Restoration Comedy Research Articles

The historical development and functional characteristics of composite predicates with Have and take in English

Composite predicates2 (abbreviated as CPs) are verbal structures comprising a verb such as give, make, have, take and a deverbal noun (e.g. give an answer, make a call, have a drink, take a guess)....

Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage (review)

112Comparative Drama for the study ofproduction and reception ofwork by these playwrights and the type oftheater companies that stage them. Where are the theater scholars who can take up this call to do the deep work of recording this theater practice and reception instead of letting the texts be the privileged record? Griffin is not positioned to do this work, but her fine study paves the way for it. Sara Freeman Illinois Wesleyan University Matthew Steggle. Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. 222. $74.95. Matthew Steggle's RichardBrome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage is a welcome addition to the Revels Plays Companion Library. Indeed, this volume solidly lives up to the claim on the back cover as "the authoritative reference work on this appealing and underrated playwright." Steggle organizes the book as a chronological journey through Bromes career, situating his fifteen noncollaborative plays and sole surviving collaborations , The Late Lancashire Witches or The Witches ofLancashire and A lovial Crew, within historical contexts as they relate to the play's date of composition and/or performance. Through impressively controlled readings ofthe plays and other primary source materials, Steggle outlines a thorough—and thoroughly convincing—chronology that corrects some previous attributions and minimizes or eliminates some previously made guesses. In addition Steggle provides a critical companion that meticulously addresses scholarly discussions of Brome and advances that discussion by several giant leaps. In his introduction Steggle clearly foregrounds his argument as he surveys past scholarship on Brome. Steggle challenges outmoded assumptions that Brome's supposed artistic limitations are a reflection of low-class standing; he observes that Brome's obvious success and prominence during his lifetime and afterward belie such narrow thinking. While Brome was indeed Ben Jonson's manservant, Steggle suggests that there is a clear evolution in their relationship, from manservant, to rival, to friend. Clearly Brome was also Jonson's student in many ways, just as he was Shakespeare's; Steggle draws this observation out at several points in the subsequent chapters. At the heart of the introduction is Steggle's principal contention—pursued and buttressed through his subsequent analyses—that Brome is a more interesting, complex, and important playwright Reviews113 than he has previously been acknowledged to be. The sum ofthe evidence that Steggle offers decidedly convinces. Although the body of scholarship devoted to Brome is not vast, Steggle's reading and knowledge is and, as a result, this bookvery effectively explores the political, social, and topical implications of Brome's work. Moreover, Steggle situates, or "places," Brome in far more detailed contexts than has previously been attempted. Indeed, as his book's subtitle (PlaceandPolitics on the Caroline Stage) implies, place or location—in material,cultural,political, economic, geographical , and literary-historical terms—is a central theme in Steggle's study of Brome's life and works. Clearly Martin Butler's Theater and Crisis, 1632-1642 is a crucialworkfor Steggle's arguments here; important as that study is,Steggle's use ofit in delving into more specifics concerning Brome's career from artistic, political, and legal standpoints is compelling. Similarly, Steggle makes effective use of Ralph J. Kauffman's 1961 Richard Brome: Caroline Dramatist, subtly yet steadily revealing the obvious datedness of that work. Politely acknowledging as he does that certain archival materials and scholarly achievements postdated Kauffman's work in no waylessens the extent to which Steggle confidently overgoes Kauffman's critical biography. For nearly all of the plays the central thematic link for Steggle is Brome's manipulation of"place-realism."While this and other elements do indeed show Brome to be a writer who bridges the gap between the earlier plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher and others, and the later Restoration Comedy, Steggle is right to assert that there is more to be said. While all of his readings reveal a profound knowledge of the various cultural, physical, geographical, economic, political, and literary intertexts that inform Brome's work writ large, Steggle's reading of The Northern Lass is especially instructive. Perhaps Brome's earliest play, The Northern Lass, as Steggle compellingly reads it, employs place-realism in order to present a protofeminist text...

John Dryden (1631–1700): His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets ed. by Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso

103 Has Mr. Stephanson forgotten his own evidence? He correctly recounts Cheselden’s response, three months after Pope’s death, to Cibber’s insinuation that Pope’s problems urinating were caused by gonorrhea. ‘‘I could,’’ Pope’s surgeon told Joseph Spence, ‘‘give a more particular account of his health than perhaps any man. Cibber’s slander of a carnosity [is] false. [Pope] had been gay [Cheselden’s ‘‘gay’’means ‘‘heterosexual intercourse’’], but left it on his acquaintance with Mrs. Blount. [He] had been in fear of a c[lap], but even that [was] without grounds.’’A Pope who fears that he might have given his beloved Martha a venereal disease is distant from recent cant about the disembodied Phallus that Mr. Stephanson detests, but it is a Pope also far from the master rhetorician Mr. Stephanson gives us in The Yard of Wit. Harry M. Solomon Auburn University John Dryden (1631–1700): His Politics, His Plays, and His Poets, ed. Claude Rawson and Aaron Santesso. Newark: Delaware, 2004. Pp. 301. $52.50 Like the volumes from the Bristol and UCLA conferences and the special Dryden issue of Huntington Library Quarterly, this collection on Dryden from the Yale conference in 2000 contains very little on the early satires, and nothing at all on Religio Laici or Hind and the Panther. Interest has shifted to the late Dryden, to Dryden the translator, and, in a broad sense, to the open-ended, unstable,subversive,richlycomplex Dryden—now that our postmodern world no longer requires ‘‘closure,’’ Dryden’s old crime of inconsistency is becoming a virtue. The two opening essays are both about Dryden and London. Lawrence Manley gives a lively account of a rapidly expanding metropolis, discussing the clash of subcultures, including everybody from displaced Huguenots and rabid Dissenters to old Commonwealth men and besotted rakes, with conservative Dryden resisting social change and trying to steer a course between different social factions. Harold Love, in ‘‘Dryden, Rochester, and the Invention of the ‘Town,’’’ takes a different approach; his London is a contest between city, court, and town, with Dryden unable to appeal to the court circle (which includes Rochester) and finally siding with the town. Both essays serve as informative introductions to Dryden and his world, informative in the same way Norton Anthology introductions are. But tempted by the genre of the academic paper, where there is no room for such niceties as supporting evidence, both Mr. Manley and Mr. Love, rather than producing probing analyses of complex social changes, write essays that, although generally good, are also too general. The majority of the contributors answered Mr. Rawson’s call for work on Dryden’s ‘‘relations with some of the poets, ancient and modern, who helped to shape his work,’’ or poets whose work he helped shape. Ian Higgins sensibly supplies an essay on Dryden and Swift, asking why Swift so detested his distant cousin, concluding that it was Dryden’s support of liberty of conscience that irritated high-church Swift, togetherwith his claim to be suffering becauseof hisloyalty, which‘‘affrontedSwift’sfamilymemory of [his] grandfather’s suffering for the Stuarts.’’ Little here is new, and Mr. Higgins even admits that ‘‘Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet’’ may also have been the cause of Swift’s contempt after all. Looking backwards, Louis Martz, in a careful com- 104 parative analysis of Dryden’s State of Innocence and Paradise Lost, demonstrates how Milton’s concern with free will is lost in the translation, while his sex scenes turn into Restoration comedy and his Adaminto aRenaissancestagehero.Andlookingforwards, Valerie Rumbold does a fine job comparing Dryden to Pope, going beyond the obvious similarities to some less often considered distinctions, for instance, that Dryden had to be hastier because he lacked patronage. Also, Dryden had to butter up the aristocracy, while Pope was sufficiently independent to attack his superiors. In the end, Dryden, with his copious flow of the experimental, outshines the fastidious Pope and emerges superior to him because he left a worthy poetic heir. (Offended Pope aficionados will take comfort that the poetic heir obviously is Pope.) Three essays discuss Dryden’s relationship to classical authors: Persius, Juvenal,and Virgil. On the least of...

Liking Men: Ben Jonson's Closet Opened

I. Prologue: "You . . . May Like Men" My title, "Liking Men" alludes to the last two lines of the verse prologue with which Jonson prefaced Every Man in His Humor when he revised it for the prestigious publication event of the folio collection of his works to date in 1616. The prologue to Every Man In must be one of the most cited and least understood of Jonson's poems. Critics pay tribute, by quoting the speech, to the bracing rhythms of its announcement that something entirely new is going to start happening in English drama, but they hardly seem, in subsequent analyses, to appreciate either the long-term dramatic effects, or the wider cultural ramifications of the novelty it announces. Jonson, it is said, has with this prologue to this play introduced a new realism to English drama, through a parodic rejection of older dramatic styles.1 My argument here is that Jonson's cultural influence and creative power deserve greater credit. His formal innovation announced in the 1616 prologue both created a completely new and exceptionally durable style of urban bachelor fiction and, simultaneously, founded a no less culturally influential style of masculine intimacy. The new style of fiction, "overwhelmingly the dominant one until recent years" in English theater, is signaled by its "real-time" opening with the leisured morning activities of London gentlemen, and has endured in the English comic tradition from Restoration comedy to Noel Coward.2 The new style of masculine intimacy which became inseparable (as Eve Sedgwick has shown us) from later developments in these urbane fictions of leisured bachelorhood is what I hope to describe in this essay. I shall, in short, be attempting to analyze Every Man in His Humor as contributing crucially to the transformation of cultural attitudes towards male same-sex desire which Alan Bray demonstrated as having taken place in the course of the seventeenth century, and which Sedgwick has mapped out across various post-Renaissance literary genres as producing "intense male [End Page 1065] homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory, and the most prohibited of social bonds."3 In the prologue to the revised text of Every Man In, Jonson distinguishes the play that he presents as the "first fruits" of his dramatic career from the offerings of the more popular Shakespearean tradition, in which playwrights disregarded neoclassical poetics, happily ignoring the principle of unity of time. He declares that he has not "so loved the stage" as to follow the example of his contemporaries, who . . . make a child, now swaddled to proceed Man, and then shoot up in one beard and weed, Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords, And help of some few foot and half-foot words, Fight over York and Lancaster's long jars, And in the tiring-house bring wounds to scars.4 The often-heard complaint of earlier humanist authors against the chronicle drama's violations of temporal probability is here given a peculiarly Jonsonian inflection in the reference to "three rusty swords" and the quick-changes of "wounds to scars" backstage. Jonson, unlike Shakespeare, persistently draws attention to the "inert materiality" and "creaking contrivances" of theater.5 Here, of course, the demystification of these contrivances works to invalidate any techniques of illusion except for those of linguistic currency and contemporaneity. Jonson's play, unlike those chronicle histories of Shakespeare, will seem real because it offers images of "deeds, and language, such as men do use" in contemporary life, enlivened by examples of the unmanly commission of "popular errors": I mean such errors as you'll all confess By laughing at them, they deserve no less: Which, when you heartily do, there's hope left then You that have so grac'd monsters may like men. ("Prologue," 26-30) The errors to be staged in Jonson's play for the delectation of the audience, then, are aspects of those plays they have elsewhere applauded or "grac'd." These will be on display as "monsters," foils...

Cassell's history of English literature

Epic Chaucer, Langland and the Treachery of the Text Two Versions of Pastoral The Sonnet Spenser's Garden Shakespeare Revenge Tragedy Milton: Author and End of All Things Restoration Comedy Inventing the Novel Gothic Follies Wordsworth and Coleridge Imagination and Fiction Dickens

Poetry from 1660 to 1780: Civil War, Restoration, Revolution, ed. by Robert De-Maria, Jr. and Duncan Wu, and: Restoration Comedy, ed. by David Womersley

185 con. The age of Walpole represented the nadir of the idea that ‘‘estates’’ comprehended the realm. With Walpole came new circumstances and therefore a need to consider the implications of a developing political structure. Pity those implications are not explored here. Charles W. A. Prior Queen’s University at Kingston Miscellanies in Prose and Verse by Pope, Swift and Gay, 4 volumes, ed. Alexander Pettit. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002. Multiple pagination in each volume . $475. Few volumes of eighteenth-centuryliterature contain more good things than Miscellanies. To read the Table of Contents is to take a tour through the best satire of the century, most of it by Swift, but amply sprinkled with important piecesby others;herewefind,intheiroriginalreader -friendly type-size with ample margins , and on high quality paper, ‘‘Abolishing Christianity,’’‘‘Tritical Essay,’’the ‘‘Bickerstaff Papers,’’ ‘‘The History of John Bull,’’ ‘‘Meditation upon a Broomstick ,’’ ‘‘Memoirs of P.P., Clerk of This Parish,’’ ‘‘Stradling versus Stiles,’’ ‘‘The Art of Political Lying,’’ ‘‘Peri Bathous,’’ ‘‘Cadenus and Vanessa,’’ ‘‘God’s Revenge against Punning,’’‘‘A Modest Proposal ,’’and an ample sampling of Swift’s shorter poems. It is a treasure for Scriblerians , and while the titles are all found elsewhere and today in more informative editions, the sense one has of being in the presence of Scriblerian thought and production may never be felt more richly than when paging through these four volumes . Indeed, for The Scriblerian, Miscellanies might well be considered the foundational text. Mr. Pettit’s Introduction is brief, but adequately provides the history of the compilation and publication of Miscellanies ; clearly Pope was the organizational genius of the enterprise, whether from fair motives (to swim down the gutter of time with Swift) or foul (to have Swift swim down the gutter of time with him). Mr. Pettit correctly suggests that ‘‘Miscellanies [is] an extended instance of lanx satura, the ancient model that regards satire as a ‘mixed’or ‘full platter,’’’ although unfortunately the rest of his sentence seems garbled by a printer’s error. Mr. Pettit’s real service is his Appendix detailing allthatisknownatpresentabout the authorship of each piece, a very helpful accounting, including brief commentaries on disputed attributions. ‘‘I am very sensible what a weakness and presumption it is, to reason against the general humour and disposition of the world,’’ but I would urge every library to reallocate its 2004 budget for purchasing critical monographs on cross-dressing in order to purchase instead this reprint edition of Miscellanies—Foucault is a fad, but great wit is forever. Melvyn New University of Florida Poetry from 1660 to 1780: Civil War, Restoration, Revolution, ed. Robert DeMaria , Jr. and Duncan Wu. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. 183. $52.95; $49.95 (paper). Restoration Comedy, ed. David Womersley . Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. 192. $49.95; $17.95 (paper). The editors and Blackwell intend these texts (two of the seven in the series, ‘‘Blackwell Essential Literature’’) for classroom use, with each volume containing ‘‘a general introduction designed to introduce the reader to those central works,’’ as stated, redundantly, by the series editor. Introductions should intro- 186 duce. Yet most of the work here is interpretative , hardly helpful for students coming to these works for the first time. More troubling is that the editions have no annotations. The poetry text offers Books I and II from Paradise Lost and selections from Dryden, Rochester, Swift, Pope, Gray, and Collins, as well as ‘‘The Vanity of Human Wishes’’ and ‘‘The Deserted Village .’’Two blurbs on the back cover compete for the reader’s eye: the first on the general series states that ‘‘traditional favourites are placed alongside less wellknown titles, reflecting the ways in which the literary canon has changed in recent years’’; the second, that the book ‘‘offers readers authoritative texts of the central works of the age from a wide range of poets,’’ which, presumably, describes the nine male poets whose works are included . Restoration Comedy offers two plays, The Country Wife and The Way of the World. It also has two blurbs of the back cover: the first, identical to the blurb in the other volume; the second, implying that one only needs these two plays to get ‘‘the flavour of the bawdy...

Pastoralism and Restoration comedy: The Example of William Wycherley’s Love in a Wood; or, Saint James’s Park

À partir de la première comédie de William Wycherley, Love in a Wood (1672), cet article analyse brièvement la nature possible des liens entre différents aspects de la tradition pastorale et la comédie dite de la Restauration. Plusieurs détournements du modèle original, notamment par l’utilisation de procédés parodiques et satiriques, font de Love in a Wood l’un des premiers exemples de la vogue du « mock-pastoral », qui connaîtra un grand succès au XVIIIème siècle en Angleterre. À la Restauration, toutefois, l’utilisation d’éléments issus de la tradition pastorale est un moyen comme un autre de ridiculiser la figure honnie de l’hypocrite puritain. La présence du drame pastoral, dans la pièce de Wycherley, doit donc avant tout être perçue comme le signe d’une prise de distance avec ce qui est dit et montré sur scène.

The lake at Llandrindod Wells—a restoration comedy?

1. The lake at Llandrindod Wells, Wales, UK, is a typical urban shallow lake. Created in the 19th century for amenity, it has a long history of management for various, often conflicting, purposes. After the 1950s, the once clear water became turbid with phytoplankton, and aquatic plants became very scarce. 2. The most likely reason for this was introduction of common carp, for angling, into a fish community that contained no piscivores. Mobilization of phosphorus from the sediments by activities of the fish led to severe internal phosphorus loading, culminating ultimately in a requirement to close the lake, temporarily in summer, to water contact activities, because of a risk of toxic cyanophyte blooms. 3. The lake-owners decided to restore the lake to greater amenity and conservation value by biomanipulation of the fish community and associated works. The restoration was successful in restoring clear water and plant communities, but because of the nature of the plants reintroduced, there were new problems of dense plant growth. Ownership of the lake then changed and, in a somewhat confused situation, the lake has been returned to a carp fishery. 4. Documents on the history of management of the lake, and available limnological data, are reviewed in relation to a general strategy for lake restoration and general lessons are drawn for future restoration projects. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“Plethoras of witty verbiage” and “heathen Greek”

This paper draws upon Horn’s reworking of Grice’s conversational maxims as Q- and R-principles in order to provide a rich pragmatic reading of British comic drama, from the London comedies of Ben Jonson, to the restoration comedy of William Wycherley to the late twentieth-century London comedy of Steven Berkoff. I demonstrate that short-circuited implicatures (SCIs) as well as conventional and conversational implicatures operate to illuminate comic meaning for readers, both knowledgeable and unfamiliar with the historical code and the cultural milieu in which these plays may be set. I conclude that two kinds of pragmatic work are involved in reading comic drama: conversational implicature is situation- rather than code-based, and depends upon our ability to construe pragmatic acts in the dramatic text. The other kind of pragmatic work involves the inference that the meanings intended are conventional and cannot be reconstructed or calculated from what is being said.

Humor in British Literature, From the Middle Ages to the Restoration: A Reference Guide by Don L. F. Nilsen

94 discovery is just that we know it already.’’ We can see that going over well in the classroom. He also knows how to use the exclamation mark precisely and properly in scholarly prose. He has a flair for the wittily turned phrase and never hesitates to declare some typical example of longwinded sixteenth-century prose not just turgid but ‘‘unreadable.’’ When Clarendon ‘‘fell in 1667, the year of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society and the year before Dryden’s Essay of Dramatic Poesy, his prose and his world fell with him.’’By 1750, Mr. Robinson thinks, ‘‘Clarendon must surely have been one of the great unreadables.’’ No question. Sterne ‘‘the deadly serious joker’’used theem rule‘‘injusttheoldwaytoindicate the succession of phrases that are anything but clauses in a complex sentence.’’ And even if the introduction of Thomas Burnet startles (but it should not, for Mr. Robinson declares his personalinterestas Burnet’s editor), listen to this: Burnet ‘‘can evidently write the beautifully clear proseof philosophicalargumentationthat one finds in Berkeley or David Hume, but he has a shade less decorum and more idiosyncratic insolence than either.’’ DON L. F. NILSEN. Humor in British Literature , From the Middle Ages to the Restoration : A Reference Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1997. Pp. xxvi ⫹ 226. $79.50. Finding the right audience for this how-to book on humor research will prove more of a challenge than its compilation . Humor in British Literature offers four segments on humor in the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, each including miniature critical biographies and thumbnail bibliographies. A general Introduction, a supplement on humor before the fourteenth century, and an alphabetical Index of authors are intended to complement the chronological layout of the volume. It is not altogether clear whether the book is aimed at supplementing the work of professional scholars or at jump-starting undergraduates stymiedbytermpaperassignments . Mr. Nilsen’s bibliographies are too predictable for the former and too complex for the latter. The chief merit of this undertaking is that it gives beginners fairly complete lists of authors’names and a broad-based accounting of relevant standard critical works. This virtue is also the chief deficiency . Attempting to be comprehensive in limited space, Mr. Nilsen leans too heavily on outdated synoptical histories of humor such as those of Louis Cazamian and Alfred Gu L’Estrange, whose edicts appear on almost every page. Mr. Nilsen is consequently limited to lessthan -dazzling statements like ‘‘Samuel Butler’s Hudibras . . . is considered to be the best example of the genre’’ of the satirical character, statements in which a general literary historian passes a general value judgment that is generally less than informative. The section covering the Restoration seldom goes beyond ambiguously informative general commentary. We get the predictable remarks about the licentiousness of the Earl of Rochester; the unremarkable announcement that Dryden was probably the ‘‘greatest of the Restoration writers.’’Sometimes Mr.Nilsen ’s synoptical comparisons border on the bogus, as when he declaresthat‘‘Marvell ’s writings are close to the writings of Jonathan Swift in their cleverness, intellect [,] and irony,’’ thereby creating in the gullible undergraduate mind a false basis for synonymizing disparate writers. Mr. Nilsen’s compendium is not without merit. He is willing to look at all genres as potential vehicles for humor. His entry on Restoration comedy is more 95 extensive than anything done by lesser encyclopedists intimidated by the complexity of Restoration theater culture. He is willing to count Locke as a humorist insofar as he contributed to the psychological analysis of wit. He even finds humor in sallow Milton and in ideological Behn. FamiliarpoemssuchasMacFlecknoe take on a new life when set out as benchmarks in the history of modern hilarity . Likewise, undervalued jottings such as Waller’s Instructions to a Painter take on a previously unnoticed importance as triggers for parody, travesty, burlesque , and thence laughter. The gems must be mined out of a deep but choked vein of older, sometimes superannuated scholarship. Mr. Nilsenlikes to give plenty of play to big-nameauthors and genre critics, not many of whom are early-modern specialists and most of whom were flourishing back in the 1970s and 1980s. His bibliographies on writers like Rochester, for example...

William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear by John A. Vance

80 major upheavals of domestic politics, specifically the Restoration, topical assassination plots, the Exclusion Crisis , and the Glorious Revolution. Mr. Hughes, despite a characteristicelisionof thesis statement, rightly argues that ‘‘a principal subject of Restoration drama wastheRestorationitself.’’Intragedyand comedy, he traces the initial celebration of the restored monarchy and then, after Charles II had generated widespread disappointment and skepticism, the public’s admonitory response to his example. Ms. Munns sees a period of profound change that spurred intellectual inquiry capable of fostering a drama that reflected national unease and social instability. She posits political and cultural skepticism as the philosophical force behind the changing institutions of patriarchy, nature, and society and their reflection in contemporary drama. Ms. Owen’s point of departure is the Exclusion Crisis, which she considers a positive force in the change in comedy, the development of tragedy, and the rise of the sentimental. The cultural institutions represented in this volume are restricted to marriage, religion , and dramatic criticism. Pat Gill claims that the plots of Restorationdrama invariably ‘‘begin, develop, and end in concerns about gender, sexuality and marriage.’’Correlating the disorder of the family with the disorder of the state, she pinpoints the emergence of a new, egalitarian , and elegant model of marriage in the popular comedy of manners. Discussing religious controversy in theatrical representation, Michael Cordner juxtaposes Vanbrugh’s comic impiety and Collier’s anti-theatrical campaign to examine England’s rising obsession with public rather than private vice. In a fine coda, Robert Markley provides a synopsis of 300 years of Restoration dramatic criticism, but he hesitates to propose any final catalogue of the Restoration canon or to limit its ideological underpinnings. Ms. Fisk’s volume encourages readers to take up the ideological challenges of our time, to rethink assumptions, and to enlarge the scope of these plays, many of them egregiously undervalued in the academy and theatrical marketplace. Included are a chronology of historical and theatrical events, brief authorial biographies , a select Bibliography, and an index. Susan B. Iwanisziw Independent Scholar JOHN A. VANCE. William Wycherley and the Comedy of Fear. Newark: Delaware, 2000. Pp. 259. $43.50. Taking issue with the widely held belief that Wycherley is an ‘‘attacking’’ playwright, condemning people’s behavior and the larger society, Mr. Vance argues that Wycherley is a ‘‘thinking’’one. His plays do not expose, warn, or teach, but depict what he found exhilaratingand disturbing. Consequently, Wycherley is not a pessimist, but one with an attitude of ‘‘exuberant penetration.’’ Wycherley sees frustration, helplessness,impotence, and above all, fear, as the most profound of human desires and frailties; Wycherley ’s four plays, each getting one chapter, explore how fear acts as the primary motivating factor behind allhumanbehavior. The biggest problem with this study is the use of ‘‘Comedy of Fear.’’ The title suggests that Wycherley is writing in a particular (albeit arbitrary) subgenre of comedy, but Mr. Vance does not follow through with it. Prominent in the title, ‘‘fear’’ gets buried in the Introduction, and no firm definition of ‘‘comedy of fear’’is offered. Mr. Vance states that fear 81 motivates Wycherley’s plays. Fine, but does that statement alone denote a subgenre ? Perhaps fear and the conflicts that arise from it are at the heart of most Restoration comedies. How, then, is Wycherley different? Mr. Vance essentially makes two arguments : Wycherley’s ultimate goal is simply to depict what he sees happening around him, and all the action in his plays centers on the fears inherent in the characters . Mr. Vance does a better job discussing the first. His close readings are thorough—no nuance is too small for Mr. Vance, no piece of dialogue too minor— but the concept of fear often gets pushed aside in his analysis. At times, the connection is clear (Pinchwife is deathly afraid of being made a cuckold by his wife); at other times, we must draw our own conclusions. The fear as motivator argument lacks a forward thrust in the text, and often become buried in his detailed plot analyses. Disregarding the performances, Mr. Vance relies solely upon the printed text. Although many playwrights (Wycherley included) wrote for particular actors, as he knows, he nevertheless assesses the play as...

Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. J. Douglas Canfield

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsTricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. J. Douglas Canfield Derek HughesDerek Hughes Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 98, Number 4May, 2001 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493012 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright 2001 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

<i>The Convent of Pleasure</i> and Other Plays

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623-1673), until recently remembered more as a flamboyant eccentric than as a serious writer, was in fact the most prolific, thought-provoking, and original woman writer of the Restoration. Cavendish is the author of many poems, short stories, biographies, memoirs, letters, philosophical and scientific works (including Description of a New World, Called Blazing World, the first work of science fiction by a woman), and nineteen plays. The Convent of and Other Plays collects four of Cavendish's dramatic works that are among the most revealing of her attitudes toward marriage and her desire for fame. Loves Adventures (1662) centers on a woman succeeding in war and diplomacy by passing as a man. Similarly, the heroine of Bell in Campo (1662) rescues her husband at the head of an army of women in this tale of a marriage of near equals. Convent of Pleasure (1668) proposes a separatist community of women and has received attention for its suggestion of lesbian sexuality. Bridals (1662), a more typical restoration comedy satirizing marriage, rounds out the collection. Edited with notes and annotation by Anne Shaver, The Convent of and Other Plays also contains a timeline, biography and bibliography of the Duchess, an appreciation of Cavendish's life and work, and a bibliography of critical essays. Also included are all of Cavendish's epistles To the Reader as well as Other Preliminary Matter from Playes (1662), and Cavendish's original preface to Plays Never Before Printed (1668). A valuable collection from an extraordinary writer, The Convent of and Other Plays raises important issues about women and gender.

Tricksters & Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy

Tricksters & Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy

Reviews

Reviews

Learning 'to Speak the English Language': The Way of the World on the Twentieth-Century American Stage

Learning “to Speak the English Language”: The Way of the World on the Twentieth-Century American Stage Deborah Kaplan (bio) Opening in a small Greenwich Village playhouse in 1924, The Way of the World created a considerable stir among New York theatregoers. The play was a novelty to many, “so old,” one reviewer said, “that it is new.” 1 The play, however, seemed fresh and unusual not simply because of its age but because it had not been seen and heard for a long time. Considered too bawdy for public performances, most Restoration comedies had been banished from theatres in Great Britain and the United States for several generations. The necessary prelude to their twentieth-century return to the stage—and to the attention that return generated—was literary. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men of letters such as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Edmund Gosse rehabilitated the comedies’ reputations, convincing their readers that the plays were not tasteless, obscene works but brilliant and witty classics. Restoration comedy seemed as new to theatre workers in the 1920s as to their audiences, for the plays had no performance tradition. An authentic or “authorized” performance style for classic plays is, of course, unattainable, but there were no vital conventions on which theatre groups could draw. 2 How, then, were the plays to be [End Page 301] performed? This essay charts the answers provided to this question in the United States throughout the twentieth century. Although that performance history can not be isolated from twentieth-century British revivals of Restoration comedies, I have chosen to foreground the American productions because their history is generally unknown. Reviewers of the American revivals still all too frequently invoke only British productions. Indeed, they do not always seem aware, when reviewing a particular comedy, that it was revived in the United States earlier in the century. 3 But my aim is to do more than just fill in a gap. We can not adequately understand and assess the ways that Restoration comedies are currently being performed in the U.S. unless we historicize the production and reception of these plays. I focus on the theatrical career of one play in order to make manifest long-term trends impossible to see in an essay surveying productions of several different plays. I have chosen William Congreve’s The Way of the World because of its prestige and prominence on twentieth-century British and American stages. Often said to be not just the greatest comedy of its period but the greatest English language comedy, it was the Restoration play first offered in modern, commercial revivals in both London and New York. And it has been performed steadily over the course of the century, travelling the route taken by many other classic plays in the U.S.—from little theatres and semi-private theatrical clubs to off and off-off-Broadway and resident theatres after World War II, with an occasional British import offered on Broadway or in one of the larger resident venues. The Way of the World is regarded by many critics as the quintessence of Restoration comedy. 4 Moreover, when staged, it concentrates the problems as well as the virtues of Restoration comedy. Its plot may be even more maze-like, its pyrotechnic wit somewhat more dense and topical, but these features in most Restoration comedies have challenged twentieth-century directors and theatre companies and have influenced the way Congreve’s play and the other comedies of its period have been performed. It is not, to be sure, the quintessence of bawdiness. The Way of the World comes late—1700—in the corpus of Restoration comedies, and it is less ribald than many of its predecessors written during the reign of Charles II. 5 But for most twentieth-century American theatre workers and theatregoers the reputed naughtiness of Restoration comedies has been more salient than the degree of ribaldry within any one of them. 6 [End Page 302] The revival history exemplified by The Way of the World has at its center a single performance style. When Restoration comedies came back to American theatres in the 1920s, a period style that had recently been devised for...

Tricksters & estates: on the ideology of restoration comedy

Tricksters & estates: on the ideology of restoration comedy

Theophrastus'Charactersand the historian

In a programmatic article, published nearly twenty years ago, Peter Laslett characterized historians who try to write social history from literature as people who look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. His particular examples of their inverted gaze were not always well chosen: warfare in Homer, the young age at betrothal of Shakespeare's Juliet, the extra-marital affairs in Restoration Comedy. The main point, however, still challenges ancient historians. ‘The great defect of the evidence’, as A. H. M. Jones forewarned readers of his social history, ‘is the total absence of statistics’: at best, we have isolated numbers which do not survive in significant sequences. Yet since 1951, ancient historians have continued to look down their telescopes and find social history in a widening range of texts. In the past decade, Roman historians have re-read prose fictions for this purpose, while on the Greek side, more recent attention has gone to poetry, especially tragedy and Homeric epic.

Meaningful Literary Names

Proper nouns, which have a special status within the language system as opposed to common nouns, can be used as characterizing devices in literary texts and so become a meaningful element in the texture of such works. Names can in this way be endowed with an extra semantic load that makes them border on wordplay. The presence of meaningful literary names is likely to cause problems when the text is to be translated, the question being not only whether the transposition of such names in the target language is technically possible, but also to what extent this would be viewed as an appropriate procedure. This paper, which reflects research in progress, explores the issue by analyzing a two-part corpus of texts: the first part consists of twentieth-century Italian translations of English Restoration comedies and the second of Italian translations of Dickens’s novels. There are occasional references to other English literary texts from the medieval and Renaissance periods as well. Technical problems of translating proper nouns are taken into consideration, along with other factors which may influence the translator’s choices, such as genre, intended audience, cultural tradition and general norms of translation.

English drama: a cultural history

Acknowledgements. User's Guide. 1. Medieval Theatre. 2. The Beginning of the Story of Drama. 3. Renaissance Drama. 4. The Image of Elizabethan Drama. 5. Restoration Comedy. 6. Bawdy, Manners and the English National Character. 7. Melodrama. 8. The Unacceptable Face of Drama. 9. Naturalism. 10. 'You Make Me Feel Mighty Real': Proper Drama. 11. Post-War British Theatre and the State. 12. Drama in the Age of Television. Chronological List of Plays. References. Index.