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Restoration Comedies

by Peter Cash

English Association Bookmarks No. 59

English Association Bookmarks Number 59

Restoration Comedies

by Peter Cash

Scope of Topic “How could an audience be both clever enough to understand the story and stupid enough to be interested by it when they did?” (Harley Granville Barker). The aim of this Bookmark is to identify the characteristics of Restoration Comedy and to account for its appeal: following Barker’s lead, it will argue that, although the plots of these plays are tedious to the point at which they test our powers of comprehension, the characters present us with a comprehensive vision of a flawed humanity which compels our interest.

BOOKS TO READ William Wycherley: The Country Wife (1675) George Etherege: The Man of Mode (1676) Aphra Behn: The Rover (1677) John Vanbrugh: The Relapse (1696) William Congreve: The Way of The World (1700) George Farquhar: The Recruiting Officer (1706) George Farquhar: The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707)

All titles are in the New Mermaid series (published by A C Black) and include impressive introductions

FURTHER READING ed. Paddy Lyons: Lord Rochester (Everyman) ed. Boris Ford: The Pelican Guide No 4 (1957) Alexander Leggatt: English Stage Comedy 1490-1990 (Routledge 1998)

NOTES “Although sex-antagonism and physical appetite are not the whole of love, they are important phases of it and the Restoration dramatists had the honesty to display these manifestations” (P A W Collins).

Although Wycherley’s adroit handling of dramatic ironies means that The Country Wife is remarkable among these plays for its playwright’s craftsmanship, no play - unless it is The Rover - supplies us with a more honest vision of mankind in Collins’ sense. Wycherley sets out to show that men and women both are essentially appetitive and hypocritical creatures; in his play, they are hypocritical precisely because they act as if their appetites are under control when in fact they are raging. The dramatic irony upon which the entire action turns is that Horner, in order to gain unsuspected access to the chamber of every lady in town, pretends to be impotent: when Sir Jasper Fidget laughs at ‘the impotent Horner’, we know - whereas he doesn’t - that the laugh is at his expense because Horner is in the process of seducing both his wife and his sister. The language of Restoration Comedy can be graphically explicit: when Sir Jasper warns Lady Fidget that Horner (whose name defines him) is ‘coming into you the back way’, he means to tell her that Horner is using another door; but we know, whereas the cuckolded husband does not, that (another joke on him) he is inadvertently describing the sexual position in which Horner (‘a Machiavel in love’) is - as he speaks - embracing his wife [IV.3].

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Two general characteristics of Restoration Comedy require attention at this point. First, it needs stressing - as it will do when we come to the play written by a woman - that the comedies of the period following the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 were the first plays in which women played the parts of the female characters; it is well known that Nell Gwyn, one of Charles II’s mistresses, was originally an orange-seller at the theatre and then an actress. Second, it needs explaining - especially when we start to wonder how these intricate plots could ever have entertained rowdy audiences - that the theatre-goers of Charles II’s London went to the Duke’s Theatre or Drury Lane both to play-watch and to people-watch; and it was the rule rather than the exception to discover that a satirised character in a play bore a wicked resemblance to a celebrity in the audience. In The Country Wife, Wycherley can seem to adopt a misogynistic stance because he uses the licence given to him by the sudden availability of actresses to dramatise the sexual hypocrisy of women. To the rumour that Horner has been incapacitated by a venereal disease, Lady Fidget reacts with disgust: “O filthy French beast!” Of this disgusted reaction, Horner supplies an accurate analysis: “But now I can be sure she that shows an aversion to me loves the sport . . . ‘tis scandal they would avoid, not men” [I.1]. In short, Lady Fidget is averse not to men who are morally lax but to men who are physically incapable. The function of Alithea - the prototype of the virtuous woman who features in each of these comedies - is to show that her sex can occasionally behave itself and contain its natural vices.

A third characteristic is the satirical attitude of the sophisticated town towards the country. It is no accident that the eponymous heroine Mrs Margery Pinchwife (aged ‘one-and-twenty’) is a Hampshire wench whose alarming innocence is designed to throw metropolitan hypocrisy into relief. Like Chaucer’s Alison, she obeys her animal instinct: upon returning from her first trip to the theatre, she declares without a care for her reputation that she ‘liked hugeously the actors’; after tricking her fifty-year-old husband and having sex with Horner, she hears the rumour and is about to bring her first-hand knowledge of his phallus to his defence -

‘Tis false, sir, you shall not disparage poor Master Horner, for to my certain knowledge -

- when Lucy cuts her short before she can give away Horner’s ‘stratagem’ in which all the other ladies are by this time happily complicit [V.4]. The problem? Despite her disarming lack of hypocrisy, Mrs Pinchwife (‘a homely country girl’) proves herself as libidinous and mendacious a creature as any ‘mere notorious town-woman’.

Nomenclature is another characteristic of Restoration Comedy. For Wycherley’s rakish protagonist, Horner is an apt name because he ‘horns’ women and thereby cuckolds their husbands. In The Man of Mode, it is to Mrs Loveit (‘the most passionate in her love’) and Sir Fopling Flutter (‘indeed the pattern of modern foppery’) that Etherege assigns names designed to sum up their characters. No matter how the title-page reads, it should not be taken for granted that Sir Fopling is the eponymous hero of this play. Dedicated follower of fashions though he is, he has a rival in Etherege’s actual protagonist Dorimant: whereas Sir Fopling drops a French word into every other sentence, Dorimant (‘a modish man’ himself) is more energetic and ruthless in his pursuit of sexual pleasure, his ‘base’ behaviour far more representative of the mores of ‘the easy town’ [III.3].

Dorimant is a Don Juan figure, ‘an arrant devil’ whose reputation as a cynical womaniser goes before him; like Horner, he is a ‘lewd rakehell’ who has dedicated his entire existence to self- gratification. Etherege’s plot does little more than present us with an amoral philanderer (‘a man of no principles’) in action. Mrs Loveit Dorimant loves and leaves distraught so that he can pursue first Bellinda (‘a jilting little baggage’) and then Harriet: ‘that lovely hair, that easy shape, those wanton eyes’. Like every Restoration hero, he does not live his life purely in search of spiritual peace.

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If Horner, Dorimant and Aphra Behn’s Willmore bear striking resemblances to one another, this is not surprising since the last two are said to be based upon a true-life reprobate at the Court of Charles II: John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (1648-1680). No wit at the Caroline Court was more dissolute than Rochester, both a lyrical and a satirical poet whose sybaritic life-style accounted for him by the age of thirty-two. Neither the surname [= he ‘will’ have ‘more’] nor the epithet (‘dear rover’) by which his alter ego is hailed in Behn’s play is any wonder. He admits that he is a creature of ‘swinging appetite’ [I.2] and is portrayed throughout as a ‘cunning flatterer’ [IV.2] who is first ‘stark mad for a wench’ [II.1] and then ‘a mad fellow for a wench’ [IV.3]; both buccaneer and serial heart-breaker, Willmore is ‘a pirate beggar whose business is to rifle and be gone’ [III.1].

What of course is radical and supremely significant about Behn’s play is that both the men and the women are the creations of a female playwright. In The Man of Mode, there is a scene [III.1] in which Harriet’s friend Young Bellair is advising her how to make the most of her physical appearance: “Shrug a little, draw up your breasts, let ‘em fall again, gently, with a sigh or two.” A scene unlikely to have been written before the advent of actresses who wore dresses designed to show off their ‘easy shapes’ to full advantage. As may also be said of a scene in The Rover [I.2] between Willmore and Hellena, played on the first night at the Duke’s Theatre Dorset Garden by Elizabeth Barry, Rochester’s mistress. In I.1, Hellena tells her sister Florinda to ‘put off this dull humour with your clothes and assume one as gay and as fantastic’ as the dresses which both she and her cousin Valeria have looked out; in this spirit, they set off to take part in the Neapolitan carnival at which they meet Willmore and his ex-patriat friends. From the language of the exchange, it is evident that, as he speaks to Hellena, Willmore’s hands (‘off my hands’/ ‘a helping hand’/ ‘by this hand’) rove up and down her dress and that Hellena (‘without looking in your hand’/ ‘well handled’) is busy emphasising her own words by a dextrous repositioning of his hands off her bosom or her belly. For this reason, it was wrong of The Women’s Playhouse Trust to stage a production of The Rover for the Open University (1994) in which the shapes of Behn’s flirtatious females were shrouded in loose, colourless clothing.

The Rover is not an action-packed drama; except at four violent moments, its aim is to stage a debate on the subject of sexual morality in which the drama is created by the dynamic conflict between the male and the female points of view. The opening scene between Hellena and Florinda [I.1] and the two scenes between Hellena and Willmore [I.2 and V.1] are concerned to establish a woman’s right to contest the sex-war on fair terms. In I.1, Hellena (‘a wild cat’) makes it plain that she wants to ‘provide’ a handsome man for herself, that she has both the face (‘A beauty passable?’) and the figure (‘Well shaped? Clean limbed?’) to do so and that she will yield her virginity willingly (‘when I begin, I fancy I shall love like anything’) but only to a man whom she likes. As she says, she is woman enough ‘to know how all these ought to be employed to best advantage’ [that is, to achieve equality with men] and in her dialogues with Willmore is not prepared to be out-done by either his ‘horrible loving eyes’ or illogical sweet-talk. Both Hellena (‘a-captain-hunting’) and the courtesan Angellica (originally played by Nell Gwyn) have come to terms with their sexual desires and are not hypocritical about them. Ultimately, then, Behn’s vision of her own sex is of an equally appetitive and libidinous creature.

Just as Harcourt and Alithea (The Country Wife) show that finer feelings contribute to ‘the whole of love’, so Young Bellair and Emilia (The Man of Mode) and Belvile and Florinda (The Rover) form the virtuous couples in their respective plays; they control their passions and construct a necessary opposite case. In The Relapse, it is Amanda and (ultimately) the worthy Worthy whose behaviour presents an alternative to the lascivious carrying-ons of the men and women who surround them. In The Relapse, the rover who struggles to leave behind the pleasures of his youth and put out ‘the raging flame of wild destructive lust’ is Amanda’s new husband Loveless. At the end of Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1696) Loveless, in an attempt to live down his name, retires to the country to enjoy his marriage to Amanda; reacting against the sentimental unlikelihood of this conclusion, Vanbrugh takes up his story and illustrates his ‘relapse’ to his ‘past follies’. In Vanbrugh’s sequel, Loveless is

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blown by ‘the rudest hurricance of wild desire’ back to London and ‘its false insinuating pleasures’. This pleasure comes in the ‘extremely handsome’ form of Amanda’s cousin Berinthia, ‘a young widow’ whom he has no difficulty at all in carrying off to bed: “(Very softly) Help, help! I’m ravished!” [IV.3].

To prove Barker’s point, The Relapse has two plots which fail in effect to inter-link. Rather than arrange rich dramatic ironies, Vanbrugh (as his sub-title reveals) is concerned simply to present us with ‘virtue in danger’. First, the endangered virtue is Loveless’ contentment with marital fidelity; from the moment he returns to London, ‘that uneasy theatre of noise’, his recidivism is assured. Of course, the second character whose virtue is in danger is Amanda, for - in a rum attempt to square his adultery with Berinthia - Loveless (reminding us here of Dorimant) enlists Berinthia’s aid in trying to arrange an affair between Amanda and Worthy. Although Amanda’s virtue proves strong enough to avert this danger, Vanbrugh’s play leaves us with a vision of a town in which mendacity and promiscuity complement each other.

Lawrence Stone has noticed that, ‘after 1690, the pleasure principle’ in English society ‘was over-ridden by an over-powering lust for money and power which turned sexuality into a mere instrument for self-advancement’. Accordingly, it is in The Relapse that a Restoration playwright first argues that man is also an acquisitive creature: “’Tis interest turns the globe” [Prologue on the Third Day]. For his sequel, Vanbrugh ennobles Cibber’s Sir Novelty Fashion and elevates his vain personality to the peerage: Lord Foppington (whom Cibber himself played on the first night at Drury Lane). Scion of Sir Fopling Flutter though he may be, Foppington is no such joke: above all, he embodies the materialistic values of the decade. Before we meet him, Lory - by means of synecdoche - reduces his character to ‘his periwig, his cravat, his feather, his snuff-box’ [I.2]. When we meet him, Foppington - sure enough - is receiving a procession of tradesmen whose wares are not good enough to pamper his ego; agreeing to put up with a wig that offends his fastidious sense of decorum, Foppington -

No: I’ll wear it today, though it show such a manstrous pair o cheeks, stap my vitals, I shall be taken for a trumpeter

- talks in an ideolect characterised by an affected vowel-shift in which every other ‘o’ turns into a strangled ‘a’ - nowhere more audibly than in an exaggerated tic of speech (‘stap my vitals’) which will be heard more than twenty times throughout the play. He is a grotesque snob, a peacock whose interest in his own plumage assumes monumental proportions. If there is nothing ultimately funny about him, then this is because he does not lack self- knowledge; he enjoys his empty pleasures and makes no apology - why should he? - that his life ‘is an eternal raund O of delights’ [II.1].

Such is Foppington’s vanity (‘for I love to see myself all raund’) that he has purchased a title for ten thousand pounds, then found himself living beyond his means; his desperate remedy is to arrange a convenient marriage to Miss Hoyden, the daughter of Sir Tunbelly Clumsey who will bring with her ‘fifteen hundred pound a year’. It is this plot that takes us into the country where there is scope for satire at the expense of the ‘bumpkinly people’ and further evidence that country wives - in the ‘plump’ shape of Hoyden - are little better than farm- animals who must be kept penned up (‘locked up like the ale-cellar’) because they are on permanent heat.

Few dispute that as a genre Restoration Comedy reaches its peak with The Way of The World. Of all these comedies, its plot is the most involved and least comprehensible, turning - as it does - upon an implicit understanding of seventeenth-century property law. This said, its chorus line -

Love’s but the frailty of the mind When ‘tis not to ambition joined

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- captures precisely the materialistic ethic by which Congreve’s characters, each of them drawn by his complex prose in subtle ways, organise their sex-lives; ‘love’, repeats the song, is nothing more than a form of mental instability if it is not allied to financial ‘ambition’. Financial considerations predominate in the relationship between Mr Mirabell and Madam Millamant: although they love each other ‘violently’, they do not trust each other to enter into a marriage based solely on their inflammable passion. With the result that in the famous Proviso Scene [IV.1] they discuss terms:

These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife concludes Millamant for her part;

These provisos admitted, in other things I may prove a tractable and complying husband concludes Mirabell for his.

They know only too well that love’s but the frailty of the mind when ‘tis not to ambition joined and in effect draw up a pre-nuptial contract. They agree to marry only ‘upon condition’ that Millamant’s fortune will be theirs; and, indeed, Millamant - when Sir Wilfull Witwoud, an oafish squire, is found for her instead - seems temporarily ‘resolved to have him rather than lose such a vast sum as six thousand pound’. Self-interest turns the globe. Lord Foppington would be the most colourful of Restoration characters were it not that Congreve’s Lady Wishfort is the greatest role for a mature actress on the English stage. Lady Wishfort is a woman in whom the three graces (beauty, chastity and passion) are comically out of harmony/ ‘in a very chaos’. Although her beauty (‘I am absolutely decayed . . . I look like an old peeled wall’) has faded, her passion still burns; as a result, her genitive phrases (‘indigestion of widowhood’, ‘lethargy of continence’) can barely suppress her frustration at a period of enforced celibacy. Congreve’s nomenclature gives the clue to her character: between the ‘r’ and the ‘t’, there is an ‘i’ missing! ‘Full of the vigour of fifty-five’, Lady Wishfort is a menopausal nymphomaniac: as Mirabell observes, she ‘would marry anything that resembled a man’. Wishing so badly for it, she becomes a cartoon of female imbalance; and yet, by her signature phrase ‘As I am a person’, used fifteen times in three Acts, she betrays her serious preoccupation with the theme of personal integrity which runs through the play. Her rhetorical question to Madam Marwood - ‘What’s integrity to an opportunity?’ - reveals that she too can sense the ‘corrupt’ way of the acquisitive world around St James’ Park.

Farquhar’s comedies are both set in country towns: Shrewsbury (The Recruiting Officer) and Lichfield (The Beaux’ Stratagem). Such settings gift to the playwright pretexts on which he can set up a familiar antithesis between urban and rural values; this being so, his metropolitan rogues have licences to be as satirical as they like about the low intelligence and high libido of Shropshire lads and Staffordshire lasses. From its title and its Prologue, it is plain that The Recruiting Officer has supplied itself with a racy metaphor by which its action can be fully controlled: just as The Rover is appropriately rich in maritime and mercantile images of seduction, so The Recruiting Officer explores the idea that the task of a recruiting officer is to ‘raise recruits’ both literally [for the English Army in its war with Louis XIV’s France] and metaphorically: after recruiting women to his bed, he will ‘raise recruits the matrimonial way’ [= have children by them]. There is an early exchange in the play [I.1] where its language pursues this point: here, Captain Plume and Mr Worthy - considering what tactics Worthy should adopt to win Melinda - extend the metaphor of a siege over no fewer than twenty lines: eg. ‘surrender’, ‘blockade’, ‘storm’, ‘assault’. Given the number of military men in his first audiences, Farquhar then concentrates in less wordy ways upon entertaining the troops ....

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Much of the action is low comedy in which risqué jokes prepare the way for Carry On films. Farquhar puts on stage a cast of yokels (named after cattle or fruit-trees) at whose ignorance urbane audiences are invited to laugh: told that ‘Carolus’ on a coin ‘is Latin for Queen Anne’, Pearmain replies,” ‘Tis a fine thing to be a scollard’ [II.3]. He then stages a recruiting drive in which Captain Plume’s success with Rose (Bullock’s sister) is enough to make any man want to swap his smock for a smart uniform:

PLUME Come, I must examine your basket to the bottom, my dear. ROSE Nay, for that matter, put in your hand; feel, sir; I warrant my ware as good as any in the market

It seems to pass unnoticed that Plume can put his hands all over the compliant Rose and carry her up to his chamber at no cost to his courtship of Silvia, Justice Balance’s rich daughter; this is because the play is partly propaganda, keen to show officers’ wives what a man has to do in order to press country folk into the King’s service. To recruit Bullock and ‘two or three’ other men, Plume (a soldier with a feather in his cap!) ‘pressed his sister’ as well; it was his duty. In time of war, mortality-rates among young men rose inevitably high; for this reason, the play is propaganda for another class, keen also to show ‘ladies of fortune’ (such as Silvia and Melinda) that they cannot afford to be morally fastidious. The sexual frankness of Melinda’s maid Lucy (“Die a maid! Come into the world for nothing!”) suggests that her mistress let an officer or a gentleman ‘recruit’ her before it’s too late. Despite its civilised conclusion, The Recruiting Officer beats its loudest drum for male licentiousness.

The Beaux’ Stratagem is an entertaining play. The eponymous beaux Martin Archer and Thomas Aimwell have squandered their respective inheritances in London and, rather than face destitution, have fled to the country to try their luck there; passing themselves off as master and servant, they hope in turn to arrange marriages to rich heiresses (a Margery or an Amanda, a Hoyden or a Silvia) which will clear their debts and secure their futures; this is the stratagem of the two beaux - whose names imply that they will hit their targets. Archer is an individualist, full of self-belief; he is supremely confident that he and Aimwell (‘knight- errants’) can make their ways in the world by their own wits: ‘we are men of intrinsic value who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves’ [I.1]. Counter-balancing this spirit of free enterprise is Lady Bountiful, an ostentatious do-gooder who wears her social conscience on her frilled sleeve. Like Lady Wishfort, Lady Bountiful (‘the best of women’) lives up to her name: having inherited a fortune, she has single-handedly turned Staffordshire into a Welfare State in that ‘she lays out half on’t in charitable uses for the good of her neighbours’. It is the conflict between these two value-systems which will inform Farquhar’s play.

For Lawrence Stone’s thesis, it is helpful that, while Archer (as servant) remains realistic, Aimwell (as master) becomes romantic. When Aimwell (‘a marksman’) reveals that he has fallen in requited love with Lady Bountiful’s daughter Dorinda, Archer [III.2] scoffs at his ‘passion’ and asks the question upon which the argument of the play turns: “D’ye think these romantic airs will do our business?” Nevertheless, Aimwell [V.4] finds himself ‘unequal to the task of villain’; he feels that he must play fair by Dorinda and confess to the stratagem (‘a scandalous design to prey upon your fortune’). The policy works: although he is a penniless roué, Dorinda adores him back for such selflessness (his ‘matchless honesty’). While Aimwell (‘romantic fool’) is inspired by Dorinda’s beauty to a bountiful generosity, Archer (mercenary ‘soldier of fortune’) remains intent on serving himself and pursues affairs first with Cherry (an innkeeper’s daughter) and then with Mrs Sullen. In the failed union between Lady Bountiful’s son Sullen (‘a sullen, silent sot’) and Mrs Sullen, the play offers us another perspective upon marrying for money. From experience, Mrs Sullen [II.1] counsels Dorinda against such a dangerous liaison; her function is to speak satirically of the woe that is in such marriages: ‘a living soul coupled to a dead body’ [III.3]. Although she brought ‘ten thousand pounds’ to her husband, she did not bring him any accompanying bliss; in the end, he is only too glad to divorce her, ‘bills, bonds, leases’ and all.

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All’s well that aims well. Upon the sudden death of his elder brother, Aimwell inherits both the title and the estate of Lord Viscount Aimwell; as such, he can now marry Dorinda, but not for her money. Upon Mrs Sullen’s divorce, Archer (after whom she lusts in return) is able to acquire her. In the end, the stratagem of the beaux [hence, the apostrophe after the French plural noun] succeeds and satisfies both appetites: not only do they take care of ‘business’, but they also mix it with ‘romantic’ pleasure.

Peter Cash is Head of English Studies at Newcastle-under-Lyme School in Staffordshire.

Restoration Comedies by Peter Cash is Number 59 in the Bookmark series, published by

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