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!