Restoration comedy
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"Restoration comedy" is English
The best-known fact about the Restoration drama is that it is immoral. The dramatists did not criticize the accepted morality about gambling, drink, love, and pleasure generally, or try, like the dramatists of our own time, to work out their own view of character and conduct. What they did was, according to their respective inclinations, to mock at all restraints. Some were gross, others delicately improper.... The dramatists did not merely say anything they liked: they also intended to glory in it and to shock those who did not like it.[3]
The socially diverse audiences included aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on and a major middle-class segment. They were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, crowded and bustling plots, introduction of the first professional actresses, and the rise of the first celebrity actors. The period saw the first professional female playwright, Aphra Behn.
Theatre companies
Original patent companies, 1660–1682
Charles II was an active and interested patron of drama. Soon after his restoration in 1660 he granted exclusive staging rights, so-called
The Restoration dramatists renounced the tradition of satire recently embodied by Ben Jonson, devoting themselves to a comedy of manners that accepted the social code of the upper class uncritically.[5]
The audience of the early Restoration period was not exclusively
United Company, 1682–1695
Both the quantity and quality of drama suffered in 1682 when the more successful Duke's Company absorbed the struggling King's Company to form the United Company. Production of new plays dropped off sharply in the 1680s, affected by the monopoly and the political situation (see Decline of comedy below). The influence and incomes of actors dropped too.[7] In the late 1680s, predatory investors ("adventurers") converged on the United Company. Management was taken over by the lawyer Christopher Rich, who tried to finance a tangle of "farmed" shares and sleeping partners by slashing salaries and dangerously by abolishing traditional perks of senior performers, who were stars with the clout to fight back.[8]
War of the theatres, 1695–1700
The company owners, wrote the young United Company employee Colley Cibber, "had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people. [They] did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support."[9] Performers like the legendary Thomas Betterton, the tragedienne Elizabeth Barry and the rising young comedian Anne Bracegirdle had the audience on their side, and confident of this walked out.[10]
The actors gained a Royal "licence to perform", so bypassing Rich's ownership of the original Duke's and King's Company patents from 1660 and forming their own cooperative company. This venture was set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority, regulating the ten actors' shares, setting the conditions of salaried employees and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories. The cooperative had the good luck to open in 1695 with the première of
London again had two competing companies. Their dash to attract audiences briefly revitalised Restoration drama, but also set it on a fatal slope to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Rich's company notoriously offered Bartholomew Fair-type attractions – high kickers, jugglers, rope dancers, performing animals – while the co-operating actors, while appealing to snobbery by setting themselves up as the one legitimate theatre company in London, were not above retaliating with "prologues recited by boys of five and epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback".[12]
Actors
First actresses
Restoration comedy was strongly influenced by the first professional actresses. Before the closing of the theatres, all female roles had been taken by boy players and the predominantly male audiences of the 1660s and 1670s were curious, censorious and delighted at the novelty of seeing real women engage in risqué repartee and take part in physical seduction scenes. Samuel Pepys refers many times in his diary to visiting the playhouse to watch or re-watch performances by particular actresses and to his enjoyment of these.
Daringly suggestive comedy scenes involving women became especially common, although of course Restoration actresses were, just like male actors, expected to do justice to all kinds and moods of plays. (Their role in the development of Restoration tragedy is also important, compare She-tragedy.)
A speciality introduced almost as early as actresses was the
Successful Restoration actresses included Charles II's mistress
First celebrity actors
Male and female actors on the London stage in the Restoration period became for the first time public celebrities. Documents of the period show audiences attracted to performances by the talents of specific actors as much as by specific plays, and more than by authors (who seem to have been the least important draw, no performance being advertised by an author until 1699). Although playhouses were built for large audiences – the second Drury Lane theatre from 1674 held 2000 patrons – they were compact in design and an actor's charisma could be intimately projected from the thrust stage.
With two companies competing for their services from 1660 to 1682, star actors could negotiate star deals, comprising company shares and benefit nights as well as salaries. This advantage changed when the two companies were amalgamated in 1682, but the way the actors rebelled and took command of a new company in 1695 is in itself an illustration of how far their status and power had developed since 1660.
The greatest fixed stars among Restoration actors were Elizabeth Barry ("Famous Mrs Barry" who "forc 'd Tears from the Eyes of her Auditory") and Thomas Betterton, both active in running the actors' revolt in 1695 and both original patent-holders in the resulting actors' cooperative.
Betterton played every great male part there was from 1660 into the 18th century. After watching
Comedies
Variety and dizzying fashion changes are typical of Restoration comedy. Though the "Restoration drama" unit taught to college students is likely to be telescoped in a way that makes the plays all sound contemporary, scholars now have a strong sense of the rapid evolution of English drama over these 40 years and its social and political causes. The influence of theatre-company competition and playhouse economics is also acknowledged.
Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to marked maturity in the mid-1670s with an extravaganza of aristocratic comedies. Twenty lean years followed this short golden age, though the achievement of Aphra Behn in the 1680s can be noted. In the mid-1690s a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience. The comedies of the golden 1670s and 1690s peak times are extremely different from each other. An attempt is made below to illustrate the generational taste shift by describing The Country Wife (1675) and The Provoked Wife (1697) in some detail. The two plays differ in some typical ways, just as a Hollywood movie of the 1950s differs from one of the 1970s. The plays are not, however, offered as "typical" of their decades. Indeed, there exist no typical comedies of the 1670s or the 1690s; even within these two short peak-times, comedy types kept mutating and multiplying.
Aristocratic comedy, 1660–1680
The drama of the 1660s and 1670s was vitalised by the competition between the two patent companies created at the Restoration, and by the personal interest of Charles II, while comic playwrights arose to the demand for new plays. They stole freely from the contemporary French and Spanish stage, from English
The unsentimental or "hard" comedies of
Example. William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675)
The Country Wife has three interlinked but distinct plots, which each project sharply different moods:
1. Horner's
2. The married life of Pinchwife and Margery draws on Molière's
3. The courtship of Harcourt and Alithea is a comparatively uplifting love story, in which the witty Harcourt wins the hand of Pinchwife's sister Alithea from the hands of the upper-class town snob Sparkish, to whom she was engaged until discovering he loved her only for her money.
Decline of comedy, 1678–1690
When the two companies merged in 1682 and the London stage became a monopoly, both the number and the variety of new plays dropped sharply. There was a swing away from comedy to serious political drama, reflecting preoccupations and divisions after the
. Behn's achievement as an early professional woman writer has been the subject of much recent study.Comedy renaissance, 1690–1700
During a second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of
In Congreve's Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), the "wit duels" between lovers typical of 1670s comedy are underplayed. The give-and-take set pieces of couples still testing their attraction for each other have mutated into witty prenuptial debates on the eve of marriage, as in the famous "Proviso" scene in The Way of the World (1700). Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife (1697) follows in the footsteps of Southerne's Wives' Excuse, with a lighter touch and more humanly recognisable characters.
Example. John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife (1697)
The Provoked Wife is something of a Restoration problem play in its attention to the subordinate legal position of married women and the complexities of "divorce" and separation, issues that had been highlighted in the mid-1690s by some notorious cases before the House of Lords (see Stone).
Sir John Brute in The Provoked Wife is tired of matrimony. He comes home drunk every night and is continually rude and insulting to his wife. She is meanwhile tempted to embark on an affair with the witty and faithful Constant. Divorce is no option for either of the Brutes at this time, but forms of legal separation have recently arisen and would entail separate maintenance for the wife. Such an arrangement would prevent remarriage. Still, muses Lady Brute, in one of many discussions with her niece Bellinda, "These are good times. A woman may have a gallant and a separate maintenance too."
Bellinda is meanwhile grumpily courted by Constant's friend Heartfree, who is surprised and dismayed to find himself in love with her. The bad example of the Brutes is a constant warning to Heartfree not to marry.
The Provoked Wife is a talk play, with the focus less on love scenes and more on discussions between friends, female (Lady Brute and Bellinda) and male (Constant and Heartfree). These are full of jokes, but are also thoughtful, with a dimension of melancholy and frustration.
After a forged-letter complication, the play ends with marriage between Heartfree and Bellinda and stalemate between the Brutes. Constant continues to pay court to Lady Brute, and she continues to shilly-shally.
End of comedy
The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was running out by the end of the 17th century, as public opinion turned to respectability and seriousness faster than playwrights did. Interconnected causes for this shift in taste were
After Restoration comedy
Stage history
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the sexual frankness of Restoration comedy ensured that theatre producers cannibalised it or adapted it with a heavy hand, rather than actually performed it. Today Restoration comedy is again appreciated on stage. The classics – Wycherley's The Country Wife and The Plain-Dealer, Etherege's The Man of Mode, and Congreve's Love For Love and The Way of the World – have competition not only from Vanbrugh's The Relapse and The Provoked Wife, but from such dark, unfunny comedies as Thomas Southerne's The Wives Excuse. Aphra Behn, once considered unstageable, has had a renaissance, with The Rover now a repertory favourite.
Literary criticism
Distaste for sexual impropriety long kept Restoration comedy off the stage, locked in a critical poison cupboard. Victorian critics like William Hazlitt, though valuing the linguistic energy and "strength" of the canonical writers Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve, found it necessary to temper aesthetic praise with heavy moral condemnation. Aphra Behn received the condemnation without the praise, as outspoken sex comedy was seen as particularly offensive from a woman author. At the turn of the 20th century, an embattled minority of academic Restoration comedy enthusiasts began to appear, such as the editor Montague Summers, whose work ensured that plays of Restoration comedy authors remained in print.
"Critics remain astonishingly defensive about the masterpieces of this period," wrote Robert D. Hume as late as 1976. It is only over the last few decades that the statement has become untrue, with Restoration comedy acknowledged as a rewarding subject for high theory analysis, and Wycherley's
List of Restoration comedies
- George Etherege – The Comical Revenge (1664), She Would If She Could (1668), The Man of Mode (1676)
- Marriage a la Mode(1672)
- Charles Sedley – The Mulberry-Garden (1668), Bellamira: or, The Mistress(1687)
- George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham – The Rehearsal (1671)
- William Wycherley – Love in a Wood (1671), The Country Wife (1675), The Plain Dealer (1676)
- Thomas Shadwell – Epsom Wells (1672), The Virtuoso (1676), A True Widow (1678), The Woman Captain (1679), The Squire of Alsatia (1688), Bury Fair (1689), The Volunteers (1692)
- Edward Ravenscroft – The Careless Lovers (1673) The London Cuckolds (1681), Dame Dobson (1683), The Canterbury Guests (1694)
- John Crowne – The Country Wit (1676), City Politiques (1683), Sir Courtly Nice (1685), The English Friar (1690), The Married Beau (1694)
- Thomas Rawlins – Tom Essence (1676), Tunbridge Wells (1678)
- The Lucky Chance(1686)
- Thomas D'Urfey – A Fond Husband (1677), Squire Oldsapp (1678), The Virtuous Wife (1679), Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681), The Royalist (1682) A Commonwealth of Women (1685), A Fool's Preferment (1688), Love for Money (1691), The Marriage-Hater Matched (1692), The Campaigners(1698)
- Thomas Otway – Friendship in Fashion (1678)
- Thomas Southerne – Sir Anthony Love (1690), The Wives Excuse (1691), The Maid's Last Prayer (1693)
- Love For Love (1695), The Way of the World(1700)
- John Vanbrugh – The Relapse (1696), The Provoked Wife (1697)
- George Farquhar – Love and a Bottle (1698), The Constant Couple (1699), Sir Harry Wildair (1701), The Recruiting Officer (1706), The Beaux' Stratagem (1707)
- Susanna Centlivre – The Perjured Husband (1700), The Basset-Table, (1705), The Busie Body (1709)
Film adaptations
- The Country Wife, starring Helen Mirren (1977)
See also
Notes
- ^ George Henry Nettleton, Arthur British dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan p. 149.
- ^ See also Antitheatricality.
- ^ George Clark, The Later Stuarts, 1660-1714 (1956) p 369.
- ^ Hume, 19–21.
- ^ Hodgart (2009) pp. 194 and 189.
- ^ Hume, 17, 23.
- ^ Milhous, 38–48.
- ^ Milhous, pp. 51–55.
- ^ Milhous, p. 66.
- ^ Milhous, pp. 68–74.
- ^ Milhous, pp. 52–55.
- ^ Dobrée, xxi.
- ^ See also Antitheatricality#Restoration theatre.
References
- Colley Cibber, first published 1740, 1976, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. London: J. M. Dent & Sons
- Bonamy Dobrée, 1927, Introduction to The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, vol. 1. Bloomsbury: The Nonesuch Press
- Elizabeth Howe, 1992, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Robert D. Hume, 1976, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press
- Judith Milhous, 1979, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields 1695–1708. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press
- Fidelis Morgan, 1981, The Female Wits – Women Playwrights on the London Stage 1660–1720. London: Virago
- Jacqueline Pearson, 1988, The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737. New York: St. Martin's Press
- Lawrence Stone, 1990, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987. Oxford: Oxford University Press
- William Van Lennep, ed., 1965, The London Stage 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled From the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period, Part 1: 1660–1700. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press
Further reading
Selected seminal critical studies:
- Douglas Canfield, 1997, Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky
- Thomas H. Fujimura, 1952, The Restoration Comedy of Wit. Princeton: Princeton University Press
- Norman N. Holland, 1959), The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
- Hughes, Derek (1996). English Drama, 1660–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-811974-6.
- Robert Markley, 1988, Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Oxford : Clarendon Press
- Montague Summers, 1935, Playhouse of Pepys. London: Kegan Paul
- Harold Weber, 1986, The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
- Rose Zimbardo, 1965, Wycherley's Drama: A Link in the Development of English Satire. New Haven: Yale University Press
External links
- Restoration playhouses (archived 11 March 2007)
- Links to e-texts of restorations Plays, Univ. of Oldenburg, 2007
- 17th Century Database
- Aphra Behn, The Rover
- William Congreve, Love For Love
- William Congreve, The Way of the World
- George Etherege, The Man of Mode (archived 31 October 2000)
- John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife. Use with caution, this is an abridged and bowdlerised text.
- William Wycherley, The Country Wife
- William Wycherley, The Gentleman Dancing-Master (archived 4 December 2004)