Augustan drama
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Augustan drama can refer to the dramas of Ancient Rome during the reign of Caesar Augustus, but it most commonly refers to the plays of Great Britain in the early 18th century, a subset of 18th-century Augustan literature. King George I referred to himself as "Augustus," and the poets of the era took this reference as apropos, as the literature of Rome during Augustus moved from historical and didactic poetry to the poetry of highly finished and sophisticated epics and satire.
In poetry, the early 18th century was an age of satire and public verse, and in prose, it was an age of the developing novel. In drama, by contrast, it was an age in transition between the highly witty and sexually playful Restoration comedy, the pathetic she-tragedy of the turn of the 18th century, and any later plots of middle-class anxiety. The Augustan stage retreated from the Restoration's focus on cuckoldry, marriage for fortune, and a life of leisure. Instead, Augustan drama reflected questions the mercantile class had about itself and what it meant to be gentry: what it meant to be a good merchant, how to achieve wealth with morality, and the proper role of those who serve.
Augustan drama has a reputation as an era of decline. One reason for this is that there were few dominant figures of the Augustan stage. Instead of a single genius, a number of playwrights worked steadily to find subject matter that would appeal to a new audience. In addition to this, playhouses began to dispense with playwrights altogether or to hire playwrights to match assigned subjects, and this made the producer the master of the script. When the public did tire of anonymously authored, low-content plays and a new generation of
The middle-class tragedy
As for prose and poetry, there is no clear beginning to the "Augustan era" in drama, but the end is clearly marked. Augustan-era drama ended definitively in 1737 with the
George Lillo and Richard Steele wrote the trend-setting plays of the early Augustan period. Lillo's plays consciously turned from heroes and kings toward shopkeepers and apprentices. They emphasized drama on a household scale rather than a national scale, and the hamartia and agon in his tragedies are the common flaws of yielding to temptation and the commission of Christian sin. The plots are resolved with Christian forgiveness and repentance. Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) hinges upon his young hero avoiding fighting a duel. These plays set up a new set of values for the stage. Instead of amusing or inspiring the audience, they sought to instruct the audience and ennoble it. Further, the plays were popular precisely because they seemed to reflect the audience's own lives and concerns.
The problem of "Spectacle"
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As during the Restoration, economic reality drove the stage during the Augustan period. Under
Pantomime and tableau spectacle
The public attended when they saw their lives represented on the stage, but also attended when there was a sight that would impress them. If costumes were lavish, the sets impressive or the actresses alluring, audiences would attend. The
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The "chromatic tortures" and divas of opera
If vacant, subliterary spectacles were not enough of a threat to dramatists,
- Joy to Chaos! let Division reign:
- Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them [the muses] hence,
- Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:
- One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,
- Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;
- To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,
- And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore. (IV 55–60)
Furthermore, grand opera had a high degree of spectacle in it. In the 17th century, when opera first came to England, it prompted enormously complex theatrical stagings to present illusions of ghosts, mythological figures, and epic battles. When Handel's arrival in England spurred a new vogue for English opera, it also caused a new vogue for imported opera, no matter the content, so long as it would create an enormous visual impact. Although some of the "Tory Wits" like Pope and John Gay wrote opera librettos (the two combining for Acis and Galatea with Handel), opera was a spectacular form of theater that left too little room for dramatic acting for most of the playwrights. Pope argued in The Dunciad that Handel's operas were "masculine" in comparison to Italian and French opera. While this is a musical commentary, it is also a commentary on the amount of decoration and frippery put on the stage, on the way that Handel's operas concentrated on their stories and music rather than their theatrical effects.
It was not merely the fact that such operas drove out original drama, but also that the antics and vogue for the singers took away all else, seemingly, that infuriated English authors. The singers (particularly the sopranos) introduced London to the concept of the prima donna, in both senses of the term. In 1727, two Italian sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni, had such a rivalry and hatred of each other (the latter had been paid more than the former) that the audiences were encouraged to support their favorite singer by hissing her rival, and during a performance of Astyanax in 1727, the two women actually began to fight on stage (Loughrey 13). John Gay wrote to Jonathan Swift on 3 February 1723:
- There's nobody allow'd to say I sing but an Eunuch or an Italian Woman. Every body is grown now as great a judge of Musick as they were in your time of Poetry & folks that could not distinguish one tune from another now daily dispute over different Styles of Handel, Bononcini, and Aitillio. People have now forgot Homer, and Virgil & Caesar.
These operas were spectaculars in every sense. The personalities of the stars were before the stage, the stars were before the music, and the music before the words. Additionally, opera brought with it new stage machines and effects. Even Handel, whom Pope values as restrained and sober, had his heroine brought on stage by "two huge Dragons out of whose mouths issue Fire and Smoke" in Rinaldo in 1711.
The "problem" of spectacle continued in the 1720s and 1730s. In 1734, Henry Fielding has his tragedian, Fustian, describe the horror of a pantomime show:
- intimating that after the audience had been tired with the dull works of Shakespeare, Jonson, Pasquin, V i.)
- intimating that after the audience had been tired with the dull works of Shakespeare, Jonson,
Fustian complains as well that authors are denied stagings because of these entertainments, and, as well, that playhouse managers would steal plays from their authors. As Fustian says earlier, a playwright could spend four months trying to get a manager's attention and then "he tells you it won't do, and returns it to you again, reserving the subject, and perhaps the name, which he brings out in his next pantomime" (Pasquin IV i.).
The reemergence of satirical drama, and the Licensing Act
Toward the end of the 1720s, the behavior of opera stars, the absurdity of spectacle productions, and an escalation of political warfare between the two parties led to a reclamation of the stage by political dramatists. During the later years of King
John Gay and comic inversion
John Gay parodied the opera with his satirical
For most of the audience, the central entertainment of the opera was the
Additionally, Gay's opera was a strict
Robert Walpole, who had some personal animosity to John Gay, attended the play and enjoyed it. However, upon learning from a friend that he was one of the targets of the satire, he tried to have the play stopped. When Gay wrote a follow-up called Polly, Walpole had the play suppressed before performance. The suppression was without precedent, although it was soon to be used as a precedent, for there had been no actual attack on the ministry. The anti-ministerial (Tory) sentiment was entirely derived from interpretation.
Playwrights were therefore in straits. On the one hand, when the playhouses were not running operas imported wholesale from the continent, they were dispensing with dramatists by turning out hack-written pantomimes. On the other hand, when a satirical play appeared from a literary source, the
The new Tory wits, escalating satire, and the creation of the Licensing Act
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Robert Walpole's personal involvement in censoring entertainments critical of him only fanned the flames of the antagonism between himself and the stage. Henry Fielding, among others, was not afraid to provoke the ministry, and anti-Walpolean plays spiked after the suppression of Polly. Fielding's Tom Thumb (1730) was a satire on all of the tragedies written before him, with quotations from all the worst plays patched together for absurdity, and the plot concerned the eponymous tiny man attempting to run the kingdom and insinuate himself into the royal ranks. It was, in other words, an attack on Robert Walpole and the way that he was referred to as "the Great Man" and his supposed control over Caroline of Ansbach. As with Gay's Beggar's Opera, the miniature general speaks constantly in elevated tones, making himself a great hero, and all of the normal-sized ladies fight each other to be his lover. The contrast between reality, delusion, and self-delusion was a form of bathos that made the audience think of other grand-speaking and grandly spoken of people. If a ridiculously tiny figure could be acclaimed a hero because of his own braggadocio, might other great leaders be similarly small? Were they titans, or dwarves like Tom Thumb? Fielding announced, essentially, that the emperor had no clothes, the prime minister no greatness. Walpole responded by suppressing the performance of the play. Fielding was a justice of the peace by profession, and so he knew that the ministry could only control the stage and not book publication. Therefore, he tapped into the market for printed plays, and his revision of the play was solely in book form. It was written by "Scribblerus Secundus," its title page announced (a reference to the Scriblerus Club of Jonathan Swift, Gay, Pope, Robert Harley, Thomas Parnell, John Arbuthnot, and Henry St. John), and it was the Tragedy of Tragedies, which did for drama what Pope's Peri Bathos: or The Art of Sinking in Poetry had done for verse. Fielding placed a critical apparatus on the play, showing the sources of all the parodies, and thereby made it seem as if his target had all along been bad tragedy and not the prime minister. (Fielding's later novel, Jonathan Wild, makes it clear that such was not the case, for it used exactly the same satirical device, "the Great Man," to lambaste the same target, Robert Walpole.)
Henry Fielding was not done with ministry satire. His Covent-Garden Tragedy of 1732 was set in a
The Licensing Act required all plays to go to a censor before staging, and only those plays passed by the censor were allowed to be performed. Therefore, plays were judged by potential criticism of the ministry and not just by reaction or performance. The first play to be banned by the new Act was Gustavus Vasa by
Effects of the Licensing Act
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In comedy, one effect of the Licensing Act was that playwrights began to develop a comedy of sentiment. This comedy was critically labeled as "high" comedy, in that it was intended to be entertaining rather than actually be funny, and brought about its entertainment by elevating the sentiments of the viewer. The plots also relied upon characters being in or out of sympathy with each other. Very late in the 18th century Oliver Goldsmith attempted to resist the tide of sentimental comedy with She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would mount several satirical plays after Walpole's death. Both of these playwrights were taking advantage of a loosening of the censorship and popular weariness with "refined" comedy. Goldsmith's play reintroduces the country bumpkin character who outwits the sophisticated would-be rakes who are engaged in a plot to marry well. Sheridan, on the other hand, very consciously turned back to the Restoration comedy for his models but carefully toned down the dangers of the sexual plots.
As mentioned above, another effect of the Licensing Act was to send the playhouses to old plays. Since any play written before 1737 could be staged without permission, theaters had a great deal to choose from. However, they sought out Shakespeare, in particular, as the one author whose name alone could generate an audience as large as those formerly provided by leading poets. Shakespeare's stature had been rising throughout the 18th century, and
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Finally, authors with strong political or philosophical points to make would no longer turn to the stage as their first hope of making a living. Prior to 1737, plays were de rigueur for authors who were not journalists. This had to do with the economics of booksellers. A bookseller would purchase a book from an author, whether that book was Gulliver's Travels or Collected Sermons, and would calculate his chances of making money off of sales. He would pay the author according to the money he expected to make. (For example, Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield was famously sold to pay a single rent installment, whereas John Gay had been paid 1,000 pounds for his Poems on Various Occasions, which was more than seven years of salary for his government job). That would be the only money an author would see from the book, and therefore the author would need to produce a new version, new book, or a serial publication of the next work to have hopes of more income. Prior to 1737, novelists had come from the ranks of satirists (Jonathan Swift) and journalists (Daniel Defoe), but these novels had in common wide changes of scenery, long plots, and often impossible things (such as talking horses)—all features that made the works unsuitable for the stage. The exception was Aphra Behn, who was a dramatist first and a novelist second. Her Oroonoko seems to have been written as a novel simply because there was no time for staging, as it was a political commentary on ongoing events, and she could not have another play on the boards at the time. Her Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister, like Gulliver's Travels and Moll Flanders, was inappropriate for the stage. However, after 1737, novels began to have dramatic structures involving only normal human beings, as the stage was closed off for serious authors.
Additionally, prior to 1737 the economic motivations for dramatists were vast. A playwright received the house take of the third night of a play. This could be a very large amount of money, and it would be renewed with each season (depending upon arrangements). Thus, John Gay grew wealthy with The Beggar's Opera. In 1726, Leonard Welsted's indifferent success, The Dissembled Woman, was acted at Lincoln's Inn Fields. It netted him £138 for the author's benefit but only £30 for the printing rights. After the Licensing Act closed off hopes for serious authors on the stage, the novel was the next logical path. In particular, Samuel Richardson's Clarissa was published in serial form and made the author a substantial amount of money from subscriptions. The novel became a potentially lucrative form of publishing, and booksellers began to pay more for novels as novels began to sell more. From being a form of exigency, the novel became a form of choice after the stage was shut down by the Licensing Act. Therefore, the Licensing Act had the unintended effect of increasing rather than decreasing the power of dissenting authors, as it put a stop to anti-Walpolean sentiments and anti-ministry arguments on the stage (which could only reach audience members in London) and sent these messages instead to the novel form, where they would remain in print, pass from hand to hand, and spread throughout the kingdom.
See also
- Restoration drama
- Augustan literature
References
Bibliography
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- Cibber, Colley (first published 1740, ed. Robert Lowe, 1889). An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, vol.1, vol 2. London. This is a scholarly 19th-century edition, containing a full account of Cibber's long-running conflict with Alexander Pope at the end of the second volume, and an extensive bibliography of the pamphlet wars with many other contemporaries in which Cibber was involved.
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- D'Urfey, Tom. Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy. 6 vol. London: Jacob Tonson, 1719–1720.
- Gay, John and Alexander Pope. Acis and Galatea London: 1718. Retrieved 12 July 2005.
- Fielding, Henry. 1734. Pasquin: A Dramatick Satire on the Times Being The Rehearsal of Two Plays Viz. A Comedy Called The Election and a Tragedy Called The Life and Death of Common Sense. New York: Kessinger, 2005.
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- Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Los Angeles: U California Press, 1957.
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