All posts tagged Amanda

Noel Coward and imagination

Reflections on Noel Coward’s plays ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Private Lives’ and ‘Easy Virtue’.

We live in an age obsessed with gender, vide the ongoing furore about trans women, the ubiquity of feminist discourse, the prominence of LGBTQ+ activism, Pride Week etc etc. It floods the zone.

Much of this has been developed in academia over the past 50 years or slow and slowly spread outwards as graduates in various branches of critical theory progress to become artists, novelists, film-makers or take control of artistic institutions and media channels.

Queer theory

One sub-set of this has been the rise of Queer Studies as a degree subject in academia. According to Google AI:

Queer Studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that examines the social construction of gender and sexuality, challenging traditional and normative categories. It explores the diverse experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer individuals, as well as exploring how gender and sexuality intersect with other social categories like race, class, and ability.

This has led over the last few decades to the application of Queer Theory, with is basic attitude of ‘challenging traditional and normative categories’, to all and every conceivable work of art or literature. Even if the author, artist or the subject aren’t explicitly queer, queer theory (like feminist theory, like structuralist and post-structuralist and semiotic and deconstructionist theory, like all the other critical theories) will find a way.

Coward was gay and since most of his work is about the troubled relations between the sexes, it is relatively easy to apply Queer Theory to all and everything he wrote, deconstructing and rewriting the overt characters and plots in his plays to accommodate the notion that they ‘challenge traditional and normative categories’. Predictably enough, the Wikipedia article on Private Lives feels obliged to include queer theory interpretations of the play:

In a 2005 article, Penny Farfan analyses the play from the point of view of queer theory, arguing that ‘the subversiveness of [Coward’s] sexual identity is reflected in his work’, and that Private Lives questions ‘the conventional gender norms on which compulsory heterosexuality depends’. Positing that the leading characters’ portrayal as equals is evidence in support of this theory, Farfan instances the famous image of [Noel] Coward and [Gertrude] Lawrence as Elyot and Amanda smoking and ‘posing as mirror opposites’… John Lahr in a 1982 study of Coward’s plays writes, ‘Elyot and Amanda’s outrageousness is used to propound the aesthetics of high camp – an essentially homosexual view of the world that justifies detachment.’

So far, so obvious and inevitable, and dated. Note how Lahr’s not very interesting suggestion that the two protagonists dramatise a form of high camp is over 40 years old, and Farfan’s flagging of its ‘subversiveness’ is 20 years old. These are old ideas.

The imaginative versus the dull

For the sake of argument, though, I am positing that the chief binary in his work was not between straight and gay; that Coward was not concerned with ‘questioning conventional gender norms’. That aim, as anyone who reads my art reviews knows, is pretty much the stock, standard and utterly predictable interpretation imposed by all art curators, and countless literary critics, on any artwork which deals even remotely with gender or in any way includes women.

Instead my reading of Coward prioritises what I see as the far more central and fundamental binary in his work, which is that between the Imaginative and the Dull.

Easy Virtue

‘Easy Virtue’ may well subvert this or that gender stereotype (yawn), interrogate this or that patriarchal trope (snore) but what on my reading, what it’s really about is the confrontation between a funny, confident, imaginative woman (Larita) and the appallingly slow, dull, dense and conventional Whittaker family. The play leads up to Larita’s extraordinarily fierce and sustained denunciation of the Whittakers for their narrow-minded, blinkered bigotry and prurient hypocrisy.

Hay Fever

In the same way, in ‘Hay Fever’, the four members of the Bliss family, despite their appalling behaviour, are each dominated by their penchant for imaginative fancies, the son and daughter and husband just as much as the obvious dominating figure, the melodramatic actress Judith. And their actorish imaginativeness, their exaggeration, speaking for effect, and liability to drop into actually acting out scenes from a play, remains almost incomprehensible to their guests (apart, admittedly, for the savvy Myra Arundel, who has their number).

Private Lives

And the same in ‘Private Lives’. A structuralist critic may point to the very neat structuring and mirroring of the plot, whereby the two couples act out almost the same scenes. A queer critic may point to the subversion of heteronormative conventions, or the way the play undermines (indeed blows apart) conventional notions of married fidelity.

But to me the leading binary is between Elyot and Amanda’s imaginative playfulness and the stiff, dim, unimaginativeness of their two new spouses. In fact the two main poles of the play are not so much Elyot and his former spouse, Amanda – but Elyot, given to free-associating whimsy at the drop of a hat, and Victor, who literally doesn’t understand what he’s talking about.

Elyot has a big stand-off scene criticising Victor’s obtuseness, but it’s more effectively left to the secondary figure of Sibyl to pinpoint Victor’s weakness:

VICTOR: Making stupid rotten jokes!
SIBYL: I thought what Elyot said was funny!
VICTOR: Well, all I can think is, is that you must have a very warped sense of humour!
SIBYL: That’s better than having none at all!
VICTOR: I fail to see what humour there is in incessant trivial flippancy!
SIBYL: You couldn’t be flippant if you tried until you were blue in the face!~
VICTOR: I shouldn’t dream of trying!
SIBYL: You must be awfully sad, not to be able to see any fun in anything!

‘It must be awfully sad not to be able to see the fun in anything.’ I take this to be Coward’s central position. He, in his glory years egged on by his collaborator and conspirator Gertrude Lawrence, wanted to have fun, let his imagination run riot, in frolics and fantasies, comic songs, revues and sketches, plays which didn’t care about realism or plausibility in their desire to make an impact and have an effect.

The queer sub-texts are there, often in plain sight. And no doubt he was subverting umpteen different conventions, we know he was because contemporary critics pointed it out: it’s obvious that showing women on the stage smoking, talking smut and getting drunk (‘Fallen Angels’) did breach contemporary conventions; that showing an unnaturally close mother and son (‘The Vortex’) did make a lot of contemporary audiences feel uncomfortable, that revealing a leading character to be a cocaine addict (‘The Vortex’ again) did shock audiences.

Yet to my mind, the fundamental position which underpins these individual assaults on the conventions of his day, was that of the Imaginative against the dull and narrow and conventional and conservative and conformist. On my reading ‘Easy Virtue’, although not one of the most popular and not often revived, is the central play, because all the other subversions the critics list (gender, queer, etc) are subsumed by or encompassed by the much bigger, more fundamental issue of the eternal struggle of the clever and sophisticated and imaginative against all the forces in society which try to keep them down. As Amanda says in ‘Private Lives’:

AMANDA: It wasn’t an innocent girlish heart, it was jagged with sophistication. I’ve always been sophisticated, far too knowing.

That is the problem Coward’s lead characters face: not that they’re straight or gay, but they’re just too damned clever, imaginative and sophisticated for the dull, narrow, hidebound society which surrounds them, is scared of them, and wants to stifle them.

So my contention boils down to this: the gay issue may for all I know have been very big, very important to Coward, and doubtless the plays abound in queer sub-texts often bubbling very close to the surface. But much bigger, much more obvious, much more defining, was his repeated depiction of the triumph of the liberated, unconventional imagination and the defeat of society’s stupid, unimaginative conventions.

Noel Coward reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on May 28, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Literary criticism, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on May 28, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/28/noel-coward-and-imagination/

Private Lives: An Intimate Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1929)

ELYOT: Don’t quibble, Sibyl.

AMANDA: What’s so horrible is, that one can’t stay happy!
ELYOT: Oh, darling! Don’t say that!
AMANDA: It’s true! The whole business is a very poor joke!

Ah, les idiots!
(Louise, the French maid’s accurate assessment of the play’s four protagonists.)

Executive summary

‘Private Lives’ is one of Coward’s more popularly and regularly revived plays. It depicts a couple, Elyot and Amanda who divorced five years ago but who have both just remarried and who, on the first evening of their honeymoons with their new spouses (Sibyl and Victor, respectively), discover that they are staying in adjacent rooms at the same hotel.

The play is set on the connected balconies outside their respective hotel rooms where they first realise they’re staying next door to each other. First of all they each have bitter arguments with the new spouses who both leave the rooms in high dudgeon. Then they have the first of many bitter fights between themselves before, improbably enough, deciding to run away and abandon their new partners (on the first night of their honeymoons!).

The second act is set in Amanda’s Paris apartment and consists entirely of the pair alternately being lovey-dovey and trembling on the brink of having sex, then some tiny trifle sparks an argument, and next thing they are screaming abuse at each other and, in climactic moments, slapping and throwing things at each other. At the height of the fiercest argument their estranged spouses, having tracked them down to Paris, enter and witness their latest slanging match.

The third act is set the next morning as the foursome awaken (Sibyl slept on the sofa, Victor in an armchair), Elyot and Amanda treating everything as normal (which is was during their stormy three-year marriage) while the new spouses are puzzled and confused. A lot of banter takes us to a position where the new spouses offer to divorce the central figures but a supposedly civilised breakfast itself degenerates into a fierce argument, this time between Victor and Sibyl. Looking on, for once watching a different couple screaming their heads off, unexpectedly makes Elyot and Amanda feel moony and spoony again and, while Victor and Sibyl come to blows, Elyot and Amanda pack their backs and quietly sneak out the front door.

Act 1

The terrace of a hotel in the South of France.

Onto the balconies outside their rooms come first one couple then the other. First Elyot and his new wife, Sibyl. They’re all lovey-dovey at first but her persistence in asking fairly innocent questions about his first marriage several times makes him lose his temper but they manage to recover and go into their room to dress for dinner.

This clears the scene for the second couple, Amanda and her new husband Victor. Same thing happens. They are all lovey-dovey at first until the subject of her first marriage comes up and Victor dwells on how awful Elyot was to her. But they manage to recover. The parallelism is deliberately emphasised. For example both Sibyl and Victor ask Elyot and Amanda where they went on their first honeymoons and both reply St Moritz.

What for me is the central issue of the play, the conflict between the imaginative and liberated Elyot and Amanda, and the boring Sibyl and narrow conventional Victor, is first sounded.

VICTOR: Well, I’m glad I’m normal!
AMANDA: What an odd thing to be glad about! Why?
VICTOR: Well, aren’t you?
AMANDA: I’m not so sure I’m normal!
VICTOR: Of course you are, Mandy! Sweetly, divinely normal!
AMANDA: I haven’t any peculiar cravings for Chinamen or old boots, if that’s what you mean!
VICTOR: Mandy!
AMANDA: I think very few people are completely normal, really… deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances.

Even Amanda’s very mild flight of fancy, mentioning Chinamen or old boots (!) is enough to freak Victor out. He just thinks of it as the kind of thing which shouldn’t be said out loud. ‘All stuff and nonsense.’ Exactly. That’s the mentality that Elyot and Amanda, and even more so the audience, come to realise they’re up against.

Victor goes in to have a bath i.e. give Amanda ten minutes alone on the balcony during which Elyot returns to his side of the balcony, lights a cigarette, waiting for Sibyl to finish putting on her make-up.

The orchestra down on the hotel dining room starts playing ‘Moonlight becomes you’ and Elyot starts humming along. Amanda, sitting on her side of the balcony, hears him and she starts singing along. Elyot hears her and they face each other across the partition of the two balconies. After a few polite remarks Amanda says she must go and goes into her room.

Sibyl comes out onto their balcony and discovers Elyot in a flustered state. With no explanation why he tells her they must pack up and leave straightaway. She absolutely refuses and he goes into one of, what we will come to realise, are his psychotic rages, complete with really startlingly violent exclamations:

ELYOT: If there’s one thing in the world that infuriates me, it’s sheer wanton stubbornness! I should like to cut off your head with a meat axe!

Understandably, Sibyl goes into hysterics as Elyot turns and stomps into their room, and she follows him.

This of course leaves the stage clear for Victor and Amanda to come stomping out onto their half of the balcony. Amanda has clearly made the same demand of Victor, that they leave the hotel straightaway and drive back to her place in Paris.

To persuade him she has concocted an entirely fictitious story about this being the very hotel where her sister committed suicide (!) and her having to accompany the body back to England. Victor sees through this instantly and accuses her of telling a lie to which she straightaway admits.

This, like the passage about the Chinamen, should be flagging to Victor (it certainly flags to us) that Amanda overflows with high-spirited fancies and imaginings and so is a) utterly unsuited to blunt imagination-free Victor and b) addicted to the equally frivolous, fanciful Elyot. It is the quality of their free-associating, untrammeled senses of humour which binds them.

She then lies again, telling Victor they have to leave because Elyot is here but for some reason not telling the truth, that he’s in the next door room, but making up another lie that she saw him down in the street. In a white suit. Running. Victor, reasonably enough, points out that she’s lying again.

Victor refuses to leave and go to Paris, which triggers Amanda to a furious denunciation:

AMANDA: I see quite clearly that I have been foolish enough to marry a fat old gentleman in a club armchair! You’re a pompous ass! Pompous ass! That’s what I said, and that’s what I meant!

Stiff with dignity, Victor says he will be in the bar and stomps out. Over on Elyot’s side of the balcony, he and Sibyl come out just long enough for her to tell him it’s the unhappiest day of her life. She says she’s off to have dinner and Elyot hopes it will choke her.

Not the height of sophistication, maybe.

And so to the final part of the act, with Amanda and Elyot finding themselves alone on the balcony. She asks for a cigarette and joins him on his side of the balcony. At first they have a typical angry outburst, blaming each other for ruining things. But slowly they remember past happiness and end up mocking each other’s partners. The band down in the dining room starts playing their tune, ‘Moonlight becomes you’, and they both soften, and Amanda delivers one of Coward’s most famous quotes.

AMANDA: Extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

In this mood they remember all the good times and, implausibly but at the same time believably, suddenly admit that they still love each other. They are appalled at the catastrophe they’ve brought upon themselves.

AMANDA: No, wait! This is terrible, something strange’s happened to us, we’re not sane!
ELYOT: We never were.

He tells her to stop shilly-shallying, calls her idiotic and suddenly they’re having one of their rows. She stops it and says they need to have a safe word or phrase, something either of them can say and which will pull them up, make them keep a 5-minute, no a 2-minute silence, while they calm down. Jokingly Elyot suggests ‘Solomon Isaacs’ and a few minutes later when they flare up into another argument, says it, they are silent, calm down and are together again. On one level they think this little device will somehow obviate their addiction to flaring rows but, as the next two acts will amply demonstrate, it won’t.

And so they rush off, grabbing the bags they haven’t unpacked yet, heading down to the garage where her car is.

Leaving the stage empty for Victor and Sibyl to enter, call their partners’ names, look around and be puzzled by their absence. In reality there’d be calling Reception, running round upset. For the purposes of the play they both accept the situation very demurely and Victor invites Sibyl over to have one of the cocktails which he brought out for Amanda 15 minutes earlier.

And with a bitter-sweet wistfulness, he suggests a toast ‘To absent friends’, which is far more for the purpose of theatrical neatness, to neatly round off the act, than any attempt at psychological realism.

Act 2

Amanda’s flat in Paris, a few days later.

Elyot and Amanda have just had a little dinner and ponder their situation. They wonder if they’ll remarry. They agree to shorten their safe phrase from ‘Solomon Isaacs’ to ‘Sollocks’. (The ex-dustman in me thinks ‘bollocks’ might have been better.)

Almost every conversational gambit leads to the flaring of an argument, such as when they stray into listing other people they had affairs with after they divorced.

They have an attractive married habit of inventing surreal nonsense. ‘Did you notice Lady Bumble blowing all those shrimps through her ear trumpet?’ and the like. Or: ‘ It must be so nasty for poor animals, being experimented on! Well, not when the experiments are successful! – Why, in Vienna, I believe you can see whole lines of decrepit old rats, carrying on like Tiller girls!’

They kiss passionately but Amanda tells him to stop because it’s too soon after dinner, at which he breaks off in a huff. And so on. One minute he’s shouting ‘Don’t patronise me’ and they cry the safe word. Moments later he’s playing her favourite song on the piano and she softens etc. It ends for the umpteenth time for a full-throated kiss.

While Elyot and Amanda cannot live without each other, neither can they live with each other. They argue violently and try to outwit each other, just as they did during their stormy marriage.

The phone rings, someone asking for a Madame Duvallon, Elyot answers in his high surreal mode that Madame Duvallon has just left for Madagascar. Amanda is relieved; she thought it was them catching up with them. Who? Oh all the people who pursue you and pull you down. At which point there’s a little author’s message:

AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious!
ELYOT: You mustn’t be serious, my dear one! It’s just what they want!
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant! Laugh at all their sacred shibboleths! Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.
AMANDA: Darling, I think you’re talking nonsense!
ELYOT: So is everyone else, in the long run! Let’s be superficial, and pity the poor philosophers. Let’s blow trumpets and squeakers, and enjoy the party as much as we can, like very small, quite idiotic school children.

Trouble is every one of these moments of silliness and closeness spirals, trips a switch, turns on a sixpence about a squabble about something trivial and then they’re in full throttle insulting rage within seconds. ‘You’re quite intolerable.’ ‘Ridiculous ass.’ ‘If you insist on being so boorish and idiotic.’ ‘You disagreeable pig!’ ‘You spiteful little beast!’

She puts on a record, he turns it off saying it’ll wake the neighbours, he turns it off again and scratches it, so she takes it off the turntable and smashes it over his head at which he slaps her in the face making her burst into tears, ‘hate you, I hate you!’ and then slaps him: ‘You’re a vile–tempered, evil–minded little vampire!’

They throw things at each other and roll around on the floor hitting each other with pillows, shouting this is the end and ‘I hope I never see you again in my life’, before storming off to their separate rooms.

For some unexplained reason, it is at precisely this moment that the spouses they abandoned in the South of France, Sibyl and Victor, walk in.

Act 3

Amanda’s flat the next morning.

Next morning the French maid arrives and is appalled by the mess everywhere, then discovers Sibyl on the sofa and Victor sleeping in a chair.

Once woken up, Victor and Sibyl agree they must see this thing through. They have somehow tracked the errant couple to Amanda’s flat in Paris. Amanda emerges from her room fully dressed, calmly accepts their presence and announces that she’s leaving immediately. When Sibyl knocks on Elyot’s door he tells her to go away and she bursts into hysterical wails.

Elyot evades the situation with studied flippancy, while Amanda brightly behaves as if they’re welcome guests on a lovely Paris morning. When Elyot speaks Amanda tells him to shut up and accuses him:

AMANDA: I have been brought up to believe that it’s beyond the pale for a man to strike a woman!
ELYOT: A very poor tradition! Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs.

Amanda takes Sibyl off to a bedroom to freshen up and Victor challenges Elyot to a fight. But Elyot manages to outwit him with his flippancy, ending up by accusing Victor of not being a proper man.

Sibyl and Amanda emerge from the bedroom and themselves have a fight ending with insults.

AMANDA: Heaven preserve me from nice women!
SIBYL: Your own reputation ought to do that!
AMANDA: Oh, go to hell!

If you enjoy watching middle class people argue and insult each other, this is the perfect night out for you.

Victor and Amanda squabble about whether they’re in love with each other. The real issue here, the dichotomy, isn’t between men and women, it’s between the imaginative – those who enjoy absurdist flights of fancy (Elyot and Amanda) – and the dim and unimaginative (Victor and Sibyl).

It’s the same basic dichotomy as between Larita and the dim Whittaker family in ‘Easy Virtue’ in fact Sibyl ends up hurling exactly the same accusations at unimaginative Victor as Larita does in the earlier play, they read like leftover lines from the earlier, far more powerful, play.

VICTOR: Making stupid rotten jokes!
SIBYL: I thought what Elyot said was funny!
VICTOR: Well, all I can think is, is that you must have a very warped sense of humour!
SIBYL: That’s better than having none at all!
VICTOR: I fail to see what humour there is in incessant trivial flippancy!
SIBYL: You couldn’t be flippant if you tried until you were blue in the face!~
VICTOR: I shouldn’t dream of trying!
SIBYL: You must be awfully sad, not to be able to see any fun in anything!

The end of the play portrays a stiff and tense breakfast, as Louise brings in a tray with coffee and brioches. Predictably this also degenerates into an argument, surprisingly, between Victor and Sibyl as Elyot and Amanda look on in silent astonishment. It brings them together to watch another couple behaving like them, and they kiss and canoodle and then agree to sneak out while the other pair are distracted.

And so they sneak out while the other couple are completely absorbed in their fierce arguing, which reaches the same level as theirs the night before, the play ending with Sibyl slapping Victor and screaming at him.

She slaps his face hard, and he takes her by the shoulders and shakes her like a rat.

THE END

Thin

Like all his early plays Coward wrote it at lightning speed, sketching the plot in two weeks and actually writing it in four days. The result is entertaining but, as countless critics observed at the time, thin.

It has been described as ‘tenuous, thin, brittle, gossamer, iridescent and delightfully daring’. Allardyce Nicoll called it ‘amusing, no doubt, yet hardly moving farther below the surface than a paper boat in a bathtub’. The Manchester Guardian commented, ‘Mr Coward certainly had not flattered our intelligence. The play appears to be based on the theory that anything will do provided it be neatly done.’ The Observer also thought that the play depended on brilliant acting but thought the characters unrealistic.

When the text was published, The Times called it ‘unreadable’ and The Times Literary Supplement found it ‘inexpressibly tedious’ in print but acknowledged that its effectiveness on stage was ‘proved by the delight of a theatrical audience.’

You’d have thought none of them had seen or read a Noel Coward play before. Surely they’re all like that, aren’t they?

Mirrors and pairs

I’m starting to notice Coward’s recurring techniques. An obvious one is structural pairing or doubling. All I mean is that ‘Fallen Angels’ portrays two couples, as does ‘Private Lives’. ‘Fallen Angels’ has two almost identical scenes where the naughty women tell the other’s husbands that the other has gone off to have an affair with the mystery Frenchman. In ‘Private Lives’ the doubling or mirroring of scenes between each of the divorced pair and their respective spouses is obvious.

This mirroring or patterning is pretty obvious. You can see how it helped Coward organise and construct his entertainments, and also how it provides pleasure to the audience, consciously or unconsciously savouring the comic patterning. (Probably consciously, it’s pretty damn obvious.)

(Incidentally, Elyot claims to have a ‘presentiment’ of disaster, which echoes the way Julia and Jane at the start of ‘Fallen Angels’ claim to have had presentiments.)

And Elyot and Amanda sneaking out at the end is the same as the four guests sneaking out of the Bliss house at the end of ‘Hay Fever’. The ‘sneaking out’ theme.

Shouting

Coward has this reputation for sophistication, and his characters are certainly pukka middle class types, they dress for dinner and drink cocktails. But one of their most striking features is how quickly the characters all resort to shouting. The climax of ‘The Vortex’ is an extended confrontation between mother and son packed with tears and shouting and recriminations. The two women in ‘Fallen Angels’ get drunk and shout and accuse each other. I was surprised that the alleged comedy ‘Hay Fever’ consists of quite so many arguments between the misnamed Bliss family and their disconcerted guests.

And frankly shocked that, after a deceptive opening five minutes, this play consists of two couples having extended filthy shouting matches, first with their new spouses, and then the two protagonists getting locked into this pattern of lovey-dovey kissy-kissy which every time degenerates into another shouting match, a grim cycle which lasts for the whole of the rest of the play.

ELYOT: If you don’t stop screaming, I’ll murder you.

Shouting and screaming abuse, threatening to kill your new wife… that’s pretty much the opposite of sophistication, isn’t it? Quite a few of these scenes could come out of Eastenders at its chavviest.

Wife-beating, battery and assault

If this was a new play being touted around now, in 2025, I doubt if it would find a backer. Nowadays we call things like this ‘domestic abuse’, ‘wife-beating’ and ‘assault’. The neighbours would call the cops to the scene of a ‘domestic’ and both parties would be arrested. Not so easy to make a comedy out of that. And yet the play is as popular as ever and celebrated for its light, charming wit.

1976 TV version

Starring Penelope Keith and Alec McCowen as the leads.

I don’t like Alec McCowen, he’s ugly isn’t he, in no way the stylish, debonair figure you associate with Coward and cocktails? And creepy. When he’s being lovey-dovey to Amanda I could feel my flesh creep. Although I suppose his jokey, tricksy manner suits the character of Elyot, with his mad flights of fancy and his imaginative subversion of pompous, unimaginative Victor.

Penelope Keith isn’t really an actress, more a cartoon caricature of herself. My generation entirely associate her with the sitcom ‘The Good Life’ in which she was always prim and controlled, so it’s disconcerting to see her a) shouting her head off and b) planting big-mouthed kisses on ugly Alec. Both are rather disgusting and certainly not entertaining. It felt like watching your parents smooching at a party, toe-curlingly embarrassing.

Related links

Related reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on May 26, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on May 26, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/05/26/private-lives-noel-coward/

The Relapse by John Vanbrugh (1696)

Sir John Vanbrugh wrote a handful of plays before going on to a complete change of career, and becoming one of England’s finest country house architects, whose masterpieces include palatial private homes such as Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace.

The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, the first of his plays, was in fact a sequel to someone else’s.

The original play was Love’s Last Shift, or, The Fool in Fashion written in 1695 by a young actor-dramatist, Colley Cibber. In Cibber’s play a free-living Restoration rake named Loveless is brought to repentance and reform by the ruses of his wife-to-be, Amanda. Supposedly, Vanbrugh saw the play and realised the ending didn’t really conclude the story. So he conceived The Relapse, in which the ‘reformed’ rake comes back up to London from his happy rural love nest, and succumbs all over again to the bright lights and pretty women.

The cast

The men

Sir Novelty Fashion, newly created Lord Foppington
Young Fashion, his Brother
Loveless, Husband to Amanda
Worthy, a Gentleman of the Town
Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, a Country Gentleman
Sir John Friendly, his Neighbour
Coupler, a Matchmaker
Bull, Chaplain to Sir Tunbelly
Syringe, a Surgeon
Lory, Servant to Young Fashion
Shoemaker, Taylor, Perriwig-maker, &c.

The women

Amanda, Wife to Loveless
Berinthia, her Cousin, a young Widow
Miss Hoyden, a great Fortune, Daughter to Sir Tunbelly
Nurse, her Governant,

The plot

Loveless is the reformed rake who has retired to the country with his pure and noble wife, Amanda.

Most of their dialogue consists of high-minded sentiments of fidelity and marital honesty cast in unrhymed verse or poetry. Being used to the oppressively consistent rhyming couplets of Alexander Pope and 18th century poets, and even the solidly iambic pentameters of Shakespeare’s plays, I was pleasantly surprised to find this verse more irregular and varied, with some lines having six beats, some only three.

Can you then doubt my Constancy, Amanda?
You’ll find ’tis built upon a steady Basis——
The Rock of Reason now supports my Love,
On which it stands so fix’d,
The rudest Hurricane of wild Desire
Wou’d, like the Breath of a soft slumbering Babe,
Pass by, and never shake it.

Fortunately, however, these insipid lovers are not the prominent figures. They decide – rashly – to come up to London on business, both swearing they won’t be tempted back to their wicked old ways – with inevitable results.

The play only really gets going with the introduction of Young Fashion and his servant Lory. Fashion is the second son and so has inherited a measly £200-a-year allowance and has managed to blow all of that so that, as the play opens, he is skint. His enterprising servant, Lory, makes the obvious suggestion that he apply to his elder brother, Sir Novelty Fashion, who inherited most of the family fortune.

Sir Novelty Fashion has only recently (within 48 hours) paid for and received the title of Lord i.e. he is now Lord Foppington. He is the most spectacularly grand and affectedly foppish fop I’ve encountered in any of these plays and he is a marvel, a cynosure of extravagant pretension, and he really lights up the play every time he appears.

Why the Ladies were ready to puke at me, whilst I had nothing but Sir Novelty to recommend me to ’em——Sure whilst I was but a Knight, I was a very nauseous Fellow… [but now I am a Lord] Well, ’tis an unspeakable Pleasure to be a Man of Quality —— Strike me dumb —— ‘My Lord’ —— ‘Your Lordship’ —— ‘My Lord Foppington’ — Ah! c’est quelque chose de beau, que le Diable m’emporte ——

The only catch is that the honour cost him £10,000! leaving him short of ready cash. Thus, when his starveling kid brother turns up begging for his debts to be paid off, Lord Foppington dismisses him with an airy wave and says he has to go dine with important people. Young Fashion is mortified and aggrieved.

Just after he’s been humiliatingly dismissed, Young Fashion bumps into Old Coupler, a marriage arranger who’s known him since he was a boy. Coupler also dislikes Lord Foppington and so the two quickly cobble together A Plan.

Coupler had been hired to find a rich widow who Lord Foppington can marry in a hurry to pay off his debts, and has contracted with a nice plump partridge of a widow woman living fifty miles away in the country. Lord Fashion had promised to pay Coupler £1,000 once the marriage was secured. Coupler now says that for £5,000 (!) he will secure the rich widow for Young Fashion.

The Plan is simple: Lord Foppington wrote the widow’s family to expect him in two weeks’ time; Young Fashion should go straightaway and pretend to be his brother, sign the contract, bed the widow, and bob’s your uncle. Or as Coupler puts it:

Now you shall go away immediately; pretend you writ that letter only to have the romantick Pleasure of surprizing your Mistress; fall desperately in Love, as soon as you see her; make that your Plea for marrying her immediately; and when the fatigue of the Wedding-night’s over, you shall send me a swinging Purse of Gold, you Dog you.

‘A swinging purse of gold’. This is by far the most vividly and clearly written of the Restoration plays I’ve read recently – Vanbrugh has a lovely swinging style.

They shake on the deal. When Coupler has gone, Young Fashion has a sudden pang of conscience, and vows he will give his brother a second chance to take pity.

If you take a ‘moral’ or psychological view of literature or plays, this shows that Young Fashion has a conscience and ‘develops the play’s themes of responsibility’.

But I don’t take that kind of view. I tend to think of works of literature as language machines built to deliver a wide range of often complex and sophisticated pleasures, and I’m interested in analysing the mechanisms and linguistic tools they use to do so.

So on my reading – divested of its ‘moral’ content – this decision to give Lord Foppington a second chance is really just a pretext for another comic scene with the monstrous Lord Fashion.

Act 2

Amanda and Loveless arrive at their London lodgings and have a long poetic exchange in which both reveal, to each other and themselves, that they have been a little distracted by the pleasures of the Town i.e. the opposite sex. Loveless in particular reveals that he went to the play the night before and was struck by a stunning beauty. Amanda is understandably upset but Loveless insists he admired but didn’t speak.

At that moment the servant announces the visit of Amanda’s cousin, Berinthia, and damn me if she isn’t exactly the woman Loveless was struck with the night before! Barely has Loveless recovered from this surprise, when Lord Foppington pays a visit.

Foppington gives a comic account of a Day in The Life of a Fop, note the affected pronunciation whereby ‘o’ is pronounced ‘a’ in ‘nat’ and ‘bax’:

I rise, Madam, about ten o’clock. I don’t rise sooner, because ’tis the worst thing in the World for the Complection; nat that I pretend to be a Beau; but a Man must endeavour to look wholesome, lest he make to nauseous a Figure in the Side-bax, the Ladies shou’d be compell’d to turn their eyes upon the Play.

Foppington goes on to explain in the most cynical way possible one attends church solely for the Society one meets there and has nothing to do with religion. Having regarded Amanda for some time, he thinks he is in love with her and, with absurd miscalculation takes her hand, kisses it and declares his passion for her.

Foppington has heroically misjudged, for Amanda snatches back her hand and boxes him round the ears, then Loveless draws his sword, engages him in a duel and appears to run him through. In fact it is the barest of scratches but the women run screaming and return with a doctor, Syringe, an excellent comic turn who declares it is a wound large enough to drive a coach and horses through and extorts a fee of £500 from Foppington before he gets servants to carry the Lord to the doctor’s house.

Consistent with his pretentious style, Foppington grandly forgives Loveless as he is carried away, as if from his death bed, but once he’s gone, Loveless tells Amanda it was just a scratch.

Enter a citizen named Worthy, who performs a structural function, namely while Loveless returns to lusting after Berinthia, Worthy can start to have designs on Amanda, creating a neat parallelism.

The menfolk leave the stage to Amanda and Berinthia who have a long dialogue about Modern Man and love affairs.

Over the course of this long scene Berinthia creates a kind of atmosphere of urban naughtiness in which Amanda is encouraged to slowly reveal her secrets. Berinthia explains that Worthy is a kind of anti-fop or anti-beau; an outwardly sensible sober man – but in fact he is quietly having affairs with half the women of quality in the Town.

By encouraging Amanda to speculate what she would do if Loveless were to die (God forbid!), Berinthia encourages her to think about a successor and replacement for her husband, and thus slyly encourages her to start to harbour thoughts about ‘other men’. Corrupts her, in other words.

Act 3

Scene 1

Lord Foppington is recovered (from his scratch) and preparing to go out when he is visited for the second time by his brother, Young Fashion, who proceeds from politely asking his brother to help him out, to pleading consanguinity, to becoming more and more infuriated by his unprovocable nonchalance.

Young Fashion: Now, by all that’s great and powerful, thou art the Prince of Coxcombs.
Lord Foppington: Sir — I am praud of being at the Head of so prevailing a Party.

Fashion vows to tame maximum revenge on his brother.

Scene 2

Loveless, in heroic poetry, ponders his mixed feelings. He knows he owes his wife everything, and yet.. and while he’s hesitating, the beautiful Berinthia enters and, after some flirting, they catch hold of each other in a big snog! They have barely begun kissing before a servant enters to say Amanda has arrived home, Loveless exists, Berinthia has a paragraph sighing about him — which is overheard by Worthy who has just entered.

Worthy now tells Berinthia he saw everything and so has her in his power. He wants to use her to persuade Amanda to have an affair with him, Worthy. Worthy proposes a precise Scheme: Berinthia should persuade Amanda that Loveless is having an affair with someone else; then Berinthia can a) pose as her friend b) carry on her affair with Loveless unsuspected. Berinthia can confirm that, during her earlier conversation, Amanda had admitted that – her husband gone – she could be tempted to another man, and even that Worthy might be a candidate.

Exit Worthy. Berinthia now finds herself in the position of carrying Worthy’s cause forward for him, not quite pimping for him, but… Vanbrugh disappoints me a little by having her express some stock anti-women sentiments:

I begin to fancy there may be as much pleasure in carrying on another body’s Intrigue, as one’s own. This at least is certain, it exercises almost all the entertaining Faculties of a Woman: For there’s employment for Hypocrisy, Invention, Deceit, Flattery, Mischief, and Lying.

Mind you, this is immediately followed by the entrance of Amanda who is in a foul mood with her husband, suspecting him of infidelity, with many insults and aspersions. Berinthia follows Worthy’s Plan and encourages her doubts, indeed says she knows exactly who her husband is in love with, without naming names (and of course she does – it is herself!).

Scene 3. The country house

Hilarious scene where Young Fashion and Lory arrive at the country house of the plump partridge widow who Coupler has recommended. It starts with the house being semi derelict and the door only reluctantly opened by suspicious yokels armed with a blunderbuss and scythes, led by the crude country squire, Mr Tunbelly Clumsy.

Cut to the country widow in question, Miss Hoyden who, in a bit of comic business, Sir Tunbelly orders to be locked up anytime anybody pays a visit. She appears to be quite a rude, rustic yokel of a young woman. Meanwhile Young Fashion impresses himself on Sir Tunbelly as a confident London fop and tries to hurry along the deal – can’t they get married that very night?

Act 4. Still at the country house

In a brief scene Miss Hoyden tells her Nurse she is keen to be married simply in order to escape the country, get up to London and start flaunting like a Grand Lady. Enter Young Fashion and he and Miss Hoyden quickly reach agreement that they should be married immediately. They call in the Nurse so Young Fashion can flatter her, give her half a crown, and get her on their side. And then ask her to use her influence with the local chaplain to get them married in a hurry. Luckily, it turns out the Nurse has been flirting with the chaplain for these past seven years, so it should be a doddle.

Scene 2

Cut to Amanda and Berinthia praising Worthy as a most excellent lover, dwelling on how he spent a couple of hours praising every one of Amanda’s features. Then Worthy himself walks in, apologises for the lateness of the hour, says he’s been sent by Loveless to say that Loveless is out very late with friends and so the women invite Worthy to make up a hand of ombre (a card game).

Scene 3. Berinthia’s chamber

Enter Loveless. He has completely ceased to be the ideal husband of act one and has reverted to being a scheming rake. He has gotten access to Berinthia’s bed chamber and now ponders where to hide. He has barely hidden in the closet before Berinthia enters, explaining that she left Worthy and Amanda to play cards, begging the excuse of having to write some letters. Loveless springs out of her closet and they embrace. After some flirting he carries her into the ‘closet’ (which is obviously more like an actual room) to ravish her!

Scene 4. Sir Tunbelly’s House

Young Fashion and Miss Hoyden have just been married by the vicar, Bull, and are congratulating each other when Lory rushes in to tell them that his brother – the real Lord Foppington – has arrived at the gates with a coach and horses and 20 pages and the full panoply. Sir Tunbelly arrives to ask what the devil is gong on, and Fashion braves it out, telling him the man claiming to be Lord Foppington is an imposter and they’ll deal with him by inviting him in, raising the drawbridge, then firing a few shots which will make his people scatter.

Scene 5. At the gate

They carry out this plan. Tunbelly admits Lord Foppington, and as soon as he’s inside the gates swings them shut, his servants fire a few shots in the air and all Lord Foppington’s servants scarper. When Lord Foppington declares who he is, Sir Tunbelly (who may be a country bumpkin but is also justice of the peace in these parts) calls him as a rascally imposter come to ravish his daughter and orders him to be tied down. The rest of the family come in to abuse him, Miss Hoyden as was, declaring he deserves to be dragged through the horse pond. Lord Foppington takes this all with tremendously aristocratic sang-froid.

The comedy heightens when Young Fashion enters and Foppington’s familiarity with him (calling him Tom since he is, after all, his younger brother) offends the other characters (the lady, Tunbelly, even Bull the chaplain). They all clamour for more punishment. Foppington is intelligent enough to realise all the people regard Tom as Lord Foppington and decides his best course is to play along, so he switches to calling him that, asking him for a close-up quiet parley in private. Tom comes close and Lord Foppington offers his brother £5,000 to be set free (!). Too late, says Tom.

His offer rejected, Foppington suddenly remembers there is a local gentleman who will vouch that he is Lord Foppington and Young Fashion a mere rascal. Who? asks Tunbelly sarcastically. Why Sir John Friendly. ‘Tis true he lives not a mile away and has just returned from London, admits Tunbelly – and sends a servant to fetch him.

But as chance would have it the servant comes straight back to tell Tunbelly that good Sir John has just alighted at the main gate and is entering the house. Young Fashion realises the game is up. He tells Lory to run and secure the first two horse he finds in the stables, Tom will slip out in a few minutes and they’ll leg it. Lory and Young Fashion slip out one door as Sir John enters by another.

There is a big Revelation Scene when Sir John finally gets to see Lord Foppington and confirms he is who he claims to be – the result is mortification and humiliation on the part of Sir Tunbelly who immediately swears fire and vengeance on Young Fashion, the imposter. But he’s long gone.

In a final short scene the Nurse, Miss Hoyden and Bull are in a conclave in the next room wondering how on earth to get out of the dilemma of Miss H being just married to Young Fashion when Lord Foppington and, more importantly, her father think she is still a maid. The solution they all innocently / cynically / comically decide on is: She shall simply marry again.

Act 5

Scene 1

Back in London. Young Fashion and Lory meet with Coupler, tell him the whole story and he caps it with what he’s heard, which is that Lord Foppington did swiftly marry Miss Hoyden – who is therefore now Lady Foppington – as told in a letter from Foppington himself in which he a) swears revenge on Young Fashion b) says that, although they are legally married, he has not yet fulfilled the divine part i.e. physically consummated the marriage.

Tom Fashion’s vexed rage prompts some good comic lines.

Coupler: Nothing’s to be done till the Bride and Bridegroom come to Town.
Young Fashion: Bride and Bridegroom! Death and Furies! I can’t bear that thou shouldst call them so.
Coupler: Why, what shall I call them, Dog and Cat?

They’re not the funniest lines ever, just expressed in a surprisingly modern, direct and understandable way which makes them feel funnier.

Anyway, Coupler suggests that they seek some kind of solution by suborning the priest, Bull who, like most modern priests, ‘eats three pounds of beef to reading one chapter’ of his Bible.

Scene 2

Worthy tells Berinthia he has all but seduced Amanda but she is still holding out with a last scruple about ‘Virtue’. Berinthia comes up with A Plan. Lord Foppington is having a Grand Supper tonight with dancing and music to celebrate his marriage. Berinthia will arrange for Amanda to see Loveless at a tryst with his lover; Amanda will be so furious, she’ll come home filled with thoughts of revenge and a little lewdness, and Worthy can pay a polite visit to escort her to Foppington’s supper and – whoops – take advantage of Amanda’s taste for revenge!

There is then another of the many comic touches which really lift this play. Worthy is so awed by Berinthia’s Machiavellianism, that he gets down on his knees before her:

Worthy [Kneeling] Thou Angel of Light, let me fall down and adore thee.
Berinthia: Thou Minister of Darkness, get up again, for I hate to see the Devil at his Devotions.

Scene 3. Tom Fashion’s lodgings

Coupler has a Plan: Some vicar has died leaving a £500-a-year living empty, and Tom has it in his gift if he can prove himself the lawful wife of Miss Hoyden.

To this end they have summoned the Nurse and the Priest to Tom’s lodgings. Initially scared at finding themselves confronted by the ‘Rogue’, Coupler sends the priest into another room with Lory, while he and Tom work on the Nurse. Tom tells her he would and will make a much better husband for Miss Hoyden than the Lord.

They go on to say that if the couple will vouch Tom is the legal husband, he will immediately present the priest with the £500 living. The Nurse is convinced. When the priest is brought back in, the three of them convince him to vouch for Tom and to win both her and the living. Coupler has some comic lines about the Nurse, comparing her to a rather rundown house:

Coupler: [Rising up.] .. The Living’s worth it: Therefore no more Words, good Doctor: but with the [Giving Nurse to him.] Parish — here — take the Parsonage-house. ‘Tis true, ’tis a little out of Repair; some Dilapidations there are to be made good; the Windows are broke, the Wainscot is warp’d, the Ceilings are peel’d, and the Walls are crack’d; but a little Glasing, Painting, White-wash, and Plaster, will make it last thy time.

You can imagine the gestures confident Coupler would make at the bewildered Nurse during this speech. Vanbrugh’s dialogue is vivid and dramatic.

Scene 4

Amanda gets home furious at having seen her husband meet with his sweetheart. Worthy is lying in wait for her and indulges in an extended seduction in high-flown rhetoric which involves forcing her onto a couch and kissing her hand. But, although torn, Amanda remains true to herself.

Amanda: Then, save me, Virtue, and the Glory’s thine.
Worthy: Nay, never strive.
Amanda: I will; and conquer too. My Forces rally bravely to my Aid, [Breaking from him.] and thus I gain the Day.

Not only this, but she preaches a sermon at Worthy, telling him to repent his fleshly urges and succeeds. He is given a speech saying he has seen the error of his ways.

Scene 5

The Nurse explains the situation to Miss Hoyden-Lady Foppinton, who in any case doesn’t like her pretentious new husband half so much as the first one.

Scene 6. Foppington’s supper

Enter Foppington, Miss Hoyden, Loveless, Amanda, Worthy and Berinthia. Foppington apologises for wooing Loveless’s wife (the pretext, if you remember, for the sword fight in act 2). Loveless forgives him.

Enter Sir Tunbelly and musicians and dancers, as at the end of every Restoration comedy. Tunbelly is the master of ceremonies and is drunk. A lengthy masque in which Cupid and Hymen present versified forms of their characters and cases.

Enter Tom Fashion with the Priest and Nurse who he lines up to testify in front of everyone that he – Tom – married Miss Hoyden first, to which Miss Hoyden herself testifies. Astonished, Lord Foppington asks the priest if it’s true.

It’s very funny that Sir Tunbelly is raving drunk and has to be held back from attacking Tom with a horsewhip. He is particularly upset when he discover the Nurse he has employed all these years lied to him. Why did she do it? The Nurse replies, because Miss Hoyden so wanted to be married.

Tom asks ‘the court’ of all the characters for their judgment and they declare him the honest husband. Sir Tunbelly says they can all go to hell and reels out drunk. Beautifully, Lord Foppington rises above it all with effortless superiority.

The epilogue

The epilogue is spoken by Foppington and is the only one of the half dozen I’ve read which I either understood or enjoyed because it is a further hymn to the wonderful superiority of noble beaux such as himself and how they have never lowered themselves to plots or violence or treason or criminality – Good Lord, no, such things are only done by the badly dressed – and so continues the comic conceit of his character right to the end of the play.

Vanbrugh’s prose

Vanbrugh’s prose is immeasurably more lucid and easy to read than the other Restoration figures I’ve been reading.

Lory. Why then, Sir, your Fool advises you to lay aside all Animosity, and apply to Sir Novelty, your elder Brother.
Young Fashion: Damn my elder Brother.
Lory: With all my heart; but get him to redeem your Annuity, however.
Young Fashion: My Annuity! ‘Sdeath, he’s such a Dog, he would not give his Powder-Puff to redeem my Soul.

It’s still 17th century prose, obvz, but it seems to me beautifully clear and easy to follow, and the clarity makes the vigour of the simile all the more vivid. I’m not sure it’s the best, exactly, but it strikes me as being the clearest of the comedies I’ve read:

Berinthia: Pray which Church does your Lordship most oblige with your Presence?
Lord Foppington: Oh, St. James‘s, Madam – There’s much the best Company.
Amanda: Is there good Preaching too?
Lord Foppington: Why, faith, Madam, I can’t tell. A Man must have very little to do there, that can give an Account of the Sermon.

See how brisk the dialogue is – question, answer, question, answer, leading up to a comic punchline – the joke being (in case it’s not obvious in this quote taken out of context) that Foppington is such a very model of a Restoration aristocrat that religion is quite literally the last thing he goes to church for; in fact the blasted sermonising etc gets in the way of the socialising!

There’s something intrinsically comic about a character asking a question and the the second character repeating the substance of the question but with a comic reversal or alternative at the end:

Servant: Will your Lordship venture so soon to expose yourself to the Weather?
Lord Foppington: Sir, I will venture as soon as I can, to expose myself to the Ladies.

And the relationships in the play have just the same clarity and precision. I liked young Fashion, the poor younger brother from the moment he started talking, and really warmed to his long-suffering, inventice and sarcastic servant, Lory, and enjoyed their relationship immensely.

After young Fashion gives his older brother an opportunity to help him out financially, and he refuses to, Fashion declares his moral reservations at an end. It’s not the decision itself, it’s the alacrity with which Lory responds which makes it bracing and funny.

Young Fashion: Here’s rare News, Lory; his Lordship has given me a Pill has purg’d off all my Scruples.
Lory: Then my Heart’s at ease again: For I have been in a lamentable Fright, Sir, ever since your Conscience had the Impudence to intrude into your Company.
Young Fashion: Be at peace, it will come there no more: My Brother has given it a wring by the Nose, and I have kick’d it down Stairs.

Vanbrugh’s sentences are short and punchy. In his robust good humour, Lory reminds me a bit of Sam Weller in the Pickwick Papers.

The accent of a fop

Vanbrugh goes to pains to spell out Lord Foppington’s pronunciation. By the look of it, the kind of rarefied courtier he is aspiring to be had a particular accent or idiom, a distinctive way of pronouncing English. In particular, ‘o’ becomes ‘a’, so that ‘constitution’ and ‘horse’ become ‘canstitution’ and ‘harse’:

  • what between the Air that comes in at the Door on one side, and the intolerable Warmth of the Masks on t’other, a Man gets so many Heats and Colds, ‘twou’d destroy the Canstitution of a Harse.
  • Fore. My Lord, I have done. If you please to have more Hair in your Wig, I’ll put it in.
    Lord Foppington: Passitively, yes

‘Or’ becomes ‘ar’:

  • Lord Foppington: I have arder’d my Coach to the Door:

‘Ot’ becomes ‘at’:

  • Lord Foppington: … when I heard my Father was shat thro’ the Head

‘U’ becomes ‘e’, e.g. ‘judge’ becomes ‘jedge’.

  • Lord Foppington: As Gad shall jedge me, I can’t tell; for ’tis passible I may dine with some of aur Hause at Lacket‘s.

He calls his brother Tam instead of Tom:

  • Lord Foppington: Don’t be in a Passion, Tam; far Passion is the most unbecoming thing in the Warld

Misogyny and misandry

I was very struck when I read some of the feminist introductions to these plays to discover that feminist critics dismiss all Restoration comedies – and indeed all Restoration society – as misogynist.

I take the point that there is a lot of anti-women propaganda in the plays, and that, on a deeper level, you could say the women are treated like chattel. Except that when you actually read the plays, you discover that a lot of the women characters are tough, independent, free to come and go as they please, take lovers, attend the theatre, and that many of them have independent means and live very well.

I’m not suggesting 17th century London was like 21st century New York in terms of women’s liberation and legal equality, but having been warned about the utter oppression of women in the period, it comes as a surprise to discover how much freedom and independence they did have.

And as to statements or sentiments, for every specifically anti-woman generalisation, there is one attacking men. Thus Amanda and Berinthia in Act 5:

Berinthia: Ay, but there you thought wrong again, Amanda. You shou’d consider, that in Matters of Love Men’s Eyes are always bigger than their Bellies. They have violent Appetites, ’tis true, but they have soon din’d.
Amanda: Well; there’s nothing upon Earth astonishes me more than Men’s Inconstancy.

If you are a feminist and want to be offended by what characters say in a play, it’s easy to find hundreds of anti-women beliefs and sentiments. But it is just as easy to find groups of women expressing anti-men sentiments.

For my part, I see statements like this as the kind of glue which binds together the plot. The dialogues are composed of sententious clichés which fill the down-time between the more urgent comic events. Often the sentiments are tendentious, and characters are using these cliches and stereotypes to bend someone to their will (generally women being persuaded that all men are faithless so-and-sos or all men being persuaded that all women are, well, the same).

They are a kind of rhetorical lubrication which keeps the engine of the play – its comic plotline – ticking over. And the women give just as good as they get. Maybe better.

Good Gods—What slippery Stuff are Men compos’d of!
Sure the Account of their Creation’s false,
And ’twas the Woman’s Rib that they were form’d of.

Related links

More seventeenth century reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 10, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 10, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/10/the-relapse-john-vanbrugh/