AT one time, calling four comedies from the Restoration (1660–1714) ‘libertine’ would have been an exercise in redundancy. Everyone knew, so the reasoning went, that these comedies advocated sexual pleasure and were therefore essentially ‘libertine’ in nature. That so many Restoration scripts dropped out of the performance repertory by the mid-eighteenth century, not to resurface until the 1920s, supplied further proof of their licentious nature. These views, standard in critical assessments from Samuel Johnson through to the 1950s, were occasionally challenged by critics hoping to rescue the plays from the slag heap of time. Ironically, while the moralists may have banned Restoration comedies from the library and the stage, the advocates tacitly admitted to the same concern by inventing adroit arguments that deflected attention away from sex to–well, practically anything else.
The Romantic critic Charles Lamb made one of the first noteworthy defences along these lines, arguing that Restoration comedies ‘are a world of themselves almost as much as fairy-land…. The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact they do not appeal to it at all.’1 In the 1960s Aubrey Williams put forth an ingenious variation on the ‘they aren’t really about sex’ thesis. Instead Williams condemned the ‘scholars and critics [who] apparently have become both captives and abettors of a mythic Restoration sexuality’.2 Of the plays, Williams asserted that behind the ‘fallen world’ of Restoration comedies ‘there is usually implied, or explicitly affirmed, both an immanent and a transcendent order of Providence’,3 a perhaps startling statement given the cheerful immorality of any number of plays. The historical interpretations of the last two decades have again shifted attention away from sex, this time to politics. Historicists, by the very nature of their enterprise, read sexual behaviour as symptomatic of larger social forces, such as class tensions or royalist ideology; thus, sexual desire can never be ‘about’ itself but something else. For Laura Brown ‘the formal centrality of libertine philosophy for the Restoration dramatists results from its direct implication of the essential social contradictions of their time and class’.4 For J. Douglas Canfield ‘Restoration comedy … is part of this same official discourse, to borrow a concept central to the work of the great Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. That is, it underwrites the same ideology, the same natural right of the English aristocracy—from peers to the gentry—to rule because they are superior in intelligence (wit) and natural parts, and because they have been bred to rule’.5
Recently Maximillian E. Novak has argued against the tendency to explain away the sexual content of Restoration comedies: ‘I think, however, that at this juncture we should be willing to admit what common sense would seem to dictate. Almost all of these plays are indeed about sex to a degree, and some of them are almost exclusively about sex.’6 While Novak is right to assert the obvious here, one hesitates to use ‘sex’ and ‘libertine’ as interchangeable adjectives. To do so assumes that any comedy in which sex features prominently is somehow libertine in nature. This is not the case. As Robert D. Hume demonstrated some years ago, the Restoration stage featured a wide variety of comic forms, including Spanish romance, reform comedy, wit comedy, sex comedy, sentiment-tinged comedy, French farce, and Augustan intrigue comedy.7 Sex, directly or indirectly, drives the plots of these comedies, whether manifesting itself in the banter-as-foreplay exchanges of the ‘gay couple’, the swaggering masculine energy of the hero in a Spanish-style comedy, or the teasing insouciance of a heroine in a comedy of wit. While these plays may be sexy, they are not necessarily libertine.
This is not to agree with those critics who dismiss libertinism outright, maintaining that it never existed as an ‘organized philosophy’ in Restoration England and therefore had little to do with the drama.8 Libertinism did exist in the late seventeenth century, but like all intellectual movements, it does not easily yield a consistent body of thought or a single point of origin. There are differences too between French and English libertinism, as several scholars have observed. Philosophical libertinism, which merged scepticism with materialism, typified continental thinking, whereas sexual libertinism, as James Grantham Turner points out, coloured English thought from Shakespeare to the eighteenth century.9 To complicate matters further, people reacted differently to libertinism, some expressing laconic bemusement, others a cool advocacy, and still others outraged condemnation. As the plays in this volume reveal, writers in the seventeenth century were hardly uniform in their thinking, any more than we are today: Shadwell’s take differs markedly from Durfey and Etherege. All of these dramatists do register its effects, suggesting that libertinism, however untidy a concept, was a social and intellectual force in late seventeenth-century English life.
To arrive at some notion of what libertinism meant to the four dramatists included herein, we might consider briefly some of the strands of thought that, interwoven, produced this movement. Maximillian E. Novak looks to Théophile de Viau (1590–1626), who first articulated several of the major tenets of libertinism: ignore social conventions (which are merely artificial constructs); question social institutions, such as marriage or the church; and elevate physical sensation over formal learning.10 While de Viau influenced a circle of like-minded thinkers in France, the writings of Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) did far more to popularize ideas that ultimately would prove useful to the advocates of libertine thought. Gassendi is credited with introducing the atomistic theories of the ancient philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BC) into the mainstream of European intellectual life. Gassendi, a Catholic priest, attempted to purge Epicurus’ writings of the atheism and materialism that had been associated with it since the classical period. Most controversial was Epicurus’ belief that pleasure (whether it be the pleasure of motion, as in copulation, or the pleasure of rest, as in the tranquillity of the soul) is the highest good; he also taught that ‘we must release ourselves from the prison of affairs and politics’.11 While Gassendi retreated from the more lubricious implications of neo-Epicurean doctrine, he nevertheless ‘joined his libertine friends in believing that philosophy could flourish only if it were free from the restraints of both the world and authority’.12 There was also a keen interest in epistemology in this intellectual circle. Richard Popkin has shown how the scepticism of Pierre Charron (1541–1603), which questioned whether human beings could possess true knowledge of things, affected Gassendi and other libertins érudits.13 By the 1640s Gassendi was associated with François Luillier, one of the more notorious freethinkers and libertines in Paris; indeed, some historians maintain that Gassendi by this period was himself a ‘secret libertine’.14
Epicurus filtered through French intellectual circles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; a century earlier, the Italian humanists rediscovered Lucretius (c.94–55 BC), another ancient writer whose thought would influence Restoration libertinism. Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), who periodically scoured French and German monasteries for ancient manuscripts, turned up a copy of Lucretius’ De rerum natura in 1417. This six-book poem, composed in dactylic hexameters, extended several key neo-Epicurean notions, among them the concept of pleasure. De rerum natura quickly made its presence felt in humanist circles. In 1431 Lorenzo Valla (1405–57) circulated a dialogue De voluptate (On Pleasure), an attempt, in the words of Maristella de P. Lorch, ‘to render through language a deeply felt conviction (persuasio) that life as we live it first and foremost with our senses is good (bonum)—in fact, the only good (unicum bonum)—because of the continuous successful encounter (connubium, or marriage) of the senses with the object of their desire (natura)’.15 Valla’s personal association with notorious roués further kindled the already inflammatory reputation of De voluptate. He studied Latin with Pietro Aretino (1492–1556), whose pornographic Sonnetti lussuriosi (Lewd Sonnets) accompanied drawings of sixteen sexual positions by Giuliano Romano, the 25-year-old pupil of Raphael. In 1433 Valla became secretary to Alfonso of Aragon, whose court was known throughout Europe for its licentiousness.
Works by Italian humanists, such as Valla, or French libertins érudits, such as Gassendi, established the philosophical basis for libertinism. By the mid-seventeenth century, translations made available the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius to English readers. Richard Kroll speculates that Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the regicide, ‘probably made the first complete translation of Lucretius into English’.16 Certainly by 1656 interest was evident: that year the scientist Walter Charleton published a translation of Epicurus’s Morals, and the polyglot John Evelyn produced a translation of the first book of De rerum natura. These would be followed by the publication during the Restoration of Thomas Creech’s 1682 translation, as well as John Dryden’s Miscellany Poems (London, 1692), which also made the verse of Lucretius available to English readers. Neo-Epicureanism complemented the more popular notions of a libertine like Théophile de Viau. The retreat from political service advocated by Epicurus (via Gassendi) allowed for the independence of thought that led ultimately to questioning social institutions, such as marriage. Epistemological scepticism shed further doubt on received knowledge and social norms. Scepticism could also lead to atheism, a charge frequently levelled against libertines. And the emphasis on sensation in the atomistic theories of Lucretius was taken to justify the libertine pursuit of pleasure.
Criticism that purports to detect the fingerprint of philosophy on popular art risks scorn. Nonetheless, scholars have for the past fifty years drawn upon the history of ideas to contextualize Restoration comedy. Dale Underwood, for one, chronicled the impact of neo-Epicurean philosophy on the libertine dramatist, Sir George Etherege. He describes how classical and medieval thought contributed to the Restoration cult of pleasure: the ‘hedonistic tendencies’ of the Greek Cynics (such as Diogenes) could be used to bolster libertinism, while the anti-rationalism of the Christian sceptic ‘presented one more source of attack upon the traditional structure of orthodox thought’. More recently, Warren Chernaik documented the impact of Hobbes upon Restoration libertinism, maintaining that ‘Hobbes and Lucretius were essentially alike in their appeal. Both were perceived as radical, anti-establishment figures …’17 In part, the demonizing of Hobbes was due to a flagrant misreading of his masterpiece The Leviathan (1651). Rochester and others appropriated from Hobbes his philosophical scepticism and tendency to question traditional morality while rejecting other strands of his thought that were less compatible with a fashionable libertinism. Because of this sort of appropriation, Hobbes’s name by the Restoration became synonymous with godlessness.
Suffice it to say that the humanist revival of classical thought, the philosophical movements of the 1640s and 1650s, and the availability of affordable translations combined to produce an intellectual climate that—in some circles at least—made possible the scepticism, defiance, and sensuality characteristic of seventeenth-century libertinism.18 In 1656, the same year that saw translations of Epicurus and Lucretius published by Charleton and Evelyn respectively, Francis Osborne printed his Advice to a Son, a sort of libertine conduct book for offspring sufficiently benighted to think marriage a good thing. Even within ‘popular culture’ libertinism was felt: Ned Ward, that scribbler of cheap print, invokes ‘Great Lucretius’ in The Libertine’s Choice.19 While the allusion to Lucretius in an otherwise negligible poem might have given pause to Gassendi or Charleton, the very gesture reveals the extent to which libertinism had infiltrated popular culture. The ‘well-defined starting-point’ and ‘very rapid development’ of erotic literature from 1650 onwards, beginning with La puttana errante, provides further evidence that libertinism, in the words of David Foxon, had emerged by the mid-seventeenth century ‘as a fashionable and pervasive mode of thought whose freedom related to religion, politics, and society as well as to sexual life’.20
The history of the word ‘libertine’ parallels its social evolution. Latinate in origin (libertinus), in Roman antiquity it applied to a freedman, someone manumitted from slavery. By 1542, the word lost its original function of social classification; instead, the French libertin designated, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘certain antinomian sects of the early sixteenth century’ (2a). By the early seventeenth century ‘libertine’, both in France and England, connoted a freethinker, someone who held ‘loose’ opinions about religion. Concurrent with this meaning is Shakespeare’s use of the word to describe someone of dissolute, licentious character. This latter meaning is the one that made its way into popular literature, eventually, by the end of the seventeenth century, extinguishing all prior religious and philosophical associations. As a point of comparison, one might think of the evolution of the term ‘deconstruction’ in our own time. Originally a series of philosophical and aesthetic propositions entertained by a handful of French and American intellectuals, deconstruction has some thirty years later—about the time it took terms like ‘libertine’ and ‘epicure’ to go from the heights of Walter Charleton to the depths of Ned Ward—come to mean something like ‘interpretation’ in the jargon of everyday film reviews. Thus to point, as have some scholars, to the more debased uses of the word ‘libertine’ during the Restoration is hardly to vitiate its impact; rather, it suggests that libertinism was sufficiently potent to filter into the popular realm of lampoons, ballads, and drama without yet losing—at least not entirely—its philosophical underpinnings.
Concepts like libertinism require more than intellectual force for their dissemination: social conditions must also be amenable. Deconstruction required the political tumult of the 1960s and 1970s to provide the cultural fecundity necessary for its growth. Certainly the same can be argued for Restoration England, that libertinism’s purchase on intellectual and popular culture—especially the drama—was partly due to the historical moment. Standard treatments of the Restoration stress the ‘relief’ felt by citizens oppressed by the puritan strictures of the Interregnum (1649–60). After years of deprivation, so the argument goes, people were eager for more self-expression (including sexual freedom) and welcomed the restoration of a monarch known for his easy, sensual nature. As with any generalization, there are exceptions. John Milton, whose writings straddle the Interregnum and the Restoration, is a notable instance of someone whose views were clearly at odds with the new official culture of hedonism. As ongoing persecution of Quakers, Anabaptists, and Presbyterians in the period indicates, many people shared Milton’s religious and political principles. Not everyone lit bonfires or danced deliriously in the streets of London upon the eve of the Restoration in 1660.
Nonetheless, there is little question that the court of Charles II became infamous for what onlookers styled its ‘libertine’ or ‘epicure’ qualities. The diarist Samuel Pepys, no stranger to the demands of the flesh, grumbled early in the monarch’s reign that the ‘King and his new Queene minding their pleasures at Hampton Court’ were neglecting more princely duties.21 For the duration of his diary, Pepys noted faithfully every alteration in Charles II’s love life, as one mistress displaced another. Keeping track of the monarch’s numerous sexual conquests became something of a national pastime, as did chronicling the health of the royal ‘member’.22 Equally of note were the more dissolute escapades of court wits like John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, or Sir Charles Sedley. Not only did they give free rein to their sexual appetites but they also defied basic standards of decency. Sedley, dead drunk on a balcony, dipped his penis in a glass of wine, emptied the glass, and then urinated on the outraged crowd that had gathered below. Buckingham killed the husband of his mistress in a duel. Rochester, the most notorious libertine of all, engaged in a host of outrageous acts: he kidnapped his future wife (her father had had the good sense to question Rochester’s suitability as a prospective mate); he wrote scatological and pornographic lyrics; he tipped over a sundial in the king’s garden; he disguised himself as a mountebank and sold medicines to gullible citizens; and he involved the king in a whorehouse caper that included the dramatist George Etherege. Rochester also happened to be the wittiest poet of the period, capable of penning verses at once heartbreakingly tender and arrestingly coarse.
The close connection between the court and libertinism rendered the latter a peculiarly urban phenomenon, one moreover confined to the up-market neighbourhoods, such as Westminster, preferred by the cognoscenti. Several pamphlets published during the 1670s not only specified fashionable London but, more particularly, the London playhouse as the site of libertine values such as wit, promiscuity, and irreverence. Gallantry-A-La-Mode (1674), a long poem in couplets, describes in one memorable section a rake taking a young woman to a performance of Dryden’s Marriage A-la-Mode, fully expecting that the performance will arouse her sufficiently to make seduction easy later that evening.23 If London and the court were associated with libertine practices, the country, as Maximillian E. Novak observes, was by this time known for all things ‘stupid, barbaric, and dull’.24 The exasperated author of Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town (1673) objected strongly to what had become the standard stage representation of the country gentlemen: ‘thou hast there seen us brought in with a high-crown’d Hat, a Sword put through the wast-band of our Breeches, and a pair of antick tops; where we tamely stand, whilst the learned man of Humours practices upon us with his sleights, and intrigues.’25 The libertine wit, by contrast, is as a kind of ‘hero’ who extols an atheism grounded in the writings of Aristotle and Epicurus while mocking marriage and conventional morality. Interestingly, the author attributes this phenomenon to a superfluity of gentlemen dramatists. Claiming affinity with the court, they embrace what ‘will pass for a wit in the Town’. Moreover, unlike a ‘mercenary Poet, who ventures for his gain’, the gentleman dramatist need not worry about box-office failure; thus freed from the constraints of the market, he can ‘hazard his abilities’ and write whatever he wants, even offensive libertine fare.26
As argued previously, plays that feature sex are not necessarily ‘libertine’. What characterizes the libertine plays written during the period is the persistence of a set of attitudes: scepticism about received knowledge; defiance against social sanctions and institutions; and a professed commitment to a life of hedonism (as opposed to a professed desire for a particular man or woman). James Grantham Turner also detects an ethos of grands esprits; he argues that the heroic ideology informing the tragicomedies and heroic dramas of the 1660s transmuted into a ‘erotic heroism’. While Turner sees everywhere in Restoration literature ‘the attempt to heroize sexuality’, he admits that ‘the stage, particularly the tragedy, was evidently the means of transmission’.27 Several factors coalesced to produce the ‘libertine offensive’, to use the phrase coined by Maximillian E. Novak, in the drama of the 1670s, the decade represented in this volume. Advocates of libertinism, men like the earl of Rochester, the duke of Buckingham, or Sir Charles Sedley, had especially close ties to the theatre. Some wrote or translated plays themselves; others functioned as important patrons to dramatists. All of them exercised aesthetic power, commenting on scripts, revising passages, and making recommendations to the managers who ran the companies. The ‘transmission’ of their influence can be seen in the career of a playwright like John Dryden. Concerned with entrée into court circles, Dryden ingratiated himself with a series of increasingly important patrons. In 1671, at work on the comedy Marriage A-la-Mode, Dryden gave the manuscript to Rochester for correction, who in turn showed it to Charles II. Their influence shows not only in the polished repartee of the court characters—indeed Dryden in the dedication pays homage to Rochester’s stylistic authority—but also in the subject matter. It is, as Novak observes, one of the first plays to register fully the impact of libertine thought.28 Libertinism also shaped authorial behaviour. James Anderson Winn points out that contemporaries were quick to mock Dryden’s affectation of the rakish speech typical of the court libertines once he had ingratiated himself with the Rochester circle.29
Changes within the companies also smoothed the way for the transmission of libertine values. In 1668 Sir William Davenant died, and management of the Duke’s Company devolved to his widow Mary and the superb actor Thomas Betterton. Davenant, a product of the Caroline period, frequently waxed nostalgic about the older drama: it was through him, for instance, that Dryden claimed to have acquired a love of Shakespeare. During Davenant’s tenure, the Duke’s Company staged tragicomedies modelled on earlier plays written by Fletcher and other Caroline playwrights.30 Betterton, who played three of the libertine rakes in this volume, appears more willing in his capacity as manager to consider licentious fare. Indeed, his own comedy The Amorous Widow, an adaptation from Molière, showcases what Robert D. Hume calls ‘titillative sex’.31 Then too professional dramatists by 1670 increasingly vied with the gentlemen writers who had dominated—in the case of the King’s Company, almost exclusively—the restored theatre. Dependent upon bread, they were, as the author of Remarques on the Humours and Conversations of the Town noted, far more subject to the pressures of the market place, which included not merely the audience but also patrons and critics. If arbiters of taste, such as Rochester and Buckingham, promoted libertine values, then the professional dramatists had at the very least to respond to this phenomenon.
This is not to suggest that dramatists embraced wholeheartedly the ‘libertine values’ debated in the pamphlet wars of the 1670s or expressed in the erotic verse of Rochester or Sir John Oldham. Because drama is a public art form, it is subject to constraints that do not otherwise govern private poems. Although manuscript circulation could, according to Harold Love, ‘bring a new poem to as many readers as might have encountered it as a printed broadside’, that very mode of transmission was intended to circumvent the sort of censorship typically visited upon the press or the stage.32 Moreover, frequent complaints by women in the audience suggest strongly that even during these more relaxed times there were limits to what could be represented, as the outcry occasioned by The Country Wife (1675) or The Kind Keeper (1678) indicates.33 Given the public nature of the theatre, it would have been impossible for a dramatist to express the sort of views voiced by a speaker in a Rochester lyric. And while professional dramatists, whether out of pressure or sheer curiosity, may have been drawn to explore libertinism in a succession of plays, their views were hardly of a piece. Sometimes in our eagerness to sketch the outline of an intellectual movement, we detect uniformly its major themes, forgetting how individual temperament and various social determinations shape response, as the ensuing discussion shows.
Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine premièred at Dorset Garden in early June 1675, the same month in which Rochester, drunk and obstreperous, toppled the king’s sundial. We know from the prompter John Downes that Thomas Betterton, the most renowned actor of the Restoration stage, played the role of Don John, the eponymous libertine. Downes does not mention the rest of the cast, nor is a cast list printed with the first or subsequent editions. A copy of the 1676 quarto in the Boston Public Library includes a manuscript cast ‘which is compatible with the company at this time’ (Van Lennep, 368). It confirms that Betterton played Don John and lists William Mountfort as Don Lopez and Joseph Williams as Don Antonio. Susanna Percival Mountfort played Maria; Frances Maria Knight personated Leonora; while Charlotte Butler and Mrs Twyford performed the sisters Flavia and Clara. The inimitable Anthony Leigh was given the role of Jacomo, a part well suited to his comic genius. The play was by all accounts a great hit. John Downes mentions it along with The Virtuoso, the other play Shadwell wrote during this period, as ‘both very well Acted, and got the Company great Reputation. The Libertine perform’d by Mr. Betterton Crown’d the Play’ (p. 78). Shadwell in the preface acknowledged its acclaim: ‘I have no reason to complain of the success of this play since it pleased those whom, of all the world, I would please most. Nor was the town unkind to it, for which reason I must applaud my good fortune to have pleased with so little pains …’ (ll. 22–5).
If Shadwell’s claim in the prefatory essay is true, he wrote the play in a little over three weeks, there being ‘no act in it which cost me above five days writing; and the last two, the playhouse having great occasion for a play, were both written in four days, as several can testify’ (ll. 25–8). The preface also makes evident Shadwell’s interest in theatrical innovation. As several critics have noted,34 The Libertine departs markedly from earlier plays about Don Juan in showcasing a villain so repulsive as to be almost unrecognizable, a departure Shadwell freely admitted: ‘I hope the readers will excuse the irregularities of the play when they consider that the extravagance of the subject forced me to it. And I had rather try new ways to please than to write on in the same road, as too many do’ (ll. 11–14). Even the prologue advertised The Libertine as ‘The most irregular play upon the stage’ (line 15). In searching for a dramatic form that might answer ‘the extravagance of the subject’, Shadwell wedded music and spectacle to a plot that veers from slapstick humour to chilling scenes of violence and degradation. Precisely because of what Michael Neill calls ‘its furiously unstable tone’,35 critics remain uncertain whether to consider The Libertine a ‘soberfaced burlesque’ or a ‘morally instructive mock-tragedy’.36 A critical practice that focuses solely on the action—on a reading rather than a consideration of performance—will no doubt register these sorts of ‘tonal’ difficulties and therefore see ambiguities in Shadwell’s attitude toward libertinism. The Libertine defies our expectations of the neoclassicism shaping plays from this period: it violates the unities, and it ignores genre. Juxtaposing scenes of rape and murder with moments of humour, provided mainly by the servant Jacomo, The Libertine careers from philosophy to comedy to outright horror.
The rapid shifts in mood, however, do not preclude a carefully crafted dramatic structure nor do they obviate Shadwell’s ultimate repudiation of libertine values. The play was often advertised as The Libertine Destroy’d,37 and this alternative title underscores the intent of dismantling not merely the practitioner but the practice itself. Aaron Jaffe argues that The Libertine stands ‘outside the immediate purview of most examinations of Restoration libertinism’ in excoriating ‘both the social implications of libertine doctrines and practices and their misappropriation of Hobbesian ideas and language’.38 Jaffe demonstrates how the three Dons in the play bear a marked resemblance to Hobbes’s ‘Foole’ in The Leviathan, a figure who ‘thinks that the most reasonable actions are those that are most instrumental to his own desires’; moreover, Shadwell’s use of humours, in which dramatic character is reduced to one overriding trait, shows the Dons to be little more than automatons, less than human.39
Of the four plays in this volume, The Libertine is by far the most overtly philosophical: Act 1 opens with Don John stringing together a series of propositions that establish his libertine credentials. The Dons laugh at law and morality, maintaining that conscience is an instrument of oppression, a way ‘to make men cowards’. Education is another form of ‘dull slavery’. Don John advocates that men should rely on ‘infallible nature’ and ‘natural appetites’, seizing what they desire with impunity. Even sensationalist theory is pressed—albeit illogically—into service: ‘By nature’s order, sense should guide our reason, | Since to the mind all objects sense conveys’ (lines 30–1).
While the more educated members of the audience would have detected the allusions to various threads of libertine thought, one need not have read this body of literature to divine Shadwell’s ethical bent in this play.40 ‘Extravagance’ indicates that Shadwell self-consciously ventured beyond standard dramatic forms, but it also refers to the play’s ‘subject’ (or content): someone who has strayed into moral and theological error, another contemporary meaning of the word. Thus in the figure of Don John, Shadwell encompasses all of libertinism’s dangerous associations: the rake, the freethinker, the atheist. To realize its ambitious scope, The Libertine demanded an excessive dramatic form, one that distorts genre, space, and time to reveal the disease at the core of this fashionable intellectual movement.41 A ‘pure’ genre like tragedy, precisely because its classical form was thought to derive from nature, would have elevated Don John, giving his actions a stature and inevitability at odds with the mission here to debunk libertinism.
Over the course of five acts, the story moves from Seville, to a storm at sea, to a country setting, and then, full circle, back to Seville. Against these varied settings are foregrounded Don John’s claims about libertinism. The urban setting of Seville in Act 1 provides the backdrop to the first major speech in which Don John advocates a life of unfettered indulgence. Seville, home to artifice and convention, is implicitly contrasted to the ‘natural’ behaviour of the libertines. Yet, when confronted with the bald power of a storm in Act 3, Don John retorts petulantly, as if the thunderbolts were simply another recalcitrant being blocking his immediate gratification: ‘You paltry, foolish, bugbear thunder! Am I the mark of your senseless rage?’ (ll. 50–1). Ironically, for someone wedded to the natural, Don John does not see the power of nature, just as he fails to recognize the intrinsic claims of morality, culture, or religion. When the three Dons happen upon shepherds and nymphs in ‘a delightful grove’ in 4.2, neither pastoral beauty nor innocence moves them; again, blind to nature, they ignore the pleas of Jacomo to spare the women. Don John justifies the impending rapes–which are likened to those visited upon the Sabine women—by retorting, ‘I am not in love but in lust; and to such a one a bellyful’s a bellyful, and there’s an end on’t’ (ll. 133–4).
These two different manifestations of the natural, the one sublime, the other bucolic, normally elicit awe and delight. Don John proves incapable of a natural response to nature, a perverse reaction adumbrated in the weird configuration of temporality in the play. Time, as a progressive sequence of causal events, does not occur in The Libertine. There is some sense of the events that transpired before the onset of the action, such as Don John’s act of parricide or his murder of Don Pedro, the governor of Seville. Once the play begins, the Dons make their way from Seville through a shipwreck to some unnamed coast and then back to Seville; but the sequencing of these scenes defies any natural progression. They just happen, arbitrarily and suddenly, as in a dream, and even the sense of place is vague. Shadwell, normally careful about stage directions, does not specify the location of the scenes in which the Dons commit their most heinous crimes, as if to situate their grotesque behaviour in a nether region that defies the logic of place. By contrast, Shadwell specifies natural and religious settings: the ‘delightful grove’ of 4.2 and the church of 4.3 and 5.2, thus giving substance—a sense of place—to those locales at odds with the libertinism of the Dons.
Shadwell’s ‘extravagant’ design also shows in the music. The Libertine has an unusually high percentage of songs for a Restoration play: as Ian Spink notes, ‘originally … there was vocal music in each act, including masque-like episodes in Acts IV and V’.42 These pieces run the gamut of musical styles, ranging from serenades to epithalamia to ‘rustic music’. Two of the original songs were reprinted in William Turner’s New Ayres and Dialogues (1678) and Choice Ayres and Songs (1679). Henry Purcell later wrote several new numbers for a revival in 1692. Certainly the play was considered sufficiently musical to inspire Isaac Pocock to use it as the basis of a two-act opera, also called The Libertine, which premièred at Covent Garden on 20 May 1817.43 Given the surfeit of music in the play, Shadwell possibly conceived of The Libertine as an opera. Shadwell was by this point in his career skilful at ‘weaving music into the plot and in structuring the musical scenes’.44 Brian Corman and Todd S. Gilman point out that he ‘was a trained (though not professional) musician with a thorough familiarity with musical idiom from the most traditional English ballad to the latest French opera’.45 It was during this period that the patent companies, hoping to compete with foreign imports, began mounting their own productions of semi-operas, an endeavour with which Shadwell was closely involved. In 1674 appeared an operatic version of the Davenant/Dryden Tempest, most likely adapted by Shadwell. The following year the Duke’s Company staged Shadwell’s Psyche, an expensive production that failed at the box office and soured the company’s appetite for more opera.
Shadwell turned almost immediately from Psyche to The Libertine, if we accept the time frame he outlines in the preface. While The Libertine does not formally qualify as an opera, or even a semi-opera, it nonetheless shows that Shadwell had learned to use music dramatically and even ironically. The mélange of musical styles, like the diffuse sense of temporality and place in The Libertine, violates decorum and further creates the sense of ‘extravagance’ Shadwell sought in this script. The songs, originally set by William Turner, function in much the same manner as the comic interludes featuring Jacomo: to lull spectators temporarily into smiling at some manifestation of the libertine code, only to shock them at its perniciousness. Don John’s serenade to Maria in 1.1, in which he advertises himself as ‘a faithful, young, vigorous lover’ (l. 318) is succeeded by Octavio’s paean to Maria’s divine beauty: she is ‘so bright a miracle’ (l. 356) and ‘so sweet, so powerful a grace’ (l. 362). Typically, Don John celebrates himself, while Octavio rejoices in his beloved. Shadwell juxtaposes these two songs to comment slyly on Don John’s solipsism; the murder of Octavio moments later shifts the tone from irony to horror. The mock epithalamium sung at Don John’s behest by his ‘minstrels’ unmercifully ridicules the six women who have just discovered themselves to be his ‘wives’. The ‘wanton song’ performed by Clara and Flavia in 3.2 that asserts woman’s ‘nature wild’ is followed by the murder of their father and injuring of their fiancés. The ‘symphony of rustic music’ sung by the shepherds and nymphs of 4.2 is followed by rape and pillage. And the final ‘Song of Devils’ in 5.2, one of two extant pieces of music from the original production, precedes the ultimate horror: the descent of an unrepentant Don John to hell.
Because The Libertine departs from dramatic and theatrical conventions, its larger design is not readily apparent: most critics are arrested by the ‘tonal ambiguities’. Taken sequentially, however, the musical interludes parallel a larger progression in the play as we move from the formal enunciation of libertine precepts at the outset to the grotesque outcome of libertine practice at the conclusion. Similarly, the music evolves from light-hearted serenades to the dirge-like ‘Song of Devils’ in C minor.46 As Curtis Price points out, ‘Turner creates a feeling of sombre awe largely through a distinctive tonal plan…. A cloud of “eternal dreadful doom” thus hangs heavy in the air’ (Price, 114). Systematically, music and action work hand-in-hand to discredit libertinism’s favourite themes: the pleasure of romantic love, the freedom to choose lovers, the perfection of a Golden Age of unfettered natural desires. Every act showcases some aspect of ‘benign’ libertinism and then pushes its premiss to the most extreme degree. Christopher J. Wheatley observes that Coleridge in the Biographia Literaria thought that Shadwell’s purpose was not to ‘dramatize a divine justice, but to take libertine philosophy to its logical conclusion and show that it is horrific’.47 For instance, the light-hearted exchange between the sisters Clara and Flavia in 3.2, in which they contrast their lack of freedom to the imagined liberty of Englishwomen, transmutes rapidly from an implicit plea for choice in marriage to an act of gross misjudgement that costs the life of their father. Moments such as these unsettle precisely because they subject unexamined propositions—naive girls should have complete freedom—to scrutiny.
The play consistently reveals the futility of secular stances in the face of evil. Marriage, friendship, romantic love, kinship ties, even nature, whether sublime or bucolic, cannot withstand the onslaught of rape, pillage, murder, incest, and desecration visited by the Dons on their hapless victims. The religious hermit who appears in 3.2 and Jacomo, himself a kind of religious fool, are the only characters who escape the mayhem; significantly, both simply walk away. Their respective exits constitute the only sane response to someone who mouths a philosophy as illogical as it is pernicious. One cannot debate rationally with Don John—indeed, he derides reason throughout the play—and one cannot vanquish him, as the bodies strewn in his wake testify. The embodiment of Christianity, the hermit is unwavering in his response to evil: he offers charity to the shipwrecked Dons and then, realizing their wicked aims, departs immediately. Jacomo, the reluctant servant to Don John, functions more as an everyman in the play. Tempted himself, he briefly emulates Don John in contemplating raping the unconscious Leonora in Act 1. A coward, he fails initially to protect any of his master’s victims. As the play progresses, however, Jacomo’s protests shift from sarcastic asides—he is the only character to speak directly to the audience—to pleading on behalf of others. By the final act, he has grown sufficiently in moral stature to leave, even if doing so results in his death, as Don John has threatened throughout the play.
If production values are overlooked, it is far easier to conclude that The Libertine represents ‘the last extreme, where satire is indistinguishable from bleak, unredeemed irony’.48 While Don John remains unrepentant and therefore unredeemed—as the story dictates—the staging of the final scene conveys an atmosphere far removed from irony. It opens in a church and ‘on each side’ we see ‘the ghosts of Don John [senior], Maria, Don Francisco, Leonora, Flora, Maria’s Brother, and others, with torches in their hands’. They remain on stage throughout, silent reminders of the carnage wrought by Don John’s libertinism. The C minor march that follows provides a suitably sombre musical accompaniment to this tableau of shades. Don John’s final defiant speech, if imagined against this staging, appears far less ironic and far more repulsive. Modern readers, accustomed to the Nietzschean patter of Shaw’s Don Juan, the ultimate ironist, might perhaps find it difficult to recapture the stark morality of Shadwell’s The Libertine. The play, however, remained overwhelmingly popular until the middle of the eighteenth century, a time when audiences were far less receptive to libertine fare on the stage, a good indication of the enduring appeal of Shadwell’s ethical stance.
Sir George Etherege’s coolly brilliant rebuttal to The Libertine, The Man of Mode, premiered at Dorset Garden some nine months later, on 11 March 1676. Part of the court circle of wits, Etherege emulated their excesses, enjoying a series of affairs—one with two sisters concurrently—and propounding fashionable libertine principles in a poem entitled, appropriately enough, ‘The Libertine’.49 We know from the correspondence Etherege penned years later when he was British ‘Resident’ in Ratisbon that he admired Shadwell as a dramatist. Although Etherege no longer wrote plays himself, he nonetheless admitted to William Jephson his desire ‘to read a good one, wherefore pray lett Will: Richards send me Mr. Shadwells when it is printed’.50 Certainly, The Man of Mode, if indeed a deliberate response, smacks of the sort of rivalry accorded a worthy competitor. It is as crafted, stylish, and witty as The Libertine is sprawling, experimental, and earnest. To audiences the connection between the two plays would have been apparent: Thomas Betterton, who had played Don John to critical acclaim, followed his tour de force with another turn as a libertine, this time as the glorious monster Dorimant. Michael Neill notes the similarity between the two characters, observing that ‘Etherege’s protagonist … is in his way, as those around him frequently remark, as “wild,” “barbarous,” “extravagant,” and “irregular” as any Don John…. Dorimant exhibits an appetite for power and a degree of perverse cruelty beside which Don John’s carnal gusto seems positively good natured’.51
One might hesitate to call Don John’s carnal appetite ‘good natured’; Neill, however, exercises keen insight into both characters. The Man of Mode showcases a libertine who indulges not mere brutish appetite but the erotics of power. While Dorimant refrains from contorting sensationalist theory into a justification for his action, he nonetheless subscribes to a libertine ethos.52 A sensualist, he juggles three women in the play who represent past, present, and future affairs: Mrs Loveit, his cast-off mistress; Bellinda, his one-night stand; and Emilia, a prospective amour even though she is intended for Young Bellair, supposedly a close ‘friend’. Of Emilia, Dorimant cynically remarks, ‘She’s a discreet maid, and I believe nothing can corrupt her but a husband’ (1.1.406–7). A pragmatist as well as a hedonist, Dorimant’s genius resides in detecting the ‘passion that lies panting under’ the mask of social artifice, as well as divining the individual psychology behind the façade of good manners (3.3.317–18). He suspects that Emilia veils desire with discretion, but he will bide his time patiently until her marriage to a romantic young fool makes possible a future assignation.
Dorimant is a libertine in other respects: he flouts social mores. A freethinker, he dissects publicly the social commonplaces others uphold. To Young Bellair, who woos the penniless Emilia, he observes coldly that ‘The wise will find a difference in our fate: | You wed a woman, I a good estate’ (4.2.181–2). To the enraged Mrs Loveit, who thunders against his chronic infidelity, he brutally asserts his right to frankness, while simultaneously using that ‘right’ to humiliate her: ‘Good nature and good manners corrupt me. I am honest in my inclinations and would not, wert not to avoid offence, make a lady a little in years believe I think her young, wilfully mistake art for nature, and seem as fond of a thing I am weary of, as when I doted on’t in earnest’ (2.2.181–5). To Medley, who remarks the growing friendship between Dorimant and Bellair, he states impassively: ‘It is our mutual interest to be so. It makes the women think the better of his understanding, and judge more favourably of my reputation. It makes him pass upon some for a man of very good sense, and I upon others for a very civil person’ (1.1.394–7). In the same spirit of social insurgency, Dorimant parades the libertine’s preference for nature over artifice. Refusing the orange-flower water proffered by his valet, Dorimant declares his intention to ‘smell as I do today, no offence to the ladies’ noses’ (1.1.326).
Nevertheless, The Man of Mode, like The Libertine, goes to some length to expose several of the contradictions at the heart of libertinism. As James G. Turner points out, Restoration libertines were ‘particularly fascinated by the oxymoronic conjunction of the civil and the rude’. Their rebellion, like that of adolescents, is ‘deeply in need of the law to guarantee their privileges and to fuel their emotional rebel-lion’.53 Outrageous behaviour, whether sexual or social, derives its efficacy from the very morality it seeks to overturn, and, in that sense, libertines require the existence of standards without which their transgressions would be meaningless. Consistently in The Man of Mode we are reminded of the conventions that make possible Dorimant’s fashionable pose. His partiality for the ‘natural’ human body, as exemplified by his choice of human musk over orange-flower water, is thrown into question by Bellair’s observation moments later that ‘no man in town has a better fancy in his clothes’. By comparison to Sir Fopling Flutter, the original fashion victim, Dorimant does indeed appear ‘natural’, but he requires the presence of a fop to frame his more refined fashion sensibilities, just as he needs the naivety of Bellair, the prissiness of Lady Woodvill, or the jealousy of Mrs Loveit to set off his blunt pronouncements against social forms.
While the play never falters in its unblinking appraisal of libertinism, its coolly ironic and analytical tone should not be mistaken for a rejection of libertine values.54 Detachment differs from repudiation, and the alternative to libertinism, embodied in Bellair’s naive romanticism, hardly represents a viable option. Etherege’s sleight of hand here is to demystify libertinism while retaining its allure. In that sense, the play is rather like Dorimant himself: showing its teeth while reeling us in. Like Dorimant’s women, we should know better—in some instances, we do know better—but we submit anyway. Such, The Man of Mode suggests, is the power of libertinism. Similarly, Dorimant’s desire for Harriet should not be taken as evidence that he has by the play’s conclusion become a ‘reformed rake’ or a ‘socialized’ Don Juan. Admittedly, in several asides, Dorimant confesses to a precipitate passion and worries that Harriet may have ‘an ascendant o’er me and may revenge the wrongs I have done her sex’ (4.1.139–40). He courts her in the religious language of the Petrarchan lover, rather than the witty rejoinder of the libertine, taken by some critics as evidence of a change in his character. And in the final scene he pledges to undertake a ‘Lenten’ sojourn to the ‘great rambling lone house’ in the country where Harriet resides with ‘an old lame aunt’ and her mother, a true test of resolution for this otherwise urban creature. Etherege, however, qualifies these moments. Dorimant may be wooing Harriet assiduously, but moments before the play concludes, he pulls aside Mrs Loveit, claiming had she been ‘reasonable’, he could have continued to see her and still marry his rich heiress. He also attempts another assignation with Bellinda. Earlier in the scene, Dorimant addresses Emilia in an aside with the ambiguous title of ‘Mistress Bride’, perhaps an allusion to the dual role she will soon play as wife to Bellair and eventual mistress to Dorimant. Emilia responds with the equally ambiguous command to ‘Defer the formal joy you are to give me, and mind your business with her’, which can, of course, be construed as an innocuous or suggestive statement (5.2.104–5).
Dorimant’s earlier proclamations about the evanescent nature of love also haunt this climactic scene of courtship. ‘Love’, as he reminds Mrs Loveit, ‘gilds us over and makes us show fine things to one another for a time, but soon the gold wears off, and then again the native brass appears’ (2.2.189–91), or ‘What we swear at such a time may be a certain proof of a present passion; but, to say truth, in love there is no security to be given for the future’ (2.2.196–8). In a reading of the play, it is easy to dwell on the glories of the language—the exchanges between Dorimant and Harriet are truly brilliant—and to forget the complications created by the presence of other characters on stage. Emilia, soon to be ‘corrupted’ by a husband, stands silent witness to Dorimant’s pleas for marriage; moments later Mrs Loveit, the abandoned mistress, and Bellinda, the recently discarded quick fling, enter the drawing room of Mrs Townley. The spectacle of these three women and the stages of passion they represent—past, present, and, possibly, the future—throw into relief Dorimant’s declaration of steadfast love. Their entry into the scene reminds us of Dorimant’s flippant response to Mrs Loveit, that vows sworn in the heat of the moment will invariably melt.
The three scenes immediately preceding 5.2 also argue for a sceptical interpretation of The Man of Mode: 4.2 shows us a post-coital Dorimant and Bellinda; 4.3 presents Bellinda hurrying away anxiously in a chair; and 5.1 gives us Dorimant tormenting Mrs Loveit for the sheer cussedness of it—and horrifying Bellinda who, in watching him emotionally dismember his former mistress, realizes her fate. Had these scenes occurred earlier in the play, it might be easier to posit Dorimant as a reformed libertine; however, Etherege’s comic design, which places these scenes immediately prior to his courtship of Harriet, suggests a continuity of behaviour, rather than a transformation. The ending withholds the marriage celebration that traditionally concludes romantic comedy; instead, Harriet tells her mother that while she ‘never will do, anything against my duty’ (5.2.255–6), she nonetheless ‘never will marry any other man’ (5.2.311–12). The ending implies marriage—but we are never entirely certain. The Man of Mode defers indefinitely the narrative pleasure accruing from the spectacle of a permanent union, and thereby re-enacts the central paradox confronting the libertine, that the very appetite spurring him to ‘heroic’ conquests must perforce render inadequate every woman, every sexual experience.55 Never can the libertine (or the spectators of this play, for that matter) enjoy ‘the sense of an ending’ that underwrites the Western aesthetic, and it is precisely this teasing deferral of satisfaction that makes this comic masterpiece and its central figure so compelling.56
We might note too that while Harriet may be rich enough to render less constricting the shackles of marriage, there is no evidence that Dorimant, if they wed, will ‘dwindle’ into a monogamous husband. Harriet’s wit ensures that she will exercise the same discretion towards Dorimant’s extramarital escapades as he has towards his mistresses’ honour.57 Unlike Mrs Loveit, at whom Harriet publicly ‘jeers’ for her emotional displays, she will never throw tantrums or tear fans. Perhaps it is for this reason that Dorimant seeks to establish from the outset Harriet’s social acumen. Having learned from the Orange-Woman of Harriet’s wealth and beauty, he immediately enquires after her wit-her ability socially and linguistically to navigate the rocky shoals of their competitive, fiercely inbred milieu. Dorimant also discerns that Harriet, for all her protestations against artifice, is like himself acutely aware of social forms, and she will never give cause for embarrassment. Urged to pledge herself to Dorimant against her mother’s wishes, Harriet declares, ‘May he hate me—a curse that frights me when I speak it—if ever I do a thing against the rules of decency and honour’ (5.2.159–60).
What might possibly ensue between Dorimant and Harriet—we have no way of knowing, of course—is the Restoration equivalent of a ‘political marriage’. The couple in question have undoubtedly fallen in love, but their attraction, as Harriet frequently reminds Dorimant, should not cloud the true nature of their union. Though she would wish him ‘devout’, she would not have him ‘turn fanatic’. We might recall that the earl of Rochester, often mentioned as the model for Dorimant, wrote tender love letters to his wife alongside missives to pals detailing the latest benders, brawls, or noxious ‘cures’ for syphilis. The whores and willing women were a foregone conclusion, as was Rochester’s assumption of a libertine privilege underwritten by an aristocratic ethos. Dorimant, if he passes his test in the country, will have a rich estate and a wife sufficiently equipped with ‘wit’ and ‘malice’, not to mention respect for ‘decency and honour’, to smile graciously amidst the whispers and, when necessary, to ‘jeer’ at her rivals. Harriet, for her part, secures residence in London, a city to her so magical that even the ‘worst cry’ of the street-traders yields ‘music’. It is the consummate libertine union, a mating of leopards.
Some fifteen months separate The Man of Mode from Thomas Durfey’s A Fond Husband; or, The Plotting Sisters. The first known performance for Durfey’s rollicking comedy is 31 May 1677. From the start, A Fond Husband was a smash hit—Charles II was said to have attended three of the first five nights—and it enjoyed frequent revivals throughout the Restoration and well into the eighteenth century (Van Lennep, i. 257). The prompter John Downes attributed its success to the efforts of the Duke’s Company: A Fond Husband ‘took extraordinary well, and being perfectly Acted; got the Company great Reputation and Profit’ (77). Given the pattern of casting in the play, there is good evidence that Durfey, by this period very much a company writer, tailored parts for specific actors. The role of Old Fumble, a doddering roué, showcased the comic radiance of Anthony Leigh (who also specialized in licentious prelates). James Nokes, the other brilliant comedian in the company—Colley Cibber years later would recall in detail the respective talents of these men—played Peregrine Bubble, the foolish cuckold, again a role suited to his particular talents. William Smith, who took a wide range of roles over his career, performed Rashley, and Henry Harris, an excellent character actor, played the part of Ranger.
The choice of Elizabeth Barry and Rebecca Marshall as the ‘plotting’ sisters of the title also drew upon a pattern of casting much in evidence during this period, ‘the angel and the she-devil’.58 From 1670 on, tragedies and heroic dramas frequently juxtaposed ‘good’ and ‘bad’ female characters. The King’s Company usually cast Rebecca Marshall, who specialized in passionate and sadistic women, against Elizabeth Bowtell, who, given her girlish looks and voice, tended toward virtuous heroines. Marshall, long a mainstay of the King’s Company, defected to the rival Duke’s Company several months before the première of A Fond Husband. Durfey drew upon Marshall’s reputation for playing wily, ‘bad’ women in fashioning for her the role of Maria, the jealous, vengeful sister determined to expose the sexual shenanigans of her sister-in-law Emilia. Although the Duke’s Company lacked Bowtell, they had an equally promising ingénue in Elizabeth Barry, who was two years into an illustrious stage career. Barry had already proved herself in a range of roles and would have been more than capable of personating the winsome adulteress Emilia. Durfey handed these two talented actresses a comic gem in 2.4, a scene that spoofs ‘the angel and she-devil’ convention almost to the point of high camp. Their characters disgorge vitriol as they battle each other for Rashley, Maria threatening to ‘trample’ Emilia into ‘ashes’ and Emilia warning that she will ‘forge a plot shall blow thee into air’.
As that scene indicates, A Fond Husband is a far cry from the philosophical musings of The Libertine or the ironic detachment of The Man of Mode. Durfey’s script is far closer in spirit to Ned Ward than Walter Charleton. For the cheerfully licentious characters who dot the landscape of this play, libertinism is more a lifestyle than a philosophy, a ‘roving and uncontrolled way of love’ (1.1.16) as Rashley announces at the outset. One still detects, albeit in popular form, aspects of the libertine credo. The play opens with Emilia’s maid Betty singing about sexual passion and vigour; and the double entendre on ‘sceptre’ no doubt would have brought to mind the many contemporary jokes about the king’s own ‘rod’ of state. The ensuing dialogue between the illicit lovers Rashley and Emilia frames their amour as the love of angels, ‘a second-rate innocence where affection, not duty, bears prerogative’. Rashley thus promulgates the libertine preference for sensation over custom—for satisfying the demands of the flesh, not the demands of society. The word ‘sense’ (or ‘senses’) appears some fifteen times in the script, denoting both the physical and practical realms of life. Libertine philosophy subsumes both meanings: ideally one should base actions on the common sense that derives from emotions and appetites, not from social conventions or rules. Emilia’s foolish husband Bubble, her sister-in-law Maria, and her unsuccessful suitor Ranger are all said to lack ‘sense’, nor do any of them exhibit the healthy animal lust—the other sense of ‘sense’—so enjoyed by Emilia and Rashley.
The striking line from Rochester’s poem A Ramble in St. James’s Park—’There’s something gen’rous in meer Lust’59—could very well function as the motto for A Fond Husband. If The Man of Mode seduces us, then A Fond Husband takes a different tack, cajoling us into agreeing that the life of ‘angels’ led by those two cheerfully unrepentant adulterers Rashley and Emilia is far more wholesome than the malice displayed by other characters. Durfey is closer in spirit to a dramatist like Aphra Behn, whose plays also showcase wholesome animal lust, than he is to an ironist like Etherege. He also shares with Behn a partiality for the discoveries, trapdoors, and descents of which a playhouse like Dorset Garden was fully capable. Durfey’s plays revel in the farcical business of bodies careering out of control, and his plots show what happens when obsessive characters resort to ludicrous devices to realize their aims. In the main plot, Emilia and Rashley want to enjoy as much sex as possible while eluding the suspicions of her foolish old husband Bubble. That Emilia and Rashley are desired respectively by Ranger, a rival to Rashley, and Maria, sister to Bubble, intensifies the lovers’ need for subterfuge. The subplot similarly juxtaposes characters with rival objectives: Sir Roger Petulant hopes to marry his son Sneak, an idiotic Cambridge undergraduate, to the witty Cordelia. The ancient lecher Old Fumble also wants her, while Cordelia seemingly wants little more than to cast a bemused eye on the frantic machinations unfolding around her.
Like most farce, A Fond Husband relies on repetitive episodes, physical business, and running sight gags, including two bed tricks. Rashley hides under tables, disappears through trapdoors, and conceals himself in closets. Sneak frantically eludes his uncle and pregnant mistress. In 5.3, Emilia and Rashley triumphantly ‘sink in the trap’ that secures their quick escape from the outraged Maria, who tries to expose the lovers to the credulous Bubble. In 5.4, Emilia and Rashley dress the servants Betty and Jeremy in their bedclothes, fully expecting to prove Maria and Ranger fools yet again. Cordelia substitutes an eager governess for herself in Fumble’s bed, betting the success of her ruse on the old man’s vain refusal to wear his spectacles. The comedy throughout these scenes depends upon the repeated failure of the old, the foolish, and the malevolent to thwart youthful high spirits; in particular, the plot contrasts the petty meanness of Ranger and Maria against the generous desires of Rashley and Emilia. Physical humour also signifies sexual vigour in A Fond Husband. The agility of Rashley and Emilia, as they wriggle (literally) out of successive calamities, points to a similar nimbleness in sex, an analogy the script secures by opening and ending their story with amorous scenes in Emilia’s bedchamber.
Durfey’s comedy upholds the natural in another regard. Attempts by various characters to paper over the visible signs of their appetites fail (albeit humorously). Their desires, no matter how skilfully disguised, come to the surface, perhaps another comment on the futility of denying nature. The plot discloses Sir Roger’s youthful peccadilloes despite his pretension of middle-aged probity, and it reveals Sneak’s pregnant mistress despite his affectation of a naive undergraduate persona. Durfey, who habitually in his plays exploits the spatial potential of the baroque stage, also makes good use of the shutter-and-groove technology of Dorset Garden for comic discoveries that bring yet more hidden desires to light. In 5.2, for instance, a scene opens upstage to reveal Sneak’s ‘sweating-chair’ for the cure of venereal disease to a horrified Sir Roger and bemused Cordelia. Even those grand tricksters Rashley and Emilia are discovered in flagrante, as the assembled cast rush into Emilia’s bedroom to find them descending into pleasure yet again. Much has been made of this final ‘discovery’ (the word Sir Roger uses) by literary critics who, variously, find it ‘sublime’, ‘humorous’, or ‘absurd’.60 At first glance, it seems an odd conclusion to the preceding action. Bubble tries to wound Emilia with his sword; Rashley proffers a duel, should Bubble think it necessary, and then exits abruptly; Emilia stammers excuses until, tongue-tied, she realizes that ‘absence is most necessary’ (5.5.45) and then flees offstage; Cordelia marvels delightedly at the wacky proceedings; and Bubble declares his intentions to secure a divorce immediately and then ‘spend the remainder of my life in penning a satire against women’ (5.5.56–7). Maria admits that ‘chance’ rather than her own attempts at ‘wit’ overthrew ‘the mighty sophistress’ Emilia; and Ranger addresses the audience with the larger ‘moral’.
The precipitous nature of the conclusion probably ‘plays’ better than it reads, as is true of most farce. In this kind of comedy, timing is all, and the design of the play hints strongly at the kind of pacing Durfey intended for the cast. The first three acts contain between one and three scenes; Acts 1 and 3 are long and unbroken. As the plot accelerates, and the accompanying shenanigans of Rashley and Emilia intensify, the fourth and fifth acts break down into four and five short scenes respectively. The final act has an especially frenetic pace, as Rashley and Emilia career wildly from one near miss to another; and the ending, in which one event rapidly eclipses the next, concludes nicely the mounting comic hysteria. While Christopher J. Wheatley is correct to note the ‘sublime’ nature of the lovers’ language (which parodies Longinus), in a staging of this play it is not the language of love but the comic grammar of bodies that impresses the audience. And the ending only appears ‘absurd’ if one concludes, as does J. Douglas Canfield, that ‘the apparent satire on libertinism is undercut at the end by Ranger’s surprising declaration’.61 ‘Satire’ seems far too harsh a sobriquet for such a comic romp; moreover, the abrupt exits of Emilia and Rashley, far from being ‘absurd’, are perfectly suited to the repetitive, almost mechanical, nature of farce whereby an action recurs endlessly until someone pulls the plug.
Arguably, if A Fond Husband satirizes anyone, it is those who would stop the fun: the spoilsports, the foolish, the malevolent. Ranger’s final speech to the audience admits as much when he vows never ‘from this hour’ to ‘baulk a love-intrigue’ (5.5.75). Instead, Ranger resolves to conform to the fashionably libertine tastes of the time, as well he might, given the sour consequences of his and Maria’s efforts. Emilia, ‘the mighty sophistress’, has been ‘o’erthrown’, but through ‘no wit of our own’, as Maria reminds Ranger (5.5.64). Their interference has ruined a marriage, destroyed the illusions of a doting foolish husband, and halted the hilarious proceedings for the audience. If anything, A Fond Husband is something of a cautionary tale directed against the self-righteous: the plot suggests that moral crusades result from thwarted desire, not ethical convictions. In Durfey’s genial farce, libertines are a far cry from the murderers and rapists who inhabit Shadwell’s extravagant experiment, or the brilliant sadist who resides in Etherege’s world of ironic posturing, a point underscored by the original casting. Revealingly, Durfey wrote the part of Rashley not for Thomas Betterton, who had played the ruthless libertines Don John and Dorimant to such acclaim, but for William Smith. As an actor, Smith was far better known for portraying heroic figures from classical antiquity or good-natured lovers than he was for personating villains or ill-natured rakes. As the choice of Smith and the young Elizabeth Barry might suggest, the libertines here are lusty youths chafing against social convention. In A Fond Husband, they have been air-brushed almost to the point of wholesomeness: they amuse, they titillate, but they certainly do not offend.
The final play in this volume has a scant history in the theatre: one performance of Friendship in Fashion occurred at Dorset Garden on 5 April 1678 and perhaps another on the 25th. The play was licensed on 31 May (Van Lennep, i.269). Thereafter it disappears from sight: not a single performance is known after the première. Thomas Otway framed the role of Goodvile for Betterton, thereby returning the famous actor to one of his well-known ‘lines’, that of the dissolute and ill-tempered libertine. In so doing, Otway suggested a tonal affinity between Goodvile, the ghastly husband in Friendship in Fashion, and Don John and Dorimant. William Smith, who had played Rashley the previous year in A Fond Husband, was cast as Truman, a doting young blade similar to his previous role. Elizabeth Barry played Mrs Goodvile, while Mrs Gibbs performed Victoria, Mrs Price the part of Camilla, and Anne Marshall Quin the part of Lady Squeamish. Cave Underhill, always skilled in comic roles, played the dull-witted Sir Noble Clumsy, while the redoubtable Anthony Leigh personated the fop Malagene. The versatile actors John Bowman and Thomas Jevon acted those musical followers of fashion, Saunter and Caper.
Despite this abundance of talent, the play appears to have failed with audiences. The anxiety-ridden dedication to the earl of Dorset, who was usually munificent in matters of patronage, hints that something went badly amiss. Otway mentions ‘the unlucky censures some have passed upon me for this play’ (ll. 14–15), as well as being ‘accused of the thing by some people of the world, who had perhaps as little reason to think I could be guilty of it as to believe themselves deserved it’ (ll. 17–19). While Otway never specifies ‘the thing’ that so offended his enemies, the oblique language suggests that some ‘people of the world’ thought themselves personated in the play and therefore killed the production, the same problem that had bedevilled John Dryden the previous month with The Kind Keeper; or Mr. Limberham. Otway had neither Dryden’s literary reputation nor the social capital to withstand such an assault, and the play vanished from repertory. Despite its obscurity, Friendship in Fashion warrants our consideration. In recent years, scholarship has resuscitated Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677) and Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1695): both plays are readily available in well-edited, inexpensive editions, and, as often happens in modern theatre, dissemination in print has in turn inspired theatrical production. The same has not occurred with Friendship in Fashion. Twenty-five years ago, Robert D. Hume complained that ‘this great play has attracted no critical attention at all’, further maintaining that ‘Friendship in Fashion is brilliant, but not fun. Neglect of it is astonishing …’62 Since then, critics undertaking large-scale thematic or historical studies of Restoration drama have cast a cursory eye on Friendship in Fashion; typically, it garners a page or two of discussion.63 Jessica Munns in her monograph on Otway provides one of the few serious considerations of the play, as does Harold Weber in his study of Restoration rakes.64 In part, neglect of Friendship in Fashion can be attributed to Otway’s well-deserved reputation for tragedy: simply put, even in his own time, Otway’s serious plays eclipsed his three forays into comedy.
Robert D. Hume’s incisive remark that the play is ‘not fun’ also explains the relative obscurity of Friendship in Fashion. It is that most uncomfortable of entertainments, a comedy that depresses. While Otway shares Etherege’s fascination with the erotics of power, his marginal position within Restoration society, in addition to his troubled personality, destined him to a far bleaker outlook. The Man of Mode, with its crafted cadences and witty rejoinders, boasts the self-assured virtuosity of the cognoscenti. By contrast, Friendship in Fashion, with its rough humour, acrid plot, and unsavoury imagery, reveals a man at odds with his culture, including its embrace of libertinism. In tone, the play is much closer to harsh satires like William Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676) or Thomas Southerne’s The Wives’ Excuse (1691/2) than it is to any of the other plays in this volume. In form, Friendship in Fashion follows the outline of what Michael Cordner calls the ‘marriage play’. Unlike the courtship plot of romantic comedy, the marriage play ‘centres on a marriage in crisis or balances a courtship action against a detailed anatomy of an irretrievably failed union’.65
Given the desolate subject matter and the abrasive humour, it should not surprise that Friendship in Fashion quickly fell out of repertory. Restoration audiences, accustomed as they were to libertine fare by the late 1670s, nonetheless baulked at plays that were too ill natured or coarse. Wycherley in The Plain Dealer makes apparent his disappointment in the audience, especially the women, who cried down his portrait of the randy female hypocrites in The Country Wife. Dryden exudes a tone of bewilderment in the preface to The Kind Keeper; or Mr Limberham, marvelling that his play sufficiently offended the ‘keeping’ part of the town to warrant suppression. As the popularity of The Man of Mode or A Fond Husband might indicate, Restoration audiences wanted their libertine comedy edged with gilt, in the manner of Etherege, or trimmed with sequins, as with Durfey. Otway’s play is far plainer garb: its plot focuses on a husband and wife at war, rather than the seductions of a smooth-talking rake or the escapades of good-natured adulterers. Their domestic war poisons surrounding principalities: relations, friends, even hangers-on are pulled into the spiralling dispute.
In terms of plot, Friendship in Fashion satisfies the basic tenets of libertine comedy. Early exposition establishes Goodvile’s libertine character: within ten days of marriage, as Truman relates, ‘he debauched me with two vizards in a hackney to supper’ (1.1.25–6). In the ensuing interval—mere months—Goodvile has seduced his kinswoman Victoria, in addition to frequenting whores. As the play opens, Goodvile, suspecting that Victoria is pregnant, attempts to fob her off on Truman, his ‘friend’; he then turns his attentions to Camilla, the love interest of another ‘friend’ Valentine. In the words of Derek Hughes, ‘Goodvile (Betterton) is an uglier version of Dorimant …’66 Like Etherege’s creation, or even Horner in Wycherley’s The Country Wife, Goodvile withholds secrets from his male ‘friends’, and thinks nothing of debauching their fiancées or wives. Appetitive and self-interested, he satisfies instinctual desires and ignores societal conventions. Unlike Dorimant, however, Goodvile is sufficiently repulsive as to banish any questions about Otway’s attitude toward libertinism. The ‘good nature’ associated with the cultivated libertine—Dorimant uses the phrase several times, as do the speakers in several Rochester poems—is nowhere here apparent, quite the opposite. For instance, despite a professed dislike for his wife, Goodvile watches her jealously, hoping to catch her in flagrante with Truman. He torments Saunter and Caper, the harmless fops who want only to sing and dance, and he humiliates the pompous Lady Squeamish and abuses the pretentious Malagene far beyond their just deserts.
If anything, the character of Goodvile can be seen as a rebuke to the commonplace of the agreeable rake, he of the witty rejoinder and becoming negligence. Otway instead gives us a libertine who is drunk and obnoxious throughout much of the play, and, in place of droll quips, descends to name-calling, invective, and curses. Goodvile’s outburst against Caper and Saunter in Act 4 typifies his loutish behaviour. Exasperated, he calls the fops an ‘ill-ordered, addle-pated, waddling brace of puppies!’ (4.1.344). He orders Saunter to ‘sing and be safe’ and Caper, that ‘slight grasshopper’, to ‘dance and divert me’. When they refuse, Goodvile shoves the two men at his wife and exits the scene, as the stage directions specify. Similarly, his sole attempt at romantic language is undercut by another infantile gesture. When he glimpses Victoria, Goodvile steps aside and ‘makes mouths’ at his former mistress, declaring, ‘farewell, fubb’ (3.1.594). His enraptured imagining of Camilla (‘Now for the lovely, kind, yielding Camilla … Swelling burning breasts, dying eyes, balmy lips, trembling joints, millions of kisses, and unspeakable joys wait for me’), uttered immediately after this childish display, reveals the slavering appetite of a glutton, someone whose desires and impulses are both undisguised and uncontrolled (3.1.595–7).
Good nature in this play belongs not to the rake but to those who are normally marginalized or even scorned in libertine comedies: the fops, the put-upon wife, the abandoned mistress. Victoria, the Mrs Loveit of Friendship in Fashion, does not exact revenge against Mrs Goodvile or Camilla, who has just gained ascendancy in Goodvile’s heart. Rather, in an extraordinary monologue at the beginning of Act 5, she asks herself whether ‘Goodvile’s wife ever wronged me?’ and then, having concluded ‘never’, decides to ‘let my revenge light wholly on that false, perjured man. As he has deceived and ruined me, I’ll play false with him, make myself privy to his whole design of surprising Truman and his wife together’ (5.1.3–8). True to her declaration, Victoria assists Mrs Goodvile, even generously ignoring a pointed rebuke from the wronged wife: ‘’Tis true she reproached me, but ’twas done so handsomely that I had doubly deserved it to have taken notice of it.’ Just as the character of Victoria departs from the standard depiction of the abandoned, vengeful mistress, so do the characters of Saunter and Caper deviate from the usual treatment of the fop. Unlike Sir Fopling Flutter in The Man of Mode, who desires only to make a ballet to himself, these gentlemen want to sing and dance for the ladies, even vowing to protect their honour when necessary. Caper, hearing of Sir Noble Clumsy’s drunken affront to Victoria and Lady Squeamish, asks ‘how durst you treat ladies so rudely as we saw you but now?’ (5.1.226–7). Dissatisfied with the inebriated response, he asks Sir Noble Clumsy to fight. The sound of fiddles interrupts this challenge and Caper, overcome as always by music, enthuses to Lady Squeamish that ‘we’ll dance forever’, Saunter adding, ‘And sing’, until they both in unison cry ‘And love’. The prospect of pleasure—a pleasure grounded in art, not malevolence—quickly vanquishes the possibility of violence.
Throughout the play, Goodvile’s persecution of Caper and Saunter seems out of proportion to their ‘crime’—which is to enjoy innocent diversions and entertain ladies. Infuriated by their sweet-natured (if somewhat inane) courtliness, Goodvile tries repeatedly to humiliate them before his wife or guests. Enraged by their devotion to song and dance, he orders a servant to tie up one of Caper’s legs and to gag Saunter, a symbolic annihilation of art. Otway, like Shadwell before him, envisions libertinism as a destructive force, one that ruins the social bonds and activities that sustain human beings. Goodvile, possessed by the same insurgency that grips Don John, destroys a marriage to a clever, beautiful woman, ruins the reputation of a devoted mistress, and betrays two close friends. Otway also focuses attention on the superfluous cruelty of the libertine. Not content with betraying his wife, Goodvile brings home in Act 5 the two whores he intends to set up as surrogate partners, a grotesque parody of marriage. Goodvile’s every action exceeds the precipitate cause and therefore asks us, whether as readers or spectators, to contemplate the motives of a man so wantonly vicious in temperament.
Otway’s choice to channel his condemnation through a more conventional comic form—rather than experiment with the sort of grand design undertaken by Shadwell—may account for the failure of Friendship in Fashion in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Audiences accustomed to the plays of Etherege, Behn, Durfey, or Ravenscroft would have come to the theatre expecting a verbal or physical romp. Instead, they were presented with a grim depiction of a society that makes marriage or friendship impossible. Even the alliances forged between Mrs Goodvile and Victoria, or Truman and Valentine, depend for their efficacy on a mutually realized goal: the thwarting of Goodvile. A play like The Libertine, half poised between spoken drama and opera, ‘extravagant’ in its design, defied audience expectations whereas Friendship in Fashion merely disappointed them. Then too the moral abyss in Otway’s dramatic world may have proved too much for audiences who expected an implied ethical stance, as in Shadwell, or, at the very least, the compensatory sheen of Etherege’s verbal pyrotechnics. Otway, however, refuses to temper his harsh vision: rough and blunt, the play forces us to see, in a comic vein no less, the worst of human behaviour. Friendship in Fashion indicts savagely a fashionable libertinism that renders untenable any human motive other than self-interest.
In certain respects, Otway is closer to modern dramatists like Jean Genet, Peter Weiss, or Edward Albee than he is to his contemporaries; indeed, some of the exchanges between the Goodviles are worthy of George and Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. That quality of seeing things differently pitted Otway against his peers and his audiences throughout his brief, tragic career. While Friendship in Fashion deserves our attention because of its sheer craft, it also speaks to us in a way that perhaps eluded the seventeenth century. Modern drama, if nothing else, has accustomed us to scrutinizing closely the internal dynamics of marriage and friendship; we are similarly used to situating the failure of human relationships against the backdrop of larger social forces. In its compassion for marginalized characters, especially women, Friendship in Fashion also seems peculiarly modern. The revival of interest these past twenty years in Aphra Behn should pave the way for an appreciation of male dramatists like Otway who shared her interest in the plight of women during the Restoration. This edition goes some modest way toward making this neglected masterpiece available; hopefully, future scholarship and productions will further enlarge Otway’s reputation as a comic dramatist.