Theatrum Belli: Late-Restoration Comedy and the Rise of the Standing Army

Abstract

“Plays are but the Mirrours of our Lives,” wrote Colley Cibber in 1707, recognizing the special relevance of a timeless metaphor to the theatre of his own day. A man generally given to hyperbole, Cibber here underestimates the theatre's affective power for influencing and transforming society. Of all the many reflections and transformations one may see in the mirror of late-Restoration theatre, however, the most important, I believe, are the images of warfare. In the early eighteenth century, thetheatrum mundiwas indeed atheatrum belli, for the theatre of war was not confined to Vigo, Blenheim, and Malplaquet, to the fields of Sanders or Spain, but was enacted on the proscenium stages of Drury Lane, Lincoln's Inn fields, and the Haymarket. Nearly every new play written and produced on the London stages in the first decade of the eighteenth century has a Redcoat or a Tar in itsdramatis personaeor has topical references to the War of the Spanish Succession, to disbandment, to conscription, or to the debate over the issue of a standing army. Concurrent with the theatre's reflection of the nation's concern over the rise of the standing army is a transformation in the representation of army officers in stage comedies. After 1700, portrayals of military men shift so dramatically that they seem to attain an ideological significance; the historical causes and the aesthetic effects of this shift—which are the focal points of the ensuing essay—suggest a widespread ideological effort by writers to enlist public sympathy not only for the soldier but also for the notion of a standing army.