The Divided Plot: Tragicomic Form in the Restoration

Abstract

The unique divided tragicomedy of the early Restoration is a singularly problematic drama-an apparently chaotic, contradictory form in which irreconcilable dramatic types share the same stage. Works like Etherege's The Comical Revenge (1664), James Howard's All Mistaken (1667?),1 Charles Sedley's The Mulberry-Garden (1668), or Dryden's Secret Love (1667) and Marriage A-la-Mode (1671)2 characteristically juxtapose two plots of equivalent importance, one serious and one comic. These plays lack the unity of tone that gives Fletcherian tragicomedy its dramatic coherence, and they avoid the clear subordination of one effect to another that shapes much of the mingled tragicomedy or the multiple plot drama of the Renaissance.3 The thematic resonances that supply a nominal connection between the disparate halves of the divided plots serve only to accentuate their disjunction. In fact, sustained disjunction is a primary end of this drama, and the best divided plays are those which seem to strive for formal collision. This studied contradiction-in tone, in thematic material, in characterization, and in convention-is commonly attributed to the schizophrenic nature of the period. Recent critics of the drama have described the divided tragicomedy as a yoking of the irreconcilable major dramatic forms of the Restoration: the Platonic, idealistic heroic play and the anti-romantic, pragmatic comedy of manners.4 This thesis is weakened by the chronological facts of dramatic evolution: the divided tragicomedy precedes by almost a decade the full development of the major manners comedy.5 Furthermore, such an account subsumes the special problems of the divided play beneath a larger assumption about the major drama of the period whose validity is at best unproven. This view, then, while it may stimulate speculation upon the psychology of the age, offers no explanation for the unique structure of Restoration tragicomedy. But more important, it conceals an implicit premise which precludes an adequate examination of this drama: the premise that the two halves of the divided play are indeed incompatible. In fact, despite its evident thematic dissonances, a play like Mar-