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The Poetry of Basil Bunting

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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]. © English Association and Peter Cash, 2007 2 English Association Bookmarks Number 59 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. © English Association and Peter Cash, 2007 3 English Association Bookmarks Number 59 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.
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