this
moment too, she displays a perfect understanding of the masculine component
in her nature that allows her to don breeches and effectively woo the young
sisters of whom Celadon is so fond:
Florimell [in mans Habit]: Twill be rare now if I can
go through with it, to out-do this mad Celadon in all his
tricks, and get both his mistresses from him; then I
shall revenge my self upon all three, and save my own
stake into the bargain; for I find I do love the Rogue in
spite of all his infidelities. Yonder they are and this
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way they must com e.— If cloathes and a bon meen will
take ’em, I shall do’t.— Save you Monsieur Florimell;
Faith me thinks you are a very jaunty fellow, poudre
and ajuste as well as the best of ’em. I can manage the
littel Comb,— set my Hat, shake my Garniture, toss
about my empty Noddle, walk with a courant slurr, and
at every step peck down my Head:— if I should be
mistaken for some Courtier now, pray where’s the
difference?- (V.i.1-13)
(Pepys, it is worth noting, exulted over Nell Gwynn’s execution of these
lines.)4 2 It is also significant that in this same scene in which she has
recognized and accepted the masculine side of her own nature, Florimell also
calls into question Celadon’s masculinity, a topic which he raises:
Florimell: But pray what do you find in your self so
extraordinary, that you should serve these Ladies better
then I? Let me know hat ’tis you value your self upon,
and let the Judg betwixt us.
Celadon: I am somewhat more a man than you.
Florimell: That is, you are so much older then I: Do
you like a man ever the better for his age Ladies.
Sabina: Well said, young Gentleman.
Celadon: Pish, thee! a young raw Creature, thou hast
ne’re been under the Barbers hands yet.
Florimell: No, nor under the Surgeons neither as you
have been. (V .i.49-59)
John Harrington Smith has written of this scene that Florimell is
"piqued" by Celadon’s simultaneous pursuit of Olinda and Sabina and is
determined to have her a sufficient revenge in the form of a marriage. "But
first," Smith writes,
she will humble him by pricking the bubble of his
conceit. He must not be permitted to continue in the
belief that he is irresistible to women. Since there is no
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available gallant to outshine him, Florimell will herself
impersonate such a gallant.4 3
Significantly, Florimell’s jealousy of Celadon in the comic plot repeats
the Queen’s jealousy of Philocles in the heroic plot. Both women are forced to
recognize unattractive aspects of their personalities which constellate around
their desire to possess both patriarchal power and exclusive rights to their
respective men.
W hile it is also true that Philocles undergoes a conflict similar in its
rhetoric to the Queen’s, his is less well developed and more quickly resolved.
Dryden’s focus, in other words, is on women, both of whom want access to
the masculine. In Florimell’s case, she owns these traits readily, all but
confessing her jealousy when she says, "Who I jealous? Then I wish this sigh
may be the last that I ever draw. [Sighs]" (IV.i. 123-4). Her will-to-power is
revealed later when she "humbles" Celadon in Smith’s phrase. He begins to
swear at her, but Florimell quickly puts a stop to that:
Celadon: By these Breeches—
Florimell: Which if I marry you I am resolv’d to wear;
put that into our Bargain, and so adieu Sir. (V.i. 157-9)
The Queen’s self-recognition, however, is much more difficult for her to
achieve and it has ambiguous results. Like Florimell’s internal conflict, the
Queen desires access both to masculine power and masculine affection. The
early scene which discovers her love for Philocles establishes both desires and
informs us which has the greater appeal to her:
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Queen: . . . [Philocles is] not of Royal bloud:
I know his fate unfit to be a King.
To be his wife I could forsake my Crown;
But not my glory:
Yet,— would he did not love Candiope;
Would he lov’d m e,— but knew not of my love
Or ere durst tell me his. (I.iii.257-263)
The Queen’s internal conflict arises out of the mutual exclusivity of her
desires. She cannot remain Queen and marry Philocles. Her jealous
persecution of Candiope is evidence that she cannot let go of Philocles, but she
is even more unwilling to renounce the glory of her monarchy. What is
required is a painful and profoundly private self-recognition, the terms of
which are revealed following an argument with Lysimantes, the rebel who
loved her:
Lysimantes: . . . all my Pride, Designs, and my
Ambition Were taught me by a Master
With whom you are not unacquainted, Madam.
Queen: Explain your self; dark purposes, like yours,
Need an Interpretation.
Lysimantes: ’Tis Love I mean.
Lysimantes: You see, that Princes faults,
(How e ’re they think ’em safe from publick view)
Fly out through the dark crannies of their Closets:
We know what the Sun does,
E v’n when we see him not in t’other world.
Queen: My actions, Cousin, never fear’d the light.
Lysimantes: Produce him then, your darling of the
dark,
For such an one you have. (V .i.297-302, 308-315)
The Queen, of course, does manage to achieve such a self-recognition
and to "reinstate" her self into her "glory" (V .i.356) by acting handsomely in
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forgiving Lysimantes and making him "heir immediate to my Crown"
(V.i.451). Her most gracious act however, is in her courageous resolution to
encourage Philocles to
Take your Candiope; and be as happy As love can
make you both, (V .i.398-9)
Politically, this generous action is also an astute public negation of her illicit
love for the low-born Philocles and of the questionable strategies by which she
set out to separate him from Candiope. Her strategy intends to protect her
from sullying her Renown (V .i.319) with a public admission of love for
Philocles, and to judge from Lysimantes’ reaction to it, it is a successful one,
I am convinc’d, she never lov’d him now;
Since by her free consent, all force remov’d
She gives him to my Sister.
Flavia was an Impostor and deceiv’d m e.— [Aside.]
(V .i.411-14)
Most interesting however, is her ultimate acceptance of the mutual
exclusivity of both of her desires for access to the masculine. Dryden keenly
figures her subsequent decision to chose power and remain celibate, in terms
of the love match she will never possess:
Queen: As for my self I have resolv’d
Still to continue as I am, unmarried:
The cares, observances, and all the duties
Which I should pay an Husband, I will place
Upon my people; and our mutual love
Shall make a blessing more then Conjugal. (V .i.456-
462)
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These same celibate conditions of the Queen’s ultimate self-recognition
guarantee her access to the patriarchal power of the throne which she herself
always describes in terms of a masculine monarchy (Kings, Princes, etc). But
although this recognition is figured in the terms of a wedding, it is clearly a
relationship, whose ambivalence is a close parallel of the non-marriage of
Philidor and Mirada in Howard’s All Mistaken. Like Howard’s play, the terms
of the integration of the masculine and feminine principles have already been
fulfilled in another relationship (Philocles and Candiope’s). The recollection of
these terms in the Queen’s rhetorical use of Husband and mutual love,
emphasize the sterility of her choice. In a very real sense, she cross-genders
herself to assume the masculine mantle of power, just as Florimell dresses as a
man to secure Celadon. The difference between the characters is the rigidity
imposed on the Queen through her public role, as opposed to flexibility in
gender that Florimell has taken on herself and which she can now
communicate to her marriage. In a phrase that recalls the Queen’s earlier use
of the word "Bugbear" (III.i. 10), to describe herself, Florimell who has
changed her gender to woo first, now changes marriage,
Florimell: But this Marriage is such a Bugbear to me;
much might be if we could invent but any way to make
it easie.
Celadon: Some foolish people have made it uneasie, by
drawing the knot faster then they need; but we that are
wiser will loosen it a little. (V .i.512-16)
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These changes, I would claim, are thematizations of the changes in gender
current in Dryden’s culture at the time of Secret Love’s composition and
which are also visible in Dryden’s next play.
It is dangerous to read Sir Martin Mar-all, or The Feigned Innocence
(1667) simply from the perspective of its place in Dryden’s comic corpus
because we are still unclear about many aspects of the play’s authorship.
Originally, it was said to be a translation of Moliere by William Cavendish,
Duke of Newcastle. Both Pepys and Downes record this fact, but both add that
the Duke’s translation was widely acknowledged to have been ’corrected’ by
Dryden.4 4 The truth is more complex than this, however, since the play relies
on two French sources, one by Moliere, another by Quinault. More
significantly, as both Alfred Harbage and Henry Ten Eyck Perry have
observed, the play’s very strength is a convincing argument against a major
involvement by Newcastle in the play’s authorship.4 5 The fact that Dryden
himself claimed the play as his own some fifteen years after Newcastle’s death
would seem to confirm that Newcastle had a minor role in its composition.4 6
Still, Dryden’s assertion is complicated by our knowledge that Newcastle
likely provided the play’s subplot which bears an almost identical resemblance
to the subplot of Newcastle’s The Humourous Lovers (1667).4 7
Whatever the contradictions in the question of Sir Martin M ar-all’s
authorship add up to, it is safe to say that both Dryden and Newcastle were
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involved in the composition of this commercially successful and popular
comedy. As the more experienced and gifted playwright, it is reasonable to
assume that Dryden’s dramatic judgements would have had a strong influence
on the play’s final form, although it is impossible to know the extent of his
emendations. It should be noted that Newcastle himself was clearly pleased
with the result since he participated in a further collaboration with Dryden
later that same year. Whatever the extent of Dryden’s contribution, however,
the fact that he had a hand in the play is more than sufficient for my present
observations that the character of Sir Martin fits into early Restoration comedy
in a generic way, and also fits into Dryden’s comic corpus in a developmental
way.
Sir Martin is, as Susan Staves frequently points out, an embodiment of
masculine inadequacy,
In so far as the knight’s behaviour is produced by his
own stupidity and vanity, his innocence also reveals his
own inadequacy;4 8
Sir M artin’s plans to deceive only afford an occasion
for demonstrating his incapacity; it is his incapacity,
not his plans which is of interest.4 9
He is also a comic reduction of this masculine inadequacy or incapacity in the
same early Restoration tradition now familiar to us from Cowley’s Puny,
Howard’s Mr. Vain (or Mr. Pinguister), Etherege’s Sir Nicholas Cully, and
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Dryden’s own Failer and Sir Timorous in The Wild Gallant. Staves describes
the mechanism of this comic reduction in this way:
the play also functions as certain bad dreams do. It is
rather like the examination dream as Freud understood
it. A man who worries about failing a particular
examination, or indeed any sort of test or trial, is apt to
dream that he failed some examination which, in
reality, he has already passed. The dream then becomes
reassuring because he can say to himself, "My fears
must be groundless; after all, I did pass that
examination." Similarly, even a rather stupid spectator,
might look upon Sir Martin and rejoice, "’Odbones,
Ifakins, at least I’ll never make that much of a fool of
myself."5 0
What Sir Martin Mar-all does, in terms of the Restoration tradition of
comic reduction of masculine inadequacy through the well-established fop
type, is to raise this previously subordinate character to a position where it
receives full dramatic treatment. Sir Martin’s strange inadequacy is clearly the
subject of the play from the opening words of Dryden’s Prologue,
Fools, which each man meets in his Dish each day,
Are yet the great Regalios of a Play. (1-2)
The newness and Englishness of this Restoration character are consistent with
what we know about the sea change that the Sir Martin character undergoes in
his ’translation’ from the French sources. Both Quinault’s Cleandre in
L ’Amant indiscret and Lelie in Moliere’s L ’Etourdi are more sympathetic and
intelligent characters than their English counterparts. Sir Martin is an
accommodation and an extension then, of the pre-existing Restoration fop
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which does not have a continental equivalent because it fulfills the wholly
English function of reducing the same Cavalier fears of impotence and
inadequacy which, as we have seen, were a legacy of the Civil W ar and
Interregnum period.
In terms of Dryden’s comic corpus too, Sir Martin Mar-all represents an
enlargement similar to that which gives it generic significance. By 1667,
Dry den had produced a variety of either intentionally weak male characters
like Failer and Sir Timorous, or underdeveloped male characters who are
dramatically subordinate to their better developed female counterparts like
Loveby, Philocles, Celadon and Lysimantes. His conscious thematization of
masculine inadequacy is coupled to an inability or reluctance to take men as
his major dramatic focus in comedy.
Sir M artin’s domination of the main plot in 1667, however, marks an
abrupt shift in the playwright’s depiction of the masculine. The play is a study
in male dupes. In addition to Sir Martin, there is his rival Sir John who is
ready to resign his claims to Millisent on the strength of W arner’s slander:
Sir John: . . . is she not honest?
Warner: Yes in my Conscience is she, for Sir M artin’s
Tongue’s no slander.
Sir John: But does he say to the contrary?
Warner: If one would believe him, which for my part I
do not, he has in a manner confess’d it to me.
Sir John: Hell and Damnation!
Warner: Courage, Sir, never vex your self, I ’le warrant
you ’tis all a Lye.
Sir John: But how shall I be ’sur’d ’tis so?
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Warner: When you be married you’l soon make tryal,
whether she be a maid or no. (IV. i.317-28)
It is Sir John who Warner marries off to Constance, Lord Dartmouth’s
expensive and newly pregnant mistress, for the exorbitant fee of 500 pounds.
Dartmouth is anxious to pay Warner to escape the designing clutches of
Constance’s aunt, Lady Dupe who has been extorting "n’ere . . . under the
rate of 500 1 . a time" (IV .i.211) from Lord Dartmouth for his sexual pleasure,
because, as Warner, true to his name, warns him, 500 pounds
. . . is nothing to what Bills you’l have when she’s
brought to bed, after her hard bargain, as they call it;
then cram’d Capons, Pea-hens, Chickens in the grease,
Pottages, and Frigacies, Wine from Shading, and La-
fronds, with New River, clearer by six pence the pound
than ever God Almighty made it; then Midwife— Dry-
Nurse— Wet-Nurse— and all the rest of their Accomplices
with Cradle, Baby-Clouts, and Bearing Cloaths . . .
and behind all these . . . a barbarous Pothecary’s bill
more inhumane than a Taylors. (IV .i.217-226)
In addition to these fops there is Sir Martin himself, perpetually cozened
and perpetually apologizing to his own servant, Warner. While it is true that
An Evenings Love (1668) in the following year, is an unexceptional comedy,
it does focus on the sexual relationships in a new way which probably owes
something to Dryden’s creation of Sir Martin. As gallants, Wildblood and
Bellamy are not particularly memorable, but neither are they subordinate to the
women they pursue. Dryden’s previous comic experience appears to have
enlarged his dramatic focus in this work to have allowed him to create more
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successful depictions of men in opposition to the full-blown booby of Sir
Martin M ar-all. At the same time this change shifted him from his earlier
preoccupation with women and with women’s domestic dominance. In An
Evening’s Love as Robert Markley notices,
Dryden uses conventional deprications of
women . . . to reassert the dominance of men in a
patriarchal society.5 1
He does this by figuring Jacinta, the heroine, as a slave both in her disguise
scenes and in W ildblood’s conversation with her:
Wildblood: For ought I see, the Great Ladies have the
Appetites which you Slaves should have; and you
Slaves the Pride which ought to be in Ladies. For, I
observe, that all women of your condition are like the
women of the Play-house, still Piquing at each other,
who shall go the best Drest, and in the Richest Habits:
till you work up one another by your high
flying . . . (IV. i. 143-9)
And of these two slave scenes Markley observes,
Both . . . may be seen as parables of the hierarchical
relationship between men and women that exists outside
the limits of the carnival: the former are conquerors,
the latter, apparently not much better than slaves.5 2
A major element in the shifting concepts of Dryden’s gender ideology
which takes place between Secret Love and An Evening’s Love appears to be
the character of W arner in Sir Martin Mar-all. Unlike the assortment of male
dupes, W arner is a ready wit who easily dominates his master and who
eventually takes Millisent from Sir Martin, whom he then marries off to the
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serving-girl Rose. Throughout the play, it is Warner who moves the action
forward, and it is possible to see him as Dryden’s first success in portraying a
positive male comic character.
If 1667 saw two major productions by John Dryden, it also saw Thomas
Jordan’s Wealth Outwitted, or Money is an Ass, an unexceptional comedy but
one which nicely illustrates the centrality of the thematization of gender
concerns in early Restoration comedy in many obvious instances, as for
example when gender becomes problematized by the banal repartee of the
drunken hero:
Captain Penniless: What is your name sweet Lady.
Feminia; Feminia Sir.
Captain: You are a woman.
Feminia: I think so Sir.
Captain: ’Tis true my little piece of modesty, you can
but think so, yet by your name you are.
Feminia: And I think you are a man. (22-3)
Although unremarkable as a comedy, Wealth Outwitted deserves mention since
it is always ignored and may actually mark an early point in the transformation
of theater audiences observed by Pierre Danchin in his landmark essay of
1968.5 3
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1668: The Sullen Lovers. The Mulberry Garden. She Would if She Could.
Thomas Shadwell was to become the successor in the 1670s to Sir
Robert Howard’s continuation of the Jonsonian humours mode of comedy.5 4
It is appropriate therefore, that the most pronounced of the four impertinent
fops in The Sullen Lovers, or The Impertinents (1668) was understood by
contemporary audiences to be a caricature of Sir Robert. Albert S. Borgman,
ShadwelFs literary biographer, puts the contemporary identification of Sir
Robert with Sir Positive in these words:
. . . the apparent satire of Sir Robert Howard in the
character of Sir Positive assured this play of
success . . . it is indisputable that [Shadwell] gave Sir
Positive numerous characteristics associated in the
minds of theatre goers with Sir Robert Howard.5 5
The characteristics associated with Sir Robert are his claims to pre-emininent
expertise in all the known arts and sciences. This humour appears to undergo a
disintegration during the course of the action and in the final acts Sir Positive
claims abilities more suited to a super-hero than to a Restoration gentleman:
Sir Positive to Lady Vain: P ’shaw! I could live in the
water so well, that o ’ my Conscience I am Amphibious,
I could catch fish as well as any Cormorant or Otter,
nay I can live so long under-water, that (but that I have
greater designs on foot here) I would go into the West
Indies to dive for Sponges and Corals, and if in one
year I were not the richest Man that ever went thither I
would be hang’d . . . when I swum over agen. (77)
104
Borgman also offers three contemporary accounts of Sir Robert’s vanity
which are worth mentioning here. John Evelyn refers to the man as "that
universal pretender," and records dining at his house, calling him:
a gentleman pretending to all manner of arts and
sciences, for which he had been the subject of comedy,
under the name of Sir Positive; not ill-natur’d but
insufferably boasting.
And Borgman records Andrew Marvell’s impression of the man:
of birth, state, wit, strength, courage, How’rd
presumes,
And in his breast wears many Montezumes.5 6
Still more pertinent however is Pepys’ entry of May 8, 1668 after an evening
spent attending The Sullen Lovers for the fourth time:
But Lord! to see how this play of Sir Positive At-All, in
abuse of Sir Robert Howard, do take, all the Duke’s
and everybody’s talk being of that, and telling more
stories of him, of the like nature, that it is now the
town and country talk, and, they say, is most exactly
true.5 7
Sir Positive’s significance to the play however, is not the simple fact of
his particular humour. Rather he is important because this fact indicates a debt
on Shadwell’s part in his first play to Dryden and to the Howards and because
the character separates the sullen lovers themselves who are both the sine qua
non of this play and an interesting and new combination of those generic
elements which thematize the gender ideology we have been exploring in this
chapter.
105
W e have already seen Dryden’s early preoccupation with gender
ideology in the comedies and, we have noted in particular, the importance of
Sir Martin Mar-all (1667) as a transitional work in his dramatic representation
of male characters. Sir Positive appears connected in a number of ways to this
earlier play which was still very popular in 1668. Its parody o f Sir Robert,
Dryden’s brother-in-law, connects the play with the now famous Dryden who
in 1668 published "An Essay of Dramatic Poesy" in refutation of his famous
brother-in-law’s theory of drama. In the passage cited above, Sir Positive
shows himself as a character who, while astonishingly incompetent, imagines
himself as exceptionally gifted as Sir Martin did in Dryden’s earlier play,
Sir Martin: Well, Madam, I’le take one turn here i’th’
Piazzas; a thousand things are hammering in this head;
’tis a fruitful Noddle, though I say it. [Exit Sir Martin.]
Lady Dupe: Go thy ways for a most conceited Fool.
(I.i.44-47)
Another similarity occurs in those scenes in which the two fops, Sir
Martin and Sir Positive respectively, woo their ladies with music. Although
these scenes are constructed differently, have very different outcomes and
possibly both owe their inspiration to Sir Frederick Frollick’s fiddler-bailiffs in
Etherege’s The Comical Revenge (1664), they share the similarity that they
both ridicule a humoursome fop’s claim to musical ability. In Sir Martin Mar-
all. Millisent has demanded that the Knight play and sing her a song of his
own composition as a proof of his love for her. Warner, M ar-all’s ever-
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resourceful manservant, engineers a way for the tone-deaf Sir Martin to win
his lady. The knight simply has to stand at a distance from her window and
mime the song while Warner does the rest:
Millisent: Methinks he plays and sings still, and yet we
cannot hear him.— Play louder, Sir Martin, that we may
have the fruits on’t.
Warner: peeping. Death! this abominable Fool will
spoil all agen, Damn him, he stands making his
Grimaces yonder, and he looks so earnestly upon his
Mistres, that he hears me not . . .
Millisent: Ah, ah! have I found you out, Sir? now as I
live and breathe, this is a pleasant, Rose,— his man
play’d and sung for him, and he, it seems, did not
know, when he should give over. [Millisent and Rose
laugh.] (V .i.203-11)
This musical-wooing m otif is varied in Shadwell’s later play. Here Sir
Positive, eager to delight Lady Vain, bursts in upon the company with his
musicians in tow:
Sir Positive: . . . let me tell you I have as much power
of Invention in Musique as any man in England: Come
in.
[Enter Fidlers and play a ridiculous piece of
music.]
Sir Positive: How do you like it Stanford, is it not
well? What say you Cozin, ha?
Lady Vain: Indeed Sir Positive, it’s very agreeable.
Sir Positive: Upon my honour this honest fellow plaid it
with a great deal of glory, he is a most incomparable
Bower, he has the most luscious, the most luxurious
bow-hand of any man in Europe, take that from me,
and let me tell you, if any man gives you a better
account of the Intrigue of the Violin, then I do, I am
Owl, a Puppy, a Coxcomb, a Logger-head, or what you
will. (40)
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Sir Positive’s first function, in The Sullen Lovers, is to keep separate the
wooing couple of the play’s title. This he does in company with a few other
notable fops. From the perspective of gender ideology however, Sir Positive,
as noted above, is a dramatic representation of the same devastating
incompetence which permitted a comic reduction of Cavalier fears through
Dryden’s Sir Martin. Shadwell, however, expands on the vanity of the
character, and so makes Sir Positive much less an innocent and much more a
comic scapegoat.
Shadwell recognized that the success of Sir Martin Mar-all was based on
the audience’s need to sneer at the inadequacies they feared would be
recognized in themselves. In addition to Sir Positive’s maximized vanity
therefore Shadwell improves on the Dryden model by adding further fops in
the person of the Country Gentleman who woos Emilia, as well as the poet
Ninny, and the overly affectionate Woodcock. It is Woodcock, incidentally,
who most clearly connects foppishness to the contemporary problematization of
masculinity in Shadwell’s first play since his (Woodcock’s) humour is to kiss
all his male acquaintances repeatedly. While Susan Staves cautions us that
"though fops are in various ways effeminate . . . there is no necessary
connection between foppery and male homosexuality."5 8 Woodcock’s
homosexual tendencies are obvious, unapologetically depicted and may, in
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fact, be emphasized by his name, since, although he pursues Emilia, he
embraces only men, only those whom he would but is not able to cock:
Woodcock: Dear Ninny, Ah Dear Lovel: Ah my dear
Jack Stanford, I am the happiest Man in thy Friendship
of any M an’s upon Earth, Dear Jack, I have the
greatest value for thee in the World; prethee Kiss me
agen dear Heart. [Kisses them all] (22);
Woodcock: Dear Heart, let me kiss thee; Gad thou art
a great Judge (26);
Woodcock: O Dear Rascal, kiss me! thou art the
honestest fellow in the world (36);
Woodcock: I had not the power to stay away from thee,
my Dear Bullyrock, for I enjoy myself no where so
well as in thy Company: Let me kiss thee Dear Heart;
’Gad I had rather kiss thee than any Woman.
Stanford: This is beyond all Example: Oh horrid! his
kindness is a greater persecution than the Injuries of
others. (35)
But if Shadwell is taking his cues from Sir Martin Mar-all in the
disposition, treatment, and abundance of his fop characters and in the
significance of male gender ideology to his comic drama, he is also paying
attention to other Dryden comedies, and to comedies by other members of the
Howard family. Shadwell’s first play is conscious of the generic potentials and
the generic sources of Restoration drama, especially as they related to the
Howard family. His mockery of Sir Robert Howard is similar in one respect to
Etherege’s ironic use of the heroic plot in The Comical Revenge, which
challenged the untenable "language of moral absolutism" of oldstyle Cavalier
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culture.5 9 Like Sir Robert, Sir Positive is presented as an heroic dramatist
who describes his poem in these words:
Sir Positive: . . . let me tell you, Sir, if in any
Drammatick Poem there has been such breaks, such
Characters, such Figures, such Images, such Heroick
Patterns, such Heights, such Flights, such Intrigues,
such Surprizes, such Fire, Salt, and Flame, then I am
no Judge: I understand nothing in this world. (51)
Shadwell is careful in his Prologue to damn exactly this kind of play:
No kinde Romantick Lover in his Play,
To sigh and whine out passion, such as may
Charm Waitingwomen with Heroick Chime,
And still resolve to live and die in Rhime;
Such as your Eares with Love, and Honour feast,
And play at Crambo for three houres at least:
That fight and wooe, in Verse in the same breath,
And make Similitudes, and Love in Death. (13, 13-20)
It is this condemnation that leads Borgman to identify Shadwell’s use of the Sir
Positive/Sir Robert caricature as a very early attempt,
to ridicule the absurdities of the heroic drama [one
which] precedes by three years and a half the
presentation of . . . The Rehearsal.6 0
If Shadwell is exploiting his generic knowledge to ridicule the Heroick
Drama as Etherege did in The Comical Revenge, he is also using his
knowledge like Etherege to create new generic possibilities. He too is striving
for a comic subgenre capable of expressing the transformations in gender
ideology which disturbed his age. But Shadwell’s generic explorations take a
much different and, perhaps not accidentally, a diametrically opposite direction
110
to those of Etherege. Where Etherege exfoliates, Shadwell reduces. Etherege’s
three fully developed plots in The Comical Revenge are countered by only one
fully developed plot in The Sullen Lovers.
Shadwell’s play shares the same identification between the humours of
the male and female lovers that was established in James Howard’s All
Mistaken and later developed in Secret Love. The Sullen Lovers also takes up
the lietmotif of gynophobia as it appeared in the character of Colonel Blunt in
Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662) and the characters Mr. Vain and
Comely in James Howard’s The English Monsieur (1663).6 1 But Shadwell,
the novice playwright, deploys these recognizable elements with an innovative
economy of plotting worthy of a more experienced hand.
Stanford and Emilia are the sullen lovers, who share a surly,
misanthropic humour. This humour makes them especially ill-disposed towards
members of the opposite sex, and Stanford’s explicit formulation of his sexual
aversion is similar in intention to the phrase "I’ll woo no woman" by Colonel
Blunt, the original Restoration gynophobe. Like Blunt, Stanford will fall in
love with Emilia "against [his] will":
Stanford: Women! O name em not: They are impertinence
It self, I can scarce endure the sight of em. (20)
Stanford: Am I trapan’d into Womens Company?
[Offers to go out, Lovell layes hold of him]. (37)
I l l
But instead of moving this recognizable motif towards a resolution based on a
breeches role, Shadwell combines it with the m otif of male and female
recognition familiar to us now from the split-plots of All Mistaken and Secret
Love. By this formula Emilia (like Mirada or Florimell), shares her intended’s
humour and they fall in love when they recognize themselves in each other,
Stanford: . . . none of our sex will dispute folly with
any of yours.
Emilia: That’s hard, I find nothing but Owls among the
best of you; your young men are all positive, forward,
conceited Coxcombs; and your old men all formall
nothings, that wou’d have sullen gravity mistaken for
wisdom.
Stanford: This is not altogether so much Impertinence
as I expected from one of your Sex; but let me tell you,
I have too often suffer’d by Women, not to fear the
best of ’em, there being nothing to be found in most of
the sex, but vanity, pride, envy and hypocrisie,
uncertainty and giddiness of humour; the furious desires
of the young make ’em fit to be seduc’d by the flesh, as
the envy and malice of the old prepare ’em to be led
away by the Devil.
Emilia: I must confess I don’t perceive yet that you are
altogether so ridiculous as the rest of
Mankind . . . (44-5)
The alienation of masculine and feminine that accompanies such
recognitions takes place in the other plots in both the split-plot tragicomedies,
All Mistaken and Secret Love. It is, however, dramatically compressed in The
Sullen Lovers. Here it appears in the same plot as both the recognition scene
and the reconciliation of the masculine and feminine. Emilia and Stanford are
separated by each of the inadequate, incompetent, unmanly fops in a series of
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horrible coincidences that has Emilia wondering aloud by Act II: "Sure there is
Magick in this; never to be free" (40). By this same device or tendency
towards compression, Stanford proves his manly courage and Emilia
demonstrates her feminine wit in the various ways that each of them handles
the fops who are preventing their union.
Emilia and Stanford are interrupted in their conversation by Huffe, a
bully, who enters on them unannounced and unwelcome. He begins a boring
tale about backgammon knowing Stanford usually gives him ’two pieces’ to be
rid of his company. This time, Stanford kicks him, and then kicks him out. In
the next scene, Stanford is again prevented from wooing Emilia, this time by
Sir Positive, who takes him for a second in a duel with a citizen who had
heckled Sir Positive’s play. At the rendezvous, the citizens postpone fighting
again and again. Their cowardice and Stanford’s anger is presented here in
juxtaposition to his already established masculine willingness to come to
blows, his worthiness, in other words, to be one half of a Cavalier match:
Stanford: O Cowardly Curs! Will they never fight . . .
Why you Impudent Rascals! how dare you come into
the Field? must I be diverted thus long by you?
[offers to kick ’em.] (51, 53)
Like Stanford, Emilia too is the victim of fools. She is pursued
romantically by both Woodcock and by Ninny, and eventually manages to
elude each of them by playing to their belief in her exclusive affection:
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Ninny: Hist, Madam; before George ’twas unkindly
done, not to remember your assignation just now.
Emilia: You’ll spoil all: I could no get loose; run into
the garden, there’s a back door: I’le come to you
immediately; make haste we are observed.
Ninny: O ho! this is something.
Stanford: This woman has a soul [Exeunt omnes.] (88)
Their masculine inadequacy is also set in contrast to Stanford’s
willingness to fight. Their general unworthiness and the specific fact that they
are both unsuited to a match with Emilia is established by their joint cowardice
in a duel whose single stage direction is a sufficient description of all that
ensues: "Draw and fight at distance" (85) and it is this contrast between the
unmanly fops and the sullen but still decidedly masculine Stanford, which
gives the play’s resolution its savour. Awakened by the fiddlers Sir Positive
has commissioned to celebrate his marriage to the prostitute Lady Vain,
Emilia’s father wishes him joy and assures him that
your Cozin Emilia and this [Country] Gentleman will
not be long after ye. (90)
W ith Ninny and Woodcock, Stanford is also present, and of course he objects,
telling the man he is mistaken, his daughter is promised to someone else.
When Emilia’s father demands who it is, all three men answer "To me" (90)
and in the eclair is sement that follows, both fops discover that they have been
fooled moments before Sir Positive discovers he has married a prostitute. All
the fools, in other words, get their comeuppance and the play ends on the
general agreement that Stanford and Emilia will marry and that therefore the
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masculine and feminine principles will be reconciled, at least for those who
deserve such a reconciliation by virtue of their tested and proven personal
merits which are shown as complementary to, but not dependent on,
aristocratic birth.
ShadwelFs economy and compression in The Sullen Lovers are in sharp
contrast to the dramatic tangle of Sir Charles Sedley’s The Mulberry Garden,
also of 1668, and I believe Shadwell’s demonstrable control in this, his first
play, is significant evidence of the superior dramatic ability which reaches full
flower in later productions like Epsom-Wells (1672), The Libertine (1675) and
The Virtuoso (1676).
Next to Shadwell’s first effort and the dramatic corpus he later achieved,
Sedley’s work pales, and The Mulberry Garden. Sedley’s first play, is no
exception. The play is of interest to us for the issues it raises, but no sensible
theater manager would ever mount a revival of it simply because it is badly
constructed and frequently confusing as Sedley’s biographer, Vivian de Sola
Pinto observes:
It is almost as if Sedley had resolved to bring in by
hook or by crook every stock situation of contemporary
comedy that he could think of. Etherege probably
referred euphemistically to this overloading of the plot
when he remarked "the fatness of the soile produced to
big a Crop."6 2
The confusion of the play’s complexity, to which Pinto refers, is itself
informative. Like Shadwell, Sedley was looking for new forms to express his
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culture’s radical redefinition both of manners, and of maleness and femaleness.
As an inexperienced playwright with only minor dramatic gifts, he was unable
to integrate the contradictions of his culture with as high a degree of success as
Shadwell or Etherege. Still, the play was very popular and therefore expressed
something relevant to its audience despite its palpable and distracting lack of
control. One reason for the play’s contemporary relevance is the character of
Forecast, an old-style Father, who keeps his daughters Althea and Diana under
lock and key. He is an embodiment of the same contradictions in Sedley’s
culture mentioned above. He cannot willingly accommodate the new morality
and allow his daughters the same freedoms which his brother, Everyoung,
allows his own daughters, Olivia and Victoria. Everyoung criticizes him on
this point:
Everyoung: . . . you think your Daughters, like your
money, never safe, but under lock and key. (I.i. 102-3)
At the same time however Forecast is quite astute in money matters. While
wooing a woman he imagines to be a rich widow, he gives her some keen
advice about a lawsuit which emphasizes his unscrupulousness at the same time
that it reveals one set of social competition which had "radically challenged the
presumptions of aristocratic culture."6 3 The Widow is complaining that she is
about to lose a lawsuit worth about £5,000 to an influential politician. Forecast
suggests she distribute that much in bribes and buy herself some justice, at
which she balks and he explains:
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. . . it were unreasonable to expect thy tender years
should understand the true worth of money . . . to
trample on these unprofitable and foolish principles the
honourable Beggars of former days Govern’d their lives
by . . . (II.iv.74-9)
Forecast’s cynicism, of course, would make him very unattractive in the
eyes of a contemporary Restoration audience, many of whom would be the
sons and daughters of families cheated of their property in similarly corrupt
legal actions during the Interregnum, the era in which Sedley’s play is set. But
because of this, Restoration audiences would also recognize the modernity and
necessity of Forecast’s suggestion, even though it is motivated by greed and
self-interest. The Cavaliers, in other words, changed under the pressures
exerted by Civil War and Interregnum exigencies. Forecast’s survival into the
Restoration at the end of the play is an emblem of the survival of some of the
new, hard-nosed practicality forced on Cavalier and Puritan alike during the
years 1642-1660. Forecast had originally objected to Althea’s affection for the
politically dangerous Cavalier Eugenio, fearing Parliamentary reprisals:
Forecast: I should be sorry to see a child of mine
solliciting her Husband’s Composition at a Committee.
(II. i. 32-4)
But shortly before the end of the play he is mistakenly imprisoned for
illegally harbouring Eugenio who is now a fugitive. Soon however political
power changes hands, the Cavaliers are restored, Forecast goes free, and
Everyoung describes his brother’s blind luck:
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Everyoung: . . . this is the happiest accident that ever
befell mortal, for an old notorious Roundhead to be
taken for a Cavalier at this time. (V.iv.43-6)
Puritan practicality, in other words, will not now deny a connection to the
Cavalier honor Forecast earlier despised, and in fact, the two will soon come
together in the marriage of Eugenio and Althea which will presumably produce
a new kind of Cavalier, one who will not subscribe to "unsuccessful
[strategies] for coping with the demands of upper-class existence."6 4
If the modernity of Forecast’s cynicism in money matters is set against
"those unprofitable and foolish principles" belonging to the Cavaliers ("the
honorable Beggars of former days"), it is ironic that his treatment of his
daughters’ honour is as archaic as the Widow’s naive notions of impartial
litigation. Sedley, to his credit, attempts to mirror Forecast’s daughters’
archaic predicament o f being housebound and separated from their lovers and
men in general in an heroic subplot, the elevated diction of which recalls the
similar use of such a device in Etherege’s Comical Revenge. Unfortunately
Sedley does not reproduce the same irony that allows the device to ’play’ in
Etherege’s comedy. O f the failure of Sedley’s imitation of Etherege, de Sola
Pinto remarks,
It is true that Sir George Etherege in his first
play . . . had used the same incongruous mixture, but
parody of the heroic tragedy of Orrery and Dryden was
at least hinted in the title of that piece . . . In Sedley’s
first play the incongruity, not only of ideas but of
language is especially shocking.6 5
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The result in The Mulberry Garden is a handful of scenes whose
slowness may account for the playwright’s dramatic decision to limit their
number and so inhibit the development of Forecast’s daughters’ characters as
well as those of their lovers. De Sola Pinto calls the four characters of the
heroic plot, "the merest lay figures."6 6 A small taste of their diction will
serve here both to confirm the tedium of the subplot and to emphasize the fact
that despite his dramatic inexperience Sedley like Shadwell, Etherege, and
Dryden before him, has chosen gender ideology as the central concern of his
first comedy:
Althea: Under what Tyrrany are Women born!
Here we are bid to Love and there to scorn.
. . . our liking like a headstrong beast,
Were made for nothing but to be opprest.
The Horse may shake the Rider from his back,
The Dog his hated Master may forsake;
Yet nothing of their native worth impair,
Nor any conscious sting about them bear.
But if a Virgin an Escape contrive,
She must for ever in dishonour live. (II.ii.207-16)
The comic plot also concerns gender ideology and follows the
development of a love-match between Everyoung’s witty daughter Olivia and
her gallant, Jack Wildish. Sedley matches men’s discourse about women to
women’s discourse about men early in the play to establish the fact that this
comedy deals with new relations between the sexes:
Estridge: . . . I have still observ’d that when one of
these persons of Honour does a little forget herself,
though at first through a secret Sympathy and invincible
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inclination (as they call it) for one particular man, she
ever after loves the whole Sex the better for it.
Wildish: Right; for these good Creatures, Women, are
like Cats, if once made tame, any one may play with
’um; if not, there’s no coming near ’um (I.ii.77-85);
Olivia [to Victoria, her sister]: the only way to oblige
most men is to use ’um thus, a little now and then;
even to their faces, it give ’um an Opinion of our wit;
and it is consequently a spur to them. (I.iii.29-32)
Sedley also offers his audience an explanation for the linguistic hostility
between the sexes in his play. Olivia demands of her Gallant, "Why do you
make us poor women the subject of your mirth?" To which Wildish replies
somewhat fancifully, but nonetheless in terms which accept the antagonism
between the sexes as an established fact,
You are grown of late so uncharitable, and villainous
hard-hearted, are incompass’d with so many difficulties,
as decency, honour, and reputation, that we men that
love our pleasure, begin to hate you worse than
Beggars do a Coach with the Glasses drawn up, despair
of Relief and fall a Railing. (II.i.92-99)
Despite the spuriousness of W ildish’s explanation of it, there can be no clearer
expression of the characteristic Restoration hostility and ambivalence towards
women. 1668 in particular saw a powerful expression of this ambivalence and
hostility in the form of the Bawdy House Riots during which, for a period of
weeks, gangs of apprentices attacked the brothels which courtiers
frequented.6 7
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1668 was also a year for innovation in comedy. In addition to the efforts
by the new playwrights Shadwell and Sedley, the year also marked a turning
point in the comedy of John Dryden with the changes to his comic voice
already noted in An Evening’s Love. George Etherege too returned to his
experimentations with comic form with She Would if She Could. This second
play by Etherege is often seen as a revolution or crystallization in the subgenre
of Restoration comedy. Kathleen Lynch, for example, wrote that with She
Would if She Could, "the main course of development in Restoration comedy
had been determined.6 8 Norman N. Holland refers specifically to the plot
structure of She Would if She Could, describing the achievement of the play in
these words,
Etherege had come a step closer towards the final
Restoration style . . . one plot matching two witty pairs
of lovers.6 9
Holland’s words could be applied equally well to Shadwell’s The Sullen
Lovers (which premiered on May 2, 1668, three months after Etherege’s
play,) because in addition to the Stanford-Emilia couple discussed above, there
is a second and subordinate couple (Lovell-Caroline). We know from the
foregoing examination of that play that Shadwell had paid very close attention
to the generic experiments of Dryden and the Howards, whose developments
served as models for much of the material in The Sullen Lovers. It does seem
likely that Shadwell also examined Etherege’s work with the same sensitivity
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he had turned towards Dryden and the Howards, and this impression is
confirmed by Shadwell’s later praise of She Would if She Could in the 1671
Preface to The Humourists (1670) where he refers to Etherege’s second play
as
the best Comedy that has been written since the
Restauration of the Stage.7 0
The possibility of Etherege’s influence on Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers
has gone unmentioned although Robert D. Hume recognizes a similarity
between the work of these men in a very general way. Hume cautions us about
the "inadequacy of conventional categories."7 1 This would prevent a
comparison of Shadwell, "the leader of the humours school," and Etherege,
one of the inventors of "wit comedy. "7 2 In this chapter my method has been
to look beyond the limitations of such generic subcategories, since it is my
central claim that the proliferation and diversity of these forms during the
Restoration is strong evidence of a widespread and urgent cultural program to
reduce through comedy the threat o f the transformations in gender ideology to
contemporary culture. Roger Thompson, who has studied the pornography of
this period, describes the male cultural program as the restoration of the
"theory of male mastery, and with it the double standard.7 3 But however
accurate Thompson is, he does not describe the urgent necessity of this
cultural project or the fact that this threat was especially real to the Cavalier
men who wrote these comedies and who comprised their majority audience.
122
Critical focus on individual kinds of comedy obscures similarities between
works and authors who only became identified with distinct comic subgenres at
a later date.
When it is clear however that Etherege and Shadwell, despite their
different approaches, were working on essentially the same cultural problem,
then affinities and influences between their work become apparent. These
include the similarity of the single plot involving two pairs of witty lovers as
identified by Holland, as well as the superficial similarity of the use of the
names Cockwood and Woodcock to describe minor characters in Etherege and
Shadwell respectively. Finally, there is an overwhelming similarity in the main
dramatic actions of both plays where all the comedy derives from the ways in
which lovers are continually and blamelessly frustrated in their efforts to be
left alone together.
In a poignant way this last resemblance thematizes the threat of sex to
Restoration males, it emblematizes the simultaneous fear and desire which lay
behind their markedly ambivalent attitudes to sex and to gender, the libertine
pursuit of and need for women which was accompanied both by a pervasive
hostility in m en’s language about women and the ever present strategy of
abandoning a female lover once she had been sexually used. The centrality of
the ambivalence in male attitudes to women created by the intensity of the
threat of gender transformation to male Cavalier audiences is essential to an
123
historical understanding of Restoration comedy and surfaces, as we already
have seen, in the lietmotif of the gynophobic lover. An understanding of this
threat is particularly relevant to Etherege’s She Would if She Could, a play in
which even the title is obviously calculated to appeal to men threatened by sex
since it fixes the responsibility for not being able to squarely on a woman’s
shoulders.
To begin with what is most obvious, in She Would if She Could over a
period of several days seven apparently determined and fairly intelligent people
are unable to have anything remotely like a sexual experience. To extend
Laura Brown’s phrase She Would if She Could is not only about the "studied
evasion of sexual conflict," it is also about the studied evasion o f sex.7 4 This
evasion of sex is raised as a topic early in the play, when Courtall explains to
Freeman that he is not refusing to reveal a new lover to his friend, but rather
that what appears to be his affair with Lady Cockwood is actually far more
intricate and, in one sense, far more innocent:
Freeman: What devilish oath could she invent to fright
thee from a discovery?
Courtall: W ilt thou believe me if I swear, the
preservation of her honour has been my fault, and not
hers?
Freeman: This is something.
Courtall: why then, know that I have still been as
careful to prevent all opportunities, as she has been to
contrive ’em; and still have carried it so like a
gentleman, that she has not had the least suspicion of
unkindness. (L i.255-65)
124
Earlier in this same scene, the woman’s husband, Sir Oliver Cockwood
explained to Courtall his own apparent distaste for his wife, his dissimulation
of affection for her, and his avoidance of making love with her:
Sir Oliver: . . . a man cannot be altogether ungrateful,
sometimes one is obliged to kiss, and fawn, and toy,
and lie fooling an hour or two, when a man had rather,
if it were not for the disgrace sake, stand all that while
in the pillory paulted with rotten eggs and oranges.
(I. ii. 133-38)
Sir Oliver’s complaint follows on the initial discussion between Courtall and
Freeman in which they excuse each other from the gentlemanly hobby of
pursuing prostitutes together because in all o f London there are none to be
had:
Courtall: . . . in my memory; a gentleman should not
have gone out of his chamber, but some civil officer of
the game would have been with him, and have given
him a notice where he might have had a course or two
in the afternoon.
Freeman: Truly a good motherly woman of my
acquaintance t’other day, talking of the sins of the
times, told me, with tears in her eyes, that there are a
company of higgling rascals, who partly for themselves,
but more especially for some secret friends, daily
forestall the markets. (I.i. 11-21)
The evasion of sex or the evasion of sexual encounters therefore is, according
to the first scene of She Would if She Could, a very important topic in the
play. One which is at once patently obvious because of the frequency of its
occurrence and, at the same time, constantly obscured, due to the weight and
125
variety of the rationalizations used to defer any sexual encounter to some
future date from which it recedes with each new attempt to realize it.
Behind the various male characters’ avoidance o f sex is the same horror
of the feminine experienced by the gynophobe in earlier Restoration comedies.
Courtall’s fear surfaces as the pronounced distaste for Lady Cockwood whom
he calls "this ravenous kite" (III.i.65). When he is drunk, Sir Oliver give a
voice to similar antifeminine feelings whose sheer viciousness attests to the
intensity of his fear and loathing of his wife:
Avoid my presence, the very sight of that face makes
me more impotent than an eunuch. (II.ii. 151-2)
Finally, in addition to Lady Cockwood’s plans to revenge herself on Courtall
which earn her Freeman’s epithet "Madam Machiavil" (IV.ii.305), there are
also Etherege’s portraits of the teasing and spiteful wild girls, Gatty and
Ariana, who make a frightening resolution to punish all of their male servants,
Gatty: . . . how I envy that sex! well! we cannot plague
’em enough when we have it in our power for those
privileges which custom has allowed ’em above us.
(I. ii. 163-5)
However unlike their overtly gynophobic forebears, by 1668 Etherege’s
male characters have learned to dissimulate their fear o f women. In Courtall’s
words, they carry their aversion "so like a gentleman that" women have
"not . . . the least suspicion of unkindness." Sir Oliver, for example, assumes
the demeanor of a dedicated rake, one who is, like his friend Sir Joslin Jolly,
126
as arrant a sinner as the best of us, and will boggle at
nothing that becomes a man of honour. (I.i. 182-3)
But despite the way he would have the male world see him however he
requires "a dose of cantharides" (Spanish Fly) (I.i. 147) before he can bring
himself to make love to his wife. And Lady Cockwood at one point knowingly
assures her woman, Sentry, that Sir Oliver "is not able to play the spark
abroad" (I.ii.53-4) presumably because she knows he is "impotent as a
eunuch" as he admits above. When Sir Oliver is discovered in mid-debauch by
his wife, Courtall prevents her from "getting an absolute dominion"
(III.iii.382) over the knight by offering what is very likely the truth as an
excuse for Sir Oliver’s apparently unfaithful behavior:
all this is mere raillery, a way of talk, which Sir Oliver
being well-bred, has learned among the gay people of
the town. (III.iii.399-401)
As one of the wild Girl characters wittily observes of Sir Oliver,
Gatty: I dare say he counterfeited his sin, and is real in
his repentance. (III. iii.396)
Sir Oliver then, is a wittier version of the gynophobic Mr. Vain, in
James Howard’s The English Monsieur (1663). Unlike Howard however
Etherege does not cheapen his comedy by explicitly signalling his fool’s
humour. Etherege’s audience is left to sift through a complex portrayal of a
fool, to employ its own wit to make judgements which would have been
explicitly signalled in an earlier comedy. By 1668, in other words, the
127
audience’s wit has been trained to accommodate a set of familiar expectations
which Etherege recognizes and exploits. Despite this distinction however
Comely’s description of Vain, "he loves to be thought a debauch, in all kinds,
and is none" (1) is equally applicable to Sir Oliver. His libertine speech shocks
Mrs. Sentry who is listening to his conversation with Courtall from a hiding
place during Act One. One scene later, when she relates Sir Oliver’s visit to
Lady Cockwood, it is clear that she had never imagined him capable of such
libertine behaviour:
Mrs Sentry: Had you but been there, madam, to have
overheard Sir Oliver’s discourse, he would have made
you bless yourself; there is not such another wild man
in all the town; all his talk was of wenching, and
swearing, and drinking, and tearing. (I.ii.45-9)
The real worth of these claims to libertinism which so shock Sentry is made
clear later in the play when he brags about a recent sexual exploit to Courtall.
If, as Sir Oliver tells Courtall, Sentry already knew of his assignation in a
ditch with a tinker’s wife, she could hardly have been shocked merely by
libertine language:
Sir Oliver: . . . ’twas my fortune t’other day to have an
intrigue with a tinker’s wife in the country, and this
malicious slut [Mrs Sentry] betrayed the very ditch
where we used to make our assignation, to my lady.
(II. ii. 164-68)
Sir Oliver then, is dissimulating or overcompensating for the impotence
which is caused by his fear and loathing of his wife. His rambles are, as
128
Courtall observes, "mere raillery, a way of talk." Behind this rake we see the
familiar figure of a Restoration man made deeply insecure by a threat
embodied in a woman, and it is worth noting that his self-presentation as a
rake, his impotence, his subsequent self-loathing and his increasing resentment
of women are very common themes in Restoration literature. The best known
example of these themes is John W ilmot’s "The Imperfect Enjoyment" which
neatly describes the causal relationship between impotence and the kind of self-
loathing recognizable in Sir Oliver:
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent. (28-30)7 5
But if Sir Oliver resembles Mr. Vain, Courtall is only different from him
in the degree of success with which he dissimulates his fear, distaste, and
extreme mistrust o f women. This is especially true of his relationship with
Lady Cockwood whom he describes in this way:
she is the very spirit of impertinence, so foolishly fond
and troublesome, that no man above sixteen is able to
endure her. (I.ii.265-7)
Courtall’s characteristic way of coping with his ambivalent feelings is simply
to defer an assignation until a later date, at which time he will defer it again:
Courtall: Tomorrow about ten o’clock in the lower
walk of the New Exchange. (II.ii.78-9);
Courtall: . . . lastly, madam, we gain an opportunity to
contrive another appointment tomorrow, which mary
129
restore us unto all those joys we have been so
unfortunately disappointed of today. (III. i.229-32)
Similar to these postponements of sex, is the rhetoric of Courtall and
Freem an’s language, which is characterized by litotes, negatives, and
indirection. Markley believes the effect of this language is to distance them
not only from marriage but from the women they are to
marry and from what we might suppose are their own
sexual desires.7 6
This combination of deferral and distancing is mirrored in the actions of
every character in Etherege’s play. We have already seen that Courtall and Sir
Oliver’s assignations are deferred into an indefinite future. The same thing is
also true of sexual teasing by the wild girl characters Gatty and Ariana. In an
interesting compliment to his examination of male libertine ideology, Etherege
shows through these young female characters that sex for women in a male
oriented world is also very threatening and potentially costly, also
accompanied by hostility and ambivalence. Dale Underwood has perceptively
grounded both women’s ambivalence in the male double-standard which he
sees as the basis of the sexual antagonism of Etherege’s play:
they [Gatty and Ariana] acknowledge the libertine
premises concerning love and they are in revolt against
the conventional values and postures concerning
matrimony. But they do not . . . propose to take their
"pleasure" outside it. Their understanding of the double
standard and the position in which it places them is
clear and crucial. It reveals the basis for the sex
antagonism— or in terms of the play’s imagery the sex
warfare— in the world of the play.7 7
130
These women then, are precise equivalents of their male lovers, Courtall
and Freeman. Once again, Etherege does not explicitly signal this equivalence
in the kind of recognition scene familiar to us now from Secret Love. All
Mistaken or Flora’s Vagaries. Etherege is more subtle than this. He deploys
the audience’s now established generic expectations and pairs the perfectly
matched lovers in a way that is perfectly appropriate and perfectly in accord
with the emerging genre but which, nonetheless, does not require ostentatious
signalling. Such signalling itself is significantly deferred, distanced, or
postponed for the first time in the short history of Etherege’s genre.
By February 1668, therefore, what was to become wit comedy, comedy
of manners, Restoration comedy, sex comedy, Restoration sex comedy, or
early Restoration sex comedy had reached a phase of development in which
generic formulae were recognized and understood by playwright and audience
alike. This fact, together with the fact that 1668 and 1669 witnessed a
disproportionate number of new and successful comic playwrights indicates
that the comedy was completing a first phase of its development and beginning
a transition to a mature stage in which a growing number of plays exploit
generic formulae similar to the formula which allowed Restoration audiences
to appreciate Gatty and Ariana as female mirror-images of their rake lovers. It
is this appreciation, incidentally, that makes the ultimate postponement of the
play so humorous. Finally brought to a condition where their newly direct
131
language indicates their willingness to marry and consummate, Courtall and
Freeman have their wedding plans temporarily and ironically postponed by
Gatty and Ariana:
Courtall: (to Gatty) Now shall I sleep as little without
you, as I should do with you: madam, expectation
makes me almost as restless as jealousy.
Freeman: Faith, let us dispatch this business; yet I
never could find the pleasure of waiting for a dish of
meat, when a man was heartily hungry. Gatty:
Marrying in this heat would look as ill as fighting in
your drink.
Ariana: And be no more a proof of lover, than t’other
is of valour. (V.i.649-58)
Furthermore this final postponement follows the non-exit of Madam
Rampant, Sir Joslin’s arch-prostitute whose repeatedly deferred entrance
emblematizes the avoidance of the threat of sex which is central to She Would
if She Could. Despite the fact that she has never appeared on stage Sir Joslin
orders her pimp Rakehell, to "take Rampant with you and be going quickly"
(V.i.550). The audience’s expectation of finally seeing her, subjecting her to
their gaze, possessing her and, in no small way, consummating their
expectation of seeing her is disappointed, just as Lady Cockwood had been
disappointed by Courtall’s constant postponements. Followed by the
postponement of Courtall’s professed desire for marriage which happens next,
this calculated disappointment of audience expectations emphasizes the irony of
Courtall’s desires being disappointed by the same trick he had always used to
cheat Lady Cockwood. The ending of She Would if She Could a few lines
132
later further illustrates the relationship between Courtall’s postponements and
Etherege’s dramatic structure. As Markley points out, there is no
consummation, no closure on the wedding feast as there characteristically had
been in festive comedy:
Throughout She Would potentially disruptive actions
are displaced into speech: talking about sex defers
sexual experience to an unrealized future ’after’ the end
of the play, to the marriage conventions of festive
comedy that the playwright chooses not to dramatize.7 8
Given M arkley’s observations about closure, it is possible to see Sir George
Etherege’s second play as the complete libertine stagepiece of the 1660s. It
exposes the insecurity of which libertinism is a compensatory behavior. Then
in the presence of its own controlling fears, it enacts, studies, and dissects
desire, and defers closure or satiety in its characters, its audience, and its
ending. She Would if She Could is Etherege’s pure expression of desire
unsullied by any act involving the same consummation which libertine fears
will not allow.
This satiric aspect of the play however is often misconstrued. Laura
Brown, for example, appears to have Etherege’s principle of deferral in mind
when she refers to tension without conflict. But the larger satiric implications
of Etherege’s use of this device go unappreciated in her survey of dramatic
social satire:
The action of She Would if She Could is made up of a
series of similar episodes, which consist of tension
133
without conflict and which tend to establish the sexual
conservatism of the rakes despite the explicit libertinism
of the play’s surface. Etherege wants his protagonists to
appear to be aristocratic rakes, but without arousing any
of the serious sexual and social contradictions that
libertinism implies.7 9
By way of providing an alternative to these claims, I would say that the scenes
of "tension without conflict" do indeed establish "the sexual conservatism of
the rakes" and it is in his recognition of sources of this conservatism that
Etherege explores "serious sexual and social contradictions" of this period.
Finally, it is in his dramatic enactment of these social contradictions that
Etherege crystallizes many of the generic themes and structures which will
serve early Restoration sex comedy during the next two decades. His choice of
closure is a case in point. In the final pages of his seminal book, Two-Edg’d
Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege Wvcherlev and
Congreve. Markley observes that many of the
critically celebrated comedies that preceded Wav of The
W orld [1700] fall into one of two groups: those that
end by forestalling or denying closure— She Would if
She Could. The Man of Mode. The Country W ife— and
those that impose abruptly, often self-consciously,
moralistic or miraculous endings on their actions— The
Libertine. The Plain Dealer. The Double Dealer.
Love’s Last Shift. The penchant among the authors of
these plays for open-ended, inconclusive, or fantastic
fifth acts suggests that wit comedy as a genre never
develops a means of closure, a set of conventions to
resolve the ’wild debaucheries of gentlemen’ into a self-
justifying theatrical form .8 0
134
O f course, this is very likely true. I would only claim in addition that it
was Sir George Etherege who first problematized the ending of Restoration
comedy by matching his theme to his content in She Would if She Could in
February of 1668 and that, leaving aside the question of influence, this
externalized or deferred closure is repeated and so presumably reinforced by
Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers a few months later. In fact, Shadwell was in an
ideal position to have an intimate acquaintance with Etherege’s second play
since it was his wife who played Lady Cockwood, as Montague Summers
notes:
On Thursday, 6 February, 1667-8, Mrs. Shadwell
played Lady Cockwood in Etherege’s She W ou’d if She
Cou’d . that brilliant comedy which on its first
production fared so ill owing to the fact that the actors
were "extremely imperfect in the action of it," and it
may be noted that Mrs. Shadwell’s role is the most
important in the play.8 1
If, in other words, Mrs. Shadwell did experience difficulty with her role, it
would be only natural for her to discuss the difficulty with her husband
especially since, as we have seen above, Thomas Shadwell had a profound
sensitivity and depth of perception concerning drama. In any case, his
repetition of the deferred or external closure of She Would if She Could
helped make the problematized ending a generic characteristic of the emerging
comedy.
135
It is very clear from the foregoing analyses that despite surface
dissimilarities and irregularities the comic subgenre of early Restoration sex
comedy had a unifying generic project even in its most formative period.
Generic conventions do change in these plays. Early in 1660s, gynophobia, the
breeches role and the leitmotif of female pursuit of the male were deployed in
quite different ways from their later manifestations. It is an important point
that these surface generic conventions persist into the mature sex comedy of
the 1670s. But more important is the cultural and psychological need which
established these conventions. Immediately preceding the heyday of
Restoration comedy, male gender ideology was threatened by a massive
transformation in sex roles. This became the inheritance of a generation of
writers who reached puberty during the Civil W ar and Interregnum period.
The effects of this widespread crisis in masculinity is visible in the stage
comedies of these writers.
It remains now to show that the subgenre o f this comedy is not a simple
expression o f a monolithic and unchanging male ideology but that the genre is,
in Rosalie Colie’s phrase "meta-stable."8 2 It is a form with unifying features
which nonetheless experiences organic growth.
136
Notes
1 Abraham Cowley, The Cutter of Coleman Street, ed. Darlene Johnson
Gravett (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987) Epilogue 4, 160.
2 Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, Introduction, The Frolicks. or the
Lawyer Cheated, by Elizabeth Pohwhele (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977) 13.
3 A chronological list of these comedies follows:
Sir Abraham Cowley, The Cutter of Coleman Street (1661).
Sir Robert Howard, The Committee, or The Faithful Irishman
(1662).
Richard Rhodes, Flora's Vagaries (1663).
James Howard, The English Monsieur. A Comedy (1663).
John Dryden, The Wild Gallant (1663).
Sir George Etherege, The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub
(1664).
John Lacy, The Old Troop, or Monsieur Raggou (1664).
Thomas Killigrew, The Parson’s Wedding (1664).
James Howard, All Mistaken, or The Mad Couple (1665).
John Dryden, Sir Martin Mar-All (1667).
------------ Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen (1667).
Thomas Jordan, Wealth Outwitted, or Money is an Ass (1667).
Sir George Etherege, She W ou’d if She Could (1668).
Sir Charles Sedley, The Mulberry Garden (1668).
Thomas Shadwell, The Sullen Lovers, or The Impertinents (1668).
4 Charles Lamb, Specimens of the English Dramatick Poets. II, ed. Israel
Gollancz (Cambridge, 1893) 269.
5 Henry A. Beers, "Critical Essay” in Representative English Comedies
IV, ed. Charles M. Gayley (New York: Macmillan, 1936) 8-9.
6 James R. Sutherland, English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) 91: "In the character of Puny, a
young, rich brisk fop . . . Cowley started something that was to have a long
life in Restoration com edy."
137
7 It is clear that Howard had a special attachment for this character who is
based on an Irish domestic servant who
performed the extraordinary task of freeing Sir Robert’s
son from an English prison after he was put there for
offences against the Parliament. When the man returned
to Ireland he neglected to inform his master of the
young heir’s freedom, and instead spent several days
getting drunk for joy among his friends in Dublin. (In
C. Baker, Biographia Dramatica. II, 114-5.)
Throughout this chapter I use the spelling of the original edition (Teg), unless
I am quoting from the critical edition of 1921, which spells this character’s
name as Teague.
8 F. C. Montague, The Political History of England. 1600 - 1660 VII
(London, 1911) 290.
9 As a dramatic theme, gynophobia recurs in Richard Rhodes’ only play
Flora’s Vagaries (1663), as well as in James Howard’s The English Monsieur.
A Comedy (1663), and Thomas Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers, or The
Impertinents (1668), in Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1675) and in
W illiam W ycherley’s The Plain-Dealer (1676). As a reflection of
contemporary conflicts in gender ideology, gynophobia is connected to the
same ambivalence towards women which we have already encountered in
nondramatic works by Samuel Toreshell, John Bulwer and Moses a Vauts.
1 0 Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late
Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 74.
1 1 John Harrington Smith, The Gav Couple in Restoration Comedy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948) 48.
1 2 Smith 49-50.
1 3 Susan Staves, "Studies in the Comedy of John Dryden," Ph.D.
Dissertation, University of California, 1967, 13-14.
1 4 Robert Moss Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the
Comedies of Etherege. Wvcherlev and Congreve (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1990) 82.
1 5 Markley 84.
1 6 Frank Harper Moore, "Dr. Pelling, Dr. Pell and Dryden’s Lord
Nonsuch," Modern Language Review XLIX (1954): 349-51.
138
1 7 Markley 82.
1 8 Sir George Etherege, Letters of Sir George Etherege. ed. Frederick
Bracher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) 276.
1 9 Smith 48.
2 0 John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1710) 25.
2 1 This is a difficult point to document, but recent criticism seems to
concur that women favored the tragedies, the tragi comedies or the heroic
dramas over the laughing comedies. David Roberts, author of The Ladies:
Female Patronage of Restoration Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) cites
the hero of John Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice (1685) in support of this claim:
"comedies are so ill-bred and saucy with Quality, and always cramm’d with
out odious Sex” (81). See also Alan R. Botica’s D. Phil, thesis, "Audience,
Playhouse and Play in Restoration Theatre, 1660-1710," (Oxford: The British
Library/UM I, 1985) 79-88, 89-107. Botica documents a wealth of sources
which indicate that men constituted a majority audience in the Theaters
generally.
2 2 Harold Weber, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual
Understanding in Seventeenth-Centurv England (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1986) 78.
2 3 Markley 106.
2 4 Markley 106.
2 5 Markley 102.
2 6 Markley 104.
2 7 Norman Holland, The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of
Etherege. Wycherley and Congreve (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1959) 27.
2 8 Markley 110.
2 9 Markley 111.
3 0 Hume, Development of English Drama 244.
139
3 1 Alfred Harbage, Thomas Killigrew. Cavalier Dramatist (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1930) 191.
3 2 The title page of the Huntington Library copy adds the phrase "written
in 1640."
3 3 W eber 160-1.
3 4 David Foxon, Libertine Literature in England. 1660-1745 (London: The
Book Collector, 1964) 1.
3 5 Harbage 177.
3 6 Harbage 178.
3 7 Richard Flecknoe, The Life of Thomaso The Wanderer: an Attack upon
Thomas Killigrew (London: Dobell, 1925) 10.
3 8 Robert D. Hume, "Dryden, James Howard and the Date of All
Mistaken." Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 422-29.
3 9 Weber 157-8.
4 0 Staves, Players’ Scepters 37.
4 1 Smith 58.
4 2 Samuel Pepys, 2 March 1667: "... so great performance of a comical
part was never, I believe, in the world before as Nell do this, both as a mad
girle, then most and best of all when she comes in as a young gallant; and hath
the motions and the carriage of a young spark the most that ever I saw any
man have. It makes me, I confess, admire her." in R. Latham, W. Matthews,
eds. The Diary of Samuel Peovs VIII (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974) 91.
4 3 Smith 57.
4 4 Pepys, VIII (16 Aug. 1667): 387 (and note 1); Downes 28.
4 5 Henry Ten Eyck Perry, "The First Duchess of Newcastle and Her
Husband as Figures in Literary History," Harvard Studies in Literary History
IV (1918): 152; Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1936) 75.
140
4 6 Advertisement prefixed to King Arthur: or The British W orthy, cited in
Works of John Drvden IX, eds. John Loftis and V. A. Dearing (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1966) 355.
4 7 Frank Harper Moore, The Nobler Pleasure: Dryden1 s Comedy in
Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963)
56.
4 8 Staves, Plavers’ Scepters 45.
4 9 Staves, Plavers’ Scepters 46.
5 0 Staves, Plavers’ Scepters 45.
5 1 Markley 97. Also, it is worth noting that Roger Thompson describes the
Restoration as a period which "restored the theory of male mastery, and with
it the double standard" in Unfit for Modest Ears, a Study of Pornographic.
Obscene and Bawdy Works W ritten or Published in England in the Second
H alf of the Seventeenth Century (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979) 11.
See also, K. V. Thomas, "The Double Standard," Jffl XX (1959): 206-13.
5 2 Markley 96.
Pierre Danchin, «Le public des theatres londinien a la epoque de la
Restouration d’apres les prologues et les epilogues,* Dramaturgie et Societe
II, ed. Jean Jacquot (Paris: Centre des Recherche Scientifique, 1968).
5 4 V. de Sola Pinto, Sir Charles Sedlev. 1639 - 1701: A Study in the Life
and Literature of the Restoration (New York: Boni and Liverwright, 1927)
258.
5 5 Albert S. Borgman, Thomas Shadwell. His Life and Comedies (New
York: New York University Press, 1928).
5 6 Borgman 132.
5 7 Borgman 18.
5 8 Susan Staves, "A Few Kind Words for The Fop," SEL 22.3 (Summer
1982): 414-15; also see Robert B. Heilman, "Some Fops and Some Versions
of Foppery," ELH 49.3 (Summer 1982): 363-95.
5 9 Markley 106.
141
6 0 Borgman 134-5.
6 1 Borgman also notes that "According to a contemporary annotation in the
British Museum copy of the first quarto, Ninny represented Edward
Howard . . . the brother of Sir Robert" (132).
6 2 de Sola Pinto 251.
6 3 Markley 102.
6 4 Markley 106.
6 5 de Sola Pinto 252.
6 6 de Sola Pinto 255.
6 7 Thompson 12. See also Pepys, IX (25 March 1668): 132.
6 8 Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New
York: Macmillan, 1926) 174.
6 9 Holland 28.
7 0 Thomas Shadwell, The Humorists I, in Montague Summers, ed. The
Works of Thomas Shadwell I (London: Fortune Press, 1927) 175.
7 1 Hume, Development of English Drama 278.
7 2 Hume, Development of English Drama 277.
7 3 Thompson 12.
7 4 Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form: An Essav in Generic History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) 38.
7 5 John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, The Complete Poems, ed. David M.
Vieth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) 38.
7 6 Markley 114.
7 7 Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth Century Comedy of
Manners (London: Oxford University Press, 1957) 60.
7 8 Markley 118.
142
7 9 Brown 39.
8 0 Markley 249-50.
8 1 Montague Summers, Introduction, The Works of Thomas Shadwell I
(London: Fortune Press, 1927) xxix.
8 2 Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance
(Berkley, University of California Press, 1973) 21.
143
Chapter Three: "To Barbarism Turn"1 : The New Generation
of Playwrights and the Changing Comedy, 1669-1671
. . . in the rest [of these plays] about to be discussed,
a trend is clear: romantic and satiric elements are
increasingly vitiated by a taste for sex and farce: the
power of the vogue must have been great . . . 2
The play which, it would seem, was to have the effect
of opening the eyes of the dramatists to the possibilities
of cynical sex comedy was Betterton’s The Amorous
W idow.3
The period 1669 to 1671 marked a transition in Restoration sex comedy.
The debuts o f both Shadwell and Sedley in 1668 can be seen as a prelude to
those of the new generation of writers who mounted their earliest comedies
before the Third Dutch War in 1672-4. Emblematic of the need to infuse new
blood into the drama are both Pepys’ decision to conclude his diary in May of
1669, and the death of Sir William D ’Avenant thirteen months earlier in 1668.
Both events are crucial to Restoration sex comedy.
Pepys’ decision to stop writing was caused by his failing eyesight, which
had become so bad that he at last observed: I "undo my eyes every time I take
a pen in my hand".4 Although he was still only thirty-six and would not die
until 1703 when he was seventy, Pepys was, in 1669, seven years older than
Aphra Behn and eight years older than William Wycherley. His age was
beginning to interfere, via his eyesight, in "almost all other pleasures"
including his secret amours and, presumably, his theater-going. His failing
eyesight had the immediate effect of depriving theater historians of a rich,
144
first-hand description of performances, productions, and premiere dates. It
may also indicate the beginnings of a generational change in theater attendance
itself. Pepys was probably not alone in being hindered from his previous
pleasures by age. If so, the changing composition of theater audiences may go
some way to account for the visible changes in comic taste. The drift towards
sex and farce noted above is the most obvious of these changes and would
naturally have appealed to a younger, more vigorous crowd. So too would the
overt borrowings from the French sources, especially from Moliere, since
during this period the French borrowings almost universally concern the
antipatriarchal conflict of a younger generation pitted against obstructive
paternal authority, insensitive to the needs and to the new sexual freedoms of
the young.
Sir William D ’Avenant’s death in April 1668 marks this same period of
generational change and it was followed within the next five years by the
deaths of Sir Henry Herbert, the one-time censor of the English stage and by
that of Edward Angel whom Dryden described as one of the two "best
Comedians of the A ge.”5 These and other theater men born in the early years
o f the Seventeenth Century who had revived English theater after 1661 with
serious romantic plays, highly moral and elevated, of
the same general tone as those written by the courtiers
in the circle of Henrietta Maria,
145
were, by the end of the first decade of renewed Stuart monarchy, an old guard
that was dying off during a period of intensifying competition between the two
houses.6 It is because of this competition that D ’Avenant’s death, in addition
to its significance as a symptom of generational change, also had a specific
and immediate impact on the abrupt generic development of the comedy.
Jacqueline Pearson has made the important suggestion that Lady Mary
D ’Avenant’s succession to the shared management of the Duke’s Company
following the death of her husband likely caused the appearance of the new
comic plays and comic playwrights whose experiments "positively encourage
women writers and performers and positive images of women in plays."7
Works by Edward Howard, Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, and possibly
Elizabeth Polwhele belong in this category of plays thematizing the changes in
women’s gender r61es mounted during Lady D ’Avenant’s tenure as co-manager
with Betterton and Joseph Harris. This thematization of women and women’s
roles therefore is one manifestation of the changes in taste taking place in the
comedy by the end of the 1660s.
Another important change attended D ’Avenant’s death in that it removed
a source o f many plays previously mounted by the Duke’s Company while at
the same time it removed an obstacle to the new kind of play that would be
developed over the next five years. Although an author of original plays
himself during the 1620s and 1630s, in the years before his death, D ’Avenant
146
was content to translate foreign works, which were staged with great success
by his company. His long illness had deprived the company of an important
source of plays while at the same time it afforded an opportunity of moving in
a new and less conservative direction. This possibility was widely understood
and appeared in a popular elegy, which attracted the notice o f Richard
Flecknoe, who composed a satire (which contains the more flattering poem) in
order to revenge himself on D ’Avenant. Flecknoe had already written a
vicious attack on Thomas Killigrew in 1667.8 An observation by Gerard
Langbaine in 1691 provides the most convincing explanation of Flecknoe’s
hatred of theater managers like D ’Avenant and Killigrew. Flecknoe, Langbaine
wrote
never could arrive with all his industry to get but one
play to be acted, and yet he has printed
several . . . tho’ possibly an Enemy has done that for
him .9
Unlike Flecknoe’s own lines, the elegy he quotes is deferential and figures
D ’Avenant as a tasteful influence on the stage whose civilizing effect is
doomed following his death. Despite the pejorative connotations of the key
word "barbarism," the verse does make clear that an imminent change in
theatrical taste is anticipated:
Now Davenant’s dead the stage will mourn,
And all to barbarism turn;
Since he it was, this later age,
Who chiefly civiliz’d the stage.1 0
147
Thomas Betterton was among the first of the new playwrights who, in
Judith M ilhous’ phrase, "set out to take up the slack" created by D ’Avenant’s
death and was among the first to participate in the changes in comic taste.1 1
A vigorous, gifted actor then in his thirties, Betterton quickly altered
W ebster’s The Roman Virgin mounting it as The Unjust Judge early in 1669
before turning his hand to The Woman Made a Justice and The Amorous
W idow. O f these plays, Edmund Curll observes "all . . . were well received;
but the Last only is preserved."1 2 Betterton’s close relationship with Charles
II is an important feature of this playwright’s contribution to gender ideology
and to the development of sex comedy. Charles once loaned Betterton his
coronation suit for a part in a play.1 3 He also sent the actor to France as
D ’Avenant’s agent in the summer of 1662 "on a theatrical commission to study
the French stage and to bring back all he could for use in England."1 4 In the
intervening years, Betterton honed his interest in French drama and then,
apparently, capitalized on his expertise during the transitional period which
coincides with his first years as manager:
The most noticeable changes [in types of plays] show
up in the area of foreign comedy, which also has the
largest proportion of new offerings, most of them at the
Duke’s Company. This suggests that the initial impetus
for these plays was competitive, a need to counter the
still solidly entrenched repertory at the King’s
Company.1 5
148
Between the years 1668 and 1670, in particular, Betterton successfully
completed and mounted a transitional comedy called The Amorous Widow: or.
the Wanton Wife which borrows the cuckolding action of its subplot from
M oliere’s Georges Dandin ou le mari confondu. Concerning the novelty of the
subplot, Judith Milhous and Robert Hume observe that The Amorous Widow
is the first play written during the Restoration "in which a cuckolding action
really looms large. "1 6 It marks a significant stage in a continuous
development towards the mature Restoration sex comedy of the mid-1670s,
and especially towards Etherege’s The Man of Mode and W ycherley’s The
Country W ife. Although the precise date of The Amorous W idow’s first
performance is unclear, it is no accident that the play was mounted between
1668 and 1670. Betterton’s reliance on French sources, his problematization of
marriage through the use of the cuckolding theme, his thematization of the
possibility of divorce, his "increased emphasis on titillative sex," his tendency
towards farce and his depiction of upwardly mobile London citizens have as
much to do with contemporary events as with the changing composition of
theater audiences and their changing tastes.1 7 A variety of elements, in other
words, was overdetermining the ways in which nearly twenty transitional
comedies would thematize gender transformation in the years immediately
following Betterton’s The Amorous W idow.1 8
3.1: 1668-1670. The Amorous Widow: or. The Wanton W ife.
149
Betterton’s full title refers both to the main plot and the subplot of his
play. The salient feature of both plots is that they problematize marriage and
depict the play’s most fully developed female characters in an unfavorable
light. The Widow Laycock is a slight variation on the early Restoration comic
figure of the older, undesirable woman obsessed with sex and men but devout
(if not skilled) in the dissimulation of her obsession. She differs from
Etherege’s Lady Cockwood in that she is both a widow and a woman whose
obsession takes as its object remarriage, not just sex:
Lady Laycock: Mr. Lovemore has spar’d no Pains to
persuade me to quit my Widowhood.
Prudence: I have been told, Madam, that Widowhood is
a Gift Heaven seldom bestows but on its Favourites;
you are Rich, and know how troublesome Marriage
is . . .
Lady Laycock: I confess, Widowhood has it
Conveniences; but if Marriage be a trouble to some,
’tis a Pleasure to others. (4)
Widow Laycock is also a blocking character who impedes the courtship
between her niece, Philadelphia and Cuningham, the young lover of whom
Laycock is jealous. Cuningham first uses his friend, Lovemore, then his
servant, Merryman, to employ the widow’s affections. Lovemore however,
actually lusts after a gentlewoman, the wife of Mr. Brittle, a rich tradesman
who despite his violence and coarseness is a problematic presence in
Betterton’s play. The stark neutrality with which Betterton stages the triangular
150
relationship introduces a moral complexity to what is actually a very
conservative play. All three characters command attention through Betterton’s
technique of deferring most of the moral cues that would allow an audience to
side with any one of the characters involved in this adultery-in-the-making. In
an age which saw the highest expressions of morally didactic heroic drama, it
is reasonable to wonder what might have contributed to the sudden appearance
of a drama that is more morally objective than anything preceding it since the
reopening of the theaters. Mr. Brittle, for example, lives up to his name but he
is unfairly abused by his clever wife and by her ungrateful, aristocratic family.
Mrs. Brittle wants life and fun. She misses the gentility of her own upbringing
and is physically abused by her authoritarian husband but she is also spoiled,
selfish and totally contemptuous of him. Finally, Lovemore, while he is a
loyal friend to Cuningham, is also a superficial liar who cares very little about
Mrs. Brittle or any woman.
The ambivalence of these characters and the detachment with which
Betterton stages their situation is enviable. Despite his neutrality in depicting
the cuckolding action however, the objective portrayal of these characters’
interactions is qualified early in the play when Cuningham’s servant Geffrey
refuses to carry a letter from Lovemore to Mrs. Brittle. The straightforward
appeal of Geffrey’s honesty provides the morally conservative context that
indicates the direction the play’s resolution will take
151
Lovemore: Can’st thou contrive to carry this Letter to a
young Gentlewoman, and bring an Answer, without
being suspected.
Geffrey: I don’t care to meddle in a Cause, where
there’s a process of Cuckoldom going forward.
Lovemore: Prithee, why so?
Geffrey: W hy, Sir, I’ll tell you; you must know, Sir, I
love Prudence . . . Now, Sir, if I shou’d be the
Instrument . . . of your making this honest Man a
Cuckold, who knows but, in return of such a monstrous
Deed, it may be my own Case next . . . (20, 21)
At the end of this play, Geffrey’s honesty is rewarded. He marries
Prudence in nearly the same moment that Mrs. Brittle’s much delayed adultery
is prevented by her (badly managed) realization that Lovemore is
fundamentally faithless. To a reader familiar with the later development of an
unapologetic sex comedy (especially after 1675), Betterton’s ending will seem
tame and false. Despite this falseness however, The Amorous Widow had a
truly revolutionary impact on the comedy and on the changing audience of the
very late 1660s who were still accustomed to an overtly didactic mixture of
entertaining farce and much less funny heroic comedy. Betterton’s themes of
cuckoldry, divorce and "titillative sex" forced comedy to take a significantly
realistic turn in thematizing the concerns of its own era. The events of the
subplot closely repeat those of the greatest scandal of the day, the Lord Roos
divorce case which was finally resolved by Parliament: Charles II actually
remarked that the debate surrounding the divorce was itself "better than going
to a play."1 9
152
Charles’ interest in the divorce of John Manners, 8th Earl of Rutland,
Lord Roos, derived primarily from concern about the royal succession which
had become pressing by the end of the decade. Antonia Fraser summarizes the
King’s situation in this way:
By the late 1660s hopes that Catherine of
Braganza . . . would bear a living child were fading
(she had suffered two miscarriages). The King however
already had a large brood of illegitimate children, and
was clearly capable of begetting a great many
more . . . One way to solve the problem of the royal
succession . . . would be for the King to divorce Queen
Catherine and marry again.2 0
The degree of intensity which this problem of succession and remarriage
presented to the king is difficult to appreciate for theater historians, for gender
historians, and for historians of consciousness now looking back from a late
twentieth century perspective. But the problem clearly troubled Charles and his
circle sufficiently to make them entertain some desperate solutions. According
to one account Buckingham, with typical extravagance, offered to kidnap the
queen and transport her to a plantation in the New World so that Charles could
claim desertion and rem arry.2 1 Charles refused but took on additional
mistresses at this time, adding Nell Gwyn and Louise de Keroualle
(Querouaille) to a seraglio which then included Barbara Villiers.2 2 Although
these women did have the effect of reassuring the realm of the king’s potency,
they were also targets of inevitable lampoons like this one concerning Nell
Gwyn in 1671:
153
Our good King Charles the Second,
Too flippant of treasure and moisture,
Stoop’d from the Queen infecund
To a wench of orange and cyster.
Consulting his cazzo, he found it expedient
To engender Don Johns on Nell the comedian.2 3
In addition to these efforts to show himself fertile, Charles also turned his
energy and attention to facilitating the Roos divorce in order to create an
avenue by which he might legitimate a male heir. Andrew Marvell referred to
the King’s efforts in this direction as "extraordinary":
The King, about ten O ’clock, took Boat . . . and
rowed . . . to the Parliament Stairs and so went up into
the House of Lords, and took his Seat. Almost all of
them were amazed, but all seemed so; . . . Being sat,
he told them it was a Privelege he claimed from his
Ancestors to be present at their deliberations . . . [and]
having had his Face first to the Conventicle Bill, he
turned short to the Lord Roos.2 4
In this context then, the dates of The Amorous Widow and the similarity
of its characters to the central characters o f the scandal indicate that the play
had a topicality which contributed to making it "extremely successful."2 5
Lord Roos
had been divorced a mensa et thoro by the ecclesiastical
court in 1666, [his Lady’s] issue being bastardized by
Act of Parliament passed on February, 1667. [Roos]
was now attempting to obtain a private Act of
Parliament to enable him to remarry while his wife was
living.2 6
With the King present, this bill was passed by the House of Lords in
1670. The three year span, 1667-1670 during which the Bill was delayed and
154
the scandal heightened also brackets the period 1668-1670 during which The
Amorous Widow is known to have been first performed. (During this period
too, Etherege’s second play appeared: She Would if She Could also thematizes
impotence and problematizes marriage.) The Amorous W idow’s unusual theme
of a marriage disintegrating to the point of actual divorce had not appeared in
a comedy since Lady Alimony in 1659. Nonetheless Mrs. Brittle, after lying
shamelessly and humiliating her husband before her parents, Sir Peter and
Lady Pride, utters a line worthy of Anne Pierrepont, the Duchess of Rutland,
Lady Roos: "Shall I forgive him; no, I desire to be Divorc’d" (67).
Once the historical trigger of this play (and of those that follow it) is
noticed, the similarities between Betterton’s plot and the Lord Roos scandal
become obvious. Betterton was probably very familiar with the French source
at the time o f the scandal and immediately connected the English events to
M oliere’s story in which divorce goes unmentioned. Sir Peter Pride’s blindness
and interference in his daughter’s marriage stand out among these parallels.
His behavior mirrors the fantastic comportment of Lady Anne Roos’s highly
eccentric father. Mrs. Brittle’s continuous invention and deceit mirror those of
Lady Anne, as do her contempt for her husband, their arranged marriage and
the "impotence" (67) of which Mrs. Brittle accuses her husband and which the
Earl of Clarendon noted was the ultimate source of Lord and Lady Roos’s
principal disagreement:
155
Lady Anne, "not finding the satisfaction expected where
she ought to have received it, looked for it abroad
where she ought not to find it. "2 7
The popularity of Betterton’s play, however, has deeper implications
than simply the topicality of a politically important precedent. In addition to its
political dimension, the play thematized the pressing problem that arranged
marriages presented to an increasingly younger audience. Unlike Aurelia in
Cowley’s Cutter of Coleman Street, who willingly marries a fool to recoup the
family fortunes, Mrs. Brittle, as Ben Ross Schneider observes, is extremely
dissatisfied with her arranged marriage and
ripe for adultery because her high-born parents
sacrificed her to a citizen to recoup the family
fortune.2 8
The main plot of The Amorous Widow is a variation on this same
theme. Widow Laycock wants to buy a young husband in order to escape "Age
and Impotence" (22), the same fate in marriage from which Mrs. Brittle
suffers and which she, the Widow, has already experienced:
Prudence: They say Sir Oliver Laycock lov’d your
Ladyship.
Lady Laycock: For all that, he was Jealous; and,
what’s worse, was Old.
Prudence: Very well; therefore you resolve to have a
young One now, Madam?
Lady Laycock: You cannot blame me for that can you
Prudence?
Prudence: Oh no, ’tis well known Youth is
comfortable; but methinks, you should take one a little
nearer your own Age, Madam. A very young Man may
be too Treacherous for you, Madam. (4, 5)
156
Both women exemplify the dangers of arranged marriage, a topic
calculated to appeal to the young theater-going crowd to which Mrs. Brittle
wants to belong and which she longingly describes when her authoritarian
husband demands of her "Whither in such haste?" (21):
Mrs Brittle: I ’ll to the Play, where there’s all sorts of
Company and Diversion; where the actors represent all
the Briskness and Gaiety of Life and Pleasure: where
one is entertain’d with airy Beaux, and fine Gallants,
which Ogle, Sigh, and Talk the prettiest things in the
World. Methinks ’tis rare to hear a young, brisk Fellow
court a handsome young Lass, and she all the while
making such pretty dumb Signs; first turns aside to see
who observes then spreads her Fan before her Face;
heaves up her Breasts and Sighs— at which, he still
swears he loves her above all the W orld— and presses
hard his Suit; tells her what force her Beauty, her Wit,
her Shape, her Mien, all join’d in one, are of. At which
she, blushing, Curtesies low, and to her self replies,
W hat Charming words he speaks! His Person’s
heavenly, and his Voice Divine, by your Leave,
Husband, you make me stay long. (22)
To a younger generation of the monied classes now coming to
marriageable age, marriage had long since acquired the double taint of
commercialization and compulsion. The Lord Roos scandal probably owe its
popularity to the overt challenge that the possibility of divorce represented to
such marriages. Such a challenge was extremely dangerous to English society
in that it was antipatriarchical in two ways. First, it challenged the authority of
the older empowered generation represented by the blind, domineering bully of
Betterton’s Sir Peter Pride. Pride’s repeatedly ugly treatment of his son-in-law,
157
Brittle, makes the tradesman unusually sympathetic for a comic cuckold at the
same time that it makes Pride completely unsympathetic:
Sir Peter: If you [Brittle] ever dare to do the like again,
w e’ll find a Means to handle you— If there be no Law,
(But cutting of Throats) to revenge these Affronts— I say
no more— . . . kneel down and ask your wife
forgiveness. (67)
Secondly, the possibility of divorce also challenged a male institution in
which women were simply objects of financial exchange.2 9 The double social
threat constituted by the possibility of divorce was also profound and widely
perceived. Susan Staves has pointed out how it prompted various treatises in
defense of marriage at this time.3 0 It may also have been responsible for
Charles’ decision not to use the Lord Roos precedent to divorce his Queen:
The bill [Lord Roos divorce] pass’d: and upon that
precedent some moved the King, that he would order a
bill to be brought in to divorce him from the Queen.
This went so far, that a day was agreed on for making
the motion in the House of
Commons . . . But . . . three days before the motion
was to be made, The King . . . [decided] that the
matter must be left alone, for it would not do.3 1
W hatever the cause for Charles’ decision, however, marriage had been
problematized in a new comedy in a way that would last beyond the short
vogue of transitional plays thematizing divorce. Young monied theater-goers
found themselves in a position similar to that of the Merry man/Viscount figure
in The Amorous W idow’s closing lines:
158
Viscount: . . . So now, you that are ready to taste the
sweets of matrimony, fall to: For my part, I have no
great Stomach to it yet. (70)
Progressively this attitude constellated and continued until each comedy and
each playhouse became an antimatrimonial and antipatriarchal space in which
the traditional rules of traditional marriages had no tenure and were, in fact,
overtly mocked. As a result, there was a pronounced resurgence of
antitheatricalism, of which the following example is symptomatic:
these men [opponents of the King’s request for funds]
proposed the laying a tax on the Play-Houses, which in
so dissolute a time were become nests of prostitution.
And the stage was defiled beyond all Example . . . This
was opposed by the Court: it was said the Players were
the King’s servants, and a part of his pleasure.
Coventry asked whether the King’s pleasure lie among
the men, or the women that acted? This was carried
with great indignation to the Court.3 2
This antitheatricalism must have drawn the lines more firmly between
theatergoers and theater abstainers. It is possible therefore to read the
increasing thematization in the comedies at this time of plays, of the theater
and the interiors and manners of playhouses as an expression of community or
party identity for those participating in theater culture. (It is worth noting that
the first illustrations of the interiors of English playhouses those in the 1673
edition of The Empress of M orocco, for example, also date from this period
[1671] as do the earliest Restoration dramatic parodies: The Rehearsal and The
Reformation [1674].) The heightened sense of a theater community which such
159
self-examination indicates, renders the technique of moral objectivity in
Betterton’s subplot intelligible.
Despite their questionable pursuit of adultery, Lovemore and Mrs. Brittle
receive fair treatment at Betterton’s hands because they are members of his
own community, a subculture bounded by the theater walls. Brittle too, we
should remember, receives objective treatment by Betterton, probably because
despite his coarseness, age, and violence, he is a victim of the same group of
socially powerful old people who impede the relationship between Lovemore
and Brittle’s wife. In The Amorous W idow, the most unpleasant characters are
old, rich, and empowered: Sir Peter Pride and the Widow Laycock who are
both depicted as dull-witted, domineering, and vain users of the traditional
patriarchal authority that inheres in the play’s kinship relations.
Finally, this interpretation of Betterton’s technique of moral objectivity
seems to be confirmed by the fact that each member of the love-triangle
corresponds to one of the three general locations of the theater audience. Of
course, these locations were not as absolute or segregated in Restoration
England as they were in continental theaters, but nonetheless, the majority of
their constituents were recognizable as this account from 1697 makes plain:
. . . the pit is an Amphitheatre, fill’d with Benches
without backboards . . . Men of Quality, particularly of
the younger Sort, some Ladies of Reputation and
Vertue, and an abundance of Damsels that hunt for
Prey, sit all together in the Place, Higgledy-
piggledy . . . Farther up, against the Wall, under the
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first Gallery and just opposite to the stage, rises another
Amphitheatre, which is taken up by persons of the best
Quality among whom are generally very few men.
The Galleries, whereof there are only two rows, are
fill’d up with none but ordinary people [my
emphasis].3 3
Betterton, as an experienced actor and well trained professional theater
manager, would be able to recognize and appreciate the concerns of each
segment of his theater’s constituency, be it pit, box, or gallery (and in fact this
phrase, "pit, box and gallery" echoes repeatedly in the comedies at this
tim e).3 4 W hat is more, the tripartite management of the Duke’s Theater by
Mary D ’Avenant (a Lady), by Betterton (a tradesman’s son), and by Joseph
Harris (whom we know from Pepys was an associate of the "young blades" in
"all the roguish things of the world"), reflects the same class and gender
representation of the changing theater audience that Betterton was apparently
eager to thematize in a new kind of comedy, which would no longer be the
recognizably exclusive property of an aristocratic coterie.3 5
This thematization of an antipatriarchal but segmented audience goes a
little way to explaining the contradictions inherent in the emerging sex comedy
following The Amorous W idow. The theater of the 1670s was simultaneously
extremely sexist and yet at the same time profoundly antipatriarchal. It was
anti-authoritarian and yet a meeting place for the court. These ambiguities, as
we shall see, are characteristic of the following plays and account for internal
ambiguities as well as for a characteristic trope of complementarity in which
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authors treat an identical set of themes from very different perspectives in
contiguous works. This trope, I believe, illuminates the relationship between
such works as Dry den’s Marriage a la Mode and The Assignation, between
W ycherley’s The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer, and between Edward
Howard’s little-read plays, The W oman’s Conquest (1670) and The Six Da vs
Adventure (1671). The trope shows that during the transitional years, 1668-
1673, the new generation of playwrights was engaged in generic experiments
similar to those which had preoccupied the practitioners of Restoration comedy
during the first decade of the restoration of the stage and that they were busy
accommodating these experiments to an audience which was undergoing
demographic change.
3.2; 1670. The Women’s Conquest. The Forc’d Marriage. The Humorists,
and Sir Salomon.
Sir Edward Howard, when he receives any recognition at all, is usually
acknowledged to be the least talented of the Howard family. In portraying him
as the poet Ninny in The Sullen Lovers (1668), Shadwell created an image of
a perfect literary fop. Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset’s much imitated
ironical encomium on Howard written in 1669 also contributed to Howard’s
low reputation for wit. The poem is extremely sharp and ends with the
memorable lines:
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Thou sett’st thy name to what thyself dost write;
Did ever libel yet so sharply bite.3 6
Finally, the poor reception of Howard’s dual attempts at tragi-comedy and
comedy in the early years of the new decade has done nothing for his
reputation since then. Still, he was a very good hand at tragedy. Pepys saw his
The Change of Crownes in 1667, recording it was "the best that ever I saw at
that House [Theater Royal], being a great play and serious."3 7 It seems likely
that Howard’s miserable reputation for comedy has contributed to the critical
neglect suffered by The Change of Crownes which was withdrawn from the
stage by Charles II’s command on political grounds. But the most politically
volatile material in Howard’s tragedy of 1667 was a subplot that ridiculed
government corruption in a very funny way. Hume describes it as
a riotous satire on sellers of government posts and those
who seek them. Asinello, the country gentleman in
search of a sinecure, is a hilarious
character . . . Charles II was not amused.3 8
W hatever the reason for Howard’s "deadly earnest" tone and "heavy hand" in
The W omen’s Conquest, it seems that Howard had returned to treating the
political issues surrounding the monarchy. The play concerns a war waged
against the oppressive men of Scythia by a nation of Amazons angered by the
m en’s unfair divorce laws.3 9 Tysamantes the new King, has gained the throne
by marrying Parisatis, the Scythian Queen but he is still in love with his
Persian fiancee Statyra. In another plot, Clarina, who has been used and cast
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aside by her inconsiderate husband Foscaris, receives some help from her
friend Melvissa who provides her with an infallible love potion that keeps
husbands enthralled.
The play reenacts the transformations in gender ideology taking place
during this transitional period, but it does so from a deceptively conservative
perspective. Born in 1624, Howard was 46 by the time The W omen’s
Conquest was staged. Despite the fact he wrote a play which incorporates his
culture’s changing view of women, their rights and abilities, his resolution
self-servingly reaffirms patriarchal authority as Jacqueline Pearson notes:
The W omen’s Conquest . . . present[s] the Amazons
affirmatively contrasting their idealistic humanity with
male selfishness. They argue eloquently that women’s
inferiority is the result of nurture, not nature, of ’that
so invincible Champion, Custom’ (p. 11). The end of
the play reverses these mildly radical views. Mandana
the Amazon falls in love and marries, and the Amazons
agree to give up their warrior lives.4 0
Howard’s conservatism permeates the play. His focus on the topical and
volatile issue of Royal divorce constitutes very clear criticism of a path that
presented a real danger to the monarchy. King Tysamantes’ decision to divorce
his Queen is portrayed as ill-considered and impetuous:
Tsyamnes: [To the Ambassadresses] . . . tell your
Queen I ’le reign a King of men in spight of all her
power of Spinsters: whose honour by this grant would
be the mock of Women . . . And by my Act, to assure
the world how much I’le own my Subjects privelege,
behold my Queen.
Cydane: A Lady full of Grace and Vertue—
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Parisatis: Oh my fears!
Tysamantes: Who with no more concern I ’le cast away,
then Indians do a Pearl, that ne’re did know It’s value;
and from this hour no more my Wife. (36)
In the following scene Tysamentes’s decision is criticized by Bassanes,
the most right-thinking and manly of the Scythian Generals who is later the
only man able to escape the victorious Amazons. Bassanes reveals his opinion
of the royal divorce to the Parisatis:
Bassanes: The injustice is to palpable; and
Fitter ’twere this Law had no more being,
Or the Sex of Women against Natures
Made supreme, then thus to be imbitter’d
’Gainst your vertue,
Though smooth’d and guilded over with pretexts,
He calls State Policy and Marriage Interest,
But simply Artifice to bring another
To his Throne and Bed. (40)
The King’s hasty decision soon plunges the country into a war it loses.
Howard’s exploration o f the theme of royal divorce contains a transparent
warning about the divisiveness and enmity such a measure would create.
Charles would clearly have lost the support of English women if he had
divorced Catherine of Braganza. (He would certainly have antagonized the
Portuguese also.) The play suggests too, however, that such a move might
have cost a monarch the support of many of his male subjects who, despite
their bravado, are afraid of (and ultimately are in the control of) their wives:
Draxanes: As I am a Souldier, I think a Brigade of men
would scarce do The bus’ness of one Woman of this
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Generation, If they have the same vivacity for Venus
As for Mars.
’Tis said they [the Amazons] hold intelligence with our
Scythian Women: and have made such furious resolves
if we fall into their hands.
Andrages: And for us Husbands— If they Conquer—
Foscaris: Eunuch’d to a Man, Gentlemen— I look to
carry my quill in my hat, To show I am wholly
castrated. (61)
The play’s title, The W omen’s Conquest, is admirably suited to represent
Howard’s double warning about the consequences of royal divorce; that it
would alienate subjects of both sexes. The W oman’s Conquest is ambiguous in
much the same way as the title of Andrea Dworkin’s Women Hating is
ambiguous.4 1 It announces the possibility of the feminine victory for which
the play is usually remembered, and it refers to the ultimate conquest of the
women and restoration of patriarchal rule, which transpire in the final scene
where the policy of divorce on demand is abolished and the earlier royal
divorce is now itself abrogated. At this point, masculine and feminine
principles are reconciled. This transpires not as it usually does in Restoration
comedy, by a recognition and union of a divinely matched set of lovers.
Instead, emphasis is placed on the play’s political dimension in the union of
two separate states via a model recommended by Bassanes, the undisputed
masculine presence of The Women’s Conquest who was responsible for the
final victory by the men:
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Mandana: Our Crowns will have a blessed union then—
W hat pattern shall we take?
Tysamantes: Such as the world
With best consent does practise.
Bassanes: Or what’s most
Laudable, the form of happy England.
Mandana: It has been most approv’d. (86)
More significant than the play’s ultimately conservative resolution
however, are its positive depiction of Mandana’s Amazons and its ideological
ambivalence. Howard’s play explores the divorce theme which (as we have
seen) constituted a fundamental challenge to patriarchal authority. In addition,
the play is unable to break free of a conservative resolution. This too,
however, is an important cultural fact. To do it justice, The W omen’s
Conquest, like Betterton’s The Amorous Widow is a representatively
transitional play whose ambivalence in matters of gender ideology is an
inescapable trace of the period of its composition and production.
Furthermore, its seriousness is a culturally significant feature. Howard, who
was, to judge from the mastery demonstrated in the subplot in The Change of
Crownes. an adept hand at comedy, chose not to subject his themes of royal
divorce and gender transformation to humorous treatment in The W omen’s
Conquest. Instead, he took the high road to "True comedy, the moral mirth of
plays" (Third Prologue) even to the point of invoking Jonson’s ghost in a
prologue to criticize the audience for losing the English taste for "Plays wisely
formed, such as I made of old" (Second Prologue).
167
The result, however, was massively unpopular. Outside of an
unthreatening treatment in comedy, it seems, themes of gender transformation
were too volatile or too painful to be raised. The intense comic reduction that
farce and satire provided for the emotionally dangerous acknowledgement of
uncertainty at a basic level of personal identity, one’s sexuality, was not
something that audiences of the early 1670s wanted to see. This observation
provides us with a clue to the cultural function of such later plays as The
Libertine. The Man of Mode, and The Country W ife, the intensity of whose
satire is some measure of the threat which the painful feelings of inadequacy,
jealousy, and sexual betrayal presented in a culture that provided no other
means to deal with them besides mockery and repression.
It is a probably a measure of Edward Howard’s courage as a dramatist
that he was willing to deal with the politically chancy material of The Change
of Crownes as well as the equally chancy material presented in The W omen’s
Conquest. But his audiences were frequently alarmed. Charles commanded the
withdrawal of Howard’s forceful tragicomedy when he learned that it depicted
corruption in the Court’s sale of offices. In 1670, audiences were confronted
with, among other things, a depiction of the following expression of contempt
with which Tysamantes (a King coincidentally loved by three women)
described his male subjects:
Tysamnes: . . . I see I govern Souldiers Scarce deserve
the name of men, more fit By Heaven, to be converted
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to some other shape, Or serve as Chamber Eunuch to
this female kind. (63)
As a result of this and other unpleasant material, The W omen’s Conquest was
rejected by audiences at the Duke’s Theatre. Howard however, was
preoccupied with the theme of gender transformation and would make
concessions to the popular taste in order to mount a second didactic play on
that theme. The Six Davs Adventure: or. The New Utopia appeared one year
later, in 1671. In the meantime both his treatment of the contemporary
challenge to patriarchy and the topicality of divorce appeared as the subject
matter of another tragicomedy by a new author who, like Howard, would soon
turn her hand to comedy. 1670 saw the first appearance of Aphra Behn as a
playwright with the Duke’s Theatre’s production of The Forc’d Marriage: or.
The Jealous Bridegroom. Unlike The W omen’s Conquest this play would more
directly follow the general practice of tragi-comedies during that era, a
practice which Hume describes in this way:
Usually when a virtue-rewarded play is called a tragi
comedy a secondary comical interest is implied— a
mixed play . . . Mrs. Behn’s The Forc’d Marriage has
lighter moments in the amours of a cowardly fop,
Falatius . . . 4 2
The dramatis personae of the first edition (1671) of The Forc’d Marriage
lists this same Falatius as "Falatio" and indicates he was played by the
notorious homosexual transvestite (and accomplished comedian), Edward
Angel. The issue of male homosexuality is one which permeates Behn’s
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comedies. She returns to it in Lorenzo, the fop figure of her next play, The
Amorous Prince (1671) and many times thereafter. The significance of her
concern with male homosexuality transcends her would-be romantic
involvement with John Hoyle (who was later prosecuted for sodomy).
According to Angeline Goreau, Behn’s dissatisfaction with Hoyle is reflected
in an early poem, "The Disappointment, ”4 3 which concerns the theme of male
impotence following premature ejaculation familiar to students of Restoration
literature from Rochester’s poem, "The Imperfect Enjoym ent." Behn’s "The
Disappointment" develops the theme from the perspective of the dissatisfied
female lover:
The Nymph’s Resentments none but I
Can well imagine or Condole:4 4
Behn’s willingness to examine marginal or taboo male sexual behavior
however, is accompanied by her equal fascination with more mainstream male
behaviour which is the preoccupation of The Forc’d Marriage as Elaine Hobby
has recently pointed out:
What is at issue in this play is not jealousy as an
abstract human trait (its subtitle is The Jealous
Bridegroom), but male jealousy which has so much
control over a woman’s freedom and can destroy her
reputation or even take away her life. This, and not the
generalized question of love and freedom, is the focus
of the play.4 5
Behn uses the play’s central and female character, Erminia, primarily as
a means for the exposition of the roles of the dominant males whose power
over her is absolute. King, father, and husband (the traditional embodiments of
patriarchal authority) all engage in a disposition, an exchange and a
conservancy of Erminia’s body that runs contrary to her fundamental need to
love and marry Prince Philander. This commodification of Erminia begins with
the King, Philander’s father, who disposes of her as an additional reward to
Alcippus for his bravery in battle. After being named successor to General
Orgulious, Erminia’s father, Alcippus requests something "essential to [his]
being" and the King responds generously:
King: Be what it will, I here declare it thine.
— Upon my life, designes upon a Lady;
I guess it from thy blushing.
— Name her, and here thy King engages for her.
Alcippus: Erminia, Sir—
King: Alcippus, with her fathers leave, she’s thine.
Orgulious: Sir, ’Tis my Aim and Honour.
King: A day or two . . .
And then we’ll consummate the happy day,
When all the Court shall celebrate your joy. (4, 5)
This same mechanism of commodification and exchange also affects the
coward, Falatio’s, relationships with women. Throughout the play, he thinks
of them materially, as he thinks of Isillia, as means to a fortune:
Labree: You had a mistress once, if you have not
Forgotten her, who would have taken you with
All these faults.
Falatio: There was so; but she was poor, that’s the
Devil, I could have loved her else. (9)
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Eventually, however, Falatio’s material view of women becomes more
nuanced and he agrees to marry Isillia. Although she is still poor, he has
realized that she is a beautiful commodity on which he can capitalize:
Falatio: By Jove, Sir, I’le agree to any thing; for I
beleeve a handsom young wife at Court may bring a
man a Greater Fortune then he can in conscience desire
[takes Isillia. (88)
Male commodification of women therefore, as Behn shows throughout
the play, is really much the same thing as the kind of marital prostitution by
which Falatio intends to prosper. The play explores the complementary system
of honor and shame on which such commodification depends. It is this male-
serving dual system that paralyses Erminia during most o f the action of the
play. Goreau observes,
. . . honor for the King, the father and the husband
lies in defending an obligation they have freely taken
upon themselves; whereas honor for Erminia means
carrying out a promise that has been made in her
absence without her approval. She is blackmailed by
their contention that their honor depends on hers; she
must protect their name. . . . She cannot conceive of
violating the duty she feels she owes her father, yet she
cannot accede to his wishes either. Instead, she thinks
of death. Rebellion or direct opposition to her father
does not seem to occur to Erminia . . . when her
father . . . reminds her of her duty she is overwhelmed
by guilt and shame.4 6
Even Falatio in his cowardice cannot escape the consequences of this
heterosexual male system of shame and honor, although he nearly succeeds
simply by refusing to fight when he is confronted by Isillia’s irate brother,
172
Cleontius, who challenges Falatio for making love to both his sister and to
their cousin Aminta:
Falatio: You shall have you desire, Sir, farewell.
Cleontius: When, and where?
Falatio: Faith very suddenly, for I think it will not be
Hard to find Men of your trade
Men that will fight as long as you can do,
And men that love it much better then I . . .
Cleontius: Abusive Coward hast thou no sense of
honour.
Falatio: Sense of honour, ha, ha, ha, poor Cleontius.
Enter Aminta and Olinda.
Aminta: . . . Lets know your quarrel.
Falatio: By Jove Labree, I am undone again.
Aminta: My cozen Isillia your Mistress,
Upon my word you are a happy man.
Falatio: By jove if she be your Cozen, Madam,
I love her much the better for’t.
Aminta: I am beholding to you,
But then it seems I ’ve lost a lover of you.
Cleontius: Confess she has or Fie so handle you.
Falatio: That’s too much Cleontius— but I will,
By jove: Madam, I must not have a Mistress that
Has more with then my self, they ever requite
More than a mans able to give them. (43-44)
Here, Falatio, despite his cowardly refusal to fight Cleontius, is brought
to a reckoning within the closed male system of honor and shame. He is
finally compelled by Cleontius’ raw physical threat to renounce Aminta as his
mistress and publicly to shame himself as the price of doing so. Essentially
therefore, both the main plot and the comic subplot of The Forc’d Marriage
deconstruct the mechanisms of patriarchal control over women during the
173
Restoration. Behn shows us that patriarchal authority is a power that focuses
on women in a material way, mainly valorizing their virginity or newness as
possessions in the scene in which Alcippus appears to have murdered Erminia
for giving herself to Philander. Patriarchal power is also material in its
treatment of women, in that it cloisters and segregates them, setting the most
beautiful and highly prized women off from male society because beautiful
women are treasured objects, which can be stolen instead of hoarded or
exchanged. The play actually begins with two paired scenes that make this
point abundantly clear, as Pearson acutely notes.4 7 The first scene depicts
male society’s disposition of the women in a crowded public reception at the
palace. The second is set in Galatea’s apartments and depicts three women’s
intimate reactions to that disposition. The dramaturgic contrast in these scenes
is that between an expansive male freedom celebrating the conquest of new
territory and a secretive female containment despairing over its emotional loss:
Aminta: Madam, that grief the better is sustain’d,
That’s for a loss that never yet was gained. (I.ii.299)
Principally, however, Behn shows how patriarchal authority reduces
women to their physical substance, their corporeality, which it subjects to
exchanges as wives or prostitutes. In so doing it denies them interiority,
spirituality, and self-determination. It is no accident then, that Erminia escapes
the domination of king, father, and husband (all traditional embodiments of
patriarchal authority) only at the point at which her material existence ends.
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W hen her body is believed dead after Alcippus’ murder attempt, Erminia
pretends she is a ghost, pretends in fact that she can no longer be reduced to a
physical body that can then be disposed of by men. From this extreme,
Erminia, freed of a body that had never really been hers, acquires a more
interesting personality than simply that of the suffering, oppressed heroine who
is a recognizable generic staple of heroic drama. She is responsible for a
comic scene in which Falatio and his servant Labree reveal themselves once
again as cowards. She also becomes highly effective and ultimately receives
patriarchal approval for her love of Philander. The King relents and annuls her
marriage to Alcippus. As in Shadwell’s Epsom W ells, the best known example
of a Restoration comedy ending with a broken marriage, the cluster of
weddings that traditionally end comedy are accompanied by a divorce (or in
this case an annulment) which distinguishes the new era in comedy by calling
into question the restoration of social harmony which comic marriages
traditionally represent. Eric Rothstein and Frances Kavenik note that:
Marriage in the 1670s lacks the finality it has in earlier
plays where characters end up with each other for
better or for worse.4 8
Another play of 1670 which problematizes marriage in its resolution is
Shadwell’s The Humourists. Here however, annulment is deployed to reassert
traditional patriarchal authority over an errant and vain wife, Lady Loveyouth.
Despite the fact that this reassertion of male authority is justified within the
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context of the play itself, The Humourists "was received very coldly by the
patrons of the Duke’s Theater," an indication, perhaps, that as a still-novice
dramatist, Shadwell had lost step with audiences who had welcomed his
Sullen-Lovers in 1668.4 9 There is some justification for this belief in the
knowledge that his unpublished and no longer extant play, The Hypocrite, was
also badly received. This lost play was likely mounted between The
Humourists and his first overwhelming success, The Miser (1672). Presumably
Shadwell decided to complete this liberal translation of M oliere’s L ’Avare. in
order, at last, to achieve a genuine dramatic success by giving his audience
exactly what they wanted, more profoundly antipatriarchal French farce. In
The Humourists however, Shadwell’s representative of antipatriarchal forces is
the very unappealing Lady Loveyouth who (in the Lady Cockwood and Lady
Laycock tradition) prevents her niece (Theodosia) from seeing a young man
(Raymund) whom the Lady pursues herself. Raymund (in the tradition of Mr.
Courtall and Cuningham) feigns an interest in the woman’s suggestions of
marriage but secretly observes:
Raymund: I have heard she is not yet assur’d of the
death of her husband, indeed I have been told he parted
from her about three years since upon some discontent,
and never since was heard of. (II.i.203)
The long term separation between Lady Loveyouth and her husband Sir
Richard is part of a small but significant cluster of immediately recognizable
differences between Shadwell’s plot and that of Etherege’s She Would if She
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Could. Kathleen Lynch has noted Shadwell’s tendency to imitate Etherege and
has observed that Shadwell nearly admits this in the preface to The
Humourists:
Throughout a long career, with patient, plodding
devotion, Shadwell revived in comedy after comedy the
dramatic scheme of She Would If She Could. As we
have observed, Shadwell proclaims his esteem for
Etherege in his preface to The Humorists (1670). The
same play, best known for its abundance of licentious
detail, marks the beginning of Shadwell’s actual
discipleship.5 0
Despite his veneration of Etherege however, Shadwell chooses to make
Loveyouth’s returning husband a much more sympathetic figure than Sir
Oliver Cockwood. From his first entrance, Sir Richard is quite a different man
from the Etherege’s blind and blusteringly drunken husband:
Sir Richard: Well, this disguise and my long absence
will secure me from my Wives knowledge, I am
resolv’d to try her farther. ’Tis possible that
impertinence, that vanity and forwardness, that made
me leave her, by this time may have forsaken her— Here
she comes, I ’ll observe her. (218)
Another significant difference is Sir Richard’s decision to pursue his disguise
as a Gentleman-Usher in his unwitting wife’s service,
Sir Richard: Ha! I have a way to make discoveries of
her, that may be cause of a Divorce, which Heaven
send me. Madam, the death of my Master has put me
out of employment . . .
Lady: My Gentleman-Usher died last week . . . you
shall succeed him. (III.i.219)
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Lady Loveyouth’s absolute failure to recognize her husband through his
disguise at any point during the rest of the play is more than ShadwelFs
skillful inversion of the generic convention of mutual recognition by lovers
who are perfectly suited to each other and destined to unite. (Sir Richard and
his Lady are clearly not lovers and they are destined only to meet briefly again
in order to separate.)
Loveyouth’s employment of her husband as a servant is principally
however, a dramatic emblem of how she improperly coopts the patriarchal
authority that Sir Richard will come to represent. As the widow she claims to
be, Loveyouth can dispose of Theodosia, Sir Richard’s fortune and her own
person. Clearly unworthy of this illicit power, Loveyouth chooses to marry the
indigent and pox-ridden Crazy following Theodosia’s elopement with
Raymund, one of the men Loveyouth professed to love. Loveyouth also signs
what she believes is a "Deed of Gift of all my Estate to my Cosin Richard
after my decease" (V.245). She does this out of a deep-seated vindictiveness in
order "to defeat my ungracious Niece of her Inheritance" (V.252).
In The Humourists however, patriarchal power is demonstrably the good
guy and it is not easily circumvented, dissimulated, borrowed, or stolen.
Raymund, who has become Theodosia’s husband and who is therefore now
himself a representative of the patriarchal authority Shadwell commends,
shows himself to be of a similar quality of wit to that of Sir Richard himself.
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Shortly after the elopement, he visited Lady Loveyouth in disguise as she was
signing the deed of gift for her cousin Richard. He produces it in the final
scene only after Loveyouth spitefully continues her refusal to bless or
recognize the young peoples’ marriage:
Raymund: Madam, your Ladyship is mistaken, it is a
Deed of Gift of all your Estate, after your decease, to
Theodosia: I have it here. (V.252)
Immediately following this revelation, Crazy confesses to Loveyouth that he is
"very much visited with the Pox" (V.252). Loveyouth has a moment to bewail
the fact that she has married an untouchable man before Sir Richard enters in
disguise, confirms that his Lady has no vestige of affection for him and then
reveals himself and sets her free of both her marriage to Crazy and her
marriage to himself:
Lady Loveyouth: Oh I have just now cast my self upon
that diseas’d impotent fellow that wakened Hospital
Crazy.
Sir Richard: Now, Madam, d ’ye wish your other
Husband alive . . .
Lady Loveyouth: No, not so neither; but would I were
as fair rid of this Husband, as I was of him.
Sir Richard: So! I am beholding to her! I have a way to
rid you of this Husband.
Lady Loveyouth: If you have, you shall command my
person and my purse.
Sir Richard: And you shall know that I’ll command ’em
both. [Discovers himself.]
Omnes: Sir Richard Loveyouth alive.
Lady Loveyouth: O Heaven! I am ruin’d for ever, there
is now no dissembing! all my misfortunes are
completed now. (V.252)
179
In Summers’ Fortune Press edition, Lady Loveyouth’s successive
humiliations by Raymund, by Crazy and by Sir Richard all occur on a single
page (252) of dialogue. The contiguity and compactness of this scene are
difficult to overlook as is the fact that all three of these men are husbands
whom she has herself in some way abused. She attempted to prevent
Raymund’s union with Theodosia. She emotionally rejected Sir Richard and
then remarried without proof of his death. Finally, in making over her deed of
gift to Cosin Richard she had cheated Crazy of his access to her fortune, the
only reason he had for marrying her (Crazy: "... I am cozen’d and abus’d"
[252]). Unlike the ending of Etherege’s She Would if She Could therefore,
(which as we have seen is antipatriarchal and deliberately defies closure), The
Humourists ends with a decisive reassertion of patriarchal authority in the
group humiliation by three husbands of an erring and completely
unsympathetic wife.
Shadwell prepares us for part of this alliance earlier in the play when Sir
Richard realizes the stuff that Raymund is made of following the younger
m an’s elopement with Theodosia:
Lady Loveyouth: . . . abus’d! betray’d! this false
Wretch this base Villain Raymund, has stol’n away my
Niece.
Sir Richard: I see Raymund is a man of honour. This
pleases me. (IV.241)
180
Ideologically, Shadwell is forging an alliance between the older patriarchal
power and the young lovers which will come to fruition in the closing lines of
the play:
Sir Richard: Sir I am a stranger to your repute, and
think my self much honoured in the relation I have to
you.
Raymund: Sir, the honour is wholly on my side.
Sir Richard: I shall ne’er have Children, I therefore
declare my Niece my heir.
Theodosia: Sir, I can return nothing but my thanks.
(V.253)
The political reality of this alliance seems strange if we remember
Betterton’s The Amorous Widow which dispatched the corresponding figures
representing patriarchy (Sir Peter Pride) and the young love (Cuningam) to
entirely separate plots. Unlike Pride however, Shadwell is very careful to
make his patriarch judicious, dignified, and in no way cruel. Even in his
absolute and final disposition of Lady Loveyouth Sir Richard does little to
offend:
Sir Richard: Fond Woman, thy foolishness and vanity,
and thy impertinent contentions with me, caus’d my
three years absence; and shall make me still continue a
stranger to your Conversation: yet you shall never want
w hat’er befits your Quality: upon the rest of all the
Company let no Cloud appear to day. (V.252)
Shadwell’s caution with Sir Richard extends even to Crazy, the weakest
corner of the patriarchal triumvirate. Throughout the play the way he is
depicted is infinitely preferable in his devout if eccentric and undiscriminating
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heterosexuality to the unmasculine fops who jointly pursue Theodosia. Mr.
Briske is exposed as a hypocrite, a snob, and a coward by Raymund on several
occasions during the course of the play. And Drybob, as Shadwell’s use of his
name suggests, is ineffectual enough to be considered an impotent non-starter
in the contest for Theodosia’s affections. David M. Vieth has pointed out that
this epithet means "coition without emission".5 1 The connotations of the
character’s sexual inadequacy are extended where he figures himself as a
Eunuch:
Drybob: [locked in a cellar] O! that I were out of this
Hellish Place! if ever I had to do with Love and
Honour more, would I were an Eunuch in the Turks
Seraglio- (IV.237)
Despite its internal consistency however, Shadwell’s The Humourists is
not a good play and was not well received. Its preface makes the familiar
excuses for a comic playwright smarting under the harsh judgement of a fickle
public and it is important to keep in mind Shadwell’s claims that the play as it
appears in print is "mangled" (181), and substantially altered, and somewhat
short (about sixty pages). Nonetheless,it is true that what has come down to us
is flawed. Shadwell clearly had difficulty plotting this play and its chief
attraction as its title suggests, is rather its humours or characterizations. One
particular flaw recurs throughout the entire design of the play and has
significant repercussions on Shadwell’s pro-patriarchal ideological stance. Five
events that are essential to the workings of the plot are not represented in the
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surviving script. Instead all information concerning these events is conveyed
by other characters commenting on them after the fact. They are: Lady
Loveyouth’s discovery of Raymund and Theodosia together, reported by
Bridget (236); the fire Raymund sets to distract the household while he elopes
with Theodosia which is reported by a servant (238); and the respective
marriages of Lady Loveyouth to Crazy (250), Brisk to Bridget (251) and
Theodosia to Raymund (251). Cumulatively, these second-hand accounts after
the fact, make the reader (and presumably the audience) aware of the
arbitrariness and artificiality of everything that appears onstage. Shadwell’s
patriarchal positioning then also strikes the reader as false because it appears
in a dramatic context that constantly and unsatisfyingly reminds its audience
that what it is reading (or watching) is only a play and, apparently, a badly
constructed one at that, one of the "unfinished works"5 2 which Rochester, a
loyal admirer of Shadwell, would later criticize.
W hether Shadwell had simply temporarily lost the dramatic gifts he
demonstrated in The Sullen Lovers, or whether the internal inconsistencies of
the ideological position he had decided to promote prevented him from
realizing a well-formed play is unclear and will remain so. W hat is certain is
that the pro-patriarchal stance of The Humorists is unique among the comedies
of 1670 and rare even among the remaining comedies of this transitional
period [1668-71]. It was also unpopular at the Duke’s Theatre and expressed
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an ideological position Shadwell himself would abandon by 1672 with his
translation of M oliere’s L ’Avare.
The remaining comedy of 1670 is also conservative but does not share
the absolutism of Shadwell’s propatriarchal ideology. John Caryll’s Sir
Salomon: or. The Cautious Coxcomb is a study in what depth psychology
terms the negative father and the play is firmly in the tradition of the Theatre
Royal’s earliest anti-patriarchal plays.5 3 Betterton, a third generation
professional stage manager in a direct line of descent from Shakespeare
(through his mentor D ’Avenant), probably had some hand in the distinctive
staging of Sir Salomon which Peter Holland describes in this way:
This technique, achieved through the identification of
proscenium doors with particular entrances to the
’house’, is reminiscent of Elizabethan staging . . .
Significantly, the primary use of these techniques of
generalized interior settings is in plays of rapid physical
action, like the Spanish plays . . . The only play
outside this tradition to use this form of fluid staging is
John Caryll’s Sir Salomon (1671). Caryll uses a form
of continuous staging that allows a scene to shift from
inside to outside at will . . . 5 4
In the last century, Robert Lowe made it clear that Betterton certainly had a
great deal of personal involvement with the play, since
he made a great success in the part of Sir Salomon
Single . . . giving thereby a proof of his great
versatility; for Sir Salomon is a comedy part, and quite
out of his usual line.5 5
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The play problematizes patriarchy emblematically by exploring four
fathers: one guilty of abandonment, two seemingly guilty of over
protectiveness and one guilty of vainly and presumptously putting his own
needs before those of his more deserving son and heir. Only the last o f these
figures, Sir Salomon, is morally condemned in the play and his condemnation
occurs with studied reluctance in a complex characterization that is the play’s
great strength, as Montague Summers acutely observed:
Sir Salomon himself is CarylFs highest
achievement . . . consummedly unpleasant, highly
ludicrous in his green jealousy, always choused, always
futile and yet exquisitely droll withal.
Caryll . . . makes us feel the conceit and weakness of
Sir Salomon’s position; we realize his heavy and selfish
tyranny; we know him hard and pragmatical, yet he
retains our respect, if not indeed in a sense our
sympathy throughout. At the last when in agony he
quits the scene with an expression of something like
despair we are not able to see him go without one short
pang, a mere stitch, or just a catch in the
throat . . . 5 6
The source of Sir Salomon’s distinctive complexity is an often ruthless
emotional neediness coupled to moments of intense self-awareness and despair.
One such moment occurs early in the fourth act, when Sir Salomon discovers
that his friend’s son, Peregrine (who has unwittingly made the older man a
confidant), is still making amorous advances to Sir Salomon’s fiancee, Betty,
despite Sir Salomon’s designs to prevent his visits. After swearing a revenge
"as loud as my disgrace" (66), the older man quietens and sees his
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predicament clearly in a passage that makes of him a more complex and
sympathetic figure than that of an ordinary blocking senex:
I am to blame. This extravagance of Passion serves
only to make my disgrace more visible: And my
Resentment, making a noise in the W orld, will but
sound a Trumpet, to draw more Company in to see the
M onster.— All things duely weigh’d, Why should I lay
the blame on others, when here within me lies my
worst Enemy? An obstinate Love has taken possession
of my heart, which makes an Ass of my Reason, and
forceth me, Though I know the Treason, to dote still
upon the Traitor. Unjustly I condemn the amorous
pursuit of a young Gallant, who is so ignorant of the
wrong and affront he does me, that he calls me to
Counsell in all his Plots and Contrivances against me!
Why do I blame the seduced Ignorance of an Innocent
Girle, whose want of knowledge . . . is the effect of
that Education which I gave her? No: My designs of
Revenge are vain, and unjust. I must pull down my
Sailes to weather out this storme. (66)
Having come to this realization however, Sir Salomon bizarrely concludes that
his only course now will be, to marry her out of hand:
That may open her eyes to see her Duty; and his, to
know the Injury he does me. Heaven! it may be, make
her honest . . . (66)
Under the guise of studied reasonableness, Sir Salomon makes a host of
bad decisions out of what at first appears to be his love for Betty but what is
actually his sense of her as his property: (just as Erminia was Orguilius’
property in The Fatal M arriage). Betty belongs to Sir Salomon, he believes, by
virtue of a fortunate windfall. He treats her as valuable property, secreting her
186
away in another house, surrounded by his trusted guards, and invests time and
instruction in her in order to increase her value to him:
Wary: Pray, Sir, what lucky Star directed you to the
discovery of this Treasure?
Sir Salomon: That (Sir) I owe to Fortune: For in a
Country Farme I first saw her, and read it in her looks,
that Heaven had not design’d her for that place . . . I
easily prevailed with the Old Woman of the House,
who was my Tenant, to resign her Charge to me. I took
her, as a Present sent from heaven to make the rest of
my days comfortable, and happy. For two years
together I have train’d her up myself, making it my
business to preserve her in her primitive innocence, and
simplicity: And, lest the contagion of ill company
should infect the original candour of her nature with the
least tincture of malice, I have plac’d two Servants
about her, the honestest and simplest, I could find out.
(8, 9)
Sir Salomon’s sexual possessiveness is one aspect of a larger
covetousness or materiality that also involves avarice and extends to his
treatment of his son, Mr. Single. Early in the play, Sir Salomon signs a
conveyance to disinherit the young man. His servant Timothy summarizes
these actions by observing to his master:
Timothy: I am afraid the World will judge hardly of
you, for abandoning thus your only Son, and making
him an utter stranger to your Blood and Estate. (3)
The same covetousness that derives from his emotional need and causes
his extreme jealousy is the means of Sir Salomon’s undoing. The first hint that
Sir Salomon has a rival occurs early in the second act when his trusted
servants reveal that they serve two masters of whom Sir Salomon is less
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favored. Ironically, the money Peregrine has bribed them with is money that
the avaricious Sir Salomon pressed upon him:
Sir Salomon knocks at Mrs. Bettys Lodging.
Alice from within: W ho’s at Dore there?
Ralph looking out from the Balcony: Gods so, ’tis
Master.
Alice: What? Our new Master, that gave us Mony?
Ralph: No, no, our old Master Evans, that never gave
us a Farthing. (17)
The undifferentiated covetousness which is the source of Sir Salomon’s
avarice extends beyond such penny-pinching to affect every aspect of his life.
His belief in the necessity of secrecy in rearing and educating Betty can be
seen as a commodification of information which, once commodified, is taken
to such a ridiculous extreme of hoarding that it indicates the measure of his
unfulfilled emotional needs:
The Art of Secrecy is the Secret of the World. ’Tis the
Rudder, that silently governs the whole bulk of Human
affairs. A Secret well kept, like Powder close ram m ’d,
does certain execution, when ever you give Fire with a
just aime. Therefore have I kept and educated this
tender Virgin in so private and remote a Quarter of the
Town; Therefore have I disguis’d my Person under a
borrow ’d name to her, and those Servants I plac’d
about her, that it should not be in the power of any
body to acquaint the World with my Design. (3)
The origins of Sir Salomon’s emotional neediness are never scrutinized
in Caryll’s play. But his search for comfort and happiness in his old age
suggests that these pleasures may have been absent from his life. His action of
disinheriting his only son and his distorted belief that "Children owe all to
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Parents, but there lies no Obligation on the parents side" (3) suggests a
childhood history of abuse through emotional deprivation which is consistent
with his overall narcissism. He is arrested at an early stage of development
and is still a very needy child. It is this same narcissism that makes it difficult
for Sir Salomon to understand other people. This is, in fact, one of his main
character traits and one of the first which Caryll chooses to display:
M r. Wary: . . . Pray do me the Favour to give me
some private Marke, whereby I may know when I am
to believe you . . .
Sir Salomon: . . . (if it be possible) lets both fall on the
right Sent. You talke of your Daughter, and her
Gallant, don’t you?
W ary: What else, Sir?
Sir Salomon: And all this while my Discourse has been
of my own Affections . . . (6, 7)
Finally, the fact that Sir Salomon is only capable of responding
emotionally (or amorously) to a pubescent girl (as Betty was when he first met
her) suggests that his anima, or feminine aspect, has been discouraged and is
underdeveloped. Like Ludovico in Flora’s Vagaries he is a man who has been
abandoned by the feminine (although Caryll portrays his character as a
widower where Rhodes portrays Ludovico as an orphan whose mother died in
childbirth). Fundamentally therefore, Sir Salomon participates in the same
psychology as that which causes gynophobia. His early history (of which we
only see traces) and his abandonment by his wife (through her death) has left
him extremely chary of women. He plots intricately and at ridiculous length to
189
allow himself both to possess a woman and to prevent her from wounding him
where he is most vulnerable. Like his undifferentiated covetousness, the
disproportionate rage he experiences when he discovers Betty’s love for
Peregrine is a result of the earlier emotional abandonment (which is also the
source of that sympathy with which audiences respond to Sir Salomon). His
continuing emotional need and its misogynist vocabulary is familiar to us now
as the vocabulary of gynophobia:
Sir Salomon: . . . False Woman! thy whole Sex is a
meer Quicksand, false and treacherous ground for any
Man to build his happiness upon! Thy whole Sexe is a
Generation of Vipers, that gnaw and eate into the hearts
that give them reception: They are born with all their
poison about them, which no Art, or Industry, no
Education can remove. (29)
Caryll softens his focus in the next father-figure he introduces in Sir
Salomon. Mr. Wary, who is Julia’s father, has been a friend to Sir Salomon
for all of their fifty-eight years. At first, Wary is a sympathetic and generally
commonsensical figure whose principle concern is to provide for his
daughter’s well-being. His greatest limitation is that he understands that well
being only in logical and financial terms. When it becomes clear that Sir
Salomon will never forgive the young man for whatever unidentified act
caused his disinheritance, Wary forbids Sir Salomon’s son, Mr. Single from
visiting Julia:
Wary: to Mr. Single: My desire of seeing you now was
to let you know in her [Julia’s] hearing, that I have
190
been taken notice of your late frequent resort to my
house: And, though according to my inclination, my
doores should never be shut to a person of your merit,
yet (as matters stand) you must excuse me, if I preferre
the Interest of a Child before the Concern of an
Acquaintance. Sir, to be short; I know your constant
Visits imply your Addresses to my Daughter: And,
since your Father is resolv’d to make you a stranger to
his Estate, I must entreat you henceforth to be a
stranger to my House; for (to deal freely with you) no
Deserts (though never so great) attended with poverty,
can satisfie the care of a Parent in the disposal of his
Daughter. (11)
Like his friend, Sir Salomon, Mr. Wary proceeds from this position of
apparent reasonableness to a bizarre course of action. He intends to dispose of
Julia by marrying her to Sir Arthur Addell, a complete English fool. Her
initial resistance is construed as a rebellion similar to that of Mr. Single and it
draws threats that reveal behind W ary’s more palatable patriarchal concerns, a
struggle for authority in terms of the absolute alternatives of either exile or
submission and domination which are familiar to us from Sir Salomon’s
relationship with his son:
Mr. Wary: Daughter, I had rather your own Reason,
then my Justice in punishing you, should make you
sensible, how heinous the Crime of Rebellion is in a
Child to a Parent; Have you not a fresh Example before
your Eyes, in your Beggarly Gallant, turn’d out of
Doors, and ejected from all Title, and Claime, which
Nature gave him to a Fair Inheritance? and now
become a mere Vagabond in the wide World? you
know, it lies in my power to do, what his Father has
done; I can marry again, and bring a second Brood into
the World to possess that Fortune, which you
undeserve: And, if you persist in your obstinate passion
191
for this Indigent-Lover, I am resolved, You shall ee’n
meet him upon equal termes.
Julia: Sir, I confess, all is in your power . . . (20-1)
Sir Arthur Addell practices the same bizarrely comic logic as that of
W ary and Sir Salomon, the (emblematic negative fathers). Here he tells
Peregrine of his intention to marry Julia sight unseen:
Peregrine: Did she ever come to a Parly with you?
Sir Arthur: Hang Parlyes; I never spoke to her in my
Life; But her father begs me to take her; and I hope she
has more need of me than he has. Can she resist a man
of Estate, and Title, with my Parts. (30)
Characteristic o f this kind of logic is that it appears to make sense while
it completely ignores the emotional dimension of those characters whose lives
it would affect. Sir Salomon ignores and attempts to override Betty’s love for
Peregrine, Mr. W ary ignores Julia’s love for Mr. Single and Sir Arthur
ignores all feelings that would necessitate a parley before marriage. Like Sir
Salomon (and Mr. Wary in a more limited way), Sir Arthur is a narcissist who
has great difficulty identifying the emotional realities of those around him.
This becomes abundantly clear in the third act when he finally gets around to
’parlying’ with Julia:
Sir Arthur: Pray Madam, for a while give over
Fooling, and be serious; Alas, I know y’are bashfull (as
all young women are, or should be) and loth to come
out with’t: Therefore I’le take pitty o ’you, and speak
your mind for you: You’d fain have a Husband (Would
you not?) and you’d be marryed to a man of Fortune,
and good Parts, and be a Lady, (I know you would:)
Then say no more, trouble yourself no farther, you
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shall have all this, here’s your Man, take him, and be
thankful.
Julia: Is there any persecution like that of a Confident
Fool. (51)
Sir Arthur has overlooked the same emotional dimension of marriage
which Julia addresses earlier in the play. Her reference to divorce does more
in this case than simply situate the play in its early-1670 context. It also
constitutes an epigrammatic condensation of the challenge that divorce
represented to patriarchal authority:
Julia: [to her father]
But (Sir) unless by Love made soft, and light,
The yoke of Marriage all the World would fright:
And, if my love in Wedlock-bands be forc’d
Alas! I am not m arry’d, but divorc’d. (21)
But despite this thematization of the contemporary challenge to
patriarchy, Sir Salomon, as I have indicated, is basically a very conservative
play. Caryll is concerned to show the excesses and failings of patriarchal
authority when it is guided by narcissistic hands, but he is also concerned to
show patriarchy in a compassionate light by making Sir Salomon a sympathetic
booby. He is concerned to show that patriarchy works, that it has its own
innate justice and symmetry, that it is about relatedness and responsibility and
in particular, about the responsibility of loving parents (fathers) for their
(frequently uncomprehending) children. One of the most interesting facets of
the dramatic design of Sir Salomon is its progressive introduction of
increasingly sympathetic and less guilty father-figures. Wary is more welcome
193
than Sir Salomon and Woodland, Peregrine’s father, who successfully arranges
a wealthy marriage for his son, is more sympathetic still.
Woodland does not appear until page 93 of the 101-page, 1671 edition,
so unlike the first two fathers, there is not much room for characterization. He
is completely and usefully an emblem, a sign of a father whose actions are
signs of fathers’ actions. His coming had been heralded by a manservant some
twenty pages earlier. It is this man who destroyed Peregrine’s hopes of
pursuing Betty by making preparations for him to be:
M arry’d out of hand to a young Lady, who, (they say)
is vastly rich, and hugely handsome.
Peregrine: . . . No, My Father must excuse me; All
other things he may do of himself without me; but,
Marriage is a Work, which I must do, not he. (71)
Caryll obviously intended a parallel between the marriages being forced on
Julia by her father Wary and the one now prepared for Peregrine. But while
W oodland has not consulted his son, his actions are actually much more
palatable than those of Wary.
Mr. W oodland’s contribution to Sir Salomon is an unexpected turn in the
play’s main plot. In his first appearance he, like Mr. W ary before him, seems
to be taking Sir Salomon’s advice to heart as a model of paternal authority:
Sir Salomon: Whatever you do, Sir, maintain the
Authority of a Father; And, since you have provided so
considerable a Match for him [Peregrine], make sure
w hil’st you may.
Woodland: I owe you much for your Friendly advice;
which I intend to follow. (93)
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Accompanying Woodland however, is a "a rich Merchant, newly arriv’d from
the Indies" (70), whose daughter is Peregrine’s intended wife. His name,
which is appropriate both to his profession, and to the father of a woman who
has become the object of a property exchange between men is Barter. One of
his few actions is to approach Sir Salomon and request the return of his
property, an action which makes of him, overwhelmingly, the most
sympathetic of the father-figures in the play:
Barter: . . . Sir Salomon, there wants nothing to
complete what you . . . advise . . . but your
concurrence: For my Daughter, I understand, is in your
Custody; who took her out of the Nurses hands, with
whom I left her before my Voyage to the Indies. (94)
Barter, therefore, at first appears as an apparently negative father. But he
is one whose abandonment of his daughter is qualified by his apparent concern
for her. His return, his determination to save, protect, and provide for her and
his success in business through which he is able to accomplish these ends and
marry her off to Peregrine (her man of choice), show Barter to be a parent
cast in the same nurturing, caring mold as his friend Woodland. Patriarchy, in
other words, is more complex and appealing than the selfish power struggle
between parent and child that characterizes Sir Salomon’s and Mr. W ary’s
relationship with their offspring. Patriarchy, Caryll is concerned to tell his
young disaffected audience, is benign and fundamentally misunderstood.
195
Anthropologist David Gilmore has recently described a ubiquitous
ideology of masculinity in terms that recall the contradiction that Caryll
explores dramatically in Barter’s apparent abandonment of his daughter and his
obvious concern for her:
One of my findings here is that manhood ideologies
always include a criterion of selfless generosity, even to
the point of sacrifice. Again and again we find that real
men are those who give more than they take; they serve
others . . . Men nurture society by shedding their
blood, their sweat, and their semen, by bringing home
food for both child and mother, by producing children,
and by dying if necessary in faraway places to provide
a safe haven for their people. This, too, is nurturing in
the sense of endowing or increasing. However, the
necessary personal qualities for this male contribution
are paradoxically the exact opposite of what we
W esterners normally consider the nurturing personality.
To support his family, the man has to be distant, away
hunting or fighting wars . . . 3 7
In the conclusion of Sir Salomon, in other words, Caryll reverses our
negative opinion of fathers, of paternal authority and of the patriarchal
hegemony which they represent by drawing us into a position of compassionate
understanding of two fathers whose generous and well-intentioned actions are
at first misunderstood as abandonment or insensitive use of force but which
actually balance the excesses of both bad fathers: Sir Salomon and Mr. Wary.
The narcissism that conditions Sir Salmon’s actions and those of W ary’s agent,
Sir Arthur Addell, is also balanced by the genuine relatedness that exists in
W oodland’s and Barter’s respective relationships with their beloved children.
196
As Gilmore puts it, "manhood is the defeat of a childish narcissism that is not
only different from the adult role but antithetical to it. "5 8 This antithesis was
apparently recognized and understood by John Caryll in the late seventeenth
century and it informs our reading of Sir Salomon today.
Moreover, in his portrayal of Woodland and Barter, Caryll tricks his
predominantly young audience into a position of relatedness themselves to
these characters and what they represent. He does this by involving the
spectators in an emotional movement from bias and suspicion to understanding
and compassion. In Sir Salomon, a comedy which even the most sensitive and
experienced theater historians have mistakenly seen as "trivial,"5 9 Caryll,
who was in 1670 a 45-year-old Catholic courtier of unquestionable loyalty to
the Stuart dynasty, succeeded in creating a pro-patriarchal ideology that was
enormously popular with Restoration theater audiences and with the court. The
conservative quality of Caryll’s ideology is visible only by comparison with
the succeeding comedies of the next few years that eventually promote a
masculine ideology, that openly and overtly mocks the nurturing relatedness
Caryll recommends. But at this moment in the development of comedy, Caryll
is presenting an ideology of male behavior which claims that patriarchy is
about responsibility, relatedness, and the compassionate forgiveness that
simultaneously allowed audiences to feel affection for Sir Salomon and to
forgive Barter and Wary as the honourable victims of gross misunderstandings.
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3.3: 1671. The Frolicks; The Amorous Prince; Love in a Wood: The Six
Davs Adventure: Marriage a la Mode.
In an important but obscure article of 1968, Restoration theater historian
Pierre Danchin observes:
l’annee theatrale 1671-1672 marque, dans ce domaine,
une sorte de tournant. La conjunction de deux ordres de
faits a du jouer cette annee-la pour librer auteurs et
comediens de leur attitude d ’obsequiosite servile ou
d ’agressivite factice a l’egard des elements le plus
bruyants des parterres; d ’une part c ’est en 1671-1672
que se produisent de serieux bouleversements dans
I’organisation des theatres . . . d’autre parts, certains
evenements historiques vont vide ces theatres d ’une
bonne partie de leur jeune public.6 0
The upheaval in theater organisation to which Danchin refers is the opening of
the new D uke’s Company theatre [Dorset Garden] in November 1671 and the
coincidental fire at the old Theatre Royal site [Bridges Street] in the first
month of 1672. Although they would have some successes in the next two
years, it was not until 1674 when the King’s Company moved from its
temporary quarters in the converted tennis courts at Lincoln’s Inn Fields to the
new Theatre Royal location in Drury Lane, that the company would once again
present serious opposition to the much more competitive and professionally-
managed Duke’s Company.
At almost exactly the same time, young gentlemen, and aristocrats were
leaving London for Europe and the North Sea in preparation for what would
soon [March 17, 1672] become the Third Dutch War. Danchin has received
198
some criticism for the "over-literalness"6 1 of his readings of the satiric
prologues and epilogues as well as his inability to provide proportions for the
categories into which he divides Restoration audiences.6 2 Still, his conclusions
that the vacuum which their absence created in the theater audience led to
certain changes in audience composition; that these changes in audience
resulted in changes in the types of theater performed before a newly
constituted audiences; and, that ultimately, the final triumph of the Dorset
Garden troupe6 3 is attributable to their ability to attract a new and bourgeois
audience-segment have been taken seriously by all recent scholarship, though
not welcomed by proponents of the view that Restoration theatergoers were
monolithically a coterie audience. Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume
explicitly concurred with Danchin’s observations about the relationship
between changes in audience composition and the new type of comedy in
1976. "The boom in sex and cuckoldry," they wrote," follows an influx of
"cit" patrons into the theater. ”6 4
An undated dream-interpretation chapbook of roughly the same era
confirms these important points. Clearly directed towards a citizen audience,
this chapbook indicates a growing citizen-awareness of comic theater both by
merely mentioning comedy and also by mentioning it in the context of
commonplace dream symbols like bells ringing or instruments being played. In
the company of these everyday images, comedy is used as a commonplace
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symbol of success, one that suggests that there were a fair number o f citizens
who had both the inclination and the disposable income to buy chapbooks and
to attend plays:
To dream of hearing bells ringing, signifieth an alarum
or disturbance among citizens. To dream you hear
singing or playing upon instruments, denotes recovering
of health to those that are sick. To dream of seeing a
comedy acted, denotes good success in business [my
emphasis].6 5
One final fact which Danchin omits from his analysis signifies the
continued problematization of marriage in Restoration culture as well as a
pervasive and increasingly unapologetic libertinism at the highest levels of
English society. In 1671 both Buckingham and Charles II (bound in perpetuity
to their barren wives by a law that was extremely difficult to challenge),
staged mock marriages to their respective mistresses, Lady Shrewsbury6 6 and
Louise de Keroualle (Querouaille),6 7 by whom each later had sons. The
traditional, stultifying morality of chastity and arranged marriages which had
been challenged during the Interregnum and Civil War period, was now openly
mocked by a generation of young people eager to emulate the freedom of their
sovereign and his minister. The new wave of playwrights who include
Shadwell, Sedley, Betterton, Behn and Wycherley, belong to this younger
generation who rutted stylishly in the libertine circles surrounding the court.
And although it is true that "at this date . . . cuckoldings do not occur in
Restoration comedies"6 8 it is also true that by 1671, cuckoldry has become a
200
central topic of the emerging genre, one which is not yet openly depicted but
which is always present either by implication or as a dreaded event which has
fortunately been narrowly averted. Significantly, this year also saw the
premiere of The Rehearsal, which parodies and signals the death of heroic
plays and their antiquated and idealized morality. The fashion in the theater as
in life was clearly headed in the direction of a defiant and open admission of
sexual natures and sexual needs. The self-serving and sensually oriented street-
smarts with which Elizabeth Polwhele’s gallant Rightwit utters as The
Frolicks: or. The Lawyer Cheated opens, give voice to this growing change in
taste:
Leonora: You were never virtuous—
Rightwit: Why? What? Thou wilt never talk of virtue
and be an ass? A thing no one so much as thinks on in
this age, that is wise; more out of fashion than a French
hood; and put on only by some old, moaded
[outmoded] piteous souls that are not fit for anything
but to count Aves on their beads to keep themselves
from sleeping.
Leonora: You are a precious Gallant.
Rightwit: You are a precious fool. (1.1-9)
Rightwit’s dilemma in The Frolicks is as straightforward as his style of
speech. He is strongly physically attracted to Clarabell and he wants to sleep
with her, the sooner the better, although he puts it more eloquently:
Rightwit: [kisses her]. Thy skin’s pure, teeth white, lips
soft, breath sweet, eyes sparkling, would we were in a
wilderness together.
Clarabell: [breaks away]. You dare as well be hang’d
as serve me so again you saucy—
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Rightwit: W ilt thou be kind an little and—
Clarabell: Do what?
Rightwit: That as is in fashion, most, and ever was,
since first the world began. If thou know’st not the
mode, lead me to thy bed and I will teach it thee and
make thee perfect in the fashion. Dost understand me?
(11.36-39, 45-50)
The first essential point in appreciating this play is that it is written by a
woman and it depicts a woman’s growing recognition of her own physical
interest in this highly-sexed man. At first Clarabell acts as though she is
repulsed by Rightwit and, in fact, she repels him, sending him off to a
drinking party cursing her:
Rightwit: Shall we try what the pow’r of wine can do
towards making me forget my debts and you your love?
This wench is proud and ill-natured to boot. (II. 193-5)
At their first meeting, she resists her growing awareness of her physical
interest in him by distancing herself from him using invectives:
Clarabell: I ’ll cross myself when I but hear you named.
(11.61)
Clarabell: Peace, issue of a nightmare, abusive fiend.
(11.70)
Clarabell: I think I shall have much ado to be shut of
you. (11.79)
But the attraction is very strong and Clarabell always acknowledges it and is
always partly convinced that she will succumb to it:
Clarabell: There’s witchcraft in everything this fellow
does. My soul is ready to run out at my eyes after him.
202
I fear I shall be fool enough, and madwoman
altogether, to fall in love with him. But I will resist it
with an Amazonian courage. Love is but a swinish
thing at best. I’ll in and study to forget him. If ’twill
not be, I’ll study how to get him. (II.203-9)
Clarabell’s acknowledgement of this powerful sexual attraction (and
therefore her acknowledgement of her sexuality) is a mark of her fundamental
honesty and a source of the audience’s sympathy with her. She is single and
therefore emotionally free to dispose of her awakening affections where she
will as she tells her father:
Swallow: Clarabell, the greatest of my ambition is to
see you happy in the arms of a husband that may please
you.
Clarabell: I would not have one to displease me.
Swallow: Will you give me leave to choose one for
you?
Clarabell: No, never, sir. (1.214-18)
The main plot pits her against Swallow (the lawyer who will be cheated)
in the familiar contest of an overprotective parent interfering in the life of his
wittier, determined and adult, offspring:
Swallow: . . . How dar’st thou thus palpably abuse thy
own natural father?
Clarabell: Lord, sir, I thought you but jested when you
talked of "chopping me in marriage," as you call it,
with an old man, and my answer was to make you
merry. But since you are in earnest, I humbly beg your
pardon.
Swallow: Beg my pardon— pray God thou are not
naught[y] thou comest off and on with so many plaguy
fetches and "why not’s" that I am very ’fraid on thee.
"Practice not deceit in thy youth."
Mark: [Aside]. You’ll deceive him—
203
Clarabell [Aside], If I can, by my troth. (1.256-67)
As an emblem of patriarchal authority, Clarabell’s father Swallow is depicted
as stuffy, silly, boring and essentially toothless in face of a keen and
determined female adversary like Clarabell. The same thing is equally true of
the play’s depiction of another patriarchal figure, the husband of Lady
Meanwell. Lord W illiam ’s dilemma is that while he himself is too blind to see
his wife’s imminent infidelity, he is constantly warned about it by Ralph, a
trusted servant who has a shrewd appreciation of his m aster’s w ife’s character
and who is exasperated by his master’s innocence:
Ralph: A word in your ear, if ye please sir. (Whispers.)
Meanwell: I prithee get thee gone. There will be no end
of my horns if thou stay’st a little longer.
Ralph: Thou art a fool, a cuckoldly fool, and I will
make thee see thy horns, though they hang in thy light
and over-shadow all natural sense and reason. (IV. 22-
28)
The woman who is intent on cuckolding Meanwell, Lady Meanwell, is
juxtaposed to Clarabell and her acknowledgement of sexual attraction is a
darker version of this same theme in the play’s main-plot. Her character gives
Polwhele’s composition a sharper edge than what is supplied by the frothy love
intrigue with Rightwit. Married, corrupt, and worldly, she rejects her overly-
credulous husband before succumbing to, or attempting to succumb to, a
passion for Sir Francis Makelove, a sleazy seducer of the Town:
Makelove: Madam, ’tis pity he should ever have
enjoy’d such sweet perfection. I grieve to think on’t—
204
Lady Meanwell: I thought him tolerable till I saw you
[They kiss]. (11.415-17)
Lady Meanwell hides her pursuit of sexual pleasure through a series of
amazingly quick-witted dissimulations that simultaneously cast Clarabell’s
relative sexual honesty and cross-gendering sexual ’frolics’ in a positive and
humorous light. Meanwell’s unabashed use of her husband on the other hand,
leaves the audience wincing for the willing credulity of Meanwell whom she
manipulates easily despite the fact that (in this scene) he has just witnessed her
kissing a rival:
Ralph: Now, sir, what think you? Will you yet believe
me you are a cuckold?
Lady Meanwell: Heaven and earth: my husband! Sir
Francis, did I not say when first I saw Mr, Meanwell
approach that I would use him for disappointing us of
his company so long? [To Meanwell] Nay, be angry
and look scurvily. For ’tis my aim to be reveng’d a
little for the defeat you have given us all this while in
not letting us have you sooner.
Meanwell: I do not like such odd revenges,
madam . . .
[She weeps].
Lady Meanwell: I can never be merry but you are
hornmad. I will go seek some wretched cave to
languish out my youth in where the sun’s light, nor
human conversation, ne’er shall find me.
Ralph: [Aside]. W hat excellent dissimulation’s this?
Meanwell: [Aside to Ralph]. Dost see this, thou infidel?
How darst thou think I am a wittol, or a cuckold? [To
his wife] I do believe thou wast in jest, my dear . . .
(11.419-439)
205
Taken together these women are an indictment of patriarchy. Clarabell’s
wit and sexuality are mirrored by Lady Meanwell’s. But in the older woman
Clarabell’s fundamental honesty has been replaced by a highly accomplished
and self-serving dissimulation. Her marriage to Meanwell has made her into a
moral grotesque. The Frolicks. in its study of women’s acceptance and pursuit
of their sexuality, presents before and after portraits of women’s characters as
they are affected by marriage.
A second essential point in understanding The Frolicks. is that
accompanying the exploration of women’s sexuality in the figures of Clarabell
and Lady Meanwell is a topic of equally vital interest to Restoration women.
The Frolicks is as much a criticism of contemporary male gender ideology as
it is an exploration of woman’s sexuality. Men get a very bad press in the
play. Swallow is ineffectual, as we have seen. Neither he nor Meanwell
presents an effective challenge to either of the play’s major female characters,
one of whom is morally distasteful and one not. In addition, Pearson recently
recognized how Polwhele’s representation of male gender ideology affects the
depiction of Rightwit. The Frolicks. she writes,
. . . presents sexual dilemmas and conflicts as openly
as any male writer, though through a woman’s eyes;
unusually for plays of the period it opens with a
woman’s words to the rake-hero, so from the beginning
we see male behaviour through the critical eyes of a
woman. Rightwit is more dominated by women than the
rakes in plays of the 1670s commonly are . . . 6 9
206
Polwhele depicts Rightwit in a way demonstrably distinct from the ways
in which male playwrights of the era presented the rake-lovers of their
comedies. Rightwit is humiliated wittily in ways that leave Clarabell with the
clear upper hand in their relationship, as Pearson notes:
he is even set upon by two or three of his ex
mistresses, who leave him to care for their bastard
child, to the great amusement of the witty heroine
Clarabell.7 0
Male humiliations, in fact, are a common feature of all or most of the
portrayals of men in The Frolicks. Lady Meanwell’s would-be seducer is
unsuspectingly married off to Faith after she has been seduced by Lord
Courtall. Lord Courtall himself is a pox-ridden sexual compulsive and
compares himself (albeit favorably) to a eunuch (IV,76-79). Ralph the faithful
servant and informer is fired by his employer for his pains. Lord Meanwell,
the play’s means of problematizing marriage, ironically shuns the possibility of
divorce and instead continues blindly in a marriage which "is completely
hollow and unsound."7 1 In his naivete, Meanwell finally discharges his
protector, Ralph, and Ralph’s bleak observation on his master’s future is also a
comment on the inevitability of Meanwell’s cuckoldom:
Meanwell: [To the company] This rogue had almost
persuaded me to divorce from my lady, had not her
virtue prov’d itself about his envy. [To Ralph] Sir,
pray, be gone. Before this whole congregation I
discharge you from my service.
Ralph: . . . God be with you, sir. [Aside] But that wish
is vain. (V.310-317)
207
As Milhous and Hume observe:
Most Restoration comedies gloss over such situations
lightly. Here Meanwell’s dismissal of Ralph drives
home hard, right at the end of the play. His wife has
not actually made him a cuckold, but she will do so
when opportunity is to be found.7 2
Before this disturbing portrait of how men are abused in marriage however,
Polwhele is careful to depict the male abuse of that institution. Lord Courtall,
on his way to an assignation with Faith, refuses to read letters from his wife
whom he has left in the country:
Lord Courtall: Receive them and put them in the gilt
cabinet. Her business is of no concernment. I have not
leisure to peruse them now. (11.257-59)
Polwhele’s urge to either slur or comically reduce the men of her play
accounts for the play’s unique feature, which leads its editors to see The
Frolicks as a peculiar anomaly, one that mixes established trends with a use of
crossdressing that is almost thirty years before its time:
Comparing The Frolicks with some plays from about
the same time, one quickly sees that it is both typical
and remarkably forward looking. The London setting,
the topographical references, the social level of the
characters, the attitudes toward marriage and money are
all what one might expect at this date. Putting the
heroine in male dress had become a favorite element in
the sixties, used in play after play . . . It fosters risque
episodes and allows a titillating display of female legs
in tight pants. The further use of transsexual disguise in
Act III is rather less usual at this date. First in a dance,
and then when Sir Gregory and Zany are arrested and
brought up before Swallow as whores, Polwhele adds
208
the sort of touch Sir John Vanbrugh was to capitalize
on in The Provok’d Wife (1697).7 3
Sir Gregory and Zany are the harshest example o f male humiliation in
the play. Clarabell tricks them into dressing as women and then steals their
clothes. Eventually they are brought before her father who had once
considered them as suitors but who now asks them in amazement:
I pray you let me understand upon what score you have
thrown by your sex and unadvisedly thus put on
another. (IV. 66-68)
This humiliation provides an interesting clue to how the breeches role
was perceived by at least part of the Restoration audience. Zany’s and Sir
Gregory’s crossdressing occurs in direct contrast to that of Clarabell. For Zany
and Gregory, the first Restoration men to be written into a part where they
dressed as women, crossdressing has unpleasant effects. They are tricked,
cheated, mistaken for prostitutes, thrown in prison by the watch, brought
before Clarabell’s father and made to explain their actions. Clarabell’s
imitation of a Gallant on the other hand (the first such comic role written by a
woman), is empowering. It enables her first to warn Rightwit of his impending
arrest by bailiffs. Secondly, it allows her a man’s freedom. It is she who
initiates the ’frolick’ of dancing in the tavern with the old men whom she then
encourages to dress as transvestites. While the breeches role was clearly
titillating, requiring some of the most desirable women in England to display
their legs onstage, the role also had much to do with power and with women
209
assuming the symbolic male freedoms of visiting taverns unaccompanied,
delivering timely warnings to friends and humiliating their enemies in such a
complete way as to render them ineffective.
The extensive use of crossgendering in The Frolicks indicates the
intensity of Polwhele’s desire to comically reduce patriarchy by comically
reducing its agents. No fathers or husbands are made to crossdress in the play,
but the transvestism of the unsuitable lovers is an extension of her portrayal of
the various manifestations of male inadequacy noted above. In effect, she is
turning the conventions of a male genre against itself. And if Sir Gregory and
Zany are the most obvious examples of transvestism in the play, they are not
the only ones. Rightwit himself is figured as a woman and, as was true of
comedies of the previous decade, this device calls into question the character’s
masculinity and therefore his right to exercise traditional male authority in his
relationship with Clarabell. Rightwit’s declaration "I am as humourous as
W oman, and can change as often" (11.192) precedes Clarabell’s triple assertion
of her own empowerment when she crossdresses to save Rightwit from the
bailiffs, when she unties him from his bastard children, and later when she
wittily and illegally frees him from prison. Finally, she puts him in the
position of having to prove himself worthy of marrying her by getting her
father’s permission for the wedding:
Clarabell: I mean not to marry with any man; but when
I am weary of my life, I’ll have thee. Meantime, go get
210
my father’s good will, and I’m a rogue if I marry thee
not as soon as thou hast it. (IV.445-48)
He accomplishes this task easily and with wit. But it is now clear with whom
the power in the relationship ultimately resides and appropriately, it is
Clarabell who leads in the negotiations with Swallow for his acceptance of the
new order of things, the witty couple’s marriage at the end of the play. Like
her husband-to-be, her father (a representative of the law) is unable to exert
the traditional patria potestas, over an empowered Clarabell:
Rightwit: . . . you wake, and your eyes are open
enough to see how you are over-reach’d lawyer, by
your own law.
Swallow: Thou art a cunning, wicked, unthrift, and
thou shalt not have her, for all this.
Clarabell: His title is too good for you, sir, to cut off
his interest, I assure you.
Swallow: Thou wert ever a pert, headstrong baggage.
. . . Since there’s no remedy . . . I receive him to my
arms— with a hope he will leave his unthrifty course.
(V.272-8, 299-301)
In addition to her overall technique of the comic reduction of men,
Polwhele also singles out sectarians for comic reduction on two occasions.
First, when Swallow puts forward Brother Joseph as an "old, wise and rich"
bachelor with whom she could "chop up a [marriage] bargain" (1.246-47)
Clarabell responds:
I confess he has wealth enough to spare a young wife a
stately pair of horns of what gallant she pleases; wise
enough to make an apology for wearing them; and old
enough to become them excellently. (1.248-252)
211
This, in itself, is insignificant enough, but later in the play, Polwhele
returns to her mockery of dissenters in the figure of the turnkey at Rightwit’s
prison:
Clarabell: Here, Brother is a mite for ye. And the Lord
put it in thy heart to look upon the poor prisoners with
an eye of pity.
Turnkey: For your sake I shall do much, for I perceive
you are a Sister of the Lord.
Clarabell: [Aside]. I shall go near to spoil all with
laughing.
I pray thee Brother, fetch some wine. The while will I
look for my money to pay for the same. "Give wine to
the afflicted and to him that is of heavy heart .. . "
Turnkey: ’Tis so set down in Holy Writ.
[He unlocks a door, as to fetch wine. She locks him in,
and catches up the keys and opens another door.]
(IV.421-435)
Together with the antipatriarchal material, these anti-sectarian passages
are consistent with the very little known (or suspected) of its author’s
biography. Milhous and Hume have suggested that Elizabeth Polwhele could
have been a twenty year-old nonconformist vicar’s daughter from Tiverton.7 4
If so, Clarabell’s rejection of Brother Joseph, and her gulling of the zealous
Turnkey would have a biographical dimension. So too would the recurring
humiliation of men which affects every action in the play’s structure. Elizabeth
Polwhele both married the Reverend Stephen Lobb and gave birth to a son by
him sometime before 1678.7 5 The Frolicks therefore, could be a reflection of
the resentments that a well-lettered young woman of marriageable age felt
212
towards the paternal, social (and patriarchal) pressures compelling her to
marry instead of pursuing the dramatic career for which she was disposed. We
do know that The Frolicks is Polwhele’s last play of three, and her only
comedy. The dedication to Killigrew’s influential friend, Prince Rupert (which
is included in the manuscript), seems calculated to win the author powerful
patronage and possibly a chance to stage the play or to act with the King’s
Company one year after Aphra Behn had begun her career with the Duke of
Y ork’s troupe. There is possibly an indication of Polwhele’s aspirations within
the play. Rightwit’s observation of ClarabelFs ability to dissimulate as she is
manipulating the turnkey and freeing Rightwit from jail: "A brave wench! She
would make an admirable comedian" (IV.427-8) could easily lead a reader to
reflect on the dramatic abilities of the play’s author.
Unhappily, nothing exists but speculation concerning whether or not this
play was ever mounted.7 6 It is clear however, that 1671 was a bad year for
attempting to win court influence either to join or to mount a play with the
King’s Company. The old Bridge’s Street Theatre was soon to burn down,
leaving its troupe without costumes or money for staging. At the same time the
Duke’s Company had opened a sumptuous new theater that would attract
increasing numbers of the same theater audience that was to shrink during the
Third Dutch War. Courtiers, including Prince Rupert (a General), were being
swept up by the approaching war and had mainly left London by the end of the
213
year. In this environment, it seems unlikely that Elizabeth Polwhele would
have been able to stage her interesting comedy, but if she did, it could not
have been a success because little more is ever heard of it and the Elizabeth
Polwhele in whom Milhous and Hume are interested settles into an
unremarkable married life sometime before 1678. Her words to Prince Rupert
are appropriate here. In 1671, dedicating her forward-looking comedy,
Polwhele wrote:
I am young, no scholar, and what I write I write by
nature, not by art. My careless stars so heedlessly do
guide me as if they were unconcerned with me, and my
affairs lead me to nothing that is fortunate. (26-29)
W hether or not Polwhele’s play was ever mounted, we do know that
1671 saw the premiere of Aphra Behn’s second tragicomedy, The Amorous
Prince. Like The Forc’d Marriage of the previous year, The Amorous Prince:
or. The Curious Husband is not a comedy, but it does contain comic elements
that will come to fruition in Behn’s third play (and first unmixed comedy) The
Dutch Lover (1673), as Maureen Duffey points out:
The Forc’d Marriage had had one comic character
Falatius, a coward. In The Amorous Prince the comedy
is diffused throughout, both in the dialogue and among
the characters. Technically it’s an enormous advance on
its predecessor and leads on naturally to the next stage
in her development . . . 7 7
214
The comic elements in both of Behn’s first plays focus on gender roles
and, in fact, sex is a dominant focus in Behn’s corpus of plays, as Angeline
Goreau has noted:
If Aphra Behn had courted immodesty on a symbolic
level merely in the act of staging her plays or the
publishing of her writing, she openly embraced it in
what she wrote. She frankly addressed the question of
sex and was not afraid to bring it onto the stage. Her
Second play, The Amorous Prince . . . opened on a
seduction scene which had just been brought to
fruition— the couple rising from their love-making.7 8
In her first mounted play, Falatio, the comic fop, had called his own
sexuality into question by means of his recurring cowardice, his attitude
towards women and his unusual name. Lorenzo, the fop-figure of The
Amorous Prince, is even more flagrantly ambivalent in his sexuality and the
motif of homosexuality or bisexuality which he personifies is patently repeated
in the character of Guillam the male transvestite. This motif is also echoed
both in the male relationships and in the misogyny that permeates the other
plots of The Amorous Prince.
Behn accompanies this exploration of what appears at first to be marginal
male sexuality with disruptions in the play’s representations of femininity.
These disruptions are characteristic of the motif of sexual reversal to which
Pearson devotes a small section of The Prostituted M use. Surveying the corpus
of these first professional plays by a woman, she discovers that "Behn is much
occupied with reversals and inversions of conventional sexual roles and
215
stereotypes."7 9 This motif has also been noted by Donald Bruce, who refers
to "Behn-like shift[s] in the role of the sexes."8 0
Pearson’s exposition of Behn’s methods for effecting this reversal has a
direct bearing on The Amorous Prince. She refers to
Behn’s enthusiastic use of the figure of the female
transvestite, who appears in nine out of seventeen
surviving plays of undoubted authorship.8 1
The cluttered action of The Amorous Prince is an exceptional example of
Behn’s use of female transvestites. There are two such breeches parts in the
play, those of Cloris and Isabella.
Pearson also identifies another of Behn’s "favorite means of effecting
this sense of sexual reversal" as allowing
a woman to draw sword, dagger or pistol against a man
who has offended her. Such women display a masculine
courage and determination, and are praised as Viragoes,
sometimes ironically but sometimes not.8 2
Again, The Amorous Prince has two such parts, those of Laura and Ismena.
The proliferation of these techniques of sexual reversal in the play could be
attributed to the heavy hand of a novice writer, but there is good evidence that
The Amorous Prince, while it is the second of Behn’s plays to see
performance, is the third8 3 she wrote. If her technique of doubling up the
sexual reversals was part of a conscious dramatic strategy by a relatively
practised dramatist who had made an enormous development, how does it
reflect or call attention to the overall structure of The Amorous Prince?
216
As both the play’s title and its subtitle (The Curious Husband) suggest,
an important topic in the play is Prince Frederick’s insatiable sexuality. He is
simultaneously Laura’s would-be rapist and the seducer and common-law
husband of Cloris. Both women are connected to Frederick’s appropriately-
named friend Curtius. Cloris, whom Frederick seduces with insincere promises
of marriage, is Curtius’ sister. The Prince feels a powerful attraction for her
but, just as he does not know she is Curtius’ sister who (ironically) has been
raised in seclusion from the court so as not to corrupt her, so he does not
I know she is high-born and eligible for a Royal marriage:
i
I
Curtius: . . . do you love her still?
Frederick: Yes, yes, extremely,
And would be constant to the Vows I ’ve made,
W ere I a Man, as thou art of thy self;
But with the aid of Counsels I must chuse,
j And what my Soul adores I must refuse. (I. ii. 129)
I
Laura, the second woman in whom Frederick is currently sexually
interested, is the woman Curtius wants to marry. When Curtius sensibly
avoids introducing Laura to his Prince, Frederick arranges an introduction
through her brother, Lorenzo, who regularly serves Frederick in the capacity
; of procurer:
Lorenzo: I am so willing to do you a good office to my
Sister. And if by Humour you become of that opinion
too, I shall hope to render myself more acceptable to
you by that Franchise.
Frederick: Thou knowest my grateful Temper. (II.i. 146)
217
Despite Lorenzo’s introduction however and pressure from her father,
Salvator, Laura resists Frederick’s advances and threatens him with a dagger
when he tries to rape her.8 4 Because she loves Curtius, she is unwilling to be
an object in an exchange between Frederick and the men of her family.
Against the structure of this main plot, Behn juxtaposes a subplot
concerning the debilitating jealousy of Antonio, a husband by an arranged
marriage, for Clarina. This jealousy leads him to force his oldest, most trusted
friend, Alberto, to test his wife’s fidelity:
Antonio: . . . I left the Court on purpose, for ’twas
not handsome for me to introduce you,
Lest she had look’d upon’t as some design . . .
And I conjur’d her too, to give you freedoms,
Even equal to Antonio. (I.iv.137)
While it is true that Antonio gives Alberto access to Clarina in order to
test her virtue, it is also true that there is a markedly homoerotic dimension to
their friendship that cannot be entirely dismissed as the vaunting rhetoric of
heroic drama. Antonio addresses Alberto ordinarily enough as "My dear
Friend" but then continues telling him "I long’d for your embraces" (I.iv. 137).
If Alberto proves successful with Clarina, Antonio vows to "renounce my faith
in W omankind/And place my satisfaction in thy Amity" (I.iv.138). After he
has accidentally wounded Alberto and discovered that Clarina is (seemingly)
unfaithful, Antonio describes his affection for both friend and wife as though
they were equal in his eyes. Interestingly, however, Clarina is added as an
218
afterthought and the equation between the pair, lover and friend, seems on
reflection to put too great an emotional emphasis on the male friendship:
Antonio: Alas, why was it not permitted me to lose my
Friend or Wife? Had one surviv’d, I might have dy’d in
silence for the other; Oh my Alberto! oh Clarina too!
(II.iii.155)
The most peculiar bit of evidence in this same vein however, is the fact
that Antonio cannot really identify the beloved wife of whose infidelity he is so
terrified. On various occasions he mistakes her sister, Ismena, who has
recently returned from a convent, for his wife. In tragicomedy, as we have
already noted of Restoration comedy, a continuing inability to recognize a
spouse or lover even through a thick disguise, decisively indicates a mismatch:
Ismena: Antonio not yet gone—
This must secure me [Pulls down her veil.
Antonio: Clarina, why thus clouded?
Isabella: I see he has most happily mistaken.
Ismena: I was going, Sir, to visit Laura—
Antonio: You must not go, I’ve business to the Duke,
And you must entertain my Friend till my return
(I.iv.140);
Isabella: Madam, turn your back to that side,
For there Antonio is hid; he must not see your
Face: now raise your Voice, that he may hear what
’tis you say.
Ismena: I’ll warrant you, Isabella:
Was ever wretched W oman’s Fate like mine,
Forc’d to obey the rigid Laws of Parents,
And marry with a Man I did not love?
Antonio: Oh, there’s my cause of fear [Antonio peeps].
(IV. i. 174-5)
219
Antonio’s avoidance of and inability to recognize his wife as well as his
strong affection for Alberto is conditioned by our knowledge of another
character, Lorenzo, who is Behn’s means of joining this subplot to the main
plot. Lorenzo is also pursuing Clarina by enlisting the mercenary help of her
maid, Isabella. As we have seen he is Frederick’s procurer and, as such, he is
very eager to have the reputation of being a lady’s man although he is none, a
fact which he will admit only to himself:
Enter Lorenzo drunk
Lorenzo: Hah, The Prince— he must not see me
t In this pickle; for I would not lose my Reputation
| O f Wenching for this of Drinking;
And I am sure I cannot be excellent at both,
They are inconsistent. (II. i. 144)
It is the presence of Lorenzo, the procurer, that clarifies our appreciation
J of the structure of The Amorous Prince, which is first and foremost a play
about male exchanges of women, licit and illicit. While Behn provides us with
unsettling, non-stereotypical female characters which focus attention on the
play’s discussion of sex, Behn like Polwhele is concerned to deconstruct male
| gender ideology, particularly as it concerns what Claude Levi-Strauss called
|
"the exchange of women". Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes these kinds of
male to male relationships as "homosocial desire" in which she includes:
I
the whole spectrum of bonds between men, including
friendship, mentorship, rivalry, institutional
subordination, homosexual genitality, and economic
' exchange— within which the various forms of the traffic
in women take place.8 5
220
It is in the context of such relationships, therefore, that Antonio loves
and uses Alberto while at the same time he avoids the woman he is giving his
friend access to. Frederick’s relationship with Lorenzo is also firmly in this
mold. Lorenzo more or less sells the Prince access to his sister in order to win
the Royal favour. In a more telling scene however, Lorenzo brings Frederick
to view what they both believe are beautiful Greek courtesans, but who are
actually women who have been subjected to male exchanges during the course
of the play. The last of these women is Laura:
Frederick: hah! I am amaz’d; see, Lorenzo,
Dost thou not know that Face?
Lorenzo: O ’ my Conscience and Soul, ’tis my own
Sister Laura;
Why, how now, Mistress,
Do things go thus with you, i’faith?
[She shakes her Hand, as not understanding
him.
Antonio: Sir, she understands you not.
Lorenzo: Is it not Laura then?
Antonio: No, Sir, it is a Stranger.
Frederick: Let her be what she will, I’ll have her.
(V.iii.202)
One of the most interesting things about using Lorenzo as a pivot on
which both plots turn is the surprise Behn has in store for us about his
sexuality. Not only is Lorenzo not a lady’s man, he is also a bisexual
pedophile who is attracted to Cloris when she dresses as the young page,
Philibert:
Lorenzo:— Hah, I vow to gad a lovely Youth!
[Lorenzo gazes on Philander
221
But what makes he here with Frederick?
This Stripling may chance to mar my market of Women
now—
’Tis a fine Lad, how plump and white he is; [aside
Would I could meet him somewhere i’th’dark,
I ’d have a fling at him, and try whether I
W ere right Florentine. (IV.iv.186)
Later, tellingly, Lorenzo first threatens to make Philibert a eunuch:
Lorenzo: . . . you were right served, you would be
made fit
For nothing but the Great Turk’s Seraglio. (V.ii.196)
Lorenzo then attempts to engage the young boy in a sexual exchange which
Cloris/Philibert, naively, does not understand:
Lorenzo: Lookye, ten or twenty Pistoles will do you
No hurt, will it?
Cloris: Not any, Sir.
Lorenzo: Why, so, ’tis well any thing will make thee
Apprehend.
Cloris: I shall be glad to serve you, Sir, without that
fee.
Lorenzo: That’s kindly said—
I see a Man must not be too easy of belief: had I been
so, this Boy would have been at, what d ’ye mean, Sir?
And, Lord, I understand you not. Well, Philibert,
here’s earnest to bind the Bargain; I am now in haste;
when I see the next, I’ll tell thee more.
j Philibert, I advise you to have a care of wenching:
I ’twill spoil a good Face, and mar your better market of
j the two [Exit Lorenzo. (V.ii.197)
< And later still, Lorenzo begs Isabella (now dressed as Philibert) not to reveal
i
j that he made an assignation with a page boy:
I Lorenzo: Philibert, Philibert, do not ruin the Reputation
O f a Man that has acquir’d Fame amongst the female
Sex;
I protest I did but jest. (V.iii.211)
It seems clear that Behn uses Lorenzo to help us identify the male-female
relationships in her play (and during her era) as really being exclusively male
relationships, including the homosocial semi-cuckoldry of Curtius by
Frederick, the homoerotic friendship which Antonio puts before his arranged
marriage to Clarina, or the homosexual attachment which Lorenzo would like
i
to form with Philibert. In addition, Lorenzo’s ambivalent sexuality and false
reputation with women colors our judgment concerning the sexuality o f the
I
other men in the play, the most notable o f whom is Frederick. Only Frederick
is renowned among the characters for his reputation with women, and it is
Frederick who exclusively pursues only those women who are attached to his
friend Curtius. In addition, Frederick’s moral position degenerates during the
course of the play until it becomes close to Alberto’s early assessment of
Lorenzo, one which calls his stature as a man (and by extension his
masculinity) into question long before we encounter his sexual eclecticism:
Alberto: I do not like this Fellow’s being here,
The most notorious Pimp and Rascal in Italy;
’Tis a vile shame that such as he should live,
Who have the form and sense of Man about them,
And in their Action Beast
And that he thrives by too . . . (I.iii. 135)
223
Frederick’s masculinity is continually referred to by Curtius throughout
the play, and he calls it into question when he intercedes to prevent
Frederick’s rape of Laura, calling his Prince:
Curtius: . . . a Ravisher,
A foul misguided Villan,
One that scarce merits the brave name of Man.
(III. ii. 162)
Using a technique of association (or implication) therefore, Behn
surrounds the devoutly heterosexual Frederick with four male characters whose
same-sex friendships are colored by varying degrees of latency or
homoeroticism. She introduces the last of these characters, Guillam, late in the
play. His abberation, like that of Sir Gregory and Zany in Polwhele’s The
Frolicks is transvestism, which he clearly enjoys:
Guillam: . . . I would Love would transmography me
to a Maid now,
— We should be the prettiest Couple:
D on’t you remember when you dress’d me up the last
Carnival, was I not the woundiest handsome Lass
A body could see in a Summer’s day?
There was Claud the Shepherd as freakish after me,
I’ll warrant you, and simper’d and tript it like any
thing. (III.iii.167)
In the context of this and similar male characters then, Frederick’s unusual
Don Juanism, his pervasive contempt for women and his determined pursuit of
a relationship with Curtius with its accompanying hostility both to Curtius and
to the women Frederick uses, influence our judgment o f this aging Prince. By
the end of the play he is no longer
i •
224
. . . but a Man
[Whose] Youth and Quality will excuse him;
And ’twill be called Gallantry in him,
When in one of us, ’tis Ill-nature and Inconstancy.
(II. ii. P 146)
He is instead a sexual compulsive who himself does not understand the forces
which led him to consume and discard his friend’s women. Frederick’s own
closing lines confirm the impression that his masculinity is or has been in
doubt during the course of the play. He describes his past follies as "the
Sallies of my flattering Youth" and refers to "his future Manhood" (V.iii.212)
as a period of reform and sacrifice. Frederick by this point has agreed to
marry Cloris and bind himself to a single heterosexual relationship. But he
does so only after he discovers Cloris is Curtius’ sister:
Frederick: . . . had I known that she had been thy
Sister,
I had receiv’d her as a Gift from Heaven;
And so I would do still. (V.iii.205)
In The Amorous Prince then, Behn saw that Restoration m en’s
relationships with women were really always already relationships between
men and other men. She also perceived that the voracious heterosexuality of a
man like Frederick had its basis in a misogyny that served what Sedgwick
would later call "homosocial desire." If portraits of fathers are minimized in
this play, making Laura’s and Lorenzo’s Salvator barely a speaking part, Behn
has chosen instead to focus on a more politicized emblem of patriarchy, a
prince of an entire state whose social and sexual structures are based on the
225
single premise that "’tis a Race that must by Man be run" (V.iii.212). Behn
deploys images of marginal sexualities in The Amorous Prince therefore, as a
means to implicate mainstream patriarchy and male gender ideology in sexual
exchanges which are cruel to women. Her audience would have drawn
inescapable parallels between Frederick and their own monarch, who was
rarely rejected by women even though he was (in 1671) getting on in years:
Lorenzo: . . . he has a Tongue and a
Purse that seldom fails: if Youth and Vigour would
Stretch as far, he were the Wonder of the Age.
(III. ii. 164)
f
[
j Charles certainly held many of the same cynical views as Frederick. A line of
I
J dialogue delivered during the attempted rape of Laura is as much a comment
! on Stuart realpolitik in a year following the secret treaty with France as it is
I
I on the ethics of libertine love:
i
Laura: . . . where is all your Honour and your Virtue?
Frederick: Just where it was, there’s no such real thing.
(III. ii. 162)
These parallels might be stretched to include similarities between Lorenzo and
Thomas Killigrew, the king’s well-known procurer. Behn knew both men. But
it is impossible to reduce The Amorous Prince to a coterie drama. Instead, the
play is clear statement of her intention to deal openly with the gender related
j topics of comedy (or tragicomedy) from a woman’s perspective. In the genre
of Restoration sex comedy therefore, her plays are an invaluable second take
226
on the same male gender ideology that was being formed and thematized by
the new generation of male writers.
Edward Howard’s final comedy, The Six Days Adventure: or. The New
Utopia, sets a precedent for the work of other comic authors during this
transitional period. Like Howard, Dry den and Wycherley each would soon
write a pair of plays that treat gender ideology in complementary ways without
becoming true sequels. The impetus for such paired plays in this period may
well derive from Roger Boyle, first Earl of Orrery, who followed his popular
oldstyle Spanish intrigue comedy Guzman (April 1669) with the true sequel
Mr. Antony (December 1669).8 6
Howard’s The Six Days Adventure is a second view of the same gender
material thematized in his The W oman’s Conquest one year earlier. It is not in
itself a remarkable, well-written or interesting play and it was not successful.
Still, Howard’s attempt to win an audience by introducing farcical elements
into the morally correct and didactic comedy he had advocated one year earlier
reflects the contemporary dramatic problematization of male gender ideology,
including male crossdressing, male homosexuality and antipatriarchalism in
addition to the usual mentions of divorce. To escape a tedious analysis of a
bad play, I will simply enumerate these features here in a brief section, and
then move on to the much more interesting and much more rewarding 1671
production of William W ycherley’s Love in A Wood
227
Allardyce Nicoll observes that The Six Days Adventure is "one of the
few omissions of the patient Genest. "8 7 Reading the play is a soporific
experience and encourages speculation about the reasons for mounting what is
at best a mediocre, unfunny farce. The fact that the play was staged at all is
further evidence that the enormous demand for new plays continued through
March, 1671. The play’s staging possibly also indicates the influence of the
Howard family, especially of the eldest brother, Sir Robert Howard, who
remained politically active long after he abandoned playwriting in 1669.
The Six Days Adventure reworks the idea of the Parliament of Women,
familiar to us now from the Interregnum tracts of Henry Neville. Unlike the
Amazons of The W oman’s Conquest, the women of Howard’s last comedy are
shrewish stereotypes who beat and threaten to cuckold their husbands and who
are mainly interested in sex and power (although not necessarily in that order).
The plot concerns an ancient constitutional agreement of a fictional
society stipulating that men and women will alternate the reins of power,
annually. The women in previous ages did not have the nerve to insist that
their men observe this law but times have changed as Polidor observes after he
returns from a long absence:
Polidor: . . . since I parted from this Countrey on the
publick service, I find our State has suffer’d no small
Metamorphosis in changing of our Sex that govern’d.
Frankman: They claimed it as their right.
Polidor: I think they might, although we have but few
Records can shew the practise, which tells us that
228
The Women of this hage have more confidence than
their Sex had formerly. (48)
Opposing the change and emblematizing patriarchy’s dark side is Sir
Grave Solymour, a somber, joyless old man who is despised by men and
women alike and who has disowned his young son, Featlin. In contrast to
Solymour, Adam Meredith is an aging and respected politician who has
recently come to the joint realizations that nothing is really as serious as it
appears and that age does not have to mean humorlessness, lovelessness or
rigidity.
Challenged by Polidor about his acceptance of the female new order,
Meredith provides us with an explanation for his lightheartedness. He is at the
end of his life and has a keen sense of his own mortality:
Polidor: You preserve your frank humour still, Sir?
Meredith: Rather encrease it— I should be loth that in
the last scene of my life, whensoever it comes, my
spirits should fall. (48)
Sir Grave Solymour however, sees the transfer of power as an
unacceptable affront to male hegemony. He schemes to impede it and is
targeted for humiliation by the women who, using his hypocritical secret
pursuit of Celinda (played by Mrs. Shadwell) as a lever, force him to marry a
"Blackamoor" who is then revealed to be a male transvestite:
Celinda: . . . the Plot is mine
And I ’ll discover it myself, to deserve his favour
With you; look you here, Sir, ’tis but a Blackamoor
Boy and my Page [Pulls off the Moors hood and he
229
appears a Blackamoor.] I hope Ladies there Needs no
decree to annul this marriage. (82)
The problematization of male gender is here used to humiliate old Solymour,
and thereby comically reduce or invalidate the old male order which he
advocates and represents.
Other male characters in the play also problematize contemporary male
gender ideology. A half-French fool called Foppering (played by James Nokes)
is beaten and harassed by his wife and spends much of the play embracing
other men:
Peacock: For you Mr. Foppering I am more than your
tres humble Serviteur.
Foppering: I return your salutation in my mothers
tongue, for want o f a better, Sir, giving you my
embrace thus
[They hug].
Frankman: O here were a sight indeed to trouble
Solymours Patience (8)
In a more successful play, it would be appropriate to call Foppering an
emblem of the crisis in masculinity. He is personally very weak and this
masculine weakness results in a nation of what the play calls "overwived" (7)
men. Appropriately, it is Foppering who first expresses alarm at the rebellion
o f the women, a state of affairs which he and men like him have done much to
cause:
Foppering: O Gentlemen!
Solymour: W hat’s the bus’ness?
230
Foppering: Outragious things in agitation! Our Women
are turning Mankind, and using their vigours the wrong
way.
Meredith: That were a Strange Metamorphosis. (13)
In addition to Foppering, there is another weak male, Peacock, played
by Edward Angel, an actor who we have already seen was renowned for his
transsexual roles. Like Sir Salamon Single, Peacock is an extreme narcissist.
In fact, he is so in love with himself that he dismisses his mistress:
Peacock: My Amours, shall be of a newer mode
And most suitable to my humour . . .
To which purpose I have lately bid Adieu to my
Mistress I told you of.
I ...
I Meredith: You have not beat her I hope, as you
j threatened you would, on a late occasion,
j Peacock: No by my life; and gave her as good Sugar,
! as ever was given in words; but told her, she must
1 excuse her friend Jack Peacock, if henceforward he did
not love her so well as himself.
Frankman: If that be all ’tis excusable, since few love
in this age on other terms; the more shame for Cupid.
Peacock: But Sir, I gave her to understand I would be
in love with myself only, and that I was resolv’d to
think that I am the Venus and Cupid, and not she.
Meredith: This is somewhat extraordinary indeed.
Frankman: And when came this humour into your
imagination?
Peacock: But two hours ago, as I read the Fable of
Narcissus. (19-20)
| From this point, Peacock’s story becomes increasingly bizarre and this
subplot is a rich mine of comic potential even if it suffers by Howard’s
execution. A visiting quack conjurer called Orlando Curioso convinces
Peacock that he can be reduplicated and Peacock is only too willing to pay in
231
order to have an external object worthy of the fawning attention he lavishes on
himself:
Featlin: How they kiss like Twins of two years old.
Meredith: But he thinks he kisses himself all the while,
that’s the jest on’t— and how many men have you made
in this manner before.
Orlando: Not many Sir, or desire it, because not so
gracious to Mankind, who are willing to continue in
their natural way of Generation.
Peacock: O my dear self, my dear self! How shall I
I love thee enough, my dear self?
Featlin: A pretty kind of love.
Peacock: And this Eye, this Lip, this Cheek of mine,
which no longing Maid living shall rob me of.
Frankman: She were but ill sped if she did. (37)
Here Howard appears to approach a remarkably psychological (if garish)
representation of the source of male homosexuality as a narcissistic longing.
(He also correctly identifies a strain of homosexual misogyny in the last lines.)
Together with Foppering this effete weakening of the masculine has an impact
on women’s characters. In the power vacuum left by male abdication, women
become the same power hungry shrews familiar to us from Neville’s pamphlets
(and it is likely that Neville’s tracts share with this play a common classical
I
f
origin). They discuss means of sexually controlling the men around them (46).
They set policies for divorce and for alimony (29). And they achieve their
political ends with threats that overwhelm the cowardly men:
i 2 Magistrate: Is there no accomodation to be had?
1 Crispina: Not one, until the powers first acknowledg’d
ours.
232
Petilla: W ithout which you shall have War, private and
Publick; The Plagues of Aegypt shall be short of what
We women will inflict on men that are disobedient,
I suppose the most of you have Wives or Mistresses, or
both, and so adieu.
1 Magistrate: A fury could not have exprest the like.
(14)
These concerns are familiar to us as a reemergence of themes from the
Parliament of Women tracts of the Interregnum8 8 and this is quite possibly a
further indication of the continuity in the continuing crisis in masculinity which
i
j was apparently reaching another peak around the tenth year of Charles II’s
i reign, if we are able to judge by the frequency with which the drama
thematizes female dominance, male transvestitism, and homosexuality. Despite
its risque subject matter however, The Six Days Adventure is fundamentally a
conservative play, as Pearson observes:
In the female government sexual as well as social roles
are reversed and the women adopt the active part
personally as well as politically. Their regime, of
course, is obsessed with ’feminine’ issues like love.8 9
i Unlike the conservative Edward Howard, William Wycherley was to
I
j become a highly innovative and respected comic author, probably as a result of
I
| events which occurred early in his life. In 1656 at the age of sixteen, he was
i sent to study in the Jesuit-oriented lycee at Angoumois. Once in France, he
I
soon came to spend a great deal of his time in the company of Julie Lucie
d ’Angennes, the Marquise of Montausier,9 0 possibly because he had a natural
233
acuity and a facility for elegant language, because he was a very handsome
young man or because his father’s patron, the Marquis of Winchester (a
devout Catholic, an English translator of French literature and the most
steadfast of the Cavalier defenders), arranged introductions to good society via
the Marquis, Louis XIV’s most trusted General, or via the Marquise, the
foremost patroness of French literature in her day.
W ycherley’s preference for the character name Lucy which he uses in
two of his four plays, may owe something to his relationship with the
Marquise. In any case, Julie Lucie d ’Angennes played an important part in the
formation of W ycherley’s literary tastes, and his young mind. She was the
daughter of Madame de Rambouillet whose Hotel de Rambouillet had hosted
the brightest names in French literature of the generation preceding her
daughter. Pierre Corneille and Georges de Scudery frequented this salon and
were among the poets who wrote the commendatory verses of the Guirlande de
Julie, the M arquis’ magnificently illustrated courtship gift that is still
recognized as a landmark of French poetry and that was presented to Julie in
1641, the year of W ycherley’s birth. After her marriage to the Marquis, Julie
continued her mother’s literary patronage at Angouleme. The indirection,
subtlety and affectation of poems by Les Precieuses are the literary legacy of
her circle.9 1 As a teenager Wycherley enjoyed her company at the height of
her literary influence. She debated religion with him until he converted to
234
Catholicism as the Marquis had done before they married. Most important,
however, Wycherley witnessed the abrupt end of Julie’s literary influence and
the complete revolution in literary taste following the Paris premiere of
M oliere’s Les Precieuses ridicules in 1659,9 2 the year which he later told
Alexander Pope was the date of his first composition of Love in a W ood.9 3
Although this claim is probably false, it does indicate both that Wycherley saw
his eighteenth year as a literary turning point in his life, and that he connected
the events of that year with the composition of Love in a W ood.9 4
In addition to Les Precieuses ridicules. Moliere had another comic lesson
for the young, literary-minded Wycherley. He is said to have modelled the
gruff manners and personal austerity of Alceste in Le Misanthrope on those of
the Marquis9 5 whose widespread unpopularity as Louis XIV’s minister was
balanced by an unshakeable loyalty on the part of the king, who had valued
Julie’s friendship and advice since his first visit to Angouleme. Wycherley
therefore had the opportunity to gain an insight to M oliere’s genius as no other
English playwright did. He had known the French master of comedy’s models
on familiar terms for a period of several years. Long before March 1671 when
the King’s Company mounted Love in Wood: or. St. James’s Park. Wycherley
had been given a unique opportunity to appreciate both the social force and the
practical techniques of comedy.
235
As Eugene McCarthy suggests, the immediate results of W ycherley’s
early French training are visible in Love in a W ood’s ironic dedication to
Barbara Villiers, the recently discarded royal mistress:
Certainly, his mode of extravagant compliment to the
proposition of the Duchess of Cleveland . . . has a
certain zest of preciosite.9 6
More recently however, David Roberts has written:
when Wycherley dedicated his first play, Love in a
Wood (1671) to the Duchess of Cleveland (formerly
Lady Castlemaine), he was a newcomer to the art of the
strained compliment who immediately grasped its comic
potential. He refers to their affair simply by deploying
all the cliches of the medium.9 7
It is clear from our review of his early education, that Wycherley was no
newcomer and that what he has actually done in his dedication is to reduce the
mannered and courtly compliments of the English subgenre of dedicatory
epistles in a way that repeats M oliere’s comic reduction of the affectations of
"Les Precieuses" using what might be called a detournement of courtly cliche.
In fact, Moliere himself may have pointed Wycherley in this direction through
his playful and self-reflexive preface to Les Precieuses ridicules, quoted here
in the rich-flavouring of the first complete English translation by John Odell in
1714:
Lord, what an uncouth thing it is to publish a book the
first time! and how queer an Author looks! If they had
given me time, I might have prepared myself better and
taken all the Precautions, that the Gentlemen Authors,
now my Brethren of the Quill, are used to take upon
236
such Occasions. Besides I would have chosen some
great Lord for the Protector of my work, whether he
would or no, and whose Liberality I have made a Tryal
of by a florid Dedication . . . But I am published
without having time to look about me . . . M. de
Luines will bind me up this Moment; so since Fate will
have it so, and there’s no help for it, I must be
Content.9 8
Following work by David S. Berkley and C. D. Cecil,9 9 McCarthy has
noted one final legacy which Love in a Wood owes to "Les Precieuses" and to
Moliere. Wycherley uses the character of Christina, Valentine’s mistress in the
play, to satirize the same preciosite he learned as a young man in Julie
d’Angennes’ circle. But what is possibly most significant about Love in a
Wood is its departure from Moliere during the transitional period of 1671
when he was at the height of his first English vogue. The play’s multi-plot
eclecticism is modelled on Etherege’s first comedy to whose subtitle, Love in
a Tub. Wycherley deliberately alludes. It is this eclecticism which James
Thompson finds the most salient feature of the play:
With a large cast of characters, and quick transitions
back and forth among high, middle, and low plots the
play encompasses multitudes. There is no trick of
comedy left out, and Chadwick terms the play a
"Jonsonian-Fletcherian-Shirleyan-platonic-intrigue-wit-
farce-comedy". Within this crowd of characters and
comic devices, Wycherley has created a vast chain of
speaking, from Puritan cant to heroic rant.1 0 0
Like Etherege before him therefore, Wycherley uses the form of his first
comedy to explore a wide variety of generic options which also resemble
237
Etherege’s first experiment in that they touch upon a broad cross-section of
English society. The most obvious difference between both of these first plays
is highly expressive. Whereas Etherege used Sir Frederick Frollick, an
emblem of the same aristocratic honor which the play problematizes, to move
effortlessly between the stratified social classes of 1664, W ycherley, in 1671,
deploys Dapperwit, an impecunious would-be wit, a writer of lampoons and
satires, to move between the high plot which concerns two entwined love
intrigues, and the low plot which takes up most of the play and concerns three
comically-arranged matches. Some hint of the purpose of deploying Dapperwit
in this way may become clear from the enormous personal success that the
play’s popularity brought to Wycherley:
If John Dennis is to be believed Love In a Wood . . .
was an exceptionally successful first play, bringing
Wycherley fame, a titled mistress, and recognition from
the court.1 0 1
More pointedly, Robert Markley has observed that
W ycherley’s first play, Love in a Wood (1671), like
Etherege’s The Comical Revenge, parodies
contemporary theatrical fashions. The differences
between the two plays are, in part, historical: Etherege
in 1664 targets the excesses of heroic passion;
Wycherley seven years later appropriates the
conventions of self-dramatizing wit to turn Etheregian
mock-heroic into ironic self-mockery.1 0 2
238
Dapperwit then, can be seen as a calculated device of self-presentation
on W ycherley’s part which was enormously successful not the least for the
reflexivity of such speeches as this one:
Dapperwit: . . . ’tis now no more reputation to write a
Play then it is honour to be a Knight; your true wit
despises the title of Poet, as much as your true
gentleman the title of Knight; for as a man may be a
Knight and no Gentleman, so a man may be a Poet and
no Wit, let me perish. (II.i.232-6)
The success of W ycherley’s play owed a great deal to the singular vanity and
foolishness of Dapperwit, a character who Kathleen Lynch notes "claims a
special share of our interest because . . . he is in the tradition of Cowley’s
Puny."1 0 3 John Palmer has observed "Wycherley seems a man . . . who,
fundamentally, had an instinct to look quite through the shows of m en."1 0 4
His deployment of Dapperwit in Love in a Wood allowed him to look at men
from a variety of social strata including a landlord, a socially pretentious
would-be wit, an Alderman, a Knight and several young well-born, well-bred
gentlemen o f the town. The play’s success brought Wycherley immediately
into the company of the Duchess of Cleveland. His widely publicized affair
with her brought him into the circle of the wits, into the company of her
disappointed suitor, Buckingham, and into contact with her former lover, the
King. W hether by design or chance, Wycherley pressed his first literary
production into the service of his social ambitions as he would later also do
with his last play. This is of interest to our present study of the male gender
239
ideology thematized in Restoration comedy because Wycherley, in deploying
his plays as instruments of self-presentation, earned the sobriquets "Manly
W ycherley," "Brawny W ycherley," and "The Plain-Dealer." To a generation
troubled in their notions of masculinity therefore, Wycherley himself was an
emblem of all that a Restoration male should be. It is not surprising therefore,
that in 1679 Charles II entrusted him with the education of an illegitimate son,
the young Duke of Richmond, just as Louis XIV had entrusted the Marquis of
Montausier with the training of the young Dauphin in 1668.
In Love in a W ood, in order to facilitate the social movement of
Dapperwit, the character through whom he was to win his first fame,
Wycherley deploys two subsidiary characters who each have complete freedom
of movement in their respective milieux. The most distinctive member of this
pair, Mrs. Joyner, is a marriage-broker and a commoner who frames the low
plots of the play and raises the issue of commerciality in love. O f course,
Joyner’s presence cannot be taken as conclusive proof of the transition in
theater audience composition, but it is one more indication o f the same
demographic changes hypothesized by Pierre Danchin which appear to have
left behind them a mass of similarly circumstantial traces. Like The Comical
Revenge therefore, Love in a Wood is a significant step towards a comedy of
manners, if by comedy of manners we understand an exploration of the sexual
attitudes and behaviours of various classes.
240
Another salient noticeable feature of Wycherley’s first comic plot is the
control with which he manages the superficial events concerning the three
pairs of lovers whom Joyner connects. Montague Summers refers to the play’s
"excellent construction" as "an extremely rare quality in a first piece,"1 0 5 and
Allardyce Nicoll uses a similar phrase, "masterly construction," calling the
plot "ably and interestingly developed."1 0 6 These observations seem
particularly significant if we recall the loose narrative fabric of Sedley’s
M ulberry Garden. Behn’s The Young King or the reputed sloppiness of the
first, never published version of Dryden’s The Wild Gallant. At age thirty, in
Love in a W ood. Wycherley, an unremarkable poet,1 0 7 had found his metier
in the same deft use of dramatic plotting, the city setting, and the
experimentation with gender ideology which characterizes all of his later work.
Like Behn’s The Amorous Prince. Love in a Wood explores the social
mechanisms of sexual exchange. But W ycherley’s exchanges are not
exclusively homosocial. In W ycherley’s world, men as well as women can be
exchanged as sexual objects in the variety of social transactions in which
Joyner is engaged. Wycherley depicts his age’s growing commodification of
sex and insists that men too can become victims when sexual unions are
conditioned by anything other than rare compatibility or the momentary mutual
pleasure afforded by the darkness and anonymity of a chance assignation in St.
241
James’s Wood. The first words of the play are exclusively devoted to
illustrating that men too are victims of Joyner’s commodification of sex:
Lady Flippant: Not a husband to be had for mony.
Come, come, I might have been a better House-Wife
for my self (as the World goes now,) if I had dealt for
an Heir with his Guardian, Uncle, or Mother-in-Law
Joyner: I a Cheat Madam. (I.i. 1-5)
In addition to her lower class origins therefore, Joyner’s double capacity
as "a Match-maker or precise City Bawd" (Dramatis Personae) to many of the
exclusively heterosexual relationships of Love in a W ood is also highly
significant. It simultaneously effects and signals the inherent commerciality of
the relationships she professionally constructs. And, when the traditional
i
i
! homosocial mechanisms of exchange are violated in this way, men become her
I victims. Lady Flippant’s brother, Alderman Gripe, is a useful example of this
I
!
| point. He commissions her to mediate an exchange involving Miss Lucy. This
exchange however, is in no way comparable to the homosocial exchanges of
The Amorous Prince. Controlled by Joyner, it is an exchange between the
avaricious Gripe and Miss Lucy’s mother, the hard and wily Mrs. Crossbite in
I which Gripe is clearly the victim:
Gripe: Hold, hold; though young Spawn of the old
Serpent; Wicked, as I thought thee Innocent; wilt thou
say I wou’d have ravish’d thee?
Lucy: I will swear you did ravish me.
Gripe: I thought so, Treacherous Eve, then I am gone,
I must shift as well as I can [Aside].
242
Mrs Crossbite: Will none of you call up the
Neighbours, and the Authority of the Alley?
Gripe: Hold, I ’le give you Twenty Mark among you to
let me go.
Mrs Crossbite: Villain, nothing shall buy thy life.
Landlord: But stay, Mrs. Crossbite, let me talk with
you.
. . . Come, Sir, I am your Friend; in a word, I have
appeas’d her, and she shall be contented with a little
sum.
Gripe: What is it? what is it?
Landlord: But five hundred pound. (III.ii.411-28)
In order to prepare Gripe for this pass, Joyner has already displaced
Dapperwit as Lucy’s maintainer by turning Mrs Crossbite against him in the
hope of better prospects:
Joyner: . . . yestarday, as I told you, a fine Old
Alderman of the City, seeing your Daughter in so ill
hands as Dapperwits, was Zealously, and in pure
Charity, bent on her redemption; and has sent me to
tell you, he will take her into his care, and relieve your
necessities, if you think good.
Mrs. Crossbite: Will he relieve all our necessities?
Joyner: All.
Mrs. Crossbite: Mine, as well as my Daughters?
Joyner: Yes.
Mrs. Crossbite: Well fare his heart; d ’y here Daughter,
Mrs. Joyner has satisfy’d me clearly; Dapperwit is a
vile fellow, and in short, you must put an end to that
scandalous familiarity between you. (III. i. 63-75)
Ironically, this comes at a moment when the impecunious Dapperwit is
himself attempting to exchange Lucy for money on which to live:
Dapperwit: . . . let me perish if I have not been offered
a hundred Guinnies, for a sight of her; by— I say no
more.
243
Ranger: I understand you . . . if the favour be to be
purchased, then I ’le bid all I have about me . . .
(III. ii. 39-42)
Joyner, in other words, first prevents the homosocial exchange of Lucy
between Dapperwit and Ranger before going on to cheat Gripe, the next man
who is willing to pay for her. In much the same way she also cozens the fop,
Sir Simon Addleplot, by the end of the play. Having taken fees to arrange
lucrative marriages for both indigents, Lady Flippant and Sir Simon, Joyner
misrepresents the state of each client’s fortune and in the wake of four other
marriages they impatiently agree to marry at the end of the play. Their
mistake, however, goes undiscovered. It will take place inevitably sometime
after the play ends just as the inevitable cuckolding of Mr. Brittle will take
place after the end of The Amorous W idow. Flippant’s marriage to Sir Simon,
in other words, problematizes the institution at the same moment that the
heroic couple’s intentions affirm it and Wycherley further deploys this motif,
which is fast becoming a Restoration comic convention, by simultaneously
problematizing the other comic marriages. Alderman Gripe agrees to marry
Lucy, knowing that she was formerly Dapperwit’s punk, so that he can "be
reveng’d for the [monetary] loss . . . " and
get Heirs to exclude my Daughter, and frustrate
Dapperwit; besides, ’tis agreed on all hands, ’tis
cheaper keeping a Wife then a Wench. (V .ii.52-55)
244
Dapperwit himself, W ycherley’s instrument of self-presentation, is also
used to problematize marriage. He discovers he has married a woman who is
"six months gone with child" (V .ii.23) but then decides her fortune is
sufficient compensation for being fooled:
Dapperwit: Well, thirty thousand pound will make
amends; I have known my betters wink, and fall on for
five or six. (V.ii.30-32)
Only the heroic characters of the high plot are left to enjoy love matches
without being ridiculed within the temporary boundaries of the play but,
because of this, they are in fact less well off. Like Lady Flippant’s marriage to
Sir Simon, Wycherley has sown the seed of future discontent both in Ranger’s
relationship to Lydia and in Valentine’s relationship to Christina. Moments
before they agree to marry, Ranger attempts to rape Lydia thinking that she is
Christina and that she is mocking him. Lydia graciously overlooks this when
the identity confusion governing this less substantial plot is ironed out, but we
know she has now agreed to marry a would-be rapist. Christina too agrees to
take Valentine despite the pathological jealousy that caused him continuously
and completely to misconstrue the impeccable character of her love.
The comic characters, in fact, appear much better off than the heroic
ones since, after all, they enter into their marriages already knowing the worst
about their partners and about their relationships. The blindness of the heroic
245
couples however, has very sinister implications for the future despite critical
opinion that this is the "lightest and gayest"1 0 8 of W ycherley’s comedies.
Like W ycherley’s Love in a W ood. John Dryden’s Marriage a la Mode
separates a low farcical plot from a higher heroic intrigue. But Dryden’s play
lacks the pivotal and socially mobile figure of a Dapperwit to explicitly
integrate the insular plot movements and, as a result, critics have been
puzzling over its conception at least since John Genest’s observation in 1832
that "the two distinct plots [are] awkwardly united."1 0 9 The problem
concerning the play’s double plot is succinctly put by Michael McKeon, who
notes a dramatic dovetailing which he refers to as a "foil correspondence"
between the last words of some scenes and the first words of those following
them. (This correspondence incidentally is consistent with Dryden’s well
balanced dramatic scheme of an alternating comic-heroic-comic-heroic pattern
which survives until the final act.) McKeon wonders if
the general effect of this foil correspondence [is] to
unite actions which at first appear only to proclaim
their separateness? What sort of formal or conceptual
rationale might justify the internal comparison of
actions which are so strikingly divided from each
other.1 1 0
McKeon also notes there is general agreement among critics that Dryden
characteristically employs a double plot in innovative ways as he does in
Oedipus (1678) or in The Spanish Friar (1681) and that his use of it in
Marriage a la Mode
246
embodies not only a formal division but a decided
thematic opposition that is, in some fashion, "resolved"
during the course o f the action . . . [and] that the
opposition is sharp enough to be felt as a conflict
between competing philosophies that possess clear
social implications: between the feudal-aristocratic,
heroic, idealistic, and hierarchical values of the high
plot and the individualistic, mundane, skeptical and
empiricist values of the low .1 1 1
McKeon then goes on to elaborate an innovative theory reconciling what
he identifies as the bourgeois and aristocratic plots of Marriage a la Mode.
I
presented here in a convenient summary by Robert Markley:
the formal separation of serious and comic plots
is . . . a strategy to dramatize the effects of an
internally divisive ideology by segregating its
contradictory components and rendering them as
individually consistent representations of aristocratic
existence. The separation of styles
therefore . . . encourages us to see the tragicomic play
as a ’dialectical unity’ held together thematically by
what McKeon calls ’the persistent contradiction between
love and duty, worth and birth, inner and outer.’1 1 2
M cKeon’s Marxist orientation, in other words, enables him to see clearly
a dialectical relationship between the alternating plots and also leads him to
read both plots as reflections of the Restoration’s dominant ideology of
segregated classes.
My own reading is more modest and simply situates Marriage a la Mode
| in the context of the current dramatic debate over patriarchal authority which,
I
; as we have seen, influenced all the comedies of this period since Betterton’s
i
i
! The Amorous W idow. A central theme of this reading is the realization that
247
Marriage a la Mode: A Comedy is what has been called anti generic. Dry den
self-consciously constructs his unusual tragicomedy as if it were an antithesis
to the self-generated norms of its own genre1 1 3 and, in so doing, reflects the
origins of the patriarchal crisis in Restoration life. It is this overtly political
dimension in Marriage a la Mode that sets it apart from the transitional
comedies of whose generic material it makes use. In this Dryden sets himself
! apart from the new generation of playwright’s whose emerging genre has, as
we have seen, a remarkable and previously unsuspected uniformity of
concerns. Dryden however, is different. Born in 1631, he is significantly older
than the generation of initiators and practitioners of sex comedy. Their
relentless concern with gender ideology was, to the Dryden of 1671, generic
j
I fodder to be deployed to the innovative though fundamentally conservative
i
political ends of Marriage a la M ode.
In this play the same patriarchal authority which complicates all of the
preceding comedies of this transitional period also influences all of the
dramatic actions. Palamede’s father has arranged a marriage for him based on
money and he resents it just as Peregrine resented his father’s matrimonial
machinations in Sir Saloman:
Palamede: . . . in few words, My old man has already
m arry’d me; for he has agreed with another old man, as
rich and covetous as himself; the Articles are drawn,
and I have given my consent, for fear of being
disinherited. (I.i. 104-8)
248
Eventually, Palamede will come round to his father’s perspective and discover
a personal interest in Melantha that reaffirms patriarchy (another similarity to
Sir Salomon) by showing us how the actions of a ’good’ father are
misunderstood in the overall dramatic context o f a negative father. Meanwhile,
however, pressure from his impending marriage leads Palamede to make love
to the first other willing woman he encounters. The resulting cuckolding action
against Rhodophil is lent an urgency by the fact that Palamede’s marriage is
only three days away. This urgency fills Palamede’s speeches with lusty
urgency and thinly disguised resentment of both marriages and husbands:
Palamede: . . . can you, in charity, suffer me to be so
mortify’d, without affording me some relief? If it be
but to punish that sign of a Husband there; that lazy
matrimony, that dull insipid taste, who leaves such
delicious fare at home, to dine abroad, on worse meat,
and to pay dear for’t into the bargain. (II. i.321-5)
In the heroic plot, paternal and patriarchal authority (this time of the
King), is likewise a central issue. It first affects Leonidas whom Polydamus
wrongly believes to be his own son:
Polydamus: Leonidas, You owe me more
Then to oppose your liking to my pleasure.
Leonidas: I owe you all things, Sir; but something too
I owe my self.
Polydamus: You shall dispute no more; I am a King,
And I will be obey’d. (II.i.308-313)
249
In turn, this same domestic and political or (paternal and patriarchal)
authority affects Palmyra. After Polydamus learns that she is actually his
offspring, she begs her father for Leonidas’ life:
Palmyra: Sir, on my knees I beg you.
Polydamus: Away, I’ll hear no more.
Palmyra: For my dead mother’s sake; you say you
lov’d her, and tell me I resemble her. Thus she
Had begg’d.
Polydamus: And thus I had deny’d her. (V.i. 372-7)
The events contained in the Polydamus’s plot interestingly repeat the
historical events leading to Charles II’s Restoration in 1660. The lawful King
[ of Sicily, an island nation, dies during the course of a war. Polydamus, a
j general, usurps his throne but the rightful heir escapes with his life. Many
years later, the heir, Leonidas, is restored to his patrimony through the
! intrigues of his father’s loyal retainers who have sheltered and educated him.
He forgives his enemies saying "all injury’s forgot" (V .i.476) as Charles II
j tried to do. His succession is sealed by the symbolic and legitimate union to
i
i
Palmyra which will presumably, and uncharacteristically for Restoration
| comedy, take place after the end of the play:
Leonidas: See, my Palmyra comes! . . .
Sir, you said [To Polydamus.
Your joys were full; Oh would you make mine so
I am but half-restor’d without this blessing. (V .i.481-
6)
This marriage does more than recall the marriage of Charles II to
Catherine of Braganza at the beginning of his reign. It also harks back to the
250
marriage conventions of an older comic formula in which, by Frye’s classic
analysis,1 1 4 a disrupted social order is emblematically reaffirmed and
restored through the device of a marriage. This sense of a generic allusion is
echoed throughout the play by language recalling Shakespearean romantic
comedy. Doralice’s lines, for example,
I’m so obedient a Wife, Sir, that my Husbands
j commands shall ever be a Law to me. (II.i. 171-2)
j recall the ironic repetitions of similar phrases including "he whose wife be
most obedient" (V.ii.67) in The Taming of The Shrew.
In the context of the play, Leonidas’ marriage to the daughter o f the
usurper of his father’s throne has a symbolic import similar to Charles II’s
actual Restoration to the throne. At the time, it was a social solution of heroic
proportions which was deeply felt by a younger Dryden. In "Astrea Redux: A
Poem on the Restoration of Charles the Second," Dryden similarly figures
Charles’ return as a marriage which has long gone unconsummated:
We sigh’d to hear the fair Iberian Bride
Must grow a Lilie to the Lilies side,
While Our Cross Stars deny’d us Charles his Bed
Whom our first Flames and Virgin love did wed. (17-
20)
!
' There is a double significance therefore to the marriage that will take
|
| place following the ending of the play. It represents the return to the unity and
i
' order of Astrean or Elizabethan times, which a restored monarchy had
251
promised to English society. It also recalls the king’s actual marriage in the
earliest days of his reign.
The heroic plot of Marriage a la Mode therefore, can be read as a
politically-oriented narrative whose diction owes to its author’s diachronic
awareness and deployment of older comic forms. The archaic style (of the
heroic plot) is connected to the historical circumstances of Charles II’s
Restoration after the first decade of his reign. In the same way, the events of
j
the comic plot can be viewed as a synchronic, contemporaneous, and bitterly
farcical reflection on the same court life which is thematized and satirized in
the sycophantic and distasteful figure of Melantha, who is simultaneously
Rhodophil’s mistress and Palamede’s fiancee:
Melantha: . . . the Prince took me by the hand, and
pressed it a la droubbee, because the King was near,
made the doux yeux to me, and en suite, said a
thousand Gallanteries, or let me die, my dear.
Doralice: Then I am sure you—
Melantha: you are mistaken, my dear.
Doralice: What, before I speak?
Melantha: But I know your meaning; you think, my
dear, that I assum’d something of fiete into my
Countenance, to rebute him; but, quite contrary, I
regarded him, I know not how to express it in our dull
Sicilian Language, d ’un ayr enjoue; and said nothing
but a d ’autre, a d ’autre, and that was all grimace, and
would not pass upon me. (II.i. 195-208)
In the distinctive disjunction of the plots in Marriage a la Mode, in other
words, Dryden is simultaneously representing two versions of contemporary
political reality using the generic conflict of his drama as a metaphor. (This of
course means that Dryden’s drama does not primarily focus on emerging
gender ideology. Instead it uses the more contemporary material to its own,
conservative, and political ends.) By the early 1670s, court life under Charles
II is frequently described as an excessive farce touching the lives of the
bourgeoisie as it does in Dryden’s play. Despite the fact that Bishop Burnet’s
posthumously published A History of Mv Own Time (1724) has been called "
difficult book to use" and its author "a biased and unreliable witness,”1 1 5 his
account in this case at least, is fairly representative of the wealth of other
material recounting the courtiers’ excesses:
At this time the court fell into much extravagence in
masquerading; both King and Queen and all the court
went about masked, and came into houses unknown,
and danced there, with a good deal o f wild frolic.
People were so disguised that with being in the secret,
none could distinguish them .1 1 6
The essential conservatism of Marriage a la Mode therefore, lies in its
appeal to return to the kind of marriage which is emblematic of the social
order, and social stability then lacking in Charles II’s reign. But the play has
darker and further reaching implications too, in that the heroic plot
problematizes the political legitimacy of the heir to a throne. Until
Hermogenes reveals that Leonidas is Theagenes’ lawful son and heir (IV .iv.l-
2), the problem of succession to the throne of Sicily is painfully up for grabs
between a variety of successors, including the King’s favorite, Argaleon. The
comic plot, insofar as it concerns a genuine cuckolding action (one which
253
involves a married couple), also thematizes the succession problem which was
quickly becoming the major difficulty of Charles II’s reign. In the absence of
any legitimate heirs, the growing number of Charles II’s illegitimate offspring
(by 1685 there were 14 including the Duke of Monmouth), which were the
results, after all, of numerous extramarital affairs, represented a real obstacle
to a smooth transition of power at the end of Charles’ reign and invited the
kind of power struggle which exists between Polydamus, Leonidas and
Argaleon. Dryden’s conservative affirmation of marriage in the comic plot
therefore is conceptually tied to the smooth and merciful change of power in
the heroic plot. The political survival of the Stuarts, in other words, depended
on the king’s ability to rekindle his interest in Catherine and to sire an heir
who would succeed him legitimately as Leonidas succeeded Theagenes and as
Charles himself succeeded his father. Of course, this proved impossible.
Catherine was physically incapable of having any but stillborn children and the
date of her last stillbirth immediately precedes Charles’ very public affairs
with Nell Gwyn and then with Louise de Keroualle. By 1671, it is clear that
Charles had completely given up hope of fathering a royal heir with Catherine
and was by that time cynically unconcerned with his reputation for sexual
license at the expense of matters of state. Dryden’s disillusionment with the
king is reflected in his next comedy The Assignation: or. Love in A Nunnery
(1672) which shares with Marriage a la Mode a unique relationship to the
emerging sub genre of Restoration sex comedy.
255
Notes
1 Richard Flecknoe, "Sir William D ’Avenant’s Voyage to the Other
World, with his Adventure in the Poet’s Elizium" in Robert W. Lowe,
Thomas Betterton (London: Kegan Paul, 1891) 106.
2 Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late
Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 295.
3 J. H. Smith, The Gav Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1948) 85.
4 Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepvs X, eds. R. Latham, W.
Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) 31 May 1669: 564.
5 John Dryden, prologue, The Conquest of Granada. Works XI, ed. H. T.
Swedenberg Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 19.
6 Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama. An Historical and Critical Supplement
to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1936) 238.
7 Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and
Women Dramatists. 1642-1737 (New York: Harvester, 1988) 32.
8 Richard Flecknoe, The Life of Thomaso the Wanderer: An Attack upon
Thomas Killigrew (London: Dobell, 1923).
9 Gerard Langbaine, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (London,
1691) 199.
1 0 Robert W. Lowe, Thomas Betterton (London: Kegan Paul, 1891) 106.
1 1 Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn
Fields (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989) 28.
1 2 ?Edmund Curll, The History of the English Stage from the Restauration
to the Present Time (London, 1741) 92.
1 3 Donald Bruce, Topics in Restoration Comedy (London: Victor Gollancz,
1974) 17.
1 4 John Wilcox, The Relation of Moliere to the Restoration Stage (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1938) 58.
256
1 5 Eric Rothstein and Frances Kavenik, The Designs of Carolean Comedy
(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1988) 108.
1 6 J. Milhous and R. D. Hume, introduction, The Frolicks: or. The
Lawyer Cheated, by Elizabeth Polwhele (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977) 15.
1 7 Hume, The Development of English Drama 265.
1 8 Thomas Betterton, The Amorous Widow: or. The Wanton Wife
(London, 1668-1670); Edward Howard, The W omen’s Conquest (London,
1670); Aphra Behn, The Forc’d Marriage: or. The Jealous Bridegroom
(London, 1670); Thomas Shadwell, The Humourists (London, 1670); John
Caryll, Sir Salomon: or. The Cautious Coxcomb (London, 1670); Elizabeth
Polwhele, The Frolicks: or. The Lawyer Cheated (London, 1671); Aphra
Behn, The Amorous Prince: or. The Curious Husband (London, 1671);
Edward Howard, The Six Davs Adventure: or. The New Utopia (London,
1671); William W ycherley, Love in a Wood: or. St. James’s Park (London,
1671); John Dryden, Marriage a la Mode (London, 1671); Thomas Shadwell,
The Miser (London, 1672), Epsom Wells (London, 1672); William
Wycherley, The Gentleman Dancing Master (London, 1672); Edward
Ravenscroft, The Citizen Turn’d Gentleman (London, 1672); John Dryden,
The Assignation: or. Love in a Nunnery (London, 1672); Henry Nevil Payne,
The Morning Ramble (London, 1672); Aphra Behn, The Dutch Lover
(London, 1673); Edward Ravenscroft, The Careless Lovers (London, 1673);
Joseph Arrowsmith, The Reformation (London, 1673).
1 9 Andrew Marvell, Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth (Oxford:
The Clarendon Press, 1927) 303.
2 0 Antonia Fraser, The W eaker Vessel (New York: Vintage Books, 1985)
305.
2 1 Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, A History of His Own Time 1
(London, 1724-32) 264.
2 2 Roy MacGregor-Hastie, Nell Gwvn (London: Robert Hale, 1987) 82,
94, 97.
2 3 "A Ballad Called the Haymarket Hectors," Poems on Affairs of State
(London, 1671) 23.
2 4 Marvell 302-3.
257
2 5 Milhous 29.
2 6 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn III, ed. E. S. de Beer (Oxford:
The Clarendon Press, 1955) 546.
2 7 Cited in Fraser, 298.
2 8 Ben Ross Schneider, The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Urbana:
University o f Illinois Press, 1971) 59.
2 9 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Sexualism and the Citizen of the World:
Wycherley, Sterne and Male Homosocial Desire," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984):
226-245.
3 0 Susan Staves, Plavers’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979) 160.
3 1 Burnet 262.
3 2 Burnet 269.
3 3 Henri Misson, Memoirs and Observations of His Travels Over England,
trans. John Ozell (London, 1719) 219-20. On this same topic of the
composition of Restoration theater audiences and theater interiors, see also:
John Mackay, A Journey Through England in Familiar Letters From a
Gentleman Here. To His Friend Abroad, second edition (London, 1722) 171;
?Stacy, The Country Gentleman’s Vade Mecum (London, 1699) 38; Samuel de
Sorbiere, "Relation d ’un Voyage en Angleterre” (Paris, 1664) 166-74; Lorenzo
Magalotti, The Travels of Cosmo the Third Grand Duke of Tuscany Through
England (London, 1821) 25 April 1669; Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman’s
Companion (London, 1675) 35-36; Robert Gould, The Plav-House. A Satvr.
Part I (London, 1675); Thomas Shadwell, A True Widow III (London, 1679).
For the most recent and authoritative reconstructions of restoration theater
audiences see: Emmet Avery, "The Restoration Audience," Philological
Quarterly 44 (1966): 54-61; Pierre Danchin, «Le public des theatres londinien
a la epoque de la Restouration d’apres les prologues et les epilogues,»
Dramaturgie et Societe. ed. Jean Jacquot, (Paris: Centre des Recherche
Scientifique, 1968) II 847-888; Harold Love, "The Myth of the Restoration
Audience," KOMOS 1 (1968): 49-56; Andrew S. Bear, "Criticism and Social
Change: The Case of Restoration Drama," KOMOS 2 (1968-9): 25; Harold
Love, "Bear’s Case Laid Open: Or, A Timely Warning to Literary
Sociologists," KOMOS 2 (1968-9): 72-80; Robert D. Hume, The Development
of English Drama: Harold Love, "Who Were The Restoration Audience?"
258
Yearbook of English Studies (1980): 21-44; Robert D. Hume and Arthur
Scouten, "Restoration Comedy and its Audience," Yearbook of English Studies
(1980): 45-69; W. H. Pedicord, "The Changing Audience," The London
Theater W orld. 1660-1800. ed. Robert D. Hume (Carbondale: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1980) 236-252; Robert D. Hume, "The Change in
Comedy; Cynical versus Exemplary Comedy on the London Stage, 1678-
1693," Essays in Theater I (1983): 101-118; A. Botica, Audience. Playhouse
and Plav in Restoration Theatre. 1660-1710. diss., Oxford, 1985 (Oxford:
UMI, 1988); David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration
Drama. 1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
3 4 i.e., The Forc’d Marriage and The Rehearsal. C. B. "Upon That
Incomparable Comedian, Mr. Edward Angel" (London, c. 1673); "His
pregnant Actions of Transcendant W it,/ Rang Peals of Mirth, in Galley, Box,
and Pit" (67).
3 5 Pepys, IX (30 May 1668): 218-9.
3 6 Charles Sackville, The Poems of Charles Sackville. Sixth Earl of
Dorset, ed. Brice Harris (New York: Garland, 1979) 9.
3 7 Pepys, VIII (15 April 1667): 167.
3 8 Hume, The Development of English Drama 255.
3 9 Harbage 24/L
4 0 Pearson 89.
4 1 Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: Dutton, 1974).
4 2 Hume, The Development of English Drama 214.
4 3 Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra
Behn (New York: Dial Press, 1980) 203-4.
4 4 Aphra Behn, "The Disappointment," Works VI, ed. Montague Summers
(London: William Heinemann, 1915) 178. In an interesting note to the poem
(425), Summers records that Behn’s original was published as early as 1661 in
a French collection at Amsterdam.
4 5 Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity: English W omen’s Writing. 1649-
1688 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989) 121.
259
4 6 Goreau 126-7.
4 7 Pearson 150.
4 8 Rothstein & Kavenik 173.
4 9 Albert S. Borgman, Thomas Shadwell. His Life and Comedies (New
York: New York University Press, 1928) 137.
5 0 Kathleen M. Lynch, The Social Mode of Restoration Comedy (New
York: Macmillan, 1926) 162, 163.
5 1 John Wilmot, The Complete Poems of John Wilmot. Earl o f Rochester,
ed. David M. Vieth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) 124n75.
5 2 Wilmot, "An Allusion to Horace, the Tenth Satyr o f the First Book"
pl23,44.
5 3 Hans Deckman, "Some Aspects of the Development of Authority," in
The Father: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives, ed. Andrew Samuels (New
York: New York University Press, 1986) 127-45; Carl G. Jung, Aspects of
the Masculine (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Eugene Monick,
Castration and Male Rage: The Phallic Wound (Toronto: Inner City Books,
1991), and Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine (Toronto: Inner City
Books, 1987); Alix Piran, The Absent Father: Crisis and Creativity (New
Y o r k ' V ik in ir /P p n m iin 1 Q8QY- rVr^nalrl SjiHirnr "TTia it nnrl th a
Father-Son Relationship," in Archetypes of the Shadow in a Split World:
Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Congress for Analytical Psychology (Zurich:
Spring Publications, 1977) 361-77; James Wyly, The Phallic Quest: Priapus
and Masculine Inflation (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1989).
5 4 Peter Holland, The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in
Restoration Comedy (London: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 46-7.
5 5 Lowe 108.
5 6 Montague Summers, The Playhouse of Pepvs (London: Kegan Paul,
1935) 373-4.
5 7 David D. Gilmore, Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of
Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990) 229-230.
5 8 Gilmore 224.
260
5 9 Milhous & Hume 14.
6 0 Danchin 877.
6 1 Love, "Who W ere the Restoration Audience?" 27nl.
6 2 Hume & Scouten, "Restoration Comedy and its Audience" 47. Also, it
may be possible to draw general conclusions about the maximum proportions
of audience segments by comparing the capacities of different locations within
the theater.
6 3 See Love, "Who Were The Restoration Audience?" 35, for a discussion
of Danchin’s treatment of this final point, which originates, according to Love,
in Ned Bliss Allen, The Sources of Drvden’s Comedies (Ann Arbor:
Michigan, 1935) 124-5.
6 4 Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume, introduction to The Country
Gentleman. A Lost Plav and Its Background by Sir Robert Howard and
George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1976) 23.
6 5 Roger Thompson, ed. Samuel Pep vs’ Penny Merriments (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1977) 72-3.
6 6 Hester W. Chapman, Great Villiers: A Study of George Villiers. Second
id o-L o tv * i o o „ u , c 'H n 4 • C rvl r a»i n A tO / t O Y lO O
6 7 MacGregor-Hastie 102-3; Ronald Hutton, Charles II: King o f England.
Scotland and Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 280; Allen Andrews,
The Roval Whore: Barbara Villiers. Countess of Castlemaine (Philadelphia:
Chilton Books, 1970) 208-9.
6 8 Milhous & Hume 20.
6 9 Pearson 137.
7 0 Pearson 137.
7 1 Milhous & Hume 20.
7 2 Milhous & Hume 21.
7 3 Milhous & Hume 29-30.
261
7 4 Milhous & Hume 44.
7 5 Milhous & Hume 44.
7 6 There is no evidence for the recent claim that "the play was acted by
the...D uke’s Company in 1670" (Hobby 113). Milhous and Hume are careful
in their introduction to state: "whether The Frolicks reached the stage or not
[is] something we shall probably never know" (49), and more recently Pearson
has reaffirmed that "there is no evidence that it was ever actually performed"
(138).
7 7 Maureen Duffey, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn. 1640-89
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1977) 103.
7 8 Goreau 164.
7 9 Pearson 154.
8 0 Bruce 139.
8 1 Pearson 157.
8 2 Pearson 158.
8 3 Hume, The Development of English Drama 322.
8 4 Elaine Hobby writes: "Frederick threatens to rape Laura at knifepoint to
humble her for scorning him, and in the same play Silvio threatens to rape his
’sister’ Cleonte" (122) but neither Silvio nor a Cleonte appear in The Amorous
Prince, and Frederick’s attempted rape is the only one.
8 5 Sedgwick 227.
8 6 See Hume, The Development of English Drama. 258, concerning these
plays. I omit them from the present discussion as I omit Sir Robert Howard
and George Villiers’ backward looking comedy of 1669, The Country
Gentleman. All three plays are late holdovers of earlier styles of Restoration
comedy. Mr. Antony and The Country Gentleman are the last comedies
written by Boyle and Howard respectively and this fact indicates the transition
with which I am concerned in this present chapter, even if the plays’ structures
and characters do not.
8 7 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama I (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1955) 282.
262
8 8 Staves, Players’ Scepters 294.
8 9 Pearson 90.
9 0 W illard Connelly, Brawny Wvcherlev: First Master in English Comedy
(New York: Scribners, 1930) 16-24.
9 1 David S. Berkeley, "Preciosite and the Restoration Comedy of
Manners," Huntington Library Quarterly XVIII (1955): 110-123.
9 2 B. Eugene McCarthy, William Wvcherlev: A Biography (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1979) 24-27.
9 3 Arthur Friedman, introduction, The Plavs. by William Wycherley
(Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979) xiii-xvii.
9 4 Hume, The Development of English Drama 278; James Urvin Rundel,
"Wycherley and Calderon: A Source for Love in a W ood. " PMLA LXIV
(1949): 701-7; P. F. Vernon, "Wycherley’s First Comedy and its Spanish
Source," Comparative Literature XVIII (1966): 132-44; John Loftis, The
Spanish Plavs of Neoclassical England (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1973) 121-7; David Stuart Rodes, "William W ycherley’s Love in a Wood and
The Gentleman Dancing M aster: A Critical Edition," diss., Stanford, 1969,
254.
9 5 Amedee Roux, Montausier. Sa Vie et Son Temps (Paris, 1860) 48.
9 6 McCarthy 25.
9 7 Roberts 99.
9 8 Jean Baptiste Poquelin de Moliere, preface, The Affected Ladies. Works
I, trans. John Odell (London, 1714) unpaginated.
9 9 C. D. Cecil, "Libertin and Precieux Elements in Restoration Comedy,"
Essays in Criticism IX (1959): 239-53.
1 0 0 James Thompson, Language in Wvcherlev’s Plavs (University:
University of Alabama Press, 1984) 37.
1 0 1 James Thompson 37.
263
1 0 2 Robert Moss Markley, Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the
Comedies of Etherege. Wvcherlev. and Congreve (Oxford: The Clarendon
Press, 1990) 140.
1 0 3 Lynch 165-6.
1 0 4 John Palmer, The Comedy of Manners (New York: Russell and
Russell, 1913) 93.
1 0 5 Montague Summers, introduction, Works I, by William Wycherley
(London: The Nonesuch Press, 1924) 32.
1 0 6 Nicoll 226.
1 0 7 McCarthy 36.
1 0 8 Wilcox 87.
1 0 9 John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage I (London, 1832) 134.
1 1 0 Michael McKeon, "Marxist Criticism and Marriage a la M ode."
Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation 24 (Spring 1983): 141-2.
1 1 1 McKeon 142-3.
1 1 2 Markley 89.
1 1 3 Jackson I. Cope, Dramaturgy of the Daemonic: Studies in Antigeneric
Theater from Ruzante to Grimaldi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984) 3.
1 1 4 Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957) 163, 171.
1 1 5 Bear 25.
1 1 6 Burnet 473.
264
Chapter Four: High Restoration Comedy, 1675-1678
It is widely recognized that the plays which comprise the largest segment of
the canon of Restoration comedy appeared during a surprisingly short span of
years, roughly in the middle of Charles II’s reign. Plays like The Country
Wife (1675), William W ycherley’s last true sex comedy, Thomas Shadwell’s
problematic The Libertine, a Tragedy (1675), George Etherege’s landmark
play The Man of Mode (1676), Aphra Behn’s best comedy The Rover (1677),
and John Dryden’s much underrated play Mr. Limberham or. The Kind
Keeper (1678), are clearly the products of a brief period of sex comedy
following the end of the Third Dutch War (1674) and immediately preceding
the beginnings of the Popish Plot (1678).
Although a new breed of Restoration rake-heroes distinguishes these
comedies, they are recognizably connected to their precursors from Cutter in
Abraham Cowley’s The Cutter of Coleman Street (1661) to Antonio in Aphra
Behn’s The Dutch Lover (1673). But in the subsequent period of radically
increased freedom of representation for the stage, the Restoration rake-heroes
of the earlier comedies mutate into priapic figures, hypersexual1 Cavaliers
whose "phallic quests" involve explicit and ruthless sexual exploitation of
many women in a large group of plays which generally do not end in
redemptive and reassuring marriages.
265
The psychological significance of such phallic quests in both heterosexual
and homosexual men has recently been recognized as a result of an inflated or
narcissistic masculinity. Eugene Monick and James Wyly have shown that men
whose masculine self-concepts have been damaged at a critical age may
attempt to recover their impaired ’phallos,’ or masculine self-identity by
engaging in what is technically termed a phallic quest, the pursuit and
consumption of a prodigious number of sexual partners.2 I will claim that such
quests have a similar significance in those Restoration cultural productions that
depict voracious, heterosexual rakes. A generation of young Cavaliers reached
adulthood with deep anxieties about their own manliness. The versions of the
Restoration rake-hero from the late 1670s are therefore intelligible as the most
extreme version of an entire generations’ search for a masculine identity which
had been crushed and stifled in them following their fathers’ humiliation,
defeat and absence due to death, imprisonment or exile.
Identifying sufficient and necessary causes for the sexual license of the
theater that permitted explicit depictions o f phallic quests is an elusive task.
The shift towards a theater devoted to morally challenging representations of
sexual pursuit was a gradual one beginning around 1668 with Sir George
Etherge’s She Would if She Could and Thomas Betterton’s The Amorous
Widow (1668-1670?). The new stage freedom is partly indebted to the effects
of the increasing libertinism of the court,3 as well as to a transition in the
266
generations of playwrights and theatergoers from those who, like Abraham
Cowley, Sir William Davenant, and Sir Robert Howard, had been born not
later than the early decades of the seventeenth century. The new generation
that came to the stage after 1668 and dominated it after 1673 had been born in
the late thirties and early forties, and reached puberty, adolescence and
adulthood during a period of massive social and political change.
With the single exception of John Dryden, an exceptional transitional
figure born in 1631— who temporarily stopped writing comedies in disgust at
this new trend-the latter group includes all of the principal authors of
Restoration comedy, among them: Aphra Behn, Thomas Betterton, Thomas
D’Urfey, Sir George Etherege, Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Otway, Edward
Ravenscroft, Sir Charles Sedley, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Shadwell, and
William Wycherley.
An important emblem of the changing freedom on the stage which this
new generation exploited, was the succession of Thomas Killigrew to the
position of Master of the Revels.4 As England’s censor during the brief period
1673-1677, Killigrew would have had much less influence than his predecessor
once had on the style and language of the drama. This change is significant,
however, since it sets in sharp contrast the sometimes overly fastidious
practices of Sir Henry Herbert concerning the plays he licensed.5 Killigrew
himself was an especially appropriate figurehead for the newer laissez-faire
267
style of licensing. Author of a deliberately lewd comedy, The Parsons
Wedding (1664), the production of which initiated the popularity of the
titillating breeches role in Restoration comedy, Killigrew was also a notorious
libertine whose sexual excesses are the topic of Richard Flecknoe’s vicious
personal satire The Life of Thomaso. The Wanderer (1667). The brief period
during which he was Master of the Revels (1673-77) significantly brackets the
production dates of the highest achievements of Restoration sex comedy listed
above. The last of these, Behn’s The Rover, is actually a reworking of
Killigrew’s published, but never produced sex comedy, Thomaso: or. The
W anderer.
In addition to Killigrew’s disinclination to censor the drama, another
reason for the burgeoning sexual license of the theater was its proximity to the
king and the court. In the years before the Popish Plot, Charles II’s monarchy
lost popular support largely as a result of England’s disillusionment with the
king’s indiscrete sexual excesses. The statement of an Oxford man written
during this period is characteristic of Charles’ growing disfavor: "The King is
neglected and none of the citizens or other care for him; stupid, heavy. "6 The
substance of this disfavor was that Charles behaved publicly like one of the
hypersexual rakes in the comedies of this period. It is worth remembering that
most of the plays considered in this chapter have some bearing on the sexuality
of the monarch. The king actually had a hand in the composition of Dryden’s
268
Kind Keeper. The Libertine and The Man of Mode are transparently concerned
with explaining the origins and consequences o f rakish behavior. The Rover
attempts to create a new kind of feminine identity in order to respond to the
rake’s consumption and destruction of women’s lives. Lastly, W ycherley’s The
Country W ife begins this trend by exposing the libertine possibilites that have
been nascent in sex comedy since the return of public drama in 1661. That
Charles II is not overtly thematized in this play is partial confirmation of the
broader social perspective from which I have tried to read the genre of
Restoration sex comedy. At this time, ’Manly’ Wycherley appears to have
been most interested in the cultural forces preceding the rake’s appearance on
i
|
the English stage. He left specific representations of England’s greatest
contemporary rake to his rivals in comedy.1
| W illiam Wycherley exploited a new theatrical freedom when he
I
l
combined the figures of the eunuch and the rake in The Country Wife (1675).
In so doing he registered the reciprocal relationship between Restoration
hypersexuality and the insecurity about masculinity which had dominated
comedy since Puny’s appearance in Cowley’s Cutter of Coleman Street (1661).
In the central ploy of Terence’s Eunuch Wycherley discovered a means to
condense his culture’s double fixation with male inadequacy and the
hypersexual reaction to it, in the single, deeply ambiguous figure of Horner.
269
But W ycherley’s fascination with impotence is not confined to one
character. William Freedman has pointed out that in each o f the play’s three
plots, sexual aggressors are juxtaposed with various impotent, asexual or
"effeminated" characters.8 Horner, Harcourt and Margery are systematically
set against Sir Jaspar Fidget, Sparkish, and Pinchwife. In addition to these
repetitions of the eunuch-and-rake motif, Wycherley also disguises the sexual
aggressors during their pursuit in a way reflecting Horner’s own disguise.
Wycherley, in other words, uses both the impotence of his eunuch and the
eunuch’s double-nature as structural principles to organize his comedy and to
give it significance. "Horner’s trick is the key to the play’s meaning no less
than to the action and the comedy"9 in an even greater variety of ways than
William Freedman imagined in 1972.
The growing fascination with eunuchs, which W ycherley’s comedy
reflects, owes its vogue to the prominence that the topic of impotence held
throughout the Interregnum and Restoration periods. The centrality of
impotence to Restoration discourse of all types, derives, as we shall see, from
the upheavals following the Civil War which challenged Cavalier gender
ideology and led to a pervasive insecurity about what masculinity was.
According to Roger Thompson, obsession with impotence is an
overwhelming theme in the pornography which has survived from the latter
half of the seventeenth-century. Works like The Wandering W hore (1660),
270
The Wandering W hore’s Complaint (1663), Fumbler’s Hall (1675), and The
London Jilt (1683) among many others, deploy the topic of male inadequacy as
a "form of insult, less important in itself than for what it symbolizes." The
symbolism, Thompson indicates, is, on one level, political since the most
frequent targets of such accusations are the bourgeoisie who are in addition
"often Puritan."1 0 But Thompson is also impressed by the sheer volume of
treatment which impotence receives. In his book’s conclusion, he takes this
fact as an indication of deep-seated anxieties about their sexuality on the parts
of Restoration men. Impotence, Thompson writes
stalks the pages of Restoration erotica, leaving a debris
of unsatisfied women. Plainly many late seventeenth-
century Englishmen shared an obsessive yet
apprehensive view of sexuality . . . they seem
profoundly inhibited and uncomfortable about the
subject . . . Their reaction is disproportionate,
discordant, distorted and disassociated . . . This attitude
seems to be new to the second half of the century.1 1
A non-pornographic pamphlet of the period illustrates the pervasiveness,
as well as the fantastic and hysterical quality of the rhetoric of impotence I am
describing. Insignificant in itself, but typical of its period and sub-genre, The
W omen’s Petition Against Coffee (1674) borrows the formula of various
Interregnum tracts like The Citv Dames Petition in behalf of the long-afflicted
but well-affected Cavaliers (1647) to condemn coffee-drinking on the grounds
that it produces impotence in men and leaves their women unsatisfied:
271
Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable,
Heathenish Liquor called Coffee . . . has so
Eunuch[ized] our Husbands, and Crippled our more
Kind Gallants, that they are become as Impotent as
Age . . . A Betrothed Queen might trust her self a bed
with one of them, without the nice Caution of a Sword
between them . . . so unfit are they for Action, that
like the young Train-band-men when called upon Duty,
their Ammunition is wanting; peradventure they
Present, but cannot give Fire, or at least do but flash in
the Pan. (2-3)
This pamphlet sub-genre and its characteristic rhetoric in which
impotence is a devastating— and deeply feared— insult derive from the
propaganda war which preoccupied the pamphlet literature preceding, during
and following the Civil War. In The City Dames Petition Puritan wives are
depicted cursing their husbands’ preoccupation with business because it leaves
[ them exhausted and impotent. As a result of their husbands’ disinterest and
i
i inability, the women lament the war that removed the Cavaliers who "alwaies
i
stood stiffe to the C ity."1 2 This tract, from the late 1640s, is noteworthy
because of its resemblance to Lady Fidget’s complaints (V.iv.26-8) about
husbands who pursue business, as Sir Jasper does, instead of satisfying their
wives.
The Citv Dames Petition however, is also typical of a flood of pamphlets
in which political partisans slurred both the reputations of their most prominent
enemies for impotence and effeminacy, and also those of their enemies’ wives
for infidelity and sexual rapacity.
272
Henry Neville, a recruiter for Parliament after 1645, authored three1 3 of
the most prominent and salacious of the anti-Loyalist tracts that proliferated
after Charles I’s imprisonment. Neville followed the form of Aristophanes’
Ecclesiadzusai. which had been first copied in England by an early anti-Puritan
pamphlet, called The Parliament of Women (1640). His purpose was to attack
his political opponents by slandering their virility. To do this, he emphasized
the increasing freedom and independence of Cavalier women which feminist
historians have noted was caused by exigencies of the w ar,1 4 and he accused
the defeated Cavaliers of such severe sexual inadequacy that they could not
control the frustrated ladies, their wives.
Throughout these and other tracts, charges abound of impotence on the
part of the Cavaliers and of sexual rapacity on the part of their mothers, wives
and sisters. The demoralizing effect of these overt and unanswerable slurs on
the defeated, humiliated and in many cases imprisoned or exiled Cavaliers is
not difficult to imagine. Of greater interest however, is the effect which these
attacks had on a generation of male children who were brought up in a highly
pressurized sexual crucible in which their own masculinity and that of their
fathers was the object of a prejudiced discourse. Although the central
criticisms of these works (and especially of the Neville tracts) may appear
contemptible to the modern reader, it is important to remember that in
Seventeenth Century England male inadequacy had moral implications and that
273
"male impotence . . . [was] not regarded as a medical condition, but as a
moral one."1 5
In addition to Neville’s tracts, a whole body of works criticizing Cavalier
fashion came into being in the late 1640s and early 1650s. Although they
enacted no sumptuary laws, the Puritans resented the younger Cavaliers’
defiance and self-identification through fashion, because it mocked a politically
dominant esthetic which eschewed vanity in all aspects of personal
adornm ent.1 6 The discourse against such fashions adapted the same sexual
rhetoric as that of Neville’s tracts. Works like William Prynne’s A Gagge for
Long-Hair’d Rattle-Heads who Revile all Civill Round-Heads (1646), the
i anonymous Habit of an English Gentleman (1646), Thomas H all’s The
I
Loathesomeness of Long Haire (1654) and his Diverse Reasons and Arguments
Against Painting Spots. Naked Backs. Breasts. Arms. &c (1654) attacked
Royalist women for wantonness at the same time they attacked young and
fashionable Cavaliers for the inadequacy and effeminacy of which their long
hair, their dress and their affected manners were taken as an outward sign.
Long hair, Thomas Hall wrote "notes effeminacy and
wantonesse . . . lascivious locusts are said to have hair like women"
(Loathesomeness 46).
In early Restoration drama, there is a common theme of political revenge
visited on an innocent generation. This theme probably owes its origin to the
274
severe Puritan attitudes towards the children of Loyalists during the
Interregnum. Criticisms of Cavalier fashion and accusations of effeminacy
against the Cavaliers are manifestations of these severe attitudes. In William
Heming’s The Fatal Contract (1653) for example, Queen Fredregond attempts
to exact a morally offensive revenge on Dumaine and Lamot, the only
surviving children of those who had killed her brother many years before.
More pointedly, after the Restoration, Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee
(1663) actually depicts Puritan Committee-men punishing a Cavalier widow
and her unborn child (19) for their political affiliation.
But if the criticism of Cavalier fashion is another manifestation of
Puritan attacks on the younger generation of their political opponents, by far
the most interesting of the books attacking the Cavaliers with accusations of
effeminacy is John Bulwer’s Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d: or.
The Artificial! Changling (1650, 1653, 1654). Bulwer’s express purpose in this
encyclopedic, illustrated and extremely popular study of personal adornment is
to show
how sicke men (generally) are of the Fashions,
convincing the world of this Truth . . . And [it] may
serve as a Glasse for the pernitiously-affected Gallants
of our time to looke in, and see the deformity of their
Minds . . . who practise such phantasticall Emendations
of Nature, as dishonour her. (A Hint on the Use of
this Treatise)
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In particular, Bulwer’s book’s appendix is careful to turn the compendious
volume against the Cavalier gallants of his day charging them primarily with
effeminacy.
These attacks by Neville, Hall and Bulwer are part of a large
Interregnum literature which emphasized sexuality and called contemporary
notions of masculinity into question. Their effect on the male self-image of the
new generation of Cavaliers was decidedly moralistic and negative, and as a
result critical images of Restoration men proliferate in Restoration comedy.
The figure of the fop is the most obvious expression of the joint distaste for
the masculine and insecurity about contemporary male roles, whatever his
peculiar affectation or ’foppery’ might be in any given comedy. The fop’s
ubiquity in Restoration drama is itself an important indication of the
significance this figure had in Restoration culture. In addition to the fop,
another staple figure of Restoration comedy thematizes the same masculine
insecurity that originated during the Interregnum. The gynophobe, a character
who fears and avoids women, appears in many of the plays1 7 from the
earliest period of Restoration comedy. (Wycherley himself used this as part of
the characterization of Manly in The Plain-Dealer [1676].)
Like the fop figure, the gynophobic male is also a result of Interregnum
pressure on male gender ideology. For many Restoration men, the changes in
women’s roles during the Interregnum precipitated feelings of abandonment
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and fears about ambitious women’s "personal and legal pow er."1 8 The extent
of these fears is suggested by the publication of Interregnum works like Moses
a Vaut’s The Husband*s Authority Unvail’d (1650) which justifies and explains
the history of wife-beating. The same social shock-waves that led to a Vaut’s
book and to the treatises on women’s rights left their trace in Restoration
comedy. In Flora’s Vagaries (1663), for example, Ludovico’s fear and hatred
of women is directly attributed to his mother’s early abandonment of him. Her
absence is an emblem of attempts by English women following the Civil War
to abandon their traditional roles and Ludovico’s enduring resentment is an
emblem of male anger directed now, not against the Puritans, but against
women, the second set of forces that challenged contemporary notions of
manliness by challenging men’s patriarchal control.
Unlike the fop and gynophobe, however, eunuchs were relative
latecomers to the comedy, even though the print media refer to both eunuchs
and impotence continuously from 1640 on. William Bentley’s Interregnum
comedy The Ghost: or. The Woman Wears the Breeches (1653) deals
specifically with the theme of impotence, but, like William Heming’s Fatal
Contract (1653) or the dramatic works of the Duchess of Newcastle, this play
is an Interregnum piece de fauteuil,— a specific kind of closet drama—
exclusively intended to be read not performed. In fact, until 1668 when the
Lord Roos divorce scandal forced impotence into the public discourse, these
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topics were apparently much too tender to be treated by any form of theater
except those whose exotic settings situated eunuchs at a far remove from
English society (The Siege of Rhodes II. for example). Pepys earliest recorded
reactions to eunuchs (Feb. 16, 1667; April 7, 1667) document a similar
distaste. But, surprisingly, by late in the following year, Pepys began to
appreciate the growing fashion for vocal music by castrati. He attended three
separate performances (Oct. 10, 12, 14, 1668) at the Theatre Royal, where
eunuchs had first been introduced by Thomas Killigrew in the early years of
the Restoration,1 9 and he was enthusiastic in his praise.
Some explanation for Pepys’ change of heart can be found in the social
currency which the topic of impotence achieved in 1668. Sued by her husband
for giving birth to a child that could not be his own, Lady Roos had accused
Lord Roos of a prolonged and frustrating impotence.2 0
Charles II’s concern with the case fuelled its popularity. He followed it
closely until its protracted conclusion in 1671, hoping to find a solution to the
succession crisis which reignited that year after a last still-born child was
delivered by Catherine of Braganza. Lampoons hinting at the King’s own
impotence date from this tim e,2 1 and these too indicate that impotence had
become a topic of national significance, one that Restoration comedy would
not ignore.
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Sir George Etherege was quick to exploit the topicality of impotence in
She Would if She Could (1668). Throughout this comedy there is a pervasive
lack of consummation of which Oliver Cockwood’s impotence is the most
obvious sign. In She Would if She Could over a period of several days seven
apparently determined and fairly intelligent people are unable to have anything
remotely like a sexual experience. To extend Laura Brown’s phrase, She
Would if She Could is not only about the "studied evasion of sexual
conflict, "2 2 it is also about the studied evasion of sex. This evasion of sex is
raised as a topic early in the play, when Courtall explains to Freeman that he
is not refusing to reveal a new lover to his friend, but rather that what appears
to be his affair with Lady Cockwood is actually far more intricate and, in one
sense, far more innocent:
Courtall: Why then, know that I have still been as
careful to prevent all opportunities, as she has been to
contrive ’em; and still have carried it so like a
gentleman, that she has not had the least suspicion of
unkindness. (L i.255-65)
Earlier in this same scene, the woman’s husband, Sir Oliver Cockwood,
expresses his own apparent distaste for his wife, his dissimulation of affection
for her, and his avoidance of making love with her (I.ii. 133-38). These
complaints follow the initial discussion between Courtall and Freeman in
which they excuse each other from the gentlemanly hobby of pursuing
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prostitutes together because in all of London there are none to be had (Li. 11-
21).
Behind the various male characters’ avoidance of sex is the same
masculine insecurity manifested as a horror of the feminine which was
responsible for the gynophobe figure in earlier Restoration comedies.
However, unlike their overtly gynophobic forebears, by 1668 Etherege’s male
characters have learned to dissimulate their fear of women. In Courtall’s
words, they carry their aversion "so like a gentleman that" women have
"not . . . the least suspicion of unkindness." Sir Oliver, for example, assumes
the demeanor of a dedicated rake. Despite the way he would have the male
world see him, however, he requires "a dose of cantharides" (I.i. 147) before
he can bring himself to make love to his wife.
The combination of impotent and rake in either a single character, like
Sir Oliver, or as a causally connected pair of characters, is a common theme
in Interregnum and Restoration literature. The characteristic pairing of a
eunuch or impotent with a rake appears to date from William Heming’s Fatal
Contract (1653). In this Interregnum play, a woman disguised as a eunuch
seeks revenge on a rake who had raped her and who intends to rape also his
own brother’s fiancee.
Heming’s play provides a significant connection to the salacious
Restoration comedies. Shortly before Wycherley’s Country Wife first
280
appeared, Heming’s play was adapted by Elkanah Settle and staged with a
much different ending as Fatal Love (1675). Etherege’s letters indicate that the
original play also may have been produced at this tim e,2 3 and to
accommodate the growing interest in eunuchs (an interest which was taking on
the proportions of a minor fad), its title was later changed by a publisher to
The Eunuch (1685).
Between the years 1668-1675 eunuchs increasingly concern the comedy.
Although no eunuchs figures are presented in plays at this time, the rhetorical
use of both eunuchs and impotence swells with mentions o f eunuchs in Edward
Howard’s The W oman’s Conquest (1670), Thomas Shadwell’s The Humorists
(1671) and in Aphra Behn’s The Amorous Prince (1671). In the Shadwell
play, one character, (appropriately named Drybob2 4 ) exclaims "would I were
an Eunuch in the Turks Seraglio" (237) while another character repeats the
same eunuch-rake ambivalence of Sir Oliver Cockwood in Etherege’s second
comedy. Shadwell’s later play, The Libertine (1675) repeats the eunuch-rake
dichotomy in the characters of Don John and Jacomo. Although there are no
actual eunuchs in The Libertine, there is an attempted gelding scene in which
shepherds angrily pursuing Don John and his companions for raping the
shepherds’ women, catch and attempt to castrate Jacomo.
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In The Country Wife then, Wycherley exploited the burgeoning dramatic
commonplace of juxtaposing an impotent or unmanly character with that of a
rake by combining them in the deeply ambiguous figure of Horner.
Both William Freedman and David Vieth2 5 have noted how, on a
dramatic level, Horner’s rakishness disguised as eunuchry highlights the
genuine impotence of the cuckolds and potential cuckolds who surround him.
Sparkish, Sir Jasper, and Pinchwife, represent different kinds of Restoration
geldings. The first of these is a vain, and inadequate ’sign of a man’ whose
impotence is his lack of self-knowledge. He "can," as Dorilant puts it, "no
more think the men laugh at him than the women jilt him" (I. i.23-4).
The second cuckold, Sir Jasper Fidget, is so preoccupied with business
that his neglected wife has reached a level of sexual cynicism and rapacity
perhaps greater than Horner’s own, since, in the China scene, she reduces him
to sexual incapacity. Even as his wife cuckolds him, Sir Jasper believes
Horner is "an innocent playfellow" (II.i.517-8) for the untrustworthy Lady
Fidget, one who will not jeopardize Sir Jasper’s standing in the world by
reducing him to ridicule. His ’new eunuch’ is a man to whom he can feel
sexually superior.
Pinchwife, on the other hand, does not share Sir Jasper’s exhausting
preoccupation with business. He seems genuinely, sexually inadequate. A
former companion rake to Horner, Pinchwife’s reasons for marrying are that
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he cannot satisfy a woman sexually, or at least cannot do so regularly. His
jealousy of his wife is directly connected to his awareness of his own
inadequacy (I. i.421-24).
Like Etherege’s Sir Oliver Cockwood, in other words, Pinchwife once
sought refuge from his own male inadequacy in the hypersexual persona of the
rake, but he was unable to sustain the role. He ’carried it sillily’ as Margery
later carries the role of pre-pubescent boy which Pinchwife forces on her out
of jealousy. As David Vieth notes, Pinchwife’s penchant for threatening people
with drawn weapons (Margery with a penknife [IV.i.93]; Horner with a sword
[IV.iii.299-302]) symbolically emphasizes his masculine inadequacy. Sword
and penknife are ineffectual substitutes for the true masculinity Pinchwife
himself lacks2 6 and which he recognizes and fears in Horner never having
heard the gossip that Horner has been castrated. Unlike Horner, Pinchwife’s
disguise as either rake or husband derives from a fear of the same social
ridicule to which Horner is continually subjected in his role as eunuch.
Pinchwife has felt desperately and painfully the double Restoration social
pressures for a man to gain "the reputation of a cocksman . . . [while] keeping
[his] belle strictly within the bounds of chastity"27. And it is the tortured
presence of Pinchwife who illuminates W ycherley’s most sophisticated
achievement, that of condensing both rake and eunuch into a single character.
283
As Horner points out early in the play, most hypersexual rakes, like the
one Pinchwife pretended to be, are "vain Rogues . . . contented only to be
thought abler Men than they are" (I.i.34-5). These partial or de facto eunuchs
keep whores as Pinchwife did. They hire Quack to "belie them" (I.i.33) in
order to aggrandize their reputations as lovers. They brag about themselves
reporting "such things" as Lady Fidget has it that "one does not know how and
whom to believe" (II.i.538). And when they are old, they keep up appearances
"like superannuated stallions" by running, feeding and whinnying "with the
mares . . . though they can do nothing else" (I.i. 183-9). Harcourt observes,
"most men are the contraries of that they would seem" (L i.250), and in The
Country W ife, perhaps even in Restoration culture in general, this law of
contrareity is particularly true of the hypersexual rake, who, beneath the social
display of sexual rapacity, is an even greater eunuch than the one Horner
appears to be. The appearance of the rake in Restoration comedy, therefore,
might be explained as a reaction formation to Restoration culture’s deeply felt
anxieties about masculinity, and the extremity of the rake’s voracious
"hypersexuality" could then be seen as a measure of the extremity of these
contemporary anxieties which, as we have seen, had their origins in the
political conflicts of the Interregnum period. Where William Freedman sees
the sign of the eunuch in The Country Wife as "a serious comment on the self
destructive impotence, neglectfulness, and ineptitude of the Restoration male",
284
I see the combination of rake and eunuch in the character of Horner more
generally.2 8 It is Wycherley’s attempt to register the ambivalent nature of his
society’s crisis in masculinity; his statement, in other words, that the
contemporary behaviors of the rake are an expression of an utter lack of
confidence by contemporary men in their own manhood.
Judging from The Libertine. Shadwell’s interests in 1675 were very close
to those that preoccupied his friend and rival William Wycherley in The
Country W ife. Both men appear to have been genuinely disturbed— and
savagely amused— by the destructive tendencies o f contemporary gender
ideology. (Significantly, a similar ambivalence is a familiar theme among the
critical responses to The Libertine.2 9 )
Like Horner, Don John is a radical combination of acute opposites
whose very dissimilarity is intended to emphasize and interrogate the theme of
masculinity. However, where Wycherley manipulates the concrete generic
symbols of the eunuch and the rake in order to create Horner, Shadwell (a
theoretician of the drama) gives these secondary significance. Instead,
Shadwell’s primary choice for a means by which to represent the contradictory
nature of the masculinity and sexuality of his era is more abstract; and these
means coincide with the period of generic experimentation following the
success of his innovative comedy Epsom-Wells in 1672.
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The Libertine’s Don John is a monster created from a radical fusion of
the two generic modes that had preoccupied Shadwell theoretically since the
publication of his preface to The Sullen Lovers in 1668. In The Libertine.
Shadwell uses the scourge of Jonsonian comedy to whip the heroic drama of
John Dryden. The libertine rake who begins the play with an heroic stature,
ends it as a diminished creature, unable to control his own self- destructive
impulses. (Whether this was a conscious choice on Shadwell’s part or not, this
is an especially appropriate dramatic structure for 1675, since Milton died that
year; Don John’s character development closely parallels that of Satan in
Paradise Lost.I
At first, Shadwell is concerned to present Don John’s understanding of
his own hypersexuality as a result of a rational adherence to the ’brutish’
variety of Hobbist existentialism illustrated in the following passage:
4. Woman: Vile Wretch! . . . Impious Villain! Though
thou hast no sense of Vertue or Honour left, thou shalt
find I have.
Don John: Vertue and Honour! There’s nothing good or
ill, but as it seems to each man’s natural appetite. If
they will not consent freely. You must ravish friends:
that’s all I know, you must ravish.
1. Woman: Unheard of Villany! Fly from this hellsh
place.
Antonio: Ladies, you shall fly, but we must ravish first.
(11.45)
The importance of Hobbist ideas is established in the play’s first lines.
Shadwell’s rake scorns human conscience which functions as a moral
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constraint on human actions. He calls it "an idle fear of future misery" (1.25).
At first glimpse, therefore, Don John would see himself— and would be seen—
as a philosopher, brought to the practice of libertinism by a carefully
considered atheism. (Perhaps to reinforce this reading, Shadwell’s preface
reminds readers of an obscure Italian ur-text of the Don Juan plays called
Atheisto Fulm inate.) As John Loftis observes, Don Juan claims it is because
he is an atheist who knows he cannot be punished, that he has no "fear . . . of
future misery", and therefore no reason to check the course of his inflated
desires:
Don John and his two companions are men without
inner controls— "psychopaths," in modern terminology—
and they tire so, as Don John explains, because they are
free of belief in the supernatural.3 0
Shadwell’s entire play therefore, is structured around the demonstration
that the libertine rake’s ’natural appetite’ is an unreasoning and unreasonable
Jonsonian ’humour’ which is the rough early modern equivalent of Freud’s
’repetition compulsion.’ Michael Alssid has pointed out that Shadwell’s major
criticism of Dryden’s heroic tragedy was its "unwillingness to realize
dramatically an accurate picture of foolish man enslaved by his will.3 1 A
dramatization of this anti-heroic enslavement is exactly the effect Shadwell
achieves in The Libertine. In Don John’s case, his humor manifests itself as a
sexual addiction. In order to convey the force of the compulsion that drives
this addiction, Shadwell’s rake must become convinced that there will be a
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supernatural retribution for his mortal sins, and that in order to escape
damnation he must renounce libertinism. The point of the play, therefore, is
that Don John’s hypersexuality is neither tragic nor heroic; it is a sickness.
The rake is in the grips of a compulsion so profound that he cannot make any
effort to save himself.
Many of the finest effects of The Libertine arise from the dramatic
necessity of convincing Don John that a supernatural reality exists. For
example, after an unnatural and stagey tempest overtakes Don John— as it did
Jonah— off the Spanish coast, he remains unrepentant, and stronger dramatic
measures are called for. Suddenly, the statue of a murdered rival becomes
supernaturally animated. It joins Don John at dinner, not to eat but to speak
with him:
Ghost: I come not here to take Repast with you;
Heaven has permitted me to animate
This Marble Body, and I come to warn
You of that Vengeance is in store for you,
If you amend not your pernicious lives. (IV. 82)
This development renders Don John’s atheism irrelevant. Although he
now appears (temporarily) convinced of the reality of the supernatural, he is
unafraid and still unrepentant. His answer to the ghost appears to indicate that
his professed atheism has very little to do with his continuing pursuit of
libertinism. On behalf of himself and his cronies, he dismisses this divine
invitation to repent by saying, "We are too much confirm’d" (IV .82). In the
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next act, when the gates of Hell open convincingly, the statue repeats the
appeal for repentance, Don John (after first dismissing this final set of
apparitions as "dreams") provides a more complete explanation for rejecting
salvation:
Statue: Will you not relent and feel remorse?
Don John: Cou’dst thou bestow another heart on me, I
might; but with this heart I have, I cannot. (V.92)
It is Don John’s ’confirm’d ’ ’heart’ therefore, and not his reasoned
atheism, that is ultimately the cause of his libertine excess. Don John, in other
words, is singularly governed by a Humor, the sine qua non of Jonsonian
comedy which Shadwell defined with an enviable economy in the Epilogue to
The Humorists (1671):
A Humor is the Byas of the Mind,
By which with violence ’tis one way inclin’d:
It makes out Actions lean on one side still,
And in all Changes that way bends the Will. (1.254)
In The Libertine, this depiction of the rake’s hypersexuality as a
’repetition compulsion’ beyond the control of his conscious will has startling
implications. As Don R. Kunz has observed, the play has a micropolitical
dimension:
the fact that scene, characters, and action were passed
off as Spanish scarcely concealed Shadwell’s criticism
of English manners. Don John, Don Antonio, and Don
Lopez were only Charles II, Sir Charles Sedley, and
the Earl of Rochester . . . substantially exaggerated.
This bombast and the libertine philosophy blended
together comprise a most irregular play filled with
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comic absurdities and tragic implications. The
Libertines were viewed as spreading an infection
throughout the land.3 2
Whether Kunz is strictly correct in his identifications of Don Antonio
and Don Lopez is unimportant. It is clear, however, that the sexual voracity
emanating from Charles II’s court figures heavily in this play as it does in all
the plays considered by this chapter. The topic of contemporary English sexual
mores is so important to an understanding of The Libertine that Shadwell
raises it explicitly. Clara and Flavia disscuss english sexual values as they
lament their arranged marriages (which to Shadwell appear to represent social
order and stability), and unwittingly prepare themselves for a polygamous
marriage to Don John :
Clara: O that we were in England! there, they say a
Lady may chuse a Footman, and run away with him, if
she likes him, and no dishonour to the Family.
Flavia: That’s because the Families are so very
Honourable, that nothing can touch them: their Wives
run and ramble whither, and with whom they please,
and defie all censure. (111.59)
Some external and contemporary support for Kunz’s view--that the
thematization of English sexual morals refers specifically to Charles II— may be
suggested by Robert Gould’s puzzling condemnation of Shadwell for abusing
"unpardonable things,/The best of Governments and the best of Kings."3 3
These lines from "The Play-House, A Satyr" appear unintelligible unless they
are taken to refer to The Libertine. In any case, the idea that Shadwell used
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Charles II as a royal model for Don John makes the playwright’s condensation
of generic forms in The Libertine particularly significant, and intelligible. In
The Libertine. Shadwell examines the contemporary crisis in sexuality, by
examining what he imagines is its source. He portrays Charles II in an heroic
mode as a figure of tragedy. In so doing, he deploys the same literary mode in
which Charles’s return was figured by poets like Dryden in 1660 and 1661.
Significantly, this mode is one of the points of origin of Dryden’s later heroic
verse-drama.
Despite the heroic rhetoric of The Libertine— its bombast and
magniloquence— Shadwell is concerned to show that there is not very much that
is heroic either about the king or the court or the current of unrestrained
hedonism that was, by 1675, trickling into marriage, the family, and the fabric
of English society. Furthermore, he shows in the disillusionment of the
characters Clara and Flavia, a popular hostility to the sexuality, ethics and
person of the king. In the play, as in life, what could be temporarily disguised
as an indominatible, aristocratic will and the overwhelming physical desire of a
powerful and resolute leader is eventually revealed as a depraved addiction
based on the same arrested oedipal development suggested by Otto Fenichel,
Antony Kaufman and Otto Rank.3 4
But if Don John’s masculine inflation is ultimately reduced to an
unheroic compulsion or humor, Shadwell has another surprise in store. He
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deploys the conventional opposition of the rake and the eunuch to effect a
much more personal criticism of the heroic drama’s inventor and chief
proponent, John Dryden, the Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal.
As their names suggest, Don John and Jacomo are somehow connected.
The name is actually the most noticeable change Shadwell makes in this minor
character who was originally called Passarino in one of Shadwell’s source
plays, II Convitato di peitra. opera esemplare del signor Jacinto Andrea
Cicognini.3 5 Onto these characters Shadwell impresses the eunuch-rake
opposition of Restoration drama, familiar from the preceding discussion of The
Country W ife. The hypersexuality of Don John makes Jacomo’s ineffectual
masculinity exaggeratedly pronounced, and Shadwell is eager that his audience
will not miss the point of this contrast. When Jacomo narrowly escapes being
gelded by shepherds who are angered at Don John’s rape of their women, he
observes "O Sir . . . If you had not come just in the Nick, I had lost my
M anhood." Whereupon one of Don John’s companions in the rape retorts
"’Tis no matter for the use you make on’t" (IV.78). W hether he possesses
genitals or not, in other words, Jacomo is all eunuch.
John Loftis believes Jacomo/Passarino is unique in English drama of the
period because of his resemblance to the gracioso-type of the comedia.3 6 But
in terms of Shadwell’s own drama, Jacomo is simply a more exotic version of
the very familiar, unmasculine fool. Moreover, Shadwell commonly employed
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such characters in his plays to a very specific end, one which experienced
Restoration play-goers probably anticipated in each new Shadwell drama,
much as a twentieth century movie-fan might scan the mise-en-scene for a
famous silhouette when watching a Hitchcock thriller.
Generally, these characters were ShadwelFs established means of
ridiculing, in a very personal way, rival dramatist and dramatic theoretician
John Dryden. While baiting Dryden in the preface to The Sullen Lovers
(1668), for example, it appears Shadwell also modelled the poet Ninny after
him .3 7 Sir Formal Trifle of The Virtuoso (1676) is another of ShadwelFs
well-known Dryden characters, as is the poet in Timon of Athens (71677-78),
and the very clearly named Drybob of The Humorists (1670).3 8
Drybob— one of Rochester’s more famous epithets for Dryden— refers to
the poet’s alleged prediliction for coitus interruptus.3 9 Drybob’s impotence
in the Humorists, like Jacomo’s in The Libertine, doubles as both a moral
evaluation of Dryden personally, and as a comment on his ’unfulfilling’ or
’unsatisfying’ dram a.4 0 In despair over his rejection and failure, Drybob
utters these words in a Shadwell play that premiered one season before
Buckingham’s The Rehearsal successfully made Dryden and the heroic drama
targets of a burlesque: "if I ever have to do with Love and Honour more,
would I were an Eunuch in the Turks Seraglio—" (1.237). Love and Honour,
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o f course, would be recognized by Restoration audiences as the the most basic
building blocks of Dryden’s heroic plays.
If The Libertine deploys meta-generic oppositions in the same way The
Country Wife deploys the eunuch and the rake— to represent the contradictions
inherent in the masculine ideology of the 1670s— it also repeats the oppositions
of The Country W ife. ShadwelFs play does this by replacing one term in the
eunuch-rake dichotomy with a vicious personal assault on Dryden in the person
of Jacomo. In other words, the play attacks ’Jack’ Dryden on two levels. First,
from the perspective of his generic ’world view’, and second from the
perspective of his personal or moral worth, his status as a man in a era when
manliness was everything and impotence was a moral crime as John H.
O ’Neill has pointed out.4 1
These attacks on Dryden are significant because they may provide a clue
a significant literary mystery of the period. David Vieth has convincingly
argued for 1676 as the publication date of "Mac Flecknoe", Dryden’s vicious
and successful assault on Shadwell’s reputation.4 2 But if we accept his dates—
as I believe we must— we must also reject Daniel McKeithan’s argument that
"Mac Flecknoe" was Dryden’s response to "an insult contained in the
dedication to [Shadwell’s] The History of Timon of Athens. The Man-Hater
(1678)" 43. We now know, in other words, roughly when "Mac Flecknoe"
appeared, but we no longer have any reason why it appeared when it did.
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On the surface, Dryden’s massive and devastating attack on Shadwell’s
reputation barely appears to acknowledge the existence of The Libertine. It
concentrates instead what is generally acknowledged to be Shadwell’s best
comedy, The Virtuoso (1676). In fact, in "Mac Flecknoe", Dryden’s only
possible allusion to the earlier play is contained in a single line: "Thy Tragick
Muse gives smiles, thy Comick sleep" (1.198). But, just as Shadwell subverted
Dryden’s heroic practice in The Libertine. Michael Alssid has it that "Dryden
subverted Shadwell’s critical ideas and dramatic practice to create "Mac
Flecknoe."4 4 Dryden, Alssid writes, did this by "deliberately and ironically
[metamorphosing] Shadwell into a humors character to show us a fool who,
like the humors of his play, persistently incriminates himself".4 5
I am suggesting then that in "Mac Flecknoe," although Dryden avoids
mentioning The Libertine, he borrows and inverts the play’s techniques of
formal and personal satire, turning them against his attacker. Much of what we
know about Dryden’s biography during this period supports the notion that he
would be especially vulnerable to an attack of the sort The Libertine
represented. His career had been in a slump since the appearance of The
Rehearsal (1671), and the failure of The Assignation (1672). He was in
financial difficulty following the disastrous fire at the Theatre Royal in 1672.
He was also unable during this period to collect his annuity from the
financially beleaguered Royal Treasury.
295
At the same time, ShadwelFs career was burgeoning. The younger
playwright’s generic experimentations appeared to be paying large dividends.
Replete with blood and sex, The Libertine enjoyed an enormous and lucrative
popularity, and success followed success. The following year saw the premiere
of ShadwelFs best-received humors comedy, The Virtuoso, in which he
deliberately went against the current taste for sex comedy. Most critics believe
The Virtuoso is his finest play.
To Dryden these successes may have appeared to come at his own
expense, and to an ambitious poet that could have made them particularly
galling and enviable. It is immaterial whether the idea o f retorting in kind to
Shadwell occurred to him at the time of The Libertine’s first production, or
whether the notion crept up on him slowly in the remaining months of 1675.
In either case, at some point as he was putting the finishing touches to Aureng-
Zebe or shortly thereafter, Dryden conceived the idea of delivering a powerful
blow to a man who "more than any other contemporary, or rival poet . . . had
become by 1676 the leading literary antagonist of Dryden.4 6 It seems possible
that ShadwelFs double attack on Dryden in The Libertine in some measure
prompted "Mac Flecknoe", It seems certain, however, that the sophistication
of ShadwelFs attack, and its popularity contributed to the vehemence of the
envious Poet Laureate’s response.
296
Unlike the anarchic sexualities both of Horner and Don John, Dorimant’s
hypersexuality is ultra-conservative. It seeks, as Harold Weber has
demonstrated, to reassert patriarchal, masculinist ideology.4 7
Michael Neill has observed that "Dorimant is at once the most succesful
and the last of the true insurrectionary rake-heroes.”481 would only add that
Dorimant is the certainly the last, but that he is not at all insurrectionary.
Despite his statement to Medley concerning his designs on Young Bellair’s
Emilia (I.i.482-495), the objects of his amours are not other men’s women as
they are with Horner. During the course of the play, Dorimant is attracted to,
attacks and consumes only the Restoration new woman, a woman independant
i of male guardians and husbands. She is a woman with enough self-sufficiency
i
| to arrange assignations at 5am, and, ultimately (as we shall see), with enough
j
i acumen to play with the rake at his own game, and to deal him a coup de
grace or, on the political level, a coup d’etat. Dorimant’s self-appointed task is
to humiliate, subjugate and contain women who represent the social chaos
culminating in the succession and exclusion crises of the 1670s. Horner’s task
is to humiliate, subjugate and disperse the ineffectual and absolutist male
j hegemony that precipitated these crises.
I
I
According to Harold W eber’s acute reading of the popular literature of
the 1670s, Stuart patriarchy was then collapsing around Charles II’s licentious
head.4 9 The same social shockwaves emanating from the king’s sexual
297
excesses and his inability to father a legitimate successor were also preparing
the ground for the Popish Plot, a crisis that would mark the beginning of the
end for sex comedy.
The rhetoric of the disfavor into which Charles had fallen by 1671 is
convoluted. Weber has demonstrated that the king’s elevation of the actress
Nell Gwyn to the status of royal concubine had had the strange result of
fostering satires that figured the king both as impotent, and effeminate. If the
king had wasted his royal substance first on a barren wife, these satires ran, he
now chose to throw his seed away on a commoner. An important irritant to
these accusations was the behavior of the king’s minions who attacked Sir John
Coventry following his public insult to the king and to the royal mistress.
Following these events Charles was publicly perceived to have invested Nell (a
commoner and a woman) with unnatural power over him (a monarch and a
man).
From the Civil War onward, social chaos had been figured in the
popular literature (as it could not be during Elizabethan times) in the image of
a woman on top.5 0 In large part, this is a genuine reflection o f anxieties
attending the changing status of women during the revolution, as well as an
extension of the same hostile attitude towards uppity women that Underdown
has shown are common to the skimmington and charivari rituals of older
festive culture.5 1 It is important to remember however, that the extent of the
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social anxieties of the mid to late seventeenth century, were unprecedented and
profound. The "crisis among men" that resulted from these changes was
manifested in an extreme defensiveness, insecurity, and misogyny.5 2 It was as
a result of these same social forces that Charles II, through his protracted
involvement with Nell, became (rhetorically) less than a man. To the eyes of
the political pamphleteers, he was now a patriarchal transsexual defying the
social matrices both of personal masculinity and of political power. John Lacy
explicitly compared him to Heliogabalus in his "Satyr" (1677). Reflecting
i sentiments that had been in existence since the beginning of Charles’s affair
! with Nell in 1670, Lacy wrote that the king "forget[s] to be man".
Lacy’s observation reflects an observable phenomenon concerning
seventeenth century mentalities. Their concept of ’effeminacy’ was much
broader than our own.5 3 Where men and women in the twentieth century
practice varying degrees of social ostracism according to a man’s position in a
spectrum of unmasculine behaviors (sodomy, gayness, transvestitism,
transexual ism, bisexuality, overt effeminacy or just plain wimpiness), citizens
of Restoration England held to a much wider spectrum of marginal behaviors
which were largely undifferentiated. All such behaviors were grouped together
i and held to be unmasculine and therefore socially unacceptable. All reflected,
in decisive ways, the moral character of the man under scrutiny.
299
The difference in attitudes can be observed in (what is to one pair of
modern, male and heterosexual eyes) the strange assortment of unacceptable
male behaviors during this period. Such taboo behaviors included items no
longer emphasized or much less distinctive to modern notions of masculinity.
Cuckoldry, in the seventeenth century, somehow reflected the moral character
or unworthiness of the cuckold, (rather than his bad luck). So did being
impotent, being hen-pecked, or even the habit of being demonstratively
affectionate towards one’s wife.S 4 Correspondingly, the seventeenth century
version of masculinity and of patriarchy, was much more extreme than our
own. This itself is perhaps a reflection of the extent of the cultural anxiety
surrounding issues of gender. In any case, their concept of the masculine was
very rigid. A truly ’manly’ man had many social constraints on his behavior as
the Orange-W oman’s curse partly indicates. She whispers, "Lord what a filthy
trick these men have got of kissing one another!" (I.i.75-76), and completes
her observation by spitting.
Etherge’s finest play therefore, can be read as the ideological response of
a cavalier courtier to the crises confronting both his king, and his male-
dominated society. The play seems intended to reassert the Cavalier’s unsteady
patriarchal mandate by means of a controlling and avenging masculinity which
Dorimant himself refers to as "the wrongs I have done her [Harriet’s] sex"
(IV.i. 166). The extent of Dorimant’s sexual excess is itself a tacit admission of
300
the desperation and extremity of the crisis confronting the dominant patriarchal
and masculine ideologies in the years immediately preceding the Popish plot.
The Man of Mode then, exploits the generic commonplace of comparing
domestic affairs to affairs of state which, as Michael O ’Neill has explained,
began with the double-plots of such plays as Lady Alimony (1659), The
Committee (1663), and The Mulberry Garden (1668) (O’Neill 119). The play
works on two levels therefore, thematizing the patriarchal structure of
I
; England’s monarchical society at the same time that it discusses the masculinist
i
ideology on which Stuart patriarchalism was based.
But if The Man of Mode is the greatest and most vicious formulation of
| the mechanics both of masculine authority, and Stuart patriarchy, it is also
| Etherege’s adieu to the stage and to his chosen form of sex comedy. As an
extreme reaction to the crumbling social and political codes of the 1670s, it
constitutes a high-water mark for sex comedy. But it also marks the
termination of the career of the greatest practitioner of sex comedy, and so, it
i anticipates the soon-to-be-realised termination of the medieval, monarchical,
j and paternal authority for which Charles, like his Stuart predecessors, had
f
f
: yearned, and had ineffectively struggled to revive.
i
[
! Correspondingly, Etherege’s Man of Mode is also the highest moment of
! glory for the Restoration rake. Its ambiguous ending however, can be read as a
!
! portent of the rake’s demise and of the obviation of the absolutist versions of
301
male control. This portent does not depend however on the belief that Harriet
will triumph over Dorimant when he follows her to the country, (athough that
is certainly suggested). Rather the play prefigures the coming end to an
absolutist male hegemony simply because its resolution is left uncertain. The
future towards which the play looks is shrouded as it would not be in an
earlier festive comedy. The ideological underside of The Man of Mode’s
exuberance in Dorimant’s expert manipulation of women then, is the doubt
about the future of such an ethic as it is expressed by the dramatic anti
closure. The play documents the same excessive masculine ideology as
Shadwell’s The Libertine (1675), but it suggests that the future of such
ideology was opague to its greatest proponent in 1676. Also, it suggests this
reading at a significant historical moment, some brief years before the Popish
plot sounded the first of several death-knells for sex comedy, the Stuart
dynasty, and the rake-hero.
These facts, I believe, illuminate the problematic ending of The Man of
Mode which has become the focus of much of the criticism concerning the
play. The uncertain outcome of Dorimant’s pursuit of Harriet can be
interpreted as his preparation to quit the London love-game while he is still
ahead. The possibility of Dorimant’s ultimate defeat by Harriet hangs heavily
in the air. Earlier, after a profoundly affecting meeting with her, he nervously
confesses in an aside "I fear sh’as an ascendant o ’er me" (IV.i. 165). Still
302
earlier, when he has his first glimpse of the woman, he was sent into poetic
rapture by her sheer physical perfection, and became immediately infatuated
(III.iii.39-45). Although he appropriates Harriet’s attraction to him as a device
by which he will come into a good estate, this is little more than a
rationalization. He admits to Young Bellair that "I may fall into the snare"
(IV.iii.211) of the marriage for which Harriet is cunningly preparing him.
The possibility of Dorimant’s potentially devastating defeat at the play’s
end, is preceded by several very real minor defeats at the hands of women.
Medley has already witnessed his displeasure and embarassment when Loveit
deliberately refused to acknowledge him in the Mall. For once, Loveit
managed to outmaneuver her sadistic gallant and to excite his fading love into
an aggressive jealousy that, to Dorimant’s mind, demands revenge on Loveit
herself (III.iii.325-330, 353-363).
In a later scene, Dorimant’s is again put out of countenance when the
insincerity is discovered when he breaks his promise to Bellinda to avoid
Loveit (IV. ii.39-47). At this point he is jointly and vigorously berated by
Bellinda, Loveit, and Loveit’s maid Pert. He admits the women have
"reproached him handsomely" (V .ii.310), and is forced to "fly" in order to
escape being "scolded to death" (V.ii.315). Still later, although he succeeds in
manipulating Loveit and redeeming his reputation as a ’real m an’ in complete
control of all the women around him, he simultaneously fails in his attempt to
303
reconcile with Bellinda. Fearing discovery by the jealously enraged Loveit,
Bellinda has already sworn to herself that she will "never venture more"
(V.ii.331-2) with the false Dorimant. Immediately after he has reconciled with
Loveit, the incorrigible rake attempts to clear himself with Bellinda, but she
rejects him with a firm "never", amplifying that rejection into "take no notice
of me and I shall not hate you" (V.ii.339).
Other defeats hound Dorimant at the end of the play. Clearly, he has
been forced to accept Harriet on her own terms. In order either to win her, to
win her fortune or to win both, he will allow her to laugh at him: (something
1
she claimed he was unwilling to do earlier [IV. i. 192-198]). The sheer strength
of Harriet’s character is important here. She marks, as Donald Bruce has
observed, the first stage in a major transition in women’s roles and in
Restoration Comedy. One which alters the generic emphasis "from the lover as
the centre of interest to his lady as the centre of interest. "5 5 John Harrington
Smith also noted that Harriet was something entirely new to the comedy.
"Etherege" he writes, "had to imagine a heroine superior to any as yet seen in
a love-game play. Harriet is equal to the assignment. "5 6
Etherege establishes Harriet’s personal strength in a symbolic comparison
I between she and Loveit in their use of that most feminine of seventeenth
I
1
century accessories, the lady’s fan. Early in the play Dorimant asserts his
pleasure in making a lady break her fan in frustration, and Loveit later
304
oblingingly tears and shatters her fan over his sadistic mistreatment o f her.
Harriet however, accepts instruction in the use of the fan from Young Bellair.
She skillfully deploys hers as a means to deceive her mother and Bellair’s
father, and, in the course of doing this, both she and her tutor discover she has
a real talent for such deception. If such a passionate woman as Loveit
therefore, has been able to achieve a limited victory over Dorimant mastering
her passions and dissumulating, Harriet, who has a gift for dissimulating, may
be able to achieve an even greater victory.
In order to effect this victory, she lures Dorimant into an entirely^
matriarchal milieu, whose demography is identical to that of his greatest
defeat. At Harriet’s home in the country, there will be only one m an,r— -
Dorimant. The setting will therefore be dominated by three women, Harriet,
Lady Woodvil, and Harriet’s aunt. Earlier Dorimant was subjected to and
✓
dissected by the critical gaze of women in the crucial scene involving himself
Loveit, Bellinda, and Pert. At Harriet’s country house, he will again be
deprived of the adoration of his masculine retinue which he needs to create and
sustain his narcissistic male identity.5 7 In the country then, he will again be
dissected and observed by women who clearly already know his reputation and
who will be primarily concerned for the well-being of Harriet. In other words,
he will be feminized. He will be put into the position of a debutante newly
305
arrived at court, a position which Harriet, the consummate Restoration new
woman, has already rejected, distaining to be
taken in pieces, have all my features examined, every
motion censured and the whole be condemned to be but
pretty or a beauty of the lowest rate. (IV.i. 151-154)
Through its depiction of the demise of patriarchy’s machiavellian
proponent, the hyper-masculine Dorimant then, the Man of Mode gives strong
indications that it portends the demise of Restoration culture’s entrenched
patriarchy. No matter what else happens, Dorimant will lose (has already lost)
some degree of his absolutist masculine power. What is at issue in the play
therefore, is not, as some critics have it, whether Dorimant can reform,
marry, and live happily ever after with Harriet. Rather, as Harold Weber has
it the play concerns the future of the paternalistic and absolutist Stuart ideology
governing contemporary political and domestic life.5 8
I would only add that in The Man of Mode this extreme partriarchal
mindset is depicted with its future in doubt some twelve years before
England’s reached the political conclusion to Charles’s Succession Crisis, and
that, like Dorimant’s impending final battle, Britain’s solution to that crisis is
also emblematic of a changing consciouness. The rightful, male, patrilinear
heir, James II, was supplanted by a woman and by her husband; both of whom
became joint regents over a nation which had lost all enthusiasm for Stuart
patriarchalism, for sex comedy, and for rakes. The Man of Mode then, is
306
simultaneously the best and the last of its kind. It desperately defends a
doomed order and documents (in its self-evident doubt about the future) that
order’s imminent demise. It also documents the most extreme and deperate
conception of masculinity in Restoration comedy. After such an extreme, all
future rakes— beginning with Aphra Behn’s Thomaso— represent an inevitable
decline.
Robert Markley has called Aphra Behn’s The Rover. The Second Part
(1681) monologic, polemical, and fundamentally different in its intentions from
the sex comedy of Etherege and W ycherley.5 9 If the play is polemical,
however, it is possible to see the origins of its monologism in the dialogic
reaction of Behn’s The Rover (1677) to the central concerns of Restoration
comedy before Etherege’s Man of Mode (1676) transformed the genre by
introducing the image of an ultra-competent Restoration woman in the person
of Harriet. Critics have debated whether or not Behn’s greatest play is feminist
in its response to libertinism, hypersexuality, and the homosocial relationships
between Restoration men. But the most recent studies generally favor
interpreting The Rover as a deliberately constructed feminist text.6 0
Despite Behn’s ploy of originally introducing the play as the creation of
an anonymous gentleman, The Rover is clearly a dramatically skillful ’take’ on
contemporary gender ideology from a very feminine perspective. Its anti-
masculinist ideology however, is restrained, subtle, and never allowed to
307
overpower the raw, entertainment value of the playwright’s careful reworking
of Thomas Killigrew’s loosely structured original. Behn’s play, in other
words, is a populist’s "satire against the whole [male] sex" (I.ii.109), one
which is propagandistic, calculated, and insidious in the very best senses. It
appears deliberately designed by an increasingly professional author to achieve
popularity by catering directly to Cavalier tastes and by deliberately avoiding
the invective directed against women playwrights. It is also likely however,
that The Rover was designed to use this popularity as a podium from which
Behn could begin to provide feminine alternatives to counter the univocally
masculine perspectives of Restoration comedy, a genre which had enormous
social impact on gender relationships in late Stuart London. The Man of Mode
and The Rover therefore, mark the beginning and the end of a final turning
point in Restoration comedy, one that might ironically be described as the
genre’s discovery of women’s souls, or, less poetically, as the first serious
transition towards generic heteroglossia.6 1 (Of course, to a comedy based on
a narcisstic fascination with men, masculinity and male roles, the appearance
of Etherege’s Harriet and the performance of Behn’s The Rover were nothing
less than the first notes of a death-knell for the genre.)
Behn’s choice of Killigrew’s Thomaso: or. The Wanderer as a source is
entirely appropriate to the dialogism of this feminist program. She appropriates
and alters the semi-autobiographical text of a notorious Cavalier whoremaster,
308
the man responsible for The Parson’s Wedding (1664), an early landmark in
the burgeoning commodification and exploitation of women by the drama.
(Her play premiered in the same year that Killigrew was forced to resign from
both of his influential positions as manager of the King’s Company and as
Master of the Revels.) Despite the charge of plagiarism against her which
Behn herself actually encourages in the weak denial of her own postscript,
Behn obviously put a lot of labor into reworking Killigrew’s original text. Her
alterations effect Killigrew’s women, his men, and his own self-congratulatory,
semi-autobiographical heroism and hypersexuality. The changes are largely
pro-feminine, as Pearson notices. Unlike the Killigrew version, women begin
the play. They are also given real personalities and much, much more
dialogue.6 2 Furthermore, in The Rover. Behn depicts feminine desires with
the same refreshing verisimilitude that Markley observes in the play’s
sequel.6 3 This verisimilitude is extremely salient in a male dominated genre
that generally treated manifestations of physical desire in women as
grotesqueries evoking the flushed, hysterical laughter that betrays genuine
sexual anxiety.6 4
In addition to Behn’s generically uncharacteristic treatment of women,
there is also her uncharacteristic treatment of men. Male schemes continuously
fall apart in The Rover. Men are constantly defeated, humiliated, and
frustrated. Belvile is thwarted again and again in his pursuit of Florinda. Blunt
309
is humiliated, robbed and left naked by Lucetta, and W illmore himself is
weak, easily manipulated, and willing to (temporarily) possess or be possessed
by almost any woman. Also, as Jones DeRitter has pointed out, Willmore is
the first rake-hero exhibited for completely unambivalent moral disapproval:
unlike Horner and Dorimant, Willmore is more target
than weapon; his primary thematic function is
ultimately to demonstrate the disruptive potential of his
own personality rather than to ridicule or qualify the
behavior of those around him. One indication of this
shift in emphasis may be that, in contrast to the two
earlier comedies, only Behn’s play takes its title from
the rake figure.6 5
i
Moreover, Willmore is by Restoration standards a somewhat feminized
and therefore unsympathetic man. Behn makes him into a sex object, desired
and pursued by two women, Angellica Bianca and Hellena. W illmore’s male
passivity and the female activity or aggression that complement it in the female
characters are the substance of the main plot of The Rover. These facts do not
jibe at all with Killigrew’s original. Hellena is totally unlike Serulina in
Thomaso who becomes, in DeRitter’s words, the hero’s "reward for having
succeeded so well in the dark world of the exile. ”6 6
1 The contrast (and the contest) between Angellica Bianca and Hellena
i then, is the substance of Behn’s main plot. Both women are attempting to
i
i construct a new version of a feminine ‘self’, one which cannot be
j
i commodified, conserved, exchanged, or possessed by men as women’s bodies,
and women’s ’honor’ are. At the same time Behn is exploring successful and
310
unsuccessful strategies for enabling women to cope with the Restoration rake
or with the absolutist and exclusive patriarchy of which the rake was an
emblem. Her attempts to invent a new self is the most sophisticated
manifestation of any number of coping strategies.
At the beginning of the play, Angellica’s cynical version of this
inalienable self seems the most viable. As an outrageously expensive
courtesan, she has either commodified herself or accepted the inevitablity of
her own commodification in her inescapably patriarchal society, and has
decided to exploit it. This she does by preserving for herself a role inacessible
to most other women. As an entirely independant courtesan, she is also a
principle able to participate in the complex web of homosocial exhanges of
! women between men. She becomes, in other words, her own pimp. Part of her
I
I therefore, occupies a traditionally male site of independance and stands aloof
and separate from the temporary barter of her body. She is compared to "an
inn where a man may lodge" (II. i. 99), and if this image correctly captures the
spirit of Angellica’s commodification, it also permits us to inscribe her as the
inn’s sole and inalienable proprietor. Her ‘true self resides with this ‘pimp-
I
I s e lf , and not with her commodified-self. That she imagines she has such an
insulated and aloof center to her identity becomes apparent later in the play,
where Angellica refers to her sense of violation and loss following W illmore’s
penetration to her "virgin heart":
311
Angellica. Had I given
Him all my youth has earned from sin,
I had not lost a thought nor sigh upon’t.
But I have given him my eternal rest,
My whole repose, my future joys, my heart!
My virgin heart, Moretta! Oh, ’tis gone. (IV.ii. 147-51)
Catherine Gallagher has demonstrated that Behn’s concern with
formulating an inalienable, feminist ’self’ is a preoccupation of the paratextual
and epitextual material accompanying her comedies67; and, just as in the
works Gallagher examines, in The Rover, the invention of a new kind of self
is a sophisticated, femininst strategy for coping with patriarchy and with its
major proponent, the rake. Angellica’s strategy of accepting her own
commodity status, of exploiting it, and remaining aloof in a detached part of
herself, ultimately fails in The Rover because it is deconstructed by Willmore.
Behind her independence, and her indifference to her male patrons, Willmore,
a highly-trained opportunist, senses the disappointed woman who has never
loved. His words are now able to reach her inalienable part: they pierce her
"to the very soul" (II.ii.76). To her face he "scorns this baseness which [she]
practice[s]" (II.ii.55), and tacitly offers her the chance o f escaping the
commodity system which preoccupies her and which she appears to understand
and loathe perfectly:
Angellica. . . . are you not guilty of the same
mercenary crime? When a lady is proposed to you for a
wife, you never ask how fair, discreet, or virtuous she
is, but what’s her fortune; which, if but small, you cry
312
"She will not do my business," and basely leave her,
though she languish for you. (II.ii.91-95)
When he tells her he finds such commodification "a barbarous custom"
(II.ii.97), Angellica begins to entertain the possiblity of giving herself to him
in an uncommodified love-exchange not of money, but of ”heart[s] entire"
(III.i. 170). But, in doing so, she abandons her inalienable, pimping self, the
heart that previously stood separate whenever she ’ jobbed out’ her body. She
now becomes an ’entire’ but unattached woman, one unable to be
commodified, conserved, possessed or exchanged with men for goods or
status. As Florinda does later in the play, by appearing unattached, needy, and
dependant Angellica abandons her inalienable self and leaves herself vulnerable
to exploitation and rejection. Since no man already has her, she is not worth
having in any permanent sense. Like Florinda who both Willmore, and later
Blunt encounter as an unattached woman and attempt to rape (III.v.4.5),
Angellica is only good for the one night stand Willmore enjoys with her
because she has no quantifiable honor that can be exchanged and preserved
among men.
Unlike Angellica, however, Hellena is able to retain not only her honor,
but also her (erotic or fiduciary) desireability, as well as her inalienable self.
She is able to do all of this not, as some critics have it, because she will not
unite with Willmore in any other way than that of a socially sanctified
exchange between her husband to be (Willmore) and her guardian-brother
313
(Pedro) that will guarantee her honor despite the inconveniences of future
abandonment and "a cradle full of noise and mischief" (V.453).
The key to Hellena’s inalienable self is actually less complex than this. It
is based on her willingness to see men in much the same way that men like
Willmore see women, not as individuals but as objects for which women must
compete. In this same competitive spirit, she promises Willmore she will "rail
at you to you all who love you, till I have made you love only
me . . . because nobody else will love you" (V.414-5); and she tells her
kinswomen "I will be beloved or I’ll get one of your men" (III.i.45). In other
words, Behn exposes the Restoration current of libertinism responsible for
reducing women to sex objects in men’s eyes, by inverting the positions of
gender and reducing men in women’s (and specifically Hellena’s) eyes.
Willmore obviously has little respect for women ("there’s but one way for a
woman to oblige me" [I.ii.262-3]), but he has sufficient experience of them to
know how to get what he wants from Angellica. Similarly, Hellena has little
respect for the dissembling Willmore, but she knows how to manipulate him in
order to get what she wants: empowerment through control.
Hellena’s struggle with Angellica for Willmore then, is clearly at the
center of Behn’s "satire against the whole sex" (I.ii.109). Because of her
guarded and controlling attitude towards men, The Rover appears to be an
exact inversion of Cavalier misogyny. In this reading therefore, the play
314
attempts to subvert the Restoration’s especially vicious version of the double
standard. Both the comic sub-plot and the main intrigue plot, depict women
(Lucetta and Hellena) manipulating men (Blunt and Willmore). In both cases
the women reduce the men to controllable and exploitable objects with varying
degrees of finesse.
The historical context surrounding the play gives a particularly sharp
edge to what is generally acknowledged Behn’s finest satire. In its broadest
outlines, The Rover repeats the details of Charles II’s mock-marriage to
Louise de Keroualle on October 9, 1671, and his temporary rejection of Nell
Gwyn.6 8 Like Hellena, Mile, de Keroualle was a stunning beauty who made
protestations about her modesty and withstood all of the King’s advances until
he promised to marry her. Like Angellica, Nell Gwyn was a more or less
professional courtesan before she became the exclusive mistress of Charles II.
Both women exerted a disconcerting influence over both Charles and his court.
This influence feminized him in the popular view as Harold W eber has
shown6 9 and this feminization together with his well-known bestial behavior
destroyed his popular support.7 0
Charles II’s inherent passivity and the public approbrium that resulted
resemble the depiction of Willimore in The Rover. Behn even goes as far as
making an explicit comparison between Willmore and "the best of men and
kings (V.509-512).
315
Just as there was in Etherege’s Man of Mode therefore, there is a micro-
political as well as an ideological significance to The Rover. Moreover, the
satire of the play is submerged and easily missed. It is clearly intended to
succeed before a courtly audience as an entirely palatable sex-and-intrigue
comedy, as indeed it did. The play was later performed privately before the
court’s of Charles II and James II, and James commissioned The Rover. The
Second Part while in temporary exile during the Popish Plot.7 1 It is also clear
however, that in its inversion of the double-standard The Rover is a patently
subversive play, one as critical of and as damaging to dominant patriarchal
ideology as W ycherley’s The Country Wife had been two years earlier.
316
Notes
1 Susan C. Shapiro defines this useful term in her article "Yon Plumed
Dandebrat: Male ’Effeminacy’ in English Satire and Criticism ," RES ns 39
(1988): "debauchery, depravity, degeneracy, a wallowing in sensuality and
self-indulgence of all kinds, even to the practice of bestiality" (411).
2 James Wyly, The Phallic Quest: Priapus and Masculine Inflation
(Toronto: Inner City Press, 1989).
3 Roy Porter has a suggestive description of the trickle-down effect of
court libertinism in his essay, "Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and
Sexuality in Eighteenth Century Britain," in Sexuality in Eighteenth Century
Britain, ed. Paul-Gabriel Bouce (Totowa: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1982): "the
spread of the sexual habits of Charles II’s court by rumour, observation and
example downward through the social scale of London life is very clearly
evidenced by Pepys’ diary. He continued to express shock and disgust, but
also prurient interest and envy, at the goings-on at court . . . he slowly
succumbed to the temptation to imitate— in a far more modest and guilt-ridden
way— the sexual behaviour of his social superiors" (560).
4 Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama I (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1955) 318.
5 Nicoll 318: In the last years of his life Sir Henry was apparently not
acting as Master. He had leased out his right to Edward Hayward and Captain
John Poyntz. Herbert suppressed Edward Howard’s The Change of Crownes
(1667) and The Country Gentleman (1669) by Howard’s elder brother Sir
Robert and the Duke of Buckingham. See The Revels History of Drama in
English, ed. V. T. W. Craik (London: Methuen, 1976) 28, 165.
6 Ronald Hutton, Charles II. King of England. Scotland and Ireland
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) 280.
7 Most of the research for this chapter was completed as the result of a
Newberry Library Fellowship in the Summer of 1991. This version was
delivered as part of a panel on the representations of Eunuchs on the English
stage in the late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries at the MWASECS
annual meeting in Kansas City in October 1991. A version of that paper was
published in Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research. I am
indebted to James Carson, Mary Beth Rose, James Tierney and to James Wyly
for discussing many of the ideas with me.
317
8 William Freedman, "Impotence and Self-destruction in The Country
W ife. " English Studies 53 (1972): 421-31: "Effeminated" in its seventeenth-
century sense, indicates a broad range of behaviour "reduced" a man "to an
unmanly thing" including all the various forms of sexual inability. On this
point see Shapiro, 400-402.
9 Freedman 422.
1 0 Roger Thompson, Unfit for Modest Ears: A Study of Pornographic.
Obscene and Bawdv Works Written or Published in England in the Second
Half of the Seventeenth Century (Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979) 105.
1 1 Thompson 212.
1 2 Thompson 103.
1 3 The Parliament of Ladies (London, 1647), The Ladies A Second Time
Assembled (London, 1647), and Newes From The New Exchange (London,
1650).
1 4 Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: W oman’s Lot in Seventeenth
Century England (New York: Random House, 1985); Women in English
Society. 1500-1800. ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985).
1 5 John H. O ’Neill, "Sexuality, Deviance, and Moral Character in the
; Personal Satire of the Restoration," Eighteenth Century Life 2.1 (1975): 17b.
1 6 Aileen Ribeiro, Dress and Morality (New York: Holmes and Meiier,
1986) 82-89.
1 7 In addition to the two gynophobic men I mention, the figure also
appears as Colonel Blunt in Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662), as
both Comely and Mr. Vain in James Howard’s The English Monsieur (1663)
| and as Stanford in Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers (1668).
j 1 8 Jon Lance Bacon, "Wives, Widows and Writings in Restoration
| Comedy," SEL 31 (1991): 428. On this point see also Margaret J. M. Ezell,
' The Patriarch’s Wife: Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill:
I University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
j 1 9 Nicoll 62.
!
i 2 0 Fraser, The W eaker Vessel 298.
318
2 1 Allan Andrews, The Roval Whore: Barbara Villiers. Countess of
Castlemaine (Philadelphia: Chilton, 1970) 234; O ’Neill 17b.
2 2 Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form: An Essav in Generic History
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) 38.
2 3 The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege. ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (London:
Oxford University Press, 1928) 227.
2 4 Vieth glosses this word as to "coition without emission"; the OED gives
one meaning as ’a wry mock or jest’; it may also, however, be a combination
of ’dry’ and ’bob’ representing a small bag or sack. David M. Vieth, ed. The
Complete Poems of John Wilmot. Earl of Rochester by John Wilmot, Earl of
Rochester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968) 124n75.
2 5 William Freedman, "Impotence and Self-Destruction in The Country
W ife." English Studies 53 (1966): 424; David M. Vieth, "Wycherley’s The
Country W ife: An Anatomy of Masculinity," Papers on Language and
Literature 2 (1966): 337.
2 6 Vieth, "Wycherley’s The Country W ife" 339.
2 7 James G. Turner, "The Properties of Libertinism," Eighteenth Century
Life 9.3 (1985): 82.
2 8 Freedman 431.
2 9 Brown 106; Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in
the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) 312; Don R.
Kunz, The Drama of Thomas Shadwell (Salzburg: Institut fur Englische
Sprache und Literature, 1972) 177; John Loftis, The Spanish Plays of
Neoclassical England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) 172.
3 0 Loftis 176.
3 1 Michael W. Alssid, "Shadwell’s MacFlecknoe. ” SEL 7.3 (1967): 393.
3 2 Kunz 177.
3 3 Robert Gould, The Plav-House. A Satvr Part I (London, 1675) 241.
3 4 Antony Kaufman, "Idealization, Disillusion and Narcissistic Rage in
W ycherley’s The Plain Dealer. " Criticism 21 (1979): 133.
319
3 5 Summers, The Works of Thomas Shadwell 1, cxxvii.
3 6 Loftis 173.
3 7 Richard L. Oden, introduction, Drvden and Shadwell: The Literary
Controversy and Mac Flecknoe (1668-16791 (Delmar: Scholars Facsimiles,
1977): vii; John Harrington Smith, The Gav Couple in Restoration Comedy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948) 42.
3 8 Alssid 397; Albert S. Borgman, Thomas Shadwell: His Life and
Comedies (New York: New York University Press, 1928): 164; Daniel
Morley McKeithan, "The Occasion of Mac Flecknoe," PMLA 47 (1932): 766-
71; Oden xvii; Tom Towers, "The Lineage of Shadwell: An Approach to
M acFlecknoe," SEL 3 (1963): 323-34.
3 9 George de F. Lord, ed., Poems On Affairs of State (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1963) 1, 324; Vieth 124n75.
4 0 Alssid 397; Borgman 164.
4 1 O ’Neill 16-19.
4 2 David M. Vieth, "The Discovery of the Date of MacFlecknoe" in
Evidence in Literary Scholarship: Essays in Memory of James Marshall
Osborn, eds. Rene Wellek, Alvaro Ribeiro (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979)
63-87.
4 3 McKeithan 766.
4 4 Alssid 388.
4 5 Alssid 338.
4 6 Oden xvii.
4 7 Harold Weber, "Dorimant, the Politics of Sexual Power," Criticism
32.2 (1990): 193-219.
4 8 Michael Neill, "Heroic Heads and Humble Tails: Sex, Politics and the
Restoration Comic Rake," The 18th Century: Theory and Interpretation 24.2
(1983): 115-139.
4 9 Weber 193-219.
320
5 0 Sharon Achinstein, "The Politics of Babel in the English Revolution,"
Prose Studies 14 (1991): 20; Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women on Top," Society
and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1985) 124-51.
5 1 David Underdown, Revel. Riot and Rebellion (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1985) 37-40.
5 2 Susan Wiseman, "Adam, the Father of All Flesh: Porno-Political
Rhetoric and Political Theory In and After the English Civil W ar," Prose
Studies 14.3 (1991): 148.
5 3 Shapiro 400-402.
5 4 Shapiro 405; Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy
and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture: 1660-1750,"
Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gav and Lesbian Past, eds. M. B.
Duberman, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey (New York: New American
Library, 1989) 129-140.
5 5 Donald Bruce, Topics of Restoration Comedy (London: Victor Gollancz,
1974) 135.
5 6 Smith 89.
5 7 Weber 208-209.
5 8 Weber 207-17.
5 9 Robert Markley, "’Be impudent, be saucy, forward, bold, touzing, and
leud’: The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn’s Tory
Comedies" forthcoming in Restor(v)ing The Restoration and Eighteenth
Century Theatre, eds. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press, 1992).
321
6 0 Jones DeRitter, "The Gypsy, The Rover, and the Wanderer: Aphra
Behn’s Revision of Thomas Killigrew," Restoration: Studies in English
Literary Culture. 1660-1700 10.2 (1986): 82-92; Elin Diamond, "Gestus and
Signature in AB’s The Rover." ELH 56.3 (1989): 519-541; Laurie Finke,
"Ideological Construction . . . " forthcoming in RestorOling the Restoration
and Eighteenth Century Theatre, eds. J. Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne;
Catherine Gallagher, "Who Was that Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the
Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn," Women’s Studies 15 (1988): 23-
42; Jacqueline Pearson, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women
Dramatists. 1642-1737 (New York: Harvester, 1988) 152-56, 160-65, 254;
Zimbardo, Rose, W vcherlev’s Drama: A Link in the Development of English
Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965) 83.
6 1 Diamond 519-41.
6 2 Pearson 152-54.
6 3 Robert Markley forthcoming.
6 4 Diamond 521.
6 5 DeRitter 84.
6 6 DeRitter 83.
6 7 Gallagher 23-42.
6 8 John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn III, ed. E.S De Beer (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1955) 589-90; Hutton 280; Roy MacGregor-Hastie, Nell
Gwvn (London: Robert Hale, 1987) 102.
6 9 Weber 193-219.
7 0 Hutton 280.
7 1 Ian Donaldson, The World Upside-Down: Comedy from Jonson to
Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 156.
322
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