The Theatre of the English Restoration II: Theatre Spaces, Design, Performers, with a little surprise at the end

When we arrive at theatre in the English Restoration, more information is available, from records, drawings, diaries and so on, than ever before.  So, whereas I was hard pressed to tell you much about Elizabethan public theatres, for example, there is much more information on Restoration stages, and such information becomes even more available and more massive as we move into the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I took a full semester seminar in grad school on Restoration and eighteenth century English theatre. To get through the all information in the course we had to rush, and still only touched the surface.  Beginning with the Restoration, then, the information in these lectures is necessarily much more reliant on Dr Jack’s filtration process. As I choose what to relate to you and what not, my own biases are revealed even more than they have been, so you must be wary, you must question, and you must begin to form your own view of theatre history. Take what you want of Dr Jack’story and make it YOURstory.

      

That said (admitted, confessed) let’s examine theatrical companies in the Restoration.  When the king was restored the theatre was also restored, and immediately many people scrambled to show themselves worthy of producing theatre, as theatre had proved lucrative in the Elizabethan era.  We’re going to omit the scramble, and look only at the results (Dr Jack’s first filter!).  After much fuss the king handed out two permits or patents for the production of “legitimate” theatre in London. Any theatre that wasn’t done by the two patentees was NOT legitimate, and was stopped, at least in theory. 

So! Two companies were formed, one called The King’s Company led by Thomas Killigrew, the other called The Duke’s Company

Thomas Killigrew

 led by William Davenant.  Actors and even the plays that could be produced were given to one company or the other. Killigrew was given most of the older, established actors and many of the pre-1642 plays, but he ran his company poorly.  Davenant’s company depended on less seasoned actors and had to produce mostly new plays, but the Duke’s Men were younger and perhaps more eager.  The company was also closely supervised by Davenant, and became the more successful of the two.  When Davenant died in 1668 his actors, led by Thomas Betterton, assumed artistic direction of the Duke’s Company.  By 1682 Killigrew’s company found itself in such serious financial straits that it was forced to merge with the Duke’s Company.  Shortly after this merger, outside investors in the “unified” company sensed the money that could be made and in 1693 a lawyer/investor named Christopher Rich took over the company.  He had cash and legal abilities but no theatrical experience and made life miserable for the actors. One writer pronounced Rich “as sly a Tyrant as ever was at the Head of a Theatre.” In 1695 a group of performers led again by Thomas Betterton left the troupe and formed one of their own.  So in the approximate forty years we are looking at, first there were two legitimate companies, which in 1682 merged to become one, then in 1695 divided into two again, one run by Rich, the other by Betterton.

Theatrical entertainments in the Restoration were offered usually three times a week, in the early evening, from October to June.  The “bill” of fare consisted of a full-length play with singing and dancing between the acts, and the plays changed for each performance, creating a “rotating” repertoire. Popular plays were repeated according to the desires of the market, but not necessarily, or even usually, on consecutive nights.

 

This is a bit later that the Restoration period, but it was similar
to what would be presented - by this time "benefits" which had
usually benefitted the author (see below) were extended for
many reasons.

Business becoming increasingly important in this era, let’s look at how playwrights were paid.  A few theatrical writers such as John Dryden were attached to companies and received fixed salaries for their work, or were shareholders in the company and received a steady income in that way.  Most writers, however, were paid a lump sum, and not a very large lump. On the third night of a play’s repetition (if in fact it was popular enough to merit to three performances) the writer received a “benefit” which meant she or he took all the profits from that night’s performance.  If the play ran to six nights, on the sixth the writer again received the profits from that performance “to benefit her or himself.” This system of benefits extended gradually to actors and other members of a company and was used and extended well into the nineteenth century.

 

While the theatre is long gone, this is where Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre was located

Places of performance were largely, as they had been in France, created from tennis courts.  In 1660 Davenant leased Lisle’s tennis court for his Duke’s company and in 1661 he converted the tennis court permanently into what is known as Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre.  This was a tiny space, measuring only 30 by 75 feet.  It was replaced 10 years later by the Dorset Garden Theatre. The 

Dorset Garden was designed by Christopher Wren, the most famous architect of the era. He practically re-built London after the great fire of 1666,most famously re-inventing St Paul’s Cathedral.  The new Dorset Garden practically doubled the space of the old tennis court theatre: 57 by 140 feet.

      

Killigrew’s first space was Gibbons’ tennis court. Then in 1663 his Theatre Royal on Bridges Street was completed.  This theatre burned in 1672 (an early example of a theatrical nightmare that would become all too typical and deadly in the next few centuries), and Killigrew replaced it with another built on the same site and called The Drury Lane Theatre.  It measured 58 by 140 feet and it was used until 1791. One of the most famous theatres in the city, ever since 1672 a theatre called Drury Lane has been in use in London. 

After 1682, when the King’s and Duke’s companies combined, they used the Drury Lane Theatre, and in 1695, when Betterton and the actors formed their own company, they moved back to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. What did these three theatres so important to

This may or may not be a cross-section of
the Drury Lane - it was once thought designed by
Christopher Wren, but several scholars have
debunked that claim

 Restoration London look like? As you might guess much like the French tennis court theatres, but with a few significant differences:  The pits in the English theatres were raked and equipped with backless benches (whereas French pits, or parterres, were flat and benchless).  There were usually either two or three galleries, the first mostly or all divided into boxes, the second with some boxes, some amphitheatre style seating, the uppermost stadium-style amphitheatres only. The auditoriums were small.  At the Drury Lane, the distance from the front of the stage to the back of the auditorium was only 36 feet.  Imagine 650 people crammed into this intimate space. Henri Misson, a French visitor to London  in 1698, wrote in some detail about the theatre and the audience at Drury Lane: 

"The Pit is an Amphitheatre, fill'd with Benches without Backboards, and adorn'd and cover'd with green Cloth. Men of Quality, particularly the younger Sort, some Ladies of Reputation and Virtue, and abundance of Damsels that haunt for Prey, sit all together in this Place, Higgledy-piggledy, chatter, toy, play, hear, hear not. Farther up, against the Wall, under the first Gallery and just opposite to the Stage, rises another Amphitheatre, which is taken by persons of the best Quality, among whom are generally very few Men. The Galleries, whereof there are only two Rows, are fill'd with none but ordinary People..."

      

The stage was an interesting mix of old and new.  It was raked, but it was divided equally into a forestage and a scenic stage.  The stage depth at Drury lane was 34 feet.  The 17 feet closest to the audience was forestage, the other 17 feet was scenic stage.  There were two doors on each side of the forestage, from which the actors entered and exited.  The scenic stage was equipped with wings in grooves and a rear shutter, used solely for spectacle and framed by stage boxes, making a kind of proscenium opening.  These audience boxes on the sides of the stage looked out over the forestage. As they had in the Elizabethan public theares fops sat on the sides of the forestage as well, often blocking the view of those in the stage boxes. The scenic stage made possible Italian style scene changes when splendor and spectacle was called for. 

Stage lighting in the restoration was much like that of the French theatres. There were windows in the theatres to make use of natural sunlight during the performances, which began in the late afternoon, but there were also candles everywhere!  The auditorium as well as the stage was lit by candles, in chandeliers, and there were some attempts made to dim and color and focus the light on stage.  There was even a job associated with the candles. Someone had to light them and maintain them during the performances at intermissions, and afterwards to replace and repair them.  So it’s not surprising that paysheets for theatre companies include payment for “keepers of the candles” – I must admit that I’ve had worse gigs in the theatre!  By 1672 footlights began to be used in English theatres, which certainly heightened illumination on an actor, but which also gave off that weird shadowy effect characteristic of lighting from below. 

For costumes, as in France the English actors wore contemporary garments, with the occasional habit a la Romaine for classical roles, equally as unlike a Roman as they were in France.

      

Finally, the actors. Interestingly, this is one of the first eras (THE first in English-language theatre) from which we see sources on how to act. How did they act? Let's just say they were less than realistic. Emotion was portrayed physically, using certain stances, certain movements and positions of different body parts. Have a look below at how different emotions were to be read in positions of the hand:

 More importantly, for the first time in England, beginning in 1660 women finally were allowed to play women’s roles!  On the continent, remember, women had been playing women’s roles for approximately 70 to 80 years. In fact women on the continent had often performed in medieval religious and secular plays, and of course women were popular throughout Europe in commedia dell’arte troupes. 

      

Granted, theatres had been closed for nearly 20 years, but if you were a middle aged person chances were very good that you’d seen performances in the public theatres before the Commonwealth, and, because it was always this way, you’d never have questioned that men and boys played women’s roles. For early audiences in the Restoration it would have been surprising, even shocking, to see WOMEN play women’s roles. What begins to happen in the feelings of the audiences is a sexual pleasure, a titillation never before experienced; from love scenes more realistic and passionate than ever before. Low-cut bodices revealed heaving bosoms. Views of women’s rears, thighs and calves were very apparent in the immediately popular breeches roles (in which women disguised themselves as men). Body parts were revealed on stage that were never displayed in public.

      

One of the nasty side effects of this new titillation was that women in the theatre became fair game offstage as well as on for lords and gallants who felt free to wait around after the play and proposition, seduce, even on occasion abduct actresses for their own pleasure -- some of the women of course may have been willing, but athere is a very dark side to the beginnings of English actresses.  Of course this is hardly all a thing of the past.  Women on stage (or film or TV) in earlier eras as well as in our era have been and continue to be exploited in a sexual fashion.  It may not be surprising that women of quality in the audience began to wear masks to the theatre, so that they could see the play, as the diarist Pepys suggested “without the Risque of an Insult, to their Modesty.”  This situation became complicated when prostitutes began to wear masks as well, and “haunted for prey...” The situation became so confusing that Queen Anneplaced a ban on masks in the theatre in 1704.

      

As I noted at the beginning of this post, we know many, many more actors in this era than in earlier ones, but let’s limit our comments to a brief look at three of the most famous women on the Restoration stage:  Nell Gwynn, Elizabeth Barry, and Anne Bracegirdle.  Nell Gwynn began working in theatres as an orange wench (a job in which she most likely sold other...commodities 

...in addition to oranges). She became the mistress of a prominent actor, who also trained her to act. Nell became quite popular especially in comic roles and more specifically in breeches roles, and finally became the mistress of the king!  At this point she retired from the stage, and bore Charles II two bastard sons, one of which was made a duke.  When King Charles lay dying he presumably said “let not poor Nelly starve.” Whatever the truth of that statement, she was taken care of by the state until her death.

      

Elizabeth Barry was also successful in comedy, but was remembered primarily for her fine work in tragedy.  Her voice and acting were described, by actor/manager Colley Cibber as “full, clear and strong, so that no violence of passion could be too much for her; and when distress or tenderness possessed her, she 

subsided into the most affecting melody and softness.  In the art of exciting pity she had a power beyond all actresses I have yet seen, or what your imagination can conceive.”  Not a bad review! She was the usual leading lady to Thomas Betterton, about whom more in a bit, and she also had quite a reputation as a lover. A version of her story can be read in The Libertine, in which the playwright imagines her as a lover of the Earl of Rochester.  

In fact she was his lover, and there was an incident on stage between Barry and another actress, a Miss Boutel, during a scene in which Barry was to stab the other actress, One night Barry “struck with such force that though the point of the dagger was blunted, it made its way through Miss Boutel’s stays, and entered about a quarter of an inch in the flesh.”  Some said this had occurred because Barry was jealous of Rochester’s attentions to Miss Boutel; others say it was all about a veil, which Barry had wanted to wear on stage, but which was given to Miss Boutel instead. We’ll never be certain, darn it!

      

Anne Bracegirdle is remembered prmarily for her work in the comedies of manners, usually as the beautiful and witty heroine. 

Among other roles she created Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World.  Colley Cibber had this to say about Bracegirdle: “She was of a lovely Height, with dark-brown hair and eyebrows, black sparkling eyes, and a fresh blushy complexion; and whenever she exerted herself, had an involuntary flushing in her breast, neck and face, having continually a cheerful aspect, and a fine set of even white teeth...Genteel comedy was her chief essay, and that too when in men’s clothes, in which she far surmounted all the actresses of that and this age...” Yes, but could she act?  Didn’t seem to matter! Point taken, I hope, about the titillation factor in Restoration theatre.

      

Among the fine male actors, I have just mentioned Colley Cibber, who kept an important journal, and about whom we’ll learn more next semester. Charles Hart was one of the more popular actors of the period, but is best known today for his affair with Nell Gwynn

 and for bringing her into the theatre. And Edward Kynaston was, at the beginning of the Restoration, the finest player of women’s roles. He had been a boy actor in the late Caroline period, when he learned to cross dress, but his career was cut short by the advent of women on the stage.  Billy Crudup played him rather well in the recent film Stage Beauty, which was based, by the way, on a play.

Thomas Betterton was the most important actor of the era, impressive in both comedy and tragedy. He was the primary player

 of Hamlet in the Restoration; and he was also a bold and daring manager, among other deeds leading the actors in a revolt against their oppressive manager, and forming a new company. He is perhaps the first in a line of star actors/managers for whom an “age” is named. Insiders know that the Age of Betterton signifies the Restoration, and the Age of Garrick the 18th century. But more of that in the not so distant future.

Betterton is on the left here - this is the bedroom scene with the Queen and
the ghost of Hamlet's father. Note that in this and in the picture below Betterton
wears seventeenth century dress.

Before we leave the Restoration, brief notes on two other dramatic forms that began in England during this time. At the very beginning of the previous lecture I noted that English opera began in the home of William Davenant, with The Siege of Rhodes. But composer Henry Purcell really put English opera on the map, not long after that maiden voyage. He wrote several operas but his most important was The Fairie Queen, which used as its source A Midsummer Night's Dream. In fact it, and others of Purcell's operas, remain in the repertoire today. Just a few examples in pictures:

Jonathan Kent is the director who put the Almeida Theatre on the map - here you see
Bottom and Titania, observed by Oberon

Kent cleverly made use of seventeenth century techniques, such as flying machines

But he also moved into the surreal...what is the Fairie Queen, after all, but a dream!

Mark Morris of course has his own dance company, and is having fun with this production of Purcell at the English National Opera (ENO, in London

Even more briefly I want to point out another popular form that had its origins at this time. Read the words in the picture below:

And if you've ever strolled around Little Venice in London, you'll see that puppet theatre and the Punch and Judy show has not gone away!

Next time we leap across time and space to Asia, for an all too brief look at theatre in India, China and Japan!

The Theatre of the English Restoration I: Background and Writers

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), 

Execution of Charles I

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.

Oliver Cromwell

After 1649 committees of Parliament governed England, but in 

William Davenant

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.

      

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

Charles II

 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 18^th century that the permissive atmosphere of Restoration England gave way in favor of a somewhat more rational worldview.

      

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

oh yes it was altered!

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!). 

      

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. 

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

 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.

      

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, 

at this time.  Katherine Phillips, Catherine Trotter, Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, and most importantly Susannah Centlivre, were among them.  Mrs. Centlivre’s plays were tremendously popular well into the 19th c, and her play The Busybody was recently revived in both England and America.

        

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. 

Sir George Etherege

 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.

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.

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!