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THE RISE of the LIBERTINE HERO on the RESTORATION STAGE by JAMES BRYAN HILEMAN (Under the Direction of Elizabeth Kraft)

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THE RISE of the LIBERTINE HERO on the RESTORATION STAGE by JAMES BRYAN HILEMAN (Under the Direction of Elizabeth Kraft) THE RISE OF THE LIBERTINE HERO ON THE RESTORATION STAGE by JAMES BRYAN HILEMAN (Under the Direction of Elizabeth Kraft) ABSTRACT Structured in the style of a printed play of the period (though with only three acts), this study focuses on the proto-libertine hero in the plays of the restored stage of the 1660s and on the plays from whence he sprang. My goal is to revise the thinking about this figure, to cleanse him, and the times that produced him, of centuries of cultural effluvia by taking all these accumulations into account. He attained the zenith of his cultural career during the 1670s; his best representations, outside of the poems and the lives of noblemen such as the Earl of Rochester, are on the stage. In a sense he represents and embodies the last full flowering of the aristocracy before the commercial classes and their characteristic, Idealistic, Christian-humanist, bourgeois modes of thinking came to dominate English culture and to alternately effeminize and demonize this figure as ―the Restoration rake.‖ His Epicurean Materialism also parallels the rise of experimental science, though his fall does not. I examine his practice and the theory that informs him, his emphasis on inductive, a posteriori reasoning, the fancy-wit that combines sensations and ideas in order to create new conceptions, his notion that desire for largely physical pleasure is humanity‘s (and even women‘s) primary motivation, and his valuing the freedom to act and think contrary to ―official,‖ moral constraint, often in subversive, playful, and carnivalesque ways. This character‘s primary dramatic precursors are featured most prominently in the plays of John Fletcher, the most popular playwright of the seventeenth century, but also in those of James Shirley, Sir John Suckling, and Thomas Killigrew. Playwrights of the 1660s, most prominently John Dryden and George Etherege, but also William Davenant, James Howard, Thomas Shadwell, Sir Charles Sedley, and others, under the encouraging patronage of King Charles II, finding him still callow, led the proto-libertine hero, by the end of the decade, to the cusp of being fully-formed and ready to assume the dominant role he would play in the 1670s with the introduction of cuckolding and the addition of formidable judgment-wit and a broader range to his basic type. INDEX WORDS: Libertine, Libertinism, Materialism, Restoration Drama, Restoration Comedy, Rake, John Fletcher, Caroline Drama, Renaissance Drama, Sir John Suckling, James Shirley, Thomas Killigrew, Sir William Davenant, George Etherege, Sir Charles Sedley, Samuel Pepys, Charles II, John Dryden. THE RISE OF THE LIBERTINE HERO ON THE RESTORATION STAGE by JAMES BRYAN HILEMAN B.A., James Madison University, 1994 M.A., Virginia Commonwealth University, 2001 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2009 © 2009 James Bryan Hileman All Rights Reserved THE RISE OF THE LIBERTINE HERO ON THE RESTORATION STAGE by JAMES BRYAN HILEMAN Major Professor: Elizabeth Kraft Committee: Frances Teague John Vance Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia August 2009 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts for their Student Research and Performance Grant and the UGA Graduate School for their Dean‘s Award, both of which aided in composing the present document and in compiling materials for future endeavors. I would also like to thank Dr. John Vance for doing his part, and very much thank the professors whose wisdom got me this far, Drs. Coburn Freer, Fran Teague, and Anne Williams. And I would especially like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Kraft, without whom I do not know that could have done it, or if I would even have wanted to. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………vi PREFACE…………………………………………………………………………………………1 DISSERTATIONIS PERSONAE…………………………………………………………………7 PROLOGUE …………………………………………………………………………………….14 ACT I: THE COMMENTATORS………………………………………………………………16 Scene I: The 1690s and the Eighteenth Century……………..………………………………..18 Scene II: The Nineteenth Century…………………………….……………………………….33 Scene III: The Early Twentieth Century………………………..…………………………..…38 Scene IV: The Late Twentieth Century (and the Early Twenty-first)…………………….…..55 ACT II: THE LIBERTINE HERO IN HIS YOUTH……………………………………………71 Scene I: Of John Fletcher and Fancy-wit…………...…………………………………………71 Scene II: The Early Restoration Proto-Libertine Hero……………………………………..…92 Scene III: Epicoene and Five from Fletcher…………………………………………………104 Scene IV: The Carolines - Shirley, Suckling, Killigrew and Davenant………………..……127 INTERLUDE…………………………………………………………………...........................155 ACT III: THE PROTO-LIBERTINE HERO ON THE CUSP………………………………...172 Scene I: Thomas Killigrew‘s The Parson‟s Wedding……………………………………..…172 Scene II: The Chances Redux……………………………………………………………..…183 Scene III: Dryden‘s Secret Love and Howard‘s Mad Couple…………………….………..…189 Scene IV: Dryden and Davenant‘s Tempest…………............................................................202 vii Scene V: Etherege‘s She Would if She Could……………..…………………………………212 Scene VI: Of Shadwell and Sedley and An Evening‟s Love…………..…………………..…220 Scene VI: The End of the Decade……………………………………………………………230 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………243 EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………………..246 WORKS CITED………………………………………………………………………………..248 APPENDIX……………………………………………………………………………………..261 NOTES………………………………………………………………………………………….272 viii PREFACE In the spring of 1664 there appeared on the stage of Lisle‘s erstwhile tennis court in Lincoln‘s Inn Fields something not yet seen, an innovation, though not as epochal, and certainly not as lasting, as the introduction of actresses--―probably‖ by the King‘s when they opened on 8 October 1660 at Vere Street--or of ―moveable and changeable scenery‖--―probably‖ by the Duke‘s on 28 June 1661 at Lincoln‘s Inn Fields) (Avery xcvii, xxxv)--but significant nonetheless: one Sir Frederick Frollick, hero of George Etherege‘s The Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub. He was the first of the rake-heroes, a hectoring, sexually obsessed tribe, occasionally admired for their roguish charm but ultimately and rightly deplored for both their immorality and irresponsibilty, who dominated the most licentious period, 1660 to 1720, in English dramatic history. So the old story goes. Sir Frederick, however, was not nearly as definitive and unprecedented a break from theatrical tradition as the vast majority of critics have heretofore been wont to assume; he was, at least, likely the most prominent prototype of a new species, albeit as yet embryonic, whom various playwrights would soon both elaborate and refine--the libertine hero, who would recur on the London stage for the remainder of the Restoration. He was nothing epochal, though, but rather simply another small step in a long tradition. The libertine hero, an exemplary, comic character, ―glamorous and successful‖ though never quite flawless, and never more than ―mildly satirized‖ (Hume 41), possessed, for a brief arc peaking in the 1670s, a near-heroic and admirable social dominance, while still savoring of the rebel and the outsider, not concatenated in any single dramatic figure before the Restoration. An aristocrat, a man of leisure with charm, significant parts and, above all, a transcendent and 1 facile wit, this most prominent of Restoration theatrical types based his actions, centering on the pursuit of pleasure, both intellectual and sensory, on Materialistic principles.1 Various forms of Idealism, and not Materialism, have traditionally been the dominant, official codes of abstract belief and of practical morality in the West, though both basic notions have unequally coexisted at least since the foundations of Western culture. Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hobbes all promote Materialism, Plato, Marcus Aurelius, and Orthodox (in the broad sense) Christianity Idealism, and the latter have almost always had the upper hand. The basic principles of Materialism are that all, or at least all humanity can know, is either matter or void, that matter is not illusory and not evil or corrupt by nature, that all we know, we know through our senses, and that if the supernatural, which this philosophy does not necessarily preclude, does exist, it does not guide or even directly influence our actions; rather, we are driven by our not inherently evil, and perhaps even good, sensual, bodily urges and corresponding passions, which we temper and direct with reason. Idealism is, basically, the obverse of Materialism, adding ―spirit‖or ―soul‖ to the mix and tending to deplore matter and the senses in favor of abstractions such as ―good‖ and ―evil.‖ Dale Underwood defines libertinism aptly enough, but rather too combatively, and with too negative a connotation, as ―an egocentrically oriented concept of nature in which indulgence was purchased through aggression, and pleasure through conquest, and in which by definition individual fulfillment and social order were in perpetual opposition‖ (28); libertinism is, at its core, but Materialism applied to the social sphere. Christian-humanism, the form of Idealism most prevalent in the seventeenth century, bases itself, along with most, if not all, other forms of Idealism, on an obligation to serve an abstract, greater good than one‘s own joy and pleasure, which the materialist sees as often, if not always, derived from power in its multitudinous
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