1 A DEDICATED FOLLOWER OF FASHION: THE AHISTORIC RAKE IN RESTORATION LITERATURE If I am right about nature’s options, history is like surrounding oneself with mirrors, like living in a bordello. —Joseph Brodsky, “Letter to Horace” Zoe Hope Gibbons May 1, 2009 Presented to the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors. 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Eugene Hill is my thesis adviser, but to praise him only in that capacity would be to do him injustice. In February of 2006, I entered his Milton class uncertain whether I should major in English; after a week or two, any other course seemed laughable. For the past three years, he has been an academic role model and, more importantly, a constant force for good. I am also indebted to my other two readers, Bill Quillian and Paula Debnar. Since my first week of college, Professor Quillian has made my life calmer and saner by his mere presence. Professor Debnar introduced me to Lucretius, polished my Latin grammar, and reassured me that one never finishes a thesis, but merely abandons it. During my time at Mount Holyoke, I have had the privilege of working with several other exceptional mentors. If not for Frank Brownlow’s Shakespeare Adapted and Interpreted seminar, I might never have discovered the farce and folly of Restoration drama. Joseph Ellis expanded my historical horizons and reminded me that a good academic is more than the sum of her papers. Finally, Stan Rachootin pointed me in the direction of Leslie Stephen, whose biography of Pope sparked my interest in the Restoration. He also supplied me with at least two dozen puns on the word “rake”; I suspect my thesis is the poorer for their absence. Last year at Oxford, Noam Reisner supervised my study of early-modern literature, reined in my Barthesian excesses, and reminded me to keep a healthy skepticism about academia. Ann Pasternak Slater worked with me on revenge tragedy, and Freya Johnston on Fielding and Richardson. But my greatest debt is to Laurence Williams, a doctoral candidate who kindly agreed to tutor me in Restoration drama. Much of the work I produced in that tutorial found its way into my thesis, and our dramatic reading of Sir Fopling’s first scene remains one of my fondest Oxford memories. My incomparable friends, at Mount Holyoke and elsewhere, provided more solace and wisdom than they know. I am especially grateful to Mallory Cohn, Anne Derrig, Hannah Duff, Ariel Franklin-Hudson, Caitlin Healey, Noa Lee Holtzman, Rebecca Mason, Becca Schaffner, and Marija Tesla. Thank you for everything—including your inexplicable desire to read my final draft. (Don’t worry, I won’t hold you to it.) My analysis of the rake-aesthete would be incomplete without the example— say rather, the case study—of Amaru Villanueva Rance. 3 I owe many thanks to my family for their love and support. My father, Elliot Gibbons, deserves special mention; for as long as I can remember, he has done everything in his power to nurture my moral and intellectual development. This thesis is dedicated to Svein Arber, my AP English teacher at Lowell High School in San Francisco. He taught me how to think and write about literature; there is no higher praise than that. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 5 CHAPTER ONE 21 “The Painted Sign of a Man”: The Gentile Sinner CHAPTER TWO 44 “The Modern Way of Writing”: The Comical Revenge CHAPTER THREE 68 “Going a Rambling”: The Mulberry Garden CHAPTER FOUR 86 “Ridiculously Wild and Apish”: The Man of Mode CHAPTER FIVE 105 “Now I Can Blaze No Longer”: The Aging Rake CONCLUSION 131 APPENDIX 138 WORKS CITED 159 5 INTRODUCTION In 1660, the newly acceded Charles II of England issued an “Act of Free and General Pardon Indempnity and Oblivion,” ordering that most crimes committed against the Crown between 1637 and 1660 “be Pardoned Released Indempnified Discharged and put in utter Oblivion.” In his preamble to the act, Charles declared his intention to “bury all Seeds of future Discords and remembrance of the former as well in His owne Breast as in the Breasts of His Subjects one towards another”—a generous sentiment, undoubtedly welcome after two decades of civil strife. Granted, Charles introduced several exceptions to the act, refusing to pardon the officials of Oliver Cromwell’s regime, or, for that matter, the deceased Cromwell himself. But he continued in a conciliatory vein until midway through the edict, when he announced that the new government would fine anyone guilty of “using words tending to revive the Memory of the late Differences”: And to the intent and purpose that all names and termes of distinction may likewise be putt into utter Oblivion Be it further Enacted by the Authority aforesaid That if any person or persons within the space of three yeares next ensueing shall presume malitiously to call or alledge of, or object against any other person or persons any name or names, or other words of reproach any way tending to revive the memory of the late Differences or the occasions thereof, That then every such person soe as aforesaid offending shall forfeit and pay unto the party grieved in case such party 6 offending shall be of the degree of a Gentleman or above ten pounds, and if under that degree the summe of forty shillings to be recovered by the party grieved . .1 It was a precarious moment in the history of the English monarchy. In 1642, Parliament had rebelled against Charles I, setting off a seven-year civil war. Sixteen-year-old Prince Charles and his mother, Henrietta Maria of France, fled to the French court in 1646. Early in 1649, Cromwell’s forces executed the King and established a Puritan republic that endured for nine years, until Cromwell’s death in 1658. His son Richard proved an ineffective leader, and the protectorate crumbled in the spring of 1659. Over the next year, the royalist interest gained the upper hand, and on May 29, 1660, Charles II returned from Paris to London. The English Restoration had begun. Though welcomed enthusiastically to England, the new King “had few illusions about the depth of the support for the monarchy.”2 Aware that “the civil war had left political, religious, and partisan divisions . that would be impossible to resolve to the satisfaction of all parties,”3 Charles sought to turn public attention from the fractious past to the unblemished future. His Act of Indemnity and Oblivion represents an attempt to legislate the collective memory. Pardons and reimbursements cannot erase a national trauma, but words can soften the horrors they describe. Teaching by example, Charles uses the euphemistic “Differences” for a conflict in which England lost almost four percent of its 1 Charles II, “An Act of Free and Generall Pardon Indempnity and Oblivion” (1660), in John Raithby, ed., Statutes of the Realm: volume 5: 1628-80 (1819), 226-234. British History Online: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=47259 , accessed 19 April 2009. 2 Paul Seaward, “Charles II (1630-1685), king of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Online edition: http://oxforddnb.com/view/article/5144, accessed 19 April 2008. 3 Ibid. 7 population, Scotland six percent, and Ireland 41 percent.4 There is something dystopian in Charles’s manipulation of language. In 1661, Edmund Waller would write a panegyric on St. James’s Park, populating the Thames with nymphs and cupids. Given Charles’s desire for “utter Oblivion,” Waller might have done better to compare the river to Lethe. A three-year moratorium on any topic of conversation is unenforceable, and many of Charles’s subjects continued to speak of the Civil War with impunity. “Critics of the Carolean establishment,” writes Paulina Kewes, “. did not shrink from marshaling the most abusive and impertinent parallels to stigmatize what they saw as the corruption of the newly restored monarchy.”5 But a king so obsessed with the politics of memory could not have failed to influence the writers of his court. Many dramatists of the Restoration belonged to Charles’s inner circle, accompanying him to the tavern and the theater. They, not their social inferiors, were forced to watch their step when discussing history. Susan Staves reminds us that “the government took the political implications of plays seriously enough to censor and to prohibit quite a number of them.”6 In 1662, for instance, Charles passed the Licensing Act, which noted that “by the general licentiousnes of the late times many evil disposed persons have been encouraged 4 Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651 (Routledge, 1994), 214. 5 Paulina Kewes, ed., The Uses of History in Early Modern England (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 2006), 18. 6 Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln and London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 50. 8 to print and sell heretical schismatical blasphemous seditious and treasonable Bookes Pamphlets and Papers.” Accordingly, Charles banned all works wherein any Doctrine or Opinion shall be asserted or maintained which is contrary to Christian Faith or the Doctrine or Discipline of the Church of England or which shall or may tend or be to the scandall of Religion or the Church or the Government or Governors of the Church State or Common wealth.7 This act, which expired in 1679 but was renewed in 1685, drove Charles’s critics to subterfuge. Prose writers often drew parallels between the Restoration and earlier ages;8 comic playwrights took a different approach.