User:Bishonen/WIP New Restoration comedy
Restoration comedy is the name given to English sex comedies written and performed in the Restoration period 1660—1700. After public stage performances had been banned for 18 years during the Commonwealth, the re-opening of the theatres in 1660 signalled a rebirth of English drama. Of the about 375 new plays performed between 1660 and 1700, xxxxxx were comedies. Restoration comedy is famous or notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660—1685) personally and by the macho aristocratic ethos of his court. Wide and socially mixed audiences were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, frequent fashion changes, bustling plots, and the thrilling introduction of the first professional actresses.
Theatre companies
[edit]The patent companies, 1660—82
[edit]Charles II was "an active and interested patron" (Hume, 8) of the drama, and soon after his restoration he granted exclusive rights, so-called Royal patents, to the King's Company and the Duke's Company to perform plays. Following a "mad scramble for power" (Hume, 20) over rights to the pre-Commonwealth plays of the reigns of James I ("Jacobean") and Charles I ("Caroline"), and to the services of the skilled actors of the earlier period, two middle-aged Caroline playwrights, Thomas Killigrew and Charles Davenant, emerged as leaders of the companies. Intense and immediate competition between the two patent companies followed. A first priority for both Killigrew and Davenant was to build new, inviting, commodious playhouses and outfit them with all possible technical innovations: moveable scenery, "machines" (such as?), and provision for elaborate scenes, music and dancing.
Playhouses?
, and was of great benefit to the drama. As the King's Company and the Duke's Company vyed with each other for audiences, for technical innovations, for popular actors, and for new plays, the new genres of Restoration comedy, heroic play, and pathetic drama were born and flourished.
Hume: "This resemblance should be no surprise, for the patent theatres were being run by a pair of middle-aged Caroline playwrights" (6). (Caroline: of the reign of Charles I, 16XX-1642.)
Important factors for new fashions in the drama: "the creation of a patent monopoly; the introduction of actresses; new designs for playhouses; a rapid increase in the use of scenery and "machines"; and growing emphasis on music and dance."
The competition between the two London companies
The United Company, 1682—95
[edit]Both the quantity and quality of the drama suffered when in 1682 the more successful Duke's Company ate the struggling King's Company and the amalgamated United Company was formed. The theatre monopoly as well as the political situation after the Popish plot (see below) contributed to a dramatic drop in the number of new plays in the 1680s. The influence and the incomes of the recently empowered actors dropped too, and in the 1690s, the actors' disgruntlement came to a head under the pinchpenny management of Christopher Rich. Parasitic investors ("Adventurers") converged on the United Company, and a petition from the players to the Lord Chancellor details a tangle of secret investments, "farmed" shares, and sleeping partners, which underlay draconian management methods and salary slashing. But the company owners, wrote the young employee Colley Cibber, "who had made a monopoly of the stage, and consequently presum'd they might impose what conditions they pleased upon their people, did not consider that they were all this while endeavouring to enslave a set of actors whom the public were inclined to support." Popular performers like the legendary Thomas Betterton, the pathetic tragedienne Elizabeth Barry, and the rising young star Anne Bracegirdle were able to command both interest from audiences and intervention from the xxxxxx Lord Chancellor, and, in the confidence of this, the senior actors walked out.
The war of the theatres, 1695—1700
[edit]The actors gained a Royal "licence to perform", thus bypassing Christopher Rich's ownership of both the original Royal patents from 1660, and formed their own cooperative company. This unique venture was set up with detailed rules for avoiding arbitrary managerial authority, regulating and documenting the ten actors' shares, the conditions of salaried employees, and the sickness and retirement benefits of both categories. The cooperative had the good luck to open with the première of William Congreve's famous Love For Love and the skill to make it a huge box-office success. Their great advantage over the remainder of Rich's company was acting talent and acting experience. When they walked out, "the very beauty and vigour of the Stage" went with them, explains the anonymous Comparison Between the Two Stages (1702). Rich's company was left "in a very despicable condition": "The disproportion was so great at parting, that 'twas almost impossible, in Drury-Lane, to muster up a sufficient number to take in all the Parts of any Play."
The change in English drama in the 1690s away from Restoration comedy towards sentimental comedy is usually ascribed to political and social causes, and rightly so. But trends in the drama were also connected with the stormy theatrical events known as the war of the theatres in the mid-nineties, when the senior actors of the monopoly "United Company" broke away and formed their own cooperative acting enterprise, which immediately became a dangerous competitor for the parent company.
London again had two competing companies. Their scramble to attract audiences briefly revitalized Restoration drama yet again in the mid-nineties, but also set it on the downward path to the lowest common denominator of public taste. Rich's company notoriously offered Bartholomew fair attractions like high kicking, jugglers, ropedancers and performing animals, and the cooperative, which appealed to snobbery by setting themselves up as the only legit theatre company in London, was not above retaliating with "novelties such as prologues recited by boys of five, and epilogues declaimed by ladies on horseback" (Dobrée, xxi). The demand for new plays stimulated William Congreve and John Vanbrugh into writing some of their best comedies, but also gave birth to the new genre of sentimental comedy, which was soon to replace Restoration comedy in the public favor.
Actors
[edit]Celebrity actors
[edit]In London during this period, actors became for the first time public personalities and celebrities. Letters and diaries of the period show audiences being drawn to performances by the talents of particular actors, whose charisma could be intimately projected on the apron stage of the Restoration playhouses.
With two companies competing for their services between 1660 to 1682, star actors were able to negotiate star deals, comprising company shares and benefit nights as well as salaries. This advantageous situation changed drastically when the two companies were amalgamated in 1682.
The first actresses
[edit]
When the theatres opened again in 1660, comedy was strongly influenced by the introduction of the first professional actresses. Previously all female roles had been played by boys, and the predominantly male audiences of the 1660s and 1670s were both curious, censorious, and delighted at the novelty of seeing real women engage in risquée repartee and take part in physical seduction scenes. There are many references in Pepys' diary to visits to the playhouse in order to watch or re-watch the performance of some particular actress, and descriptions of how much Pepys enjoyed these experiences.
Daringly suggestive comedy scenes involving women became especially common, although of course Restoration actresses were just like male actors expected to do justice to all kinds and moods of plays. Their role in the development of Restoration tragedy is also important (compare She-tragedy).
A highly popular way of showing off an actress' body on stage was through breeches roles, which called for the actress to appear in male clothes (breeches = trousers), for instance in order to play a witty heroine who dresses up as a boy in order to follow her lover anonymously and with the greater freedom society allowed to boys. Out of some 375 plays (comedy and serious drama both) produced on the London stage between 1660 and 1700, at least a quarter contained one or more roles for actresses in male clothes (see Howe). All of Wycherley's and Aphra Behn's best-known plays feature this attraction.
Successful Restoration actresses include Charles II's mistress Nell Gwyn, the tremendously popular tragedienne Elizabeth Barry, the 1690s comedienne Anne Bracegirdle, and Susanna Mountfort, who had many breeches roles written especially for her in the 1680s and 90s, and whose swaggering, roistering impersonations of young women enjoying the social and sexual freedom of Restoration rakes were relished by both men and women in the audience.
Comedies
[edit]London audiences had no taste for structurally simple, well-shaped comedies such as those of Molière, but enjoyed bustling, crowded multi-plot action and fast pace. English comic playwrights borrowed freely from the contemporary French and Spanish stage, from English Jacobean plays, and even from Greek and Roman classic comedies, and combined the looted plotlines in adventurous ways. Resulting differences of tone within a single play were appreciated rather than frowned on, as "variety" was highly prized. Even a splash of high heroic drama might be thrown into the comedies, as in George Etherege's Love in a Tub, which has one heroic verse "conflict between love and friendship" plot, one urbane wit comedy plot, and one low pants-dropping farce plot. (The Restoration period tragic/comic rollercoaster and total drama par excellence, the heroic play or heroic tragedy, is not dealt with in this article.) Such incongruities contributed to Restoration comedy being held in low esteem in the 18th, 19th and early 20th century, but are today again valued on the stage, as well as by postmodern academic critics.
Restoration comedy peaked twice. The genre came to spectacular maturity with an extravaganza of aristocratic comedies in the mid-1670s, followed by twenty lean years brightened mainly by the achievement of Aphra Behn, and in the 1690s a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a mixed audience. Public taste was, however, just then about to turn away from wit comedy and towards the new sentimental comedy.
Aristocratic comedy, 1660—80
[edit]The drama of the 1660s and 1670s was vitalized by the competition between the two patent companies created at the Restoration, as well as by the personal interest of Charles II. In the 1670s, the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege reflected the atmosphere at Court and celebrated with frankness an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. The Earl of Rochester, real-life Restoration rake, courtier and poet, is flatteringly portrayed in Etherege's Man of Mode (1676), while the single play that does most to support the charge of obscenity levelled then and now at Restoration comedy is probably Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675). Wycherley's The Plain-Dealer (1676), a variation on the theme of Molière's Le misanthrope, was highly regarded for its uncompromising satire and earned Wycherley the appellation "Plain Dealer" Wycherley or "Manly" Wycherley, after the play's main character Manly.
Example: The Country Wife
[edit]Decline of comedy, 1678—1690
[edit]When the two companies were amalgamated in 1682 and the London stage became a monopoly, both the number and the variety of new plays being written dropped sharply. There was a swing away from comedy to serious political drama, reflecting preoccupations following on the Popish Plot (1678) and the Exclusion Crisis (1682), and the few comedies produced also tended to be political in focus. The dominant comic playwright of the unencouraging 1682—1695 theatrical period is Aphra Behn, whose unique achievement as an early professional woman writer has been the subject of much recent study.
Comedy renaissance, 1690—1700
[edit]
During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the "softer" comedies of William Congreve and John Vanbrugh reflected mutating cultural perceptions and great social change. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. In Congreve's plays, the "wit duels" between lovers typical of the earlier comedy have been transformed into witty prenuptial debates such as the famous "Proviso" scene in The Way of the World (1700). Vanbrugh's The Provoked Wife (1697) is something of a Restoration problem play in its discussion of the subordinate legal position of women in marriage at this time.
The tolerance for Restoration comedy even in its modified form was running out at the end of the 18th century, as public opinion turned to respectability and seriousness even faster than the playwrights did. Interconnected causes for this shift in taste were demographic change, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, William's and Mary's dislike of the theatre, and the lawsuits brought against playwrights by the Society for the Reformation of Manners (founded in 1692). When Jeremy Collier attacked Congreve and Vanbrugh in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698, he was confirming a shift in audience taste that had already taken place. At the much-anticipated all-star première in 1700 of The Way of the World, Congreve's first comedy for five years, the audience showed no great enthusiasm for that subtle and almost melancholy work. The comedy of sex and wit was about to be replaced by the drama of obvious sentiment and exemplary morality.
Example: The Provoked Wife
[edit]After Restoration comedy
[edit]Stage history
[edit]During the 18th and 19th centuries, the sexual frankness of Restoration comedy ensured that theatre producers would cannibalize it or adapt it with a heavy hand, rather than actually perform it. Today, Restoration comedy is again appreciated on the stage. The classics, Wycherley's The Country Wife and The Plain-Dealer, Etherege's The Man of Mode, and Congreve's Love For Love and The Way of the World have competition not only from Vanbrugh's The Relapse and The Provoked Wife, but from such dark unfunny comedies as Thomas Southerne's The Wives Excuse. Aphra Behn from being considered unstageable has had a major renaissance, with The Rover now a repertory favourite.
Literary criticism
[edit]In literary criticism, distaste for sexual impropriety kept Restoration comedy locked up in a critical poison cupboard for 250 years. Victorian critics like William Hazlitt, although valuing the literary qualities of the canonical writers Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve, always found it necessary to temper aesthetic praise with heavy moral condemnation. Aphra Behn received the condemnation without the praise, since outspoken sex comedy was considered particularly offensive coming from a woman author.
Academic Restoration comedy enthusiasts were an embattled minority at the turn of the 20th century. An example is the important editor Montague Summers, whose work ensured that the plays of Aphra Behn remained in print. In-depth analysis of individual plays followed, but was long restricted to he three canonical writers Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve, up to and including Norman N. Holland's important study The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve (1959).
"Critics remain astonishingly defensive about the masterpieces of this period", wrote Robert D. Hume as late as 1976. Over the last few decades, that statement has finally become untrue, as Restoration comedy has been acknowledged a rewarding subject for high theory analysis, and Wycherley's The Country Wife, long branded the most obscene play in the English language, has become something of an academic favourite. The exclusive focus on Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve has been replaced by a broad study of "minor" comedies, made possible by Internet access to the large holdings of 17th-century plays at the British Library (unfortunately by subscription only). Interest in women playwrights has been particularly intense, including besides Aphra Behn bla and bla, compare list below.
Modern milestone approaches have been those of ... hmmm ...Norman Holland, Rose Zimbardo, Thomas Fujimura. .... Robert D. Hume's The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century, an invaluable resource for anybody with an interest in these plays, is an almost season-by-season history based on a reading of all preserved plays performed in London in the 1660—1710 period, including the 375 new plays 1660-1700. ... A small selection of seminal studies appears in the References section below.
Nevertheless, as an academic field, Restoration comedy still remains understudied today.
List of notable Restoration comedies
[edit]Charles Sedley, The Mulberry-garden (1668)
George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, The Rehearsal (1671)
John Dryden, Marriage-A-la-Mode (1672)
William Wycherley, The Country Wife (1675), The Plain-Dealer (1676)
George Etherege, Love in a Tub (1664), The Man of Mode (1676)
Aphra Behn, The Rover (1677), The Roundheads (1681), The Rover, Part II (1681), The Lucky Chance (1686)
Thomas Shadwell, Bury Fair (1689)
Thomas Southerne, Sir Anthony Love (1690), The Wives Excuse (1691)
William Congreve, The Old Bachelor (1693), Love For Love (1695), The Way of the World (1700)
John Vanbrugh, The Relapse (1696), The Provoked Wife (1697)
References
[edit]- Fisk, Deborah Payne (ed.) (2000). The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Fujimura, Thomas H. (1952). The Restoration Comedy of Wit. Princeton.
- Howe, Elizabeth (1992). The First English Actresses: Women and Drama 1660–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Van Lennep, William (ed.) (1965). The London Stage 1660—1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments & Afterpieces Together with Casts, Box-Receipts and Contemporary Comment Compiled From the Playbills, Newspapers and Theatrical Diaries of the Period, Part 1: 1660-1700. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
External links
[edit]Well-informed discussions of Restoration comedy are unfortunately rare on the Internet. Many e-texts of the comedies themselves are available through subscription services only.
- John Vanbrugh, The Provoked Wife. Use with caution, this is an abridged and bowdlerised text.