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The Restoration Theater World and the Plays of William Wycherley Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1989 The Restoration Theater World and the Plays of William Wycherley Robert C. Neagle Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Neagle, Robert C., "The Restoration Theater World and the Plays of William Wycherley" (1989). Dissertations. 2671. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/2671 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1989 Robert C. Neagle THE RESTORATION THEATER WORLD AND THE PLAYS OF WILLIAM WYCHERLEY by Robert C. Neagle A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Loyola University of Chicago in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 1989 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to first acknowledge the encouragement, criticism and advice of Douglas White, John Shea, and Thomas Kaminski. Without their help, and that of Allen Frantzen, I would never have finished a project that I wanted desperately to complete. I also thank my wife, Marilyn, and children, James, Katherine, and Elizabeth, for years of support, motivation, and understanding. We did it! 11 VITA The author, Robert Charles Neagle, is the son of Robert P. and Florence Schavone Neagle. He was born June 20, 1953, in Chicago, Illinois. He graduated from St. lgnatious College Prep, Chicago, Illinois in 1971. In September, 1971, Mr. Neagle entered North Central College, Neperville, Illinois, receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and History in June, 1975. In September of 1975 Mr. Neagle was granted an assistantship in English at Loyola University of Chicago, where he received a Master of Arts in 1977. While a Ph.D. candidate at Loyola, Mr. Neagle was inducted into Alpha Sigma Nu. Mr. Neagle is presently Vice President of Corporate Communications for Bell Atlantic Capital Corp., an international provider of equipment leasing and financing and corporate financing services. He lives in River Edge, New Jersey with his wife, Marilyn, and their three children, James, Katherine and Elizabeth. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS. • • • • • • • • • • ••••••••••••••••••••••• ii VITA • . • . ..•.. · · · · . · · • • · · · · . • . • • • • • . • 111 Chapter I. THE RESTORATION THEATER WORLD, 1660-1682 ••••••••• 1 II. "MUDDLED LOVE: LOVE IN A WOOD, OR ST. JAMES PARK" • ••••••••••••• 93 III. THE GENTLEMAN DANCING MASTER: SPECTACLE FOR THE CITY •••••••••••••••••••••• 134 IV. THE COUNTRY WIFE: NEW RULES FOR WIT ••••••••••••• 168 V. THE PLAIN DEALER: TOO MUCH SELF-RELIANCE •••••••• 213 VI. CONCLUSION •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• 260 BIBLIOGRAPHY . •...••....••••...••••.••......••••...•. 265 iv CHAPTER I THE RESTORATION THEATER WORLD, 1660-1682 Since the 1680's, the subject of Restoration comedy has generated a plethora of comment and critical controversy. While most of the discussion is about the plays, notably those of Etherege, Dryden, Wycherley and Congreve, all usually included under the rubric "restoration dramatists," the commentary itself has also become a significant critical subject. Because so much of the criticism attempts to recreate an audience, a theoretical environment, a theatrical history, and because much of it makes or accepts assumptions advanced by others, it requires periodic review and critical scrutiny. Even an admittedly general review of the commentary sufficiently illustrates that descriptions of the Restoration milieu, or that of a particular writer like Wycherley, seriously affect the evaluation of the plays. Although Jeremy Collier did not single out Wycherley in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage(I698), Wycherley's plays have traditionally been grouped with the "comedy of manners" plays that Collier attacked. Because of the "Collier controversy" and the seventeenth and eighteenth century commonplace belief that. the 2 purpose of art was to instruct, early critics tended to ask moral questions about Wycherley's drama, often finding the plays morally deficient. Early nineteenth century critics rebelled against these tendencies by placing the plays in what they thought were their historical contexts. Charles Lamb's attempts to a void imposing a new age's critical standards on Restoration comedy, for example, concluded with his substituting a "Utopia of gallantry; a society without reference to the world that is111 for the beau monde of seventeenth century England. William Hazlitt, later joined by Leigh Hunt, was interested in seeing the plays as the products of an age, as a "more exquisite and airy picture of the manners of an age.112 Lamb's imaginative "reconstruction" of the restoration milieu gave way to Hazlitt's more realistic and historical one. The attempt to view the drama of the late seventeenth century in a socio-historical context, to see the plays, rightly or wrongly, as reflections of the "manners" of the court circle and those who tried to imitate it, gave way to moral considerations later in the nineteenth century. Thomas Babington Macaulay disparaged the "bad" morality of a restoration society that was fond of everything "ridiculous and degrading."3 The reputation of 1Charles Lamb, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Age," The Essays of Elia, ed. Alfred Ainger (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, n.d.), p. 187. 2see William Hazlitt, "On Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar," Lectures on the English Comic Writers (London: Taylor and Hessy, 1819), and Leigh Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar (London: G. Routledge, 1866). 3Thomas Babington Macualay, Critical Essays, v.2, (London: J.M. Dent, 1963), pp. 411-452. 3 Wycherley, and the Restoration comedy of which he was regarded a part, was adversely affected by this kind of provincialism. For the most part, twentieth-century criticism has not viewed Restoration comedy as immoral. In fact, general critical estimates of the drama between 1660 and 1700 are quite varied. At one extreme are critics like John Palmer whose 1913 study attempted to vindicate Restoration comedy by arguing that it was an art form that should be judged according to the laws of the imagination and not those of a subjective or conventional morality.4 Palmer's stress on formal consideration was continued by Norman Holland who analyzed the imagery and structural elements in Wycherley.5 More recently Rose Zimbardo attempted to place the plays of Wycherley in the tradition of formal verse satire, explaining their themes and structures in terms of a traditional "blame/praise" format.6 While the general attack has not been concerned with "immorality," the drama of Wycherley and his contemporaries has suffered at the hands of modern critics. There are critics like L.C. Knights who have aggressively argued that Restoration comedy is "gross, trivial and dull"7 4John Palmer, The Comedy of Manners (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913). 5Norman N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959). 6Rose A. Zimbardo, Wycherley's Drama: A Link in the Development of English Satire (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1965). 7L.C. Knights, "Restoration Comedy: The Reality and the Myth," in Restoration Drama: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed., John Loftis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 50. 4 because the plays have no relation to the significant thought of late seventeenth-century England. Interestingly, it might be true that the plays of Wycherley, for instance, have no significant direct relationship to contemporary intellectual currents, but this is not sufficient grounds for deprecation. The plays of Wycherley are like all theater-- topical and public, having as their primary subject human relationships that reveal human weaknesses and strengths. The lasting impression of the drama of Wycherley and some of his contemporaries is the result of the universality of the subject matter and its strength as theater, and not its connection to the most significant intellectual thought of the day or its attempt to define a universal standard of morality. The value of the plays of Wycherley is to be found in the timelessness of their themes and subjects, and the unique treatment of those themes and subjects at the hands of William Wycherley. How the discussion of the dramatic history of the period has affected assessments of specific Wycherley plays is evident in the commentary on his most widely read, and most appreciated, The Country Wife. According to Robert Hume, a respected critic and historian of the period, The Country Wife has provoked such drastically divergent commentary that its spread is "almost ludicrous."8 To some, The Country Wife is a farce, to others a comedy, and to still others a satire, all terms whose meanings are difficult to fix. In terms of subject matter, it is said to be a a satire on jealousy, a satire on female hypocrisy, an expose of 8Robert D. Hume, The Development of Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 97. 5 repression in marital relationships, and an investigation into
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