Restoration Drama: Sir George Etherege and The Man of Mode, or Sir Fopling Flutter

In his admirable book, English Drama: Restoration and Eighteenth Century (1660-1798) (London: Longman, 1996), Richard W. Bevis is less dismissive with respect to Restoration comedy and sums up debates revolving around it with the following six questions:

1. “ Was Restoration comedy ‘artificial’ or a realistic picture of its society?

2. Was ‘comedy of manners’ the dominant type?

3. Were the comedies moral, immoral, or amoral?

4. Were they trivial or serious, gross or subtle, dull or lively?

5. Do they indicate social and literary health, or sickness?

6. Were they primarily conservative, or rebellious?”

He concludes that “comedies were heightened but roughly realistic pictures of life in a part of London society, not totally artificial;” thus, “‘comedy of manners’ is a slippery term that does not accurately describe a large number of Restoration comedies” (p. 99). On the other questions there does not seem to be any consensus yet.

It is a significant question indeed if we may apply our aesthetics, mostly trained on 19^th century Romanticism and realism, to these plays at all, or we should rather study contemporary aesthetic-poetic treatises (such as Dryden’s) and try to evaluate these plays in terms of their “own”. Yet, firstly, playwrights seldom actually do what “official” treatises say;

secondly, contemporary critics and writers are not unanimous on most of theses questions, either, and, thirdly, we can hardly help looking at these plays through the eyes of our own;

after all – besides some obvious historical interest – some features should be found whereby Restoration comedy may have an appeal of its own to the 20^th-21^st century audience. Perhaps it is precisely for their “realism” that Restoration comedy is so much anchored in its own times; since it is so “typical” of its age, it is not typical enough to arc over several hundreds of

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years and shake off – even in cunning modern adaptations – the manners, customs and values of the late 17^th century. This “shaking off” might be difficult because what these comedies are concerned with is precisely manners, customs and values.

The heated debates concerning the sources of knowledge in the 1640s (should one accept arguments of authority, or should every single step of reasoning be proven and demonstrated in the Cartesian fashion?), the disappearance of the idea of the “divine monarch”, replaced by the theory of “social contract” in a fierce world where everyone is at war with everybody (Hobbes), the bitter quarrels between Parliamentarians (“Whigs”, Puritans) and Royalists (“Tories”, Catholics) over politics and religion – where Anglicanism was never a satisfactory “third alternative” – are symptoms of a society in need of new values, yet it seems that in the late 17^th century the stage was not a suitable arena to settle such questions. With the rise of science and of the anti-sceptical philosophy of Descartes, the boundaries between the various disciplines became more marked than ever, and thus an

“aesthetic” response – such as the theatre (or, in general: poetry) is able to provide – sounded less convincing, or even impossible. By comparison, e.g. Marlowe in his Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare in Hamlet could still represent the crisis around “God-given knowledge”, or the popularity of the history-play in the Renaissance (and, to some extent, of the revenge-tragedy) indicates that a play was still an accepted means to respond to a “politics of realism”

associated – for better or worse – with the Italian humanist and statesman, Niccolo Machiavelli. If Restoration playwrights touched upon politics of their day at all, they interpreted it as a moral question on the personal level, and we look for “serious thinkers” on the Restoration stage in vain.

Yet the appearance of actresses and especially the frequent staging of the reformed or quasi-reformed “rake-hero” indicate that comedy in the Restoration still felt it had authority over a certain area: marriage, gentility and sexual behaviour. It is especially the figure of Don Juan, the promiscuous cynic (cf. Molière as well) in various incarnations (such as Dorimant) which reflects the anxiety and the aggression surrounding sexuality. And comedy, which has always had the role of releasing anxiety and aggression as one of its functions, was a suitable means to put such questions on display. Indeed, the problem with Restoration comedy is how seriously we should take what we see; the ambiguity arises from the well-known question whether a play is the criticism or the “simple” “realistic” representation of contemporary social life? Should we watch e.g. Dorimant (his character largely based on Etherege’s friend, the riotous Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester) as a model which the audience, with some benign forgiveness, should follow, or should we think that he is not more than a “document of his age”, representing the rakish and shocking deeds of the contemporary aristocracy and upper middle-class? This question is hard to decide when the audience wishes to see themselves on the stage but it is hard to tell how much they are able to recognise and to take any “tongue-in-cheek” criticism (even in the form of parody), and when the ancient problem of the relationship between “illusion and reality” is centred around the mask – worn more in the auditorium than on the stage – as perhaps the most important symbol of the age. Some people may wear their faces as masks; some masks are to hide a rich inner life; some masks are there to deceive and some naive people are deceived; some masks, in turn, are worn with the others’ knowledge that they are meant to deceive; sometimes even “plain dealers” (truly honest people) are forced to put on masks to survive, and where is the terminal? Can we ever get down to the “bottom” of truth? To what extent do these playwrights themselves take these questions seriously? The hide and seek might only be turning around itself.

Sir George Etherege was born into a prosperous middle-class family, but neither the date of his birth, nor the time of his death can be given with precision. He was born around 1636 (the earliest date is 1634); the grandfather (also George) was a well-to-do vintner and a shareholder in the Virginia and Bermuda Companies; the father (also George) was a captain

and a purveyor to the Queen Henrietta Maria and followed the Queen to France after her escape in 1644. He died there in 1650 and his children (seven all together) were brought up by the grandfather.

Etherege had a reasonable education; it is likely that he attended Lord Williams’s Grammar School and he may have studied law because in 1654 we find him apprenticed to an attorney. But we know very little about his life right after and before the Restoration; he may have travelled in Flanders and France as well; at least he had a very good knowledge of French. By 1664, when his first play, The Comical Revenge is performed, he already appears as an established court-wit, befriended to famous rakes and courtiers like Sir Charles Sedley, the Earl of Rochester, the Duke of Buckingham and even to the king, Charles II himself. In 1668 his second play, She Wou’d if She Cou’d was shown and he was made Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in Ordinary. That year, he was sent, as Sir Daniel Hervey’s secretary, to Turkey on a diplomatic mission; he returned to London in 1671. The Man of Mode, his third and last play, was produced in 1676 and it seems that Etherege and his friends spent most of their days with merry trouble- making, enjoying the patronage of the King. In the summer of 1676, in Epsom, Etherege was involved in a fight in which Rochester insulted and almost killed a night-watch and in 1677 we find them in a tavern squabble, where a man was wounded under the eye. It is also likely that Etherege was intimate with Mary of Modena, the wife of the future James II (the King’s brother). In 1679 he married Mary Sheppard Arnold, who was, according to the contemporaries, an ugly, old but very rich widow; it is true that the surviving letters of Etherege to his wife are mostly about money, also recording how much he lost, for example, at the Duchess of Mazarin’s basset-table. Yet he was knighted, perhaps precisely because of his newly acquired wealth. In 1685, when – only for three years – James II followed Charles II on the throne, Etherege was sent on a diplomatic mission again, this time to Ratisbon, and the haste with which he left England seems to indicate that he was escaping from something. He could never return to his beloved London: he neglected his diplomatic duties, he was bored, felt lonely, and spent his time playing cards and when he finally realised that William of Orange was to replace James on the throne and sent warning letters to the Court on this matter, he was not taken seriously. When the exiled James reached Paris in 1689, Etherege joined him and he died in 1691 or 92, converted, at least according to the Benedictine monks at Ratisbon, to Catholicism. Yet these data are obscure – for example for some mysterious reason he is not mentioned in the list of the Court in exile.

As a playwright, Etherege is hailed for no lesser a reason than for bringing “genteel comedy” (as the comedy of manners was then called) to its “first peak” (cf. Bevis, p. 73) especially with She Wou’d, which Thomas Shadwell considered to be “the best comedy written since the Restoration” (Bevis, p. 77). It is true that The Man of Mode also had a noisy – though short-lived – success; at the premiere even the King was present and the name of the hero of the subplot, Sir Fopling, soon became a byword – it even occurs in a theological dispute. The play was staged in Dorset Gardens Theatre by The Duke’s Men, who tried to do their best: Dorimant was played by Thomas Betterton and Mrs Loveit by Mrs Barry, famous for her tragic roles (and for being the current mistress of Rochester).

The plot is rather conventional and mostly episodic: the main story concerns Dorimant, who is introduced in a “private place”, his dressing-room, preparing for action in his “theatre-within-the-theatre”, i.e. in the Mall and in London’s private houses. He wishes to cast his mistress, Mrs Loveit off and start a new liaison with Loveit’s best friend, Bellinda, who is still to be “initiated” because she has not yet had an affair. As early as the beginning of Act I Dorimant learns form the orange-girl that a beautiful young heiress, Harriet is coming to town and he decides to make marrying her the goal of his play (yet perhaps not the goal of the play or of his life). Though we also see him sending money to a town-whore, he successfully tricks Mrs Loveit into rejecting him with the help of Bellinda (whom he successfully seduces)

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and he does win Harriet’s heart, with a promise of marriage, though it is obscure if he would not continue his relationship with both Bellinda and Mrs. Loveit (and/or with other sophisticated and worldly ladies) even after his marriage.

Much of the interpretation of the play depends, indeed, on how we see Dorimant. Is he cultured or rude, a promiscuous cynic, or a man honestly trying to reform in the end? Is he a witty and harmless impostor or a ruthless, narcissistic hypocrite, filled with Hobbisan aggressiveness and appetite? Which is the mask and which is the “real self”? We may try to guide ourselves through contrasts and comparisons; this time, it is Sir Fopling (the hero of the sub-title) who is the “odd-man-out”, the “misfit”: strictly speaking, the play could be acted without him but he is not outside of the play’s meaning at all. Dorimant’s sophisticated style comes from France but has become distinctly English, whereas Sir Fopling is only aping French values yet for us the comedy he creates is less easy to appreciate because most of the jokes at his expense assumes knowledge of contemporary French gossip, including the names of the fashionable gallants and their valets (!) in Paris. Thus, Sir Fopling’s main function is twofold: he creates, in contrast with Dorimant, some space for the latter’s machinations, in the form of perhaps encouraging some real admiration for Dorimant’s easy-going, fearless and elegant new style of manners; yet Sir Fopling also serves as an example of the man who becomes identical with the idiocies of the roles he is playing and with the masks he is putting on to mimic “imperialistic” French culture. The four bullies in Act III, Scene iii, insulting Mrs Loveit and Bellinda are most probably inserted for the sake of contrast as well: they might indicate the difference between openly aggressive manhood and the covert ways in which a

“real wit” makes love to fair ladies. Yet whether this makes Dorimant more or less dangerous, or especially whether Dorimant represents just another “mode” of deplorable – though undeniably attractive – social behaviour remains an open question. As it remains an open question whether for him Harriet is a punishment or a reward. Dorimant and Harriet seem to be a perfect match, yet Harriet is not only beautiful, witty and very rich but nasty too: with Young Bellair she is a malicious observer of contemporary manners and she has no scruples when it comes to turning another knife in the beaten Mrs. Loveit (V; ii.). Loveit is the only real loser in the story: she is the only person ejected in the finale because she cannot control her passions, which, in turn, might be “a telling comment on the values of the play’s society”

(Bevis, p. 89). Perhaps we can say no more that, for better or for worse, Dorimant and Harriet do deserve each other and it is up to them to take this as heaven or hell.

It is remarkable that in the world of the play, the lifestyle of the upper-class wit seems to have a corrupting effect on the lower-classes, too; the Shoemaker, in Act I, does not only complain about apprentices imitating the fashionable gallants but gives the following portrait of his marriage:

’Zbud, there’s never a man i’ the town lives more like a gentleman with his wife than I do. I never mind her motions; she never inquires into mine. We speak to one another civilly, hate one another heartily, and because ‘tis vulgar to lie and soak together, we have each of us our several settle-bed” (I, 255-9).

Does the play blame the “lower classes” for such conduct as well? Or does it wish to demonstrate that there is no exception: the world is corrupt though and through?

In the subplot, however, The Man of Mode does allow a very different pair of lovers to come together with the promise of a good marriage: Young Bellair and Emilia are the representatives of true love and they only have to employ an innocent and easily accomplished trick-marriage to fool Old Bellair, the typical “comic old father” and senex and to bring about a real marriage. Old Bellair’s portrait is nicely matched by her sister’s, Lady Woodwill’s outmoded ideas of gallantry and both of them think that marriage is a purely social and mercenary affair. This is considered to be “unreasonable” by everyone, including

Harriet and Lady Woodwill’s laments about her beauty no longer admired and Old Bellair’s comic attempt at courting Emilia undermine all their claims to authority.

Yet even Young Bellair and Emilia have to resort to a trick, to a mask: they are not able to ignore society around them, in which love is constantly demystified: it is portrayed in images of money, sickness, (legal) battle, “business”, hunting, a card game, etc., so largely in materialistic and competitive terms. This innocent couple might be carefully placed a long way from the young rakes about town, still they have to realise that in London love is a temporary thing; nothing and nobody may be trusted for ever; the world is governed by interests and not friendships or “real” love, and most relationships are based on a conspiracy against somebody rather than on supporting a common goal. Will they survive in the long run? Of course, in a comedy it is impossible to ask what happens after the curtain goes down but it is noteworthy that compared with Harriet and Dorimant, Emilia and Young Bellair – the latter escaping a proposed match precisely with Harriet – are far less vital or perceptive.

Innocence and naivete seem to go hand in hand, just like wit and a fair amount of foppishness and we have to wait until Congreve’s Mirabell and Millamant to find a couple who are both witty and in love at the same time, though their figures will not be devoid of some question-marks, either.

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Chapter 12

Drama in the 18^th Century 12. 1. Alexander Pope

12.1.1. Pope’s life and work (1688-1744)

Alexander Pope was born in 1688, in the year of the “Glorious Revolution”, which, however, meant a relatively pleasant period for Protestants rather than for Catholics and Pope was the only son of a Catholic linen merchant. The Act of Toleration in 1689 granted free worship only to Dissenters but not for Catholics: Catholics had to live at least ten miles from the city-centre, they could not attend university (cf. “numerous nullus”), they were not allowed to hold public offices and they had to pay extra taxes. Still, Pope’s father was a well-to-do man and Pope lived, all through his life, under comfortable circumstances yet he never lost his “outsider position”. He had an excellent education (he made up for what he missed at the university with private tutors) and he got encouragement to try his hand at literature both from his parents and from powerful patrons. His first publications (The Pastorals, 1709; An Essay on Criticism, 1711; and the first version of The Rape of the Lock; 1712) brought him immediate success. He boasted of friends like Jonathan Swift, John Gay (author of The Beggar’s Opera), Thomas Parnell (a good poet and an excellent scholar of ancient Greek texts) and the Queen’s physician, Dr. John Arbuthnot (also interested in literature). Together they formed a “society of man of letters” (which was very much in fashion those days) called the Scriblerus Club (Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels grew out of this circle, too).

Pope’s greatest enterprise was the translation of Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey (1714-1726). Trough subscriptions, he managed to make his life financially secure and he became one of the first poets who did not have to rely on aristocratic patronage but earned his living entirely “by his pen”.

Pope belonged to the circle of “Tory gentleman poets” and was constantly criticised and ridiculed by the more “plebeian Whigs”, led by Joseph Addison. Even his physical deformity was made fun of: he was 4 feet and 6 inches tall because of the tuberculosis of the spine. Much play was made with the letters of his name, too: A. P...E. The Dunciad (1728) marks Pope entering the satire- and pamphlet-warfare of the age. Among Pope’s enemies the bitterest were Thomas Tickell (producing a rival translation of the Iliad) and Lewis Theobald (with a rival edition of Shakespeare’s plays). Neither the Tories, nor the Whigs did form, by any means, an organised party: these names started to circulate after the Glorious Revolution

Pope belonged to the circle of “Tory gentleman poets” and was constantly criticised and ridiculed by the more “plebeian Whigs”, led by Joseph Addison. Even his physical deformity was made fun of: he was 4 feet and 6 inches tall because of the tuberculosis of the spine. Much play was made with the letters of his name, too: A. P...E. The Dunciad (1728) marks Pope entering the satire- and pamphlet-warfare of the age. Among Pope’s enemies the bitterest were Thomas Tickell (producing a rival translation of the Iliad) and Lewis Theobald (with a rival edition of Shakespeare’s plays). Neither the Tories, nor the Whigs did form, by any means, an organised party: these names started to circulate after the Glorious Revolution