Two capable versions of French plays followed (1677)_Titus
and Berenice from Racine's Bérénice and The Cheats of Scapin
from Molière's Fourberies de Scapin.
and Berenice from Racine's Bérénice and The Cheats of Scapin
from Molière's Fourberies de Scapin.
Cambridge History of English Literature - 1908 - v08
A noble
patron persuaded him to pay his debts by the sale of his com-
mission, promising him another: that other never came. In 1703
he married a lady who pretended to be a fortune, and who, for love
of Farquhar, had concealed her poverty. Here was a plot which
might have served him for a comedy, and which, with him cast for
the chief róle, could have had only a tragic ending. Being Farquhar,
he harboured no resentment for the trick that had been put upon
him, but 'behaved to her with all the delicacy and tenderness of
an indulgent husband. ' Nothing could daunt the brave serenity
of his spirit. If he clung to the gaiety of the beau, he never knew
the beau's cynicism. He has sketched himself in a page which you
may well believe is without flattery, and he confesses himself so
great an epicure that he hates all pleasure that's purchas'd by
excess of pain. ' He, at any rate, did not accept Sir Harry Wildair's
theory of life.
'I would have my passion,' he writes in a passage of evident sincerity, 'if
not led, at least waited on by my reason; and the greatest proof of my
affection that a lady must expect is this: I would run any hazard to make us
both happy, but would not for any transitory pleasure make either of us
miserable.
It was not within his compass to make them both happy. His
friend Wilks, missing him at the theatre, discovered him lodged in
1 For Lessing's debt to Farquhar consult an excellent article by J. G. Robertson in
The Modern Language Review, vol. 11 (1907).
## p. 173 (#195) ############################################
Thomas Shadwell
173
3
a back garret in St Martin's Lane. He advised him to write a play
which should be instantly put upon the stage. 'Write! ' says
Farquhar, 'it is impossible that a man can write common sense
who is heartless, and has not a shilling in his pocket. Wilks gave
him twenty guineas, and, in six weeks, The Beaux' Stratagem, that
marvel of merriment and good-humour, was finished. It hints by
no sign that the author wrote it with a settled sickness upon him,
nor 'that before he finished the second act he perceived the
approaches of death. It was produced on 8 March 1707, and
Farquhar lived just long enough to hear of its triumphant success.
A last note to the friend of his brief life, Wilks, was found among
9
6
his papers:
Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory,
but two helpless girls; look upon them sometimes, and think on him who was
to the last moment of his life thine, G. Farquhar.
An epilogue fittingly spoken by a gallant man whose life was in
dire conflict with his theory of living, and whose courage, in suffer-
ing, sustained him to the end.
Whenever this or that battle of literature is engaged, the
leaders are attended by a vast mob of camp-followers, who
without natural talent or obvious ingenuity, hope to share the
spoils of victory. Thus it was that the masters of comedy saw
their works mimicked and the repute of their craft not enhanced
by eager, industrious journeymen. The most of these preserve
their names and no more in the annals of the stage. Now and
again they emerge, for some quality of wit or good nature, from
the rest and, with their half-forgotten works, prompt the curiosity
of the historian. Thomas Shadwell", poet laureate, for instance,
enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable
in ours. Literary skill was not among the gifts of his mind. He
had a trick of invention, and was determined to turn the best models
to account. But when he had invented (or adapted) his puppets,
he handled them so carelessly, that they long since lost their interest
for us. The sense of style, the mastery of language, which might
have tempered their extravagance, were lacking to him, and he
resembled the facile playwrights of to-day in refusing to look upon
the drama as a branch of literature. In his preface to The Sullen
Lovers he proudly professed himself a pupil of Ben Jonson, whose
variety of humours' he attempted to reproduce, and whom, he
* See above, Chapter I.
## p. 174 (#196) ############################################
174
The Restoration Drama
thought, 'all dramatic poets ought to imitate. ' His debt to Ben
Jonson was infinitely less than his debt to Molière. The Sullen
Lovers is based upon Les Fâcheux; Bury Fair, bis masterpiece,
owes its fantastic characters to Les Précieuses Ridicules; and
The Miser is no more than a perversion of L'Avare. Yet so good
a conceit of himself had Shadwell, that he thought he did his
masters no discredit. ''Tis not barrenness of wit or invention that
makes me borrow from the French,' he boasted, 'but laziness. '
To be lazy is a greater sin, in the realm of art, than to be barren.
He patronised Shakespeare as amiably as he patronised Molière.
When he had mangled Timon of Athens, 'I can truly say," he
wrote, “that I have made it a play. Yet with all his shortcomings
'
he held the stage for a quarter of a century. His Epsom Wells
was praised by Saint-Évremond. He had the wit to make Don Juan
the hero of The Libertine, and with The Squire of Alsatia he
scaled the topmost height of his popularity. This last play has
many faults. Its story is incredible. The cant used by the rufflers
of Whitefriars is handled with so little tact, that it seems an ex-
crescence upon the dialogue rather than a part of it. Yet how
much excellent material it contains was revealed by Sir Walter
Scott, who made a free use of it in The Fortunes of Nigel.
Briefly, the vices and virtues of hasty Shadwell have been well
summed up by Rochester in four lines:
"Shadwell's unfinished Works do yet impart
Great Proofs of force of Nature, none of Art,
With just bold Strokes he dashes here and there,
Showing great Mastery with little Care. '
It is this judgment which, together with Dryden's satire, has
preserved the name and fame of Shadwell from oblivion.
Another camp-follower was Thomas D'Urfey, a French Hu-
guenot by descent and a habitant of Grub Street by profession,
who turned his hand to prose or verse, composed songs, elegies,
and panegyrics, wrote tales, tragical and comical, contrived operas
and pantomimes, satirised ministers, cultivated the friendship
of kings, changed his politics as he changed his coat, and left
behind him a vast number of boisterous farces and bombastic
melodramas. A scurrilous fellow in his life and speech, he was
the familiar friend of all, was called “Tom' by high and low, and
for nearly half a century played a part in the life of his time.
Addison remembered 'King Charles the Second leaning on his
shoulder more than once, and humming over a song with him. '
>
## p. 175 (#197) ############################################
Thomas D'Urfey
175
He was important enough to incur Buckingham's disfavour, and
lives undeservedly in the distich:
And sing-song D'Urfey, placed beneath abuses,
Lives by his impudence, and not the Muses.
His more serious plays, mere burlesques of tragedy, are in ‘Ercles'
vein. The Siege of Memphis and The Famous History of the
Rise and Fall of Massaniello may scarcely be matched, for sheer
fustian, in English literature. Thus it is that Genovino, the
Jesuit, apostrophises the friends of Massaniello:
Shout on, ye sons of clamour, louder still,
And fright the Grandees with obstreperous noise,
Whilst I secure in Darling Policies
Am pleased with the success of my Designs
Against this vile ungrateful City Naples.
For two parts, of five acts each, D'Urfey sustains his rant at this
high level, interrupting it, characteristically, with songs. The
fourth act opens with a fisherman's rousing chorus, and the
serious business of the fifth act is pleasantly beguiled by an
encounter, in amabean strains, between two fish-fags. Thus, the
method and temperament of D'Urfey are sufficiently displayed,
and a mere glance at Massaniello will explain why his friends
vastly preferred his songs to his tragedies.
The plays which he dignifies by the name of comedy are, one
and all, the broadest of broad farces. There is no trick of the
time which he does not employ. The thinnest disguises are
sufficient to deceive his simple heroes. His country squires are
guilty of wilder antics than any devised by Vanbrugh. As he
borrowed from his contemporaries, so his poor treasury of wit was
rifled by his successors. Madam Fickle, in the comedy of that
name, gave Farquhar a hint for the lady Lurewell of The
Constant Couple, and the well-deserved misfortunes of Beau
Clincher and Old Smuggler owe something to the disaster which
overtakes Beauford and Brainworm in The Virtuous Wife.
Many years later, in 1709, D'Urfey astonished the town with a
play of a wholly new pattern. It was called The Modern Prophets,
and was described by Steele as a most unanswerable satire against
the late spirit of enthusiasm. ' The writer
'had by long experience observed,' wrote The Tatler, 'that, in company, very
grave discourses had been followed by bawdry; and therefore has turned the
hamour that way with great success, and taken from his audience all manner
of superstition, by the agitations of pretty Mrs Bignell, whom he has with
great subtlety, made a lay-sister, as well as a prophetess. '
## p. 176 (#198) ############################################
176 The Restoration Drama
Of the virtues which should grace a comic poet D'Urfey had none.
He showed not even a passing interest in human character; he
knew no other wit than horseplay. In brief, save in the writing
of songs, he was a man of very slender talent, and it is a high
tribute to his amiable qualities that his memory has been so long
and so clearly preserved.
Colley Cibber was what D'Urfey was not, a born man of the
theatre. An actor by temperament, a comic poet by accident,
he took a perfect measure of the public taste, and he knew his
colleagues as he knew the pit and boxes. He could fit himself
and them with parts nicely suited to the talent of each. The
result is that his plays are no more than delicately poised
machines, which run easily enough upon the stage, but creak
horribly in the study. Congreve's criticism of Cibber's first play,
Love's Last Shift, the justice of which Cibber in his candid
way publicly acknowledged, would serve as a criticism for them
all. 'It has only in it,' said Congreve, “a great many things that
were like wit, that in reality were not wit. ' Even when he declared
that he drew from life, he succeeded in making the portrait lifeless
as stone. Lady Betty Modish, in The Careless Husband, is said to
have owed not a little to Mrs Oldfield's manner of converse.
6
There are many sentiments in this character, the author confesses, that
I may almost say, were originally her own, or only dress'd with a little more
care, than when they negligently fell from her lively humour. '
a
1
1
Yet Lady Betty is essentially a puppet of the stage. As you listen
to her wit, when it encounters the wit of Sir Charles Easy or Lord
Foppington, your mind never flits for a moment to the talk of
human beings. You are reminded, at every page, of that phrase-
book of ironic genius, Swift's Polite Conversation.
However, Cibber, being a man of the theatre, cared as little
for human character as for literature. It was for him to fill the
pit and boxes, and he filled them for two generations. In the
making of plays he was an expert, and he cared not whose work
it was that he adapted. He improved Shakespeare with as light
a heart as he improved Mrs Centlivre. His most important service
to the stage of his time was the invention of a new kind of beau
in Sir Novelty Fashion, who was accepted by Vanbrugh as a type,
and held the stage until he was reincarnated as Lord Dundreary.
Services such as this hardly outlast the author who does them, and
1 As to the relation of Cibber's later plays to sentimental comedy, see the retrospect
infra in vol. x.
!
## p. 177 (#199) ############################################
Colley Cibber
177
Colley Cibber has a claim upon our regard, which all his journey-
work would not merit. He left us in his Apology for his Life an
incomparable record (published in 1740). It is to his talent of
observation, to his good-humour, and to his sense of justice that we
owe the best set of theatrical portraits that ever came down to us.
As much as words can tell, he has told us of Mrs Bracegirdle and
Betterton, of Leigh and Nokes, of Estcourt and Powell, of all the
brilliant actors, who in our golden age of comedy made the repre-
sentation of that comedy possible. And he has done this with never
a jealous word, with never a hinted dislike at a prosperous rival.
Above all, he has drawn an imperishable portrait of himself, a man
protected against insult by a triple brass of confidence, whose vanity
smiled untouched at the fierce assaults of desperate enemies. That
presently he was chosen by Pope to succeed Theobald on the throne
of folly gave him a strange pleasure, and he discovered, I think,
the real reason of Pope's choice. "Right or wrong,' said he, 'a
'
lick at the laureat will always be a sure bait, ad captandum
vulgus, to catch him little readers. ' It was, in effect, the laureate
unworthy of his wreath that the great poet attacked, and the poet's
shaft should have been directed against the court which put Cibber
in a false position. His laureate odes, sunk in the waters of ob-
livion, no longer trouble us. We may even forget the skilful maker
of stage-plays. The historian of the theatre, the apologist, who
has left behind him the best commentary that we have upon the
comedy of manners, will still be entitled to the world's gratitude,
though he wears the bays no longer on his brow.
E. L. VIIT.
CH. VÌ.
12
## p. 178 (#200) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
THE RESTORATION DRAMA
III
TRAGIC POETS
The lesser tragic writers of this period, uninspired as most of
their work seems when judged on its own merits, fall inevitably
to a still lower level by comparison with the amazing literary
powers of their great leader, Dryden. They have all his faults
and only a small and occasional admixture of his strength and
resource. In tragedy, as in other departments of literature, the
genius of Dryden overtops, on a general estimate, the productions
of his lesser contemporaries, and how closely his lead in the drama
was followed may be correctly estimated from the fact that, in
1678, on his abandoning the use of rimed verse in the drama, his
followers also dropped this impossible form, wisely reflecting, no
doubt, that when Dryden was not satisfied as to its success, they
might be sure of its failure. The productions of the lesser
tragedians, however, in which a desire to catch the humour of
the public and to flatter the mood of the hour is the most fre-
quently recurring characteristic, remain most valuable as helping
to furnish a clear idea of the state of the drama and the prevailing
standard of taste.
The drama on the re-opening of the theatres was subjected to
a flood of new influences. Paramount among these was the in-
fluence of the court, to which dramatists and actors alike hastened
to pay the homage of servile flattery. This lack of independence on
the part of the dramatists of the day, coupled with the general
relaxation of morals consequent on the restoration, account, in a
large measure, for the degradation into which tragedy in England
sank. While comedy retained, in its brightest manifestations at
all events, some redeeming wit and humour, tragedy fell to a level
of dulness and lubricity never surpassed before or since. It
should not be overlooked that, in this period, attendance at the
theatre became a constant social habit, and the theatre itself a great
## p. 179 (#201) ############################################
New Dramatic Influences 179
social force; and in this way alone can be explained the success
on the stage of much portentous rubbish. People went to the
theatre not because they were interested in the drama but be-
cause, to the exclusion of almost all other interests, they were
interested in one another. This is strikingly brought out by
Crowne in the epilogue to Sir Courtly Nice, where he says of the
audience :
They came not to see plays, but act their own,
And had throngd audiences when we had none.
It must also be remembered that this was an age which bred a
succession of great actors and actresses, who occupied an unpre-
cedentedly large share of the public attention. As Colley Cibber
said, speaking of Lee's Alexander the Great:
When these flowing Numbers came from the Mouth of a Betterton the
Multitude no more desired Sense to them than our musical Connoisseurs
think it essential in the celebrate Airs of an Italian Operal.
The same must have been even more true of such a woman as
* Mrs Barry. Lee, Crowne and a host of others were perfectly
capable of writing plays, with a French polish, to suit these new
conditions ; but they are unreadable to-day. The crowd of
lesser restoration dramatists perfectly understood what would
be effective on the stage, and for the rest they relied on in-
credible bombast and threadbare stage devices. It has been seen
how, notwithstanding all the changes which had taken place in
the literary and social conditions of the times, and in those of
the performance of plays, the theatres were reopened in 1660
with favourite old plays; but now, side by side with the surviving
traditions, new influences were at work? . Among these influences,
the operatic element, which owed its first introduction. to
D'Avenant, became specially powerful in tragedy, and helped
to bring about its degradation. Another important factor in the
development of tragedy, viz. the influence, direct and indirect,
of French romance and drama, produced its first important
result in the heroic play, which has been discussed in treating of
the works of its chief representative and unapproached master,
Dryden.
The heroic play was not, however, an entirely new growth.
For the most part, it was French, but the influence of the Eliza-
bethan dramatists may also be traced in it; and though, at first
1 An Apology for his Life, ed. Lowe, R. W. , 1889, vol. 1, 106.
2 Cf. ante, chap. v, pp. 121 sq. , 127 eqq. , 132 sqq.
3 Cf, note, chap. I, pp. 20 sqq.
>
12_2
## p. 180 (#202) ############################################
180
The Restoration Drama
sight, it may appear to represent a departure from previous
methods and ideals, and to be a distinct breaking-away from the
established traditions of tragedy in England, yet a more careful
examination shows that, in the main, it was the natural successor of
the late Elizabethan drama, modified according to prevailing tastes,
and confined within the pseudo-classical limits which were the
order of the day. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that
the heroic play did not take deep root in English soil. By 1680,
tragedies in verse were going out of fashion, and the English tragic
manner, as opposed to the French, began to re-assert itself in the
work of contemporary dramatists.
The works of the great French dramatists had, also, a consider-
able direct influence on English tragedy during the restoration
period; and this is particularly true of Pierre Corneille. A version
of the Cid by Joseph Rutter had been acted before 1637 'before
their Majesties at Court and on the Cockpitt Stage in Drury Lane'
-it is said under the special patronage of queen Henrietta Maria.
This, the first translation of Corneille into English, was fol-
lowed, in 1655 and 1656, by two very poor blank-verse versions of
Polyeucte and Horace respectively, executed by Sir William Lower.
Neither piece seems to have been acted. The masterpieces of
French drama were, therefore, not unfamiliar in translation, and,
shortly after the restoration, Corneille found a worthy translator
in the person of Mrs Katherine Philips--the Matchless Orinda. '
Her version of Pompée, in rimed verse, was produced in Dublin early
in 1663 with great éclat, and increased her already high reputation.
It was also successfully produced in London, and published there,
in the same year. In 1664, another version of Pompée ' by certain
Persons of Honour Waller and lord Buckhurst were the moving
spirits-was successfully produced ; and, in the same year, Hera-
clius was reproduced by Lodowiek Carlell. This last met with great
success, though it does not attain the respectable level of others in
the same batch of translations. Mrs Philips, meanwhile, encouraged
by the success of Pompey, began to translate Horace; but she died
before completing more than the first four acts. Her version,
completed by Sir John Denham, was published in 1669 together
with her other works; but, in later issues, a conclusion by Charles
Cotton was printed. Charles Cotton had himself printed a trans-
lation of the whole play in 1671; his version, however, was never
acted. In the same year, 1671, John Dancer's translation of
Nicomède was acted at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. While
Corneille thus became known and appreciated in England, his
## p. 181 (#203) ############################################
French Influence on English Tragedy 181
contemporary Racine had to wait for anything like general
acceptation until the next century, though signs are not wanting
that he was being studied in England during the last quarter of
the seventeenth century. The industrious Crowne put forth, in
1675, an utterly inadequate version of Andromaque, which did
not meet with any favour, no hint being given of the extra-
ordinary coming success of Ambrose Philips's adaptation of
the same piece in 1712. Otway's Titus and Berenice, though a
careful and scholarly version, and abounding in the pathetic
touch which was his secret, met with but moderate success on the
stage? The same was the case with two other versions of plays
by Racine--Achilles, or Iphigenia in Aulis by Abel Boyer
(1700); and Phaedra and Hippolitus (1706) by Edmund Smith
(who, a few years later, supplied Rowe with material for his Lady
Jane Gray), when the tragedy was first produced. Public taste,
no doubt, was being educated, for, in 1712, The Distrest Mother,
Ambrose Philips's skilful adaptation of Andromaque, met with
immediate and lasting popularity, and Smith's Phaedra and
Hippolitus was revived many times, with marked success, from
1723 onwards.
On the whole, French influence on English tragedy, at this
time, has been exaggerated; such as it was, it affected rather
the outward form than the inward spirit. Much was written to
prove that the French mode, which was a reversion to classic
rules, was the right mode, and most of the earlier plays of the
period bear marks of the influence of these discussions. But, for
the last quarter of the century, the drama in the hands of Otway,
Southerne and Rowe was essentially a descendant of earlier
English work. The result of the controversy is admirably summed
up by Thorndike : "The laws of the pseudo-classicists,' he says,
'were held to be measureably good, but Shakespeare without those
laws had been undeniably great? ? ?
After Dryden, the foremost place among the dramatists of the
restoration age is, undoubtedly, held by Thomas Otway. Born
in 1652, at Trotton in Sussex, he was educated at Winchester and
Christ Church, Oxford, but he left the university without taking
a degree. After an unsuccessful appearance in Mrs Aphra Behn's
Forc'd Marriage (1671), he devoted himself to writing for the
stage. His first play, Alcibiades, a tragedy in rimed verse, was
1 And this was probably due to his having tacked on to it Molière's Fourberies de
Scapin.
Thorndike, A. H. , Tragedy, p. 249.
## p. 182 (#204) ############################################
182
The Restoration Drama
acted in 1675 at the new theatre in Dorset garden by the duke
of York's company, including the Bettertons and Mrs Barry. It
is a dreary and stilted piece, and, though the heroic play was then
at the height of its vogue, Alcibiades met with but little success. In
his next play, Don Carlos (1676), Otway was more happy. Though
still hampered by bombast and rimed verse, the scenes are handled
with some vigour, and the play seems to have been effective on the
stage, and very popular. It ran for ten nights and was frequently
revived. The plot is taken from the Abbé de Saint-Réal's his-
torical romance of Don Carlos (1673), of which a translation into
English had appeared in 1674. The same source, at a later period,
supplied Schiller with the plot of a tragedy bearing the same title
as Otway's; but, though the English poet was not unknown in
Germany, there is no evidence to show that Schiller made use of
his work. The part of Philip II was played by Betterton, who pro-
duced all Otway's subsequent plays—a remarkable proof of their
attractiveness from an actor's point of view.
Two capable versions of French plays followed (1677)_Titus
and Berenice from Racine's Bérénice and The Cheats of Scapin
from Molière's Fourberies de Scapin. The latter held the stage
for more than a hundred years.
While Otway was away in Holland on military service, his first
comedy, Friendship in Fashion, was produced (1678). His genius,
however, most assuredly did not lie in the direction of comedy. On
his return to London, Otway produced (1680) The History and Fall
of Caius Marius', half of which tragedy, as he frankly admits in
the prologue, is taken bodily from Romeo and Juliet. In the
same year (1680) appeared The Orphan, a tragedy in blank verse,
and the earlier of the two plays upon which Otway's reputation
rests. The plot is supposed to have been suggested by Robert
Tailor's comedy The Hogge hath lost his Pearle (1614), which it
resembles, or, more probably, by a work entitled English Ad-
ventures. By a Person of Honour (attributed to Roger Boyle,
earl of Orrery), published in 1676, which narrates the escapades of
Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk With this play, Otway stepped
out of the rank and file of restoration dramatists into his own
particular place among great English tragedians. He abandoned
the artificial emotions of heroic personages in favour of the joys
and sorrows of ordinary human life. The Orphan is, for the
1
1 It is probable that this tragedy was produced before The Orphan, for it ocours in
the Term Catalogue (ed. Arber, 1903) for Michaelmas term 1679, while The Orphan
occurs ibid. , for Easter term 1680, six months later.
1
## p. 183 (#205) ############################################
Thomas Otway
183
period, a singularly domestic play. Two brothers, Castalio and
Polydore, are in love with Monimia, their father's ward. Castalio
secretly contracts himself to her in marriage; but Polydore, over-
hearing their plans for meeting, and unaware of the nature of
the tie which unites them, contrives to supplant his brother on
the wedding night. Castalio, seeking admittance to the bridal
chamber, is supposed to be Polydore and rudely repulsed; and
he spends the night cursing all womankind. With the morrow
come explanations, and the misery of the situation becomes clear.
Whether the plot makes too large demands on the reader's credulity,
or whether it shocks his sense of decorum, the pathetic irony of the
situation in which the characters find themselves is indisputably
brought home with great tragic force.
A comedy called The Souldier's Fortune followed (1681), in
which the poet drew upon his military experiences. Langbaine
discovered in this piece numerous borrowings-notably from
Boccaccio and Scarron; but the episodes are so common to plays
of intrigue that it is difficult to say whence Otway derived them.
There is, however, more than a suggestion of Molière's L'École
des Maris.
Otway's next play, Venice Preserv'd, or a Plot Discover'd, a
tragedy in blank verse, was first acted in February 1682. The story
of this tragedy is taken from an anecdotal history entitled La
Conjuration des Espagnols contre la république de Venise en 1618,
published in 1674 by the Abbé de Saint-Réal. An English trans-
lation had appeared in 1675. The finest character in the play,
Belvidera, is, however, purely the creation of the poet's genius;
and the scenes between her and Jaffier, the weak, but at heart
noble, conspirator who is persuaded by his wife to reveal the plot
to the senate, are beyond praise. Jaffier, torn between his
passionate affection for Belvidera and his almost equal devotion
to his friends and their cause, presents a signally true picture
of the human soul seeking vainly to reconcile contending ideals.
His remorse and shame under the stinging reproaches of his dear
friend and fellow-conspirator Pierre, his inability to free himself
from the clinging love and fascination with which Belvidera has
enmeshed him, his agony of grief on the senate's breach of its
promise to spare the lives of all the conspirators as the reward
of his treachery-all these successive phases through which his
sensitive, but weak and vacillating, spirit has to pass are depicted
with consummate skill and true tragic power.
1 This may have been acted earlier, on Otway's return from Holland.
## p. 184 (#206) ############################################
184 The Restoration Drama
Otway's political leaning reveals itself in the secondary title,
with its obvious reference to the popish plot, and; still more
clearly, in the prologue and epilogue; and the play is further dis-
figured by some scandalous 'comic' scenes, written to ridicule
Anthony, earl of Shaftesbury, in the character of Antonio, a
lascivious old senator.
In Venice Preserv'd and, to a less extent, in The Orphan,
Otway produced plays which, for intensity of feeling and for the
display of elemental emotions, are worthy to rank with the
later masterpieces of the Elizabethan age, and with some of
Fletcher's plays in particular. The language of their finest
passages is of a notable simplicity, admirably conveying the
poet's conception of his characters. Unfortunately, passages
of noble poetry are, at times, intermixed with lines of
almost ludicrous ineptitude. More pathetic and convincing
pictures of women overwhelmed by grief, confusion and hopeless-
ness cannot be imagined than those drawn by Otway in his
Monimia--' the trembling, tender, kind, deceived Monimia'-and
the still finer Belvidera-a masterpiece of insight into the human
heart. Both characters were originally performed by Mrs Barry, the
celebrated actress who appeared in Otway's first play, Alcibiades,
and for whom the poet had conceived a hopeless passion. Some
of his letters to her have been preserved, and prove how deeply
he had fallen under her influence. His unrequited passion for
this fascinating woman had a manifest share in the uplifting of
his genius from the dusty commonplaces of lesser restoration
drama to the heights of characterisation and expression which
he reached in his two great tragedies.
The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd were extremely popular,
and were played with some frequency down to the middle of the
nineteenth century. Both plays are full of opportunities for
effective acting, and the principal characters in them continued
to be among the greatest triumphs, not only, when first produced,
of the Bettertons and Mrs Barry, but, also, of their most dis-
tinguished successors. Mrs Siddons and Miss O'Neill were famous
Belvideras and Monimias; Pierre was one of John Kemble's most
signal successes; and Garrick many times played Pierre, Jaffier
and Chamont'.
The Atheist, or The Second Part of The Souldier's Fortune
1 Venice Preserv'd was revived at Sadler's Wells, in 1845, with Phelps as Jaffier and
Mrs Warner as Belvidera, and, as recently as 1904, the play was acted in London by
the Otway Society.
## p. 185 (#207) ############################################
Nathaniel Lee
185
completes the list of Otway's plays. It was produced in 1684
and is as unsatisfactory as his previous efforts in comedy. In
addition to the plays mentioned above, Otway wrote some poems
and translations of no great importance. The most ambitious of
the poems are The Poet's Complaint of his Muse (1680), which
is full of curious autobiographical touches ; and Windsor Castle,
published posthumously in 1685, a panegyric on Charles II. He
also wrote, according to the fashion of the day, a few prologues
and epilogues for his fellow-dramatists. He died, in 1685, in the
utmost want and misery-one account says of actual starvation.
Though Otway failed as an actor, he possessed a strong sense
of dramatic possibilities; and it is the combination of this sense
with an original and individual genius, that will preserve his two
chief efforts from oblivion?
1
Nathaniel Lee, son of a clergyman, was born about 1653, and
educated at Westminster and Trinity college, Cambridge, where
he graduated B. A. in 1668. His early experiences bear a strong
resemblance to those of Otway. Like him, Lee began his life in
London in reliance upon some of the fitful patrons of letters in
whom the age abounded, and, also like Otway, he, in the same
year at the same theatre, failed utterly as an actor. The first
plays—and there is not much to choose between them-of the two
dramatists alike appeared in 1675. Between that date and 1681,
Lee produced in rapid succession eight tragedies and a tragi-
comedy, all with quasi-historical settings His first play, Nero,
Emperour of Rome (1675) was succeeded, in 1676, by Sophonista,
or Hannibals Overthrow; which seems to have been inspired by
Orrery's Parthenissa. To 1676, also, belongs Gloriana, or The
Court of Augustus Caesar. These three are heroic plays, for the
most part in rimed verse, and thoroughly typical of the period.
In 1677, Lee, following Dryden's lead, produced the blank verse
play entitled The Rival Queens, or The Death of Alexander the
Great, which proved an immediate and lasting success. It is
founded on Cassandre, a romance by La Calprenède, upon whose
Cléopâtre Lee had already drawn for some of the incidents in his
Gloriana. There followed, in 1678, Mithridates, King of Pontus,
1 For Hazlitt's criticism of these two plays see his Lectures on the Dramatic
Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, L. VII (Collected Works, edd. Waller, A. R. and
Glover, A. , vol. v, pp. 3545). In his first lecture (ib. p. 181) Hazlitt declares that
'with the exception of a single writer, Otway, and of a single play of his (Venice
Preserv'd) there is nobody in tragedy and dramatic poetry . . . to be compared to the
great men of the age of Shakespear and immediately after. '
## p. 186 (#208) ############################################
186
The Restoration Drama
another blank verse play; and, in 1679, Dryden and Lee co-
operated in the composition of Edipus, King of Thebes.
Theodosius, or the Force of Love, one of Lee's most successful
plays, was produced in 1680, and was acted very frequently
throughout the eighteenth century. Caesar Borgia, Son of Pope
Alexander the Sixth (1680), Lucius Junius Brutus, Father of
His Country (1681), and The Princess of Cleve, acted in 1681, but
not printed until 1689, are all more or less reminiscent of French
romances of the Scudéry type. (La Princesse de Clèves, by the
countess de La Fayette, was a late masterpiece of this school of
fiction. ) In 1682 Dryden and Lee again joined hands in The Duke
of Guise. Most of this play was Lee's work, and was drawn from a
piece called The Massacre of Paris, which, though written some
years previously, had not then been produced. In 1684 appeared
Constantine the Great, his last play, if we except the aforesaid
Massacre of Paris (1690). Lee went out of his mind in 1684
and was confined to Bedlam until 1689, when he was released.
He had been given to drink all his life; and, in 1692, an excess of
this kind brought about his death.
Lee's plays are not without a certain imposing picturesqueness
and broad effectiveness ; but he entirely lacked the sense of
measure and proportion, with that of humour. Neither delicacy
of perception, nor the power of characterisation-in short, none
of the finer qualities of the dramatist
are to be found in him.
His personages talk at the top of their voices on all occasions-
happy or the reverse—while rant and confusion, blood and dust,
ghosts and portents and hysterics, effectually conceal from all but
the most persevering student the occasional nobler features of
Lee's imagination. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to judge his plays
by reading them in cold blood. They were intended for acting;
and, as acting plays, they have abundantly justified themselves.
- The Rival Queens and Theodosius supplied favourite parts to
many of the most gifted tragic actors not only of their own day,
but, also, in the next century. Alexander, in The Rival Queens,
was one of Betterton's most popular róles, and he played leading
parts in all Lee's later productions ; while Hart and Mohun ac-
quired fame in his earlier pieces. At a later date, Charles Kemble
а
and Mrs Powell and Edmund Keen and Mrs Glover revived The
Rival Queens with marked success. And it is easy to understand
how thrilling, in their hands, must have been the scenes
of white-hot elemental passion in which Lee abounds. He was
consistently a candidate for immediate popular favour. He gave
## p. 187 (#209) ############################################
Nathaniel Lee. John Crowne 187
1
the court what it liked-heroic plays on French lines, with a strong
appeal to the senses, and characters capable of being played with
immense effect and abandon by gifted actors and actresses. It
may be accounted a significant, though hardly a surprising, fact
that, at a time when almost everything-good, bad and indifferent
-has been reprinted, no publisher has been found courageous
enough to undertake an edition of Lee. No analysis of his extra-
vagance can give so distinct an impression of it as an example, and
the following description in Lricius Junius Brutus, of a young
boy's grief, is typical of many similar absurdities scattered up and
down his plays:
His pretty eyes, ruddy and wet with tears,
Like two burst Cherries rolling in storml.
On the other hand, the lines frequently quoted :
Thou coward! yet
Art living? Canst not, wilt not, find the road
To the great palace of magnificent Death,
Though thousand ways lead to his thousand doors
Which day and night are still unbarred for all2 ?
may be taken as an instance of Lee at his best. Now and again,
a stray verse or metaphor reminds us of the Elizabethan heights
from which the restoration dramatists had fallen so far. But these
beauties are few and far between, and it must be frankly confessed
that, to-day, Lee is almost unreadable.
The birthday and parentage of John Crowne, one of the most
prolific of the crowd of restoration dramatists, are alike unknown.
From recent researches it appears probable that he was the son of
William Crowne, who emigrated to Nova Scotia, and that he was born
about 1640. He was certainly in London in 1665, for his first work
appeared in that year, the romance entitled Pandion and Amphi-
genia. In 1671 was acted and published his tragicomedy Juliana,
or the Princess of Poland-the first of a long series of dull and half-
forgotten tragedies. It was succeeded by The History of Charles
the Eighth of France (1672), in rimed couplets, and Andromache
(1675), in prose. The last seems to have been a mere adaptation
of a translation, chiefly in verse, by another hand, of Racine's
Andromaque. In 1675 also appeared the masque Calisto, or the
Chast Nymph, acted at court by members of the royal family and
household. It is without charm, and owes whatever interest it
1 Act v, sc. 2.
Oedipus, act v, 80. 1.
## p. 188 (#210) ############################################
188
The Restoration Drama
may retain to the personalities of the performers, and to the fact
that, on the occasion for which it was written, Dryden, the poet
laureate, was passed over in favour of Crowne through the interest
of Rochester.
Crowne's first comedy, The Country Wit, was acted in 1675.
It is founded on Molière’s Le Sicilien, ou l'Amour Peintre (1667),
and, in Sir Mannerly Shallow, contains a sort of first sketch of the
type--that of the pompous gull-which Crowne afterwards de-
veloped with marked success into the Podestà (in City Politiques),
Sir Courtly Nice (in the play of that name), and Lord Stately (in
The English Frier).
Then followed three tragedies of absolute dulness, The De-
struction of Jerusalem (1677); The Ambitious Statesman (1679),
of which the theme and sources are alike French; and Thyestes,
taken from Seneca (1681). The concentrated horror of the last-
mentioned piece has led to its receiving more notice from Crowne's
critics than his other tragic productions? ; but there is not any
nobility in his treatment of the awful story. Shortly before the
appearance of this tragedy, Crowne, in 1680, produced a hash of
Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II, which he called The Misery
of Civil-War, and followed this, in 1681, with Henry the Sixth,
the First Part. With the Murder of Humphrey, Duke of
Glocester.
His best comedies came next: City Politiques (1683), and
Sir Courtly Nice, or It cannot be (1685). The date of the former
of these pieces, long a subject of debate, is now established. In
its elaborate and very amusing satire on the whigs, despite
Crowne's perfunctory professions to the contrary, the originals
from which some of the portraits were drawn may be detected
without difficulty. Titus Oates masquerades as Dr Panchy, and
Stephen Colledge is introduced in the guise of a bricklayer; while
frequent hits are made at Shaftesbury in the person of the Podestà
of the very un-Neapolitan ‘Naples' where the action is supposed
to take place.
1 Lamb thought it worth while to include scenes from this as well as from other
plays by Crowne in his Extracts from the Garrick plays.
Biographia Dramatica gives the date of production as 1675; while several other
authorities, including Genest, state that did not appear until 1688. The earlier
of these dates is, from internal evidence, impossible; for Dryden's Medal, published in
1682, is referred to by name, and the play is full of satire about plots and counterplots,
burning the city and letting in the French. It seems probable that this comedy was
confused with The Country Wit, which actually appeared in 1675; in any case, the
publication of the Term Catalogues establishes beyond further question the fact that
City Politiques was first published in 1683. It was re-issued in 1688.
## p. 189 (#211) ############################################
John Crowne
189
Sir Courtly Nice is by far the best of Crowne's plays, and has
in it something of the true spirit of comedy which, in this age,
reached its height in the group of comic dramatists headed
by Congreve? It is founded on Moreto's play No puede ser
guardar una mujer (No holding a Woman), which is itself an
imitation of Lope de Vega's Mayor Imposibile (The greatest of
impossibilities). An English version of Moreto’s comedy, by Sir
Thomas St Serfe, had been produced without success in 1668,
under the title Tarugo's Wiles, or the Coffee-House ; but Crowne
does not seem to have been aware of its existence. In any case,
the principal characters in Crowne's play are new. Sir Courtly
himself, with Hothead and Testimony-an admirably contrasted
pair, representing, in a most diverting manner, the extreme factions
of the age and Surly are all due to Crowne's invention!
The tragedies of Darius (1688), Regulus (1692) and Caligula
(1698) call for no more than a passing mention. Crowne's last two
comedies are, however, more interesting. The English Frier
(1690) is a mordant satire on the personal lives and characters of
the Catholic priests who had been high in favour at the court
of James II. Father Petre has been suggested as the original of
Father Finical; and the satire is certainly on much the same
lines as that of several scandalous narratives of the Martin's 'life.
The piece owes much to Molière’s Tartuffe (printed 1669), well
known in England by this time.
The story of The Curious Impertinent in Don Quixote, which
had been used ten years previously by Southerne in The Dis-
appointment, or the Mother in Fashion, furnished Crowne with
a central idea for his last comedy The Married Beau (1694). It
is less witty and coarser than his other comedies. Crowne seems
to have been alive in 1701.
Lee has been called an inferior Otway, and Crowne, so far as
1 See, ante chap. VI.
; Hothead is charged with not often attending church- What then, I'm for the
church. ' Timothy wants to know whether we can't be saved unless we go to Oxford.
Sir Courtly, though he has bestowed 'some garniture on plays, as a song or a prologue,'
holds to the principle that . Men of quality are above wit. ' The play is full of allusions
to the politics of the day, and an entirely new verb to Godfrey' is introduced, in obvious
allusion to the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in 1678. Mountfort was un-
equalled in the part of Sir Courtly Nice, which he performed at its original production
at the Theatre Royal, though Colley Cibber made a great success of the part in the
eighteenth century, when it was frequently revived.
3 Cf. ante, chap. I, p. 48.
* According to Downes’s Roscius Anglicanus (facsimile reprint, 1886, p. 45) Crowne
produced a further comedy, Justice Busy; but it ‘prov'd not a living play' and was
never printed.
## p. 190 (#212) ############################################
190 The Restoration Drama
his tragedies are concerned, might be called a second-rate Lee.
His plays have all Lee's turgidity, with none of that author's
redeeming though crazy picturesqueness. They preserve a dead
level of mediocrity, and it seems almost incredible that such a
piece as The Destruction of Jerusalem could ever have gained
the marked success which it undoubtedly secured. Nothing but
mounting elaborate enough to impress an uncritical audience
could have saved such plays as these from immediate and final
damnation. Such originality and talent as Crowne possessed
found vent in his comedies; and it may be pointed out that,
of all the tragic dramatists of the time who wrote comedies, he
alone produced any that have a claim to be remembered. His
Sir Courtly Nice is a genuinely comic and living personage, and,
though he has found numerous imitators, the creation of the type
belongs to Crowne.
Thomas Southerne (or Southern, as his name is spelt in the first
editions of all his plays), was of Irish parentage; but he spent his
life in London, where his career was in striking contrast to those
of most contemporary dramatists, as to both its length and its
conduct. He produced two highly successful plays exactly calcu-
lated to hit the public taste, and by no means without intrinsic
merit. Southerne seems to bave possessed considerable personal
charm and was a valued friend of several of the most distinguished
men of his day. He enjoyed the intimate friendship of Dryden,
who wrote prologues and epilogues for several of his plays and
who, in 1692, entrusted him with the task of completing the last
act of his Cleomenes and revising the whole. Printed at the
end of his Works (1774) is a delightful letter addressed to him by
Lord Orrery, dated 1733, beginning 'My dear Old Man,' which
breathes throughout a spirit of the warmest friendship and regard.
Southerne's dedications sufficiently show that these were no
isolated instances. Not only was his literary work successful in
obtaining for him admiration and regard, but he also reaped from
it substantial pecuniary profit?
In his first play, The Loyal Brother (1682), Southerne discloses
strong tory sympathies, and the character of Ismael is supposed
to convey the inevitable attack on Shaftesbury. The play is
taken from a novel called Tachmas, Prince of Persia, translated
from the French by P. Porter in 1676.
1 For the copyright of The Spartan Dame (by no means his best play), Chetwood
the bookseller paid one hundred and twenty pounds, and Southerne is stated to have
made altogether five hundred pounds profit out of this rather commonplace production.
## p. 191 (#213) ############################################
Thomas Southerne
191
This was followed by four comedies, for the most part in
prose. The Disappointment, or the Mother in Fashion (1684) is
(once more) founded on the story of The Curious Impertinent in
Don Quixote. Sir Anthony Love, or The Rambling Lady (1691)
was 'acted with extraordinary applause,' the part of Sir Anthony
being ‘most masterly played' by Mrs Mountfort. The Wives
Excuse, or Cuckolds make themselves (1692) was not so successful,
and seems to have given offence in some quarters by its too
faithful delineation of polite life. The Maids Last Prayer, or
Any, rather than Fail (1693) is chiefly notable as containing a
song said to have been the earliest acknowledged piece of Con-
greve's writing. However, Southerne's strength; did not lie in
comedy, though his comic productions are, in general, considerably
less gross, and decidedly more witty, than those of most of his
contemporaries; and it was not until 1694 that, in The Fatal
Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery, he achieved a play worthy
of his talent. This popular drama was founded on Mrs Aphra
Behn's novel The Nun, or The Perjur'd Beauty. Its success
was immediatel. The Fatal Marriage was frequently acted
during the eighteenth century, Garrick, in particular, reviving it,
in an abridged version, in 17572
In 1696 appeared Southerne's other great success, Oroonoko, or
the Royal Slave, like its predecessor a mixture of blank verse and
prose. Mrs Behn again supplied the plot in her novel of the same
name, and the piece, as adapted by Hawkesworth, had an even
- longer life than The Fatal Marriage. It is not, however, intrin-
sically so effective; though the novelty of its story and setting
(a slave plantation in the West Indies), and the acting of Ver-
bruggen, as the noble-minded, if somewhat tedious, negro, the hero
of the piece, gave it a high place in public favour.
In none of his last three plays did Southerne reach so high a
level. The Fate of Capua (1700) was a failure; nor can The
Spartan Dame (1719), founded on Plutarch’s Life of Agis, in
spite of its stage success, be pronounced a good play. Money the
Mistress (1726), Southerne's last production, was quite unsuccessful;
its plot is taken from the countess D’Aulnoy's Travels into Spain.
When at his best, Southerne reminds us of Otway in his power of
1 Mrs Barry played Isabella, which remained one of her most telling parts.
Betterton played Villeroy, Isabella's seoond husband.
: On this occasion, Mrs Cibber played Isabella to Garrick's Biron. Later, Mrs
Siddons played the same part with immense effeot, and it remained her most popular
part outside Shakespeare.
## p.
patron persuaded him to pay his debts by the sale of his com-
mission, promising him another: that other never came. In 1703
he married a lady who pretended to be a fortune, and who, for love
of Farquhar, had concealed her poverty. Here was a plot which
might have served him for a comedy, and which, with him cast for
the chief róle, could have had only a tragic ending. Being Farquhar,
he harboured no resentment for the trick that had been put upon
him, but 'behaved to her with all the delicacy and tenderness of
an indulgent husband. ' Nothing could daunt the brave serenity
of his spirit. If he clung to the gaiety of the beau, he never knew
the beau's cynicism. He has sketched himself in a page which you
may well believe is without flattery, and he confesses himself so
great an epicure that he hates all pleasure that's purchas'd by
excess of pain. ' He, at any rate, did not accept Sir Harry Wildair's
theory of life.
'I would have my passion,' he writes in a passage of evident sincerity, 'if
not led, at least waited on by my reason; and the greatest proof of my
affection that a lady must expect is this: I would run any hazard to make us
both happy, but would not for any transitory pleasure make either of us
miserable.
It was not within his compass to make them both happy. His
friend Wilks, missing him at the theatre, discovered him lodged in
1 For Lessing's debt to Farquhar consult an excellent article by J. G. Robertson in
The Modern Language Review, vol. 11 (1907).
## p. 173 (#195) ############################################
Thomas Shadwell
173
3
a back garret in St Martin's Lane. He advised him to write a play
which should be instantly put upon the stage. 'Write! ' says
Farquhar, 'it is impossible that a man can write common sense
who is heartless, and has not a shilling in his pocket. Wilks gave
him twenty guineas, and, in six weeks, The Beaux' Stratagem, that
marvel of merriment and good-humour, was finished. It hints by
no sign that the author wrote it with a settled sickness upon him,
nor 'that before he finished the second act he perceived the
approaches of death. It was produced on 8 March 1707, and
Farquhar lived just long enough to hear of its triumphant success.
A last note to the friend of his brief life, Wilks, was found among
9
6
his papers:
Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory,
but two helpless girls; look upon them sometimes, and think on him who was
to the last moment of his life thine, G. Farquhar.
An epilogue fittingly spoken by a gallant man whose life was in
dire conflict with his theory of living, and whose courage, in suffer-
ing, sustained him to the end.
Whenever this or that battle of literature is engaged, the
leaders are attended by a vast mob of camp-followers, who
without natural talent or obvious ingenuity, hope to share the
spoils of victory. Thus it was that the masters of comedy saw
their works mimicked and the repute of their craft not enhanced
by eager, industrious journeymen. The most of these preserve
their names and no more in the annals of the stage. Now and
again they emerge, for some quality of wit or good nature, from
the rest and, with their half-forgotten works, prompt the curiosity
of the historian. Thomas Shadwell", poet laureate, for instance,
enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable
in ours. Literary skill was not among the gifts of his mind. He
had a trick of invention, and was determined to turn the best models
to account. But when he had invented (or adapted) his puppets,
he handled them so carelessly, that they long since lost their interest
for us. The sense of style, the mastery of language, which might
have tempered their extravagance, were lacking to him, and he
resembled the facile playwrights of to-day in refusing to look upon
the drama as a branch of literature. In his preface to The Sullen
Lovers he proudly professed himself a pupil of Ben Jonson, whose
variety of humours' he attempted to reproduce, and whom, he
* See above, Chapter I.
## p. 174 (#196) ############################################
174
The Restoration Drama
thought, 'all dramatic poets ought to imitate. ' His debt to Ben
Jonson was infinitely less than his debt to Molière. The Sullen
Lovers is based upon Les Fâcheux; Bury Fair, bis masterpiece,
owes its fantastic characters to Les Précieuses Ridicules; and
The Miser is no more than a perversion of L'Avare. Yet so good
a conceit of himself had Shadwell, that he thought he did his
masters no discredit. ''Tis not barrenness of wit or invention that
makes me borrow from the French,' he boasted, 'but laziness. '
To be lazy is a greater sin, in the realm of art, than to be barren.
He patronised Shakespeare as amiably as he patronised Molière.
When he had mangled Timon of Athens, 'I can truly say," he
wrote, “that I have made it a play. Yet with all his shortcomings
'
he held the stage for a quarter of a century. His Epsom Wells
was praised by Saint-Évremond. He had the wit to make Don Juan
the hero of The Libertine, and with The Squire of Alsatia he
scaled the topmost height of his popularity. This last play has
many faults. Its story is incredible. The cant used by the rufflers
of Whitefriars is handled with so little tact, that it seems an ex-
crescence upon the dialogue rather than a part of it. Yet how
much excellent material it contains was revealed by Sir Walter
Scott, who made a free use of it in The Fortunes of Nigel.
Briefly, the vices and virtues of hasty Shadwell have been well
summed up by Rochester in four lines:
"Shadwell's unfinished Works do yet impart
Great Proofs of force of Nature, none of Art,
With just bold Strokes he dashes here and there,
Showing great Mastery with little Care. '
It is this judgment which, together with Dryden's satire, has
preserved the name and fame of Shadwell from oblivion.
Another camp-follower was Thomas D'Urfey, a French Hu-
guenot by descent and a habitant of Grub Street by profession,
who turned his hand to prose or verse, composed songs, elegies,
and panegyrics, wrote tales, tragical and comical, contrived operas
and pantomimes, satirised ministers, cultivated the friendship
of kings, changed his politics as he changed his coat, and left
behind him a vast number of boisterous farces and bombastic
melodramas. A scurrilous fellow in his life and speech, he was
the familiar friend of all, was called “Tom' by high and low, and
for nearly half a century played a part in the life of his time.
Addison remembered 'King Charles the Second leaning on his
shoulder more than once, and humming over a song with him. '
>
## p. 175 (#197) ############################################
Thomas D'Urfey
175
He was important enough to incur Buckingham's disfavour, and
lives undeservedly in the distich:
And sing-song D'Urfey, placed beneath abuses,
Lives by his impudence, and not the Muses.
His more serious plays, mere burlesques of tragedy, are in ‘Ercles'
vein. The Siege of Memphis and The Famous History of the
Rise and Fall of Massaniello may scarcely be matched, for sheer
fustian, in English literature. Thus it is that Genovino, the
Jesuit, apostrophises the friends of Massaniello:
Shout on, ye sons of clamour, louder still,
And fright the Grandees with obstreperous noise,
Whilst I secure in Darling Policies
Am pleased with the success of my Designs
Against this vile ungrateful City Naples.
For two parts, of five acts each, D'Urfey sustains his rant at this
high level, interrupting it, characteristically, with songs. The
fourth act opens with a fisherman's rousing chorus, and the
serious business of the fifth act is pleasantly beguiled by an
encounter, in amabean strains, between two fish-fags. Thus, the
method and temperament of D'Urfey are sufficiently displayed,
and a mere glance at Massaniello will explain why his friends
vastly preferred his songs to his tragedies.
The plays which he dignifies by the name of comedy are, one
and all, the broadest of broad farces. There is no trick of the
time which he does not employ. The thinnest disguises are
sufficient to deceive his simple heroes. His country squires are
guilty of wilder antics than any devised by Vanbrugh. As he
borrowed from his contemporaries, so his poor treasury of wit was
rifled by his successors. Madam Fickle, in the comedy of that
name, gave Farquhar a hint for the lady Lurewell of The
Constant Couple, and the well-deserved misfortunes of Beau
Clincher and Old Smuggler owe something to the disaster which
overtakes Beauford and Brainworm in The Virtuous Wife.
Many years later, in 1709, D'Urfey astonished the town with a
play of a wholly new pattern. It was called The Modern Prophets,
and was described by Steele as a most unanswerable satire against
the late spirit of enthusiasm. ' The writer
'had by long experience observed,' wrote The Tatler, 'that, in company, very
grave discourses had been followed by bawdry; and therefore has turned the
hamour that way with great success, and taken from his audience all manner
of superstition, by the agitations of pretty Mrs Bignell, whom he has with
great subtlety, made a lay-sister, as well as a prophetess. '
## p. 176 (#198) ############################################
176 The Restoration Drama
Of the virtues which should grace a comic poet D'Urfey had none.
He showed not even a passing interest in human character; he
knew no other wit than horseplay. In brief, save in the writing
of songs, he was a man of very slender talent, and it is a high
tribute to his amiable qualities that his memory has been so long
and so clearly preserved.
Colley Cibber was what D'Urfey was not, a born man of the
theatre. An actor by temperament, a comic poet by accident,
he took a perfect measure of the public taste, and he knew his
colleagues as he knew the pit and boxes. He could fit himself
and them with parts nicely suited to the talent of each. The
result is that his plays are no more than delicately poised
machines, which run easily enough upon the stage, but creak
horribly in the study. Congreve's criticism of Cibber's first play,
Love's Last Shift, the justice of which Cibber in his candid
way publicly acknowledged, would serve as a criticism for them
all. 'It has only in it,' said Congreve, “a great many things that
were like wit, that in reality were not wit. ' Even when he declared
that he drew from life, he succeeded in making the portrait lifeless
as stone. Lady Betty Modish, in The Careless Husband, is said to
have owed not a little to Mrs Oldfield's manner of converse.
6
There are many sentiments in this character, the author confesses, that
I may almost say, were originally her own, or only dress'd with a little more
care, than when they negligently fell from her lively humour. '
a
1
1
Yet Lady Betty is essentially a puppet of the stage. As you listen
to her wit, when it encounters the wit of Sir Charles Easy or Lord
Foppington, your mind never flits for a moment to the talk of
human beings. You are reminded, at every page, of that phrase-
book of ironic genius, Swift's Polite Conversation.
However, Cibber, being a man of the theatre, cared as little
for human character as for literature. It was for him to fill the
pit and boxes, and he filled them for two generations. In the
making of plays he was an expert, and he cared not whose work
it was that he adapted. He improved Shakespeare with as light
a heart as he improved Mrs Centlivre. His most important service
to the stage of his time was the invention of a new kind of beau
in Sir Novelty Fashion, who was accepted by Vanbrugh as a type,
and held the stage until he was reincarnated as Lord Dundreary.
Services such as this hardly outlast the author who does them, and
1 As to the relation of Cibber's later plays to sentimental comedy, see the retrospect
infra in vol. x.
!
## p. 177 (#199) ############################################
Colley Cibber
177
Colley Cibber has a claim upon our regard, which all his journey-
work would not merit. He left us in his Apology for his Life an
incomparable record (published in 1740). It is to his talent of
observation, to his good-humour, and to his sense of justice that we
owe the best set of theatrical portraits that ever came down to us.
As much as words can tell, he has told us of Mrs Bracegirdle and
Betterton, of Leigh and Nokes, of Estcourt and Powell, of all the
brilliant actors, who in our golden age of comedy made the repre-
sentation of that comedy possible. And he has done this with never
a jealous word, with never a hinted dislike at a prosperous rival.
Above all, he has drawn an imperishable portrait of himself, a man
protected against insult by a triple brass of confidence, whose vanity
smiled untouched at the fierce assaults of desperate enemies. That
presently he was chosen by Pope to succeed Theobald on the throne
of folly gave him a strange pleasure, and he discovered, I think,
the real reason of Pope's choice. "Right or wrong,' said he, 'a
'
lick at the laureat will always be a sure bait, ad captandum
vulgus, to catch him little readers. ' It was, in effect, the laureate
unworthy of his wreath that the great poet attacked, and the poet's
shaft should have been directed against the court which put Cibber
in a false position. His laureate odes, sunk in the waters of ob-
livion, no longer trouble us. We may even forget the skilful maker
of stage-plays. The historian of the theatre, the apologist, who
has left behind him the best commentary that we have upon the
comedy of manners, will still be entitled to the world's gratitude,
though he wears the bays no longer on his brow.
E. L. VIIT.
CH. VÌ.
12
## p. 178 (#200) ############################################
CHAPTER VII
THE RESTORATION DRAMA
III
TRAGIC POETS
The lesser tragic writers of this period, uninspired as most of
their work seems when judged on its own merits, fall inevitably
to a still lower level by comparison with the amazing literary
powers of their great leader, Dryden. They have all his faults
and only a small and occasional admixture of his strength and
resource. In tragedy, as in other departments of literature, the
genius of Dryden overtops, on a general estimate, the productions
of his lesser contemporaries, and how closely his lead in the drama
was followed may be correctly estimated from the fact that, in
1678, on his abandoning the use of rimed verse in the drama, his
followers also dropped this impossible form, wisely reflecting, no
doubt, that when Dryden was not satisfied as to its success, they
might be sure of its failure. The productions of the lesser
tragedians, however, in which a desire to catch the humour of
the public and to flatter the mood of the hour is the most fre-
quently recurring characteristic, remain most valuable as helping
to furnish a clear idea of the state of the drama and the prevailing
standard of taste.
The drama on the re-opening of the theatres was subjected to
a flood of new influences. Paramount among these was the in-
fluence of the court, to which dramatists and actors alike hastened
to pay the homage of servile flattery. This lack of independence on
the part of the dramatists of the day, coupled with the general
relaxation of morals consequent on the restoration, account, in a
large measure, for the degradation into which tragedy in England
sank. While comedy retained, in its brightest manifestations at
all events, some redeeming wit and humour, tragedy fell to a level
of dulness and lubricity never surpassed before or since. It
should not be overlooked that, in this period, attendance at the
theatre became a constant social habit, and the theatre itself a great
## p. 179 (#201) ############################################
New Dramatic Influences 179
social force; and in this way alone can be explained the success
on the stage of much portentous rubbish. People went to the
theatre not because they were interested in the drama but be-
cause, to the exclusion of almost all other interests, they were
interested in one another. This is strikingly brought out by
Crowne in the epilogue to Sir Courtly Nice, where he says of the
audience :
They came not to see plays, but act their own,
And had throngd audiences when we had none.
It must also be remembered that this was an age which bred a
succession of great actors and actresses, who occupied an unpre-
cedentedly large share of the public attention. As Colley Cibber
said, speaking of Lee's Alexander the Great:
When these flowing Numbers came from the Mouth of a Betterton the
Multitude no more desired Sense to them than our musical Connoisseurs
think it essential in the celebrate Airs of an Italian Operal.
The same must have been even more true of such a woman as
* Mrs Barry. Lee, Crowne and a host of others were perfectly
capable of writing plays, with a French polish, to suit these new
conditions ; but they are unreadable to-day. The crowd of
lesser restoration dramatists perfectly understood what would
be effective on the stage, and for the rest they relied on in-
credible bombast and threadbare stage devices. It has been seen
how, notwithstanding all the changes which had taken place in
the literary and social conditions of the times, and in those of
the performance of plays, the theatres were reopened in 1660
with favourite old plays; but now, side by side with the surviving
traditions, new influences were at work? . Among these influences,
the operatic element, which owed its first introduction. to
D'Avenant, became specially powerful in tragedy, and helped
to bring about its degradation. Another important factor in the
development of tragedy, viz. the influence, direct and indirect,
of French romance and drama, produced its first important
result in the heroic play, which has been discussed in treating of
the works of its chief representative and unapproached master,
Dryden.
The heroic play was not, however, an entirely new growth.
For the most part, it was French, but the influence of the Eliza-
bethan dramatists may also be traced in it; and though, at first
1 An Apology for his Life, ed. Lowe, R. W. , 1889, vol. 1, 106.
2 Cf. ante, chap. v, pp. 121 sq. , 127 eqq. , 132 sqq.
3 Cf, note, chap. I, pp. 20 sqq.
>
12_2
## p. 180 (#202) ############################################
180
The Restoration Drama
sight, it may appear to represent a departure from previous
methods and ideals, and to be a distinct breaking-away from the
established traditions of tragedy in England, yet a more careful
examination shows that, in the main, it was the natural successor of
the late Elizabethan drama, modified according to prevailing tastes,
and confined within the pseudo-classical limits which were the
order of the day. Under these conditions, it is not surprising that
the heroic play did not take deep root in English soil. By 1680,
tragedies in verse were going out of fashion, and the English tragic
manner, as opposed to the French, began to re-assert itself in the
work of contemporary dramatists.
The works of the great French dramatists had, also, a consider-
able direct influence on English tragedy during the restoration
period; and this is particularly true of Pierre Corneille. A version
of the Cid by Joseph Rutter had been acted before 1637 'before
their Majesties at Court and on the Cockpitt Stage in Drury Lane'
-it is said under the special patronage of queen Henrietta Maria.
This, the first translation of Corneille into English, was fol-
lowed, in 1655 and 1656, by two very poor blank-verse versions of
Polyeucte and Horace respectively, executed by Sir William Lower.
Neither piece seems to have been acted. The masterpieces of
French drama were, therefore, not unfamiliar in translation, and,
shortly after the restoration, Corneille found a worthy translator
in the person of Mrs Katherine Philips--the Matchless Orinda. '
Her version of Pompée, in rimed verse, was produced in Dublin early
in 1663 with great éclat, and increased her already high reputation.
It was also successfully produced in London, and published there,
in the same year. In 1664, another version of Pompée ' by certain
Persons of Honour Waller and lord Buckhurst were the moving
spirits-was successfully produced ; and, in the same year, Hera-
clius was reproduced by Lodowiek Carlell. This last met with great
success, though it does not attain the respectable level of others in
the same batch of translations. Mrs Philips, meanwhile, encouraged
by the success of Pompey, began to translate Horace; but she died
before completing more than the first four acts. Her version,
completed by Sir John Denham, was published in 1669 together
with her other works; but, in later issues, a conclusion by Charles
Cotton was printed. Charles Cotton had himself printed a trans-
lation of the whole play in 1671; his version, however, was never
acted. In the same year, 1671, John Dancer's translation of
Nicomède was acted at the Theatre Royal in Dublin. While
Corneille thus became known and appreciated in England, his
## p. 181 (#203) ############################################
French Influence on English Tragedy 181
contemporary Racine had to wait for anything like general
acceptation until the next century, though signs are not wanting
that he was being studied in England during the last quarter of
the seventeenth century. The industrious Crowne put forth, in
1675, an utterly inadequate version of Andromaque, which did
not meet with any favour, no hint being given of the extra-
ordinary coming success of Ambrose Philips's adaptation of
the same piece in 1712. Otway's Titus and Berenice, though a
careful and scholarly version, and abounding in the pathetic
touch which was his secret, met with but moderate success on the
stage? The same was the case with two other versions of plays
by Racine--Achilles, or Iphigenia in Aulis by Abel Boyer
(1700); and Phaedra and Hippolitus (1706) by Edmund Smith
(who, a few years later, supplied Rowe with material for his Lady
Jane Gray), when the tragedy was first produced. Public taste,
no doubt, was being educated, for, in 1712, The Distrest Mother,
Ambrose Philips's skilful adaptation of Andromaque, met with
immediate and lasting popularity, and Smith's Phaedra and
Hippolitus was revived many times, with marked success, from
1723 onwards.
On the whole, French influence on English tragedy, at this
time, has been exaggerated; such as it was, it affected rather
the outward form than the inward spirit. Much was written to
prove that the French mode, which was a reversion to classic
rules, was the right mode, and most of the earlier plays of the
period bear marks of the influence of these discussions. But, for
the last quarter of the century, the drama in the hands of Otway,
Southerne and Rowe was essentially a descendant of earlier
English work. The result of the controversy is admirably summed
up by Thorndike : "The laws of the pseudo-classicists,' he says,
'were held to be measureably good, but Shakespeare without those
laws had been undeniably great? ? ?
After Dryden, the foremost place among the dramatists of the
restoration age is, undoubtedly, held by Thomas Otway. Born
in 1652, at Trotton in Sussex, he was educated at Winchester and
Christ Church, Oxford, but he left the university without taking
a degree. After an unsuccessful appearance in Mrs Aphra Behn's
Forc'd Marriage (1671), he devoted himself to writing for the
stage. His first play, Alcibiades, a tragedy in rimed verse, was
1 And this was probably due to his having tacked on to it Molière's Fourberies de
Scapin.
Thorndike, A. H. , Tragedy, p. 249.
## p. 182 (#204) ############################################
182
The Restoration Drama
acted in 1675 at the new theatre in Dorset garden by the duke
of York's company, including the Bettertons and Mrs Barry. It
is a dreary and stilted piece, and, though the heroic play was then
at the height of its vogue, Alcibiades met with but little success. In
his next play, Don Carlos (1676), Otway was more happy. Though
still hampered by bombast and rimed verse, the scenes are handled
with some vigour, and the play seems to have been effective on the
stage, and very popular. It ran for ten nights and was frequently
revived. The plot is taken from the Abbé de Saint-Réal's his-
torical romance of Don Carlos (1673), of which a translation into
English had appeared in 1674. The same source, at a later period,
supplied Schiller with the plot of a tragedy bearing the same title
as Otway's; but, though the English poet was not unknown in
Germany, there is no evidence to show that Schiller made use of
his work. The part of Philip II was played by Betterton, who pro-
duced all Otway's subsequent plays—a remarkable proof of their
attractiveness from an actor's point of view.
Two capable versions of French plays followed (1677)_Titus
and Berenice from Racine's Bérénice and The Cheats of Scapin
from Molière's Fourberies de Scapin. The latter held the stage
for more than a hundred years.
While Otway was away in Holland on military service, his first
comedy, Friendship in Fashion, was produced (1678). His genius,
however, most assuredly did not lie in the direction of comedy. On
his return to London, Otway produced (1680) The History and Fall
of Caius Marius', half of which tragedy, as he frankly admits in
the prologue, is taken bodily from Romeo and Juliet. In the
same year (1680) appeared The Orphan, a tragedy in blank verse,
and the earlier of the two plays upon which Otway's reputation
rests. The plot is supposed to have been suggested by Robert
Tailor's comedy The Hogge hath lost his Pearle (1614), which it
resembles, or, more probably, by a work entitled English Ad-
ventures. By a Person of Honour (attributed to Roger Boyle,
earl of Orrery), published in 1676, which narrates the escapades of
Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk With this play, Otway stepped
out of the rank and file of restoration dramatists into his own
particular place among great English tragedians. He abandoned
the artificial emotions of heroic personages in favour of the joys
and sorrows of ordinary human life. The Orphan is, for the
1
1 It is probable that this tragedy was produced before The Orphan, for it ocours in
the Term Catalogue (ed. Arber, 1903) for Michaelmas term 1679, while The Orphan
occurs ibid. , for Easter term 1680, six months later.
1
## p. 183 (#205) ############################################
Thomas Otway
183
period, a singularly domestic play. Two brothers, Castalio and
Polydore, are in love with Monimia, their father's ward. Castalio
secretly contracts himself to her in marriage; but Polydore, over-
hearing their plans for meeting, and unaware of the nature of
the tie which unites them, contrives to supplant his brother on
the wedding night. Castalio, seeking admittance to the bridal
chamber, is supposed to be Polydore and rudely repulsed; and
he spends the night cursing all womankind. With the morrow
come explanations, and the misery of the situation becomes clear.
Whether the plot makes too large demands on the reader's credulity,
or whether it shocks his sense of decorum, the pathetic irony of the
situation in which the characters find themselves is indisputably
brought home with great tragic force.
A comedy called The Souldier's Fortune followed (1681), in
which the poet drew upon his military experiences. Langbaine
discovered in this piece numerous borrowings-notably from
Boccaccio and Scarron; but the episodes are so common to plays
of intrigue that it is difficult to say whence Otway derived them.
There is, however, more than a suggestion of Molière's L'École
des Maris.
Otway's next play, Venice Preserv'd, or a Plot Discover'd, a
tragedy in blank verse, was first acted in February 1682. The story
of this tragedy is taken from an anecdotal history entitled La
Conjuration des Espagnols contre la république de Venise en 1618,
published in 1674 by the Abbé de Saint-Réal. An English trans-
lation had appeared in 1675. The finest character in the play,
Belvidera, is, however, purely the creation of the poet's genius;
and the scenes between her and Jaffier, the weak, but at heart
noble, conspirator who is persuaded by his wife to reveal the plot
to the senate, are beyond praise. Jaffier, torn between his
passionate affection for Belvidera and his almost equal devotion
to his friends and their cause, presents a signally true picture
of the human soul seeking vainly to reconcile contending ideals.
His remorse and shame under the stinging reproaches of his dear
friend and fellow-conspirator Pierre, his inability to free himself
from the clinging love and fascination with which Belvidera has
enmeshed him, his agony of grief on the senate's breach of its
promise to spare the lives of all the conspirators as the reward
of his treachery-all these successive phases through which his
sensitive, but weak and vacillating, spirit has to pass are depicted
with consummate skill and true tragic power.
1 This may have been acted earlier, on Otway's return from Holland.
## p. 184 (#206) ############################################
184 The Restoration Drama
Otway's political leaning reveals itself in the secondary title,
with its obvious reference to the popish plot, and; still more
clearly, in the prologue and epilogue; and the play is further dis-
figured by some scandalous 'comic' scenes, written to ridicule
Anthony, earl of Shaftesbury, in the character of Antonio, a
lascivious old senator.
In Venice Preserv'd and, to a less extent, in The Orphan,
Otway produced plays which, for intensity of feeling and for the
display of elemental emotions, are worthy to rank with the
later masterpieces of the Elizabethan age, and with some of
Fletcher's plays in particular. The language of their finest
passages is of a notable simplicity, admirably conveying the
poet's conception of his characters. Unfortunately, passages
of noble poetry are, at times, intermixed with lines of
almost ludicrous ineptitude. More pathetic and convincing
pictures of women overwhelmed by grief, confusion and hopeless-
ness cannot be imagined than those drawn by Otway in his
Monimia--' the trembling, tender, kind, deceived Monimia'-and
the still finer Belvidera-a masterpiece of insight into the human
heart. Both characters were originally performed by Mrs Barry, the
celebrated actress who appeared in Otway's first play, Alcibiades,
and for whom the poet had conceived a hopeless passion. Some
of his letters to her have been preserved, and prove how deeply
he had fallen under her influence. His unrequited passion for
this fascinating woman had a manifest share in the uplifting of
his genius from the dusty commonplaces of lesser restoration
drama to the heights of characterisation and expression which
he reached in his two great tragedies.
The Orphan and Venice Preserv'd were extremely popular,
and were played with some frequency down to the middle of the
nineteenth century. Both plays are full of opportunities for
effective acting, and the principal characters in them continued
to be among the greatest triumphs, not only, when first produced,
of the Bettertons and Mrs Barry, but, also, of their most dis-
tinguished successors. Mrs Siddons and Miss O'Neill were famous
Belvideras and Monimias; Pierre was one of John Kemble's most
signal successes; and Garrick many times played Pierre, Jaffier
and Chamont'.
The Atheist, or The Second Part of The Souldier's Fortune
1 Venice Preserv'd was revived at Sadler's Wells, in 1845, with Phelps as Jaffier and
Mrs Warner as Belvidera, and, as recently as 1904, the play was acted in London by
the Otway Society.
## p. 185 (#207) ############################################
Nathaniel Lee
185
completes the list of Otway's plays. It was produced in 1684
and is as unsatisfactory as his previous efforts in comedy. In
addition to the plays mentioned above, Otway wrote some poems
and translations of no great importance. The most ambitious of
the poems are The Poet's Complaint of his Muse (1680), which
is full of curious autobiographical touches ; and Windsor Castle,
published posthumously in 1685, a panegyric on Charles II. He
also wrote, according to the fashion of the day, a few prologues
and epilogues for his fellow-dramatists. He died, in 1685, in the
utmost want and misery-one account says of actual starvation.
Though Otway failed as an actor, he possessed a strong sense
of dramatic possibilities; and it is the combination of this sense
with an original and individual genius, that will preserve his two
chief efforts from oblivion?
1
Nathaniel Lee, son of a clergyman, was born about 1653, and
educated at Westminster and Trinity college, Cambridge, where
he graduated B. A. in 1668. His early experiences bear a strong
resemblance to those of Otway. Like him, Lee began his life in
London in reliance upon some of the fitful patrons of letters in
whom the age abounded, and, also like Otway, he, in the same
year at the same theatre, failed utterly as an actor. The first
plays—and there is not much to choose between them-of the two
dramatists alike appeared in 1675. Between that date and 1681,
Lee produced in rapid succession eight tragedies and a tragi-
comedy, all with quasi-historical settings His first play, Nero,
Emperour of Rome (1675) was succeeded, in 1676, by Sophonista,
or Hannibals Overthrow; which seems to have been inspired by
Orrery's Parthenissa. To 1676, also, belongs Gloriana, or The
Court of Augustus Caesar. These three are heroic plays, for the
most part in rimed verse, and thoroughly typical of the period.
In 1677, Lee, following Dryden's lead, produced the blank verse
play entitled The Rival Queens, or The Death of Alexander the
Great, which proved an immediate and lasting success. It is
founded on Cassandre, a romance by La Calprenède, upon whose
Cléopâtre Lee had already drawn for some of the incidents in his
Gloriana. There followed, in 1678, Mithridates, King of Pontus,
1 For Hazlitt's criticism of these two plays see his Lectures on the Dramatic
Literature of the Age of Elizabeth, L. VII (Collected Works, edd. Waller, A. R. and
Glover, A. , vol. v, pp. 3545). In his first lecture (ib. p. 181) Hazlitt declares that
'with the exception of a single writer, Otway, and of a single play of his (Venice
Preserv'd) there is nobody in tragedy and dramatic poetry . . . to be compared to the
great men of the age of Shakespear and immediately after. '
## p. 186 (#208) ############################################
186
The Restoration Drama
another blank verse play; and, in 1679, Dryden and Lee co-
operated in the composition of Edipus, King of Thebes.
Theodosius, or the Force of Love, one of Lee's most successful
plays, was produced in 1680, and was acted very frequently
throughout the eighteenth century. Caesar Borgia, Son of Pope
Alexander the Sixth (1680), Lucius Junius Brutus, Father of
His Country (1681), and The Princess of Cleve, acted in 1681, but
not printed until 1689, are all more or less reminiscent of French
romances of the Scudéry type. (La Princesse de Clèves, by the
countess de La Fayette, was a late masterpiece of this school of
fiction. ) In 1682 Dryden and Lee again joined hands in The Duke
of Guise. Most of this play was Lee's work, and was drawn from a
piece called The Massacre of Paris, which, though written some
years previously, had not then been produced. In 1684 appeared
Constantine the Great, his last play, if we except the aforesaid
Massacre of Paris (1690). Lee went out of his mind in 1684
and was confined to Bedlam until 1689, when he was released.
He had been given to drink all his life; and, in 1692, an excess of
this kind brought about his death.
Lee's plays are not without a certain imposing picturesqueness
and broad effectiveness ; but he entirely lacked the sense of
measure and proportion, with that of humour. Neither delicacy
of perception, nor the power of characterisation-in short, none
of the finer qualities of the dramatist
are to be found in him.
His personages talk at the top of their voices on all occasions-
happy or the reverse—while rant and confusion, blood and dust,
ghosts and portents and hysterics, effectually conceal from all but
the most persevering student the occasional nobler features of
Lee's imagination. It is hardly fair, perhaps, to judge his plays
by reading them in cold blood. They were intended for acting;
and, as acting plays, they have abundantly justified themselves.
- The Rival Queens and Theodosius supplied favourite parts to
many of the most gifted tragic actors not only of their own day,
but, also, in the next century. Alexander, in The Rival Queens,
was one of Betterton's most popular róles, and he played leading
parts in all Lee's later productions ; while Hart and Mohun ac-
quired fame in his earlier pieces. At a later date, Charles Kemble
а
and Mrs Powell and Edmund Keen and Mrs Glover revived The
Rival Queens with marked success. And it is easy to understand
how thrilling, in their hands, must have been the scenes
of white-hot elemental passion in which Lee abounds. He was
consistently a candidate for immediate popular favour. He gave
## p. 187 (#209) ############################################
Nathaniel Lee. John Crowne 187
1
the court what it liked-heroic plays on French lines, with a strong
appeal to the senses, and characters capable of being played with
immense effect and abandon by gifted actors and actresses. It
may be accounted a significant, though hardly a surprising, fact
that, at a time when almost everything-good, bad and indifferent
-has been reprinted, no publisher has been found courageous
enough to undertake an edition of Lee. No analysis of his extra-
vagance can give so distinct an impression of it as an example, and
the following description in Lricius Junius Brutus, of a young
boy's grief, is typical of many similar absurdities scattered up and
down his plays:
His pretty eyes, ruddy and wet with tears,
Like two burst Cherries rolling in storml.
On the other hand, the lines frequently quoted :
Thou coward! yet
Art living? Canst not, wilt not, find the road
To the great palace of magnificent Death,
Though thousand ways lead to his thousand doors
Which day and night are still unbarred for all2 ?
may be taken as an instance of Lee at his best. Now and again,
a stray verse or metaphor reminds us of the Elizabethan heights
from which the restoration dramatists had fallen so far. But these
beauties are few and far between, and it must be frankly confessed
that, to-day, Lee is almost unreadable.
The birthday and parentage of John Crowne, one of the most
prolific of the crowd of restoration dramatists, are alike unknown.
From recent researches it appears probable that he was the son of
William Crowne, who emigrated to Nova Scotia, and that he was born
about 1640. He was certainly in London in 1665, for his first work
appeared in that year, the romance entitled Pandion and Amphi-
genia. In 1671 was acted and published his tragicomedy Juliana,
or the Princess of Poland-the first of a long series of dull and half-
forgotten tragedies. It was succeeded by The History of Charles
the Eighth of France (1672), in rimed couplets, and Andromache
(1675), in prose. The last seems to have been a mere adaptation
of a translation, chiefly in verse, by another hand, of Racine's
Andromaque. In 1675 also appeared the masque Calisto, or the
Chast Nymph, acted at court by members of the royal family and
household. It is without charm, and owes whatever interest it
1 Act v, sc. 2.
Oedipus, act v, 80. 1.
## p. 188 (#210) ############################################
188
The Restoration Drama
may retain to the personalities of the performers, and to the fact
that, on the occasion for which it was written, Dryden, the poet
laureate, was passed over in favour of Crowne through the interest
of Rochester.
Crowne's first comedy, The Country Wit, was acted in 1675.
It is founded on Molière’s Le Sicilien, ou l'Amour Peintre (1667),
and, in Sir Mannerly Shallow, contains a sort of first sketch of the
type--that of the pompous gull-which Crowne afterwards de-
veloped with marked success into the Podestà (in City Politiques),
Sir Courtly Nice (in the play of that name), and Lord Stately (in
The English Frier).
Then followed three tragedies of absolute dulness, The De-
struction of Jerusalem (1677); The Ambitious Statesman (1679),
of which the theme and sources are alike French; and Thyestes,
taken from Seneca (1681). The concentrated horror of the last-
mentioned piece has led to its receiving more notice from Crowne's
critics than his other tragic productions? ; but there is not any
nobility in his treatment of the awful story. Shortly before the
appearance of this tragedy, Crowne, in 1680, produced a hash of
Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part II, which he called The Misery
of Civil-War, and followed this, in 1681, with Henry the Sixth,
the First Part. With the Murder of Humphrey, Duke of
Glocester.
His best comedies came next: City Politiques (1683), and
Sir Courtly Nice, or It cannot be (1685). The date of the former
of these pieces, long a subject of debate, is now established. In
its elaborate and very amusing satire on the whigs, despite
Crowne's perfunctory professions to the contrary, the originals
from which some of the portraits were drawn may be detected
without difficulty. Titus Oates masquerades as Dr Panchy, and
Stephen Colledge is introduced in the guise of a bricklayer; while
frequent hits are made at Shaftesbury in the person of the Podestà
of the very un-Neapolitan ‘Naples' where the action is supposed
to take place.
1 Lamb thought it worth while to include scenes from this as well as from other
plays by Crowne in his Extracts from the Garrick plays.
Biographia Dramatica gives the date of production as 1675; while several other
authorities, including Genest, state that did not appear until 1688. The earlier
of these dates is, from internal evidence, impossible; for Dryden's Medal, published in
1682, is referred to by name, and the play is full of satire about plots and counterplots,
burning the city and letting in the French. It seems probable that this comedy was
confused with The Country Wit, which actually appeared in 1675; in any case, the
publication of the Term Catalogues establishes beyond further question the fact that
City Politiques was first published in 1683. It was re-issued in 1688.
## p. 189 (#211) ############################################
John Crowne
189
Sir Courtly Nice is by far the best of Crowne's plays, and has
in it something of the true spirit of comedy which, in this age,
reached its height in the group of comic dramatists headed
by Congreve? It is founded on Moreto's play No puede ser
guardar una mujer (No holding a Woman), which is itself an
imitation of Lope de Vega's Mayor Imposibile (The greatest of
impossibilities). An English version of Moreto’s comedy, by Sir
Thomas St Serfe, had been produced without success in 1668,
under the title Tarugo's Wiles, or the Coffee-House ; but Crowne
does not seem to have been aware of its existence. In any case,
the principal characters in Crowne's play are new. Sir Courtly
himself, with Hothead and Testimony-an admirably contrasted
pair, representing, in a most diverting manner, the extreme factions
of the age and Surly are all due to Crowne's invention!
The tragedies of Darius (1688), Regulus (1692) and Caligula
(1698) call for no more than a passing mention. Crowne's last two
comedies are, however, more interesting. The English Frier
(1690) is a mordant satire on the personal lives and characters of
the Catholic priests who had been high in favour at the court
of James II. Father Petre has been suggested as the original of
Father Finical; and the satire is certainly on much the same
lines as that of several scandalous narratives of the Martin's 'life.
The piece owes much to Molière’s Tartuffe (printed 1669), well
known in England by this time.
The story of The Curious Impertinent in Don Quixote, which
had been used ten years previously by Southerne in The Dis-
appointment, or the Mother in Fashion, furnished Crowne with
a central idea for his last comedy The Married Beau (1694). It
is less witty and coarser than his other comedies. Crowne seems
to have been alive in 1701.
Lee has been called an inferior Otway, and Crowne, so far as
1 See, ante chap. VI.
; Hothead is charged with not often attending church- What then, I'm for the
church. ' Timothy wants to know whether we can't be saved unless we go to Oxford.
Sir Courtly, though he has bestowed 'some garniture on plays, as a song or a prologue,'
holds to the principle that . Men of quality are above wit. ' The play is full of allusions
to the politics of the day, and an entirely new verb to Godfrey' is introduced, in obvious
allusion to the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in 1678. Mountfort was un-
equalled in the part of Sir Courtly Nice, which he performed at its original production
at the Theatre Royal, though Colley Cibber made a great success of the part in the
eighteenth century, when it was frequently revived.
3 Cf. ante, chap. I, p. 48.
* According to Downes’s Roscius Anglicanus (facsimile reprint, 1886, p. 45) Crowne
produced a further comedy, Justice Busy; but it ‘prov'd not a living play' and was
never printed.
## p. 190 (#212) ############################################
190 The Restoration Drama
his tragedies are concerned, might be called a second-rate Lee.
His plays have all Lee's turgidity, with none of that author's
redeeming though crazy picturesqueness. They preserve a dead
level of mediocrity, and it seems almost incredible that such a
piece as The Destruction of Jerusalem could ever have gained
the marked success which it undoubtedly secured. Nothing but
mounting elaborate enough to impress an uncritical audience
could have saved such plays as these from immediate and final
damnation. Such originality and talent as Crowne possessed
found vent in his comedies; and it may be pointed out that,
of all the tragic dramatists of the time who wrote comedies, he
alone produced any that have a claim to be remembered. His
Sir Courtly Nice is a genuinely comic and living personage, and,
though he has found numerous imitators, the creation of the type
belongs to Crowne.
Thomas Southerne (or Southern, as his name is spelt in the first
editions of all his plays), was of Irish parentage; but he spent his
life in London, where his career was in striking contrast to those
of most contemporary dramatists, as to both its length and its
conduct. He produced two highly successful plays exactly calcu-
lated to hit the public taste, and by no means without intrinsic
merit. Southerne seems to bave possessed considerable personal
charm and was a valued friend of several of the most distinguished
men of his day. He enjoyed the intimate friendship of Dryden,
who wrote prologues and epilogues for several of his plays and
who, in 1692, entrusted him with the task of completing the last
act of his Cleomenes and revising the whole. Printed at the
end of his Works (1774) is a delightful letter addressed to him by
Lord Orrery, dated 1733, beginning 'My dear Old Man,' which
breathes throughout a spirit of the warmest friendship and regard.
Southerne's dedications sufficiently show that these were no
isolated instances. Not only was his literary work successful in
obtaining for him admiration and regard, but he also reaped from
it substantial pecuniary profit?
In his first play, The Loyal Brother (1682), Southerne discloses
strong tory sympathies, and the character of Ismael is supposed
to convey the inevitable attack on Shaftesbury. The play is
taken from a novel called Tachmas, Prince of Persia, translated
from the French by P. Porter in 1676.
1 For the copyright of The Spartan Dame (by no means his best play), Chetwood
the bookseller paid one hundred and twenty pounds, and Southerne is stated to have
made altogether five hundred pounds profit out of this rather commonplace production.
## p. 191 (#213) ############################################
Thomas Southerne
191
This was followed by four comedies, for the most part in
prose. The Disappointment, or the Mother in Fashion (1684) is
(once more) founded on the story of The Curious Impertinent in
Don Quixote. Sir Anthony Love, or The Rambling Lady (1691)
was 'acted with extraordinary applause,' the part of Sir Anthony
being ‘most masterly played' by Mrs Mountfort. The Wives
Excuse, or Cuckolds make themselves (1692) was not so successful,
and seems to have given offence in some quarters by its too
faithful delineation of polite life. The Maids Last Prayer, or
Any, rather than Fail (1693) is chiefly notable as containing a
song said to have been the earliest acknowledged piece of Con-
greve's writing. However, Southerne's strength; did not lie in
comedy, though his comic productions are, in general, considerably
less gross, and decidedly more witty, than those of most of his
contemporaries; and it was not until 1694 that, in The Fatal
Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery, he achieved a play worthy
of his talent. This popular drama was founded on Mrs Aphra
Behn's novel The Nun, or The Perjur'd Beauty. Its success
was immediatel. The Fatal Marriage was frequently acted
during the eighteenth century, Garrick, in particular, reviving it,
in an abridged version, in 17572
In 1696 appeared Southerne's other great success, Oroonoko, or
the Royal Slave, like its predecessor a mixture of blank verse and
prose. Mrs Behn again supplied the plot in her novel of the same
name, and the piece, as adapted by Hawkesworth, had an even
- longer life than The Fatal Marriage. It is not, however, intrin-
sically so effective; though the novelty of its story and setting
(a slave plantation in the West Indies), and the acting of Ver-
bruggen, as the noble-minded, if somewhat tedious, negro, the hero
of the piece, gave it a high place in public favour.
In none of his last three plays did Southerne reach so high a
level. The Fate of Capua (1700) was a failure; nor can The
Spartan Dame (1719), founded on Plutarch’s Life of Agis, in
spite of its stage success, be pronounced a good play. Money the
Mistress (1726), Southerne's last production, was quite unsuccessful;
its plot is taken from the countess D’Aulnoy's Travels into Spain.
When at his best, Southerne reminds us of Otway in his power of
1 Mrs Barry played Isabella, which remained one of her most telling parts.
Betterton played Villeroy, Isabella's seoond husband.
: On this occasion, Mrs Cibber played Isabella to Garrick's Biron. Later, Mrs
Siddons played the same part with immense effeot, and it remained her most popular
part outside Shakespeare.
## p.
