All posts tagged Restoration comedy

Introduction to The Plays of William Wycherley by W.C. Ward (1893)

Old literary criticism is often valuable because it sees works of literature in the round, as a whole. Its judgements are often mature, made by people who have seen a lot of life and often had other full-time careers, as lawyers, politician and so on. So their opinions are aware of and take into account a range of audiences and their essays are written in a language designed to be accessible to all literate readers.

All this contrasts with the highly professionalised nature of contemporary literary criticism, generally written by people who have little or no experience of life beyond the academy; written in fierce competition with other academics and so often focusing on narrow and highly specific aspects of works or genres where the author desires to carve out a niche; and written in a jargon which has become steadily more arcane and removed from everyday English over the past forty years or so.

This kind of modern literary criticism is contained in expensive books destined to be bought only by university libraries, or in remote articles in any one of hundreds of subscription-only specialist journals. It is not, in other words, designed for the average reader. Nowadays, literary criticism is an elite discourse.

Older criticism can also be humane and funny, and can afford to be scathingly critical of its authors, in a way modern po-faced and ‘professional’ criticism often daren’t.

The 1893 edition of The Plays of William Wycherley which Project Gutenberg chose for their online library includes an introduction to Wycherley’s plays by the edition’s editor, W.C. Ward, followed by an extended biographical essay by Thomas Babington Macauley which dates from even earlier, from the 1850s.

(If this appears very old fashioned a) it is, and b) several of the Wikipedia articles about Wycherley appear to be cut and pastes of the relevant articles from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

Introduction by W.C. Ward

Comedies of Manners

Ward describes the Restoration comedies as Comedies of Manners, contrasting them with Shakespeare’s plays which he calls Comedies of Life.

Aristocratic audiences

Restoration comedies only illustrate one aspect of life, and that the most superficial – the courtly badinage of aristocrats having affairs. They were initially designed for a tiny, upper-class clientele, and kept that sense of targeting a select audience which ‘gets’ its attitude and in-jokes.

Displays of wit

The plays were designed to display Wit and Ingenuity – all other human activities, all other human emotions and psychology, are simply omitted in pursuit of these goals. Their dialogue is not intended to reveal the characters’ psychology or development. It exists solely to display the author’s Wit and to further the ‘Plot’, which also exists solely to demonstrate the author’s ingenuity.

Robot characters

The characters are not people, they are ‘simulacra… puppet semblances of humanity’. They only copy human behaviour insofar as is required to further the clockwork plots.

This narrow mechanical aspect of the characterisation is, in Ward’s view, paradoxically a redeeming factor when we come to consider the plays’ indecency and immorality.

Licentiousness always superficial

The very fact that the characters are barely human, are really flashy automata, means that their licentiousness and cynicism has no real depth. It doesn’t affect us in the way the same speeches put into the mouths of real characters would affect us, because we know they are the baseless vapourings of toys.

Designed to amuse

Ward also defends the plays against the frequent charge of licentiousness by pointing out that they are designed solely to amuse and make us laugh – they don’t even have the deeper ambition of Ben Jonson’s comedies, ‘to laugh us out of vice’.

Antidote to lust

And, Ward says, the kind of superficial laughter they prompt on every page is in fact an antidote to lustful thoughts. The plays do not inflame the audience with genuinely licentious and immoral thoughts because the characters are so one-dimensional and the plots are so extravagantly ludicrous that real sexual thoughts never enter our heads.

Virtue triumphs

Other critics charge that Restoration comedies only being Virtue on stage to be mocked and ridiculed, which is a bad thing. Ward admits that most of the characters lose no opportunity to mock honesty, hard work, sobriety, the law, business, chasteness and loyalty and fidelity and love. All true. But at the same time, love does eventually triumph (after a superficial fashion) the qualities of loyalty and virtue do, in the end, triumph.

Women of virtue

And each play contains at least one female character, and sometimes a man, who is significantly less cynical than the other characters and becomes almost a defender of virtue. For example, Alithea in The Country Wife and Fidelia in The Plain Dealer are unironic emblems of Goodness and Virtue – and they and their values do, eventually, win the day.

Marriage mocked

Other critics lament the way the sanctity of Marriage is routinely mocked, at length, continuously, throughout all the plays. Ward puts the defence that when you look closely, the specific examples of marriage being mocked are the marriages of ludicrous characters such as Pinchwife or Vernish. (This defence, in my opinion, is nowhere near adequate; all the characters mock marriage as a school for adulterers and cuckolds far more powerfully and continuously than Ward acknowledges.)

Wycherley’s poetry

Ward goes on from Wycherley’s plays to discuss Wycherley’s poetry, which was published in two volumes late in his life and about which he is entertainingly rude. The poems are, in Ward’s opinion (and everyone else’s – he quotes Wycherley’s contemporaries) utterly worthless, beneath criticism. ‘Wycherley had no spark of poetry in his whole composition’.

It’s good to have this confirmed, as I thought the short poems which appear scattered through Wycherley’s plays were utterly lifeless.

Wycherley’s character

As to his character:

It is not to be doubted that Wycherley participated in the fashionable follies and vices of the age in which he lived. His early intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland was notorious.

The success of his plays drew him into aristocratic court circles which really did value the behaviour he describes.

Alexander Pope

Late in life, Wycherley became a kind of mentor to the very young Alexander Pope, when the later was only 16 or 17 years old, and their correspondence, and also memoirs written about the great John Dryden, show that Wycherley was loved as a good friend by many of his contemporaries.

Essay by Thomas Babington Macauley

According to Joseph E. Riehl’s book about Charles Lamb and his critics, Macauley wrote his criticism of the Restoration dramatists at least in part as an attack or counter to Charles Lamb’s strong defence of them. Macauley argued that Restoration comedy is degrading to human relationships, and that it promoted ‘evil, perverted or shameful conduct’. I sympathise.

In the 22-page essay on the Gutenberg website, Macauley describes Wycherley’s life and character in some detail, with comments on the plays. Key points are:

Early life

Wycherley was born in 1640. Young Wycherley was sent to France as a teenager, where he converted to Catholicism. After the Restoration of 1660, he went to Oxford, left without a degree, studied law at the Inns of Court just long enough to be able to make comic butts of lawyers and their hangers-on, as in The Plain Dealer.

Religious conversion

Shrewdly, Wycherley converted back from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Macauley has a droll sense of humour and a nice turn of phrase:

The somewhat equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist into a very good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.

The Restoration court

He gives a vivid sense of the promiscuity of Charles’s court:

The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes upon [Wycherley] and was pleased with his appearance. This abandoned woman, not content with her complaisant husband and her royal keeper, lavished her fondness on a crowd of paramours of all ranks, from dukes to rope-dancers.

The Dutch Wars

He comments scornfully on the Dutch Wars:

The second Dutch war, the most disgraceful war in the whole history of England, was now raging. It was not in that age considered as by any means necessary that a naval officer should receive a professional education. Young men of rank, who were hardly able to keep their feet in a breeze, served on board the King’s ships, sometimes with commissions and sometimes as volunteers.

The Royal Navy

There’s debate about whether Wycherley – like many other completely unqualified ‘gentleman’ – volunteered for the navy, but it would be nice to think so and that it gave verisimilitude to his depiction of Captain Manly and the sailors in The Plain Dealer.

The Country Wife he describes as:

one of the most profligate and heartless of human compositions… the elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original or imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient of the toil of polishing.

Marriage and prison

Wycherley was such a royal favourite that Charles appointed him tutor to his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. However, Wycherley ruined his reputation with the king and swiftly lost the post of tutor by unwisely marrying the Countess of Drogheda, ‘a gay young widow’ in 1679. She was jealous and kept a close eye on him till she died young in 1685. He hoped he would leave her a fortune, but she left him a long and ruinous legal case. Possibly as a result of this, Wycherley was thrown into the Fleet prison where he languished for seven long years. The story goes that the newly crowned King James II (ascended the throne 1685) happened to see a performance of The Plain Dealer, asked about the author, was shocked to discover he was in gaol, paid his debts and settled an annuity on him.

Released, he was nonetheless impoverished, unable to sustain his old lifestyle, and unable to write another play. In 1704, after 27 years of silence, a volume of poetry appeared – ‘a bulky volume of obscene doggerel’.

Alexander Pope

It was in the same year he formed the friendship with the young sickly hunchback Alexander Pope, who he mentored, took about town, and who in turn offered to rewrite and ‘improve’ the older man’s verse. Quite quickly Pope realised how dire Wycherley’s poetry was and that nothing could save it. Quite a few of their letters survive which shed light on both men.

Literary reputation

Rests entirely on his last two plays, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. His characters are often little more than mouthpieces for the contrived wit of the time.

It was alleged he was a slow and painstaking author, but Pope claims he wrote The Plain Dealer in three weeks! Having just read both his hit plays, I am inclined to believe the slow and painstaking version. They both feel slow and laboured.

In truth, his mind, unless we are greatly mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great labour and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest flavour.

Widow Blackacre

Macauley is correct to say:

The widow Blackacre [is] beyond comparison Wycherley’s best comic character

In full flood she struck me as being almost a female Falstaff. But these few words of praise don’t stop Macauley taking every opportunity to damn Wycherley:

The only thing original about Wycherley, the only thing which he could furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy.

Degrading French originals

By which he means his low, mean, degraded subject matter. Macauley accuses him of taking the fine and graceful character of Agnes in the French play L’Ecole des Femmes and turning her into the degraded imbecile Mrs Pinchwife in The Country Wife.

Wycherley’s indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach.

Similarly, Macauley accuses him of taking the light and chaste character of Viola in Twelfth Night and turning her into the much narrower and lewder Fidelia, an attempt at loyalty and fidelity who in fact acts as a pimp for her master; and of taking the misanthropic but essentially noble character Alceste in Moliere’s Le Misanthrope and turning him into the much cruder and more vengeful Manly.

So depraved was his moral taste, that, while he firmly believed that he was producing a picture of virtue too exalted for the commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal that is to be found even in his own writings.

Wow. Not the kind of unashamed contempt a modern literary critic would allow themselves. These two, pretty old essays bring Wycherely’s life and times and character and works to life far more vividly than anything else I’ve read about him. And hence the value of older literary criticism. It tends to paint a fuller picture of the man, the times and the works. And not be afraid to give pungent judgements.

More seventeenth century reviews

More seventeenth century reviews

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by Simon on July 27, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Literary criticism, Theatre

Posted by Simon on July 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/william-wycherley-w-c-ward/

The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)

‘I’ll have no leading-strings; I can walk alone: I hate a harness’
(Manly in The Plain Dealer, Act One)

William Wycherley wrote four comedies during the Restoration era. The Plain Dealer is the fourth and final one and is generally thought to be the best. It is a free adaptation of The Misanthrope (1666), one of the best-known plays of the French dramatist Moliere (1622 to 1673).

The protagonist, Manly, is a sea captain now returned to shore. His ship sank (he is said to have scuttled it after being trapped by Dutch enemy ships) and now he is back on land in lodgings. In any case, he only went to sea to get away from people, who he loathes:

You must pardon me, I cannot wish well to pimps, flatterers, detractors, and cowards, stiff nodding knaves, and supple, pliant, kissing fools

Manly prides himself on his plain-speaking and plain-dealing – in stark contrast to the society around him which he thinks is made up of fawning, lying hypocrites.

What, thou art one of those who esteem men only by the marks and value fortune has set upon ’em, and never consider intrinsic worth! but counterfeit honour will not be current with me: I weigh the man, not his title

Inevitably, his boasted plain dealing strikes others as rudeness and cruelty.

Manly has a friend or confidante, Freeman, who is the auditor of his extended soliloquies about society’s hypocrisies. Freeman is ‘a gentleman well educated, but of a broken fortune, a complier with the age’. I like that description, a complier with the age. Am I a complier with my age, I wonder.

In fact, Manly brusquely tells Freeman that the latter is not his friend; he (Manly) has only one friend, one true deep friend (and even as he says this, the reader suspects that this ‘friend’ is fated to betray him).

Manly is in love with Olivia, a wealthy woman who is tough and misanthropic in her own right. He is so confident of her love he has deposited with her some £6,000 of his fortune including a pile of jewels.

Olivia, also, purports to hate ‘the filthy world’. She has a cousin, Eliza, who is her confidante i.e. who she can confide in, and who is a sarcastic, ironic foil to her, in their first scene together listening to Olivia’s long description of how she despises the world and then, when Novel visits, embarrassingly proving that she is in fact an expert at all the hypocritical practices she has just condemned (gossiping, criticising etc).

OLIVIA: Hold, cousin, hold; I hate detraction. But I must tell you, cousin, his civility is cowardice, his good-nature want of wit; and he has neither courage nor sense to rail: and for his being always in humour, ’tis because he is never dissatisfied with himself.

Manly is beloved by Fidelia, who dressed up as a man to serve aboard his ship, won his trust and now, back on land, continues to dress as a man, all the time professing her love for Manly, declaring in an aside to the audience that she owes him her:

love, faith, and duty to you, the bravest, worthiest of mankind

Then there’s a flotilla of secondary, comic characters, including a couple of sailors who sailed with Manly and now do him the office of doormen or bouncers, tasked with keeping all his callers at bay, plus:

Novel – ‘a pert railing Coxcomb, and an admirer of novelties’ who tries to woo Olivia
Major Oldfox – ‘an old impertinent Fop, given to scribbling’, who is wooing Widow Blackacre
Lord Plausible – ‘a ceremonious, supple, commending Coxcomb, in love with Olivia’
Widow Blackacre – ‘a petulant, litigious Widow, always in law, and Mother of Squire Jerry’
Squite Jerry – feeble, hen-pecked son of the Widow Blackacre

The scenes with Novel and Plausible are particularly funny. As the play progresses, so do the complications.

Act 2

Act 2 starts with Olivia explaining at length how she also despises society, and rejects company and visits, to her foil Eliza. Which makes it funny when she is promptly paid lots of visits – by the dandies and fops, Novel and Lord Plausible, and indulges in the very kind of catty gossip she has just criticised to Eliza.

Half-way through this scene Manly, Freeman and Fidelia arrive and, from a secret vantage point (one of the conventions of Restoration comedy) watch Olivia consorting with the fops. Manly overhears Olivia criticising him, a tone she continues once they’ve fully walked onstage and announced their presence. In fact Manly’s arrival prompts Olivia to make the shock declaration that she is married, a revelation which staggers all Manly’s hopes.

MANLY: I wish I never had seen you.

Olivia tells the assembled cast that she is married to an honourable gentleman and I, for one, immediately suspected this will be none other than ‘the one man’ Manly esteems as friend.

Manly and Olivia part with vehement curses of each other. But, during the visit, Olivia has taken a fancy to young Fidelia, dressed as a man, who was accompanying Manly.

When Lady Blackacre is announced, Freeman declares he will stay and woo her, impossible though she is, in order to inherit her money and to pay off his own debtors. Freeman’s bare-faced attempt to chat the Widow up turns into a comic scene as he competes with Lady Blackacre’s constant companion, a dried-up older man, Major Oldfox, who mostly exists to provide a comic foil to Freeman. The scene morphs into a parody of a courtroom confrontation, with either side flinging legalistic accusations at each other in order to prove their ’cause’, i.e. the widow’s hand and money.

The Widow is given a magnificent series of imaginative, long insults which match Falstaff at his finest:

WIDOW BLACKACRE: Thou withered, hobbling, distorted cripple; nay, thou art a cripple all over: wouldst thou make me the staff of thy age, the crutch of thy decrepidness?

Act 3. Westminster Hall

Manly has been summonsed there to be a witness in Lady Blackacre’s law suit. There is a touch of Jarndyce and Jarndyce about a character entirely consumed by one never-ending law suit, and it gives Manly and Freeman the opportunity for conventional criticisms of the law and lawyers.

Enter Fidelia who says she’ll do anything for him, so Manly asks her to go and win back Olivia on his behalf. Obviously, Fidelia is appalled at being given a task which runs directly counter to her own wishes.

Enter Widow Blackacre surrounded by a flock of cavilling lawyers named Blunder, Quaint and Petulant, Buttongown and Splitcause, Quillit and Quirk. When the Widow exits, Freeman takes the opportunity to chat up her poor, put-upon son, Jerry, lending him money to buy a book, encouraging his hopes.

FREEMAN: Steal away the calf, and the cow will follow you.

To which the fabulous Widow replies:

WIDOW: What sir, d’ye think to get the mother by giving the child a rattle?

Anyway, Freeman arranges for one of Manly’s sailor-servants to pinch the Widow’s bags full of years of legal papers which she had left with Jerry to guard. When Jerry re-enter to say they’re all gone, the Widow is distraught, Jerry is mortified, and Freeman gets the sailor-servant to drag Jerry off to Manly’s apartments. I smell a scam!

Manly re-enters and tells Freeman that he has managed to get into three lawsuits already, just by candidly telling some lawyers and a poet what he thinks of them, before going on to dispense with a suite of other characters, Oldfox, various lawyers, an aldermen and a City merchant with withering humour, commented on by Freeman. You realise it is a deliberate gallery of London types, of men of the world – all of them fawning cheats, in Manly’s opinion.

Act 4

Scene 1. Manly’s lodging

Dialogue between Manly and Fidelia (still dressed as a man). He hopes she has come back from Olivia’s to say she won her round to his cause. Instead Fidelia says the diametric opposite, that Olivia extravagantly insulted Manly and then took her (Fidelia) in her arms and showered her with kisses and would have done more but they were interrupted, and Olivia begged her to return for an assignation.

Manly leaps to the conclusion that Fidelia is in love with Olivia, and has made the story of her abusing him up and begins attacking her.

Freeman enters and joins in a philosophical trio about Love. Then the Widow Blackacre and Major Oldfox enter. Oldfox has penned some poetry to the Widow but she comically counters with her writs and lawyer’s letters, her preferred genre of writing.

Then Freeman enters with Jerry: he has successfully corrupted the boy, who now wants to escape his mother’s apron strings and live the London life of theatres, pubs and brothels. In a confrontation the boy demands his right to a life of his own (backed up by Freeman) – but the Widow reveals that Jerry was born out of wedlock, is a bastard and so shall not inherit her jointure

Jointures crop a lot. A jointure is: ‘an estate settled on a wife for the period during which she survives her husband, in lien of a dower.’

Scene 2. Olivia’s lodging

Novel and Lord Plausible compete with each other, claiming Olivia is vowed to them. Her servant gives them each identical letters, stating she despises their rival and loves only them… except that they swap and read them out loud and realise she is tricking both of them.They leave. Olivia enters, dispenses with her serving boy and prepares to meet Fidelia in the dark, as she had earlier arranged. Except that in the darkness a new character named Vernish arrives and embraces her, Olivia enthusiastically responding. He is, we discover, her husband!

After Olivia cleverly covers her initial mistake thinking of thinking Vernish was her secret lover, we learn that Vernish has been out of town five days; it is during that time that Manly rearrived in town i.e. after encountering the Dutch in the Channel, sinking his ship and making it back to shore; and that Olivia and Vernish have deliberately conned Manly out of his money, she persuading Manly to give her his £6,000 while he appears to have given Vernish some £1,000 guineas to be held at a goldsmith’s.

They now plan to be so cruel to Manly as to encourage him back to sea where, hopefully, he will drown. Vernish goes. Olivia soliloquises, making it clear she plans to swindle him, as well.

Enter Fidelia (still dressed as a man) trailed at a distance by Manly. Olivia instantly starts kissing her but when Fidelia asks about Manly, Olivia is crushingly honest, saying she never loved the brute, only wanted him for his money – which Manly, in hiding, hears.

Olivia says she’ll just pop into the other chamber and lock the doors. This gives Manly and Fidelia time to discuss Olivia’s treachery. Manly is initially for murdering her, which Fidelia talks him out of, but then comes round to a more savage revenge, and slips into the darkened room after Olivia, presumably to ravage her pretending to be Fidelia.

But just moments later he slips out of the room again and says his savage revenge would be pointless if no-one witnesses it. Therefore he tells Fidelia to tell Olivia that she (Fidelia) has to leave, but will return same time tomorrow night. By which time Manly will have set up his scam.

Olivia returns and Fidelia successfully feigns illness (‘the falling sickness’) and so says she must leave – but promises to return tomorrow night. But she has no sooner exited than she hurries back onstage saying a man is coming up the stairs with a candle. ‘Tis Vernish! Olivia disappears into the inner room – but Vernish catches Fidelia, thinking she is a male adulterer, draws his sword and threatens to stab her.

At which point Fidelia confesses she is a woman. Vernish pulls off her wig then squeezes her breasts. Yes, she is a woman! Still angry and puzzled, Vernish says he’ll have one final proof that Fidelia is a woman and drags her towards the bedroom, obviously to **** her. Fidelia starts screaming.

At which point a servant enters to tell Vernish that an alderman has sent his ‘cashier’ round with some money he had promised money, and the servant is is even now coming up the stairs. Forced to abandon his attempt at ravishment, Vernish gets the servant to help him push Fidelia into an adjoining room and lock the door.

Act 5

Scene 1. Eliza’s lodgings

Eliza is just telling Olivia off for the bad reputation she’s acquired when enter Vernish who promptly tells Olivia off for consorting with a woman dressed in men’s clothes.

Olivia is greatly confused, thinking Fidelia must have persuaded Vernish that ‘he’ is a woman. Then it begins to dawn on her that Vernish might be telling the truth, that Fidelia might be a woman in disguise!

Either way, Vernish lets slip that he terrified the girl by pretending he was going to ravish her – at which point Olivia finds an opportunity to accuse Vernish of being a heartless ravisher, and in the first month of their marriage, too!

So Vernish finds himself having to apologise and gives Olivia 200 of the guineas he has just received from the cashier. He then asks Eliza to accompany i.e. take Olivia home. Vernish leaves, at which point Eliza teases Olivia about this woman dressed as a man who was no doubt the lover and gallant Olivia was boasting about, and this turns into an almighty argument, with both women ending up damning each other.

Scene 2. The Cock pub in Bow Street

Fidelia is back in her costume as a man explaining to Manly how s/he managed to persuade Vernish that s/he was a woman. Manly is now desperate to know what Olivia’s husband looks like, but Fidelia didn’t get a clear view (the room was darkened). So in a bid to find out, Manly insists that Fidelia send a note telling Olivia she will visit again, tonight, at seven.

Enter Freeman who asks Manly why, now that he’s poor (he gave Olivia all his money), he doesn’t call on old friends and old obligations. This is a prompt for Manly to give an extended explanation of his misanthropy.

Disappointed in Manly, Freeman leaves to carry on his schemes re. the Widow Blackacre.

Enter Vernish to meet Manly amid a great display of enthusiasm and, sure enough, he does turn out to be the One Good Friend In The World Manly thinks he has while the audience, of course, knows Vernish is gulling and robbing him.

The conversation turns immediately to Olivia and Vernish joins in hypocritically damning her for a mercenary… Until Manly claims to have slept with her, at which point Vernish (who we know is Olivia’s ‘secret’ husband becomes genuinely angry. Manly sends him, as his best friend, to ask if Olivia will give him even a little of his money back.

The buzzing fops, Novel, Lord Plausible and Oldfox barge into Manly’s room, leading to comedy at their pretensions and foibles, namely stupid Novel insisting it is a sign of great wit to make loud noises and break windows.

This is just business to pass the time during which Vernish is supposed to have gone and asked Olivia for some of Manley’s money. Now he re-enters the room, and Manly kicks the fops out. Vernish tells Manly that Olivia told him to go to hell.

Vernish is still uncertain whether Olivia’s slept with Manly or not but, in any case, in an aside, confesses he would gladly slit Manly’s throat. Some friend!

In a scene drenched in dramatic irony, Manly laughs with Vernish about what a poor, wretched cuckold Olivia’s husband must be, about how he has been sending a go-between to Olivia who persuaded the fool he was a woman, and how he – Manly – now has an appointment with Olivia, as the time is coming up to 7.30 at night.

Vernish is confused and angry, he’s sure Fidelia was a woman, why is Manly describing him as a man? (Because Manly doesn’t yet realise that Fidelia is a woman, that’s why.) Manly goes to keep his appointment and Vernish shares his bewilderment with us, his plan to catch them at it (whatever it is) and his abiding hatred of Manly. He is a genuinely bad man.

Cut to Manly arranging with Freeman for the latter to scour all the drinkers in the pub and bring them all to Olivia’s place in half an hour precisely. Manly wants as many people as possible to witness his humiliation of her.

Scene 3. Another room in the Cock pub

Widow Blackacre suborns some professional perjurers and lying witnesses she will need in her next court case.

She has barely finished and dispatched them before Major Oldfox appears with a waiter who overcomes the widow and ties her to her chair and gags her! Is Oldfox going to rape her? No. Worse! He is going to read her his poetry!!

But he hasn’t even started before Freeman, Jerry, three bailiffs a constable and his assistants all burst into the room. They untie the Widow, Oldfox scarpers, but they haven’t come for him, they’ve come to serve an enormous suit on the Widow for ten thousand pounds!

This has all been cooked up by Freeman who now tells the Widow there’s only one way out of it which is to marry him. But the Widow is a legal expert, and suggests instead that she pays all his debts and settle an annuity on him. Hmmm, Freeman throws in £40 a year for Jerry (and free access to the Widow’s maid’s bedroom) and it’s a deal. He has lawyers at hand to draw up a contract.

Scene 4. Olivia’s lodging

Olivia has barely welcomed Fidelia (followed silently by Manly) into her darkened chambers and is leading her to the bed, than there are sounds at the door, which is locked and starts to be forced.

Panicking that it is her husband, Olivia tells Fidelia they’ll climb out the window down a rope made of curtain.

In the dark Olivia just has time to give Manly – thinking he is Fidelia – her purse and cabinet (presumably containing all the money she took from Manly) and disappear out the window, before Vernish forces the door and charges at Manly with his sword out.

In the pitch black, Manly unswords Vernish and throws him to the floor, Olivia returns and embraces Manly thinking him Fidelia, at which point Freeman, Novel, Plausible, Jerry and Widow Blackacre all barge in carrying torches.

So it is finally revealed that Vernish, pinned to the floor – Manly’s best friend – is Olivia’s husband. Manly is appalled.

In the struggles Fidelia’s wig has fallen off and she is revealed as a woman! She makes a speech about how she has loyally loved and followed Manly everywhere. Realising the depth of her loyalty, Manly pledges his love to her, too, and gives her the cabinet and purse.

Olivia and Vernish exit after being admonished, and now condemned to live as faithless man and wife in poverty.

Fidelia announces her family name is Grey and her father left her £2,000 a year. Money money money is always the ultimate subject of Restoration comedy.

The philosophy of Love

For thousands of years writers have been anatomising, categorising and philosophising about Love. Huge swathes of these Restoration comedies are devoted to this subject of apparently endless fascination and are stuffed with sweeping generalisations about men, women and Love.

MANLY: Why, what did you hear me say?
FREEMAN: Something imperfectly of love, I think.
MANLY: I was only wondering why fools, rascals, and desertless wretches, should still have the better of men of merit with all women, as much as with their own common mistress, Fortune.
FREEMAN: Because most women, like Fortune, are blind, seem to do all things in jest, and take pleasure in extravagant actions. Their love deserves neither thanks, nor blame, for they cannot help it: ’tis all sympathy; therefore, the noisy, the finical, the talkative, the cowardly, and effeminate, have the better of the brave, the reasonable, and man of honour; for they have no more reason in their love, or kindness, than Fortune herself.
MANLY: Yes, they have their reason. First, honour in a man they fear too much to love; and sense in a lover upbraids their want of it; and they hate anything that disturbs their admiration of themselves; but they are of that vain number, who had rather show their false generosity, in giving away profusely to worthless flatterers, than in paying just debts. And, in short, all women, like fortune (as you say) and rewards, are lost by too much meriting.

I find this stuff quite exhausting to read. It is tempting to skim over this eternal opinionising about men and women and Love in order to get to the plot, where people discuss actual events and plans and schemes, and where there is a lot more comedy.

Anti-women propaganda

MANLY: Yes; for she is not (I tell you) like other women, but can keep her promise
MANLY: for women’s wants are generally the most importunate solicitors to love or marriage.
OLIVIA: Well, we women, like the rest of the cheats of the world, when our cullies or creditors have found us out, and will or can trust no longer, pay debts and satisfy obligations with a quarrel, the kindest present a man can make to his mistress, when he can make no more presents.
FREEMAN: Well, you see now, mistresses, like friends, are lost by letting ’em handle your money; and most women are such kind of witches, who can have no power over a man, unless you give ’em money: but when once they have got any from you, they never leave you till they have all. Therefore I never give a woman a farthing.

Insulting servants

Olivia calls her servant, Lettice, ‘you dowdy’, ‘insatiable creature’, you buffle-headed stupid creature you’, and the boy who serves her ‘you little unthinking fop’, ‘you heedless little animal’ and so on. Manly curses his sailor-doormen as rogues

The Widow Blackacre

Is a quite marvellous comic creation. All the scenes with her come vividly to life. Her language is supercharged with vitriol and imaginative insult. She is a kind of female Falstaff, and a magnificent invention. Voltaire, himself a playwright, considered her ‘the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage’ (Letters Concerning The English Nation, 1733).

More seventeenth century reviews

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by Simon on July 24, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Theatre

Posted by Simon on July 24, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/24/the-plain-dealer-william-wycherley/

The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1675)

“It is a good representation of the age in which that Comedy was written, at which time love and wenching were the business of life, and the gallant manner of pursuing women was the best recommendation at Court.”
(Richard Steele commenting on a revival of The Country Wife in 1709)

Coming fresh from reading George Etherege’s The Man of Mode, The Country Wife immediately struck me as more wordy and less funny. I liked Dorimant and Medley in The Man of Mode, they had quick, funny repartee. Horner, the lead character in The Country Wife, and his two aristocratic sidekicks, Harcourt and Dorilant, don’t have dialogue so much as speeches which try to outdo each other in their studied cynicism, which I found rather wearing:

HARCOURT: Mistresses are like books. If you pore upon them too much, they doze you, and make you unfit for company; but if used discreetly, you are the fitter for conversation by ’em.
DORILANT: A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town; not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away, to taste the town the better when a man returns.

At moments like this the play feels almost like sitting through a corporate presentation where successive members of the Board line up to bombard you with repetitive endorsements of the company’s achievements, except in this case each character is trying to outdo the previous one’s cynicism about women or marriage.

Maybe each actor took it in turns to make his cynical speech, did a little bow to indicate when it ended then waited for the audience to applaud his breath-taking cynicism, before the next actor stepped forward to cap it.

HARCOURT: Most men are the contraries to that they would seem. Your bully, you see, is a coward with a long sword; the little humbly-fawning physician, with his ebony cane, is he that destroys men.
DORILANT: The usurer, a poor rogue, possessed of mouldy bonds and mortgages; and we they call spendthrifts, are only wealthy, who lay out his money upon daily new purchases of pleasure.
HORNER: Ay, your arrantest cheat is your trustee or executor; your jealous man, the greatest cuckold; your churchman the greatest atheist; and your noisy pert rogue of a wit, the greatest fop, dullest ass, and worst company.

Pause, applause.

The plot

Brief plot summary

Harry Horner pretends to be impotent so as to sleep with more women. His friends Harcourt and Dorilant ridicule the idiotic fop, Sparkish, and Harcourt falls in love with Sparkish‘s intelligent and honourable fiancée, Alithea. Meanwhile, quick-tempered, miserly Pinchwife has married a simple country woman and brings her up to London where he hopes to keep her away from all corrupting influences by locking her up in her bedroom whenever he goes out. But nonetheless she quickly catches the corrupt manners of the times, and also falls in love with Horner.

More detailed plot summary

Three plotlines are entwined. Libertine Harry Horner has paid a doctor to declare he’s had an operation which has made him impotent, a eunuch, and to publicise the fact. When respectable women visit he abuses them in a misanthropic way, indicating he is past ‘the chase’.

And so he uses the cover of impotence to chat up aristocratic women, well, one aristocratic woman, Lady Fidget, whose husband – Sir Jasper Fidget – is cheerfully convinced Horner presents no threat. Horner progresses from this first conquest, by steady steps, to being admitted into the personal chambers and changing rooms of a number of posh women. In Act 4 Sir Jasper even encourages his wife to go into a locked room with Horner – from which they emerge laden with double entendres about him taking her from behind – and thinks none the worse of it. Horner‘s doctor looks onto this scene from a hiding place in disbelief.

Horner has a gang of two libertine friends, Frank Harcourt and Dick Dorilant. They enjoy mocking a fourth man, a would-be libertine who is incredibly dim and slow, Sparkish. Sparkish is scheduled to marry his lady love, Alithea, the next day, but Harcourt falls in love with her and proceeds to woo her in a series of different contexts and scenes.

The running gag is that Sparkish is so convinced that his friends (Horner, Harcourt and Dorilant) love and respect him as ‘one of them’ that he lets Harcourt say all kinds of things to Alithea right in front of him, convinced it is all just harmless rakeish joshing – a level of idiocy which convinces Alithea that Sparkish is too stupid to marry.

In Act 3 Harcourt dresses up as a chaplain to perform the marriage of Alithea and Sparkish during which he plans to steal Alithea away. Alithea spots the deception but dim Sparkish believes Harcourt‘s absurd story that he is his own twin brother.

The third plotline concerns another semi-rake, Pinchwife (who is Sparkish‘s brother) who has been away to the country and there married a wonderfully beautiful wife – Margery – who is utterly ignorant of the cynical worldly ways of the big city. Pinchwife brings Margery up to London but makes a whole series of classic errors, for example introducing her to Horner, Harcourt and Dorilant, letting her go to the theatre and so on, so that she slowly catches on to Big City ways and, by Act 4, has fallen in love with Horner who saw her at the theatre (despite Pinchwife‘s best efforts to keep her hid, in fact despite the numerous times he locks her into her bedroom whenever he goes out).

In Act 5 there is quite a funny scene where three aristocratic ladies ask Horner to make up a four for cards, and proceed to reveal their feminine secrets, before it finally emerges that Horner is sleeping with all three of them! They vow to form a sisterhood to keep it secret, but then Mrs Pinchwife arrives and threatens to reveal everything.

At which point Sir Jasper arrives and there is a mini crisis. For the first time, Jasper dimly begins to suspect that Horner has been faking impotence all this time – before Alithea and Harcourt and Sparkish arrive and convince him that, yes, Horner really is incapable of love.

Eventually everything is sorted out. With the help of the doctor, Horner maintains his reputation for impotence – and his three noble lovers. Sparkish realises he has been done out of Alithea who, realising he is an imbecile, has married Harcourt. And Mrs Pinchwife is reluctantly persuaded to abandon her schoolgirl crush on Horner, go back to Pinchwife and both of them go and rusticate in the country.

That’s the end of the plot which is signalled by the arrival of the maskers and singing and dancing.

Abuse

There are some fine comic moments, for example the scenes where:

Harcourt woos Alithea right in front of Sparkish who insists it’s all just harmless joshing is so preposterous, it’s funny
So convinced is he of Horner’s impotence, that Lord Jasper virtually forces his wife to go into a locked chamber with Horner to ostensibly discuss ‘china’. It becomes clear from the context that they have made this not only an ad hoc code word for sex, but, apparently, for semen, for the ‘load’ which a woman receives during sex. They emerge from the locked room to find another of Horner’s mistresses has just arrived who, when she hears what has been going on, also demands to be taken into the locked room to discuss ‘china’, while Horner humorously pleads that he has used up his current supply but will be full again by the evening. I can’t see any way this refers to anything other than his semen, and this explains why the ‘china’ scene became the most notorious of any restoration comedy, and was seized on by religious critics of these plays as the ultimate in sordid smut.
It is a broad comic revelation moment when the three women playing cards – Lady Fidget, Mrs Fidget and Mrs Squeamish – all realise Horner has been sleeping with them. Even funnier when they go on, in a sisterly way, to say ‘Oh well, such is life, but we’d better make pact to hide it from the world’. At moments like this you realise the plays revel in upturning all ‘moral standards’ about sex, and showing people as hypocrites who are only interested in keeping up appearances.

These are some of the more striking, extreme and funny situations. But nonetheless, I still felt the overall style was very wordy – that Wycherley’s characters made short speeches at each other rather than engaging in dialogue.

And, apart from feeling lectured and harangued throughout, I also felt the text sometimes descended into sheer abuse.

Bullying

For a start when the three caballeros, Horner, Harcourt and Dorilant gang up on the idiot fop, Sparkish, it really does feel like ganging up. It reminds me of bullying at school. They insult him to his face, at length, and Harcourt makes a joke of making love (i.e. chatting up) Sparkish’s wife, Alithea, right in front of him, but which poor Sparkish insists is just ordinary banter between such such gallants, such beaux as him and his best friends – an attitude Alithea justly describes as ‘invincible stupidity’.

But my point is, the audience is encouraged to laugh at Sparkish’s stupidity and gullibility as much as the characters on stage. I found all the scenes with Sparkish in, too close to bullying and/or taking the mickey out of a rather slow person to be truly funny.

Woman-hating

Loath though I am to admit it, this play began to make me see the point of the feminist critics who talk about the ‘misogyny’ of Restoration culture. You can argue a lot against it – that the characters’ attitude is often one of general misanthropy, that the women make as sweeping generalisations and criticism of men (‘Men in love be fools’) as the men do of women, that everyone takes the mickey out of the older generation (‘grave Matrons and old rigid Husbands’), of husbands (100% of husbands exist to be cuckolded and ridiculed) and wives (exist to be seduced), of their servants (exist to be insulted). Everyone despises and ridicules the country, and so on.

Nonetheless, by half-way through this play I began to feel a bit sick of the sweeping, insulting generalisations the men are continually making about women.

HORNER: Well, a Pox on love and wenching. Women serve but to keep a Man from better Company.
PINCHWIFE: Well, there is no being too hard for Women at their own weapon, lying,
HORNER: Indeed, Madam, the time was I only hated virtuous Women, but now I hate the other too.
HORNER: Ay, Women are as apt to tell before the intrigue as Men after it, and so show themselves the vainer Sex.
PINCHWIFE: Why should Women have more invention in love than men? It can only be because they have more desires, more soliciting passions, more lust, and more of the Devil.
PINCHWIFE: Come let me lock you up in your chamber till I come back. And be sure you come not within three strides of the window when I am gone. (Exit Mrs. Pinchwife. Pinchwife locks the door.) If we do not cheat women, they’ll cheat us.
PINCHWIFE: Our sisters and daughters, like usurers’ money, are safest when put out; but our wives, like their writings, never safe, but in our closets under lock and key.

Cutting and pasting them out like this does bring out the fact that the two most misogynist characters are singled out for that quality i.e. it is not universal across all the male characters. That Horner makes many speeches belittling women in his disguise as a eunuch, and Pinchwife is intended to be an extreme character, a miserly, paranoid fool (a ‘stingy country coxcomb’).

Whereas other characters, such as jovial Sir Jasper or affable Harcourt, have much more balanced and reasonable opinions about women, and quite a few of the female characters give as good as they get.

SQUEAMISH: That Men of parts should take up with and spend fortunes in keeping little Playhouse Creatures, foh!
LADY FIDGET: All Men of honour desire to come to the test. But indeed, generally you Men report such things of yourselves, one does not know how or whom to believe.

Still. I found the sustained atmosphere of women-denigrating negative and unpleasant.

SPARKISH: Come, she and you must go dine with me. Dinner’s ready, come. But where’s my Wife? Where is she?
PINCHWIFE: Making you a Cuckold, ’tis that they all do as soon as they can.

Threats

Once or twice characters descend from insults into blunt threats of violence. These may come off onstage, they may have a kind of wild humour to them when acted – but reading them cold just felt horrible.

PINCHWIFE to his wife: Write as I bid you, or I will write “Whore” with this knife in your Face… I will stab out those eyes that cause my mischief. (Holds up the knife)

Now, Pinchwife is intended to be an angry, paranoid, foolish character in a play which is itself made out of exaggerations and stereotypes. Pinchwife’s ill-tempered threats to draw his sword at the drop of a hat, against men or women or anyone who asperses his honour are a conscious comic motif. But still…

Much more than in the Behn or the Etherege plays, I felt the characters were like robots going through cleverly constructed motions, like pieces of Swiss clockwork. Each scene is cleverly constructed, but the characters in it felt as if they had little or nothing to do with robots of the same name appearing in other scenes. There is little in the way of character no psychological depth, nothing resembling character development. Each avatar is more like a bundle of mechanical responses to mechanically assembled and highly contrived situations.

I vaguely thought I liked Restoration comedy till I came to reread these plays and realised how dry, how mechanical and contrived, how regularly unpleasant, and above all what very hard work they are to read.

More seventeenth century reviews

More seventeenth century reviews

The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter by George Etherege (1676)

‘Damn your authors, Courtage; women are the prettiest things we can fool away our time with.’
(Sir Fopling Flutter)

Sir George Etherege (1636 to 1692) came from a middle-class family, may or may not have gone to Cambridge (the record is unclear), he definitely studied law at the Inns of Court then went to Paris with his Royalist father.

Etherege who wrote just three plays, but the first, The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub, holds the distinction of being the first new play performed in London’s theatres after they were re-opened at the restoration of Charles II in 1660. It was premiered in 1664 and although most of it consisted of old-style heroic verse, it contained comic scenes depicting sophisticated banter between men and women which were entirely new and caught the spirit of the new age.

Etherege holds a distinguished place in English literature as one of the ‘big five’ in Restoration comedy – George Etherege, William Congreve, William Wycherley, George Farquhar, and Sir John Vanbrugh. He is credited as the playwright who invented the comedy of manners and led the way to the achievements of Congreve and Sheridan.

The second of Etherege’s plays, She Would if She Could, was performed in 1668. It is ‘a comedy of action, wit and spirit, although censured by some as frivolous and immoral’. In it Etherege first showed at length the fantasy version of contemporary London in which flirtation is the only serious business in life.

The Man of Mode was the third of his plays and the most celebrated.

The Man of Mode

The protagonist of The Man of Mode is Dorimant, a notorious libertine and man-about-town. He is said to have been based on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the most notorious debaucher in Charles II’s court of noted debauchers and by far the most obscene poet in English literature (but then, as such a notorious figure, Rochester’s name was easily attached to any fictional libertine).

Brief plot summary

The libertine Dorimant tries to win over the young heiress Harriet, and at the same time disengage himself from his previous affair with Mrs. Loveit. Despite the subtitle, the ‘man of mode’, Sir Fopling Flutter, is only one of several marginal characters.

Extended plot summary

Act I Dorimant’s chambers

– The story opens with Dorimant addressing a billet-doux to Mrs. Loveit, with whom he is having an affair, to lie about his whereabouts. A working class orange seller, Foggy Nan, is admitted to his rooms and informs him about the arrival in London of grand Lady Woodvil and her beautiful heiress daughter, Harriet, who’s been watching and asking about Dorimant.

Dorimant‘s closest friend and fellow rake Medley arrives and offers more information about Harriet ‘vastly rich’. Dorimant expresses his wish to break off his relationship with Mrs. Loveit, being already involved with her younger friend Bellinda. The two friends plot to encourage Mrs. Loveit‘s jealousy by getting a woman acquaintance to talk up Dorimant‘s new affair so that when Dorimant visits her, Mrs L will be furious and it will be she who ends the relationship. Comic interlude with the poor shoemaker.

Young Bellair, the handsome acquaintance of both men, enters and relates his infatuation with Emilia, a woman serving as companion to his aunt, Lady Townley. His relatively innocent devotion is ridiculed. Admiration of Dorimant in his fine suit leads into news that the noted fop Sir Fopling Flutter has newly arrived in London from Paris. Bellair reports that he’s been attending the theatre and visiting Mrs Loveit.

This is perfect for Dorimant‘s plan because he can accuse Mrs Loveit of intriguing with Fopling. Bellair exits and returns with the news that his father has arrived in town and is lodging in the same place as his Emilia – i.e. at Lady Townley‘s. (Lady Townley and Old Bellair are sister and brother i.e. Bellair is Old Bellair‘s son and Lady Townley‘s nephew). Old Bellair informs his son that he has arranged a marriage for him and he must be obedient or be disinherited.

A letter arrives from a semi-literate whore Dorimant is ‘seeing’ begging for money, and Dorimant and Medley think it will be an excellent joke to give her some so she can go and lord it at the opera.

Act II

Scene 1. At Lady Townley’s – Lady Townley and Emilia discuss the arrival of Bellair‘s father. Bellair pops by briefly to tell them his father insists he marries the rich heiress, Harriet. Old Bellair flirts with Emilia unaware his son is in love with her. (Young Bellair has acquiesced in his father’s wishes for the time being.) Medley arrives and entertains the ladies with the latest gossip from round town.

Scene 2. Mrs. Loveit and her servant Pert, who asks Mrs L why she likes Dorimant despite his ignoring her. Belinda arrives: if you remember, Dorimant‘s plan is to get Belinda to describe Dorimant paying excessive attention to a masked woman at the theatre, and so make Mrs Loveit mad with jealousy. The plan works perfectly and by the time Dorimant breezes in Mrs L is furious and accuses him of unfaithfulness.

In his defence, Dorimant a) accuses Belinda of libelling him (they both know this is play acting) and b) counter-attacks with the accusation that Mrs L is spending her time with Sir Fopling. She is scandalised at this lie but Dorimant storms out. Mrs L is livid and vows hellfire and revenge, that was part of the plan – not part of the plan is the way Belinda is unsettled at seeing how cynically Dorimant plays Mrs Loveit and, not unnaturally, wonders if he will behave the same when it comes to dumping her.

Act III

Scene 1. At Lady Woodville’s – Harriet is stroppy and difficult with her servant, Busy. She is very similar to Hellena in The Rover i.e. she is a canny, scheming witty woman, as clever as any man, yet at the same time claims to know nothing of love, to be an innocent in the ways of love:

HELLENA: I wou’d fain know as much as you, which makes me so inquisitive; nor is’t enough to know you’re a Lover, unless you tell me too, who ’tis you sigh for.
FLORINDA: When you are a Lover, I’ll think you fit for a Secret of that nature.
HELLENA: ’Tis true, I was never a Lover yet…
(The Rover)

HARRIET: I know not what ’tis to love, but I have made pretty remarks by being now and then where lovers meet. Where did you leave their gravities?…
DORIMANT: Where had you all that scorn and coldness in your look?
HARRIET: From nature, sir; pardon my want of art: I have not learnt those softnesses and languishings which now in faces are so much in fashion
(The Man of Mode)

Harriet is the young woman Old Bellair wants his son to marry but a) Bellair is in love with Emilia b) Harriet has taken a fancy to Dorimant. Realising that they are mismatched, Bellair and Harriet make a comically cynical vow to be unfaithful and not in love with each other, and this leads into a comic sequence where they then play-act being bashful young lovers, wryly commenting on each other’s performance of the cliches of love as they do so, for the benefit of their parents, ‘their gravities’ as they call them, Lady Woodvil and Old Bellair.

Scene 2. At Lady Townley’s Lady T and Emilia and Medley are gossiping when Belinda arrives and tells them how upset Mrs Loveit is, and has barely finished explaining her fury at Dorimant before Dorimant himself arrives. Bellinda complains about his behaviour but lets herself be talked into a) persuading Mrs L to go to the Mall later so Dorimant can contrive a meeting between her and Fopling b) agreeing to a romantic rendezvous with Dorimant.

Enter Sir Fopling Flutter but Dorimant cautions Medley not to mock him – he needs him for his plan. So Dorimant and Medley slyly encourage Sir Fopling to play up, to exaggerate his knowledge of Paris, fashion, his fine clothes, and his ornate way of speaking. Mistaking their encouragement for genuine friendship, Fopling falls for the idea that Mrs Loveit fancies him.

Scene 3. The Mall A complex scene of multiple encounters and conversations, the chief of which are: Dorimant for the first time meets Harriet; her guardian Lady Woodvil is there, scared of this wicked devil Dorimant she’s heard so much about, but she is led by the other characters to mistake Fopling for Dorimant. Fopling turns out to be a genuine hit with Mrs Loveit, at least she pretends so, and as she and Fopling leave amid much laughter, Medley ribs Dorimant that seeing her laughing and happy has made him jealous. Dorimant tries to deny it, but it’s true.

Act IV

Scene 1. At Lady Townley’s – A big dance. Old Bellair has asides to the audience in which he makes it plain he is in love with Emilia. Dorimant is there, masquerading as one ‘Mr Courtage’ because Harriet’s guardian, Lady Woodvil, has an exaggerated fear of ‘Dorimant’. In this guise of Courtage, Dorimant enjoys politely playing up to old Lady Woodvil‘s prejudices about the good old days and these horrible modern times.

DORIMANT: Forms and ceremonies, the only things that uphold quality and greatness, are now shamefully laid aside and neglected.
LADY WOODVIL: Well! this is not the women’s age, let ’em think what they will; lewdness is the business now, love was the business in my time.

It is a bravura display of disguise and play-acting, a core ingredient of Restoration comedy.

Dorimant engages in extended repartee with Harriet and, in an aside, tells the audience that he loves her. Sir Fopling turns up in masquerade, with a retinue of French musicians and nearly gives the game away by calling Dorimant by his name, till Dorimant tells him he is here under the pseudonym Mr Courtage.

All the characters encourage Sir Fopling to boast about his time in Paris and then encourage him to dance, not realising they are guying him. Dorimant becomes impatient because he had made an appointment with Belinda who – we have seen in some asides – didn’t like his way of putting off Mrs Loveit. Dorimant now scares Lady Woodvil by claiming that the wicked Dorimant is present in disguise, proceeds to see the ladies to their coaches, then heads off home, these latter (offstage) activities reported by young Bellair as he enters to see Old Bellair and Medley.

Scene 2. Dorimant’s lodgings Seems like Dorimant and Belinda have had sex. She is regretting it and begging Dorimant not to tell anyone, and never to see Mrs Loveit in private again. In the middle of this semi-argument, the servant announces the arrival of Bellair, Medley and Fopling. Mortified, Belinda exits down the backstairs.

Once the men have entered, Fopling makes a fool of himself, singing a new song he has written, and the others encourage his ‘love’ of Mrs Loveit, before departing. Dorimant confides to the others he’s quickly off to Mrs Loveit‘s.

Scene 3. The men carrying the chair Belinda is escaping from Dorimant‘s lodgings in take her to Pall Mall instead of home. As she gets out of the chair, she is spied by Mrs Loveit‘s footman who is nearby. Damn! The first night she’s spent with Dorimant and she bumps someone who’ll tell his former – and vengeful – lover.

Act V

Scene 1. Mrs Loveit’s Belinda’s arrival is announced by the very same servant who saw her being set down in Pall Mall by ‘Ambling Harry’ who Mrs Loveit knows is the chairman who plies from Dorimant‘s house i.e. Mrs Loveit immediately guesses that Belinda is having an affair with Dorimant. In the same moment, she suspects the part Belinda played in making her angry with Dorimant in Act 1 i.e. that she conspired with Dorimant against her.

MRS LOVEIT: There is no truth in friendship neither. Women as well as men – all are false, or all are so to me at least.

But Belinda just about manages to save the day. She had threatened the chairman with the sack unless they lie and say they picked her up in the Strand. When Mrs Loveit sends her man to interrogate the chairmen, they duly tell this lie – that they picked Belinda in the Strand, not at Dorimant‘s – and as a result Mrs Loveit decides Belinda was telling the truth after all and feels guilty at suspecting her.

At that moment Dorimant is announced, as visiting Mrs Loveit and now Belinda is horrified to discover that the man she’s just slept with and swore faithfulness to her, is, within the hour, paying a visit to his old lover. As a result Belinda feels faint and Mrs Loveit‘s servant, Pert, takes her into the other room to lie down. Pert delivers some pretty ripe double entendres about something lying heavy on her stomach (i.e. she detects that Belinda has recently had sex).

Enter Dorimant and he and Mrs Loveit proceed to have a terrific quarrel circling round the idea that by being seen laughing with Fopling she has debased herself and humiliated him. He throws the love letters she sent him back in her face.

Dorimant is just telling Mrs Loveit that, if it’s true she has no feelings for Fopling, she should meet him one more time in Pall Mall and laugh him to scorn – when Belinda is brought back into the room.

Dorimant is thunderstruck to see her, realising she will realise he is there to pay court to Loveit. Belinda joins Mrs Loveit in scorning Dorimant, through only he and the audience know that there is the real animus of a scorned lover behind her words. When even Pert joins in the chorus of women damning him, Dorimant knows it’s time to leave.

Mrs Loveit orders a servant to follow him and exits breathing fury and revenge. Leaving Belinda solo wondering why on earth she ever slept with Dorimant.

Scene 2: Lady Townley’s Things come to a head. Medley and Bellair and Mrs Townley have invited a chaplain who has already married Bellair and Emilia – but they have barely kissed before Old Bellair arrives with Harriet and a chaplain who he has hired to marry Bellair to Harriet — so they bundle chaplain 1 into a hiding place!

While things are on hold, Emilia teases Harriet that she loves Dorimant, which Harriet denies. Dorimant promptly arrives and he and Harriet have an extended dialogue in which she matches him point for point, as he declares his true, unironical love and she refutes, rejects and disbelieves him.

Chaplain 1 is released from his hiding place as Old Bellair returns onstage and amazes the old man by announcing that his son is already married!

Enter Belinda and Mrs Loveit. Now the entire cast is onstage. Dorimant sort of makes it up to Mrs Loveit by explaining ‘the other woman’ is Harriet who he is motivated to marry because her fortune will patch up his ruined estate. Dorimant tries to make it up to Belinda i.e. sleeping with her and promptly marrying someone else…

Meanwhile, Harriet rebels against Lady Woodvil and announces that she loves Dorimant. Fopling turns up and Mrs Loveit rebuts him. He doesn’t care; he is writing a wonderful ballet which will entrance the entire sex!

Harriet is blunt to Mrs Loveit, saying Dorimant has been her god long enough. Mrs Loveit vows to go home and never go out again. Why not go to a nunnery? says Harriet rudely.

Lady Woodvil now discovers that the man she thought was named Mr Courtage is none other than the wicked Dorimant, but everyone speaks in his favour and he was so sweet to her earlier that her heart has softened and she almost approves of him marrying her (rich) niece. She doesn’t agree to their wedding straight away, but Dorimant breaks the habits of a lifetime and promises to come and visit Harriet in her big empty country house.

Harriet then has a speech making it sound empty and lonely, echoing to the sound of rooks. It’s an odd and powerful image in what is otherwise such an urban, London play.

The play ends with music and dancing and Old Bellair encourages the audience to congratulate his son and Emilia.

Cynical manipulation of others

The entire plot consists of the rake Dorimant’s attempts to juggle his various love affairs. There is genuinely heartless cynicism in the way he plans to simply dump Mrs Loveit simply because he’s bored of her. Dorimant’s entire life is devoted to toying with women:

‘Next to the coming to a good understanding with a new mistress, I love a quarrel with an old one; but the devil’s in’t, there has been such a calm in my affairs of late, I have not had the pleasure of making a woman so much as break her fan, to be sullen, or forswear herself these three days.’

Presumably these attitudes were deliberately exaggerated, their heartlessness and cynicism played up, to make them more ‘shocking and comic.

Cynicism about people’s behaviour, specially round sexual morality

‘I have known many women make a difficulty of losing a maidenhead who have afterwards made none of a cuckold.’

When you ponder statements like this you realise there is nothing funny about them except insofar as they are wilfully cynical, the humour derives from the conveying of an entire worldview about love and sex and men and women which is elaborately, exaggeratedly, cynical and superficial.

The cultivation of sin and immorality

The aristocratic figures seek to promote licentiousness and drunkenness at every available opportunity. Thus when Dorimant dismissively orders Medley to give the shoemaker half a crown, Medley insists it is only on condition that the shoemaker uses it to get ‘bloody drunk’.

Conservative moralists had, for centuries, thought a chief defence of having an aristocratic class was that they should provide models of morality for the masses to copy. Clearly, there is a cynical pleasure to be had in puffed-up aristocrats behaving in exactly the opposite manner, spitting in the faces of Puritans and other earnest social reformers, mocking any attempts to take more or less anything seriously.

The reversal of values

In this upside-down world it is virtuous to womanise, to drink to get drunk, to gamble away fortunes, to toy with women’s affections, to cynically manipulate all around you. Religion – real genuine religious faith – is ridiculed, and education is scorned as leading to the production of shallow fops.

‘[Fopling] is like many others, beholding to his education for making him so eminent a coxcomb; many a fool had been lost to the world had their indulgent parents wisely bestowed neither learning nor good breeding on ’em.’

Parents and the older generation are mocked for their seriousness. Harriet ironically refers to her and Bellair’s parents as ‘their gravities’. In fact, everything is mocked.

Wit and repartee

Shakespeare’s comedies are full of banter and word play, which can, admittedly, sometimes get knotted and dense. Sometimes the flow of puns and double meanings in Shakespeare confuses even the people exchanging them (which can then be another cause of humour).

Restoration comedy uses much plainer language in the sense that it is more purely factual. There is occasional wit and set pieces of repartee, particularly between the rake figure and the clever female lead, but even here the play is between ideas more than words, as such. Overall there is a greater focus on elegance of expression, on a kind of melliflousness. The kind of clever word play which clots Shakespearian comedy is largely absent.

Gamini Salgado in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the play says of Etherege’s prose style, compared to that of the first half of the century, that it has a more orderly and elegant rhythm, but is harder and less resonant. I would add that the language has lost almost all its poetic force. Metaphors of sin and redemption and love’s flames etc feel mechanical, have become an empty social conventional rhetoric.

Anyway, that’s how language was used between knowing aristocrats, at any rate. Regarding the rude mechanicals or working classes, there is a lot more of what you could call simple abuse. Dorimant casually insults all the lackeys, servants and tradespeople he comes into contact with, describing the orange woman and shoemaker as ‘vermin’, ‘double tripe’, ‘a cartload of scandal’ and other amusing insults. His footman he describes as ‘eternal blockhead and sot’.

The class-based nature of his arrogance is combined with ultra-cynicism when he tells the shoemaker:

‘Whoring and swearing are vices too genteel for a shoemaker’

Who in turn makes the comic point that the aristocracy will soon monopolise all the sins and vices so completely that there’ll be none left over for poor folk.

Fopling may be absurdly mannered but expresses the same upper-class prejudices as the other toffs. When a servant tells him his name is Trott, Fopling bursts out:

SIR FOPLING: Oh, unsufferable! Trott, Trott, Trott! there’s nothing so barbarous as the names of our English servants.

Insulting marriage

Salgado in his introduction makes the point that one of the clumsiest aspects of Restoration comedy is the way all the characters cynically abuse the institution of marriage for the first four acts, before suddenly converting to thinking it the most perfect state of being, in the fifth.

There are certainly some choice insults of marriage here:

‘’Zbud, there’s never a man i’ the town lives more like a gentleman with his wife than I do. I never mind her motions, she never inquires into mine; we speak to one another civilly, hate one another heartily, and because ’tis vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several settlebed.’

Old Bellair explains to his son:

OLD BELLAIR: You need not look so grum, sir; a wife is no curse when she brings the blessing of a good estate with her.

Elsewhere, Medley comments:

‘Your nephew ought to conceal it for a time, madam, since marriage has lost its good name.’

References to ‘this age’

It is part of the mystique or worldview of the plays that they are being staged in a specially depraved time:

DORIMANT: An antiquated beauty may be allowed to be out of humour at the freedoms of the present.
OLD BELLAIR: I like her countenance and her behaviour well, she has a modesty that is not common i’ this age.
LADY WOODVIL: The depraved appetite of this vicious age tastes nothing but green fruit, and loathes it when ’tis kindly ripened [i.e. prefers young girls to mature women]

1. There’s a kind of self-regarding, self-satisfaction with living in such a very depraved time. 2. Every age has considered itself especially fallen and corrupt – you can find the same kind of references in literature from the ancient Greeks, through Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Gender stereotypes

Feminist critics generally have it in for all these male Restoration writers. Jane Spenser in her introduction to The Rover repeatedly refers to the ‘misogyny’ of the Restoration literary world, and there is, without doubt, an enormous amount of anti-women rhetoric, and cynical manipulation of women characters.

But reading these plays without the blinkers of feminist ideology, it’s just as obvious that all the characters are stereotyped, manipulated and mocked. The most manipulated and mocked person in this play is a man, Sir Fopling Flutter, who exists solely to be laughed at. Other entire groups are mocked; for example the entire older generation are ridiculed, all servants and the entire working class are ridiculed.

And, in these plays, men are subject to just as much withering criticism and virulent stereotyping as women. In fact the plays work through the systematic stereotyping of both genders:

Stereotyping women

‘Faith, women are i’ the right when they jealously examine our letters, for in them we always first discover our decay of passion’
MEDLEY: I wait upon you, and I hope (though women are commonly unreasonable)…
YOUNG BELLAIR: ’Tis not unnatural for you women to be a little angry if you miss a conquest, though you would slight the poor man were he in your power.
EMILIA: There are afflictions in love, Mr. Dorimant.
DORIMANT: You women make ’em, who are commonly as unreasonable in that as you are at play…
MRS LOVEIT: Those noisy fools, however you despise ’em, have good qualities, which weigh more (or ought at least) with us women than all the pernicious wit you have to boast of…
DORIMANT: There is an inbred falsehood in women which inclines ’em still to them whom they may most easily deceive.
MEDLEY: Besides, ’tis a common error among women to believe too well of them they know and too ill of them they don’t.
MEDLEY: Like a woman, I find you must be struggled with before one brings you to what you desire…
HARRIET: Did you not tell me there was no credit to be given to faces? that women nowadays have their passions as much at will as they have their complexions, and put on joy and sadness, scorn and kindness, with the same ease they do their paint and patches—Are they the only counterfeits?

If you only quote these kinds of statements, then the plays can be made to look monstrously misogynist. But they need to be balanced with the scores of times when men are mocked, stereotyped and ridiculed.

Stereotyping men

MRS LOVEIT: There’s nothing but falsehood and impertinence in this world; all men are villains or fools.
DORIMANT: Indeed, the little hope I found there was of her, in the state she was in, has made him by my advice contribute something towards the changing of her condition. [enter YOUNG BELLAIR] Dear Bellair, by heavens I thought we had lost thee; men in love are never to be reckoned on when we would form a company.
HARRIET: The sordidness of men’s natures, I know, makes ’em willing to flatter and comply with the rich, though they are sure never to be the better for ’em
HARRIET: Mr. Bellair! let us walk, ’tis time to leave him; men grow dull when they begin to be particular.
MEDLEY: But I have known men fall into dangerous relapses when they have found a woman inclining to another.
HARRIET: Men are seldom in the right when they guess at a woman’s mind; would she whom he loves loved him no better!
HARRIET: In men who have been long hardened in sin we have reason to mistrust the first signs of repentance
MRS LOVEIT: There’s nothing but falsehood and impertinence in this world; all men are villains or fools.

Mocking both sexes

And then there are plenty of places where characters mock both sexes equally, in effect ridiculing the human race.

HARRIET: That women should set up for beauty as much in spite of nature as some men have done for wit!
MRS LOVEIT: He bring her! His chair stands near Dorimant’s door, and always brings me from thence – Run and ask him where he took her up; go, there is no truth in friendship neither. Women as well as men – all are false, or all are so to me at least.
MRS LOVEIT: The man who loves above his quality does not suffer more from the insolent impertinence of his mistress than the woman who loves above her understanding does from the arrogant presumptions of her friend.

Stereotyping the old and their silly laments for the good old days

LADY WOODVIL: Well! this is not the women’s age, let ’em think what they will; lewdness is the business now, love was the business in my time.
LADY WOODVIL: Unsufferable at thirty! That they are in the wrong, Mr. Courtage, at five-and-thirty there are living proofs enough to convince ’em.
DORIMANT: Ay, madam, there’s Mrs Setlooks, Mrs Droplip, and my Lady Lowd; show me among all our opening buds a face that promises so much beauty as the remains of theirs…

Stereotyping Jews

MEDLEY: Is it not great indiscretion for a man of credit, who may have money enough on his word, to go and deal with Jews who for little sums make men enter into bonds and give judgments?

Stereotyping the lower classes

HARRIET: She [Harriet’s servant, Busy] has a voice will grate your ears worse than a cat-call, and dresses so ill she’s scarce fit to trick up a yeoman’s daughter on a holiday.

Stereotyping the dullness of the countryside

YOUNG BELLAIR: Are you in love?
HARRIET: Yes, with this dear town, to that degree I can scarce endure the country in landscapes and in hangings.
YOUNG BELLAIR: What a dreadful thing ’twould be to be hurried back to Hampshire?
HARRIET: Ah! name it not!

Or:

BELINDA: Pity me rather, my dear, where I have been so tired with two or three country gentlewomen, whose conversation has been more insufferable than a country fiddle.

Or:

MRS LOVEIT: Where do these country gentlewomen lodge, I pray?
BELINDA: In the Strand, over against the Exchange.
PERT: That place is never without a nest of ’em; they are always as one goes by fleering in balconies or
staring out of windows.

HARRIET: This is more dismal than the country, Emilia; pity me who am going to that sad place.

In other words, the entire play is a tissue of stereotypes. The characters repeat almost nothing but stereotypes, cliches and truisms, which the audience are intended to recognise with a knowing smile, and applaud. Picking out only the anti-women sentiments seems to me to miss the bigger picture of the generally misanthropic cynicism of the total worldview.

P.S. A mirror up to society

The verse prologue, written by the improbably named Sir Car Scrope, contains a particularly clear expression of the age-old doctrine that the theatre holds up a mirror to society.

For, heaven be thank’d, ’tis not so wise an age
But your own follies may supply the stage.
Though often plough’d, there’s no great fear the soil
Should barren grow by the too frequent toil,
While at your doors are to be daily found
Such loads of dunghill to manure the ground.
’Tis by your follies that we players thrive,
As the physicians by diseases live;
And as each year some new distemper reigns,
Whose friendly poison helps t’increase their gains,
So among you there starts up every day
Some new unheard-of fool for us to play.

More seventeenth century reviews

More seventeenth century reviews

The Rover, or The Banished Cavaliers by Aphra Behn (1677)

‘I know not what thou mean’st, but I’ll make one at any Mischief where a Woman’s concerned’
(Willmore, the Rover of the title)

Aphra Behn (1640 to 1689) is generally considered the first professional woman writer in English literature. She wrote poems, essays and prose narratives but in her own day was best known as the author of some 18 plays, indeed she was second only to the poet laureate John Dryden in terms of theatrical productivity. The Rover is by common consent the most polished and entertaining of her plays.

In fact The Rover comes in two parts, each a self-contained five-act Restoration comedy. Part two contains some though not all of the same characters and so is a sequel, though it was never as popular as the original. Both were heavily plagiarised from a similarly two-part, ten-act play, Thomaso, or The Wanderer, written by the Royalist exile and companion of Charles II, Thomas Killigrew. Thomaso was never performed onstage but was published in 1663 to 1664. Behn comprehensively rewrote it, turning its turgid style and long wordy speeches into brisk comic dialogue.

The argument

The Project Gutenberg online edition is prefaced by a prose summary of the plot. Here it is with my additions and comments:

During the exile of Charles II a band of cavaliers, prominent amongst whom are Willmore (the Rover), Belvile, Frederick, and Ned Blunt, find themselves at Naples in carnival time. Belvile, who at a siege at Pamplona (in Spain) has rescued a certain Florinda and her brother Don Pedro, now loves the lady, and the tender feeling is reciprocated. Florinda’s father, however, designs her for the elderly Vincentio, whilst her brother would have her marry his friend Antonio, son to the Viceroy.

Belville, Fred and Blunt greet Willmore who has just arrived by boat in Naples in company of ‘the Prince’ (the implication being the exiled Charles II). Florinda, her sister Hellena (who is intended for the veil i.e. to become a nun), their cousin Valeria, and their duenna Callis surreptitiously visit the carnival, all in masquerade, and there encounter the cavaliers. Florinda flirts with Belvile and arranges to meet him that night at her garden-gate. Willmore is bewitched by the ready wit of Hellena who is pretending to be a gypsy.

Meanwhile a picture of Angelica Bianca, a famous courtesan, is publicly exposed, guarded by bravos. Antonio and Pedro dispute who shall give the 1,000 crowns she demands for her ‘favours’, and draw swords. After a short fray Willmore, who has boldly pulled down the picture, is admitted to the house, and declares his love, together with his complete inability to pay the price she requires. Angelica, none the less, falling in love at first sight, yields to him.

Hellena and Florinda appear in the street below, the latter mocking Hellena for so suddenly and completely falling in love with the man she briefly met earlier (Willmore). Belvile and pals arrive, knock at Angelica’s door and get Willmore sent out to them. Wilmore makes it plain he has slept with Angelica. Hellena, eavesdropping, hears all this from a hiding place and is heart-broken, but when she confronts him Willmore outfaces the situation and resumes his ardent courtship of her, which is detected by the jealous Angelica, who has followed him vizarded.

In the same scene Florinda in disguise had approached and talked to Belvile, trying to seduce him, but found him loyal to the women he’s in love with which, she realises, is her. She gets him to promise to meet her in ‘the garden’ that evening and leaves a pledge with her which he realises, once she’s gone, is a little picture of his beloved.

A comic interlude in which simple honest Essex gentleman Ned Blunt is enticed back to her house by a very willing whore, Lucetta, who lures him up to her bedroom, where she hops into bed and asks him to strip off, which he promptly does. But as he stumbles towards her a) the lights go out b) the bed moves (a piece of comic mechanism) and c) Ned tumbles through a trapdoor down into a sewer – leaving Lucetta and her pimp Philippo to count the gold they find in Blunt’s clothes. The scene cuts to New Blunt emerging from the mouth of the sewer, very smelly and very sorry.

Florinda that night goes to the garden gate to meet Belvile, but encounters Willmore who is drunk and tries to ravish her. Her cries attract Belvile and Fred, who interrupt drunk Willmore, but then immediately her brother, Don Pedro, and the servants. Florinda just has time to tell Belvile to come back and loiter under her bedroom window later, before she escapes back into the house where she pretends to be fast asleep. Don Pedro and servants beat off Willmore et al who run away.

Willmore has to endure the reproaches of Belvile, who is furious with him for assaulting his beloved. They have wandered to the front of Angelica’s house, where they hide as Antonio approaches and makes as about to enter the house. Because he still feels linked to Angelica Willmore staggers forward and attacks Antonio with his sword, wounding him, before reeling offstage. Belvile goes to Antonio‘s aid just as officers run up and arrest him, conveying him by Antonio’s orders to the Viceroy’s palace.

Antonio comes to Belvile in his cell, with his arm in a sling, and they make friends, Antonio asks Belvile to wear a mask (vizard) and impersonate him in a duel he has to fight with Florinda‘s brother, Don Pedro. Florinda intervenes to part them and Don Pedro gallantly assigns his sister to him thinking he is Antonio. (Florinda refuses to be bullied but then Belvile pulls up his mask and reveals to her it is him.) But just as things are panning out well, Willmore staggers up and knocks Belvile’s mask off, Don Pedro realises it is he, and drags Florinda away.

Belvile is even more furious with Willmore and when he won’t stop talking, draws his sword and chases him offstage.

Angelica next comes in hot pursuit of Willmore. She accuses him of faithlessness, he gets bored and wants to hasten off to an appointment with the ‘gypsy’. They are interrupted by the ‘gypsy’ – in reality, Hellena, who arrives dressed as a boy. She tells a tale of the Rover’s amour with another dame and so rouses the jealous courtesan to fury, with Willmore intervening and beginning to suspect this young lad is Hellena. These scenes are getting confusing. Willmore makes excuses and leaves Angelica lamenting that all her beauty cannot hold such a treacherous man.

Florinda, meanwhile, who has escaped from her brother, running into an open house to evade detection, finds herself in Ned Blunt’s apartments. Blunt is sitting half-clad in a very angry mood, reflecting on having been stripped and duped by the whore Lucetta. Florinda throws herself on his mercy but he vows to use and abuse her:

Cruel, yes, I will kiss and beat thee all over; kiss, and see thee all over; thou shalt lie with me too, not that I care for the Injoyment, but to let you see I have ta’en deliberated Malice to thee, and will be revenged on one Whore for the Sins of another; I will smile and deceive thee, flatter thee, and beat thee, kiss and swear, and lye to thee, imbrace thee and rob thee, as she did me, fawn on thee, and strip thee stark naked, then hang thee out at my Window by the Heels, with a Paper of scurvey Verses fasten’d to thy Breast, in praise of damnable Women

Enter Fred who begins to believe Florinda‘s protestations, especially when she mentions Belvile and how he will thank them if they are kind to her. Hmm. Blunt‘s determination on revenge is mollified by the present of a diamond ring, but at this moment a servant announces his friends and Don Pedro are arriving, so they lock Florinda away.

Belvile had told him Don Pedro that Blunt was a fool and would be a good source of amusement. Now, despite his protestations, they break down the door to his rooms and, sure enough, all have a good laugh at Blunt’s expense. But he insists he’s going to have the last laugh and take it out on another Italian whore. But when he shows them the diamond ring Florinda gave him, Belvile immediately recognises it as the love token he gave Florinda much earlier in the play. However, the rest of the company are determined to ‘enjoy’ her as much as Blunt, and in fact draw straws in the shape of drawing their swords to find out whose is longest. Ironically, it is Don Pedro‘s who is promptly sent into the room where Florinda is hiding in order to ravish her – his own sister! Florinda comes running out pursued by Don Pedro, but she is in disguise and he doesn’t recognise her.

A servant arrives and tells Don Pedro his sister is not safe at home – as he thought – but has run off dressed as a page. He makes his excuses and leaves. The moment he’s gone Belvile acknowledges Florinda, they leap into each other’s arms, Willmore says, so this is the woman you’ve been pining for all along’, Fred begs her pardon. A boy is sent out to fetch a priest and Florinda and Belvile go into the other room to be married.

They leave Willmore to protect the pass in case anyone arrives to interrupt the ceremony but who arrives is Angelica in disguise. Willmore totally gives himself away by excitedly hoping it is his ‘gypsy’ i.e. Hellena. Infuriated, Angelica puts a pistol to his chest and is about to shoot him dead. She follows him round the stage as he outdoes himself with a stream of justifications of the cynical debaucher’s attitude.

To everyone’s surprise Antonio walks in, still wearing the sling from where Willmore wounded him last night and takes the pistol off Angelica. But when he realises the man she was threatening is his attacker from last night, he himself threatens Willmore. At which moment Don Pedro enters and overhears Angelica and Antonio declaring their love. Antonio! The man he intended to marry his sister, Florinda!

Also Don Pedro is angry because he challenged Antonio to a duel and Antonio sent a deputy, an impersonator in disguise, who turned out to be Belvile, his own rival. Don Pedro is angry with him and say, as soon as his arm has recovered, he’ll challenge him to another duel. He leaves and Pedro says he is so angry with the man whose cause he tried to promote, he is in a mood to give his sister to Belvile.

Funny you should say that, says Willmore – they are in the other room and have just got married. At which point they emerge and Pedro gives Belvile and his sister his heartiest congratulations. They exit and Willmore is about to follow them when he is accosted by Hellena. There follows a really long dialogue of wits, and he finds he is attracted to her wit and intelligence. He discovers he is ready to marry her. In a comic moment he asks if he may know her name.

The rest of the cast re-enter and Pedro is initially furious that his other sister is being ravished away, the one intended for a nunnery but, in another comic moment, bold Hellena asks the cast whether she should throw in her lot with Heaven or with the Captain:

Hellena: Let most Voices carry it, for Heaven or the Captain?
All cry: a Captain, a Captain.
Hellena: Look ye, Sir – ’tis a clear Case.

Enter Ned Blunt looking ludicrous in a badly fitting Spanish outfit, to give everyone a laugh.

Then enter a group of mummers passing by to the masquerade, who are invited in to play music and dance, thus rounding the play out with music and gaiety.

And the very last lines are to Willmore, the rover himself, as he leads Hellena into the adjoining room to be married.

Willmore: Have you no trembling at the near approach [of marriage]?
Hellena: No more than you have in an Engagement or a Tempest.
Willmore: Egad, thou’rt a brave Girl, and I admire thy Love and Courage.

Lead on, no other Dangers they can dread,
Who venture in the Storms o’ th’ Marriage-Bed.

And thus this convoluted series of shenanigans comes to an end. It is obviously designed to amuse a sophisticated London theatre audience, a large part of which would be precisely the kind of amoral aristocrats the play depicts, so they would enjoy seeing their lifestyle depicted on stage – while others would enjoy moralising about them.

The gossip instinct

It struck me the play is a kind of concatenation of gossip in the sense that

the characters on stage spend almost all their time gossiping about each others affairs’
they spend a lot of time pondering and reflecting and – in effect – gossiping about their own affairs
and this complicated spectacle prompts members of the audience, or readers, to gossip about the gossip – to approve or disapprove of Willmore, to opine that Florinda is too hard or too soft etc

You know the magazines you get at supermarket checkouts which are stuffed full of stories about the stars of TV soaps or presenters of Good Morning Britain or Loose Women, the endless supply of tittle tattle about celebrities going out, getting married, getting pregnant, being unfaithful, splitting up with their partners, getting back together with their partners? Well – it’s like them.

The academics who introduce plays and texts like this are paid to write about them in terms of ‘gender representation’ and ‘female agency’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ and Restoration ‘misogyny’ and the handy cover-all term, ‘The Patriarchy’ (all these terms can be found in the Oxford World Classics introduction to The Rover).

I don’t deny that these are real things, are valid ideas, interpretations, and worth exploring – although the solid wall of feminist interpretation laid over everything like carpet felt, does often get very monotonous, monoglot and wearing.

But I’m suggesting something much simpler and more obvious. These plays – Restoration plays – full of theatrical artifice, 18th century language and elaborate games as they may well be – also appeal to the basic human instinct for Gossiping. They cater to the same love of judging and moralising about other people’s (‘ooh that Willmore!’) as the endless celebrity tittle-tattle which fills the Daily Mail.

Comedy

Also, it is easier to moralise and judge than to write about humour. It is notoriously difficult to write about comedy – to convey in a flat essay the thousand and one things which make an audience smile or laugh, from ironic asides, tone of voice, sarcasm, pratfalls, bathos, grotesque characters, comic mistakes, comic business with props, gags with punchlines and so on.

Much easier to grandly state that a narrative ‘subverts’ 18th century ‘gender stereotypes’ – any schoolgirl can write that kind of thing these days, it’s taught at GCSE and A-level and at university: anybody writing like that is just faithfully parroting what their teachers taught them degree level. Much harder to pinpoint just why The Rover is the brightest and funniest of Behn’s plays.

For example, when Hellena points out that aged Don Vincenzio may increase Florinda’s ‘Bags but not her family‘ I take it as a sly dig at his probable impotence, to be said with a knowing leer to the audience to trigger a fnah fnah laugh. Or, in the same speech, Hellena vividly pictures the scene as her young sister is forced, night after night, to accompany the aged Don Vincencio to his bed. After she has performed the disgusting task of undressing him…

That Honour being past, the Giant stretches it self, yawns and sighs a Belch or two as loud as a Musket, throws himself into Bed, and expects you in his foul Sheets, and e’er you can get your self undrest, calls you with a Snore or two – And are not these fine Blessings to a young Lady?

What middle-aged wife would not recognise this unflattering portrait of her husband? It reminds me of the jokes about unromantic age which fill the TV series Last of The Summer Wine

Clichés and conventions

Italy

It is set in Italy. The wickedest reprobates and comic plots are always Italian (cf Shakespeare comedies with their endless Antonios). In fact, there are multiple reasons for its foreign locatio:

– The nations of Europe (and of Britain) were freely stereotyped. Italy was thought to have very devious and sophisticated people – suiting both comedies or tragedies that depended on plot devices like deception and treachery

– Italians were thought to be more hot-blooded and passionate than the phlegmatic Brits (a belief which runs through the 18th and 19th centuries, underpins countless novels and continues, in some quarters, up to this day) – thus allowing for a degree of sexual passion which might not be believable in Brits

I like their sober grave way, ’tis a kind of legal authoriz’d Fornication, where the Men are not chid for’t, nor the Women despis’d, as amongst our dull English;

– Italians were popularly known for their violence – always quick to grab a sword or dagger – as in Romeo and Juliet

Yes: ’Tis pretty to see these Italian start, swell, and stab at the Word Cuckold,

– The weather is better in Italy – so the people are more often outside – in gardens, streets and so on, bumping into each other and thus providing the potential for countless complicated comic permutations. It never rains in plays like this as, of course, it regularly rains in England, keeping people trapped moodily indoors.

Blunt: What a Dog was I to stay in dull England so long

– Also there was the simple pleasure that it was a foreign country with an exotic language, food, customs etc there was a sort of mental tourism in seeing plays in Italy

Faith I’m glad to meet you again in a warm Climate, where the kind Sun has its god-like Power still over the Wine and Woman.

Spain

Same sort of thing –

Belvile: Remember these are Spaniards, a sort of People that know how to revenge an Affront.

But with the difference that Britain had little or no military or geographical interest in Italy, whereas we were at war with Spain for a good deal of the 16th century and were major rivals for imperial territories, for example in the Caribbean. Behn has the whore Lucetta’s pimp Philippo find gold pieces from ‘Old Queen Bess’s reign in Ned Blunt’s waistband and comment:

We have a Quarrel to her ever since Eighty Eight, and may therefore justify the Theft,

I.e. the character is made to say that the Spanish have had a quarrel with the British since 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, the attempt at an amphibious invasion of England which was designed to overthrow the Protestant queen and impose a Catholic Spanish dictatorship, all blessed by the Pope. The Armada had taken place about 70 years before the play’s production, so the same length of time as separates us from the Second World War, which we still remember and commemorate.

Therefore English writing about Spain often has a more bitter or harder edge, whereas Italy had and still has, fewer negative connotations. So it is a little notable that so many of the actual characters are Spanish. Still, the same hot-blooded, exotic rules apply.

English

Also, being set abroad allows some of the characters to ridicule the home audience, the English, which is also humorous.

This is a stranger, I know by his gazing; if he be brisk he’ll venture to follow me; and then, if I understand my Trade, he’s mine: he’s English too, and they say that’s a sort of good natur’d loving People, and have generally so kind an opinion of themselves, that a Woman with any Wit may flatter ’em into any sort of Fool she pleases.

Which might have brought ironic cheers from the London audience.

Young woman struggling to be free

A young woman is being forced to marry an old man by her wicked father for the money (Florinda being hustled to marry aging but rich Don Vincentio).

The young couple

Whereas the young woman wants to marry a dashing young hero: There is a pair of young lovers – Florinda and Don Belvile.

The confidante

The young woman has a comic confidante to provide a running comic commentary on the main action and make cynical asides and jokes. This leaves the heroine free to express only Noble and Dignified sentiments – in this instance the cynical humorous confidante is her sister Hellena.

The two couples

In fact, as the play unfolded I realised there are two couples. This, apparently, is a core, stock convention of Restoration comedy:

A particularly appealing feature is the contrast between two pairs of lovers. The ‘gay couple’ are witty and independent, with time to banter and tease their way to choosing a marriage partner. Through them, the complexities of commitment could be explored… The second couple are constant and unexciting. Their path to true love is thwarted by outside forces, usually in the shape of a blocking character – Don Pedro in The Rover…
(An Introduction to Restoration Comedy)

Rogue male

There is an outstanding, amoral, rakish, predatory male figure – Willmore, the Rover.

Thou know’st I’m no tame Sigher, but a rampant Lion of the Forest.

Haste

Things always have to be done in a hurry. This is itself a structural requirement of the theatre where it is difficult to convey the passage of months or years. Instead the action must follow pell-mell. Over and above the difficulty of conveying the passage of time, haste and deadlines also simply create tension, energy, dynamism – sweep the audience up in the action – and, of course, prompt the characters to all kinds of desperate behaviour they might not take. Thus when Don Pedro tells his sister, Florinda, that he wants to organise her marriage to young Antonio we can be confident it will trigger all kinds of desperate behaviour.

Dressing up

The masked ball or masquerade or disguise is a key element of comedy from ancient Rome to modern pantomime. The feminist scholars of the play get excited because the masquerade allows characters to ‘subvert the gender roles’ imposed on them by ‘misogynist Restoration society’. But in fact dressing up allows for two really basic elements of comic theatre, namely:

1. Freedom

You can get away with saying and doing things in disguise which you wouldn’t think of trying normally:

Will. But why thus disguis’d and muzzl’d?
Belv: Because whatever Extravagances we commit in these Faces, our own may not be oblig’d to answer ’em.

2. Comic misunderstanding

Where characters say things to each other which match the outfits and characters they’ve adopted, but are wildly inappropriate to the actual characters we – the audience – know them to be.

3. Serious understanding

Having read The Rover carefully it dawns on me that dressing up as someone else is also a way of discovering the real motives and character of the person you have designs on, as in the complex scene where Belvile dresses as Antonio and can sound out Don Pedro’s real character; or where Hellena dresses as a young man in order to assess Willmore‘s relationship with Angelica.

Also – people like dressing up for parties. It makes them feel special excited, in a party mood. Thus characters on stage – which have already been simplified and heightened for the audience’s enjoyment – become twice as simplified and heightened. Comedy squared.

Politics

Behn was a devoted Royalist. The play is set in the 1650s and Belvile, Willmore, Frederick and Blunt are all English courtiers in exile from the Roundhead, republican government of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell.

Gentlemen, you may be free, you have been kept so poor with Parliaments and Protectors, that the little Stock you have is not worth preserving—but I thank my Stars, I have more Grace than to forfeit my Estate by Cavaliering.

There are lots of little indications e.g. when Belvile introduces Blunt to Willmore as one of us’.

Belvile: Yet, Sir, my Friends are Gentlemen, and ought to be esteem’d for their Misfortunes, since they have the Glory to suffer with the best of Men and Kings; ’tis true, he’s a Rover of Fortune, yet a Prince aboard his little wooden World.

Class distinction

There is an interesting moment when Colonel Belvile gives a satirical portrait of Ned Blunt, one of their party for sure, but an honest country English gentleman who – it is implied – the more urban, worldly Belvile and Willmore despise.

Willmore: Prithee what Humour is he of…?
Belvile: Why, of an English Elder Brother’s Humour, educated in a Nursery, with a Maid to tend him till Fifteen, and lies with his Grand-mother till he’s of Age; one that knows no Pleasure beyond riding to the next Fair, or going up to London with his right Worshipful Father in Parliament-time; wearing gay Clothes, or making honourable Love to his Lady Mother’s Landry-Maid; gets drunk at a Hunting-Match, and ten to one then gives some Proofs of his Prowess—A pox upon him, he’s our Banker, and has all our Cash about him, and if he fail we are all broke.

As so often, the aristocracy are in reality dependent on the honest bourgeoisie – and despise them for it.

Fred: Oh let him alone for that matter, he’s of a damn’d stingy Quality, that will secure our Stock. I know not in what Danger it were indeed, if the Jilt should pretend she’s in love with him, for ’tis a kind believing Coxcomb;

Blunt: No, Gentlemen, you are Wits; I am a dull Country Rogue, I.

Nobody is surprised when honest Ned Blunt is swindled out of his diamond. He even hails from Essex which, right down to this day, 370 years later, is the butt of jokes.

Blunt: ’Tis a rare Girl, and this one night’s enjoyment with her will be worth all the days I ever past in Essex.—

Contemporary references

Moretta: He knows himself of old, I believe those Breeches and he have been acquainted ever since he was beaten at Worcester.

The Battle of Worcester, 3 September 1651 was the last battle of the Civil War.

Moretta: Oh Madam, we’re undone, a pox upon that rude Fellow, he’s set on to ruin us: we shall never see good days, till all these fighting poor Rogues are sent to the Gallies.

Consignment to galleys was a punishment.

Frederick: It may be she’ll sell him for Peru, the Rogue’s sturdy and would work well in a Mine;

The Spanish had used slave labour in their South American silver mines for over a century.

Blunt: I had rather be in the Inquisition for Judaism, than in this Doublet and Breeches

Tells us something about the reputation of the Italian Inquisition and its treatment of Spain’s Jews in the 1660s.

More seventeenth century reviews

More seventeenth century reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on July 17, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on July 17, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/17/the-rover-aphra-behn/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Restoration comedy

Introduction to The Plays of William Wycherley by W.C. Ward (1893)

Introduction by W.C. Ward

Comedies of Manners

Aristocratic audiences

Displays of wit

Robot characters

Licentiousness always superficial

Designed to amuse

Antidote to lust

Virtue triumphs

Women of virtue

Marriage mocked

Wycherley’s poetry

Wycherley’s character

Alexander Pope

Essay by Thomas Babington Macauley

Early life

Religious conversion

The Restoration court

The Dutch Wars

The Royal Navy

Marriage and prison

Alexander Pope

Literary reputation

Widow Blackacre

Degrading French originals

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The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)

Act 2

Act 3. Westminster Hall

Act 4

Scene 1. Manly’s lodging

Scene 2. Olivia’s lodging

Act 5

Scene 1. Eliza’s lodgings

Scene 2. The Cock pub in Bow Street

Scene 3. Another room in the Cock pub

Scene 4. Olivia’s lodging

The philosophy of Love

Anti-women propaganda

Insulting servants

The Widow Blackacre

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The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1675)

The plot

Brief plot summary

More detailed plot summary

Abuse

Bullying

Woman-hating

Threats

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The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter by George Etherege (1676)

The Man of Mode

Brief plot summary

Extended plot summary

Act I Dorimant’s chambers

Act II

Act III

Act IV

Act V

Cynical manipulation of others

Cynicism about people’s behaviour, specially round sexual morality

The cultivation of sin and immorality

The reversal of values

Wit and repartee

Insulting marriage

References to ‘this age’

Gender stereotypes

Stereotyping women

Stereotyping men

Mocking both sexes