Cibber and Vanbrugh: Language, Place, and Social Order in Loves Last Shift

Abstract

1 COMPAKATIVE •rama Volume 20Winter 1986-87Number 4 Cibber and Vanbrugh: Language, Place, and Social Order in Loves Last Shift Derek Hughes "Wheresoever, manners, and fashions are corrupted," wrote Ben Jonson, "Language is. It imitates the publicke riot."l The belief that men's language is a reflex of their moral and social conduct has a long and very varied history, and has been sanctioned by radically different views of the nature and origin of language (and indeed of society). It may (as in Jonson's case) proceed from the belief that human speech is an image of the archetypal language of heaven, having been created by God in order to further a divinely ordained moral order, or it may be quite independent of that belief. To list some well known seventeenth-century examples, the dangers of semantic corruption were urged, in support of profoundly different causes, by Milton, Hobbes, Robert South and Samuel Parker, and John Locke: for Milton, language originated as a divinely instituted system of natural signs; for Parker and Locke it originated in arbitrary social compact, though both (in very differing ways) believed in a naturally validated moral law; South shifted between the two views of language; and Hobbes regarded not only DEREK. HUGHES is a Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Dryden's Heroic Plays and of many articles on Restoration drama. 287 288Comparative Drama language but (to a large extent) morality as an arbitrary construct, and denied that human speech had any capacity to reflect the divine nature.2 The difference, of course, is that belief in the divine origins of human speech and morality necessitates belief in moral function of language, whereas belief in their purely conventional nature may lead to denial of the power of language to represent and assert binding values; in dismissing moral categories as mere "names" created by convention, the libertines treated language merely as an intangible flatus vocis. I have argued elsewhere that Hobbes' linguistics in part influenced a brief period of extreme linguistic scepticism in Carolean drama, when several leading dramatists denied or greatly limited the capacity of language to correlate individual thought and sensation with any larger, analogical, social, and cosmic orders.3 The period of extreme scepticism was quickly over. Dryden returned to a more traditional view of language in Troilus and Cressida (1679), and of course the conclusion of Absalom and Achitophel (1681) provided one of the period's greatest affirmations of language as an instrument of social and divine order: Thus from his Royal Throne by Heav'n inspir'd, The God-like David spoke: with awfull fear His Train their Maker in their Master hear.4 But, although language quickly recovered its status as an agreed index of social and moral health, writers were more ready than in Jonson's time to see linguistic order as a matter of secular convention^ and I propose in this and a succeeding article6 to examine one area of a large, complex, but by no means complete shift of intellectual emphasis by discussing the contrasting ways in which two obviously linked plays of the 1690's interpret the symbolic and moral capacities of language. Divergences of linguistic theory are, of course, quite apparent in pre-Restoration drama. A radically secular view of language dominates Tamburlaine, in which the protagonist's "working words"7 impose a system of signs and values that is validated only by his will and power. Troilus and Cressida abounds in deceptive signs, such as the "Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart" of Cressida's letter,8 and the signs are arguably deceptive not because they have been perverted but because they are intrinsically arbitrary and discrepant from their objects.9 Nevertheless, the predominant tendency in Shakespeare , and in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama generally, is Derek Hughes289 to treat the corruption of language as the corruption of signs of intrinsic moral function, and belief in the intrinsic moral function of language is frequently allied to belief in its divine origin: language fulfils its natural end only insofar as it preserves the purposes of its creator and furthers the...