Dulling the Rake with Charm: The Politics of Mid-Century Comedy in The Suspicious Husband

Abstract

Abstract: David Garrick's most frequently performed role was that of Ranger in Benjamin Hoadly's The Suspicious Husband (1747). Once in exceptional demand on the stage and in print, this play is now an obscure curiosity, seldom read, even less often performed. This essay sets out to revitalize attention to The Suspicious Husband by pursuing two interrelated arguments. First, that Hoadly's play is a sophisticated comedy that not only entertains, but also offers crucial information about the theatrical politics of its time. Second, that Ranger embodies a midpoint between audacity and moral rectitude that helps illuminate the mid-eighteenth century as an important moment of transition in the history of taste and morals. Presented as a failed libertine in training, whose exploits amount to mere boasting, but who does not reform in the end, Ranger can be seen as a figure who took in the best-liked qualities of the stage rake and then transformed them into a defanged variant of the type. Moreover, although The Suspicious Husband has been characterized as "apolitical," I argue that Ranger is actually offering a quiet, yet potent political statement. In presenting the rake as a charming, but ultimately powerless character, the play belittled the Jacobite threat that had been neutralized less than a year earlier. The Suspicious Husband thus exemplifies how mid-century drama engaged in politics without seeming to do so by resorting to the same ambivalent joviality with which it tackled romance and sex.