In and Out of the Bed-chamber: Staging Libertine Desire in Restoration Comedy

Abstract

Considering frequency with which libertines appear onstage in comedies written in four decades following Restoration of Charles II to throne of England in 1660, it may be reasonable to assume that beds would appear as primary pieces of furniture associated with these plays' sexually voracious protagonists. In fact, beds and bed-chambers appear onstage relatively infrequently during this period; it is far more common to set a scene in a house, lodging, garden, park, tavern, coffeehouse, or dressing room than in a bed-chamber.1 This essay argues that one reason for this infrequency is that bed-chambers in Restoration comedies signify differently from other scenic locations listed above. Peter Holland notes that the peculiarities of staging comedy on Restoration stage allowed audience to 'read' scenery, just absorb it. He therefore proposes that scholars could read scenery, sets, and stage directions as part of a larger series of signs, a system that helps comprehension of structure of whole play text (19). Rather than attempting an analysis of bed-chambers in all Restoration drama, my focus in this essay is very particular: examination of bed and its adjacent locales as sites in which Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley stage their rejection of same baroque aestheticism that scholars now commonly associate with Restoration libertinism.I explore what happens when these playwrights, known for their libertine activities in and around court of Charles II, write a comedy and then stage a scene in bed-chamber. Because these playwrights enjoyed cultural capital as libertines, their use of bed-chambers in these plays has a different resonance than those featured by their contemporaries, particularly Aphra Behn. A number of activities do indeed occur in beds and bed-chambers of these playwrights' libertine characters, but these activities only infrequently involve sex. Whereas it must be conceded that period's notions of decency and taste would prevent explicit depictions of sex onstage in any case, I maintain that libertine playwrights use signification of bed-chamber to explore these scenes as potentially problematic sites filled with dramatic tension, anxiety, and even pain for men and women. On one hand, bed-chambers are locations in which libertine desires may compete with one another: libertine often must choose between his sexual desire for women and his social bonding with men. On other hand, libertine playwrights' bed-chamber scenes suggest that bed-chamber can easily signify as male violence against women, male violence against other men, and even female violence against men.In The Baroque in English Neoclassical Literature, J. Douglas Canfield analyzes baroque-which he defines as art that stresses disorder, excrescence, exuberance, irrational, cryptic (15)-in Restoration literature. For most scholars, Canfield writes, the early seventeenth century is traditionally considered heyday of baroque, its vertiginous apex but this aesthetic mode eventually yields to neoclassic in both England and France as that century progresses (15). He maintains, however, that baroque elements such as extravagant display, the monstrous, the grotesque, the macabre, the morbid, and the outrageous persisted into late-seventeenthcentury English literature not in some weak residue but in some of later, neoclassical literature's most arresting moments (15). In this vein, Canfield suggests that it is fruitful to think of baroque as style suited to centralizing and of late feudal aristocracy, with its attendant, heterodox libertinism, burning brightest and most extravagantly as it is about to expire (16).Although Canfield sees baroque as something bold, exciting, [and] delicious (17), self-glorifying impulses of aristocratic libertine sexual desire have generally led scholars to associate late baroque with libertinism's potential gender and class violence against women. …