THOMAS SHADWELL's the Libertine (1675): a FORGOTTEN RESTORATION DON JUAN PLAY
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THOMAS SHADWELL'S The Libertine (1675): A FORGOTTEN RESTORATION DON JUAN PLAY Gustav Ungerer University of Bern. Switzerland While the London theatres remained closed during the Commonwealth, the companies of actors in Paris were vying with one another for the rights to stage their own French versions of Tirso de Molina's Don Juan play. The Paris audiences, to be precise, had been introduced to the legendary figure of Don Juan by the Italian actors. In 1658 the Italians performed, for the entertainment of the Parisians, Il Convitato di pietra, an adaptation made by Giacinto Andrea Cicognini from Tirso de Molina's El Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra. There are a number of reasons why this Spanish play caught on with the Paris audiences in those days. One was the peace negotiations conducted between France and Spain, in 1659, and sumptuously celebrated, in 1660, by the marriage contract between Louis XIV and Maria Teresa, daughter of Philip IV. The Spanish Infanta brought along with her a company of Spanish actors which was to stay on in Paris until 1672. It is reasonable to assume that the Spanish actors seized the opportunity to capitalize on the interest of the court and town audiences awakened by the Italian and French adaptations of the Burlador de Sevilla. In 1658, the actor Dorimond, inspired by the success of the Italian company, came out with a French version of his own, with Le Festin de pierre ou le fils criminel; the following year, Claude Deschamps, Sieur de Villiers, a member of a rival company, pieced together his own rifacimento, which he presented under the same title; and in 1665, Molière, still chafing at the strong disapproval of Tartuffe, hastened to bring out his Dom Juan ou le festin de pierre. Then in 1669, Claude La Rose, Sieur de Rosimond, put on Le nouveau festin de pierre ou l'athée foudroyé. It was Rosimond's rendering that caught Thomas Shadwell's attention, prompting him to write The Libertine. Save Molière's play, all the Don Juan adaptations just mentioned 223 Gustav Ungerer have fallen into oblivion, Shadwell's included. It is the object of this paper to rehabilitate Shadwell as the author of an unjestly neglected and undervalued Restoration play based on the Don Juan legend. Critical assessment of Shadwell's literary achievement has been controversial ever since, in 1668, Shadwell staged his first play, The Sullen Lovers or the Impertinents. In the preface to this comedy of humours, Shadwell initiated a professional debate over current modes of comedy, that is, over the comedy of manners, then championed by Dryden, and the comedy of humours, championed by Shadwell. An avowed disciple of the Jonsonian comedy of humours, young Shadwell took Dryden to task for having written, in his essay Of Dramatic Poesy (1668), that Ben Jonson's best plays lack wit. To make things worse, he was courting danger by ridiculing two of Dryden's brothers-in-law who happened to be dabbling with heroic drama, a genre he strongly disliked. Sir Positive, the omniscient braggart and purveyor of dramatic absurdities, in The Sullen Lovers, is a parody of Sir Robert Howard, one of the brothers-in-law, and the conceited poet Ninny a parody of Edward Howard, the other in-law. Shadwell and Dryden pursued their debate over the nature of comedy and the heroic play in the prefaces to their plays. The debate gradually escalated into a political quarrel, which reached its climax in 1682 with the publication of Dryden's MacFlecknoe or A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S. Dryden wrote this mordant lampoon in order to deal Shadwell a death-blow. The Satire celebrates Shadwell's mock coronation as the new poet laureate of boredom, the ceremony being conducted by Richard Flecknoe, the old laureate. Thus MacFlecknoe proclaims that Sh- alone my perfect image bears, Mature in dullness from his tender years. Sh- alone, of all my Sons is he Who stands confirmed in full stupidity. These heroic couplets have come to represent for many students of Restoration literature the real Shadwell as well as the real Flecknoe. The damage done by this venemous invective to Shadwell's reputation has remained unparallelled in English literature. Critical evaluation of Shadwell's dramatic output has not only been hampered by Dryden's animosity; it has also been impaired by moral objections which Victorian scholars and critics raised to Restoration drama 224 Thomas Shadwell's The Libertine (1675) as a whole. Moreover, critical discussion of The Libertine has also been bedevilled by the generic issue. It is best defined as a satirical tragedy even if satire, as a rule, is held to be incompatible with tragedy. Shadwell himself called the play a tragedy and in the preface apologized for its "Irregularities" caused by "the Extravagance of the Subject". Allardice Nicoll, the distinguished historian of English drama, has chosen to call it a comedy; other critics, baffled by the "Irregularities", have preferred to ignore it. The play was written, as Shadwell boasted, in something like three weeks and was produced in Dorset Garden in June 1675, possibly on the 15th, when the King was present. We have it on the authority of John Downes, the prompter and author of Roscius Anglicanus (1708), that "The Libertine, and Virtuoso … were both very well acted, and got the Company great Reputation; the Libertine perform'd by Mr. Betterton crown'd the play". It remained a favourite in the repertoire until about the thirties of the 18th century. Thomas Betterton, the great actor and manager in the leading part of Don John, impressed the London audiences as the brutal leader of a trio of iconoclasts for whom all social, natural and religious laws are irrelevant. To believe Jacomo, the cowardly and self-pitying servant, Don John, together with his two disciples Don Lopez and Don Antonio, have committed "Some thirty Murders, Rapes innumerable, frequent Sacrilege, Parricide; in short, not one in all the Catalogue of Sins have scap'd" them. Don Lopez has killed his elder brother; Don Antonio has seduced and impregnated his own sisters; and Don John has killed Don Pedro, the Governor of Seville, and has also plotted the murder of his own father. When the curtain rises, Don John's destructive life unfolds itself in a rapid series of fatal episodes. In a nocturnal scene, Don John murders Don Octavio, the lover of Maria. Then, using his victim's cloak as a disguise, he seduces Maria, the lady-in-waiting to his mistress Leonora, and slays Leonora's brother who has come to defend his sister's honour. Pursued by the vengeful Maria and her maid Flora, he first kills Flora and next Maria. On his flight from Seville, he kills the hospitable Don Francisco, whose two daughters Clara and Flavia he attempts to seduce and whose bridegrooms he wounds on the eve of their wedding. Next he poisons the faithful Leonora, who has come to help him escape. He beats off a group of shepherds and shepherdesses, rapes one of the shepherdesses, hies to the convent in which Clara and Flavia have taken shelter and tries to get hold of the two by setting the convent on fire. Finally he blasphemes Don Pedro's statue bid him 225 Gustav Ungerer repent, he refuses. Not even the descent of his two companions into hell can move him. True to his ideal, without a hint of remorse, impervious to the thunderbolts from heaven, he sinks into hell, clouded by fire and accompanied by devils. In the light of Restoration tragedy, the blood-curdling atrocities, perpetrated by Don John and his two henchmen, were quite common. Horror tragedy flourished in the mid-1670s; and to audiences, accustomed to seeing horror plays, the atrocities committed by Don John were quite in keeping with this mode. Shadwell's play must have reminded them of the uninhibited display of brutality, of overbearing lawlessness in such plays as Nathaniel Lee's Nero (1674) or Thomas Otway's Alcibiades (1675) or Don Carlos (1676). The great success of The Libertine must also be accounted for by the fact that the play shares most of the conventions of the so-called Spanish cloak and sword plays, as they came into vogue in the first decade of the Restoration. The two London companies that came into being between 1660 and 1661 were short new plays. Therefore their managers were obliged either to stage old plays or to put on old plays accomodated to the new demands. Among the new drama that emerged within a few years, the type that prevailed was the Spanish cloak and sword play. The breakthrough was achieved in 1663 by Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours. It is partly a translation, partly an adaptation, made at the instance of King Charles II, from Antonio Coello's Los empeños de seis años. Many more dramatists followed in the wake of Tuke such as Dryden with The Rival Ladies (1664) and An Evening's Love or The Mock Astrologer (1668). Shadwell's The Libertine conforms to most conventions of the Spanish cloak and sword plays, to wit: the Spanish setting and names, the mistaken identities and nocturnal rendezvous, the duels, the young woman disguised as a man and pursuing her faithless lover, the loquacious and cowardly servant participating reluctantly in his master's dangerous intrigues. Despite the Spanish origin of the Don Juan legend and the popularity of the English variety of the cloak and sword plays, it would be misleading to consider The Libertine as the direct outcome of Anglo-Spanish literary relations.