Dialogue and Duelling in Restoration Comedy

Abstract

A LTHOUGH not every duel was fatal, the life-or-death consequences of many actual duels that took place in England during the long eighteenth century may be difficult for twenty-firstcentury readers to imagine. Restoration and early eighteenth-century comedies make this imagining no easier, for their lighthearted treatment of duelling portrays the often deadly activity as just one of the many hazards and amusements that constitute fashionable life. This lighthearted treatment in comedy veils the seriousness of the cultural debate surrounding the practice of duelling throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some English saw duelling as a civilizing practice because it provided gentlemen with a remedy for addressing impolite acts, figured as offenses against honor. For others, duelling was a threat to civilized society because it taught gentlemen to assert their own authority rather than encouraging them to turn to established authorities, like the king and the law. In a recent study, Markku Peltonen traces these views through the conduct books of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.' As British society became increasingly concerned with politeness, duelling became both more prevalent and an increasingly controversial issue. Peltonen situates duelling at the center of the debate about civility that Anna Bryson traces in her study, From Courtesy to Civility.2 The representations of duelling in the plays I examine here, dating from 1664 to 1707, support the assertion that duelling became a central site of England's struggle