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| Nothing to do with theatre, but St Paul's Cathedral is one of the great works of architecture created during the Restoration, by Christopher Wren - this is as close as I was ever able to get to photograph a large portion of it - if you've walked around it you'll understand my difficulty! |
Theatre nearly died in England after 1642, or to put it more
accurately, it was nearly murdered. Puritans and parliamentarians who had
wrested the throne from King Charles I in 1642 and proclaimed a “Commonwealth”
(as opposed to a monarchy),
disapproved of the theatre nearly as strongly as
they loathed the royals. During the tumultuous 1640s a law was passed (in
1642) banning theatre for 5 years. In 1647 plays began again to be
performed now and then, but in 1649, after the Puritans had lopped off Charles’
head, Parliament passed an even tougher law – that all actors be
imprisoned! Nearly all the public theatres were torn down, and the
interiors of court theatres were dismantled. In spite of these harsh measures,
performances continued sporadically. Officials were bribed, and plays
were kept short and sweet. The usual form of entertainment was called a “droll” – a short version of a longer
(and usually comic) play. One example is the droll “Bottom the Weaver,”
taken of course from A Midsummer Night’s
Dream.
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| Execution of Charles I |
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| Oliver Cromwell |
After 1649 committees of Parliament governed England, but in
1653
Oliver Cromwell took control and became a virtual dictator until his death in
1658. Late in the “reign” of Cromwell, William Davenant, a man friendly to the crown, and the man who had
taken over the writing of court masques after Ben Jonson had quit in a huff,
found a form of dramatic entertainment that Cromwell and co. did not object to
– the opera. England’s first operas (several years later than those
performed in the courts of Italy and France), were staged and performed at
Davenant’s home, Rutland House. In 1656 Davenant presented to any public
who cared to
come a piece of music called The Siege of Rhodes. As an
opera it is insignificant except in the historical sense -- it was England’s
first public opera; but it marked the first time the English public could pay
to see Italian style “a vista” scene changes. And they liked what they
saw. The designer of the theatre, as well as of the opera itself, as well
as of many other operas and plays, was John
Webb, who had assisted Inigo Jones in designing the later court masques.
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| William Davenant |
Then in 1660, a king was restored to the throne of England.
The exiled son of Charles I became Charles II and for the next 15 years this king
repudiated Puritanism and followed the pattern he’d
observed while he was
abroad at the court of Louis XIV in France. Restoration England (so named
because the king had been “restored” to the throne) became known for its
permissiveness and for the courtly libertines who seemed to rule, if not all
England, at least London. Charles’s brother took over in 1685, as James II, and
continued the spirit instilled by Charles until he was unseated in 1688 by
William of Orange in the so-called “Glorious” Revolution. William then ruled
jointly with James’s sister Mary in a more sober manner, but it was not until
the turn of the 18th century that the permissive atmosphere of
Restoration England gave way in favor of a somewhat more rational worldview.
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| Charles II |
After being restored to the throne, one of the first things
Charles did was to re-open the theatres. Anyone who could afford the
price of admission could get in to a Restoration playhouse, but the masses that
had poured into Elizabethan public playhouses were now dominated by puritanical
beliefs, and often avoided the new theatres. Most scholars believe that,
although a cross-section of the public was represented at Restoration
performances, the vast majority were now courtiers, gallants and fops,
sophisticated ladies and “women that haunt for prey” as one contemporary writer
put it (just in case any of you are puzzled by that phrase, it means
prostitutes). This mostly upper crust audience made the Restoration theatre
a sort of private club, and even while plays were in progress,
gallants wandered about searching for and chatting with friends and mistresses,
courtesans strutted their stuff, and quarrels sprang up; at times duels were
fought in the auditorium – real life drama!
Several kinds of plays were offered to this fashionable audience and
we’ll examine a few of them. First of all, what do you present after 18 years
of no theatre? No new plays had been written for nearly a generation –
why would they? They weren’t going to be produced. Now writers
scrambled to pen new plays, but what with the sudden demand to go to the
theatre it was easier to revive old ones.
While the idea of revivals
was a novelty in Restoration England, several “hits” of the Elizabethan, Jacobean
and Caroline eras were quickly put into production. Beaumont and Fletcher were
most frequently revived playwrights on the restoration stages. James
Shirley’s plays were also revived regularly. Shakespeare? Yes…but not as often as you might think.
And when he WAS revived, he was often “improved.” The Restoration courtiers,
who’d been seeing the rather refined tragedies of Racine in France, saw
Shakespeare as a fine writer but chaotic, disordered – “an unweeded garden” as
one Restoration writer put it, turning
Shakespeare’s own words (from Hamlet) against him. So the
Restoration writers set out to weed the garden. One example is Nahum
Tate’s re-writing of King Lear, which
he called “a string of pearls, unadorned.” Tate “adorned” Lear by removing the Fool (comedy in a
tragedy? a Neoclassic no-no!) and by inserting a love story between Edgar
and Cordelia. Instead of the tragic ending of Shakespeare’s play, Edgar
saves the day, as well as Cordelia, and Lear (who lives this time around) gives
his blessing to the marriage of Cordelia and Edgar (ah! poetic
justice!).
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| oh yes it was altered! |
There are many other examples, in fact years ago Hazleton Spencer
wrote a book called Shakespeare Improved,
which details many of the mutations. A few other examples include The Tempest (in which Ariel is given
another sprite so that the two can fly
around together) and Macbeth, which was even re-named Sauny the Scot! Suffice it to say that
the Restoration mind just didn’t “get” Shakespeare. Samuel Pepys, the most famous diarist of his day, LOVED the
theatre, went nearly every night and wrote about affairs on and off stage when
he got home. A more clever scholar than Dr Jack once said that “an upper
class reveals itself by its gossip,” and Pepys filled his diaries with gossip
day in, day out. In fact he’s one of the best sources of information on
Restoration theatre.
Pepys saw A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, and even in its somewhat “improved” state, just hated it: ”the
silliest stuff I’ve ever seen!” he complained in his diary. Pepys argued
that Bottom, Quince and company would never have been allowed to play before
Charles II. And perhaps he was right. Fairies and magic didn’t seem
to have much appeal during this era, either, and there was little room for them
on the Restoration stage. The English now seemed more interested in
French style, neoclassic plays, following the rules of verisimilitude, decorum
and the three unities.
The first new plays of the Restoration were churned out
quickly. They have been identified as “heroic” tragedies. They resembled French tragedies, with more than
a touch of Spanish capa y espada
plays tossed in, more than they resembled Shakespearean tragedies. Nearly
always characters in these plays wrestled with the theme of love versus duty.
A formidable hero, also the
brightest light in his country, falls in love with
an equally beautiful and brilliant woman, who just happens to be the daughter
of the king of the country next door, who also happens to be the sworn enemy of
the hero. Corneille had done a good job with a similar situation in Le Cid, but most of the Restoration
heroic tragedies were not written at Corneille’s level. To continue with
the generic plot, after much agonizing turmoil and trouble, all is solved in
about 24 hours, the hero and heroine are enabled to get together and proclaim
their love...and they do it all in rhymed couplets! John Dryden and the Earl of Orrery were
the chief writers of this form. Dryden’s plays The Indian Queen, and The
Conquest of Granada, parts I and II, are good examples of this rather
tedious and stilted drama.
Dryden, who was one of the finest British poets of the period, saw
the problems with heroic tragedy, and in 1677 abandoned that it in favor of
what most scholars call “Restoration” tragedy. The first, and
perhaps the best, example of this genre is Dryden’s own play All for Love, his version of the Antony
and Cleopatra story.
Unlike the “improvers” however, Dryden didn’t
re-work Shakespeare (though he certainly would have been aware of Shakespeare’s
play Antony and Cleopatra). Instead
he took a fresh look at this great love affair, and in doing so he defined a
new set of English Neoclassic rules. Action was unified, but there were
subplots (not allowed in the French Neoclassic style). As long as characters
could feasibly move between places in the 24 hour time period, unity of place
was upheld (but again not as tightly as in the French model). Most importantly,
Dryden stopped using the stiff rhymed couplets he’d worked with in heroic drama
and switched to blank verse, thus freeing up the language significantly.
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| Mary Ann Yates in All for Love in an 18th century revival Note the contemporary dress with an extra sash or so, no attempt at historical accuracy in costumes |
Dryden’s mix of Shakespearean and Neoclassic influences is obvious
in the best work of other writers of Restoration tragedy,
notably Thomas
Otway. His Restoration tragedy, Venice
Preserv’d, centers around the youth of Venice rising up against a corrupt
government (based on a true story). This play, which held the stage until
well into the nineteenth century, has been occasionally revived in recent
years. It includes as a character a prominent and lecherous Venetian
senator, who literally crawls around brothels. In one scene he begs a courtesan
to treat him like a dog. No wonder it still gets revived! It’s topical!
Some of the serious plays are more interesting than others, but
they haven’t really passed the test of time. Restoration audiences seemed to prefer
comedy to serious drama. The two most important comic genres were the comedy of intrigue and the
comedy of
manners. A fine example of the former is by Aphra Behn – MRS. Aphra Behn! The play is called The
Rover, and in it hot-blooded young courtiers are roving around on
a sexual rampage throughout Europe. Swords are drawn in a flash, and all the
love is steamy! Aphra Behn has the distinction of being not only the first
English-language identifiable female playwright, but also the first ever
professional female playwright, managing to earn enough money to live by
writing plays as sexual, even as raunchy, as that of her male counterparts.
She was harshly criticized for her writing by the old boys’ club, but while men
were rewarded for this writing style in the Restoration, as Mrs. Behn
complained, “from a woman it was unnatural.”
Aphra Behn was not the only woman writing, and being produced,
When we think of the Restoration, however, the most important form
by far is the comedy of manners.
We’ve already defined this important genre when we dealt with
Molière. But, whereas Molière’s comedies and the comedies of manners
written during the English Restoration both provide a critique of society
through comic means, Molière’s plays provided a comedy broad in its
implications. In contrast, the Restoration versions focused solely on the
aristocracy. In fact we might call this version the comedy of “aristocratic”
manners! While the greatest are still performed occasionally today, their
appeal is not nearly as broad-based as are Molière’s comedies. All of them
followed the same basic format:
1. All deal with the social elite, the leisure class.
2. Sexual seduction and its pursuit (and
pursued with wit!) is the
goal.
3. Playing the game is tremendously
important -- if you don’t play
it well, you’re
ridiculed.
4. Women are as good at the game as men,
and as dishonest,
amoral and
libertine in its pursuit.
5. And marriage -- is a joke!
Let’s examine three writers generally acknowledged as the finest
writers of this form: Sir George
Etherege, William Wycherley, and William Congreve. Etherege came
first, and set the style.
He was a man of money and leisure, and to the
manor born; one in a long line of English gentlemen who dabbled in the arts, and
who sometimes were excellent at it. At the center of the action in an
Etherege play are the charming young gallants, and the not so charming young gallants
– the fops – all of them looking for amorous adventure. The gallants pursue it
cleverly and with charm; the fops overdo it and make fools of themselves,
though they usually have no clue that they are laughingstocks. In Etherege
we hear the clever repartee between men and women that becomes a hallmark of
the form. This British comedy of manners extends after the Restoration to
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later to Oscar Wilde, and in the twentieth century
to Noel Coward.
Etherege’s plays include The Comical Revenge; or, Love in a Tub (1664), She would if She Could (1668), and perhaps his greatest work, The Man of Mode, which featured one of
the best players of the game ever written, patterned closely on the real-life Earl
of Rochester. The work also featured one of the clumsiest
overreaching fools in the genre, who Etherege named (and made the subtitle of
the play) Sir Fopling Flutter.
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| Sir George Etherege |
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| Colley Cibber was one of the finest interpreters of the fop character in the late 1699s and early 1700s |
William Wycherley’s plays are every bit as funny as Etherege’s,
but darker, less charming. In fact, some critics have called them
morally
corrupt. One senses a real and perhaps even angry critique of society in
Wycherley’s work, but at the same time his biography shows that he was one of
the lustiest lovers in Restoration London. A Major Pak said of him in
1728 that “as King Charles was extremely fond of him for his wit, some of the
royal mistresses set no less value upon those parts in him, of which
they were the more proper judges.”
Wycherley’s most famous play, The Country Wife (1675) is a mix of
Terence’s play The Eunuch and
Molière’s School for Wives, but it
comes out uniquely Wycherley. The story deals with Horner,
whose clever
name refers to the job he has taken on: to place the horns of a cuckold on
other men. In order to make love to the ladies unhindered by their jealous
males, Horner lets it be known that he’s been castrated, during a journey to
France. Meanwhile, the aging libertine Pinchwife (an informative name if
ever there was one!) has married a very sexy, very young country girl, and
makes the mistake of bringing her to London. Pinchwife takes the precaution of
disguising her as a boy, which doesn’t fool Horner
for a minute, and he/she is
easily seduced by Horner. The play’s most famous scene has Horner taking a
series of ladies, one after the other, into an adjoining room to show them his
collection of “china.” How well they like his china becomes a euphemism
for how they like...well, those parts of him of which they were the proper
judges! Another Wycherley play The
Plain Dealer is modeled on Molière’s The
Misanthrope, and features Manly, who is disgusted by the infidelities
and philanderings going on all around him.
Last but certainly not least, William Congreve. In his writing the
Restoration comedy of manners reaches its fullest expression, said
one critic,
and this one agrees! It is even more elegant and witty than the plays of
Etherege and can get nearly as dark as those of Wycherley. It is also heads and
shoulders above most of Restoration comedy. Congreve’s most famous plays
are Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700).
The latter features a cast of hilarious characters with names like lady Wishfort (because she’s over the hill and can only WISH for it!), Witwoud (who would be a wit...if only he could!), Fainall
(who feigns or falsifies everything he
does) and Mincing, a servant -- you can tell from her name everything about her!)
The leads are two of the wittiest lovers ever on stage: Mirabell, a gallant
who’s earnestly in love in spite of himself, and Millamant, the perfect lady of
fashion, who’s in the same boat. The scene in which these two propose
marriage to each other is the least likely marriage proposal ever written.
Mirabell and Millamant are modeled on
Beatrice and Benedick, and yes, in spite
of the unwritten law of Restoration comedies of manners, they DO get married in
the end.
The latter features a cast of hilarious characters with names like lady Wishfort (because she’s over the hill and can only WISH for it!), Witwoud (who would be a wit...if only he could!), Fainall
Part of the reason for the happy and relatively moral ending of
the Way of the World is that a middle
class is rising. Less than 40 years after the king had been restored to the
throne of England, this new “middle” class began to tire of the excesses of the
Restoration, on stage and off. And, as there were more and more of them,
and as they began to earn more and more money, they became an increasingly
important voice, to which both government and the arts had to respond.
This increasingly wealthy middle class became increasingly
interested being entertained in the theatre, but not the decadent theatre of
Restoration dandies. In fact pressure was put on Congreve to write a more
“moral” comedy of manners in Way of the
World. He did so only reluctantly, and quit the theatre thereafter.
Just as well, members of the new middle class would probably have said.
There were many attacks on the theatre at the end of the seventeenth
century, but none of them was so eloquent and effective as Jeremy Collier’s
pamphlet A Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Instead of irrationally
attacking actors and writers as “filthy devil-gods,” which Puritans and other
moral protesters had done before him, Collier used Sir Philip Sidney’s Art of Poetry as the basis of his
argument. He quoted Sidney quoting Horace, who of course said that
theatre should TEACH as well as delight. By asking the question, “What
does such an amoral drama as many of the comedies of manners, in which the most
clever lover gets the girl, whether she happens to be married or not, TEACH us?”
Collier showed the differences between Sir Philip Sidney’s fine theory and the not-so-fine
current practice. We’ll see what came of this pamphlet, the middle
class reaction, and all the other attacks on Restoration theatre when we come
to “sentimental comedy” in the eighteenth century.
Next time, theatre spaces, design and performers in the Restoration!
Next time, theatre spaces, design and performers in the Restoration!
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