Utiles Nugae: Restoration Plays in Samuel Pepys's Library

Abstract

Utiles Nugae:Restoration Plays in Samuel Pepys's Library Juan A. Prieto-Pablos Samuel Pepys's interest in drama is a primary theme in accounts of his life and personality. One of his main biographers, Arthur Bryant, remarks that this interest was recognizable since his youth and further states that the theater was "his chief weakness." Claire Tomalin includes the theater among the several things ("music, . . . celebration, processions, ritual and fine clothes") that "delighted him throughout his life."1 This consensus extends to theater critics: Helen McAffee says that "everything and everybody on the stage appealed to him," Montague Summers calls him an "ardent theatre lover," and Henry B. Wheatley and Peter Holland go so far as to define Pepys's theater interest as an "addiction" and his playgoing as "obsessive," respectively.2 The entries in his Diary, covering his daily activities from 1660 to 1669, do seem to confirm these descriptions. McAfee collected references to Pepys's attendance of no fewer than 150 plays,3 and Deborah C. Payne estimates that he visited a playhouse over three hundred times in the nine years covered by the Diary.4 What is recurrently ignored, however, is that the Diary is almost the exclusive source on his playgoing or playreading activities. The scarcity of references to such activities in other documents has not deterred scholars from assuming that this was a permanent feature in Pepys's life. So, for example, Emmet L. Avery states that "Pepys in 1680, long after he discontinued his diary, still attended the theatres"; and Summers implicitly defines Pepys's relationship with the theater as a long-lasting one in the title of his Playhouse of Pepys (London, 1935), which covers London's theatrical production from 1660 to 1682, beyond the more limited range of the Diary years.5 Only in the last decade has Pepys's traditional image been reconsidered. Payne has found some evidence in the Diary itself to conclude that Pepys's attachment to the theater was conditioned by his pursuit of new social identities, which changed in accordance [End Page 23] with the varying conditions of "historical and personal contingencies."6 She confines her analysis to the years of the Diary, but her approach can be applied to the study of Pepys's relationship with plays after 1669, too. That application is the purpose of this essay. Indeed, there are very few references to visits to playhouses or to playreading in other documents related to Pepys's life, but the extent and shape of his relationship can be attested also by looking at the plays he kept in his library, which still remains very much as he left it before his death. According to Kate Loveman, Pepys intended his library to be a lasting representation of himself—or rather, of his best, most socially acceptable self—for those who visited it.7 My purpose in this essay is to discuss the part played by his collection of plays, particularly those acted or published after 1660, in Pepys's general plan. My initial hypothesis was that he must have kept copies of the plays he was most interested in, either because those were the ones he most liked or—as Payne and Loveman contend—because they were the most fitting for the public image he wished to project throughout his library as a whole. Contrary to what I expected, however, Pepys's play collection lacks the consistency one would have expected from such a theater lover. What the collection suggests instead is that Pepys underwent a significant shift of attitude toward drama soon after the Diary years. In this essay, I seek to ascertain the extent and consistency of that shift by (1) reviewing the influence that the Diary holds in current descriptions of him as a lover of plays; (2) discussing the functions that Pepys assigned to his whole library and those that the volumes containing plays may have had as part of the library; and (3) trying to assess the relevance of these plays as illustrations of his public and private interests. My conclusion is that the plays he kept in his library cannot be taken as evidence of any permanent interest in...