A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment [4] 1350000744, 9781350000742, 135044071X, 9781350440715

Table of contents :
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS vii
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS x
EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
SERIES PREFACE xiv
Introduction / Elizabeth Kraft 1
1. Form / Brian Corman 27
2. Theory / Jean I. Marsden 49
3. Praxis: The Practice of Comedy in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century / Laura J. Rosenthal 69
4. Identities: Deception, Discovery, and the Paradox of the Dark Lantern / Heather Ladd 93
5. The Body: Performing Comic Eighteenth-Century Embodiment / Misty G. Anderson 119
6. Politics and Power / Aparna Gollapudi 143
7. Laughter: Enlightenment Philosophies of Laughter, from Superiority Theory to Incongruity Theory / Andrew Benjamin Bricker 171
8. Ethics / Melvyn New 197
NOTES 221
REFERENCES 227
INDEX 243

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF COMEDY VOLUME 4

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A Cultural History of Comedy General Editors: Andrew McConnell Stott and Eric Weitz Volume 1 A Cultural History of Comedy in Antiquity Edited by Michael Ewans Volume 2 A Cultural History of Comedy in the Middle Ages Edited by Martha Bayless Volume 3 A Cultural History of Comedy in the Early Modern Age Edited by Andrew McConnell Stott Volume 4 A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Enlightenment Edited by Elizabeth Kraft Volume 5 A Cultural History of Comedy in the Age of Empire Edited by Matthew Kaiser Volume 6 A Cultural History of Comedy in the Modern Age Edited by Louise Peacock

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF COMEDY

IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT VOLUME 4 Edited by Elizabeth Kraft

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Elizabeth Kraft and contributors, 2020 Elizabeth Kraft and contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this work. Cover image: Thalia, Muse of Comedy (cropped), 1739, Jean-Marc Nattier, French, 1685–1766, Oil on canvas 53 1/2 x 49 in. (135.9 x 124.5 cm) Signed and dated at the left on the column: Natteir pinxit 1739 © The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, museum purchase, Mildred Anna Williams Collection, 1954.59 For legal purposes the Editor’s Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: HB Set:

978-1-3500-0074-2 978-1-3500-0082-7

Series: Cultural Histories Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

vii x

EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

SERIES PREFACE

xiv

Introduction Elizabeth Kraft

1

1 Form Brian Corman

27

2 Theory Jean I. Marsden

49

3 Praxis: The Practice of Comedy in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century Laura J. Rosenthal

69

4 Identities: Deception, Discovery, and the Paradox of the Dark Lantern Heather Ladd

93

5 The Body: Performing Comic Eighteenth-Century Embodiment Misty G. Anderson

119

v

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6 Politics and Power Aparna Gollapudi 7 Laughter: Enlightenment Philosophies of Laughter, from Superiority Theory to Incongruity Theory Andrew Benjamin Bricker

CONTENTS

143

171

8 Ethics Melvyn New

197

NOTES

221

REFERENCES

227

INDEX

243

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5

Geraldine McEwan, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud in School for Scandal. William Hogarth, Characters and Caricaturas. William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, toilette scene. Hugh Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer Act 2, Scene 1. Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy.

7 12 13 20 24

CHAPTER ONE 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

Dame Edith Evans as Lady Fidget in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Johann Zoffany, a scene from Love in a Village. William Hogarth, The Authors Benefit Pasquin. School For Scandal. Thomas Rowlandson, illustration to Henry Fielding’s Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his friend Mr Abraham Adams.

34 39 40 41 44

CHAPTER TWO 2.1 2.2 2.3

Le Cid, title page. The Dutch burning English ships during the Raid on the Medway. Oberon, Titania, and Puck with dancing fairies.

53 55 67

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER THREE 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

William Hogarth, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. Interior of Drury Lane, 1804. Exterior of Covent Garden Theatre. Frontispiece, The Devil to Pay. Harlequin. Frances Abington as Phillis in The Conscious Lovers.

70 74 75 79 81 89

CHAPTER FOUR 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5

J. E. Millais, Rosalind, and Celia. Hugh Thomson, illustration, She Stoops to Conquer Act 3, Scene 1. “The Buck Metamorphosed or Mr Foote in the character of the Englishman return’d from Paris,” 1754. The Masque, c. 1650. David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard in The Suspicious Husband.

95 99 102 105 105

CHAPTER FIVE 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8

Charlotte Munson (Miranda), Charles Pasternak (Marplot), and Brian Mani (Sir Frances) in The Busy Body. Illustration of characters from the Commedia dell’arte play. Lauren Pennline (Isabinda), Emily Kicklighter (Patch), and Terry Weber (Sir Jealous) in The Busy Body. Joshua Reynolds, “Mrs. Abington as the Comic Muse.” Jeff Dickamore (Sir George), Charlotte Munson (Miranda), and Brian Mani (Sir Francis) in The Busy Body. Jeff Dickamore (Sir George) and Charlotte Munson (Miranda) in The Busy Body. Charles Pasternak (Marplot) and Charlotte Munson (Miranda) in The Busy Body. Jeff Dickamore (Sir George), Jude Vincent (Charles), and Charles Pasternak (Marplot) in The Busy Body.

125 127 132 135 136 138 139 140

CHAPTER SIX 6.1 6.2 6.3

Idol Worship or the way to preferment, c. 1740. An “official” print commemorating and celebrating the birth of the king’s son, James Francis Edward, in June 1688. Satirical print of Mary of Modena with infant

144 153

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

6.4 6.5 6.6

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James Stuart and Father Petre. The Cobler of Preston, frontispiece. The Festival of the Golden Rump (1737). John of Gaunt in Love, Or Mars on his knees (1749).

154 157 165 168

CHAPTER SEVEN 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Thomas Rowlandson, Laughter (1800). James Caldwall, Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis (1798). Three grotesque heads of big-nosed old men, laughing, c. 1720–66. George Cruickshank, Laugh & Grow Fat [1818?].

182 183 185 195

CHAPTER EIGHT 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Francis Hayman, “The Expulsion” (1749). William Hogarth, “The Funeral of Chyrstom & Marcella vindicating herself.” “The Tub Preacher,” Tale of a Tub. Morea le Jeune, ejection of Candide from the Baron’s Castle. “Yorik, The Monk, and Madame L—in the inn courtyard at Calais.”

200 202 207 212 215

CONTRIBUTORS

Misty G. Anderson is the James R. Cox Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she also holds courtesy appointments in the departments of Theater and Religious Studies. Anderson is the author of Imagining Methodism in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Enthusiasm, Belief, and the Borders of the Self (2012) and Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage (2002), as well as numerous articles on performance and gender in the long eighteenth century. She is a coeditor of the new Routledge Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama and Performance (2017 and 2019) along with Kristina Straub and Danny O’Quinn. She has worked as a dramaturg for the Clarence Brown Theatre and produced a documentary about their 2017 production of The Busy Body. She is currently completing a third book project, God on Stage. Andrew Benjamin Bricker is an assistant professor of English Literature in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, in Belgium. His forthcoming book, Libel and Lampoon: Satire in the Courts, 1670–1792, is about satire and the development of defamation law. Brian Corman is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Toronto. His work is largely on drama, fiction, and literary theory. His publications include Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy, 1660-1710, Women Novelists before Jane Austen: The Critics and Their Canons, and (as editor) The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy. Aparna Gollapudi is Associate Professor of English at Colorado State University. Her book Moral Reform in Comedy and Culture, 1696–1742 (2011) discusses the socio-political and performative implications of reform plots in early x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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eighteenth-century comedies by playwrights such as Cibber, Steele, Centlivre, Johnson, and Hoadly. In addition she has worked on eighteenth-century child performers and representations of children in a variety of cultural narratives, from legal and literary to political and economic. Elizabeth Kraft is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. She is author of Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction (1992), Laurence Sterne Revisited (1996), Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire (2008), and Restoration Stage Comedies and Hollywood Remarriage Films (2017). Heather Ladd is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge, where she teaches and researches Restoration and eighteenth-century literature. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830, Authorship, Literary Imagination, and Theatre Notebook. Recently, alt.theatre, a Canadian theater magazine, published her stage adaptation of Charlotte Charke’s autobiography, which she has performed. She is currently co-editing (with Leslie Ritchie) a collection on English theatrical anecdotes. Jean I. Marsden is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut, where she teaches Restoration and eighteenth-century literature and drama. She is the author of Theatres of Feeling: Affect, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage (2019), Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the Eighteenth-Century English Stage (2006), and The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (1995). Melvyn New, Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida, has been publishing on eighteenth-century literature for fifty years. He served as General Editor of the University of Florida Edition of the Works of Sterne, in nine volumes (1978–2014). Recent essays include “Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison and Sterne: A Study in Influence,” Modern Philology 115.2 (2017); with Robert G. Walker, “Who Killed Tom Cumming the Quaker? Recovering the Life Story of an Eighteenth-Century Adventurer,” Modern Philology 116.3 (2019); and “Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and the City,” in Samuel Johnson Among the Modernists, ed. Anthony W. Lee (2019). He has been the Book Review Editor for The Scriblerian for almost twenty years. Laura J. Rosenthal is Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of the forthcoming Ways of the World: Theater and Cosmopolitanism in the Restoration and Beyond, as well as Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2006; paperback, 2015) and Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern Drama: Gender, Authorship, Literature Property (1996). She is editor of Nightwalkers: Prostitute Narratives

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

from the Eighteenth Century (2008); and co-editor (with Donna Heiland) of Literary Study, Measurement, and the Sublime: Disciplinary Assessment (2011) and (with Mita Choudhury) of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (2002). She currently edits the journal Restoration: Studies in Literary Culture 1660–1700.

EDITOR’S ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the Department of English and the Franklin College of the University of Georgia for support during the preparation of this book. I am particularly grateful for the expert editorial assistance of Kara Krewer. I am also grateful to Andrew Stott and Eric Weitz who approached me about editing the Enlightenment volume of this series and who were always encouraging and helpful as the work proceeded. My greatest debt is to the eight contributors to this volume. Their erudition, creativity, and enthusiasm made the project a pleasure.

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SERIES PREFACE

One of the best places to look for the deep-lying thoughts, feelings, and presumptions of a society is in its comedy. Any historical text rewards informed study for the insights into sociocultural contexts that reside sometimes invisibly in and between its lines. Texts associated with comedy and the comic go that step deeper by virtue of being built upon a generic presumption of insider status. Umberto Eco, the writer, philosopher, and semiotician, intimated as much in a 1980 essay1 when he pointed out that, unlike tragedy, comedy assumes a nigh conspiratorial stance towards the society it renders. According to Eco, the tragic journeys of, say, Orestes and Madame Bovary, may derive from societies differing to some extent from our own, but the codified injunctions regarding retribution and adultery are made eminently clear as part and parcel of their textual worlds. In comic texts, on the other hand, we encounter the fact that comedy does not always travel well, and “without a degree in classics we don’t know exactly why the Socrates of Aristophanes should make us laugh” (1995: 270). Eco concludes that, whereas tragedy will acknowledge the social rule being violated and, indeed, examine its validity, “comic works take the rule for granted, and don’t bother to restate it” (1995: 272). Building upon this principle, comedy trades on that within society which needs no introduction—it takes as given the rules and structures it breaks, varies, and usually reaffirms. A probing of the comic practices of other times and places, with a critical light shone on their assumptions by the many contributors assembled in these volumes, stands to expose considerable tensions between individuals and society. A cultural history of comedy, then, promises wide-ranging insight through the examination of both how it presents experience on the ground, and what further it reveals about what goes without saying in the everyday life beneath it. xiv

SERIES PREFACE

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At best comedy identifies itself only in soft focus. The six volumes of this series provide extensive evidence that there is little enough basis for generalization about comedy as to render anything one might hope to claim panoramically about it all but meaningless. Each of the volumes serves to impress how differently comedy has been defined, idealized, practiced, and received over the past few thousand years. As a proto-genre, it arose in and through Greek and Roman cultures in the crucible of the dawning European civilization we have come to call Antiquity. Its subsequent invocation as a descriptor for other types of literature and performance retains an inescapably western orientation, even though formal features associated with comedy— notably, playful or humorous registers—can be found in ancient texts from around the world. While reference to texts and thought beyond western contexts appear occasionally in these volumes, the prevailing focus remains within such frames of reference. We have looked to organize our Cultural History of Comedy into eight themes across the six volumes, both for manageability and to suit readers pursuing circumscribed perspectives. Each volume begins with an introduction that aims to orient the reader in period and context. Three of the themes— Form, Theory, and Praxis—might appear in many a broad treatment of art as a cultural object of study, with three more—Identity, Politics and Power, and Ethics—representing its social implications and supplying lines of inquiry relevant to studies in other subjects, as well. The rooting of human experience in the Body has garnered increased attention over the past half century and more, and on several levels remains of particular interest to a vision of the world through comedy. Laughter, of course, is a theme that appears the most viable throughline for comedy, all but definitive of the transaction between comic text and spectator/reader. The corpus of comedy-related thought and practice is sprawling and everexpanding, and so to some extent, each of the contributors has customized an approach to the theme according to their scholarly spheres. We have, in any case, tried to ensure that the fifty-four essays contained in these volumes (eight themed essays plus an introduction in each one) offer themselves accessibly to more than a strictly academic readership. In fact, you will find herein a range of orientations and writing styles not limited to any given band of conventional scholarly approach. Whatever the cause or nature of any given reader’s interest, there are intriguing and, indeed, revealing times ahead within the pages of this and the other volumes. Andrew McConnell Stott and Eric Weitz, General Editors

xvi

Introduction ELIZABETH KRAFT

The Enlightenment is a complicated term, even considered, as in this volume, a denomination of a historical period.1 There is general agreement in the fields of literary and historical studies that the Enlightenment is closely synonymous with the “eighteenth century,” but in both fields of English studies (in particular) even that term is subject to debate. The inclusive dates for eighteenth-century English literary history vary. A typical span would be 1660–1789, that is, from the Restoration of the Stuart Monarchy to the beginning of the French Revolution which many in England supported, or 1660–1798, from the period defined by the tastes of the libertine court of Charles II to the publication of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads which announced a new kind of aesthetic dominated by the voice of a poet as “a man speaking to men” in the “real language of men” (Wordsworth 1802: xxviii, i). The Preface to Lyrical Ballads in which Wordsworth clearly articulated this aesthetic was not included in the 1798 edition. Its publication in the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads encourages an even neater conclusion to the “age,” though some would argue that a significantly new literary, social, and political culture that included a consideration for the common man did not begin in England until 1832, the year of the first Reform Bill. The brief Restoration period (1660–85) is not a return to the culture that existed prior to 1649 (the execution of Charles I). It is, instead, a period of skepticism and questioning, harbingers of Enlightenment thought, significantly buoyed by a flourishing of comic literary forms. The political tensions of the English Civil War (the power struggle between Parliament and the Monarchy) persisted through the Restoration period and were not significantly resolved until 1689, the year of the Glorious Revolution, which saw the peaceful 1

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deposing of a king regarded as authoritarian in favor of a constitutional monarchy. This political event proved inspiring for France as that country began its long journey toward civil conflict. Therefore, the transnational Enlightenment is sometimes delimited as the hundred-year period from the Glorious Revolution in England to the Revolution in France, 1689–1789. The geographical spread of Enlightenment culture extended beyond England and France, but those two countries were the major players—politically, ideologically, and culturally. As Peter Gay has put it, “while the essential ideas of the Enlightenment were adumbrated in England, the battleground on which these ideas were first tested was France” (Gay 1973: 119). The essential culture of the Enlightenment (especially its theatrical comedy), however, was adumbrated in France and tested in England. After all, 1642 marked the end of public theater in England until the Restoration, eighteen years later. A generation of actors and playwrights was lost; no boy actors were trained. What had been the normal theatrical culture in England prior to 1642 was dealt a death-blow. And the restored monarch had spent his formative years—at least in terms of the development of taste—in “France, Italy, and Holland” where he “probably saw, and would understandably have been entertained by seeing, women on the stage” (Styan 1986: 89).

ENLIGHTENMENT IDEAS Though the major proto-Enlightenment thinkers early on were English thinkers working their way through the killing of a king and the establishment of parliamentary power, the Frenchman René Descartes (1596–1650) also must be acknowledged as foundational to Enlightenment thought. His “cogito ergo sum” highlights the importance of thinking and reason and individuality. Seemingly without fully comprehending the radical nature of his turn to the scientific exploration of truth (Descartes remained a Roman Catholic, attributed his insights to visions, and declared that the soul of man resides in the pineal gland), this philosopher is widely regarded as the herald of modernity. Still, he articulated no radical break with the authorities of his time. His followers, acknowledged and unacknowledged, French and otherwise, did. Influencing and reflecting the skeptical intellectual landscape in England, and indeed in all of Europe, during this period are Thomas Hobbes (1588– 1679), John Locke (1632–1704), Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), David Hume (1711–76), and Adam Smith (1723–90). The social and political ramifications of the English Civil War prompted Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) which posited a theory of monarchial rule based on the notion of social contract. Hobbes is famous for his speculative description of life in a state of nature, which he

INTRODUCTION

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defines as, inevitably, a state of war where “every man is Enemy to every man” ([1651] 2010: 78). In such a state there is no place for Industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. —Hobbes [1651] 2010: 78 To secure the peace we need for civilized life—agriculture, navigation, building, knowledge, arts, and letters—we must eliminate the threat of violent death and create conditions in which human life can be lived in community, competence, health, and physical comfort. Therefore, in Hobbes’s view, we must give up some of our freedoms to an absolute, powerful monarch who can guarantee the safety and security we need to flourish as individuals, a species, and a nation. To Hobbes, a peaceful, healthy society depends on an absolute authority at the head of that society and submission to that authority on the part of society itself. In this emphasis on absolutism, Hobbes does not anticipate Enlightenment thought, but in his insistence on the rational theorizing of government and in the skepticism that led him to exclude religion from his philosophical meditations on the topic, he models the approach of those more strictly identified as Enlightenment thinkers. Hobbes’s definition of a flourishing society includes, as we see above, the arts. While he does not have a fully articulated theory of comedy, he does address the nature and cause of laughter which he attributes to either “Sudden Glory” (a surprising pleasure in one’s superiority) or “apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (Hobbes [1651] 2010: 37; for a fuller discussion, see Chapter 7). Moreover, Hobbes’s philosophy was important in drawing attention to, and thereby beginning the period’s discussion of, the idea of social contract and the philosophical problem of the nature of man. John Locke’s revised notion of social contract was founded on the premise that human beings are social creatures who, in the main, respect the liberty of others as they value it for themselves and their families. In Locke’s view of the social contract between a people and its government, it is the people’s power that is greater. We consent to be ruled, but when our rulers violate our natural rights (life, liberty, and property), we have the right to withdraw our consent and to enter into another social contract (to form, in the words of the American founding fathers who were following in Locke’s footsteps, “a more perfect union”).

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Locke is also famous for articulating the importance of individual conscience in matters of religious choice as well as the need to separate religion from matters of state. Locke’s view of social contract found a ready English audience following the Glorious Revolution of 1689 in which the Roman Catholic James II was replaced on the throne of England by the Protestant monarchs William and Mary. While neither comedy nor laughter is a subject of Locke’s concern, his theories had implications beyond government as the age tended to see an analogy between the family and the state. What begins as discussion of social contract in terms of state politics quickly becomes adapted to rule in the home. It is significant that both Hobbes and Locke view women in general and wives in particular as subjects with rights, not the property of fathers or husbands. With marriage the central trope of comedic genres, the influence of social contract will become increasingly evident on the stages and pages of Enlightenment comic cultural production. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, challenges Hobbes’s implicit definition of man as basically brutish, violent, and selfish, positing, instead, a specifically human moral sensibility that is innate. This sensibility is benevolent and inclines mankind toward harmony in society through a natural tendency to seek the good of the whole. The notion of this innate moral sense becomes important to Enlightenment thinkers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith in Britain, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, Baruch Spinoza in Holland, Denis Diderot and (for a time) Voltaire in France. Belief in a basic moral sense that is innate and universal in individuals as well as societies produces the kind of philosophical optimism that underwrites much Enlightenment activity—from revolutionary movements to capitalistic enterprises. It is also removed from specific religious doctrine and particular nationalistic concerns. As such, it has an impact on comedy in at least two ways. On the one hand, it encourages sympathy for characters regardless of class, creed, or nation, producing not derisive but humane laughter at foibles and mistakes. On the other hand, because the behavior of individuals, nations, and cultures so often belies the notion of an innate sense of right and wrong, set against the ideal of a perfectible world full of perfectible people, reality often provoked the satirist’s pen—not from a sense of human depravity so much as from a sense of our stubborn refusal to follow our better instincts. Shaftesbury himself wrote a good bit about ridicule and humor (two topics closely related to comedy). In his Letter Concerning Enthusiasm, for example, he defends ridicule as a necessary part of a free society: “I have often wonder’d,” he says, “to see Men of Sense so mightily alarm’d at the approach of any thing like Ridicule on certain Subjects; as if they mistrusted their own Judgments. For what Ridicule can lie against Reason?” (Shaftesbury 1708: 16–17). Indeed, ridicule can serve as a kind of “Test” of the subjects we treat with “Gravity”

INTRODUCTION

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(1708: 17). Gravity, though, can also serve as a mask, Shaftesbury points out; it is, indeed, “the Essence of Imposture” though it is also the appropriate attitude toward important subjects and positions (1708: 17). Exposing the grave to ridicule is the only way “to know true Gravity from the false” (1708: 18). Laurence Sterne echoes this insight when he describes his character and alterego Yorick as one who “had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity;—not to gravity as such:—for where gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or serious of mortal men . . . but he was an enemy to the affectation of it” (Sterne [1759] 1978: 1.28). Yorick endorsed La Rochefoucauld’s moral maxim that gravity is “a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind” (Sterne [1759] 1978: 1.28–9; original italics). Sterne’s Tristram Shandy shares with other works of the Enlightenment a delight in ridiculing the affectation of seriousness and exposing the mental imperfections lurking beneath. In Shaftesbury’s discussion of humor, we see the class biases endemic in Enlightenment society despite the great strides made in the period toward democratic reform. For example, Shaftesbury distinguishes the kinds of humor that appeal to the “Vulgar” who will “swallow any sordid Jest, any mere Drollery or Buffoonery” and “Men of Sense and Breeding” who require “finer and truer Wit” (Shaftesbury 1708: 17). When David Hume later invokes taste in defining the proper subjects for comedy, he too mentions class stratification. A writer who wishes to “affect the mind with pleasure” will eschew “the pleasantries of a waterman, the observations of a peasant, the ribaldry of a porter or hackney coachman” which, though “natural” are “disagreeable.” To be sure, the “chit-chat of the tea-table, copied faithfully and at length,” would also make “an insipid comedy” in Hume’s opinion—adding gender bias to class snobbery. Hume opines that Nature must be “drawn with all her graces and ornaments,” with “strokes . . . strong and remarkable, [that] convey a lively image to the mind.” His example is one that inspired many Enlightenment comic writers, from Henry Fielding to Tobias Smollett to Sterne: “The absurd naivety of Sancho Pancho is represented in such inimitable colours by Cervantes, that it entertains as much as the picture of the most magnanimous hero or softest lover” (Hume [1777] 1985a: 191–2). Hume’s fellow Scotsmen, Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith, also follow Shaftesbury in challenging Hobbes, Hutcheson arguing, as Andrew Stott has noted, that “ ‘nature has given us a sense of the ridiculous,’ ” simply for our “ ‘pleasure’ ” (Stott 2005: 135). Hutcheson’s sense of what makes us laugh has to do with the basic comic trope of “juxtaposition of incompatible contrasts” (2005: 135). It is the ludicrous that amuses. Stott elaborates: “As incongruity plays with taxonomies and hierarchies it suggests that these hierarchies are permeable and fluid rather than rigid and permanent. The collision or juxtaposition of the great with the low, or the humble adopting the airs of the

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elite, take their humour from a displacement of order that simultaneously acknowledges order and reveals absurdity” (2005: 137). Speaking to his students at the University of Glasgow in 1763, Adam Smith seems more open to the kinds of humor that occur in daily life. In fact, he comments that in ordinary conversation, only “Ridiculous Stories” are “at all tollerable”; storytellers who attempt to awe us by the marvelous or to move us by the “lamentable” are suspect because in order to affect the reader they have to “paun [the stories] upon us for true ones” (Smith [1763] 1985: 119). The teller of ridiculous tales just wants to make us laugh; our belief in facticity is not only unimportant but undesired: “all they seem to have in view is to divert us . . . [and as] we perceive that this is their design, we are not very anxious whether the Story be just as they tell it or not” ([1763] 1985: 118). In art, the license we give to comic storytellers extends to tragedy and epic and ode and elegy; however, comedy maintains its special connection with the ordinary as its effect depends on character, not circumstances, “[p]ersons in low life either equall or inferior to ourselves” ([1763] 1985: 124). Enlightenment comedy also demands new characters, Smith says: “We can not always be laughing at misers, or fops” ([1763] 1985: 125). Comedy, as Smith told his students in 1763, differs from tragedy which is driven by circumstance, not character. All we need in tragedy is a worthy person in distressed circumstances. Comedy depends on variety. The effect of moral sense philosophy on comedy was most keenly felt in the turn to sentimental comedy in England and comédie larmoyante in France. These comedies (such as Richard Steele’s 1722 The Conscious Lovers and Destouches’s 1732 Le Glorieux) featured plots with happy resolutions in the triumph of virtue and the overcoming of vice. The emphasis on sentiment was evident in the domain of the emerging novel as well as on the stages of England and Europe. As Kenneth Richards has pointed out, these works “helped to prepare the ground for the more ambitious drame bourgeois,” serious drama focused on “self-conscious moral rectitude, emotional excess and the interplay of over-refined sensibilities” (1991a: 101). In England, such a move toward the melodramatic can be seen in George Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731), the English version of drame bourgeois, but also in a new commitment to comedy that celebrated virtue without sacrificing ridicule and laughter such as Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and School for Scandal (1777). In the final work, indeed, Hobbesian man (Joseph Surface) meets Shaftesburian man (Charles Surface). Joseph, who spouts pieties through the play, is exposed as a hypocritical seducer in “the screen scene,” one of the most famous comic “reveals” of the eighteenthcentury stage (see Figure 0.1). The seemingly rakish Charles, on the other hand, is discovered through the course of the play to be kind-hearted and sentimental, devoted to his uncle and charitable toward the poor. The audience

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FIGURE 0.1: Geraldine McEwan, Ralph Richardson, and John Gielgud in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Photo by John Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

for such morally inflected, though still funny, theatrical productions expanded throughout the period as commerce created a class of consumers whose tastes were formed by middle-class experiences and values rather than aristocratic privilege. As noted earlier, Peter Gay posits that England began the discussion of Enlightenment ideals, but France put those ideals to the test. Indeed, in France, one risked one’s life for enlightenment (Leigh 2011: 353). The Protestant Reformation (1517–1638) had prepared the grounds in England and Germany

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for the questioning of authority that was the hallmark of Enlightenment thought. In 1700, France remained a Roman Catholic nation (as, of course, did Italy, Spain, and other European countries). Overtly defining themselves as deists, and privately embracing atheism, Denis Diderot and Jean le Ronde d’Alembert pursued the venture of amassing human knowledge as a base upon which to build a better future. Religion has a place in their encyclopedia as a subject that has concerned humankind, but it bears no explanatory value. Celebrated by Kant as the period in which mankind emerged from a long “nonage” into freedom of thought, belief, and action (Kant [1784] 1973: 384), the term “Enlightenment” bothered later commentators such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno who would find the period’s focus on rationality the seedbed of incipient horror.2 Whereas for Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers (those of the Scottish Enlightenment, with their view of stadial history, in particular) the emphasis on reason and improvement signaled an ameliorative historical process, for the twentieth-century thinkers, such emphasis ratified programs of exclusion and extermination in pursuit of nationalistic and racial ideals and a concomitant descent into the horrors of fascism and Nazism. Philosophical optimism, however, was not embraced by all Enlightenment thinkers, and the horrors decried by Adorno and Horkheimer were fully anticipated and warned against by eighteenth-century satirists. As Jonathan Swift put it, humankind is not by definition (as often claimed) “animale rationale” but more accurately described as “rationis capax” ([1725] 2010: 676)—capable of reason, but often not availing themselves of that capacity or availing themselves only to promote false systems and mistaken beliefs. And Voltaire went even further to dispel the notions of human progress and perfection in Candide’s conclusion: faced with the enormous evils of life— natural and manmade—the best we can do is tend our own gardens. Significantly, of course, Swift and Voltaire are two of the foremost humorists of the period. And satire, such as they and other Enlightenment authors practiced, is, perhaps, legitimately deemed the prevailing comic sensibility of the time. Yet, we cannot sum up the period as an age of satire. Many other comic forms flourished, and some were invented, in the Enlightenment. All were infused with an embracing of skepticism—that is, the willingness to challenge received notions and a tendency to view with a jaded eye all professions of expertise and mastery. Despite this defining spirit of skepticism, however, the European Enlightenment continued to venerate the literature and learning of classical Greece and Rome, and many of the period’s authors remained (in significant measure) committed to the Christian vision. Interestingly enough, veneration of the classics yielded a focus on the one topic the classical authors left thinly theorized: comedy. And commitment to Christianity yielded new comic stereotypes in pursuit of a workable modern

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theology. In short, the prevailing characteristics of the Enlightenment are curiosity, skepticism regarding received notions and authorities, a belief in the perfectibility of mankind and the world, a confidence in reason as the tool by which to pursue that perfectibility, as well as an acute wariness about the misuses of reason due to its vulnerability to fanaticisms, enthusiasms, and misuses. After all, Swift’s Modest Proposal is logically consistent and rigorously argued—both the point and the problem of that text.3

ENLIGHTENMENT COMEDY Comedy is also a complicated term. Enlightenment authors often bemoaned the absence of an Aristotelian treatise on comedy, but these regrets do seem to be crocodile tears. The lacuna provided space for comedy to define itself in various ways, untrammeled by the edicts of the classical past. Of course, Aristotle did leave some hints (in the Poetics) about the province of comedy: ordinary life and the ridiculous. And Enlightenment authors were also (generally) classicists who knew about Aristophanes and Menander. Classical precedents resonated productively with Enlightenment emphases on empiricism and critique. For the period’s understanding of comedy, we profitably turn to that “monument of the Enlightenment,” the Encyclopédie; ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers, published from 1751–72 (Kafker 1991: 145). Jean François Marmontel wrote the essay on “Comedy” for the Encyclopédie. He defines comedy as “the imitation of social mores performed on stage” (Marmontel [1753] 2008). In treating the historical development of comedy, Marmontel notes its beginnings “on the wagon of Thespis” as “merely a clutch of insults addressed to passers-by by wine workers smeared with dregs.” In time poets raised the form “to a more decent level of theatre, and with more regular orderliness” until, eventually, Greek comedy was born. Not using the terms “Old Comedy” and “New Comedy,” Marmontel nevertheless rehearses what is still the standard understanding. The ancient period of Greek comedy was satiric and concerned “characters who were known and named, whose quirks and vices were imitated.” What he calls the “middle period” of Greek comedy is the age of Aristophanes during which the satire intensified and coarsened and crossed a legal line that today we would call libel or scandal. Marmontel pauses in his historical account to express wonder that “in the century of Molière” the Aristophanic type of comedy enjoyed a resurgence of popularity and approval. The same can be said of the comic spirit in England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. At the advent of the final stage of Greek comedy, i.e. “new comedy,” Marmontel observes (with more enthusiasm than accuracy), that comedy “stopped being satire, and assumed the respectable and decent form it has kept

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since” (Marmontel [1753] 2008). He quotes, with approval, the observation of Plutarch that “the muse of Aristophanes resembles a fallen woman; that of Menandres a decent woman” (original italics). Contradicting his earlier comment about the respectability of comedy following Menander, Marmontel notes that early Roman comedy, particularly the works of Plautus, “followed in the footsteps of Aristophanes,” as “it is easier to imitate coarseness and baseness, than delicacy and nobility.” Eventually, though, Terence introduced more sobriety to the comic stage of Rome, writing in the school of Menander. Neither poet receives unqualified praise: “one would like to see Plautus with the soul of Terence, and Terence with the wit of Plautus.” This tension between the specific and the universal, the bawdy/satirical and the elegant/moral is presented as a historical phenomenon by Marmontel, but, indeed, as Eric Weitz has observed, this tension is endemic to comedy as a form. From the beginning we see “the opposite pull of comedy between the universal and the localized” (Weitz 2009: 39), the archetypal and the recognizable, the pleasing and the instructive. While this pull is ancient, it is also transhistorical. The mid-to-late twentieth century, for example, provides excellent examples of Aristophanic comedy (e.g., Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin) as well as comedians who might be said to be more genial, more convinced “of society’s basic goodwill and underlying wisdom” (Weitz 2009: 51), such as Ellen Degeneres, Carol Burnett, and Billy Crystal. In the Enlightenment, these tensions were not only present, but matters of debate, conversation, and sometimes legislation. One name for the age, after all, is the neoclassical period; what wonder then that the patterns noted in the cultural productions of ancient Greece and Rome would be rearticulated and reinscribed in the 1700s. This period also witnessed the rise of the nation-state and the complex growth of national identity and cultural (and actual) imperialism. Therefore, we find in Marmontel’s theorizing of comedy a quite typical attention to national distinctions. His remarks are neither original nor idiosyncratic. They represent the standard French and English view of the different comic landscapes of Europe. The Spanish “who used to affect an ostentatious gravity in their mores, and a Romanesque pomposity,” Marmontel notes, have comedies “full of exaggerated incidents and characters” (Marmontel [1753] 2008). Italian comedy is distinguished for the “mutual jealousy of the little Italian states,” which led to plots featuring “men from Bologna, Venice, Naples or Bergamo, each displaying the dominant weakness of his own region.” While “[t]his bizarre mixture could not fail to succeed through its novelty,” Marmontel observes, Florence, Rome, and Naples have “replaced . . . [these] farces with the best comedies of Molière.” French comedy can be classed according to mores—“low comedy, bourgeois comedy and high comedy”—or (which he deems a “more essential category”) according to “the aims” of the comedy. Here, too, he lists three categories: comedy that “depicts vice” in order to

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correct it (satiric comedy), comedy that “makes men the playthings of events” in order to provoke laughter (situational comedy), or comedy that “touches the audience” (comédie larmoyante). The comedy of England, according to Marmontel, naturally arises from that nation’s “pride in thinking independently.” The English comic stage features characters with “personal peculiarities, which give rise to ridicule.” But, he asserts, “French comedy . . . has enriched the English theatre as much as differences in mores have allowed” (Marmontel [1753] 2008). Some Enlightenment commentators felt that national boundaries and cultural differences discouraged the importing and exporting of comic texts from nation to nation or even age to age. David Hume, for example, argued that comedy was pretty much relegated to home turf and present time: “comedy is not easily transferred from one age or nation to another” ([1777] 1985b: 245). Likewise, Anna Letitia Barbauld observes early in the nineteenth century in remarks included in her canon-making edition of the works of the British novelists (a nationalistic cultural enterprise): “Humour, like some fruits of delicate taste, should be enjoyed on the spot where it is produced. It loses its flavour by being carried abroad” (Barbauld 1810b: xxxii). In part, these observations seem true enough, but the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment militated against such narrowly nationalistic practices. For, to be sure, comedy did cross national boundaries, and, while the transference of tragedy and epic from country to country was facilitated by grand and universal themes, comedy’s specificity may have been the more effective ambassador for transnational understanding, especially given the movement away from stereotypes to individuals, from caricature to character. As Timothy Erwin says in an essay on the comic genius of William Hogarth, “national identity is . . . a composite social identity made up of various shifting alliances” (2001: 409). Hogarth’s print Characters and Caricaturas (see Figure 0.2) features many comic images of common characters in an aesthetic argument against the idealization of character types represented by the Carracci school on the continent, as Erwin explains. In the bottom center of the print are back-to-back comic portraits of Henry Fielding and Hogarth himself, in allusion to the commitment to the ridicule of vanity and the distinction they each make in their separate media between the portrayal of human nature (character) and exaggerations of such (caricature or, as Fielding has it in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, burlesque). Erwin has noted that in his insistence on portraying individual character rather than creating idealizations of universal types, Hogarth allies himself “with the realist cultural iconoclasm of other art forms taking shape at mid-century—most notably the novel” (2001: 393). Characters and Caricaturas served as the subscription ticket for Hogarth’s Marriage A-la-Mode. Erwin explains the ticket’s message: instead of holding “a

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FIGURE 0.2: William Hogarth, Characters and Caricaturas. Photo by Sepia Times/ Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

distorting mirror to human nature, [in the way of the Carraci school] . . . Marriage A-la-Mode will represent human nature as it truly is” (2001: 390). Even so, in the fourth plate (see Figure 0.3), much of our viewing pleasure comes from recognition of the comic national stereotypes before us: the French hairdresser, the German flutist, the Prussian soldier, the Italian castrati, the African servant in an Indian turban, the unsophisticated English country people, the equally (but differently) unsophisticated Londoners, with new money and no innate taste.

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FIGURE 0.3: William Hogarth, Marriage A-la-Mode, toilette scene, plate IV. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images.

The Encyclopédie reflects this tendency to mingle awareness of cosmopolitan exchange with insistence on national differences. The relatively brief (and unattributed) essay on humor begins by noting the relationship between humor and wit (and ascribing that relationship to the English): “The English use this word [humor] to describe original, surprising and unusual wit.” Jonathan Swift’s preeminence is duly noted: Among this nation’s authors, none had as much humor, or this original form of comic expression, as Swift, who, by the form he gave to his jokes, sometimes produced effects on his compatriots that you would not expect from reading serious and closely reasoned works. Ridiculum acri, etc (“A joke often decides. . .” Horace, Satires, Book I, Chapter 10). So in advising the English to eat the little children of Ireland with cauliflower, he caused the British government to re-examine its position at a time when they were preparing to deprive the Irish of the last resources of trade that they had left. The title of this pamphlet is A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, etc.

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Another of Swift’s works, Gulliver’s Travels, is a satire brimming with humor. In a similar style is Swift’s joke in which he predicted the exact date of death of Partridge, the author of almanacs. At the foreseen date, Swift attempted to prove to Partridge that he was indeed dead, despite the latter’s protests to the contrary. —“Humor” [1765] 2007 However, the article continues: “the English are by no means the only people who have had their fair share of humor.” And, indeed, even Swift “took a good deal of inspiration from the works of Rabelais and Cyrano de Bergerac,” so much so, the essay concludes, “[w]e could even say that generally this form of comedy is more a property of the light and merry spirit of the French than the serious and rational turn of mind of the English” (“Humor” [1765] 2007). The single most important French influence on the English stage is the same source that Marmontel defines as the “great model” for the contemporary French stage: Jean Baptiste-Poquelin, better known as Molière (and who also wielded influence on the comedies of other nations, Italy, in particular). Molière’s genius, according to Marmontel, was his “philosophical gaze, which sees not only the extremes, but the middle ground.” He elaborates: [B]etween the rascally hypocrite and the gullible believer, we see the good man who unmasks the villainy of the one and pities the credulity of the other. Molière juxtaposes the corrupt mores of society with the untamed probity of the Misanthropist: between these two extremes appears the moderation of the wise man, who hates vice and does not hate humanity. —Marmontel [1753] 2008 Molière “unites situation comedy with the comedy of character,” Marmontel continues. His characters “are engaged by the vices of the heart, or by the idiosyncrasies of the mind, in humiliating circumstances which expose them to the ridicule and contempt of the audience.” His example is the scene in which Harpagon, the miser, poses as a moneylender in conversation with a disguised Clenathe, his spendthrift son. Our amusement comes from our awareness of their established characters, their disguise, and the ridiculous situation in which they find themselves. The influence of Molière who dominated the French comic stage from the 1650s until his death in 1673 persisted well into the eighteenth century in both France and England. In France, of course, his outsized achievement and influence were perhaps most notable for the inspiration he afforded to his eighteenth-century comic followers, including Pierre Beaumarchais and Pierre de Marivaux. In England, references are frequent—and always offered in praise. In his prefatory remarks to Joseph Addison’s comedy The Drummer, for

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example, Richard Steele puffs the piece as containing “Scenes . . . written very much after Moliere’s Manner” (Steele 1715: [i]). Almost a century later, in her 1810 collection of The British Novelists, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1810a: iv) praises Frances Burney’s creation of comic character by identifying Harpagon as a source for Mr. Briggs, a miser in Cecilia (1782). For Molière, comic types such as the miser, the hypocrite, the prude, and the misanthrope were instructive mirrors meant to correct the play-going audience. But they were also simply amusing comic butts. And the range of his comic repertoire expanded the form in ways that the Enlightenment could exploit. In Larry F. Norman’s words, Molière “managed to assemble in a single corpus a remarkable range of the comic forms that flourished around him.” These forms include “high literary comedy . . . physical farce, biting social satire . . . [and] gently elegant pastoral” and featured narratives focused on “a vast spectrum, from . . . courtiers . . . to the beggar in the forest . . . from Latin-spouting university professors and pedantic poets . . . to the most education-deprived servant or sequestered girl” (Norman 2011: 274). Influenced by Italian commedia dell’arte and its cast of stock characters (Scaramouche, Pantalone, Harlequin, Capitano, Pulchinella, Pierrot) and routines (lazzi), Molière developed new characters and situations that provided comic vocabulary for later authors—the miser, the misanthrope, the hypocrite, the quack, the jealous husband, the social climber, the pedantic woman, the prude, among others. But Molière’s characters, while recognizable types, were also individuals. Indeed, his contemporaries often found specific likenesses in the behavior and personalities; there was, on the late seventeenth-century French stage, as on the late seventeenth-century English stage, “close resemblance between the subject matter depicted on stage and the audience viewing it” (Norman 2011: 275). If challenged, the justification for such specificity was didacticism, but, as Norman notes, “the end of the century offered no signs of a marked decline of pedantry, hypocrisy, or miserliness, despite being the targets of countless comedies” (2011: 283). The eighteenth-century comic world would continue to laugh at such targets (and others). In both France and England, the early decades of the century emphasized specific political satire along with the sentimental comedies discussed above. In England, Sir Robert Walpole’s annoyance at being a favorite butt of stage and journalistic comic turns led to the Licensing Act of 1737, which subjected all new plays to approval by the Lord Chamberlain. Recognizable targets of ridicule were therefore driven from the stage into the pages of the emerging novel. Henry Fielding, most notably, shifted comic attention to prose narrative, beginning with his parodic send-up of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) as Shamela (1741). When he begins to write comic fiction seriously, as it were, Fielding rejects burlesque, as noted above, as a form of caricature and distortion rather than a true reflection of human nature and

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contemporary mores. But he does so after he pens Shamela, a work rightly celebrated as one of the funniest parodies in world literature. In it, we see the dramatist’s exuberant delight in the ridiculous posturings of his venal, calculating protagonist. She, like the heroine on which she is based, presents herself in letters; and like Pamela, as well, Shamela has a flair for the dramatic. The following scene follows closely an episode in Richardson’s text wherein his virtuous heroine is attacked by her lecherous master while in bed with her fellow maidservant, the maternal Mrs. Jervis. Of course, Fielding’s Shamela is perfectly happy to be so besieged. Indeed, she has set the scene to entice her wealthy master into her bed—and she plays her part to perfection: Mrs. Jervis and I are just in Bed, and the Door unlocked; if my Master should come—Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense, as Parson Williams says. Well, he is in Bed between us, we both shamming a Sleep, he steals his Hand into my Bosom, which I, as if in my Sleep, press close to me with mine, and then pretend to awake.—I no sooner see him, but I scream out to Mrs. Jervis, she feigns likewise but just to come to herself; we both begin, she to becall, and I to bescratch very liberally. After having made a pretty free Use of my Fingers, without any great Regard to the Parts I attack’d, I counterfeit a Swoon. Mrs. Jervis then cries out, O, Sir, what have you done, you have murthered poor Pamela: she is gone, she is gone.— O what a Difficulty it is to keep one’s Countenance, when a violent Laugh desires to burst forth. —Fielding [1741] 2008: 165–6 Here it is as if we have a stage, stage directions, asides to the audience, and laughter. Following in the tradition of George Villiers’s The Rehearsal (1671), John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), and Fielding’s own Tragedy of Tragedies (1731), Shamela is an example of the spirit of jest and lampoon that emerged in the Enlightenment to undercut any cultural phenomenon or personage who took itself, himself, or herself too seriously.4 Enlightenment comedy and Enlightenment theories about comedy regularly invoke and, in that sense, reinforce the cultural symbols and practices popularly associated with various nations, sects, classes, and practices. Yet the cosmopolitanism of Enlightenment culture ensured a creative cross-pollination that militated against the rigid relegation of identity to class, nation, creed, or race. While subscribing to a notion of universal human nature, the Enlightenment’s comic authors both expanded the list of “types” that illustrated such a concept and developed nuanced responses to the ridiculous and flawed characters at the heart of their comic narratives. Even Swift, who could be darkly dismissive of “Nations professions and Communityes,” was sympathetic

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to the individuals of such classes: “I hate the tribe of Lawyers, but I love Councellor such a one, and Judge such a one for so with Physicians . . . Soldiers, English, Scotch, French, and the rest” (Swift [1725] 2010: 676). Henry Fielding, who self-consciously followed in the satiric tradition established by Swift, similarly noted the blend of universal and individual that ideally defined the comic character. His formulation, however, is designed to prevent readers from regarding his general satiric strokes as condemnations of specific, identifiable individuals: “I describe not Men, but Manners; not an Individual but a Species” (Fielding [1742] 1967: 189). Or so he says. Of course, he goes on to admit that “I have writ little more than I have seen,” but, even so, his characters are “not only alive, but [have] been so these 4000 Years” (Fielding [1742] 1967: 189). His point is “not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to thousands in their Closets, that they may contemplate their Deformity, and endeavour to reduce it” (Fielding [1742] 1967: 203). Enlightenment comedy features a typical range of characters reflective of the social structure of European culture at the time—libertine courtiers, young heiresses, impecunious second sons, mistresses or would-be mistresses a bit past their primes, lecherous or curmudgeonly old men, unfashionable or hyperfashionable men and women (objects of laughter, either way), lawyers, doctors, clergymen (generally exposed as vain pontificators of jargon), hoydenish country girls, country bumpkins (some lovable), money-obsessed merchants and many servants—savvy, hapless, clownish, pert—often employed by the narrative to move the plot along, sometimes even becoming (through an oftenused trope of mistaken or hidden identity) the surprise beneficiary of the comic happy ending. The plots generally pit the younger generation against the older and feature several couples in pursuit of love (ending, usually, in marriage) against a number of blocking agents (sometimes circumstantial, but often parental). Even Richard Steele’s Conscious Lovers (1722) which presents a world in which virtue has become fashionable includes the generational tension typical of this era’s comedy. Bevil, Jr. does not want to marry the young woman chosen for him by his father (Lucinda Sealand, daughter of a successful merchant). Belvil, Jr. has fallen in love with Indiana, a girl with no fortune and no family. Besides, his best friend, Myrtle, is in love with Lucinda, and she with him. The characters in this play (save for the self-centered fop, Cimberton, who also has his eye on Lucinda) generate confusion for themselves due to their overly scrupulous regard for one another. A little honesty between father and son, for example, would have put an end to one of the plot complications in the first act! In the end, however, the revelation that Indiana is Sealand’s long-lost daughter resolves the conundrum—Belvil, Jr. indeed marries into the Sealand family, as his father wished, and Cimberton walks away of his own accord since

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the dowry for which he wanted Lucinda is now just half what he’d expected. The play, as is true of most sentimental comedies or comedies larmoyantes, provides few laughable moments, but the cast of characters and the plot twists and turns bear close relationship to those of the more risible members of the Enlightenment comic canon. While Enlightenment comedy is recognizable by the characters and situations that were central to the lives of the readers and audiences of the time, it also features the standard comic motifs that transcend specific time and place. Crossconversations, double meanings, mistaken identities, scheming characters, lying characters, role playing, disguise, hidden characters, asides—all of these techniques characterize the comic landscape of the Enlightenment (as they do comic landscapes of all times).5 It is funny and always will be funny to know that one person is speaking on assumptions that are not shared by the person to whom he is talking. To take a famous example from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, young Marlow and his friend Hastings are on their way to see Mr. Hardcastle, a friend of Marlow’s father. The purpose for the visit is so that Marlow can meet Hardcastle’s daughter, Kate, and the hope is that the two young people will agree to marry one another, as their fathers design. Marlow is shy and awkward around genteel women, but quite the charming flirt with barmaids. The central joke of the play depends on the bargain between Kate and her father: if she dresses plainly in the evenings, according to her father’s desire, she is allowed to wear her beloved finery (silks and satins and so forth) in the mornings. When Marlow meets her as plain Kate, he’s forward and charming; when he meets her as fine Kate, he is a shy, mumbling fool. The mistakes begin even before the two are introduced, however, due to the fact that Marlow and Hastings are misled by Kate’s step-brother, the oaf Tony Lumpkin, to believe that they have come to an inn rather than to the Hardcastle estate. They treat Mr. Hardcastle as an innkeeper rather than as a host—and even today, when we seldom visit inns or country estates, the following exchange is amusing because of what we know and what the characters wrongly assume: Let’s see your list of the larder then. I ask it as a favour. I always match my appetite to my bill of fare. MARLOW (To Hardcastle, who looks at them with surprize.) Sir, he’s very right, and it’s my way too. HARDCASTLE Sir, you have a right to command here. Here, Roger, bring us the bill of fare for to night’s supper: I believe it’s drawn out. Your manner, Mr. Hastings, puts me in mind of my uncle, Colonel Wallop. It was a saying of his, that no man was sure of his supper till he had eaten it. HASTINGS (Aside.) All upon the high ropes! His uncle a Colonel! we shall soon hear of his mother being a justice of the peace. But let’s hear the bill of fare. HASTINGS

—Goldsmith [1773] 1966b: 137

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When the bemused, but sincere, Hardcastle does his best to comply, producing not the “list of the larder” (typical of an inn) but the “bill of fare” (drawn up by the staff of the manor), the behavior of Marlow and Hastings becomes even more egregious: MARLOW HASTINGS MARLOW

(Reading.) For the first course, at the top, a pig, and pruin sauce. Damn your pig, I say. And damn your pruin sauce, say I. —[1773] 1966b: 138

Today we might take offense at Hastings and Marlow for thinking it acceptable to treat an innkeeper so badly, but we still laugh at the basic joke driving this scene, as we laugh at many episodes of Seinfeld, such as “The Limo” wherein George and Jerry pretend to be the O’Brien party and end up in a hired car they think will take them to a Bulls’ game but that instead is headed for a neo-Nazi rally. Indeed, as the scene between Hardcastle and the young men continues, the recitation of food itself becomes amusing as Marlow recites the menu handed him: “Item: A pork pie, a boiled rabbet and sausages, a florentine, a shaking pudding, and a dish of tiff–taff–taffety cream!” ([1773] 1966b: 138). One can only imagine how performance history exploited and expanded these lines to deem them worthy of the 1912 illustration by Hugh Thomson (Figure 0.4).6 Comedy builds on communal recognition of funniness, lost, eventually, to later audiences or readers (as tiff–taff–taffety is lost to me) but funny in the moment and well beyond the moment with repeated performance or viewing. “Newman!” or “Are you still master of your domain?” or “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” can still provoke a chuckle, but the time will inevitably come when they will not. The prologue to She Stoops to Conquer, written by actor-manager and playwright David Garrick, renounces moral intention, claiming that due to the vogue for sentimental comedy “The Comic Muse, long sick, is now a-dying” (Goldsmith [1773] 1966b: 102; original italics). “I give it up,” the prologue continues, “morals won’t do for me” ([1773] 1966b: 103), but, in truth, She Stoops to Conquer does instruct (and consciously so) in a way that the Seinfeld episodes do not, for didacticism was a value of the Enlightenment.7 As he says in his “Essay on the Theatre: Comparison Between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” (1773) the purpose of comedy is and has always been “rendering Folly or Vice ridiculous” (Goldsmith [1773] 1966a: 211). It is folly in Marlow that he “rattles” flirtatiously with serving-maids while he can barely speak in the presence of young women of his own class—and he has been laughed out of his silliness in the end. In this sense, we have a lesson in what ancient grammarian Donatus called comedy’s true purview: “schooling . . . in practical

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FIGURE 0.4: Hugh Thomson, illustration of Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Act 2, Scene 1. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images.

ethics” (Stott 2005: 6). Marmontel agrees that “[c]omedy draws its strength and its resources from this inclination to highlight folly” though he says “[i]t would no doubt have been more advantageous to convert this immoral complaisance into philosophical pity.” However, he concedes that “it has been found easier and more certain to use human malice to correct the other human vices, rather like using the points of a diamond to polish the diamond itself” ([1753] 2008). Of course, as both Andrew Stott and Larry F. Norman note, there is scant evidence of comedy actually fulfilling the noble end of correcting vice and folly

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(Stott 2005: 6; Norman 2011: 282–3). Marmontel records skepticism in Enlightenment itself; there are those, he observes, who say “nobody will reform himself” based on what he sees on the stage (Marmontel [1753] 2008). Nevertheless, it is a common defense when comedy comes under attack to claim its didactic usefulness. Indeed, we see such defenses mounted by William Congreve, John Dennis, and others in England in the late seventeenth century following the attack on the stage by Jeremy Collier who objected to the libertinism and anti-clericalism of the Restoration stage (see Stott 2005: 6). And Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, in his Preface to his 1784 comedy, The Marriage of Figaro, which had prompted criticism for its censorious portrayal of the aristocracy, defends his comedy as dedicated to exposing “vices and abuses” for the purpose of correcting them: “One cannot reform men without forcing them to see themselves as they are” (Beaumarchais [1784] 1958: 6). While the Figaro plays do not overtly preach political equality or social reform, the character of Figaro and his attitude toward the aristocratic characters with whom he shares the stage and page were considered instructive enough to warrant bans and objections by the authorities of the time. And, indeed, comic didacticism takes myriad forms. In commenting on his pleasure at the comic performances of Nell Gwyn, for example, Samuel Pepys never mentions any lesson he learned. He was more apt to marvel at Gwyn’s ability to bring a comic role to life. Yet his fascination with her skill in breeches roles is suggestive: “when she comes in like a young gallant; and hath the motions and carriage of a spark the most that ever I saw any man have[,] [i]t makes me, I confess, admire her” (Pepys [1667] 1995: 8.91). As Elizabeth Howe puts it, the assertive heroines of the English Restoration stage inspired by Gwyn left audiences with a new sense of the “comic love relationships between the sexes,” that, at least on some level, translated into new ideas about the pleasures of courtship, marriage, and conversation (Howe 1992: 71). Song, dance, and even (perhaps especially) moments of wordplay are all characteristic of Enlightenment comedy, often aimed at communal (and crosscommunal) understanding. The hilarious burlesque dialogue, for example, of Fielding’s Tragedy of Tragedies, has lost little of its comic effect despite the absence of heroic tragedy on the twenty-first-century stage. Lines such as “O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh” ([1731] 2004: 567) are funny out of context (and, I would suggest, in any language, since the syllables are nonsensical anyway). More common than witty nonsense in the period is laughter shared from awareness of pattern and surprising uses of language—such as Dryden’s joke at the end of Mac Flecknoe—“The Mantle fell to the young Prophet’s part, / With double portion of his Father’s Art” ([1682] 1972: 60; ll. 216–17). Seeing the pattern of alliteration in the first line of the couplet (f-p-p) makes the knowing reader expect a fart at the end of the second line—Dryden’s scatological dismissal of his rival Shadwell. Equally playful (and scatological) is Swift’s joke

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on Gulliver as the myopic and earnest traveler begins his life story featuring his master whom he introduces as “Mr. James Bates” and to whom he refers with the following sequence of phrases: “Mr. Bates,” “my good master Mr. Bates,” “Mr. Bates, my master,” and, finally, “Master Bates” (Swift [1726] 2010: 325). Pope is less scatological but no less reliant on ludicrous patterning in his description of the objects on Belinda’s dressing room table: “Here Files of Pins extend their shining Rows, / Puffs, Powders, Patches, Bibles, Billet-doux” (Pope [1714] 1963: 222; 1.137–8). It is also ridiculous in the same poem when the most proficient writer of rhymed couplets in English literary history has Belinda’s foppish relation Sir Plume demand from the Baron the lock he has stolen: With earnest Eyes, and round unthinking Face, He first the Snuff-box open’d, then the Case, And thus broke out—“My Lord, why, what the Devil? Z—ds! damn the Lock! ‘fore Gad, you must be civil! Plague on’t! ’tis past a Jest—nay prithee, Pox! Give her the Hair”—he spoke, and rapp’d his Box. —[1714] 1963: 238; 4.125–30 Though but for a moment, the reader is on the Baron’s side, when he responds in perfect iambic pentameter, with a rhyme supplied by the poet: “It grieves me much (reply’d the Peer again) / Who speaks so well shou’d ever speak in vain” ([1714] 1963: 238; 4.131–2). In the foregoing examples, robust, sometimes ribald, laughter and shared hilarity emerge as an Enlightenment value beyond didacticism, more illustrative of the ideal of community than corrective satire. The ideal is rooted in the specific—not the stereotypical but the believable, the comic individual character. However, the preference for wit over decorum, especially in England, conveys, as Stott notes, a counter-message as well, a “disillusionment with ideologies of absolute order following the social upheavals of the English Civil War. Authority had disgraced itself, it seemed, and sincerity and conviction were currencies debased by ideology” (Stott 2005: 56). The emergence of a literature of sensibility and sentimentality might suggest a modicum of restored confidence in sincerity and conviction, but throughout the entire period, sentiment was never articulated without running the risk of provoking witty ripostes, rejoinders, burlesques, or parodies. Although there are prominent late-century examples of unrelievedly sentimental fiction that evoked sighs and tears without the ballast of laughter (Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling [1771] and Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther [1774], to name two), it was safest, if one were planning to present sentiment to be admired and accepted, to situate it in a world of wit. The virtue of Clarissa (in Samuel Richardson’s eponymous novel)

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and Volanges (in Pierre Choderos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses) was set in relief by the inventive—and often entertaining—cynicism of Lovelace and Valmont, whose shenanigans both horrified and entertained readers until morality demanded that, in the end, each wit be impaled on a literal rapier! Laurence Sterne, on the other hand, merged sentiment and sensuality by questioning his own narrators via antic wordplay so thoroughly ambiguous that readers were constantly kept off-center and suspicious of a bawdy joke lurking behind the most benign, sincere, ordinary language. Because of the thick strain of skepticism and questioning at the base of Enlightenment culture, the comedy can often seem alienating. Perhaps the best example would be comedy centered on learned women, which begins with Molière and does not end until sometime in the nineteenth century. The confidence in reason, the beginnings of feminist thought in both France and in England resulted in lively literary cultures in which women participated fully— as readers, writers, and critics. Paris had the salon culture; London (and its environs) had the bluestockings. The women at the center of these worlds were respected, their acquaintance cultivated, their opinions courted. Yet the wouldbe female wit was a staple of the comic repertoire. Possibly most jarring is to see her come forth in the works of Frances Burney. Indeed, in Burney’s comic world, female would-be wits abound and are regularly traduced. One exception is Evelina’s Mrs. Selwyn who is known for her wit—and who also plays a major role in bringing together the heroine of the novel and her long-lost father. She is described, however, as “masculine” (Burney [1778] 1968: 268]—a common adjective in the comic literature of the period used to describe a witty woman. While perhaps the term does not rankle today (maybe the opposite), in the context of the period’s literature, it bears witness to the anxiety at the heart of the Enlightenment enterprise. Like Figaro, in a sense, Mrs. Selwyn dares to define her behavior, language, and life in an unorthodox way. To ameliorate the discomfort of her readers, she is labeled and then also made, ostensibly, to serve the shoring up of conventionality. But she is there in all her subversive glory, suggesting, comically, the possibility of cultural change.

A BRIEF CONCLUSION David Garrick (1717–89), in the words of Kenneth Richards, “brought an Enlightenment consciousness to the art of acting” (1991b: 185). The famous 1761 portrait by Joshua Reynolds (Figure 0.5), Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy, is based on the 1596 painting The Choice of Hercules by Annibale Carracci. Hercules, of course, is faced with the choice of Virtue or Pleasure, and (though in the painting he has not chosen) we know from Xenophon that it is the hard road of virtue that wins. Garrick rose to fame on the British stage in

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FIGURE 0.5: Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy. Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.

performance of Richard III in Colley Cibber’s version of Shakespeare’s tragedy. In Reynolds’s painting, however, Garrick seems more inclined to follow the comic muse. And, indeed, in his writing, he did just that, focusing on “afterpieces and harlequinades, translating the crudity of both popular genres into graceful and sophisticated light entertainment” (Richards 1991b: 186). Known as “the Newton of the stage,” Garrick applied his interest in technology to stagecraft, particularly innovations in lighting (Richards 1991b: 185). He was a superb mimic, popular at dining tables all over Europe, yet he was also the quintessential advocate for a national literature, organizing the first Shakespeare festival (the Jubilee of 1769) which turned Stratford into a tourist destination and Shakespeare into the national bard. He also brought international talent to England, “import[ing] in 1755 . . . the French dancer and choreographer Noverre to orchestrate the celebrated Chinese Festival” (Richards 1991b: 185). Respectful of the censors of the stage, Garrick nevertheless reformed acting styles by ignoring the traditional declamatory stances associated particularly with tragic acting and bringing a more naturalistic focus to the creation of stage character. His movement in the direction of “Comedy” in Reynolds’s portrait

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is as much a rejection of artificial acting as a preference for comic roles. The original and the individualistic focus of Enlightenment (especially English Enlightenment) thought is clear not only in Garrick’s preference, but also in Reynolds’s choice. While many paintings have been identified as at least partial models for the composition of this portrait, in none is there a “parallel” for the figure of Comedy (dubbed by Horace Walpole a “ ‘beautiful and winning girl’ ”), as David Mannings notes (1984: 275, 259). “Nor,” he continues, “is there for the figure of Garrick” (1984: 275). The portrait and its subject, thus situated, negotiate joyfully between tradition and novelty, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, instruction and entertainment as does Enlightenment comedy itself.

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CHAPTER ONE

Form BRIAN CORMAN

By the time of the “Age of Enlightenment,” comedy already had a two-thousandyear history. Given this long history and the changes that occurred over time, it is not surprising that critics have failed to arrive at a precise, inclusive definition of the form.1 Most would agree that comedy usually ends happily, fulfilling audience desires and expectations for the protagonists. Most would also agree that there is usually a moral dimension to comedy. Consensus tends to end there. Attempts at formulating a more exact definition are misguided for a number of reasons. Forms are not tangible objects but rather intellectual constructs, heuristic devices that provide models for comprehension and interpretation to aid both authors and readers in a range of activities from the creation of new works to the understanding of both new and older works. Their value is in problem solving, not prescription or classification.2 Attribution is necessarily conjectural and subject to change over time in response to changing literary fashions and critical and cultural concerns. Comedy has the longest continuous tradition in western literature, but it has developed in many different ways over time and in diverse cultures. Large synchronous generic terms like comedy thus have limited—but real—value. Such “institutional” forms are “externally defined” (Koelb 1975: 252); that is, membership is determined by inclusiveness and responsiveness to historical change. Thinking about comedy this way fosters an approach that recognizes that many of the characteristics of what we continue to recognize as comedy were in place by the time of Aristophanes and Menander. The differences between the “Old Comedy” of Aristophanes and the “New Comedy” of Menander made it impossible even then to capture a single, intrinsic genre. To reach that level of specificity, it became necessary to divide comedy into subgenres, a practice well-developed 27

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before the “Age of Enlightenment.” As Alastair Fowler points out, subgenres, often treated as freestanding genres, are formed “by distinguishing additional genrelinked motifs or topics,” and they can, in turn, be further subdivided “more and more minutely” (Fowler 1982: 112). In large genres like comedy, change occurs at the level of subgenre. It is here where innovation occurs. It is here where the conservative form of dramatic comedy was continually revitalized during the Enlightenment. It is here where historic change is best seen. It is also important to recognize that comedy extends beyond genre and subgenre to what Fowler calls its modal or adjectival form, the “comic” (1982: 106–7). Many works that are not comedies contain parts or aspects that are comic; nevertheless, their overall form is not comedy. A familiar example is the “comic relief” found in many tragedies such as in the “Nicky-Nacky” scenes in Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (1682). Forms of drama other than comedy often contain parts that are comic; other literary forms such as the novel and satire do so at least as often. I differ with Fowler in one significant point about comedy. For him, comedy means dramatic comedy; outside of drama, all other occurrences of comedy are modal, that is, there are only comic novels, not prose fiction comedies. I would argue that with an institutional genre like comedy, the manner of representation does not determine its form. For me, there are comedies presented in narrative just as later forms of comedy appear in film or television. I consider a novel like Emma, to cite one of Fowler’s examples, a comedy, a point I return to below. Comedy’s origin, at least as a critical concept, goes back to Aristotle; his thinking about comedy was largely about dramatic comedy. Since thinking about comedy in the Enlightenment continues to be based in dramatic comedy, I begin with the drama and propose to use it as a basis for exploring nondramatic forms and modes of comedy. I focus largely on the literature of England and Great Britain to allow for sufficient detail to examine the range of comedy and its changes over time, but I do so with the conviction that very similar patterns are found in other European literatures, in part because of the common classical origins of comedy and in part because of the constant crossfertilization of these literatures throughout the Enlightenment. Cultural tastes and needs determine the specifics, but comedy is recognizably comedy across cultures and languages. When the London theaters reopened after the restoration of Charles II, they depended on earlier plays for a number of years while a new generation of playwrights established itself. The most popular playwrights were John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. (Shakespeare’s romantic comedies did not appeal to Restoration audiences. They preferred The Merry Wives of Windsor over A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It.) Comedies by other preRestoration playwrights were also performed, often adapted to the tastes of the Restoration audiences. French and Spanish plays that had pleased Charles II

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and his court while they were in exile quickly became preferred sources for adaptation. Continental plays continued to provide playwrights with texts they made English/British throughout the period. The popularity of the plays of Fletcher and Jonson demonstrates the ongoing appeal of both the “Old” and “New” comedies of the Greeks and Romans. Restoration and eighteenth-century playwrights continued to use these two basic streams of comedy to think about and construct their work. The dramatic criticism of the period is frequently based on the promotion of one of these streams over the other in arguments that are often self-promotional attempts to insure the success on stage of the playwright-critic. Such well-known disputes as those between John Dryden and Thomas Shadwell or John Dennis and Richard Steele show the centrality of Fletcher and Jonson to the thinking about comedy in the period.3 Plot elements from Fletcher and Jonson continued to dominate the theaters, though subject to frequent modification. Fletcher provided the model for what was to be known as “wit comedy” or “comedy of manners.” His is a comedy of action and intrigue; the plots derive from Greek “New Comedy” with its focus on courtship and the obstacles to that courtship, usually from parents, other relations, or rival suitors. Clever servants often aid the lovers. It frequently includes seduction or cuckolding plots or marital discord plots, and frequently combines more than one of these elements. Late seventeenth-century examples are dominated by highly sophisticated protagonists who emulate the polished, sophisticated values of the Restoration court. They excel at clever, witty dialogue (repartee) that distinguishes them from lesser characters, those unable to live up to the elite social standards of the protagonists. These inferior characters are subject to ridicule and victimization for their deficiencies. Resolution normally comes with the young lovers overcoming the obstacles to their desired union, the unhappy married couples restoring harmony in their households or finding ways to separate, and the cuckolding of foolish, older husbands by the younger lovers of their younger wives. Jonson’s is more a comedy of character. The Jonsonian model derives from Greek “Old Comedy,” with its focus on political and social satire and the punishment and/or correction of characters guilty of venial sins. Jonson’s version often centered on “humours” characters, those suffering from an imbalance of the four humours that ancient medicine identified as the determinants of personality and behavior.4 For Jonson, humours characters were the object of ridicule, well-deserving of the punishments they suffered. By the Restoration, it became increasingly common for humours characters to be cured, though only after painful exposure. And not all humours could be cured. These two formal models provided the restored theaters of the 1660s with the elements of dramatic comedy that would dominate the period—and beyond. Although playwrights and critics debated the relative value of each, often

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declaring their firm adherence to the model of their choice, Dryden for one recognized that theory rarely translated into practice without compromise. What he called “the mixt way of Comedy; that which is neither all wit, nor all humour, but the result of both” (Dryden 1970: 206) best describes the actual practice of most playwrights. The dominance of one of these models provides an aid for understanding a given play, but it is very rare for a comedy not to partake of elements of the other. An assumption that rigid walls can be built across the various comic subgenres, however defined, is likely to produce incomplete or distorted understandings. Fletcher’s witty intrigue comedy and Jonson’s punitive humours comedy, then, are constructs for understanding the forms of comedies that appear and develop in the 140 years after the restoration of Charles II. Although tragedy remained the most prestigious form of drama, it was comedy that most pleased audiences. Hundreds of comedies were performed in this period and a significant subset entered—and left—the repertory of plays performed season after season. I have elsewhere identified a core repertory of eighty-one comedies for the first fifty years following the Restoration (Corman 1993: 12–13). It is not surprising that this group is highly diverse in both form and content. Additional subgenres come and go, though it is rare to find core elements of the models provided by Jonson and Fletcher absent. English audiences were notorious for their love of variety. They rejected the French models of neoclassical critics who demanded purity of form as well as adherence to the unities of time, place, and action. The one thing that virtually all of the comedies of the period share is the inclusion of formal elements from multiple subgenres. Since these subgenres, like all literary forms, change over time, sometimes mutating and other times dropping out of active production, even such relative constants as wit and humours evolve over the course of the period. Subgenres of comedy proliferated over the course of the period; they remained easily recognizable throughout because the two streams of comedy represented by Fletcher and Jonson provided the models from which they developed. The wit comedy of Dryden and the humours comedy of Shadwell were joined by Spanish intrigue comedy, burlesque and farce, pantomime, ballad opera, sentimental comedy, and burletta to name some of the most prominent. The addition of new subgenres was accompanied by the constant development of existing subgenres, all to meet the ever-changing needs and expectations of audiences. The one constant in the comedy of this period is responsiveness by playwrights and theater companies to audience demands. Their livelihood depended upon it. As a result, change in the theaters was ongoing, but gradual, mirroring the gradual changes in English and, later, British society. The theaters, like their audiences, were conservative and evercautious about change. Getting too far ahead of their audiences was at least as dangerous as failing to keep up with them.

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Some examples from the early years of the restored theaters provide a sense of that variety as well as the way some subgenres had very short active lives while others thrived for the duration. Despite the preeminence in frequency of performance of comedies by Fletcher (including those written with Francis Beaumont and other collaborators), the wit comedy often thought to epitomize the Restoration period does not emerge until the late 1660s and does not reach maturity until the 1670s. New comedies of the 1660s followed other models. Sir Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662) shares with many early postRestoration comedies a plot that exposes the recently defeated Puritans to ridicule and punishment. The exposure and defeat of the self-serving upstart Day family in their attempt to appropriate the estates of Royalists in the 1650s places the comedy firmly in the formal camp of Jonsonian comedy though Howard dwells on the immediate political implications of his satire more explicitly than Jonson normally did. The primary plot follows two Royalist colonels in their successful attempt to reclaim their estates from the rapacious Puritans. In the process, they fall in love with two young women victimized by the Days who had assumed guardianship of them after the deaths of their Royalist parents. One of the colonels has an Irish servant who provides additional comedy through his well-intentioned but inept attempts to help his master. This combination of elements contributed to a comedy that remained in the repertory for more than a century after anti-Puritan satire had any immediacy. It provides an early example of the mixed and varied elements found in the most successful comedies. Howard provided one model for the post-Restoration stage. Sir Samuel Tuke provided a very different model with The Adventures of Five Hours (1663), his adaptation of a play he believed to be by Pedro Calderón. Tuke’s play offers a prototype for many Restoration heroic plays with its elevated tone, frequent use of verse including rhymed couplets, moral purity, and its emphasis on the tension between love and honor that propels much of the plot. Tuke called the play a “tragi-comedy,” but that label does not provide much explanatory power to a play that is focused on the traditional young couples who must overcome family opposition to reach their desired end, marriage. (Dryden also called The Rival Ladies [1664], his attempt to cash in on the popularity of Tuke’s play, a “tragi-comedy.”) But the matters of state so central to tragedies and heroic plays are absent from these “tragi-comedies,” as is any real threat to the desired happy ending. The obstacles faced by the young lovers prove to be based on misunderstandings that are easily resolved. “Spanish romance” better describes this subgenre of comedy, one that had a brief vogue in the wake of Tuke’s great success, but one that died out before the end of the decade. The label “tragi-comedy” has been more usefully applied to the split-plot plays that also emerged in the 1660s. These plays have plots linked by shared characters and themes, but plots that are very different in form. Much Ado About Nothing

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provides a familiar model from the early seventeenth century. In the postRestoration versions, the serious plots follow the patterns of the heroic play aside from their happy endings; they are not comic. The comic plots follow the patterns of the emerging wit comedy. Dryden’s crowd-pleasing Secret Love (1667) was the earliest of this subgenre and his Marriage á la Mode (1671) its greatest triumph. Dryden did not provide a generic label for Secret Love; he called Marriage á la Mode a “comedy.” (Relying on seventeenth and eighteenth-century generic terminology is not often helpful.) Split-plot tragicomedies continued to be written, with increasing infrequency, until the end of the century. Thomas Southerne’s adaptation of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko (1695) combines a genuinely tragic plot with a light-hearted marriage plot; the distance between the two plots, despite overlapping characters and themes, is so great that it pushes the form to its limits, destroying it as a viable subgenre for many years to come. A third variant, also of Jacobean origins, to have some success in the 1660s, but one that also lacked staying power, was the multi-plot comedy with plots ranging from very high to very low. The first plays of two of the most important writers of wit comedy provide good examples: Sir George Etherege’s The Comical Revenge (1664) and William Wycherley’s Love in a Wood (1671). In these plays, the plots are of “descending magnitude and seriousness,” with a high plot of characters elevated in heroic or romantic terms, a middle plot with more commonplace characters and considerable irony or satire, and a low plot with more debased characters, usually of a lower class (Levin 1971: 55–6). Both of these plays were influenced by Spanish models, in Wycherley’s case by a Calderón play. Etherege’s presentation of levels of society is more comprehensive and more clearly hierarchical; his elevated plot is in verse while the others are in prose. Wycherley levels the field by eliminating the verse and by using a narrower social range of characters. His is the more transitional play as this subgenre did not survive long into the 1670s. What remains constant is that both of these plays—representative of their kind—mix prominent elements from the models provided by Jonson and Fletcher. Four other popular plays from the 1660s expand the range of comic subgenres that provide the basis for dramatic comedy throughout the period. Dryden and the Duke of Newcastle’s Sir Martin Mar-all (1667) has been seen, as Samuel Pepys put it, as “a complete Farce from one end to the other” (Pepys 1995: 8.387). It is an early example of the influence of French farce with its sources in Quinault and Molière. But the play is also an example of the way French sources were adapted to please English audiences. Several of its characters are updated Jonsonian humours (Newcastle was Jonson’s patron) and the young lovers, too, are adapted to fit in the Covent Garden that is the play’s setting. Dryden’s An Evening’s Love (1668) shows how the Spanish elements of plays like Tuke’s were made more sustainable by focusing on farce and intrigue at the expense of elevated characters and language and concern for

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the niceties of love and honor. Set in Madrid, it has three courtship plots, two of which involve English cavaliers. And its main comic dupe is very much in the line of Jonsonian humours. Etherege’s She wou’d if she cou’d (1668) is often credited with being the first fully-formed Restoration wit comedy.5 The witty repartee among the pairs of young lovers and the loosening of linguistic propriety bears out this assessment. The licentious Lady Cockwood and her foolish husband also anticipate much to follow in 1670s comedy. Etherege’s play is not the first with witty lovers or the first to minimize plot in favor of character, but it brings together many of the elements that will dominate the next generation of comedies. Finally, Shadwell’s first play, The Sullen Lovers (1668), establishes his updated version of Jonsonian comedy and its humours characters.6 Although it is structured around two courtship plots, the play is dominated by a number of humours characters displaying and being punished for their folly. Several of these humours characters were drawn from easily recognizable real-life models; the lampooning of those models was a major source of the play’s initial, if short-lived, popularity. I have devoted this much attention to comedies of the 1660s because these plays established patterns that would continue throughout the period. The most important is the persistence of subgenres developing the comic traditions established by Jonson and Fletcher. By the end of the 1660s, those patterns have been transformed into subgenres that appealed to Restoration audiences, audiences that demanded variety in their plays. That variety translated into comedies that do not strictly adhere to a single subgeneric form. Redefined elements from both the Jonsonian and Fletcherian traditions continue to be incorporated into the vast majority of comedies, regardless of which of the many subgenres that emerged in the 1660s and continued to emerge in the following decades provides the formal model for a particular play. The 1670s saw the development of the best-known subgenre of the postRestoration period, wit comedy or comedy of manners, reach maturity. The various pre-Restoration and continental models had been absorbed and adapted to produce a more genuinely English form of comedy embodying the aristocratic values of the Restoration court that continued to dominate society and its theaters. Where the plays of the 1660s were clearly moral and often idealistic, the newer plays reflected the more cynical and hedonistic responses that came with prolonged exposure to court culture and governance. The emergence of the rake-hero as the protagonist in these plays heightened the increase in explicit sexual activity; it also aroused considerable opposition from playwrights like Shadwell, who considered these developments immoral, and from some audience members as well as anti-theatrical controversialists. These are plays set in London where rakes are the greatest wits and masters of high society. Pretenders to wit, country folk, parents, and rivals are all subject to harsh ridicule; they suffer cuckolding or being married off to prostitutes

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(men) or fops or fools (women). Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) are probably the most familiar exemplars of classic Restoration wit comedy. Each is structured around courtship plots, and each is populated with social inferiors who are punished for their shortcomings. The point I would emphasize is that even these most familiar Carolean comedies of manners are very different in their relative use of Jonsonian and Fletcherian elements. Wycherley is far more Jonsonian; Horner is an updated version of Jonson’s protagonists inflected by a much looser adherence to traditional morality. Etherege is the more Fletcherian with a plot dominated by two courtships. Wycherley’s plot, unlike Etherege’s, abounds in farcical elements. The 1670s saw the values of wit comedy influence other subgenres as well. Aphra Behn’s The Rover, part 1 (1677) develops the Spanish intrigue plot of An Evening’s Love with increased action and increased sexual activity. The rake-hero Willmore, for all his shortcomings and despite his mistreatment of the courtesan Angelica Bianca, succeeds in winning the witty, wealthy virgin Hellena. Behn’s Londonbased comedies of the 1670s and 1680s also feature intrigue, often farcical, witty dialogue, lots of sex, and traditional humours characters for comic victims.

FIGURE 1.1: Dame Edith Evans as Lady Fidget in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife. Getty Images.

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Both sex comedy and farce became very popular forms in the 1680s and continued to develop throughout the decade. Otway’s Molière adaptation, The Cheats of Scapin (1676), pioneered the incorporation of short comic afterpieces that followed (usually) more serious plays in the typical eighteenth-century daily program. Otway’s venture soon led to other farces such as Nahum Tate’s A Duke and no Duke (1684), Thomas Jevon’s The Devil of a Wife (1686), Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687), and William Mountfort’s The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1688) which anticipated the pantomimes of Harlequin and Scaramouche that became so popular a few decades later. The Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672) had remarkable staying power for a play whose initial popularity was based on its farcical lampooning of Dryden and the heroic play. Burlesque comedies and parodies were infrequent and rarely as popular as The Rehearsal, but the occasional success occurred throughout the period, for example Henry Fielding’s Tom Thumb (1730), Catherine Clive’s The Rehearsal (1750), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic (1779). The increasingly explicit sex comedy of the 1680s moved in two very different directions. Edward Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds (1681) develops sex comedy as farce. It tells of three elderly citizens with young wives and three young gentlemen who plan to cuckold them. It is a very light, actionpacked and frivolous piece that was a huge success on stage. John Crowne’s City Politiques (1683) blends sex and farce with personal and political satire in the wake of the Popish Plot. Crowne is able to celebrate the defeat of the Whigs in a light-hearted punitive comedy. Shadwell offers a Whig take on these events in The Lancashire Witches (1681, but heavily censored), a mixture of courtship comedy and anti-Catholic satire. Otway’s The Soldier’s Fortune (1680) represents the other direction; it is a much darker version of a cuckolding plot with a mood set by pervasive cynicism. It is lightened by a courtship plot, which in turn becomes equally dark in the sequel, The Atheist (1683). The Atheist is a good example of a play too dark for its audience, a recurring problem for playwrights like Otway and Southerne, whose The Wives Excuse (1691) contained such unpleasant social satire that it failed despite its many strengths. Playwrights and managers learned from plays like these to avoid challenging their audiences too aggressively. Political instability was not good for the theaters. The restored calm that came with the “Glorious Revolution” brought with it some significant shifts in theatrical culture. William and Mary did not share Charles II’s enthusiasm for the theater, so other forms of patronage were required. A more inclusive approach to audiences was the gradual response to the social changes that were signaled by the exile of James II. The new regimes were accompanied by the appearance of Societies for the Reformation of Manners and by anti-theatrical polemicists like Jeremy Collier. Aristocratic values no longer informed the stage, and the result was a kinder, gentler comedy. In his late plays like The Squire of

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Alsatia (1688), Bury-Fair (1689), and The Scowrers (1690) even the hardline Jonsonian Thomas Shadwell softened his humours characters, making them more sympathetic, while rejecting more firmly than ever the moral standards of the Carolean court. This softening is most notable in the plays Shirley Strum Kenny has influentially described as “humane,”7 plays that remained among the most popular throughout the eighteenth century, as Carolean comedy increasingly lost favor. What distinguishes these plays from their predecessors is more human and fallible characters with more fully developed personalities. The protagonists are more three-dimensional and so, significantly, are the humours characters and other comic victims. The more complex a character, the more difficult it is for the cruelty often applied in earlier plays to be maintained. Severe punishment is reserved for hypocrites and villains. Repartee is also softened as dialogue is written for individual characters rather than types. Finally, intrigue and action are more central to these plays than it had been in many wit comedies. These qualities are most prominent in some of the playwrights Kenny cites as the major figures in humane comedy: George Farquhar, Colley Cibber, Richard Steele, and Susanna Centlivre more fully distance themselves from Carolean wit comedy. Humane comedy signals significant cultural changes; formal changes are far fewer. It is difficult to group humane comedies together as a new subgenre. The plot elements of the earlier comedies remain, though many of the elements are updated. Rakes must now reform like William Congreve’s Valentine in Love for Love (1695) and Cibber’s Loveless in Love’s Last Shift (1696) or must be pretend rakes with admirable motives for the pretense like Farquhar’s Plume in The Recruiting Officer (1706). The rake-hero went out of favor and is rarely to be seen again. Unrepentant rakes are now villains like Fainall in Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700). Reform comedy, a subset of Kenny’s humane comedy, is more viable as a subgenre, and one that continues to be popular throughout the eighteenth century.8 Congreve’s Mirabell in The Way of the World retains the wit of the Carolean rake, but it is applied single-mindedly to winning the hand of Millamant. Vanbrugh’s Loveless resumes rakish behavior in his sequel to Love’s Last Shift, The Relapse (1696), and Farquhar’s Archer in The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) is fixed on the seduction of Mrs. Sullen. But these are increasingly rare examples. The burden of purer manners fell more strongly on female characters who increasingly reveal little in the way of sexual desire or wit; neither is seen as ladylike in the new century, especially in the young virgins who are the intended wives of male protagonists. Early examples of these more restrained—often dull—heroines include Cibber’s Amanda in Love’s Last Shift (1696), Farquhar’s Dorinda in The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), Centlivre’s Anne Lovely in A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), and Steele’s Indiana in The Conscious Lovers (1722). Courtship remains central to most of the plays. Conflicts between married

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couples also continue as prominent plot elements, but cuckoldings are now more threatened or feared than realized as married couples and their problems become more realistic and sympathetic. Country characters similarly become more sympathetic; Congreve’s Sir Wilfull Witwoud in The Way of the World offers a good example of what Stuart Tave calls “the amiable humorist,” a traditional comic humours character made more three-dimensional and increasingly seen as embodying British values that valorized native eccentricities, prototypical John Bulls.9 With its more inclusive middle-class values, humane comedy provided the models for most of the comedies for the remainder of the eighteenth century. The first two generations after the Restoration, then, established the patterns that would continue to dominate the comic theater. Comic playwrights’ success depended on pleasing theater managers, whose success, in turn, depended on pleasing audiences. Hence managers were cautious and risk averse. The result was a conservative repertory, but not one without ongoing modification. The growth of the audience and its more diverse demography produced changes, as did occasional innovations by playwrights. But the basic forms of the subgenres of comedy continued to follow the patterns derived from Fletcher and Jonson. The new century brought in a drive for a more gentle and moral comedy; it coincided with the philosophic arguments for the benevolence of human nature.10 The reform of the rake was but an early contribution to reforming comedy, both morally and socially. Centlivre’s The Gamester (1705) provides an early example of a comedy where courtship or marital harmony is threatened by a social problem, in this case gambling. Steele’s The Conscious Lovers tackles the pernicious practice of dueling as well as class conflict between the gentry and the newly ascendant merchant class. The happy resolution of these examples of social problems almost obscures the two courtship plots and the exchanges between the witty, scheming servants. The tears of joy that accompany the play’s ending also helped establish the growing emphasis on the value of exemplary characters and heightened sensibilities. These plays and the more self-consciously sentimental works that followed point to eighteenth-century answers to how the moral requirements of comedy were henceforth to be met. Overt didacticism, always a part of the Jonsonian tradition, begins to assume a greater role in the subgenres of eighteenth-century comedy. These new cultural norms prevailed in new plays, but the extremes of didacticism and sentiment were far from universal. The popularity of the afterpiece provided a base for farce and pantomime, two subgenres especially resistant to these extremes. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) introduced the ballad opera and opened another avenue for more traditional comedy. Music was, of course, always part of theatrical comedy, whether as background before the play or between the acts or as songs during the play which sometimes even helped advance the plots. The success of Italian opera inevitably led to

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parody and burlesque. Gay’s success established a place for a more English form of musical theater, one that often included Italian opera among its satiric targets. New ballad opera had run its course by 1736 (Burden 2009: 207), but the incorporation of music drawn from opera and popular song alike had a continuing legacy in other subgenres. Henry Carey’s The Dragon of Wantley (1737) adapts the musical parody found in ballad opera in a farcical afterpiece. Carey labeled his piece a “burlesque opera.” The subgenre burletta, usually an all-sung afterpiece, was firmly established with Kane O’Hara’s Midas (1760) and continued into the nineteenth century. And the pasticcio comic opera became a mainstay soon after Isaac Bickerstaff’s hugely popular Love in a Village (1762) with its original music largely by Thomas Arne. It has the mix of spoken dialogue and music pioneered by Gay in a plot taken from traditional Fletcherian comedy. The nomenclature for these various forms of musical comedy remains fluid if not contested; what is clear is the musical comedy holds a central place on the eighteenth-century stage. Love in a Village also offers a fine example of the flexibility of Fletcherian comedy, a flexibility essential to its continuity. It is hard to think of a courtship comedy more different from the hard-edged comedies of the Carolean period like Etherege’s The Man of Mode. Love in a Village came nearly a hundred years later, by which time British society had gone through several cultural revolutions. It is set in the country, not London. Both pairs of lovers are forthright about their love and singularly lacking in wit. The closest character to a rake is a servant. The parent figures are benign eccentrics. One of the two pairs of lovers has each independently run away from home to escape a marriage arranged by their parents. They take positions as servants to avoid detection. These are not the actions of the young lovers of the earlier comedy. But formally, the play follows the standard pattern of two couples who must overcome parental opposition— and some self-generated resistance—to achieve the expected conclusion. Parental opposition is easily overcome; this is a comedy, not a tragedy. Clever servants and a helpful friend assist the lovers. There is little doubt about the outcome. One other musical subgenre, comic opera, emerged late in the century. The most prominent example is Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Duenna (1775) with most of the music by Thomas Linley Senior and Junior. The plot resembles an amalgam of the Spanish romance and intrigue comedies of the 1660s with considerable attention devoted to matters of love and honor. Like Tuke’s The Adventures of Five Hours, it is structured around two courtship plots, each ending with the triumphs of the young lovers. The relative contributions of the Jonsonian tradition diminish in the eighteenth century, but like its Fletcherian counterpart, its formal continuity is ongoing. It remains rare to find a comedy without humours characters, but it is also increasingly rare to find a comedy dominated by humours or satire. Henry Fielding’s political satires of the 1730s such as Pasquin (1736) and The Historical

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FIGURE 1.2: Johann Zoffany, a scene from Love in a Village by Isaac Bickerstaff. Act 1, Scene 2 with Edward Shuter as Justice Woodcock, John Beard as Hawthorn, and John Dunstall as Hodge. Creative Commons.

Register for the Year 1736 (1737) led to the 1737 Licensing Act that effectively ended the political subgenres of Jonsonian comedy. After the Licensing Act, the predominant Jonsonian was Samuel Foote, “the English Aristophanes.” Foote pushed against the restrictions of the Licensing Act, though his targets were prominent individuals or social types such as nabobs (The Nabob, 1772) and Methodists (The Minor, 1760) rather than politicians. More common was the focus on British eccentrics like the title character in Arthur Murphy’s The Upholsterer (1758), a man so obsessed with keeping up with the latest political news that he attends to nothing else. Yet even these plays follow the Jonsonian tradition of including courtship plots, however minimal or rudimentary, in otherwise punitive comedies. Although the cultural specifics altered over time, Dryden’s “mixed way” continued to be the rule in the eighteenth century. The majority of playwrights continued to minimize the harder-edged elements of the Jonsonian tradition just as they had softened Carolean wit

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FIGURE 1.3: The Authors Benefit Pasquin. Etching by William Hogarth, 1736. The London Printing and Publishing company. Photo by GSinclair Archive/UIG via Getty Images.

comedy. A good example of this sanitized mainstream comedy is David Garrick’s The Country Girl (1766), his adaptation of Wycherley’s The Country Wife. The cuckoldings and other extramarital sex in the source play are eliminated along with most of its characters. What remains is nonetheless a traditional comedy with two courtship plots, contrasting lovers, some parental opposition, and an older mentor figure to provide wise advice and help insure the desired resolution. Wycherley’s Horner and the Fidget group are gone. Horner is replaced by Belville, Harcourt’s nephew, who is in love with Miss Peggy (the Margery Pinchwife character). And he wishes to marry her. Alithea’s brother Pinchwife is replaced by Moody, Miss Peggy’s guardian, whose designs for her are also honorable, Harcourt courts Alithea who, as in Wycherley’s play, is betrothed to Sparkish. Harcourt wins Alithea and Belville marries Miss Peggy. Love and morality triumph and folly and greed are punished in an ending that satisfied the demands of mid-century audiences.

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FIGURE 1.4: Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s School for Scandal, Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2009. Photo by robbie jack/Corbis via Getty Images.

Other comedies introduced characters with more heightened sensibilities and situations that more directly addressed social issues. Overt didacticism was frequently part of the mix. The moral and social excesses of Carolean and later Stuart comedy were effectively banished. Instead of cuckoldings, jealous, usually older husbands were cured of their jealousy as in Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband (1747) or Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1777). Threats to young lovers often focus on the discomfort or danger suffered by innocent young women as in Garrick and George Colman the Elder’s The Clandestine Marriage (1766), Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), and George Colman the Younger’s Inkle and Yarico (1787). The heightened sensibility in The West Indian exemplified the subgenre of sentimental comedy, also seen in plays like William Whitehead’s The School for Lovers (1762), Hugh Kelly’s False Delicacy (1768), and Elizabeth Inchbald’s Every One Has His Fault (1793). Sentimental comedies like these vary a great deal; a concise definition is no easier for this subgenre than for others. False Delicacy even seems to satirize excess sensibility. (Oliver Goldsmith makes such satire central to his The Good Natured Man [1768].) Playwrights occasionally returned to earlier subgenres, long out of fashion, updating them to produce successful plays like Hannah Cowley’s A Bold Stroke for a Husband (1783), a Spanish intrigue comedy. Heavy didacticism determined

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the form of plays like Inchbald’s Such Things Are (1788), a play constructed to maximize praise for a character much like the prison reformer John Howard, set in exotic Sumatra, with plot elements recalling the Restoration heroic play. Such plays contain threats from characters sufficiently evil that they push comedy to its limits, thereby paving the way for the melodrama of the next century. But again, the basic elements of comic form continued to be mixed in ways updated to keep up with changing cultural norms. Dramatic comedy has a long and continuous history; the comedies of this period are part of that history. Comic prose fiction at the beginning of the period had no such continuous history. The absence of a long critical history does not, however, make “the novel” easier to define as a form than “comedy.” It is probably more difficult since the origins of the novel remain a subject of heated debate. In his Dictionary, Samuel Johnson defined the novel as “a small tale, generally of love.”11 His definition is at best partial, and it is limited to the romance (Fletcherian) tradition, including the full range of love stories from comedy to tragedy and many in between. Increasingly, “novel” is used to describe any long work of prose fiction. I use “novel” and “prose fiction” interchangeably in this essay. Like the drama, the forms of the novel are best seen in its subgenres. Moreover, thinking about prose fiction was not based on the classical binary of comedy and tragedy. Most prose fiction had continental models. Some of these works were comic; few were comedies. French romances and their English imitations by writers like Roger Boyle and religious allegories like those of John Bunyan have little or no comic content. The criminal literature represented by Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665), drawing on English models like Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler (1594) and Spanish picaresque novels like Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), consists of a series of episodes tracing the life of the title character (and narrator) in a series of criminal activities of varying degrees of immorality. When the episodes show the punishment of deserving victims, Head’s work is in the Jonsonian tradition, but Head’s plot remains a collection of usually unrelated episodes without overall coherence. Another form of popular fiction after the Restoration was that of amorous love intrigue, tales of love and (sometimes) courtship that were as often tragic as comic, and more often somewhere in between. Among the closest to comedy are some of Aphra Behn’s novellas: The Lucky Mistake (1689), The Adventure of the Black Lady (1697), Memoirs of the Court of the King of Bantam (1697), and The Unfortunate Happy Lady (1698). (Behn’s fondness for amorous intrigues produced a full range of works from comedy to tragedy.) The Lucky Mistake is not Behn’s best work of prose fiction, but it is perhaps her best example of comic fiction. It tells of young lovers thwarted by their fathers while fighting off the attention of an older rival. It is conveyed in a style derived from French romance with a plot that could have had a tragic turn without the narrator’s reassuring, if still suspenseful, manner of presentation.

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Two other late seventeenth-century novellas retain the tone of aristocratic romance in tales that remain clearly comic: Walter Charleton’s The Ephesian Matron (1668) and Congreve’s Incognita (1692). Charleton’s retelling of the story of a woman who falls in love with a soldier while grieving the recent death of her husband in his tomb is kept clearly comic by the extensive, witty commentary of the narrator. Congreve’s more conventional comic plot is well captured by its subtitle, Love and Duty Reconciled. It is a story about lovers resisting parental authority, mistaken identity, and the predictable happy resolution that follows from the revelation of true identities. Congreve argues that “Since all Traditions must indisputably give place to the Drama,” it follows that the novel should imitate the older, better, more polished form. He therefore aims to imitate the drama’s “Unity of Action” with what he calls the “Unity of Contrivance” (Congreve [1692] 2011: 5). Like Behn, he uses his urbane narrator to achieve that unity and to insure that the narrative remains firmly in the realm of the Fletcherian comic tradition. The early eighteenth century saw an increased demand for most kinds of prose fiction but little development of new forms. Amatory fiction,12 and picaresque and criminal tales proliferate, often in exotic settings. They are for prose fiction equivalent to the Fletcherian and Jonsonian streams of dramatic comedy. And like dramatic comedy, individual works of prose fiction mix the two streams, although one or the other tends to dominate. Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood follow Behn in providing a range of amatory novels with varying degrees of comic content. Daniel Defoe writes a number of criminal narratives; some have comic content. Satiric fiction is similar; works like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are not comedies, but they often contain an abundance of comic moments. Samuel Richardson and Fielding did not invent the novel, but they did bring changes to its form. Richardson’s novels are serious, or in the case of Clarissa (1748) tragic, rather than comic; he is not a comic writer. But Fielding is at heart a comic writer, a comic playwright who had explored the full range of the comic stage tradition before applying himself to prose fiction. Shamela (1741) was written in response to Richardson’s Pamela (1740). It exposes what Fielding saw as the shortcomings of Richardson’s novel by sending it up in a prose equivalent to Buckingham’s burlesque The Rehearsal. Fielding prefaced his first full-length novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), with his thoughts on “comic Romance,” which he described as “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose,” one that is “light and ridiculous” rather than serious or tragic (Fielding 1967: 4). He recognized the extended range made possible by prose fiction. He also reflects the eighteenth-century movement away from laughing at qualities beyond the control of their holders, limiting his comic victims to those made ridiculous through affectation, not nature. Joseph Andrews begins with more parodic references to Pamela, but soon expands to a freestanding tale of love and courtship in a plot that puts the

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FIGURE 1.5: Thomas Rowlandson, illustration to Henry Fielding’s Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his friend Abraham Adams, Elisha Whittelsey Collection. Creative Commons.

central characters on the road, encountering a wide range of people and situations, many of which are unrelated to the main plot. That is, it is a kind of picaresque narrative embedded in a Fletcherian courtship plot complete with an amiable humorist, Parson Adams, who is a mainline representative of the Jonsonian comic characters already described above in eighteenth-century dramatic comedies. Fielding thus develops a more fully integrated “mixed way” of comedy for the novel, a much more expansive form that requires a looser sense of unity of action. Fielding’s greatest triumph with comic form—and as a novelist—is Tom Jones (1749), a much longer and more complicated courtship plot full of picaresque digressions and more obstacles than would be possible in even the most complex of dramatic comedies. Despite the potential seriousness of the obstacles faced by Tom in his pursuit of Sophia such as the evil intentions of Blifil, Fielding maintains a resolutely comic approach to his plot with his narrator playing a central role in maintaining expectations for a happy ending.13 Parental opposition, uncertain identity, youthful indiscretions, misunderstood motives are all among the threats to Tom and Sophia that will never undo the desired resolution. Like Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones has a variety of humorists,

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some amiable like Partridge and to a lesser degree Squire Western and his sister, others more clearly in the punitive tradition. In other words, Fielding takes the “mixed way” of comedy to its maturity in the novel. Tobias Smollett’s first two novels, Roderick Random (1748) and Peregrine Pickle (1751), are more conventional picaresque novels tracing the histories of their title characters in a series of unrelated episodes culminating in happy marriages and promising futures. The courtship plots frame actions that are almost entirely punitive as their heroes suffer early indignities and later learn to repay their tormentors in ways that are often brutal but appropriate punishment for a variety of rogues and scoundrels. These novels are among the best of the “life and adventures” subgenre that dominates the Jonsonian stream in the first half of the century—and beyond. Their violent, gritty humor testifies to the persistence and popularity of punitive comedy in the face of criticism advocating more refined forms of literature.14 It is interesting that Smollett’s last novel, Humphry Clinker (1771), domesticates the punitive in a travel narrative framed by courtship but dominated by the characters in the family of the amiable i.e. humorist, Matthew Bramble. Smollett abandons incidents of brutality in favor of situations that reveal the quirks and benign humours of the central characters. The taming of the “life and adventures” format was not new with Smollett. Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–7) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) also focus more on the characters than on their adventures, with special attention to their sensibilities. Where the more traditional fictional biographies and histories focused on plot and action, Sterne, like the late Smollett, shows how the privileging of character over plot pioneered by Richardson could be assimilated in a more comic novel. Neither Tristram’s nor Yorick’s lives are comic, but they respond to their adversities in ways far more at home in comedy than tragedy. Sterne’s unique combination of Jonsonian humours and Fletcherian intrigue was not easy to imitate, but his “mixed way” includes many of the elements that are to be found in late-century comic novels. The influence of Richardson and Fielding (among others) informs the direction Frances Burney took the comic novel in Evelina (1778). Evelina is a comic romance in the form of a “History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World.” There are many obstacles to the desired marriage between Evelina and Orville, but they are largely the obstacles of Fletcherian comedy. And Burney punctuates her novel with a number of humours characters and a number of episodes that would not be out of place in a Smollett novel, skills she had honed writing dramatic comedies (albeit plays that went unpublished and unperformed until the late twentieth century). But the courtship plot dominates, as does the focus on character over action. The novel allows for a kind of exploration of internal states of mind impossible in the drama. Burney’s “mixed way” helped establish a new version of the comic novel, one soon developed by Jane Austen into a model that eclipsed eighteenth-century forms. Austen’s novel Emma

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(1815) provides a fine example. The moral development of its eponymous central character receives more attention than would be possible in a dramatic comedy, but the action is firmly in the Fletcherian tradition with its three courtship plots undergoing the usual external and internal obstacles before the success required for the happy ending. And there are also a number of humours characters such as Mr. Woodhouse, Miss Bates, and the Eltons, well-developed characters who contribute significantly to the plot. There is never a doubt about the outcome, though how the characters will get there is never obvious. The novel eventually develops its own strong comic tradition. The same cannot be said for the poetry of the period though it, too, often contains comic moments. The most frequent use of comedy is in satiric poetry where the exposure and punishment of satiric targets is central to the moral aims of the poets. Comedy in such poetry is usually in the Jonsonian tradition. It is central to a wide range of poetic subgenres from formal verse satire (often imitations of the satires and epistles of Horace and Juvenal), mock-heroic poetry (which plays off of the genuinely heroic poetry of Greek and Roman epics) and “advice-topainters” poems to broadsides and mock-panegyrics.15 In Mac Flecknoe (c. 1676) and Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Dryden uses comic, even farcical, episodes to heap scorn on his satiric targets. The comedy is especially low in Mac Flecknoe since its main target was the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden was more cautious with his aristocratic and royal targets in Absalom and Achitophel; the language is more elevated, though the treatment is far from gentle. Alexander Pope similarly tries to match tone with target, maintaining considerable decorum in The Rape of the Lock (1714) while showing little restraint in attacking literary inferiors in The Dunciad (1728; revised 1742). Charles Churchill is still less concerned with decorum in taking on the acting profession in The Rosciad (1761). These poems all use comic episodes to support their satiric ends. Less formal, but in the same tradition, are poems like Samuel Butler’s burlesque of the Puritans in Hudibras (1663–78); John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester’s satires on Charles II and the culture of his court such as “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” (c. 1672–3), “Signor Dildo” (c. 1673), “A Satyr on Charles II” (c. 1673–4), and his many songs about the rampant promiscuity and immorality of the court; and Swift’s attacks on social foibles (including his own) in such poems as “The Lady’s Dressing Room” (1732), “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift” (1731–2), and “The Legion Club” (1736). Even more gentle satirical poems like Congreve’s “Doris” (1710), Thomas Gray’s “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat” (1747), and Goldsmith’s satiric descriptions of his friends, “Retaliation” (1774), share similar uses of comedy in favor of their satiric ends. But while dramatic comedy and the novel maintained their popularity at the end of the century and into the next, verse satire did not. The result was far less comedy in British poetry. English comedy in the “Age of Enlightenment,” then, developed from the comedy of the early modern period, particularly from models derived from the

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plays of John Fletcher and Ben Jonson. Fletcher’s and Jonson’s models, in turn, were firmly in comic traditions having their origins in Greek “Old” and “New” comedy. Enlightenment writers began with those earlier, well-established forms of comedy and refined and updated them throughout the period, and, like Jonson and Fletcher, rarely produced work that did not mix elements from both traditions. Parallel developments occurred in France, Italy, Spain, and Germany, to name just the most familiar continental literatures. Analogous early modern writers provided analogous local forms derived from “Old” and “New” comedy, mixing them in practice and developing them to meet changing cultural demands throughout the period. Enlightenment comedy is characterized by its conservatism, its sensitivity to cultural change, and its openness to influences from other European cultures. Its critical and commercial success depended on the ability of its writers to continue to make a transnational and transcultural form local and sensitive to ever-changing audience needs and expectations.

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CHAPTER TWO

Theory JEAN I. MARSDEN

But can any Thing but corrupt and degenerate Nature be the proper Subject of Ridicule? And can any Thing but Ridicule be the proper Subject of Comedy? Has not Aristotle told us in the Fifth Chapter of his Poeticks, that Comedy is an Imitation of the very Worst of Men? —John Dennis (1722) Thus it is, that we are enabled to judge of the politeness of nations, from the delicacy of their Comic writers. —James Beattie (1776) What exactly was comedy in the years between 1650 and 1800? As the two passages above depicting vastly different visions of the genre suggest, deciphering an eighteenth-century theory of comedy is a challenging task (Dennis [1722] 1943: 2.243; Beattie 1776: 438). During the period, critical writings on the topic were overshadowed by the far more extensive debates over tragedy, considered a more “elevated” form, second in status only to epic. Descriptions of tragedy, however, had a long history of antecedents stretching back to ancient Greece and the ultimate ur-text of Aristotle’s Poetics, a work to which all critics could turn when articulating their own theories of tragic form and function. Discussions of comedy had no such originary text (Aristotle’s treatise on comedy being famously lost), and thus those writers who sought to create their own commentaries on the genre found themselves with fewer established categories or ideals to align themselves with or define themselves against. When looking back to the classics to find authorities for their theories, critics found themselves consigned either to applying more general rules on drama to their views on 49

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comedy or relying on short passages within the context of larger works, as with Horace’s comments on comedy and proper decorum in Ars Poetica. This essay is largely devoted to critical writings from England and France; although comedy was an important part of the Italian and Spanish theater during the eighteenth century, neither nation produced a body of critical writings on comedy or on the dramatic tradition. In England and France, however, drama was perceived as an embodiment of national values; each nation defined itself in opposition to the other even as it adopted and adapted the other’s literary conventions. In this sense it is impossible to completely separate these two critical traditions. The cross-fertilization of ideals and practices occurred even as the French protested against English irregularity and the English attacked French drama as insipid and coldly correct. For the English in particular, comedy came to represent the British national character even more so than tragedy, and, as the eighteenth century progressed, English critics discussed the ideals of comedy at greater length and with increasing national fervor. This alignment of comic theory and national identity resulted in extensive discussion of comedy among English critics. While French critics did not ignore comedy, in contrast to England the French considered tragedy to be France’s great national genre, and comedy is frequently discussed in terms of drama as a whole rather than as a specific genre with distinct ideals and distinguishing characteristics. As with tragedy, comedy was seen as a specifically dramatic genre during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and critical writings during this era tied their discussions of its nature and function directly to the stage. While some works, such as Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, might be referred to as comic, they were not seen in the eighteenth century as comedies (even Fielding referred to his novel as a “comic Romance” or a “comic Epic-Poem in Prose, differing from Comedy, as the serious Epic from Tragedy” [1967: 4]).1 Comedy’s affect, the response it generated in its audience, was key to theories of the genre and in particular to the defenses of particular points of view; should the characters embodied by actors on the stage cause laughter or tears? Should they instruct or entertain? The close ties between theory and practice can be seen in the forms that many critical commentaries took; especially in the years before 1700, analyses of comedy are scattered, often appearing in the course of more general discussions of drama or in the paratexts to actual plays, in prologues and prefaces rather than in formal essays or discourses. A second central critical precept essential to understanding theories of comedy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is that comedy and farce were two distinctly different genres, with farce being a degenerate form, far beneath the dignity of comedy. These distinctions are explored in an oftencited passage from the Preface to John Dryden’s An Evening’s Love: Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions, and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designes, as are to be found and met

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with in the world. Farce, on the other side, consists of forc’d humours, and unnatural events. Comedy presents us with the imperfections of humane nature: Farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical. The one causes laughter in those who can judge of men and manners, by lively representation of their folly or corruption; the other produces the same effect in those who can judge of neither, and that only by its extravagances. The first works on the judgment and fancy; the latter on the fancy only: There is more of satisfaction in the former kind of laughter, and in the latter more of scorn . . . In short, there is the same difference betwixt Farce and Comedy, as betwixt an Empirique and a true Physitian [sic]: both of them may attain their ends; but what the one performs by hazard, the other does by skill. —1970: 10.203–4 The vision of farce Dryden articulates in 1668 remained unchallenged throughout the eighteenth century. More than seventy years later, Samuel Johnson provided a similar description in his Dictionary, even citing Dryden in his definition of the form. In the hierarchy of genres in which epic stood at the top followed by tragedy and comedy, farce held a much lower position, mere entertainment rather than a source of intelligent laughter and instruction. Comedy represents nature, even if its characters are lower than those in tragedy; farce is unnatural altogether. In England, the distinction between comedy and farce was emphasized in performance: comedies were staged first as the theatrical centerpiece of an evening’s entertainment while farces appeared later as shorter afterpieces. On the stage as in the minds of critics, the two forms were—or at least should be—entirely different forms. While Dryden’s dismissal of farce remained unchallenged, the vision of comedy he espouses would come under debate over the course of the next century. Examining how critics viewed the proper form and function of comedy reveals a seismic shift in arguments regarding how comedy should operate, what its ultimate goal should be, and even what a play should look like in order to be considered a comedy. Beginning with formalist discussions of the rules of drama and moving through the advent of sentimental or tearful comedy, the following chapter explores how a genre characterized by “corrupt and degenerate nature” could, fifty years later, be seen as the ideal representation of delicacy and politeness.

1660–1700 Some of the most influential critical works dedicated specifically to drama, if not to comedy, appeared in the first years after the restoration of Charles II to the throne of England. Two useful works to examine as a starting point for any discussion of eighteenth-century comic theory come from opposite sides of the English Channel: Pierre Corneille’s Discours des trois unities (Discourse on the

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Three Unities, 1660) and John Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). These works focused in particular on formal concerns, examining the proper structure of drama, and provided a foundation for following critics, both those writing specifically about comedy and those dealing more generally with drama. The two works are closely linked; Dryden’s Essay cites Corneille’s Discours in numerous places, more so than any other contemporary critic. While neither essay focuses specifically on comedy as an individual genre with its own distinguishing characteristics, each critic incorporates comments on comedy into his more general exploration on what makes a correct drama. Both Corneille and Dryden respond directly to French neoclassical theory, such as that adhered to by François Hédelin, abbé d’Aubignac.2 Drawn from a reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, this theory established a set of precepts often referred to as the “rules of drama,” requiring adherence to the unities of time, place, and action. In order to be considered correct or regular, a play should take place over the course of no more than one day, restrict its activity to a single location, and focus on a single plot or “action.” Only through a careful adherence to these rules could a play convince an audience of its verisimilitude and thus prompt an appropriate response. Although derived from Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy, it is important to note that these rules were applied to comedy as well as tragedy. Thus, a proper comedy was expected to be constructed according to the same formal principles as a tragedy. Corneille’s approach to the form of drama is more nuanced than that of his predecessors. He himself had run afoul of critics earlier in the century because of perceived irregularities in his tragi-comedy Le Cid (1637). Despite the popularity of Corneille’s play, it incited a pamphlet war referred to as Querelle du Cid (“Quarrel of Le Cid”); critics argued that it did not properly observe the unities and that it failed to observe proper poetic justice. Corneille responded by attacking some of his critics, and ultimately the Académie française declared that the play broke too many rules to be considered a true work of art. In his Discours Corneille rethinks rather than simply reiterates the concept of a regular drama. While the examples he uses to illustrate his points are all drawn from tragedy, he makes it clear at the beginning of the essay that he considers comedy to be part of the discussion and that he will refer to it specifically only when it differs noticeably from tragedy. Thus, regarding the unity of action, he comments, I hold then, as I have already said, that in comedy, unity of action consists in the unity of plot or the obstacle to the plans of the principal actors, and in tragedy in the unity of peril, whether the hero falls victim to it or escapes. It is not that I claim that several perils cannot be allowed in the latter or several plots or obstacles in the former, provided that one passes necessarily from one to the other. —Corneille 1970: 101

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Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid, 1637, title page. Photo by Culture Club/

The nature of what constitutes a unified action will differ from comedy to tragedy, but the fact that all events should be connected to this central obstacle or peril remains consistent. Although Corneille distinguishes between comedy and tragedy in terms of their representations of a unified action, his comments on the other rules apply to both genres. Like other neoclassical critics, Corneille turns back to Aristotle

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for the unity of time, but bases his own rationale on common sense, arguing that as the dramatic poem is an imitation, or rather a portrait of human actions, and it is beyond doubt that portraits gain in excellence in proportion as they resemble the original more closely . . . Let us then not settle on twelve or twenty-four hours, but let us compress the action of the poem into the shortest possible period, so that the performance may more closely resemble reality and thus be more perfect. —1970: 109–10 While Corneille seeks a compressed timeframe, he refuses to prescribe a set limit. He is even more open in his comments on the unity of place, something he claims has no precedent in either Aristotle or Horace. He rejects earlier critics who claimed that in order for true unity of place to be observed, all events should take place in the same room (as he notes, we cannot expect that all events in a palace are going to take place in the king’s chambers). Rather, plays ought to strive for unity of place as much as possible, but, he explains, “this unity does not suit every kind of subject” (1970: 113). As with the unity of time, Corneille’s understanding of dramatic theory is contingent; the playwright should focus on the needs of the audience rather than on the demands of theory. If Corneille wrote his Discours as a commentary on the currently existing French theory, Dryden wrote his treatise with a larger goal in mind, that of demonstrating the superiority of English drama against other traditions but most especially against the French. As he states in his opening remarks to the reader, “The drift of the ensuing Discourse was chiefly to vindicate the honour of our English Writers, from the censure of those who unjustly prefer the French before them” (Dryden [1668] 1971: 17.7; reverse italics). This nationalist attitude is reiterated throughout the Essay and is inherent in the very structure of Dryden’s argument. He presents his argument in the guise of a debate between four urbane gentlemen who join many of their countrymen in taking a barge down the Thames to watch the English eventually repel a devastating Dutch raid in a naval battle. The gentlemen, Crites, Eugenius, Lisideius, and Neander (the “new man”—Dryden’s mouthpiece) discuss drama as they observe the battle, and the English navy’s superiority prefigures the superiority of English drama.3 The Essay consists of three debates: the first between Crites and Eugenius on the virtues of ancient plays versus those of modern (English) drama; the second between Lisideius and Neander comparing the French and English drama; and the final debate between Crites and Neander regarding the role of rhyme in drama. Throughout, the debates are civilized, and the Essay begins and ends

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FIGURE 2.2: The Dutch burning English ships during the Raid on the Medway, June 20, 1667, oil on panel. Photo by Getty Images.

with the men in perfect accord. The discussants begin by establishing a description of good drama as a baseline: “A just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind” (1971: 17.15). As was the case in Corneille’s third discourse, this description is equally applicable to both comedy and tragedy, and Dryden and his speakers make no distinction between the qualities that make an outstanding comedy and those which should distinguish tragedy. From his stronger rhetorical position of speaking last, Neander refutes French theories of the importance of regularity in drama, ridiculing the contortions that he claims playwrights are forced into, adding, “now what I beseech you is more easie than to write a regular French Play, or more difficult then [sic] to write an irregular English one, like those of Fletcher, or of Shakespeare?” (1971: 17.53). Ultimately, comedy becomes the core of Dryden’s vindication of the “honour” of English writers. As he explains, the English are inherently superior; the French are by nature “of an ayery and gay temper” and thus need tragedy to make them serious. The English, by contrast, are more serious in nature and in need of comedy as a diversion; thus they write better comedies. The French not only write mechanically dull plays, but they cannot write comedy. However, the English can not only write comedy, but they can master the rules if they wish to; to prove this point, he provides an example of a perfectly regular comedy, Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609). The action of Jonson’s play centers around Morose, a wealthy old man with a morbid hatred

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of noise. Morose seeks to cheat his nephew Dauphine out of his inheritance by marrying a young wife, the silent woman of the title. Dauphine contrives to have Morose marry a boy dressed as a woman instead and fills Morose’s house with noisy relatives. Morose desperately seeks to end his marriage; Dauphine promises to help his uncle in return for his inheritance, and, once that is granted, he reveals the true identity of the “silent woman.” This tightly-focused plot fulfills the unity of plot; the events of the play take place over the course of three and a half hours, fulfilling the unity of time, and the action occurs in London, primarily in a single house, thus fulfilling the unity of place. In addition to his general emphasis on comedy as peculiarly representative of English national genius, Dryden points to two specific forms of comedy prevalent on the English stage. One emphasizes verbal wit, a quality Dryden especially values for, as he notes, in “Comedy, Repartee is one of its chiefest graces; the greatest pleasure of the Audience is a chase of wit kept up on both sides, and swiftly manag’d” (1971: 17.48). As his description here indicates, this form of comedy emphasizes language and quick exchanges between characters; the verbal “chase” constitutes comedy’s “greatest pleasure” and is something alien to French drama with its proclivity for lengthy speeches. A second form of comedy is the comedy of humors, which places its emphasis on character, in particular those in whom “some extravagant habit, passion, or affection; particular . . . to some one person: by the oddness of which, he is immediately distinguish’d from the rest of men; which being lively and naturally represented, most frequently begets that malicious pleasure in the Audience which is testified by laughter” (17.60–1). Jonson is the great master of this form, and, although never stated explicitly, Dryden implies that comedies such as Jonson’s belong to the past, comedies of wit to the present. A somewhat different vision of comedy is presented by Thomas Shadwell, one of the great comic playwrights of the Restoration, who diverges from Dryden in his assessment of the importance and moral worth of comedies of wit versus those of humor. Where Dryden focuses most of his discussion of comedy in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie on its national implications, Shadwell examines comedy’s didactic goal. His comments appear in several long prefaces attached to plays that he implies, none too subtly, are properly constructed examples of the genre. In the Preface to his comedy The Sullen Lovers; or, the Impertinents (1668), Shadwell compares wit to humor in a passage that is worth quoting at length. Like Dryden, he turns to Jonson as the authority on which he bases his argument: Though I have known some of late so Insolent to say, that Ben Johnson wrote his best Playes without Wit; imagining, that all the Wit in Playes consisted in bringing two persons upon the Stage to break Jests, and to bob one another,

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which they call Repartie, not considering that there is more wit and invention requir’d in the finding out good Humor, and Matter proper for it, then in all their smart reparties. For, in the Writing of a Humor, a Man is confin’d not to swerve from the Character, and oblig’d to say nothing but what is proper to it: but in the Playes which have been wrote of late, there is no such thing as a perfect Character, but the two chief persons are most commonly a Swearing, Drinking, Whoring, Ruffian for a Lover, and an impudent ill-bred tomrig for a Mistress, and these are the fine People of the Play; and there is that Latitude in this, that almost any thing is proper for them to say; but their chief Subject is bawdy, and profaneness, which they call brisk writing, when the most dissolute of Men, that rellish those things well enough in private, are chok’d at ’em in publick. —Shadwell 1927: 1.11 In Shadwell’s eyes, wit in comedy is nothing but superficial wordplay, “break[ing] jests” and repartee between “ruffians” and “tomrigs,” characters who are seemingly interchangeable from one play to another.4 It requires little skill, just the ability to write bawdy jokes so indecent that they embarrass even the most dissolute of men. By contrast, a comedy of humors requires true “wit and invention” for the play must revolve around the central character and his defining humor or, in Dryden’s words, his “extravagant habit, passion or affection.” (Examples of such humors appear in The Silent Woman, Molière’s Le Misanthrope [1666], and Shadwell’s own comedies The Sullen Lovers and The Humorists [1671], which contain a panoply of characters of humors.) Writing such characters is difficult, Shadwell explains, because the playwright must dedicate himself to writing a consistent character and is “oblig’d to say nothing but what is proper to it.” Shadwell’s preference for humors comedy is grounded in his firm belief that the purpose of comedy is not simply to entertain but to educate. As he asserts in the Preface to The Humorists, comedy should “reprehend some of the Vices and Follies of the Age, which I take to be the most proper, and most useful way of writing Comedy” (1927: 1.183). In his eyes, this moral instruction can best be accomplished through ridicule, and comedies of humors, with their exaggerated representations of human failings, constitute the ideal vehicle for this necessary ridicule. Shadwell stresses that it is the playwright’s moral obligation to create flawed characters and to render their Figures of Vice and Folly so ugly and detestable, to make People hate and despise them, not only in others, but (if it be possible) in their dear selves. And in this latter, I think Comedy more useful than Tragedy; because the Vices and Follies in Courts (as they are too tender to be touch’d) so they concern but a few; whereas the Cheats, Villanies, and troublesome

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Follies, in the common conversation of the World, are of concernment to all the Body of Mankind. —1927: 184 Whereas tragedy pertains to a small group of kings and princes, comedy takes on the whole of mankind, making its lessons more broadly applicable and its moral potential more widespread. Moreover, he adds, rendering vice ridiculous is “a much greater punishment than Tragedy can inflict” because being laughed at and despised by one’s contemporaries is more feared than death (1927: 184).

1700–30 The emphasis on the contrast between comedies of wit and those of humor that was so central to Shadwell’s and even Dryden’s conception of comedy would fade by the turn of the eighteenth century along with the popularity of the comedy of humors. However, the concern that Shadwell expressed regarding the proper function of comedy was to become the subject of heated debates leading to pamphlet wars, charges of immorality, and ultimately to discussions over a radically new form of dramatic comedy. The catalyst for the most intense theoretical debates over the purpose and propriety of comedy was the Reverend Jeremy Collier, a nonjuring clergyman who in 1698 published an inflammatory pamphlet attacking what he saw as the moral failings of contemporary theater. While Collier did not begin the controversy (changes were already underway in the theater), his diatribe prompted a very public reassessment of drama in general and comedy in particular. The title of Collier’s treatise, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage, together With the Sense of Antiquity upon his Argument, accurately sums up his position: the English stage, as it existed in his day, was morally bankrupt. It was obscene, bereft of moral principles, and through its depiction of the clergy it mocked religion at every turn. Collier’s invective focused explicitly on the contemporary comedy of playwrights such as William Wycherley, William Congreve, and John Vanbrugh, and he turned repeatedly to a specific example, Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1697), to prove his point. For Collier, Vanbrugh’s play exemplified the abuse of the stage. Written in response to Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion (1696), a comedy climaxing in moral reform and the triumph of virtue, the plot of The Relapse featured the same reformed rake portrayed in Cibber’s play but depicts him “relapsing” to his former dissolute ways, committing adultery with a willing widow, Berinthia, while neglecting the wife, Amanda, who had worked so hard to redeem him in Cibber’s play. Whereas Collier would have seen Shadwell’s comedies as no more decent than those of most of his contemporaries, he shares Shadwell’s vision of the

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stage as having the power to impact the morality of an audience, and, like Shadwell, he sees that power most firmly at work, for good or bad, in comedy. A Short View ignited a pamphlet war of major proportions as playwrights and theatergoers rushed to defend the stage and in particular those comedies that Collier had attacked so fiercely. However, the popularity of Collier’s pamphlet along with the advent of plays such as Cibber’s reveals changing attitudes toward the nature of stage representations, especially comedies. No longer was the sexually-charged banter common in plays by Wycherley, Etherege, and Congreve the sign of a good play. In London, Societies for the Reformation of Manners formed during the 1690s; their activities included suing playhouses “for the most Abominable, Impious, Prophane, Lewd and Immoral Expressions, contained in the Plays acted by them” (Milhous and Hume 1991: 702).5 As with Collier and his attack on the theater, the actions of these societies did not themselves change the nature of drama but rather reflected broader cultural changes often linked to the growth of the middle classes. The theater and the plays performed within it became a flashpoint for an expanding audience that saw itself as the voice of proper moral values and associated the comedy of the Restoration with a degenerate aristocracy. Not surprisingly, commentary on comedy reflected these changing attitudes. One of the first critics to address the proper nature of comedy was playwright and critic Sir Richard Steele. Steele rejected earlier notions of comedy by means of an examination of The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter (1677), one of the most popular comedies of the Restoration. Commenting that “the Received Character of this Play, is That it is the Pattern of Gentile [sic] Comedy,” Steele sets himself in the position not simply of judging the play but of judging what the “received character” of comedy should be (Spectator 65 [1711] 1965: 1.278). His assessment of the play begins with the two central characters, for “Dorimant and Harriet are the Characters of Greatest Consequence, and if these are Low and Mean, the Reputation of the Play is very Unjust,” adding “I will take for granted, that a fine Gentleman should be honest in his Actions, and refined in his Language” (1965: 1.278). Steele’s comments here reveal a notion of comedy that diverges strikingly from that of Shadwell and from other critics who had argued that comedy’s purpose was to reform vice by exposing it to ridicule. By contrast, Steele argues that the examples presented in comedy should be positive not negative; they should inspire admiration not disgust. His final assessment of The Man of Mode is based upon the words of Dorimant and Harriet. Rather than seeing their dialogue as an example of witty repartee (Dryden’s standard for good comedy), he finds it rife with vulgar phrases, filial impiety, and indecency, and, while such a depiction of high society may be well drawn, it is not good comedy. He concludes that “nothing but being lost to a Sense of Innocence and Virtue can make anyone see this Comedy without observing more frequent Occasion to move Sorrow and Indignation than Mirth

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and Laughter . . . I allow it to be Nature, but it is Nature in its utmost Corruption and Degeneracy” (1965: 1.280). Steele’s essay was just the first salvo in what would become a heated altercation waged in a series of pamphlet, prologues, and prefaces. All the participants agreed that the ultimate goal of comedy was to instill virtue, but how this goal was to be achieved was the subject of debate. Steele’s disparagement of The Man of Mode was answered a decade later by the critic John Dennis, who objected to Steele’s assessment of Etherege’s play and to Steele’s general view that comedy should represent honest and refined characters. Dennis also objected to Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722), a comedy much advertised by Steele and his friends even before it first appeared at Drury Lane Theatre on November 7, 1722. To Dennis, the views Steele expressed in Spectator 65 and embodied in The Conscious Lovers represented a travesty of the entire genre of comedy. His comments are thus, in his eyes, not simply a defense of The Man of Mode and an attack on Steele but a much-needed overview of the proper practice of comedy; thus it “contains several Remarks upon Comedy in general; Remarks that are equally necessary for the Writing of it successfully, and for the Judging of it surely” (Dennis [1722] 1943: 2.241). Bolstering his argument with numerous references to Greek and Roman critics, he dismisses Steele’s argument that proper comedy should represent elevated rather than debased characters. Yes, characters in The Man of Mode are corrupt, “but can any Thing but corrupt and degenerate Nature be the proper Subject of Ridicule? And can any Thing but Ridicule be the proper Subject of Comedy? Has not Aristotle told us in the Fifth Chapter of his Poeticks, that Comedy is an Imitation of the very Worst of Men?” ([1722] 1943: 2.243). Characters who are better than we are the stuff of tragedies, and those who believe them to be appropriate figures of comedy do not know the “Nature of true Comedy,” for “patterns for imitation” such as those Steele would use as the basis for his own comedy, “are serious Things, and Laughter is the Life, and the very Soul of Comedy” ([1722]1943: 2.245). Ridicule prompts laughter, and it is through laughter that the audience learns to shun the vices represented on the stage, and “the business of a Comick Poet is to cure his Spectators of Vice and Folly, by the apprehension of being laugh’d at” ([1722] 1943: 2.248). Ridicule and the laughter that it generates are to Dennis the defining features of comedy; all delight and instruction derive from these essential components. Steele’s view of how to cure spectators of vice and folly was very different. While not the first comedy to make the triumph of virtue the centerpiece of its action, The Conscious Lovers is constructed around a series of “patterns for imitation,” sons willing to abandon true love to obey a father’s wish, fathers united with long-lost daughters, friends who resolve quarrels without resorting to duels. Steele elaborated on his view of the appropriate subject matter of comedy in the Preface to his play. Referring indirectly to Dennis, Steele writes that some people see the events in his play as

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no Subjects of Comedy; but I cannot be of their Mind; for any thing that has its Foundation in Happiness and Success, must be allow’d to be the Object of Comedy, and sure it must be an Improvement of it, to introduce a Joy too exquisite for Laughter, that can have no Spring but in Delight . . . I must therefore contend, that the Tears which were shed on that Occasion flow’d from Reason and Good Sense, and that Men ought not to be laugh’d at for weeping, till we are come to a more clear Notion of what is to be imputed to the Hardness of the Head, and the Softness of the Heart. —Steele 1971: 299–3006 Ridicule has no place in Steele’s view of comedy. Characters and actions that have their “Foundations in Happiness and Success” rather than folly are the proper subjects, and the playwright’s goal is not to incite laughter but rather a “Joy too exquisite for Laughter” that arises from the delight we take in watching honorable actions. In his vision of comedy, the audience should weep rather than laugh, not from sadness but from “Reason and Good Sense,” a recognition of virtue rather than vice. Dennis was to deride Steele’s comments, claiming in a subsequent pamphlet that Steele was confusing comedy with tragedy and that his words in this passage demonstrated that he had taken care to show that he knew nothing of comedy ([1723] 1943: 2.259). The prologue to Steele’s play elaborates on the issues that he had raised in the Preface. Written by Steele’s admirer Leonard Welsted, the prologue situates The Conscious Lovers as a “bold” new view of comedy that stands against tired old modes dependent on clichés, superficial glitter, and smut to appeal to men’s lower instincts: But the bold Sage, the Poet of To-night, By new and des’rate Rules resolv’d to Write; Fain would he give more just Applause Rise, And please by Wit that scorns that Aids of Vice; The Praise he seeks, from worthier Motives springs, Such Praise, as Praise to those that give, brings. Welsted expands the implications of this new form of comedy by casting it in national terms: Your Aid, most humbly sought, then Britons lend, And lib’ral Mirth, like Lib’ral Men defend: No more let Ribaldry, with License writ, Usurp the Name of Eloquence or Wit; No more let lawless Farce uncensur’d go, The lewd dull Gleamings of a Smithfield Show,

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’Tis yours, with Breeding to refine the Age, To Chasten Wit, and Moralize the Stage. Ye Modest, Wise and Good, ye Fair, ye Brave, To-night the Champion of your Virtues save, Redeem from long Contempt the Comic Name, And Judge politely for your Country’s Fame. —Steele 1971: 303–47 The theater audience here becomes a stand-in for Britons as a whole, and its support for refined “mirth” rather than low, ribald, and lewd wit reflects the “liberal” values of their country. Steele thus emerges as a “Champion” of British values who redeems the genre of comedy too long debased by plays such as The Man of Mode.

1730 AND BEYOND The moment encapsulated in the debate over the merits of two very different plays represents a turning point in English theories of comedy and foreshadows changes that were to occur across Europe as well. The clash over the nature of comedy generated by The Conscious Lovers went far beyond Dennis and Steele, and the growing prominence of this new form became the most significant development in the theory and practice of comedy during the rest of the eighteenth century. The popularity of plays such as Steele’s was to reshape critical understandings of what constituted a comedy as well as the nature of the response the comedy should draw from its audience. In England, discussions follow the general contours of the exchanges between Dennis and Steele: should comedy endeavor to reform vice and folly through ridicule or should its efforts be directed toward depicting virtue rewarded? Should the characters be ordinary people we might meet on the street whose behavior we should ridicule and avoid or should they be moral exemplars whose virtues we should imitate? Should comedy inspire laughter or tears? Increasingly, Steele’s vision of a comedy of moral delight became widely accepted, gaining influence in part because of widespread distaste for later seventeenth-century comedies, plays such as Etherege’s Man of Mode. By midcentury, most Restoration comic playwrights were out of favor, their plays seen not as worthy examples of the genre but as indecent blots upon the history of English drama. Critics blamed comedy’s corruptness on the age in which it was written and in particular on Charles II, whose debauchery had become an embarrassment. As Hugh Blair wrote in 1783, “it was not till the aera of the Restoration of Charles II that the licentiousness which was observed, at that period, to infect the court, and the nation in general, seized, in a peculiar manner, upon Comedy as its province, and, for almost a whole century, retained

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possession of it” (1787: 3.375). It was not simply that Charles had corrupted comedy, this corrupt form now reflected poorly on the entire English nation, for, as Blair observes, comedy, more than any other genre, is a barometer of the virtue and refinement of a nation, and “in general, whatever form Comedy assumes, whether gay or serious, it may always be esteemed a mark of Society advancing in true politeness, when those theatrical exhibitions, which are designated for public amusement, are cleared from indelicate sentiment or immoral tendency” (1787: 3.383–4). The form of comedy represents a distillation of the English national character, those liberal values and moral standards Welsted had cited in his prologue. There was, inevitably, a backlash against the moral comedies Blair praised so highly. Although negative voices were in the minority, some critics feared that this “sentimental comedy,” so called because of the elevated sentiments of its characters, would emasculate English drama. Seeing the developments in comedy as unmanly, William Cook derides their lack of ridicule, describing them as the product of an age not of refinement and taste but as an era marked by a “slavish effeminacy of manners . . . unknown to former ages.” Continuing the sexual imagery, he concludes that, as a result, comedy has been “debauched, like an unhappy female” (1775: 142–3). Playwright and novelist Oliver Goldsmith entered the fray as well in 1773, publishing an “Essay on the Theatre; Or, A Comparison between the Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” anonymously in the Westminster Magazine. While not as overtly sexual in his vision of comedy’s downfall, Goldsmith presents an apocalyptic picture in which humor and true comedy depart the English stage in favor of sentimental comedies, which he terms “bastard tragedies.” The focus of his argument lies on the importance of maintaining comedy and tragedy as two separate genres; comedy not only should not but cannot represent pain and suffering: The principal question therefore is, Whether in describing Low or Middle life, an exhibition of its Follies be not preferable to a detail of its Calamities. . . . Distress, therefore, is the proper object of Tragedy, since the Great excite our pity by their fall; but not equally so of Comedy, since the Actors employed in it are originally so mean, that they sink but little by their fall. —Goldsmith [1773] 1966a: 210–11 Although his argument runs counter to the popularity of current tragedies such as Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753), Goldsmith contends that we cannot feel pity for the distresses of lower or middle classes because they cannot truly “fall”; therefore, displaying their follies is far more effective. Moreover, he claims that the figures depicted in sentimental comedies are patently unrealistic:

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In these Plays almost all the Characters are good, and exceedingly generous; they are lavish enough of their Tin Money on the Stage, and though they want Humour have abundance of Sentiment and Feeling. If they happen to have Faults or Foibles, the Spectator is taught not only to pardon, but to applaud them, in consideration of the goodness of their hearts, so that Folly, instead of being ridiculed, is commended, and the Comedy aims at touching our Passions without the power of being truly pathetic. —[1773]1966a: 212 We should avoid rather than emulate these sentimental fools whose grand gestures have no real consequences. The ultimate danger of this hybrid form is that, because it is so easy to write (in Goldsmith’s eyes), playwrights will forget how to write “true” comedy, actors will forget how to act it, and real comedy will vanish forever from the English stage. (Goldsmith’s gloomy view of the death of comedy was driven in part by personal pique; he resented the success of rival playwright Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian [1772], a play in which the good-hearted title character is indeed very generous with his “Tim Money.”) While the debate regarding the true nature of comedy raged most fiercely in England, French comedy experienced its own upheavals and controversies. By 1740, French playwrights were making a conscious effort to blend comedy and tragedy, developing a subgenre known as comédie larmoyante (“tearful comedy”). The goal of the playwrights who designed these plays and the critics who supported them was to move beyond the formal tragedy of the seventeenth century and show the distresses of virtuous characters in modern life. The playwright generally credited with originating the genre was Nivelle de La Chaussée. In the prologue to his first comedy, Fausse Antipathie (False Antipathy, perf. 1733, pub. 1734), De La Chaussée explains the rationale for his play in the form of an extended consideration of the fluid nature of comedy. The prologue consists of a debate between Le Genie de la Comédie Françoise, La Folie, and Le Bon Sens (The Spirit of French Comedy, Folly, and Good Sense) over what constitutes a proper comedy: should it be ridiculous and sometimes indecent, as La Folie suggests, or more serious and moral, like the play that is to follow, as Le Bon Sens urges. Ultimately, Le Bon Sens and Le Genie are joined by Thalie, the muse of comedy, and they agree that there is no absolute genre of comedy and thus they will take a chance on the new form even though it may not please the public, leaving the theater no more than a temple de l’ennui (temple of boredom) as La Folie had warned (La Chaussée 1734: 27).8 While, as in England, some critics held out for a strict segregation of the genres, this vision of comedy as an unstable genre represented a major shift in French theories of drama— tragedy as well as comedy. Increasingly, playwrights sought to blur the lines between tragedy, with its elevated characters, and the lower realm of comedy.

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Even Voltaire, who at one time scoffed that comédies larmoyantes were the realm of playwrights who could write neither tragedy nor comedy, sought to integrate comedy and sentiment and wrote his own hybrid dramas.9 Perhaps the best-known French theory of drama in the mid-eighteenth century is that of Denis Diderot, who argued for a new genre, neither tragedy nor comedy, that he called drame or “serious genre.” Diderot was a great admirer of works that depicted the distresses of the middle class, in particular English plays such as George Lillo’s popular tragedy The London Merchant (1731), and he wrote two hybrid plays of his own: Le Fils naturel (The Natural Son, 1757) and Père de famille (Father of the Family, 1758). His most extended discussion of drame appears in three “conversations” attached to The Natural Son in which he describes the new form and explains its importance. The “Conversations” consist of a series of dialogues between Diderot and Dorval, the “natural son” of the play; Dorval explains to Diderot the philosophy behind the play and, in the third conversation, the importance of the serious play in the overall spectrum of drama. He emphasizes that what he proposes is not tragicomedy, which “brings together two genres which are far apart and separated by a natural barrier” (Diderot 1994: 48), but rather a form that lies between the two: A play never fits exactly into one category. There is no work in the tragic or comic genres without parts that would not be out of place in the serious genre; and there will equally well be some aspects of this genre which bear the stamp of the comic or the tragic. The advantage of the serious genre is that, set as is it between the other two, there are possibilities for it whether it moves upward or downward. It is not the same for the comic or tragic genres. All the gradations of the comic are contained between this genre and the serious genre; and all those of the tragic between the serious genre and tragedy. The burlesque and the fantastic both go beyond nature and nothing can be taken from them which would not spoil the effect. —1994: 47 In his emphasis on the place and usefulness of this “serious genre,” Diderot does not so much influence other playwrights or critics as express the shifts that were occurring in France. De La Chaussée’s comédies larmoyantes fit within this vision of an in-between genre, as do the works of later playwrights such as Louis-Sébastien Mercier, and even Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais wrote at length about the non-traditional qualities of his two best-known comedies, Le Barbier de Séville; ou, la precaution inutile (The Barber of Seville; or, the Useless Precaution, 1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1784).

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Despite the overlap between English and French comic practice in the second half of the eighteenth century, English critics often used French precepts from a previous generation as a means of advancing a nationalist agenda. In their rhetoric, the irregularity of English comedy becomes a reflection of the freedom of the English people; by contrast, French comedy is flat, insipid, and unoriginal, with the French adherence to the rules representing the general slavish nature of the people (although Diderot, Mercier, and Beaumarchais might not have seen themselves in this description). This perceived theoretical divide became an important component in English criticism in the final decades of the century as it provided criteria for comedy, most notably plays that focused on feelings rather than form. As Richard Cumberland explains, “there never have been any statute-laws for comedy; there never can be any; it is only referable to the unwritten law of the heart, and that is nature” (2002: 1.171–2). Evoking the English passion for freedom, Hugh Blair presents this vision of comedy in more explicitly national terms, From the English Theatre, we are naturally led to expect a greater variety of original characters in Comedy, and bolder strokes of wit and humour, than are to be found on any other Modern Stage. Humour is, in a great measure, the peculiar province of the English nation. The nature of such a free Government as ours; and that unrestrained liberty which our manners allow to every man, of living entirely after his own taste, afford full scope to the display of singularity of character, and to the indulgence of humour in all its forms. —1787: 372–3 English liberty, inherent in its government and its people, produces the best comedy because its genius is “unrestrained”; the implicit contrast is with the absolutist monarchy of France, which translates, in literary terms, to comedy that is restricted, as are its people, by rules. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Ben Jonson was no longer cited as the ideal exemplar of English comedy with his regular dramas but rather Shakespeare, with his unregulated genius. Where Dryden sought to “vindicate” the honor of English dramatists using Jonson to demonstrate the ease with which they can write drama as correct as any French playwright, critics one hundred years later claim irregularity and originality as national virtues, as much a part of the empire of letters as they are of the expanding English empire. Cumberland’s words rejecting “statute-laws” for comedy in favor of the “unwritten law of the heart” demonstrate just how much theories of comedy changed in the years after Corneille and Dryden wrote in the late seventeenth century. Formal rules, such as those involving unities of time, place, and action, which had been central concerns in both England and France, were muted or

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FIGURE 2.3: William Blake, Oberon, Titania, and Puck with dancing fairies, 1786. Photo by Getty Images.

even discarded while the emphasis on instructing an audience by ridiculing vice and folly was no longer seen as the ultimate goal. Where more classical views of comedy had stressed that it should represent characters who are lower than we are, either in status or in virtue, critics in England and France increasingly stressed the need for characters from the middle realm of life, with whose distresses we can sympathize and whose virtues we can emulate. Despite Goldsmith’s claims, tears did not replace laughter as the language of comedy, but, by the end of the eighteenth century, formally rigid lines between genres had broken down, giving way to a genre which coupled emotional connection with humor, creating a radically new comic vision.

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CHAPTER THREE

Praxis The Practice of Comedy in the Restoration and Eighteenth Century LAURA J. ROSENTHAL

PERFORMANCE SPACES The performance of comedy in the Restoration and eighteenth century was not confined to the formal, commercial stage, although that stage was a crucial part of the story. During much of this period legitimate theater needed government approval in the form of a patent of operation, and after the Licensing Act of 1737, the British government censored the theater, requiring that plays be submitted for official inspection before they could be performed, limiting the range of performances and drawing more attention to the actors (Kinservik 2002: 99). Comedies by Henry Fielding and others that satirized the government sparked this legislation.1 But it is also worth mentioning that, as Jane Moody has shown, by the end of the eighteenth century many “illegitimate” theaters found ways to operate without governmental approval (Moody 2000: 10). Comedies, however, appeared in a range of locations: as we know from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814) and other sources, families entertained each other by putting on plays in their own homes. In Austen’s novel, the characters perform The Lover’s Vows, a comedy by Elizabeth Inchbald, although the heroine of the novel has qualms about the propriety of this form of entertainment. In addition to watching performances in households, communities enjoyed plays when strolling actors stopped in their neighborhoods, setting up their performances in a variety of venues. 69

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FIGURE 3.1: A print after William Hogarth, Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn. Photo © Historical Picture Archive/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images.

Much more could be said about all of the different ways that audiences witnessed comedies in the Restoration and eighteenth century. The plays we know from anthologies and repeated performances tell only part of the story. In this essay, I will try to capture some of the diversity that marks comic practice in the eighteenth century, as well as some of the major developments since the early modern period. Theater flourished in the Restoration and eighteenth century, and much of this commercial success was due to comedy. Comic practice underwent a major transformation in this period, as did performance in general. There were six major patent theaters that thrived over the course of the eighteenth century.2 These theaters, however, were all relatively new at the time because the English stage was reinvented, of necessity, in 1660 as a result of political turbulence. It is worth briefly explaining this conflict as it had such significant practical consequences for the stage. In the middle of the seventeenth century, devastating civil wars pitted supporters of King Charles I against Parliamentarians aligned with various religious factions. While this opposition to the king included different kinds of people with different reasons for resistance, they and many English people objected to

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Charles I’s increasingly absolutist governing style. Additionally, Charles had married the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France, raising fears of Catholic influence and the power of France. Puritans, aligned with Parliament, objected to theater on moral grounds; Oliver Cromwell, who led the Commonwealth government, also worried about theater’s capacity to give royalists, who had a history of supporting theatrical entertainments, the opportunity to gather in public and discuss dangerous political ideas. Throughout the seventeenth century, the theater could be a chaotic place, with audience members paying as much attention to each other as to the performance on stage. But the association between royalism and the stage runs even deeper: throughout the seventeenth century, theater had been associated with court culture, as Henrietta Maria had been an enthusiastic sponsor of and practicing contributor to masques. Puritan anti-theatricality reached a peak with the publication of William Prynne’s Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedy (1632). The author was imprisoned and found guilty of seditious libel, partly because his ranting against female performers was taken to refer to Henrietta Maria. The masques were written by others, but Henrietta Maria might be considered their central practitioner, as she gathered the resources, arranged the space, and invited the participants. She often took important roles herself in their performance, as did her friends. Yet the tables turned when the Puritan side triumphed in the civil wars, and in 1642, the Parliament shut down London’s professional theaters. Certainly, plays continued to be written and even surreptitiously produced during this period, but there were no legitimate or legal performance spaces.3 The situation changed in 1660 with the Restoration—that is, the decision to invite Charles II, who had been living in exile, to return and take the throne after the death of Oliver Cromwell and the failure of his son Richard to hold power. Many former supporters of Cromwell worried that England would fall into more civil wars, and they hoped that Charles II could bring about a peaceful union. The return of Charles II not only changed the political landscape, but it transformed comic practice on stage in England, much of it through the influence of continental aesthetics and ideas. Charles had grown up in a household that not only appreciated but also regularly engaged in theatrical arts. Charles spent time in Paris during his exile where he witnessed sophisticated theatrical performances that included women playing women’s parts, a point to which I will return in greater detail. Upon his return to the throne, he issued two patents to open new theaters. Yet the story of the return of legitimate theater to London actually begins a little before the return of the king, and few individuals made as important an impact on theatrical practice as the Stuart loyalist William Davenant. Davenant had written masques for Queen Henrietta Maria’s cosmopolitan court, and in 1656 obtained permission to produce a “Musical Entertainment” with a plot,

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actors, and characters. It was a dramatic opera, although not a comedy. However, this production is worth mentioning in a discussion of comic practice because it heralded a change in so many aspects of performance in England. Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes brought moveable scenery to the English stage, and an even more important innovation: the professional female performer. The part of Ianthe in the 1656 production was played by Catherine Coleman, a performer about whom little is known. After the Restoration, Samuel Pepys socialized with Mrs. Coleman and her husband, mentioning them several times in his diary. Davenant’s new aesthetic, which included an emphasis on the visual, women playing the parts of women, and the incorporation of music and dance, drew heavily from the private theater of Queen Henrietta Maria. Without a recent culture of playwriting, theaters drew from older plays; comedies were modeled on, and even directly adapted from French and Spanish drama. Partly because of this continental influence and partly from the admiration of writers of biting social satire, comedies of this period emerged as the genre we now call “comedy of manners,” with a tight focus on interior spaces, witty dialogue, and the embarrassing failures of elites.

THE ADVENT OF THE ACTRESS Few changes brought by the Restoration had as much impact on the practice of comedy as the replacement of the boy actor with women in women’s parts, a change decreed by the king himself and inspired by Continental practice. Charles’s enthusiasm for female performers might also have been influenced by his mother and her own performances in masques. Charles II granted one patent to Davenant, who led the Duke’s Theatre and, as mentioned, had written masques for his mother, and another to Thomas Killigrew, who managed the King’s Theatre. While there were particular aspects of Restoration theater that later dramatists, performers, and critics in the eighteenth century rejected—a point to which I will return—these early years of the Restoration broke significantly in aesthetic terms with the earlier stage, making changes that shaped theatrical practice throughout the eighteenth century and beyond (Keenan 2017: 2). Theatrical productions became much more lavish and more visual, with not only moveable scenery but also trap doors, pulleys for suspending actors as if in flight, and costumes that reflected the latest fashions. Some of the costumes, in fact, were donated from elite and titled audience members, adding to the glamor of the stage. These costumes were so valuable that performers were not permitted to wear them outside of the theater— clearly something that had tempted many, given the presence of this regulation. Perhaps the most significant practical transformation of the stage, however, was the king’s decree that henceforth the female roles would be played by women. This edict profoundly changed the practice of stage comedy. In part

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because playwrights were now writing roles for actresses, comedies in the Restoration relentlessly explored the boundaries of gendered possibilities, taking advantage of the novelty of female performers and engaging a new ethos of gendered and sexual identity that, as Harold Weber has argued, for the first time represented sexuality as primarily a secular rather than religious experience (Weber 1986: 10). Many comedies called for actresses to dress up as boys within the plot of the play, thus exposing their legs more than usual, but also playing self-consciously on audience memory of a time when all the female parts were played by boys. By the eighteenth century, audiences had become accustomed to women on stage, but their presence still felt fresh in certain ways, and attracted attention, curiosity, and a new kind of fan culture. Not everyone, however, loved actresses. In the Restoration in particular but also spilling into the eighteenth century, moralists and satirists attacked women players for their supposed sexual availability and bridled at the participation of women in the public sphere. Actresses had a particularly sexualized reputation in the Restoration: the king himself carried on a long-term affair with one of the most popular comic actresses, Nell Gwyn. (Gwyn played tragic roles as well, but her strength was considered to be in comedy.) Several other elite gentlemen found lovers on the stage. Yet, historical evidence suggests that there was great variety among early actresses, with some married to actors and others uninterested in becoming mistresses. The women worked side by side with men, and actors of both genders were admired and disparaged. After the initial years, in which work as an actress attracted suspicion, the profession became more elevated. Elizabeth Boutell, who first played Margery Pinchwife in The Country Wife and became one of the first female stars of the Restoration stage, played more crossed-dressed roles than any other woman (Pullen 2005: 40). She enjoyed a highly successful career, but also endured attacks in print about her sexuality. In the next generation, Anne Bracegirdle, who had a reputation for virtue, starred in the comedies of William Congreve. Congreve was reputed to have been in love with Bracegirdle, and wrote several of his memorable comic roles for this actress. Later in the eighteenth century, Frances Abington made audiences laugh in the role of Miss Prue from Congreve’s comedy, Love for Love (1695); Lavinia Fenton was thought to be responsible for the success of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), and Anne Oldfield brought audiences to tears in the sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722). These women certainly had to put up with rumors about their personal lives, but they also, as Felicity Nussbaum has shown, became full-blown celebrities and models of individualism for women in the audience (Nussbaum 2010: 16–18). Part of the attraction of these performers, however, remained bound up in the sense of their novelty. Playwrights adapted Shakespeare plays, for example, to expand the roles for women, aware that the original parts were intended for boy actors. In his Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, published in 1740, this successful actor/

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manager/author looked back to the Restoration to praise the innovation of including “real, beautiful women” on the English stage (Cibber 1740: 55). Few other changes transformed the practice of comic production in this period as much as the opportunity for women to perform on stage.

THE THEATERS All of this new and expanding theatrical activity required new kinds of theaters. One famous theater established at the crucial moment of the Restoration was the Theatre Royal of Drury Lane. The Theatre Royal was built by Thomas Killigrew, who received one of the two patents from Charles II, and became one of the most important performance spaces, although in multiple iterations, through most of the eighteenth century. The original Drury Lane theater burned down in 1672, but was rebuilt in 1674, lasting until the end of the eighteenth century when it was demolished to make way for a much larger space. The 1672 fire, however, had destroyed the theater’s financial stability, with the loss of not just the building but also the valuable sets and costumes. Drury Lane then merged with the competing patent theater, leading nevertheless to a period of financial struggle. In the eighteenth century, however, this theater

FIGURE 3.2: Interior of Drury Lane, 1804. Photo by The Print Collection/Getty Images.

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rose to prominence with the advantage of good management, particularly by a succession of high-profile actor/author/managers: Colley Cibber, David Garrick, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. When the new Licensing Act 1737 made it more difficult to produce new plays, David Garrick made his mark by reviving Shakespeare plays. Shakespeare, along with Ben Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, had been popular in the Restoration, although the plays were significantly adapted to accommodate new theatrical conditions, changing taste, and political sensitivities. The Shakespeare plays that attracted the most attention during this period, however, were the tragedies, and these were the plays on which Garrick built his reputation. One of Garrick’s claims to fame in his revivals was that they were Shakespeare’s authentic works. While Garrick’s performance texts restored significant amounts of Shakespeare’s original writing, however, they were still marked by key changes. Shakespeare’s comedies did attract attention, but the style of comedy during the Restoration and eighteenth century perhaps changed more significantly than the style of tragedy. Comedies of the Restoration leaned toward the satirical and even cynical works of Ben Jonson. In the eighteenth century, as we will later see, the comedy of manners tradition expanded to include not just the elite. Comic figures in Shakespeare were often drawn from the lower classes, but in Restoration and eighteenth-century practice, anyone could be ridiculous. According to the data collected in Eighteenth-Century Drama: Censorship, Society, and the Stage, the overall number of active theaters in the eighteenth

FIGURE 3.3: Illustration of the exterior of Covent Garden Theatre in Original Letters of Dramatic Performers Collected and Arranged by CB Smith, Vol. 5. Photo courtesy of the Garrick Club, London.

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century ranged from low points of three (1790) or four (1708) to peaks of twentysix (1731 and 1732) and one year even supported thirty active theaters (1734). There was a big leap in the number of plays performed each year from the late seventeenth century, which had its most active decade in the 1660s when theater had been freshly revived (726 performances) but only saw 296 performances in the 1680s. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, however, there were 3,610 performances, peaking at 15,154 works performed in the 1730s and not declining much thereafter (The London Stage: data visualization). Of the twenty most popular plays of the century, thirteen were comedies, four were Shakespearean tragedies, and only one—Jane Shore—was a tragedy original to the eighteenth century. While there was much variety in theatrical fair during the eighteenth century, for new plays comedy seemed to dominate.

COMEDIES ON STAGE Comedies, as noted, were particularly popular on the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage; comedy, however, is a broad category that can cover a lot of different kinds of performances and practices. The early part of the eighteenth century saw the rise of the ballad opera, a mixed genre that includes dancing, music, and crafting new, comical lyrics for familiar ballads. The most performed play of the eighteenth century, according to The London Stage database, was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a pioneer in the ballad opera format; the second most performed play, The Devil to Pay (1732) by Charles Coffey, was also a ballad opera. (Number three on the popularity list is Shakespeare’s Hamlet.) Eighteenth-century theatrical genres were fluid, a point that Gay turned into entertainment in his play The What D’ye Call It (1715) in which actors cannot quite figure out what kind of play they are rehearsing. We might think of ballad operas, however, as part of the practice of comedy, since they tend to be humorous, involve characters from the lower echelons of society, and resolve with some form of a happy ending. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera makes fun of comedy’s generic demand: at the end the highwayman Macheath is sentenced to hang, but the play’s on-stage author (the titular beggar) explains that the audience always prefers a happy ending, so Macheath will have a reprieve. The Beggar’s Opera features the rivalry between two criminals: Peachum, who runs a gang of thieves, fences stolen goods, and turns in any of his thieves who do not have enough success in order to get the reward money, and Macheath, who heads a gang of highwaymen and tries to undermine Peachum by marrying his daughter (although, as we later find out, Macheath had contracted marriages to several other women.) But the biggest star of this show was Polly Peachum, the daughter of Mr. Peachum and in love with Macheath. The actress Lavinia Fenton created the role of Polly and became, as

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mentioned, a celebrity as a result. Enthusiasts could buy fans printed with scenes from The Beggar’s Opera as well as images of the performers to hang on their walls. While the extraordinary performance of Lavinia Fenton contributed significantly to the play’s popularity, clearly Gay’s wit and design turned this piece into a lasting favorite. In the twentieth century, the German Marxist playwright Bertold Brecht turned Gay’s ballad opera into Threepenny Opera (1928), a darkly comic work that has been continually revived on Broadway and beyond. Gay satirized the eighteenth-century British government and the social injustices that he saw around him through the plot of this play, but also through its music. In the ballad opera format, Gay put new lyrics to familiar songs, a comic tradition continued in our time through performers like The Capitol Steps and Randy Rainbow. Audience members who recognize the original tune get extra pleasure through the appreciation of the lyricist’s creativity in rewording an earlier version to make a new point. The familiarity, and also in the case of ballads, the relative simplicity, of the tune makes the new version catchier than it would be with unfamiliar music. Gay used these songs, however, not just to entertain but also to take on social injustice and political corruption. In particular, The Beggar’s Opera exposes how the eighteenth-century criminal justice system favored the wealthy, who could buy their way, the opera implies, out of almost any charge. The opera further suggests that elite politicians are not any better than street criminals. The Beggar’s Opera offended government authorities, but the play became so popular that authorities could not shut it down without implicating themselves by implicitly confessing that they saw themselves in Gay’s portrayal. The eighteenth-century government, led at the time by Prime Minister Robert Walpole, elements of whom could be seen in both Peachum and Macheath, instead censored Gay’s Polly, a somewhat more serious sequel. Polly, in fact, might be the rare ballad opera that is not a fully a comedy. At the end of the sequel, Macheath has been hanged but Polly seems poised to marry a truly honorable Native American prince. A happy ending thus seems imminent. But as in the ending of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the text does make entirely explicit that the marriage will take place. Polly is filled with serious danger, such as when a bawd familiar to the audience from The Beggar’s Opera shows up in the new play and sells Polly to a heartless plantation owner. Macheath has escaped his punishment of indentured servitude and roams again, this time disguised as a black pirate. Even in this grim setting, however, Gay fills Polly with wit, humor, and song. While The Beggar’s Opera, Gay’s comic masterpiece, continues to be produced on stage to this day, the second most performed piece, Charles Coffey’s The Devil to Pay: Or, the Wife Metamorphos’d (1732), has slipped into obscurity. Inspired by the success of Gay’s ballad opera, Coffey first wrote The Beggar’s Wedding in 1729, which did very well. The Devil to Pay, however, did

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even better. It is a brief piece, and usually performed after a main play, which was clearly a factor in the number of performances it enjoyed. Unlike in the seventeenth century, in the eighteenth century the main play would often be followed by a brief comic performance; short performances of comedy or music also often appeared between the acts of play. Still, while it doesn’t make sense to compare its popularity to full-length comedies—it is an unfair competition— there were nevertheless many afterpieces to choose from, so it is worth looking closely at this one. The Devil to Pay features two couples, the wealthy country gentleman Sir John Loverule and his wife, and a couple in much humbler circumstances: a cobbler named Jobson, married to Nell. Lady Loverule is a shrew who harasses her husband and beats the servants. At the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, Nell meekly endures her husband’s drunkenness and cruelty. A blind fiddler who turns out to be a conjuror promises Nell that she will soon find happiness and ease. The next morning, in an eighteenth-century “switcheroo,” Nell wakes up as Lady Loverule and Lady Loverule as Nell. All of the servants are delighted that their lady has become so sweet and modest in her demands, a sentiment shared by Lord Loverule himself. Nell cannot believe her good fortune, although comically confused by the situation. Lady Loverule, however, has met her match with the cobbler. In a plot that echoes Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, the cobbler beats his “wife,” who is terrified and runs “home,” only to witness her servants’ loyal affection to the woman they think is the lady of the house. The roles of Nell and Lady Loverule present both an opportunity and a challenge for the actresses, who must persuade audiences that her personality has moved into a different body. The conjurer returns and admits to Sir John that he has switched the women. Sir John is despondent over this news, realizing that he is obliged to take his real wife back. The conjuror suggests, however, that she might have learned a lesson, and assures both men (who of course ask) that neither had been cuckolded by this experiment. Lady Loverule has been reformed, and Sir John gives Nell and the cobbler five hundred pounds to bring about a happy ending all around. Eighteenth-century comedy has commonly been described as sentimental, rejecting the cruel jokes of the late seventeenth century (Gollapudi 2011: 1–2). Yet, Simon Dickie has suggested that while a good-natured sentimental style of humor was commonly recommended, in practice eighteenth-century comedy could be quite brutal (Dickie 2011: 1–14). The Devil to Pay is an excellent illustration of his argument. Lady Loverule’s maid Lucy complains that “if her Complexion don’t please her, or she looks yellow in a Morning, I am sure to look black and blue for it before Night” (Coffey 1732: 10). Soon we see this in action: when she finds the servants celebrating a holiday with a bowl of punch, she beats the butler and “lugs” Lucy “by the ears”: “O Lud! She has pull’d off both my Ears” (13). A drawing that accompanies the printed version shows Lady Loverule lunging at Lucy and yanking on her ears while the other servants scatter in terror.

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Frontispiece of The Devil to Pay (1736).

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When a blind fiddler comes to entertain the servants, Lady Loverule beats him with his own musical instrument, which Sir John gives him money to replace. Lady Loverule turns out the Doctor, who is also a conjuror, when he has lost his way and stops for directions. Sir John directs him to the cobbler’s cottage, but his treatment by the lady has so angered him that he comes up with the plot of switching her with Nell. While the opening of the play, with Lady Loverule beating all of the servants and making her husband miserable, sets up the anticipated punishment of a woman who does not properly obey, The Devil to Pay gives us something slightly more complicated than the “taming” of Kate in Shakespeare’s Shrew, clearly a source for this eighteenth-century farce. Jobson the cobbler responds to the Doctor in a way that echoes the response of Lady Loverule, with a much cruder threat: “Out of my House, you Villain, or I’ll run my Awl up to the Handle in your Buttocks” (19). Clearly, neither Lady Loverule nor Jobson the cobbler is guilty of excessive sentimentalism. In the end, though, both are reformed. In finding herself under the power of Jobson, Lady Loverule gets a taste of her own medicine when he threatens violence. When she runs away from Jobson and appears at Sir John’s and starts beating the servants as usual, everyone treats her as a madwoman. She realizes that she has been a terrible wife, and reforms not necessarily out of empathy for the servants, but because she is grateful to have a husband who does not beat her. Jobson reforms as well, but also not out of empathy but instead because Nell’s value has been raised in his eyes as a result of Sir John’s generous gift. As mentioned, the conclusion emphasizes that neither Nell nor Lady Loverule had sex with her temporary husband in her switched identity. Thus the play ends with a lesson about marriage and against domestic violence, although perhaps there has been more emphasis on Lady Loverule’s transgressions than on Jobson’s, who does not have an equivalent speech in which he recognizes that he has been a terrible husband. We see some gender imbalance in this solution, but nevertheless a concern for male violence against women that parallels the rejection of female violence of men in the Loverule plot. In 1740, Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela would mesmerize readers through its romance between a wealthy gentleman and a serving maid. Possibly, though, the popular and oft-performed Devil to Pay paved the way for Richardson’s novel, in that Nell and Sir John are highly pleased with each other. We are tempted to imagine these good-natured characters as a happy couple. The Devil backs away at the end from this class mixing and, as mentioned, makes a point of assuring audiences that no sexual impropriety has occurred. Yet one imagines that part of the pleasure of performance this is seeing the long-suffering Nell treated kindly by Sir John. Before turning to full-length comic plays, one more form of entertainment is worth mentioning in this context of the practice of comedy: pantomime, with its central figure of Harlequin. Harlequin, according to John O’Brien, “put a

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FIGURE 3.5: Mr. Ellar as Harlequin in Playhouses, theatres and other places of public amusement in London and its suburbs from the reign of Queen Elizabeth to William IV , Volume IV: Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, p. 86. Photo courtesy of the Garrick Club, London.

name and face on the moment when entertainment in the modern sense became intelligible as such.” He further argues that “entertainment as a form of diversion directed to a mass culture began in the first half of the eighteenth century in Britain,” and that Harlequin might stand for this movement (O’Brien 2004: xiii).

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These shows were enormously popular, appreciated for the skill of the performances, spectacular stage effects (some of which we still don’t know how were achieved), movement, dance, and music. This same full sensory affect, however, also attracted suspicion among critics, some of whom disparaged this form as degrading the stage. Pantomime, however, had some of the similar appeal as ballad opera in its appeal to vernacular culture; like ballad opera, it also at least momentarily upended dominant hierarchies (O’Brien 2004: 11).

PRAXIS AND IMPACT Finally, we turn to the most familiar comic practice: full-length comedies that eighteenth-century audiences adored. In moving from the Restoration to the eighteenth century, comic practice changed in ways that have long been recognized. But while this change is generally identified as a moral difference, I am going to suggest here that the change had more to do with a specific goal of theatrical practice. Eighteenth-century sentimental comedies were not more moral (although they claimed to be); instead, they focused on arousing a different set of emotions. The eighteenth-century comedies that appear at the end of the century and more closely resemble Restoration comedy are more familiar to us. Comedies from the end of the eighteenth century, especially those by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The School for Scandal, 1777; The Rivals, 1775), Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773), and Hannah Cowley (The Belle Stratagem, 1780) continue to be performed and anthologized, as do many plays from the Restoration. The plays written for the stage between Congreve and the revival of comedy of manners in the 1770’s, however, are less familiar. In The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy (2001), for example, there are only two plays included between The Way of the World (1700) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773). One of those is The Beggar’s Opera, part of the subgenre, as discussed, of the ballad opera; the other is Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722), a sentimental comedy. This form of comedy—the sentimental—has been disparaged, although it was very popular in practice during the eighteenth century and persists to this day in genres like the romantic comedy. In 1773, Goldsmith objected to the way that comic productions were being taken over by the sentimental, and asked whether we should prefer “the Weeping Sentimental Comedy, so much in fashion at present, or the Laughing and even Low Comedy” (Goldsmith [1773] 1966a: 210). Goldsmith prefers the “laughing comedy,” and in many ways the comedies in the 1770s and 1780s self-consciously bring back a style popular in the Restoration that mocked foibles rather than encouraged tender feelings. Richard Steele produced the sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers with much fanfare, claiming a new style of comedy that would avoid the immorality of the past by encouraging audience members to sympathize with virtuous

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characters. In the eighteenth century and in contemporary criticism, the change from Restoration to eighteenth-century comedy is generally cast in terms of morality. Certainly, Restoration comedies pushed the envelope of social norms. Yet in describing the difference between sentimental comedy and the “laughing comedy,” Goldsmith focuses more on the emotional effects on the audience in practice of these different sorts of plays rather than their relative morality. Provoking sentimental feelings, he argues, is easy; making people laugh is hard: But there is one Argument in favour of Sentimental Comedy which will keep it on the Stage in spite of all that can be said against it. It is, of all others, the most easily written. Those abilities that can hammer out a Novel, are fully sufficient for the production of a Sentimental Comedy. It is only sufficient to raise the Characters a little, to deck out the Hero with a Ribband, or give the Heroine a Title; then to put an Insipid Dialogue, without Character or Humour, into their mouths, give them mighty good hearts, very fine cloaths, furnish a new sett of Scenes, make a Pathetic Scene or two, with a sprinkling of tender melancholy Conversation through the whole, and there is no doubt but all the Ladies will cry, and all the Gentlemen applaud. —Goldsmith [1773] 1966a: 213 In making the case for “laughing comedy,” Goldsmith defends the kind of edgy satire that had been attacked in the late seventeenth century. These attacks account in part for the turn to the sentimental, with its presentation of idealized characters. In 1698, a clergyman named Jeremy Collier published A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, a treatise that attacked the theater for performances that were sexually explicit, that used unrefined language, and that did not show enough respect for religion. William Congreve and John Dryden attracted particular scorn from Collier. The Short View generated dozens of responses, some of them full-length books, that attempted to defend the stage. Many members of the new generation of playwrights responded by writing plays that they promoted as a change from the scandalous and immoral style of Restoration plays. Comedies written during the Restoration struck some critics in the early eighteenth century as immoral because they represented adultery and other varieties of sex outside of marriage for comic effect. These Restoration comedies also—and this is a point central to Collier’s treatise—encouraged audiences to laugh at the elite. Often the most ridiculous characters in Restoration comedies belong to the elite class that should, critics insisted, be represented as setting an example for their inferiors rather than as full of pride, lust, and vanity—vulnerabilities that playwrights displayed through these characters for humorous effect. In the early eighteenth century, The Spectator accused the popular Restoration play written by George Etherege called The Man of Mode (1676) of this kind of violation. Gentlemen on stage,

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Addison argued, should serve as models to people in the audience; the higherranking figures should set an example for good behavior and good morality. While much criticism has accepted the argument made by playwrights themselves in the eighteenth century—that they were writing performances that upheld morality in a way that their predecessors did not—there was skepticism about this claim at the time. Some argued that Restoration comedies were moral: audiences, for example, were intended to see the heinousness of rakes and the absurdity of fops. The critic John Dennis responded to Joseph Addison’s attack on The Man of Mode by arguing that comedy holds vice up for ridicule. Thus, by creating the character of Dorimant, a disrespectful but charming libertine, George Etherege encourages audiences to laugh at this character’s vices and to see through his appealing exterior. Dennis further argues that Dorimant is a realistic portrayal of what courtiers were like in the Restoration, but that audiences are intended to hold these characters up for scrutiny rather than embrace them as superiors. Drawing on Aristotle’s theory of comedy, Dennis suggests that these comedies are indeed moral because they ridicule vice. New arguments emerged in the eighteenth century, however, that comedy should offer models of moral behavior, or that it should at least adhere to poetic justice, a phrase coined by Thomas Rymer in his Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d (1678), in which virtuous characters find reward and vicious ones find punishment by the end of the play. The case, then, that eighteenth-century plays are more moral than Restoration plays is not entirely persuasive when we look at it from the perspective of how audiences experienced the plays in practice, even if it seems persuasive in theory. Eighteenth-century plays do, however, feel different in important ways from the bawdy comedies of the Restoration, but I’d like to suggest that this is not because they are more moral. Goldsmith’s comments point to a different kind of change: not a moral shift, but an emotional one, which becomes clearer by imagining how the plays came across as a whole (as opposed to focusing on the moral that one was supposed to draw from them). In William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), for example, Harry Horner plots to seduce married women by spreading a rumor that venereal disease and its cure have left him impotent. While Horner might seem to be motivated by sexual appetite, we quickly learn that it must be more complicated, since part of his motivation is to get rid of his current mistresses. He targets two marriages: Mr. Pinchwife is an old comrade who has renounced London women and found a country wife, on the theory that she will be more faithful. Lady Fidget, the wife of Sir Jasper Fidget, belong to a society of women who Horner had in the past experienced as out of his reach (the mistresses he wants to dismiss are “common women”). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has influentially argued that Horner’s focus on these two marriages shows his attraction to the men as well as the women—to seduce the ladies, in other words, expresses his desire for the men, and would be a way

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of getting close to them or experiencing them through the women (Sedgwick 1992: 49–66). Whether or not he is motivated by sexual attraction, Horner clearly selects these particular women because of their husbands. To “cuckold” Sir Jasper would be to humiliate him, or at least overcome him in some way. This otherwise ridiculous plot gets its credibility and edge from a sense of resentment toward Sir Jasper for his status (he is the only “Sir” in the play), wealth, and importance (he doesn’t mind leaving his wife with Horner because he has business at Whitehall, where the nation’s affairs are conducted). The plot would not be entertaining unless the audience shared a little bit of Horner’s hostility toward elite privilege. Horner’s project to cuckold Mr. Pinchwife is a little different, as Pinchwife is not his social superior. Pinchwife, however, has reaped the benefits of an early libertine life, and now tries to avoid his old friends. Further, he is domineering, and even cruel, to his rustic wife Margery, so there is some pleasure in witnessing his humiliation. Pinchwife tries to control Margery, but his contrivances always backfire, which lead to his furious ranting. While Horner’s anger, then, leads to subtle maneuvering, Pinchwife remains in a constant state of outrage through most of the play. Since we in the audience side with the naïve but curious Margery, Pinchwife’s ranting over her fascination with London, with theater, and with attractive young men becomes a central comic pleasure. The inability of men to control women, and their resulting outrage of these men, is a staple of Restoration comedy. Displays of impotent anger are not, however, limited to men on this stage. Dorimant, the notorious rake from George Etherege’s Man of Mode, enjoys watching his mistress Mrs. Loveit tear up her fan in fury over his infidelity. Her anger becomes a joke throughout the play, ending with a searing put-down from the heiress who attracts Dorimant’s more sustained attention. Displays of anger can work their way into comedy even when the characters themselves are not ridiculous like Pinchwife or Mrs. Loveit. In Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), Don Pedro attempts to contain his sisters, but Florinda tries to escape to marry her true love Belville; meanwhile, Hellena looks for any man willing to marry her so she will not have to enter a convent. Their father wants Florinda to marry Don Vincentio, but when Florinda expresses her dislike of this much older man, Don Pedro proposes his own friend Don Antonio as an alternative. When Don Pedro, masked (it is carnival time), competes for the same courtesan (Angellica Bianca) as Don Antonio (also masked, but his mask momentarily slips), he becomes angry that Don Antonio would be so willing to betray Florinda and challenges him to a duel over Angellica. Antonio’s anger heightens the tensions in this play, which threatens violence at every turn. But the anger of another character, aptly named Blunt, resembles more closely the comic impotent fury of Mr. Pinchwife. Blunt has become infatuated with Lucetta in spite of the warning by his friends that she is out to take advantage of him. When Blunt arrives in her bedroom, instead of the excepted pleasures

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he instead is robbed and dumped in the street without his clothes. Blunt’s ranting and raving at this indignity is comical, since he should have foreseen this outcome but instead thought too highly of his own attractiveness. He is the least sophisticated of the English visitors. Yet this anger turns ominous when he swears that he will take revenge on Lucetta by turning against all women. Unfortunately, Florinda accidentally falls into his hands, and he would have raped her in revenge had she not delayed him by persuading Frederick (who finds them) that she might be from an important family. Blunt is comically humiliated at the end of the play by having to appear in ill-fitting Spanish clothes to replace his stolen English garb. Blunt and his anger are comically impotent in the style of Mr. Pinchwife, but in both cases the comedy draws its power from the threat of genuine violence. The Rover, however, differs from The Country Wife in its incorporation of righteous anger as well as impotent frustration. Belvile, for example, is furious with his less sensitive friend Wilmore because Wilmore attempts to rape Florinda when she is waiting for Belvile outside of her house. Wilmore’s defense—that he didn’t know this unknown woman was Belvile’s love—does not persuade Belvile, who argues that no woman should be treated so rudely. Further, Angellica Bianca, who overlooks both Don Pedro and Don Antonio in favor of Wilmore, is furious when she finds out that he plans to marry the heiress Hellena after promising that he loved her. Rather than breaking her fan, however, Angellica threatens to kill him with a pistol. While many of the angriest characters in Restoration drama are intended to be comical through the impotence of their fury, a sense of resentment and a desire to triumph over another character can drive the plots of the more sympathetic characters as well. Restoration comedy is often described as cynical, which in this case means that characters accept the injustice of their situation and the arbitrariness of the social hierarchy. Even Pinchwife at the end of The Country Wife, knowing full well that Horner has seduced Margery, nevertheless realizes that he would be better off keeping his rage to himself. Margery has been awakened by new possibilities during her time in London, but agrees at the end to return to being a country wife. The ending feels cynical, then, because the characters do not seem to have any values higher than finding their best deal in the context of a social order that no one truly believes in but that also no one is willing to change because at the end of the day they know that it works to their benefit. Oliver Goldsmith, in the passage quote above, defines sentimental comedy as filled with “melancholy” dialogue. There are many adjectives one could use to describe Restoration comedy—witty, energetic, scandalous—but “melancholy” is not one of them. As noted, Restoration comedy is driven by plenty of negative emotions, but while characters are often frustrated, they rarely give into to sadness. Instead, they either come up with a new scheme to get what they want

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or rail impotently, to the amusement of the audience. While comedy often aims to spark laughter and a sense of well-being through social stability restored at the end, the best examples in any period tend to be threaded with negative feelings as well. Restoration-style comedies dramatize anger and envy; they indulge audiences in Schadenfreude, as they take pleasure in the humiliations of the characters on stage. Eighteenth-century comedies rely less on anger and tend to limit Schadenfreude, but they are not devoid of negative emotions. In particular, they do tend to incorporate, as Goldsmith observes, threads of melancholy, some thicker than others. We can see this very early on in the transition from the Restoration to the eighteenth-century style. William Congreve (1670–1729) was no reformer: he was a particular target of the antitheatricalist Jeremy Collier, and he argued back in defense of the stage. The style of his comedies tends to look back to the Restoration rather than forward to the eighteenth century. Yet, there is something more serious and a little sadder about the characters in The Way of the World than one would typically find in a Restoration comedy. One of the central comic figures in the play is Lady Wishfort, who at fifty-five tries to act like twenty-five (or even younger). Mirabell, the young man who wants to marry her niece and has had an affair with her daughter, tries to get himself invited into their household by pretending to court Lady Wishfort. He even spreads a rumor that the town thinks she is pregnant, thus flattering her self-image as younger in appearance than her true age. Lady Wishfort is furious and humiliated when she finds out about his plan, yet she falls for it again, in a different version: Mirabell next disguises his servant as a gentleman who seeks the hand of Lady Wishfort in marriage. There is lots of ribald humor about Lady Wishfort wishing for “it,” but at the end of the play Mirabell and Millamant show themselves willing to sacrifice their own happiness to protect the heroine’s aunt against the scheming Mr. Fainall. Further, as Robert Erickson has argued, Lady Wishfort is deluded, but she is not evil (Erickson 1984: 343). There is (as Goldsmith suggests, although he would certainly classify The Way of the World as a “laughing comedy”) something melancholy about Lady Wishfort’s desperate need to hold on to her youth and about the unfulfilled yearning that renders her vulnerable. Equally melancholy is Lady Wishfort’s daughter, also a widow, and now Mrs. Fainall, after being persuaded to marry the unscrupulous Mr. Fainall because she was lovers with Mirabell, and such a marriage would allow any resulting pregnancy a patina of respectability. Mrs. Fainall does not complain and even helps Mirabell in his plot of marry Millamant. She is not Mrs. Loveit, breaking her fan in rage. Instead, she operates with melancholy resignation that she has “lov’d with Indiscretion” (Congreve [1700] 2011: 2.4.6). While, as mentioned, much of the style of the play returns to the Restoration, the play’s end wades into emotional territory rarely seen in the earlier plays. Mirabella is able to save the dignity and property of Lady Wishfort and her daughter when he reveals

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that Mr. Fainall cannot take possession of his wife’s money because Mrs. Fainall, rather than keeping her money and leaving it vulnerable to eighteenth-century marriage laws, in which the husband comes to own the wife’s property, had signed over her entire estate to Mirabell before she married Mr. Fainall (and before the play begins, so it surprises the audience as well). At the end of the earlier The Man of Mode, in sharp contrast, Harriet, the heiress who has secured Dorimant as her lover, makes humiliating comments to the rejected Mrs. Loveit, telling her that it is time for her to find another man or go to a convent. At the end of The Way of the World, the friendship between Mirabell and Mrs. Fainall had endured. Restoration characters are always scrambling for estates, and while Congreve’s characters share some of these inclinations, at the end it has become clear that Mirabell possessed this estate all along and had the full legal right to keep it. His return of the estate to Mrs. Fainall does not feel sentimental in the pejorative sense of exaggerated, unearned, or self-indulgence feelings. The emotional effect, and the response of the characters, is in general one of surprise and relief that Mr. Fainall’s seemingly airtight plot has been foiled. There is a bit of the sentimental in the eighteenth-century sense, however, in which feelings and morality must be aligned. Mirabell’s revelation of his previous action to protect Mrs. Fainall mitigates our initial suspicion that he might be interested in Millamant, Lady Wishfort, and Mrs. Fainall for the potential possession of their estates. He turns out, in other words, to be more compassionate than he seems. In The Man of Mode, by contrast, we are invited to enjoy the rakish Dorimant’s triumph, and possibly even Mrs. Loveit’s abjection. The Way of the World ends with a touch of sentimentalism in the evasion of disaster by Lady Wishfort, who is ridiculous but ultimately harmless, and Mrs. Fainall, who is more pathetic than abject in her loss of Mirabell. Most significantly, Mirabell and Millamant, a bit surprisingly, reveal that they are willing to put the well-being of the threatened Lady Wishfort ahead of their own desire to marry each other. The sentimental gesture that we see in The Way of the World of giving something without expecting anything in return reaches full fruition in Richard Steele’s play The Conscious Lovers (1722). As argued, this play is not necessarily more moral than plays that came before it, despite its author’s claim. It does, however, aim to have a radically different emotional effect on the audience: it is intended, according to the author, to bring spectators to tears rather than laughter. Steele, it must be noted, does include a humorous subplot around two flirtatious servants that aims for laughter rather than tears; in the main plot, however, Bevil Junior has fallen in love with a mysterious woman named Indiana whom he supports financially but never asks for anything in return. His father wants him to marry Lucinda, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, but his best friend loves Lucinda and she returns his affection. Lucinda’s father, Mr. Sealand, had been enthusiastic about the marriage of Bevil Jr. and Lucinda, but

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starts to worry when he learns about Bevil’s relationship with Indiana. In the end, Mr. Sealand confronts Indiana directly, and in doing so recognizes that she is in fact his daughter, who had been lost at sea in a storm many years ago. This recognition, and the realization that her relationship with Bevil had been “innocent” (that is, he was not paying her for sex), brings about the happy

FIGURE 3.6: Frances Abington as Phillis in The Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele. Artist: Isaac the Elder Taylor [copy after]. Photo courtesy of the Garrick Club, London.

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ending in which Bevil can marry Indiana, Myrtle can marry Lucinda, and Mr. Sealand, perhaps most movingly, has a child restored to him who he had thought was lost forever. Steele’s Preface to the play notes how audiences wept at this ending. Some critics at the time suggested that by bringing audiences to tears rather than laughter, Steele revealed that he did not understand comedy. Through the course the eighteenth century, however, the feeling of melancholy and the response of weeping at a joyful event become a permanent option for comic practice. This emotional force has become deeply embedded in the form, asserting itself in stage plays and, most commonly, in romantic comedies in film. Certainly, as Simon Dickie has argued, much comedy throughout the eighteenth century was neither bitterly cynical, like Restoration comedies, nor sentimental, like The Conscious Lovers. Much of it was downright cruel.4 The novelist Frances Burney gives us a brief window in such cruelty in her novel Evelina (1778), in which some wealthy young men with too much time on their hands organize a race of elderly women, each placing bets on his champion. At the other end of the period in The London Cuckolds (1681), various characters get chamber pots dumped on their heads. Neither of these incidents lead to either cynical recognition or weeping for joy. In general, this level of humor without wit or emotional depth has been left behind as part of popular culture rather than literature worth preserving (except to record its disturbing implications, as does Burney). At the time it was popular, but criticized by moralists for its exploitative qualities. Further, the cynicism, “laughing comedy,” and indulgent delight in behavior that pushed up against the boundaries of propriety certainly did not disappear in the eighteenth century. But while The Conscious Lovers is extreme in its embrace of tears over laughter, there is a streak of melancholy running thought a lot of eighteenth-century comedies. In The Beggar’s Opera there are actually few opportunities for laughter, even though no one would call this play “sentimental.” There are no tears either, but there is no shortage of darkness and melancholy. Polly, arguably, is even darker, saturated with melancholy over seemingly unsolvable injustices. George Farquhar incorporates some of the brutality of eighteenth-century comedy while at the same time leading audiences to hopeful pairings of lovers. Like Congreve, Farquhar drew from the Restoration style of witty dialogue and risqué plots, although somewhat tempered to accommodate the modern style. One tends not to think of Farquhar as part of the sentimental rebellion, but in an odd way his plays fit Goldsmith’s accusation of generating melancholy rather than laughter. His Recruiting Officer (1706) enjoyed tremendous popularity and continues to entertain audiences. It was performed at the Donmar Warehouse in 2012 in a production that the Guardian called “resolutely unsentimental” (Gardner 2012: n.p.). But it is not exactly a “laughing comedy” either, and certainly not a Restoration comedy, with its focus on a desperate team of military recruiters trying to drum up troops in the village of Shrewsbury.

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It is, however, threaded with melancholy: if Restoration tricksters lure semisuspecting women to their beds, this pair of recruiters use the same level of deception to persuade men to sign to up to fight, putting their lives and limbs in danger. This backdrop of violence and the grim prospects of the men being recruited complicated the energetic and gender-bending main plot, in which the heroine Sylvia manages to marry the man she loves by taking up male disguise. Another of Farquhar’s popular plays—The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707)— features two young men down on their luck who plot to set one of them up to marry an heiress by each taking a turn at being the other’s servant. In the main plot, what starts out as an underhanded trick turns into genuine love, and then becomes respectable when the young man inherits an estate. His friend, however, falls in love with a woman who is already married, and the play offers an unusually sympathetic glimpse into her unhappy marriage to a lazy and abusive alcoholic. The spectacular agreement of this couple at the end to divorce (spectacular because of the rarity of divorce in the eighteenth century) is welcome, but not sentimental—there are no tears, but instead an uplifting sense of this woman’s empowerment and liberation. If one modern or cynical definition of the sentimental is the manipulation of emotions, or the production of an emotion that is undeserved, then the ending of The Beaux’ Stratagem is not sentimental in that Mrs. Sullen (the abused wife) has suffered unjustly and freed herself through considerable effort. In Susanna Centlivre’s comedies, characters also work hard for their happy endings, and there is plenty of laughter along the way. In The Wonder (1714), the main character’s honor is constantly tested. Violante had agreed to hide her friend Isabella to help her avoid the forced marriage her father is planning. As it happens, Isabella falls in love with Colonel Britton—literally falls, as he catches her after she jumps out of window to escape. Violante must continue to hide Isabella even when Colonel Britton comes to see her, causing her own lover to grow jealous. Unlike Restoration characters, Centlivre’s characters love each other and must overcome obstacles, usually in the form of a father, to marry happily. Her plays are not sentimental in any negative sense, but they also balance broad comedy with emotional turbulence: Violante cannot reveal to her lover the true reason that Captain Britton appears outside of her house, thus painfully enduring suspicions of disloyalty for which she is entirely innocent. Her popular play The Basset Table (1705) also incorporates an undercurrent of melancholy and danger. Lady Reveller puts her virtue, reputation, and even her safety in danger through her passion for gambling; her friend Mrs. Sago socializes and gambles way above what her circumstances should allow. In a second plot, Lady Reveller’s cousin Valeria wants to devote herself to science, but her father, a comically excessive patriot, tries to force her into a marriage with Captain Hearty when she loves Ensign Lovely. The father’s threat to destroy her beloved laboratory brings Valeria great distress. So while in this play

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and others by Centlivre, love prevails and happiness follows consternation and confusion, the threats are genuine and the triumphs hard won. Most literary movements will claim some form of moral foundation, whether religious, secular, or political; whether advocating personal liberty or responsibility to a larger goal. Attempting to evaluate these moral differences, however, leads to complications, contradictions, and varying definitions of the best way to convey a system of values. Oliver Goldsmith gives us a big clue to an alternative based on comic practice and comic affect: how did the theater produce and manipulate particular emotions? Why were some emotional experiences preferred by audiences over others at different times in history and in different contexts? Why do eighteenth-century sentimental comedies often seem risible rather than humorous to modern readers, who nevertheless at the same time enthusiastically consume similar combinations of melancholy and poetic justice in romantic comedies? These questions lie beyond the scope of this essay; they are, however, an integral part of the practice of comedy in the Restoration and eighteenth century.

CHAPTER FOUR

Identities Deception, Discovery, and the Paradox of the Dark Lantern HEATHER LADD

Comedies regularly feature mistaken and manipulated identities and end with scenes of identity confirmation—the discovery of family connections and the ubiquitous engagements and weddings that solidify gender normative and connubial identities. In its systems of characterization and teleological plots of enlightenment, comedy often strives towards revelation and ontological certainty. Since the New Comedy of Menander, known through the Roman playwrights Terence and Plautus, much of the stability within the genre has been provided by stock characters, archetypes possessing distinct traits who interact with each other in largely predictable ways. These types were adapted from Theophrastus’ The Characters (c. 319 BCE ), a taxonomic work of character sketches. Such recognizable characters became key to the popular Italian theatrical form of commedia dell’arte and the English comic satire of Ben Jonson, whose plays are peopled with obvious social types. Though audiences could easily grasp these conventionally represented identities, the static stage characters themselves have limited vision, transhistorically being poor seers of themselves and of others. Perceptual dynamics, like those within Plautus’ twin play, Menaechmi, are central to plots of mistaken identity, another significant literary legacy of the ancient world. These plots endure, as the trope of mistaken identity flourishes in the stage comedies written between 1660 and 1800, an Age of Enlightenment, and particularly within the English context, an Age of Epistemology. Staged 93

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intradiegetic deceptions speak to those philosophies preoccupied with theories of interpretation, namely different strains of eighteenth-century empiricism, a theory of sense-based knowledge acquisition. Scenes of misidentification underscore the importance of objective observation, also implicitly enacted through comic irony in the playhouse: audiences, let into the secret of characters’ double-dealing, have access to the truth; playgoers view the action through the playwright’s clearer lens. Yet the ascendance of rationality—and its concomitant dismissal of superstition and blind faith—in the eighteenth-century consciousness obviously did not preclude representations of its failure. Disguises, darkness, and unexpected likenesses conspire in these imaginary comic worlds to undermine certitude and demonstrate the limits of human knowledge and the importance of skepticism. In the comedy of the Enlightenment period, identity confusion engenders surprisingly nuanced, socially-oriented (and sometimes politically-inflected) philosophical questioning of being and knowing, especially involving reason, judgment, imagination, and the senses. Considering comedies by Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, and others alongside the contemporaneous ideas of Enlightenment thinkers including Francis Bacon, John Locke, and David Hume, this chapter approaches comic literature via epistemological problems of certainty and ideological potentialities of uncertainty. Identity play is likewise rife in drama of the prior period; Renaissance comedy shares many structural and thematic similarities with comic literature produced in England during the Age of Enlightenment. John Finnis observes that “mistaken identity is the hinge of plots, subplots, and countless scenes in most of Shakespeare’s comedies and romances and many of his tragedies” (2005: 258). The Comedy of Errors (1595), Twelfth Night, or What You Will (1623), Much Ado About Nothing (1623), and As You Like It (1623) can all be comfortably labeled comedies of identity. Disguise—a means to enact both prosocial and antisocial schemes—is a survival measure in both Renaissance and Enlightenment comedy. In As You Like It, as well as later comic works by authors such as Aphra Behn, assumed identities ensure the safety of female travelers in public, and hence masculine, spaces. To that end, Shakespeare’s exiled Rosalind and Celia disguise themselves, the former as a young man named Ganymede. Although vulnerability to sexual predation might be the initial practical impetus, Shakespeare’s women, like Centlivre’s later heroines, exercise their creative and moral authority in these personae, an outlet for ludic as well as romantic desires. Feigned identities are used by Shakespeare and his eighteenth-century successors to the comic stage to comment on the troubling hypocrisies of men and women. Eighteenth-century dramatists replicate the disguises and discoveries of the Renaissance stage, but diverge from Shakespeare’s comic treatment of the trope of mistaken identity in more clearly secularizing knowing and not-knowing: the

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FIGURE 4.1: J. E. Millais, Rosalind and Celia, As You Like It, Act 2, Scene 4, engraved W.H. Simmons. Folger Shakespeare Library. Creative Commons.

product of Enlightenment thinkers like Bacon, Locke, and Hume. With the shift into modernity, which involved moving away from medieval certainties, came incessant questioning, albeit alongside “the affirmation of a more secular approach to and experience of knowledge as rationally, temporally, and socially situated” (Freeman 2002: 14). While Shakespeare acknowledges sensory impressions as shaping (often incorrectly) characters’ perceptions of each other, later authors, such as the playwrights considered in this chapter, demonstrate a complex appreciation of empiricism and acknowledgment of the various barriers to objective truth in the pursuit of epistemic discovery. Natural philosopher Francis Bacon lit the way for later empiricists in publishing two treaties on the subject, The Advancement of Learning (1605) and Novum Organum (1620). He explicated the “idols”—four delusions that lead us into error: Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Marketplace, and Idols of the Theater. Like Hume after him who spoke of the “theatre of the mind,” Bacon utilized theatrical imagery to explicate his ideas. Bacon’s first two fallacies, those of human nature and the individual, are emphasized in Enlightenment comedy. In terms of the former, self-love is one such pitfall to

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which humans are naturally prone in Bacon’s estimation and which distorts perception. An example of such delusion is dramatized near the beginning of Benjamin Griffin’s 1715 farce Love in a Sack, which begins with a conversation between a master, Sir Arthur Addlepate, and his servant Phillip. Phillip tries to dissuade his aged master from pursuing romance with a young woman, pointing out his gray hair. Sir Arthur does not see himself as an old man, however, and boasts: “I See, Hear, Smell, Taste as well as ever I did” (Griffin 1715: 1.1.11). Hume builds on Locke’s fundamental empiricist epistemology and moves closer to a position of skepticism; he sees both “our fiction of external, resembling objects, and our fiction of a simple, continuing self” as “metaphysically questionable” (Jacobson 1996: 172). Comedy illumes the capabilities and fallibilities of the human understanding upon which Hume meditated. In many of these plays sensory experience becomes a source of (mis)perception and (mis) information, or a basis upon which character is judged. Often, there will be verbal recognition of perceptions, characters referring to what they see and hear, and to a lesser extent feel and smell. The entrance of the foppish Sir Novelty Fashion in Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift (1696) is presaged by his heavily scented hair powder, for Elder Worthy asks his interlocutors: “don’t you smell powder, gentleman? Sir / Novelty is not far off!” (Cibber [1696] 2001: 5.3.39–40). Loveless refers to Sir Novelty as a “weed,” which gives Elder Worthy an opening to an insulting pun about the perfumed man as being “as rank as ever” (Cibber [1696] 2001: 5.3.44, 45). Here, as with the effeminate macaroni, a similar eighteenthcentury stock character, smell is an “epistemological tool” and “means of social discrimination” that confirms Sir Novelty’s problematic identity as a coxcomb, for, “in contrast to notions of manly independence and self control, the macaroni was unregulated and open, constantly diffusing perfume or humming music” (Tullet 2015: 14, 14, 10). Yet the hermeneutics of Enlightenment comedy are such that characters may collect information through their senses, but often do not know how to interpret these impressions; oftentimes, they are swayed by comically exaggerated social biases, what I term “socialized cognitive distortion,” examples including prejudices against other Englishmen and the virulent misogyny that can erase distinctions of rank. Locke’s own attitudes towards knowledge and the self represent the opposite of this widespread comic blindness. Consider, for instance, “The Epistle to the Reader” that prefaces An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, wherein he recognizes the necessity of “examin[ing] our own Abilities, and see[ing], what Objects our Understandings were, or were not fitted to deal with” (Locke [1690] 1975: 7; original italics). Early in this treatise, Locke emphasizes the importance of knowing “the extent of our Comprehension,” our capacities and limitations as we acquire ideas from either of their two sources: “Sensation and Reflection” (Locke [1690] 1975: 44n; 119). As I will demonstrate throughout this chapter, mistaken identity within Enlightenment

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comic texts involves characters—male and female, servants and masters— manipulating the Lockean “knowing” of their less self-aware counterparts; characters in Enlightenment comedy are both the antithesis of the Lockean self and the reflections of that self, individuals groping in the dark and finding their way lit by either a false flame or a true.

COUNTERFEITING CLASS Pertinent to the exploration of mistaken identity in Enlightenment comedy is the exceptionally dynamic social context of eighteenth-century England, a period that Michael McKeon has identified as in “epistemological crisis,” experiencing— and attempting to manage—“the instability of social categories” (1985: 20). An array of scholars, from Ian Watt to Aparna Gollapudi, have remarked on the changing demographics of England, and Europe more generally, in this period, which saw a wealthy merchant class jockeying for more political influence and the purchasing of titles, both of which compromised the traditional sociocultural dominance of the English aristocracy. Gollapudi neatly summarizes how visual markers of class transformed, and maintains that by century’s end, “outward appearance and social identity were no longer a closed system of signification” (2011: 22). McKeon addresses these crises in Origins of the English Novel (1987) as questions of truth and virtue posed by authors conscious of these underlying anxieties and ambitions among their readership. “By specifying mutability to the concrete realm of social stratification and mobility,” he posits, “progressive plots explain it in terms of the status inconsistency and social injustice that are inherent features of aristocratic culture” (McKeon 1987: 223). This assessment speaks to plots of class volatility on the Enlightenment stage and page. Class identities are regularly—and deliberately—confused by enterprising characters in Enlightenment comedy. There are multiple examples of servants adopting higher-status personae in the period’s comic literature. In Centlivre’s The Gamester (1705), a nobleman, the Marquis of Hazard, is revealed to be a footman. This revelation amuses the gambler-hero Valere, who laughs, remarking that “This morning he boasted of his royal blood” (Gamester [1705] 2011: 5.2.163), a comment that reveals the power of speech to deceive. Masters and mistresses likewise exploit the importance of clothing to signal class identity. Frequently, servants are dressed as their betters to forward or thwart plots of courtship and cuckolding, as in William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), in which Mirabell’s servant Waitwell becomes “Sir Rowland” in a plot to woo and wed Lady Wishfort. Before Waitwell begins courting his quarry in this aristocratic guise, Mirabell queries whether his servant will “forget [him]self” ([1700] 2011: 2.9.3). Waitwell’s witty reply points to the potentially lasting effects of this ploy:

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Why, Sir; it will be impossible I shou’d remember my self—Marry’d, Knighted, and attended all in one Day! ’Tis enough to make any Man forget himself. The Difficulty will be how to recover my Acquaintance and Familiarity with my former self; and fall from my Transformation to a Reformation into Waitwell. —2.95–100 Significantly, Waitwell articulates a self-consciousness about his social identity in the moments before acting a higher one for the benefit of his master, who will use the subsequent marriage to blackmail Lady Wishfort. The underlying power relationship between Waitwell and Mirabell remains unchanged, even as the former assumes the position of titled gentleman. Lady Wishfort, eager as she is for romance, must be tipped off by an epistolary warning that “He who pretends to be Sir Rowland is a Cheat and a Rascal” (4.15.20–1). The titular ruse of Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) is perpetrated by two impoverished gentlemen, Aimwell and Archer. Hoping to secure their fortunes, the pair plan to transact a mercenary marriage; the details of their plot require Archer to temporarily pose as Aimwell’s servant. Reflecting on their subterfuge in an early scene of the play, Farquhar’s characters raise pertinent questions of class, personal value, and the legibility of social identities: . . . Would not any man swear now that I am a man of quality and you my servant, when if our intrinsic value were known— ARCHER Come, come, we are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose worth is independent of accidents in life or revolutions in government. We have heads to get money and hearts to spend it. AIMWELL

1.1.169–76 As the beaux proceed to enact their plan, which is predicated on the superficiality of the age, they are equally attuned to ways in which outward markers of social distinction can be counterfeited or assumed. Archer’s comments on his friend’s appearance, for instance, underscore society’s too great emphasis on surfaces: “You are so well dressed, Tom, and make so handsome a figure, that I fancy you may do execution in a country church; the exterior part strikes first, and you’re in the right to make that impression favourable” (2.2.19–23). Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) is a comedy of errors similarly built around a class deception plot. Kate Hardcastle pretends to be a barmaid in her father’s supposed inn in order to appeal to her prospective fiancé, Marlow, who is only comfortable around lower-class women. Meeting with him as a respectable daughter of the landed gentry was a failure, as the awkward and reserved Marlowe did not even look at her. Thus, Miss Hardcastle

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FIGURE 4.2: Hugh Thomson, illustration of Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, Act 3, Scene 1. Photo by Getty Images.

changes attire and adopts “true bar cant” (Goldsmith [1773] 1966b: 169) to dupe Marlow, who duly flirts with this supposed barmaid. In one of their playful exchanges—which, ironically, revolves around sight and perspective— Marlow guesses her age and draws nearer with the claim that women look younger when viewed up close. Later in the play, a false discovery scene precedes the true, and Miss Hardcastle swaps her barmaid identity for another clichéd fabrication: the poor relation. In response, Marlow acknowledges he has misinterpreted her: “My stupidity saw every thing the wrong way. I mistook your assiduity for assurance, and your

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simplicity for allurement” (185). Sight is a fallible sense, for what is seen is filtered through assumptions and biases and processed by faulty reason. The play ends with Hardcastle blessing the union of his daughter and Marlow, to whom he says, “as you have been mistaken in the mistress, my wish is, that you may never be mistaken in the wife” (216). Mistaking is the key verb in Goldsmith’s comedy, subtitled “the mistakes of a night”; the confusion of identities is not caused simply by deceptions under cover of darkness, that perennial machine of farce, but instead by socialized cognitive distortion.

FEIGNING FOREIGNNESS Another noteworthy category of identity confusion in Enlightenment comedy involves confused nationalities, typically Englishmen pretending to be foreigners in convoluted deception plots. Reflecting London’s ever-increasing status as a world capital, this comic device corresponds with greater economic traffic as well as day-to-day contact between the English and the rest of the world. While the English have a long history of strenuously asserting their political and moral superiority, outgrowths of this national confidence include xenophobia and anxieties about national and racial difference. Yet the ability of characters to hide their Englishness can be interpreted as an implicit critique of foreign identities as superficial, and therefore imitable, unlike a more deeply-set essential English identity that has its basis in presumed ideological superiority. Practical considerations motivate this dissembling, as characters feigning foreignness estimate the dividends of hiding their real identities and adopting new ones. These assumed identities are constructed within the plays on the same logic as comic stock characters, bundles of predictable traits based on national stereotypes. Like silly comic characters who too eagerly adopt foreign dress and manners out of a perverted taste against their own nation, these dissembling characters are used by playwrights to satiric and nationalistic ends. Mistaken nationality offers an opportunity for epistemological questioning and testing, which results in divisions along lines of intellect; the obtuse cannot distinguish between what is foreign and what is English, while the clever are invested in falsifying—and thus temporarily muddying—these distinctions; these differences are inconsistently discerned through first-hand witnessing in Enlightenment comedy, which demonstrates both the promise and the limitations of empiricism. In Centlivre’s A Bold Stroke for a Wife (1718), national identities—authentic and inauthentic—are vital to the central marriage plot. The play’s hero, Colonel Fainwell, wants the rich heiress Anne Lovely as his wife, but must first obtain the consent of her four disparate guardians. Fainwell collaborates with Anne to thwart the guardians, who control access to her fortune, and who impose their undesirable values and practices on their ward. Fainwell, a protean libertine,

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takes on a series of disguises to secure this match—French beau; Dutch tradesmen; virtuoso; and Puritan preacher—for he needs to serve as a kind of mirror, reflecting their (flawed) ideal of a good man. Mrs. Lovely is associated with consummate Englishness, rebelling against her guardians with the values of her nation, opposing their “tyranny, if there be either law or justice to be had” and demanding her “liberty” (Bold Stroke [1718] 1995: 5.1.29–30, 30). She alludes to her nation’s political institutions in her threat against her controlling guardians: “I’ll try the power of an English senate” ([1718] 1995: 5.1.122). Her critique of her virtuoso guardian Periwinkle, an obsessive world traveler and collector, is nationalistic. “Ah, study your country’s good,” she instructs Periwinkle, “and not her insects. Rid you of your homebred monsters before you fetch any from abroad” ([1718] 1995: 5.1.109–11). Yet her guardians’ absurdities render them ripe for imitation and manipulation by Fainwell, who creates convincing roles for himself by altering his speech, dress, and manners to appeal to each guardian; they are all taken in, their biases severely limiting—nay, warping—their individual apprehension. To pose as a continental gentleman (though he is taken for a Frenchman), Fainwell dons a borrowed suit of fancy clothes and adopts “the tawdry air as any Italian count or French marquis” ([1718] 1995: 2.1.2–3). As planned, he immediately draws the interest of Sir Philip, whose first impression is that the hero “has the appearance of a man of quality. Positively, French by his dancing air” ([1718] 1995: 2.1.10–11). Sir Philip, faced with clues about the nationality of this stranger, treats him like a facile epistemological puzzle, noting that Fainwell carries excellent snuff in a French snuffbox and “speaks good English, though he must be a foreigner” ([1718] 1995: 2.1.30–1). Biased by a belief in the superiority of England’s traditional enemy, Sir Philip reads the Colonel as French, denigrating his own nation in doing so, for he avows that “this island could not produce a person of such alertness” ([1718] 1995: 2.1.42). Fainwell confirms this mode of reading nationality: “One may plainly perceive it—there is a certain gaiety peculiar to my nation (for I will own myself a Frenchman), which distinguishes us everywhere” ([1718] 1995: 2.1.57–9). A Frenchman is knowable, but vaguely labeled with apparently visible qualities, Sir Phillip admitting to Fainwell: “Your vivacity and gentil mien assured me at first sight there was nothing of this foggy island in your composition” and a few lines later: “I was sure you was French the moment I laid my eyes upon you” ([1718] 1995: 2.2.76–7, 81–2). Fainwell charms Sir Phillip with this mistaken nationality ruse, but easily discards these superficial proofs of his foreignness, possessing an essential Englishness that survives the identity-shifting necessitated by the marriage plot. Samuel Foote’s The Liar (1764)—also spelled The Lyar—is likewise preoccupied with identity and appearance as matters of both fashion and serious epistemological concern—namely the idea that “Lockean consciousness makes the interiority, the

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FIGURE 4.3: “The Buck Metamorphosed or Mr Foote in the character of the Englishman return’d from Paris,” 1754. Photo by Getty Images.

inward ‘truth’ of one’s individual identity disturbingly inaccessible to others” (Blackwell 2006: 82). Foote’s farce is part of a playwrighting career that often involved playing with the idea of nationality-as-costume. In The Englishman Returns from Paris (1756), his sequel to his earlier An Englishman in Paris (1753), Foote’s hero Buck foppishly embraces French ways after continental travel. He can be reformed, despite another character’s undue panic about global influences: “we . . . are become a bundle of contradictions, a piece of patchwork, a mere harlequin’s coat” (Foote [1764a] 1830: 1.154). The Liar begins on the topic of dress in a conversation between Young Wilding, who has just arrived in London from university, and his servant Papillon, the master desiring confirmation of his stylish appearance. Appropriately, the first line of the play is a question posed by Young Wilding, who has arrived in London: “And am I now, Papillon, perfectly equipped?” (Foote [1764b] 1830: 1.75) Papillon responds in French to this query, but soon starts speaking English, and “like a native,” when he is asked to be his master’s advisor (1.77). Papillon

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comes clean that he is actually from England and has only been posing as a Frenchman in order to obtain a position and emphasizes that his role as a servant has not prevented him from learning like his master, a university student. He shows off his own gleanings: “Logically thus, sir: whoever speaks pure English is an Englishman: I speak pure English; ergo, I am an Englishman. There’s a categorical syllogism for you—Major, Minor, and Consequence. What, do you think, sir, that whilst you was busy at Oxford, I was idle? no, no, no” (1.77). While acting the part of a French servant, Papillon was hiding not only his Englishness but his intellectual abilities, which he now openly showcases. Papillon’s first lecture to his pupil is about false—even theatrical—urban identities, as he cautions Young Wilding to “not expect, sir, to find here, as at Oxford, men appearing in their real characters; every body there, sir, knows that Dr. Mussy is a fellow of Maudlin, and Tom Trifle a student of Christchurch: but this town is one great comedy, in which not only the principles, but frequently the persons are feigned” (1.77). Papillon then delineates the manifold deceptions of London, a place replete with hypocrites and posers. He lists the kinds of people one finds at a coffeehouse, such as a Dr. Julap, who looks like a physician, but is actually a French spy. He summarizes Londoners: “In short, sir, you will meet with lawyers who practice smuggling, and merchants who trade upon Hounslow-heath; reverend atheists, right honourable sharpers, and Frenchmen from the county of York” (1.78). Yet as the Frenchman ruse is acknowledged and explained so early in the play and then serves as a bridge into a satire on hypocrisy, Foote is arguably less troubled by national character as it is acted, than he is by a larger eighteenth-century concern: the endemic obscurity of the private self within modern society. Hannah Cowley’s The Belle’s Stratagem (1780) is more centrally concerned with national identities, featuring as it does an insufficiently English Englishman, Doricourt, who has just returned from the Grand Tour changed by his European travels. His is not a hopeless case, however, as time away has confirmed some of his feelings of national superiority, characterizing as he does the English as Enlightened, rationally independent men unlike their slavish French counterparts: “An Englishman reasons, forms opinions, cogitates, and disputes” (Cowley [1780] 2001: 1.3.24–5). Yet he needs to be re-naturalized, reabsorbed into British culture and divested of his acquired continental tastes. His arranged marriage to the rich English heiress Letitia Hardy will not necessarily effect his reform, which can only be achieved by falling in love. Doricourt’s initially cool response to Letitia is shaped by his experiences with continental women: “She should have spirit! Fire! L’air enjoué. That something, that nothing, which everybody feels, and which nobody can describe, in the resistless charmers of Italy and France” (1.3.61–4). Although Letitia describes herself as “his slave,” the helpless victim of her passion (1.4.131), she nevertheless becomes an active agent in the reform plot that will tutor the hero in the appropriate desires of an

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Enlightened Englishman. In sum, Doricourt must be taught to see and appreciate the subtler charms of an English lady. As in so many comedies of this period that involve mistaken identity, a masquerade scene is central in The Belle’s Stratagem to plots of testing, discovery, and reformation even as the dangers of masquerade are an intradiegetic subject of debate and even a metaphor for the blurring of social identities. The ease by which age identities are obscured or feigned is an anxiety articulated by Sir George Touchwood, who complains: Formerly there were distinctions of character amongst ye. Every class of females had its particular description: grandmothers were pious, aunts discreet, old maids censorious! But now aunts, grandmothers, girls, and maiden gentlewomen are all the same creature; a wrinkle more or less is the sole difference between ye. —2.1.206–11 In the same scene, Sir George criticizes social mixing; society, in his estimation is “A mere chaos, in which all distinction of rank is lost in a ridiculous affectation of ease, and every different order of beings huddled together as they were before the creation. . . . In short, ‘tis one universal masquerade, all disguised in the same habits and manners” (2.1.241–7).1 Letitia, however, uses theatricalized social performance as a model for her own personal comedy of identity. She assumes the character of a mysterious, teasing woman—a proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl who appears to Doricourt during the masquerade in Act 4. Cowley’s hero extols the incognita’s worldly allurements: “By heavens! I never was charmed till now. English beauty— French vivacity—wit—elegance. Your name, my angel!” (4.1.251–2). The mask, as in innumerable earlier plays including Benjamin Hoadly’s The Suspicious Husband (1747), is an accessory for flirtation, involving, as it does, the manipulation and heightening of sensory perception. As this masked lady of ambiguous nationality, she tantalizes with a fantasy of marital bliss engendered by female malleability to male desire. She rewrites the identity of “wife,” for when Doricourt asks her “But what will you be when a wife,” she answers, “a woman,” or in other words, a desirable object rather than a burden (4.1.271, 272). She paints an alluring picture of her protean self in a loving marriage shaped by “the blessings of liberty and love” (4.1.287): . . . I’d be anything—and all! Grave, gay, capricious—the soul of whim, the spirit of variety—live with him in the eye of fashion, or in the shade of retirement— change my country, my sex, feast with him in an Eskimo hut, or a Persian pavillion—join him in the victorious war-dance on the borders of Lake Ontario. —4.1. 278–82

FIGURE 4.4: The Masque, c. 1650. Photo by Getty Images.

FIGURE 4.5: David Garrick and Hannah Pritchard in a scene from The Suspicious Husband. Photo by Getty Images. 105

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Significantly, these “blessings” are not so much cosmopolitan as imperially English, the sensual luxuries of England’s colonial spaces—the fruit of Enlightenment progress for the privileged few. By unmasking as Letitia, the heroine thus concludes her test, which confirms to Doricourt the desirability of an English wife; hiding her true national identity against which he was biased, she leads him out of his Baconian “Idol of the Cave”—his private misunderstanding and misvaluation of Englishness. In this discovery scene Letitia reveals her “little stratagem,” which she claims was necessitated by a feminine modesty—a national and personal characteristic— that first obscured her to him: “The timidity of the English character threw a veil over me you could not penetrate” (5.5.229, 231–2). Yet this “veil” is recognized by Enlightenment thinkers as the essential condition of identity in the world, for as Mark Blackwell explicates: “Locke’s distinction between the outward trappings characteristic of the man, including behavior and body, and the morally accountable, wholly personal core of the self means that society has but an obscure window upon the moral obligations and deepest feelings of its members” (2006: 82). Essentially, individuals are in the dark about each other, regularly waylaid by the false lights cast by socially determined appearances. Although Letitia excuses his blindness, in this final exchange between the lovers, Doricourt acknowledges that she is perceptive—tacitly because of her truer “Englishness”—in a way he is not: “I will not wrong your penetration by pretending that you won my heart at the first interview, but you have now my whole soul” (Cowley [1780] 2001: 5.5.242–4; my italics). Moreover, Cowley figures Letitia—so adroit at concealing, revealing, and seeing—as a playwright character, and the play’s epilogue thus suggests the fundamental opacity of character within public life, and, inversely, its legibility within dramatic art: ‘Tis plain, then, all the world, from youth to age, Appear in masks. Here, only, on the stage, You see us as we are: Here trust your eyes; Our wish to please admits of no disguise. —35–8 Letitia, like the playwright, takes off masks, her own and Doricourt’s, revealing the compatible subjectivities that will shore up their imminent companionate union. Moreover, she provides the audience with what Lisa Freeman has so brilliantly elucidated as eighteenth-century playwrights’ positioning of identity as a public property, which meant that “writers for the stage capitalized upon, rather than compensated for, anxieties over the stability of personal and social identity” (12). Moreover, as Cowley demonstrates through her comedy, even as the stage highlighted the theatricality of social practices, these same practices could nonetheless still be deployed for nationalist, heterosexual,

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and overwise supposedly pro-social ends within the generic and patriarchal constraints of the play.

THE LEGIBILITY OF SEXUAL VIRTUE The next sections of this chapter consider epistemologies of sex and marriage, a key component of comedy as a genre, but of particular significance to Enlightenment comedy with its increasing emphasis on both reform and “testing.” Stage comedies participated in an interrogation of marriage as an institution that spanned John Milton’s Divorce Tracts through (and beyond) the Marriage Act of 1753. For women of the long eighteenth century, as in earlier and later centuries, identity and sexual availability were closely entwined, a woman’s social status determining her accessibility to men, particularly men above her station. Conversely, a woman’s—and especially a lady’s—social identity could be compromised if she put her body at a man’s disposal. Comedy plays with these social expectations insofar as identities and their accompanying distinctions of sexual availability/unavailability are blurred, if temporarily and superficially. Hero’s defamation in Much Ado About Nothing shows us that anxieties about women’s sexual purity, like bed tricks, are not new. However, reflecting Enlightenment interest in progress and experimentation, these comic motifs and tropes more explicitly become empirical exercises for Restoration and eighteenth-century characters. The secondary plot in Behn’s The Rover (1677), set during Carnival, concerns the trials of the heroine’s sister, Florinda, who is mistaken for a wanton when she leaves her brother’s house. The inadvertent confusion of a gentlewoman for a courtesan drives this subplot, which skirts tragedy, in Behn’s comedy. For Behn’s audience, class blindness would have seemed a harbinger of a disturbing collapse of social distinctions and threat to the long-accepted English social hierarchy. After Willmore threatens Florinda with sexual violence, the wouldbe rapist is confronted by Belvil (Florinda’s intended) and his compatriot Frederick. Willmore begins the scene by defending himself: “Why, how the devil should I know Florinda?” (Rover [1677] 2008: 3.6.1). Some lines later, he clarifies, “By this light, I took her for an arrant harlot” (3.6.21). Belvil accuses Willmore of being drunk and inobservant: “Tell me, sot, hadst thou so much sense and light about thee to distinguish her woman, and couldst not see something about her face and person, to strike an awful reverence into thy soul?” (3.6.22–5). Willmore claims, however, he saw nothing special about her, “Faith no, I considered her as mere a woman as I could wish” (3.6.26–7). Behn implicitly critiques masculine epistemological certainty as not only unfounded, but also potentially damaging insofar as it threatens to erase and overwrite female identities. First-hand perceptions in The Rover are fallacious, altered as they are by individual and social prejudices.

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Behn’s 1679 comedy The Feigned Courtesans (also spelled The Feign’d Curtizans) presents a more sustained challenge to the legibility of sexual virtue, and more generally male certitude. Confusion involving identity and the senses runs rampant in this play, which involves much bedroom farce. Multiple deception plots are set in motion, beginning with that of Laura Lucretia, a young gentlewoman in love with Galliard, an English cavalier. In the play’s first scene, Laura instructs her servant: “Be sure you conceal my name and quality, and tell him—anything but truth—tell him I am la Silvianetta, the young Roman courtesan, or what you please, to hide me from his knowledge” ([1679] 2008: 1.1.17–20). Concealment is fundamental to the main plot: Marcella and Cornelia, young Italian runaways, assume false identities to obscure their true social rank. Their first impression is convincing, as three male characters spot the sisters, and the Englishman, Galliard, exclaims: “Women! and by their garb for our purpose, too. They’re courtesans; let’s follow ’em” (2.1.118–19). One of the men, Sir Harry Fillamour, is in love with Marcella, but does not recognize her in this dress, which indicates sexual availability. A key exchange between Fillamour and Marcella (as a courtesan)—which should be a recognition scene—demonstrates prejudice at war with the senses; Fillamour is confused by this courtesan’s resemblance to his chaste beloved, but is unwilling to believe them the same woman, he desires further evidence. Marcella, playing the role of the covetous prostitute, provides this proof in the form of her supposed mercenary philosophy. Fillamour’s aside reveals his acceptance that this is not his Marcella: “[aside] Oh, that heaven should make two persons so / resembling, / And yet such different souls” (2.1.279–80). He wavers with each successive sight of her, however. When appearing on a balcony with Cornelia in Act 3, he recants his earlier conclusion, declaring: “By heaven, it must be she! Still she appears more like” (3.1.175). His Lockean preoccupation with sensory impressions makes him intuit (correctly) that Marcella and the courtesan are the same woman, thus drawing him against his will towards her courtesan lookalike. In another encounter between Fillamour and Marcella-as-courtesan, he apprehends her as a “fair enchantress” (4.1.14) with the same face as his beloved, of whom he dreams. The sensuality and mystery of the scene lends a supernatural air to Marcella, who seems more like a vision or “lovely phantom” than a real person (4.1.35). As in a number of Enlightenment comedies, characters resort to incorrect supernatural explanations when sensory impressions conflict or fail to lead to knowledge acquisition. Marcella (as herself) eventually confronts Fillamour with his infidelity, but he claims a knowledge beyond the five senses, a sixth emotional and intuitive sense and argues: “Howe’er my eyes might be imposed upon, you see my heart was firm to its first object” (5.4.133–4). Fillamour’s inability to reconcile the two Marcellas until Act 5 of The Feigned Courtesans is duplicated in Galliard’s initial resistance to Cornelia’s self-identification and participation in a female-

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generated discovery scene that seems to bely his senses. He does not believe her declaration that she is a respectable woman and is certain she is a courtesan (or at least that she could be made one) because that is what he wants her to be. In the same breath, he asserts his male prerogative to determine female identity, a prerogative repeatedly challenged in women-authored stage comedy. Galliard declares that if Cornelia is not a courtesan, he “can soon mend that fault, / And make thee so,” adding that he is “impatient to begin the experiment” (4.2.146– 7). In using the term “experiment,” he figures himself as a scientist and his lover as the passive object upon which he proves/forces his hypothesis. Cornelia stands her ground, however, for in Behn’s comedy, a crucible of proto-feminist Enlightenment hermeneutics, identity is contingent on female plotting. Proven wrong in his entwined perceptions and assumptions by Cornelia, Galliard is rendered into a new stock character, the reformed libertine; he is further transformed, becoming a married man in no small part because of the courtesan trick, for he pronounces: “So many disappointments in one night, would make a man turn honest in spite of nature” (5.4.72–3). The disappointments of which Galliard speaks, are twofold, and related: the comic misprisions of identity and the comic confusions of the senses, both of which result in either the denial or deferral of male sexual gratification. Behn’s economy of seeing and being in The Feigned Courtesans is only partially progressive, however; while Marcella and Cornelia may assume the appearance of courtesans, and stage manage their own discovery scenes, neither have apparently compromised their virginity, so necessary to their future social identities as the wives of English gentlemen. Nonetheless, Behn’s scenes of identity confusion gesture to the artificiality of social identities, which can be so convincingly constructed, and point to the ultimate unknowability of vice and virtue, the former unverifiable sensory perception, and the latter imitable with a clever script.

BED TRICKS Related—and sometimes overlapping with—the comedy of mistaken partners is that of mistaken bedfellows; these plays utilize the farcical device of the “bed trick,” where characters are mistaken about their bedfellows’ identities, having sex with (or almost having sex with) the wrong person. This trope, deployed by Chaucer in “The Reeve’s Tale,” dates at least as far back as the Bible, namely Genesis 29, which tells of Jacob’s accidental bedding of Leah instead of his intended Rachel on their wedding night, a ruse machinated by the girls’ father Laban. Variations of this device include plots involving sexual assignations with an incognito lover under the cover of darkness and cuckoldry by sham husbands (considered in the last section). A bed trick is obviously the titular action of Francis Fane’s Love in the Dark (1675), a bawdy Restoration comedy fittingly dedicated to John Wilmont, Earl of Rochester. Yet the bed trick is most

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compelling as it is used by female characters as a means of effecting the rake’s reform by challenging male epistemological certainty. Scenes of mistaken and concealed identity in erotic encounters between husbands and wives challenge the characters’ assumptions: what they think they know as well as who they think they (and their spouse) are. In all these scenes, sensate bodies and the imagination are the instruments of desire. Playwrights underscore the limits of male epistemological certitude, the senses confirming desirability, but not identity. Instead, these mistaken bedfellow episodes put the power of discovery—as well as moral superiority—into women’s hands; protean female characters, hitherto denied a sexual dimension to their identity, pose as mistresses, and after a calculated reveal, complicate the wife stereotype. In Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion (1696), mistaken identity will be a key element in the reform of an unfaithful and indifferent libertine-husband, Loveless, by his long-suffering wife, Amanda. Loveless’s friend, Young Worthy, conceives of a plot for Amanda to reclaim her wayward spouse, from whom she has been living apart for a decade: she will pose as “a new mistress” (Cibber [1696] 2001: 1.1.67). Here, as in other reform comedies, female identity is socially and personally productive in its fluidity; though Amanda technically maintains her core identity as virtuous wife, she will enjoy the pleasures of an eager lover as Loveless will inadvertently “cuckold himself” (1.1.523). This transformative experience will give Loveless the opportunity to “see the weakness of his deluded fancy, which even in a wife, while unknown, could find those real charms which his blind, ungrateful lewdness would ne’er allow her to be mistress of” (1.1.508–12). The concealment of her true identity will ironically allow him to “see” her and know her for what she truly is: his desirable wife. Amanda worries that he will recognize her, but ten years and the smallpox have altered her countenance. Furthermore, alcohol presents another contrived obstacle to him “knowing” her, for part of the “design” is to ply him with strong wine in a scene of sensory confusion that seems to Loveless a dreamlike fantasy of abundance. Gazing on his mystery lover (Amanda), he confesses: “While my senses have such luscious food before ’em, no wonder if they are in some confusion, each striving to be foremost at the banquet. And sure my greedy eyes will starve the rest” (4.3.123–7). His dialogue evidences her overwhelming desirability to him. Explicit and implicit questions of identity and interpretation are at the center of this pseudo-adulterous seduction scene: What d’ye take me for? A woman, and the most charming of your sex. One whose pointed eyes declare you formed for love. And though your words are flinty, your every look and motion all confess there’s a secret fire within you, which must sparkle when the steel of love provokes it.

AMANDA

LOVELESS

—4.3.152–8

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Continuing to privilege sight above other ways of knowing, he reads her body for visual signs of her receptiveness to his advances, for proofs of her willingness to become his mistress. He can make no connection between this woman and his wife, but still he confesses she seems vaguely familiar to him. She is able to effect his reform by exploiting his conviction that he cannot be sexually satisfied by a wife, an assumption that hinges on his mistress not being his wife. Amanda engages her husband in hermeneutical play as she leads him toward the discovery that will ultimately result in his moral transformation from inconstant rake to constant husband. They converse and ask each other questions, Amanda presenting her labile identity as “a perfect riddle,” for she self-identifies as: “A wife, sir, a true, a faithful, and a virtuous wife” (5.2.80, 83), which seems impossible as she has just slept with Loveless. She promises to explain herself to “unloose [his] fettered apprehension” and requests him to “summon all [his] force of manly reason to resolve me” (5.2.93–4, 98–9). Within this discovery scene she pleads for him “Look on me well” (5.2.179). Convinced as he is that his wife is dead, he cannot believe Amanda’s confession or face, but must be given proof of identity in the form of a tattoo of his name on her arm. This “indelible confirmation” on her body finally makes him exclaim: “ ’Tis no illusion, but my real name, which seems to upbraid me as a witness of my perjured love” (5.2.203, 207–9). This reconciliation ends with Loveless’s versifying: “ ’Twas heedless fancy first that made me stray, / But reason now breaks forth and lights me on my way” (5.2.274–6). Though the hero hails “reason” rather than his wife as his means of Enlightenment, Cibber’s play is less ideologically safe than this final rhyming couplet would suggest, as Amanda—a woman, and a designing one at that—is shown again and again as the source of legitimate knowledge within the play. Identity confusion in bed is also crucial to the marital reform plot in Charles Johnson’s The Wife’s Relief (1712). Riot, a rake-husband like Cibber’s Loveless, illogically dislikes his wife Cynthia simply because she is his wife, “—she is my Wife, that is, she is my Aversion” (Johnson [1711] 1712: 1.1.1). Yet his visceral distaste will be discredited by an amatory encounter in the dark with his wife, whom he thinks is another woman, Arabella, and by sexual jealousy, evoked by putative cuckoldry. Riot’s libertine philosophy of sensual variety renders him insensible to Cynthia’s charms, and his friend Volatil remarks on this blindness: “In how false a Mirror you behold that Woman” (1.2.14), an opinion that the playwright will substantiate in subsequent scenes. Cynthia develops, and with the help of Arabella, executes a “Plot” to reform the self-deceived Riot (2.2.20). Cynthia will be Arabella’s proxy and muses: “If I cou’d but once open his Eyes, and let him view his vicious Follies in their real Light, I might then hope a Cure” (3.1.28). When Riot is half-undeceived, he accuses Cynthia of enjoying her role-playing scheme, but she responds by reasserting her identity, an identity that rests on reuniting the terms woman and wife: “You know I have

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stooped below the Earth to show my Duty—but thus, thus trampled on, I rise to tell the World I am a Woman—a Wife,—an English, freeborn Wife” (4.2.51). The final, transformative discovery is made by Cynthia who reveals she has not slept with Volatil and has only led Riot to believe so to reform him. Her plot is successful, as Riot confesses that “my Follies glare upon me in their full Light” (5.2.68). Volatil, hoping to prevent a relapse, notes to Riot: “we must endeavour to draw you by just Degrees to Virtue’s Charms; nor dare at once to show you all her Lustre—your sight is yet too weak to bear it” (5.2.68). Riot puts his own reform in terms of sight and blindness: “I own I may be Blind with too much Light, but I see so well at present, to be fully satisfy’d that the Libertine’s Joys are all short, and false, as Feverish Dreams, wherein the whole Animal Oeconomy is miserably torn and distracted, to support a momentary Delerium” (5.2.68). On one hand, the mistaken bedfellows plot enables playwrights to dramatically represent pseudo-adultery, and on the other, this plot underscores the power of immediate sensory experience to reshape both assumptions and identities when put into context by an epistemologically powerful female character.

CUCKOLDRY AND THE DARK LANTERN The night’s “disappointments” in The Feigned Courtesans and many other eighteenth-century plays are externalized in the stage property of the dark lantern, a portable lantern with sliding panels that shut the light on/off. A symbol of the paradoxes of “Enlightenment” comedy, this prop enables deception and blindness as well as discovery; it is an emblem of characterdriven comic confusion and thematically connects the central action to other identity tricks within intrigue plays. The social-sexual deception of Behn’s genteel sisters is comparable to the night antics of other characters who confound perceptual accuracy. Sight is controlled by characters who carry dark lanterns, using them to hide themselves and prevent detection in their plots.2 Dark lanterns also signal to audiences that they are watching a night scene, and thus perform the same function as verbal cues about darkness, a state endemic to bedroom farce. The dark lantern serves as metaphor for the issue of identity, emblematic of the manipulation of appearances that facilitates the erotic confusions within the plays of this period, but also within wider English society. Behind these adultery plots lies the fear of cuckoldry, a fear grounded in a more nebulous fear of the loss of authority in its several senses: class-based social authority, political and economic authority, and the masculine patriarchal authority that places husbands above wives, the virile above the impotent. As power changed hands and accrued in unexpected places during this period of imperial expansion and the rise and spread of English capitalism, comedy showed challenges to

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consolidating this power among the middle class. As J. Douglas Canfield explains, “the cuckolding of Cits, the seduction of City wives, is a special reaffirmation of class dominance,” a defense mechanism triggered “because the middle class was increasingly threatening aristocratic hegemony” (1997: 27). In several plays performed between 1660–89, husbands leave home and supposedly return to sleep with their wives, the ensuing scenes with mistaken husbands often illuminating the period’s interest in sensory hermeneutics. Two Restoration plays, The Mistaken Husband, anonymously published in 1675 by “a person of quality” (long thought to be John Dryden) and Dryden’s Amphitryon; Or, The Two Sosia’s (1687) involve proxy husbands duping wives into conjugal relations. Within The Mistaken Husband, the long-lost Mr. Manley is impersonated by Mr. Hazzard. Hazzard, whose very name suggests his proclivity for gambling, is motivated by a love of risk and the desire for “profit . . . as well as pleasure” (Dryden [1675] 1882: 583). Confident that his physical resemblance to Manley (especially after he scars himself to enhance the likeness) will mean “it shall take a subtler head Than [Mrs. Manley’s] to find the difference” (583), Hazzard obtains personal information and even an authenticating golden keepsake from the real Mr. Manley. A family servant, Thomas, is given the task of breaking the news of her husband’s apparent return. Thomas uses the gold to convince her: How willingly I would believe thee, and how little Can I. THOMAS Can you believe this? [Gives her the Gold.] MRS. MANLEY Sure my senses do not conspire against me. MRS. MANLEY

—589 Mrs. Manley fails this first epistemological test in accepting Hazzard as Manley, and welcomes him to her bed to finally consummate their marriage. Hazzard’s cuckolding plot is successful, as he has off-stage sex with Mrs. Manley immediately before the opening of Act 2, which begins with the dynamic stage direction: “Mrs. Manley running in, in Night-Cloaths, Hazzard after her” (598). This postcoital confrontation is melodramatic, as Hazzard must go through an elaborate routine to convince her of his identity, albeit after her seduction. His voice is what has betrayed him as not-Mr. Manley, for after Mrs. Manley hears him again speak after the consummation of their marriage, she declares: “Now I’m confirm’d; that’s not his voice” (589). But this confirmation is shaky, as he gives her another proof in a whispered aside: a shared secret. After receiving this “private token,” she weighs the evidence for and against: “I know not what to think on’it. / Those Eyes, that Hair is very—He: / But, O! that Voice, like the Devils cloven / Foot Discovers an Imposter” (599). But his trump card, so to speak, is the revelation of the scar on his breast. Conflicted, she exclaims: “Bless me! I am amazed! / It should be he! and yet methinks it

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cannot . . .” (600). The epistemological confusion of this moment is inseparable, however, from the emotional disorder the return of “Manley” catalyzes. After their long separation and pleasurable reunion, Mrs. Manley wants to be convinced that this is her husband and Hazzard, Satanic in his specious rhetoric, is persuasive. Calculatingly anti-empirical, he extorts that she not trust her sense of hearing, which is no trusty “Servant,” but rather “a Traytor” (600). Instead, she should “Please to consult the Steward of your Soul, / And Ruler of your Senses / Your wise Reason” (600). His pseudo-philosophical encouragement of rational skepticism only temporarily vanquishes Mrs. Manley’s doubts, as solid proof against Hazzard appears in the shape of Mr. Manley himself. When the heroine’s real husband, the actual Mr. Manley, appears, it is his voice and appearance together that positively identifies him; after he speaks, she declares, “Sure I should know that Voice” and upon lifting her veil to see her interlocutor, faints (616). Her intense emotional response validates Manley’s claim to his own name, although weeping, in blurring the vision, is literally sight-threatening. “Do you know me Madam,” Manley asks, adding “Sure, you are not so over-grown in Tears, but your Eye may discern whether you know me then” (616). The servant Thomas is still on Hazzard’s side, but he acknowledges that Manley’s “very like” and asks: “let me bite a mark about your face, that I may know you” (620). Thomas is likening the men to coins, it being still common practice to confirm a coin as gold by biting it. In short, one man is the real Manley and the other is a counterfeit. Yet once Hazzard has been definitively found out, he attempts to convince Mrs. Manley to preserve her reputation by accepting him as her husband. He argues that everyone engages in hypocrisy, hiding their sins to appear more virtuous, and avers that individuals cannot know each other because: “we see all things by false lights, which hide defects, and gloss o’er what’s amiss” (620). The Mistaken Husband is an atypical comedy insofar as the playwright subverts the conventional discovery scene: the disguise becomes real. Hazzard is transformed permanently into Mr. Manley, as the wronged husband is paid off and agrees to exile himself from England and relinquish his name and wife. Hazzard’s identity changes from cuckold-making libertine to husband or, paradoxically, husbandcuckold, for when another character asks him if he would have Mrs. Manley for his wife, he replies: “’tis true I have had her before hand, but that’s but being my own Cuckold” (641). Mrs. Manely, given no Christian name in the play, is still named and defined vis-à-vis the man she legally married, and then the man who consummated their union by proxy. Yet the suspicions she articulates in the play do not simply position her as a victim of mistaken identity, but a player—like Hazzard himself—in the high stakes game of epistemology at the center of this period’s comedy. While her apprehension is faulty and positional, it is notable that she is given the opportunity in The Mistaken Husband to analyze aloud her firsthand impressions as an Enlightenment subject grappling with questions of veracity.

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A mistaken husband plot is also firmly at the center of Dryden’s classically-set Amphitryon (1687), a reworking of Molière’s play of the same name. A woman (Alcmena, the title character’s wife) is presented as an active epistemological agent. While Amphitryon is off at war, he is betrayed by the Roman god Jupiter, also called Jove in the play, who assumes the exact likeness of Alcmena’s husband. This divine plot is successful as Jove-as-Amphitryon sleeps with her and then gives her a diamond bracelet, a gift that represents the ambiguity of appearances—perceived as either real jewels or “Flints, or Pebbles, or some such Trumpery of enchanted Stones” ([1687] 1976: 223–4). Amphitryon’s servant proposes a bawdy experiment to determine the stones’ authenticity: “They say the proof of a true Diamond is to glitter in the dark; I think my Master had best take my Lady into some By-corner, and try whose Diamond will sparkle best” (3.1.225–7). Nonetheless, Alcmena herself is more empiricist than object in the play than this bawdy comment would suggest. Though duped by Jove, she is not presented by Dryden as his victim; rather, she is wronged by her husband’s jealousy, as she notes a change in him, wondering at her husband’s coldness in contrast to her loving “husband” (Jupiter in disguise). The dark lantern is another key prop—and metaphor—in Dryden’s play. In Act 2, a “Night-Scene,” both Sosia and Mercury (Jove’s messenger) disguised as Sosia carry this light source according to the stage directions. The doubling of the servant Sosia, as the play’s subtitle indicates, is almost as central as the plot of the two Amphitryons. When the two Sosias meet, the real Sosia sees his impostor, and wonders in an aside: “How now? what do my Eyes dazzle [sic], or is my dark Lanthorn false to me” (2.1.77–8). He initially thinks this double a ghost or monster, but then after he “Walks about Mercury with his dark Lanthorn (2.1.269), he takes a more rational, less superstitious approach to the situation; he attempts to analyze the evidence before him, using legal language in his aside: “He’s damnable like me, that’s certain. Imprimis, there’s the Patch upon my Nose . . .” (2.1.273–4). Sosia claims to his master to have seen his twin, but Amphitryon dismisses his story as an “intricate piece of Nonsense” (3.1.136). Sosia complains that he is disbelieved because of his low social position: “ ’Tis only Nonsense because I speak it who am a poor fellow; but it wou’d be Sense, and substantial Sense, if a great Man said it, that was back’d with a Title, and the Eloquence of ten Thousand Pounds a year” (3.1.137–40). Dryden’s social critique, that truth claims are authorized by social status, points to another way in which comedy explores the fallibility of human knowledge acquisition. Bias and ignorance regularly color characters’ reactions to puzzling occurrences as well as affect how hypotheses within the play are assessed. Prefiguring the discovery scene in Act 5 is a shift in the last act away from the imagery of the dark lantern to another light source, the sun. Seeing the identical Amphitryons, a minor character, Gripus, declares: “I have beheld th’ appearance of two Suns; / But still the false, was dimmer than the true; / Here, both shine

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out alike” (5.1.120–2). The sun does not stand simply for Enlightenment but also its limitations, namely the bounds of empiricism, for when the senses alone prove inadequate, Alcmena turns to intuitive ways of knowing beyond them. Choosing between the identical Amphitryons she proposes that: “This is a Case too nice for vulgar sight . . . my Heart will guide my Eyes / To point, and tremble to its proper choice” (5.1.256–8). Jupiter, claiming that he is her spouse, compares Amphitryon to an ignus faatus: “Follow no more, / That false and foolish Fire” (5.1.263–4). She is convinced by not only his speech, but other, more affective identity markers, for she proclaims: . . . thou art he! Thy Words, thy Thoughts, thy Soul is all Amphitryon; Th’ Impostour [sic] has thy Features, not thy Mind; Thy Face might have deceiv’d me in my choice; Thy kindness is a Guide that cannot err. —5.1.267–72 Although she is technically wrong—Jupiter will soon reveal himself with “convincing proof” of his divine identity—she is right in her affective, even implicitly proto-feminist assessment of Jupiter as husband material (5.1.283). This dimension of the heroine’s response to her spouse looks forward to Hume’s nuancing of Locke’s empiricism, as the later thinker gives “a prominent place to the impressions of reflection, our passions and emotions” in his theory of knowledge and human nature (Jacobson 1996: 157). Identities are questioned, manipulated, and revealed in Dryden’s comedy, but not simply in service of the obvious comic payoff of cuckoldry. The playwright uses moments of epistemological uncertainty to press (within a comic framework) established assumptions about unenlightened Enlightenment social institutions, namely marriage and the class system.

CONCLUSION Mistaken identity, a trope ubiquitous in all comedy, is particularly emphasized in the comedy of the long eighteenth century to draw attention to the crisis of epistemology in a post-Lockean world still deeply committed to narratives of Enlightenment both inside and outside imaginative literature. The period’s comedy is most interested in the failure of the powers of discernment, providing as it does unique comic and philosophic opportunities. Sensory accrual—that central mechanism for Enlightenment knowing—does not necessarily lead characters closer to the truth, and epistemological uncertainty destabilizes, albeit temporarily, other ideological certainties (i.e., the legibility of seemingly essential qualities like birth) within this nascent period of modernity and urbanization.

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The unreliable relationship between the external world and the mind—and simultaneously, “the vexed question of how to ‘read’ others in a world vastly expanded from kinship relations” (Ahnert and Manning 2011: 13)—is externalized through Enlightenment comedy’s key stage property: the dark lantern. Often used in farcical night scenes in which identities are hidden and revealed, these lanterns with moveable panels symbolize the fallibility of individual apprehension but also the personal power of the Enlightened subject, man or woman. At the same time, the audience is positioned as the knowing observer, aligned with those manipulating comic action, namely the dissembling characters, the playwright, and the actors themselves. Comic irony flatters the playgoing viewer as an agent of perspicuity by facilitating their identification with the characters who demonstrate observational accuracy and control, with the lanthorn-bearers rather than the fools. Significantly, the dark lantern has no bearing on the audience’s discernment of identities, as house lights during this period would be up, leaving no playgoer—literally or metaphorically—in the dark. Despite the epistemic confusion that characterizes dramatic comedy and the persistence of socialized cognitive distortions beyond the playhouse, blindness is limited to the characters, Enlightenment audiences are reassured of epistemological and ideological certainty so long as they are immersed in the comic environment, a foot-lit world that only plays at darkness.

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Body Performing Comic Eighteenth-Century Embodiment MISTY G. ANDERSON

This chapter offers an argument about what we can know about comic embodiment on the eighteenth-century stage. Stage comedy’s traffic in marriage, its contained saturnalia, and its reliance on exaggeration made key relations of gender, power, and national identity visible on the anglophone eighteenth-century stage. A glance at the most performed plays shows that, after The Beggar’s Opera (in a class of its own in terms of its repertoire dominance) and comic afterpieces, which were recycled to round out a night’s entertainment, comedies like The Beaux’ Stratagem, The Provoked Husband, The Busy Body, The Recruiting Officer, A Bold Stroke for a Wife, and The School for Scandal top the charts, with their quick changes, escapes, and openings for comic gesture. These eighteenth-century comedies brim with moments in which the forms of social meaning are embodied in performance, the archive of what Joseph Roach has called the “history of the theatricalization of the human body” (1985: 12). Repertoire comedies also constantly revived, reanimated, and revised the great comic bodies of the actors Charles Hart, Colley Cibber, Nell Gwyn, Robert Wilks, John Rich, David Garrick, Samuel Foote, and Kitty Clive, which were, above all else, bodies in expressive motion. Making the kinetic history of early eighteenth-century comedy visible depends on understanding the vitality and the iterations of difference frozen into a single gesture in portraits and prints; the kinetic instructions that can thaw these poses are often preserved in the texts themselves. Visual and textual artifacts, along with corporeal mime, the legacy of Decroux, and commedia dell’arte can help theater practitioners revive the comic bodies of the past. 119

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The Clarence Brown Theatre’s spring 2017 Equity production of The Busy Body attempted to bring the kinetic archive of comic performance to life.1 Our process began with a tight adaptation based on the London second edition, with advice on cuts from the 1782 Edinburgh edition, which printed the prompter’s stricken lines in italics. Using a set that remained faithful to the stage technologies of early eighteenth-century houses, we situated our comic bodies amid rapidly shifting flats that whirled them through parks, drawing rooms, streets, and hiding spaces. The contrast between the flats, with only a minimum of dimensional detail, and the bright, richly embroidered costumes grounded locations, and emphasized the vitality, color, and substance of the bodies moving through them. The costumes, created by Marianne Custer, using a Baby Lock Valiant embroidery machine to recreate patterns from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s costume collection,2 framed the physical movements of those bodies, at once tightly cased and fluid in their silks. My work on this show as script editor and dramaturg made apparent the disciplinary split, artificial but persistent, between textual and performance studies, as well as the possibilities of mending that rift in embodied action. Comic motion, gesture, and pace left more traces than they did full impressions in the archive, and those traces threaten to betray us into caricature. But the script, bolstered by the visual record of prints, paintings, and textiles, led to an historically rich producible interpretation. The grammar of comic movement structured and iterated the trajectories of social power as the readable practices of gender, sexuality, nationality, and class. This kinetic archive lives in both text and the genealogy of gesture and movement to which we remain connected. The analysis that follows tacks between the archive, the repertoire, and our particular experiment with Centlivre’s The Busy Body, a comic warhorse of the eighteenth-century stage, in order to test this thesis.

COMEDY AND PROXIMITY Acting theories of the eighteenth century tended to reproduce the absences of comedy in Aristotle’s Poetics in that the mentions of comedy are superficial and perpetually put off the task of writing the theory of comedy for another day and another writer. The Prompter, Aaron Hill and William Popple’s short-lived but rich excursus into performance theory that served as prelude to Hill’s more famous An Essay on the Art of Acting, declared a primary interest in “TRAGEDY ONLY” (with exceptions for the “pathetic Species” of comedy), thus reproducing Aristotle’s glancing blow at comedy and avoiding the difficulty of talking about the quick motions and readings that are part of comic performance (Hill and Popple [1735] 1966: 67). Like so many others, An Essay on the Stage; or, the Art of Acting (1754), written by “A Comedian,” has much more to say about playing tragedy. It makes passing mentions of the great comedians (Woffington, Clive,

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Cibber, Quin, and Garrick) and laments that “real” comedy is playing its own death scene: “But whither, say, is fled the comic power!/ Say why nor bards nor players feel it more!” (1754: 18) Dancing-master John Weaver offers a related narrative of lost kinetic taste and accomplishment, the power of which, he laments, “even some of our best Actors are so little acquainted with” (1712: 120). Narratives of aesthetic decline are common enough, but in the case of eighteenth-century comedy, they suggest that the great age of Restoration wit comedy, high in verbal density and complexity, has fallen off in plays that are, by comparison, lowly, embodied, or sentimental. Centlivre in particular, whose work was called by Hazlitt “the best of our acting plays” and by Inchbald “productions that depend on action” (qtd. in O’Brien 2004: 143, 140) received from Steele faint praise in Tatler 19 for writing plots with “that Subtilty of Spirit which is peculiar to Females of Wit.” (1709: 154). Byron would later boast that he knew Congreve gave up the stage “because Mrs. Centlivre’s balderdash drove his comedies off” (Bowyer 1952: 97). The feminization of the fall into plot, incident, and action tracks with a narrative about comedy that is anxious about both embodiment and commercial success. Eighteenth-century stage comedy’s move away from the biting social satire of the Restoration city comedies and toward what Shirley Strum Kenny has called “humane comedy,” has also been conflated with a slide into sentimental comedy (1977: 29). Jean Marsden, Peggy Thompson, Misty Krueger, Aparna Gollapudi, Anne Greenfield, and Jennifer Airey have all written about the tragic heroines, trapped in bodies that are vulnerable, permeable, and often immobile.3 But the embodiment of female agency in stage comedy, even sentimental comedies like The Conscious Lovers, provided a counter-narrative to female powerlessness by orchestrating escapes and upsets of the powerful through action. In the main body of repertoire comedies, female characters had to make their plots succeed not just by talking but by taking action, whether by donning their brother’s clothes, jumping through windows, switching a letter, or escaping with a lover in order to evade the social scripts designed to keep them from power. That female playwrights, along with men like Farquhar, who were not inheritors of economic or cultural authority, would understand this possibility in embodied, physical trickery should not surprise. Jacky Bratton reclaims it as a system of “intertheatricality,” which includes “non-verbal systems of spectacle and sound” attentive to “who is in the audience, and the presence of actors and their own personae,” which included the rumors of private lives and the sexual activity of the actors (2000: 21). The specificity and materiality of the female body on the comic stage probes the boundaries of women’s social mobility in a bourgeois culture and a genre defined by the marriage plot. Second, a wider range of bodies began to populate the comic stage, tacking between the poles of type and particularity. The names of many of these

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characters were code for embodied class, social, and regional identities: Lockit, Peachum, Loveit, Wishfort, Horner, Hoyden, Sir Fopling Flutter, Lord Foppington, and Obediah Prim. They are comic inversions of naming conventions from medieval morality plays, signifying through a range of social cues and foibles (which, it turns out, is a noun that makes a fine maid’s name). Shearer West notes that the “infinite variety” contained in comedy, which represents a broader range of passions in contrast to tragedy’s more limited notes, nonetheless signified against and “had to compete with the idea of comic acting as the presentation of a stereotype” (West 1991: 139). The tension between the unique, distinct comic persona, an “original” or a “singularity,” and the stereotype accomplished in “broad strokes easily repeated from one comic character to another” are two corresponding pages from the comic playbook (1991: 139). Successful comedians like Pack, Quin, Charke, and Foote used their “grotesque” comic bodies, to use the period’s term, known in grimaces, falls, and exaggerated affects to create “originals” that embodied recognizable human weaknesses and faults. Imitation of particular individuals also worked to show what was original and reproducible as a site of comic anxiety and pleasure. Charlotte Charke played her own father playing Lord Foppington, while Foote made a career of taking off people as types, including the Methodist firebrand George Whitefield and his old one-legged rival George Faulkner “Peter Paragraph.” Foote boasted he could impersonate Faulkner/Paragraph even better after he lost a leg, and threats of a lawsuit didn’t stop him (Kinservik 2002: 141). The reiterability of these performances represent an extreme of comic typology that took shape in character parts. Comic figures that signify beyond mere farce or lampoon balance types against the varieties of lived experience. The representation of various classed and non-elite bodies was not, however, a simple or democratic project. Horace Walpole lamented the “rise of the low” and the “currency” of breeding in modern comedy, which presents “a shopkeeper’s daughter” as “a young lady with a handsome fortune and necessary accomplishments” and her brother, who “acts plays.” Worse yet, thought Walpole, “even highwaymen die genteelly” (1798: 319). John Hippisley’s A Dissertation on Comedy (1750) emphasized that comedy mocks affectation, which is another way to say that it enforces power relations through physical representations. His own Flora (1737), both in its farcical and comicopera forms, trafficked heavily in class distinctions as the basis for comic action through Hob and his father Old Hob, rustic bumpkins whose blunders, pratfalls, and cudgeling establish class domains. These typologies fostered the development of ethnic and racial stereotypes on the eighteenth-century stage, which embodied difference as a set of signature gestures, accents, and looks, from Centlivre’s Gibby the Scot, with his kilt and thick brogue (“What mun I de with the horses, an like yer honour, they will tack cold gin. . .”) to Dibdin’s

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performance of Mungo in black face, speaking a type of Caribbean pidgin (“Massa . . . Mungo here, Mungo dere. . . . Me wish to de Lord me was dead”) (Bickerstaff and Dibden 1768: 10). Michael Ragussis notes that mid-century comic representations of ethnic minorities put them into competition with one another, while Helen Burke has traced the production of the stage Teague, accompanied by the stage Scot, through the eighteenth century. The movements, gestures, and velocity of comic bodies trace the racialized lineaments of national identity, political power and social mobility. Each of these types depended on affects and reproducible gestures performed (at their best) by a host of gifted comic actors like George Pack, James Quin, William Bullock, Anne Oldfield, Kitty Clive, and Frances Abington, whose “plastic imaginations” took shape in their plastic features. Comic acting, like comedy itself, received only the occasional mention in treatises on the stage in contrast to the more sustained and well-theorized practice that tragedy and tragic acting received, but there are moments in Hill, Betterton, Foote, and Shuter which provide some insight. Foote, in The Diversions of a Morning, mocks an imagined acting lesson in which Macklin teaches Spranger Barry how to play Othello. Foote parodies the stiffness of tragic technique with gaping mouths, pointing fingers, “the clinch’d fist for rage,” and eventually, a horrible diction lesson from Puzzle, the instructor: Give me the occular proof— PUZ Lay your emphasis a little stronger upon occ—occ—occ— BOUN Occ—occ—occular proof— PUZ That’s right! BOUN Or by the worth of my eternal soul, Thou had’st better been born a dog— PUZ Grind dog—a d—o—o—g, Iag— BOUN A do-od, Iago, than answer my wak’d wrath. PUZ Charming!—Now quick—[Speaking all the time.] BOUN Make me see it, or at least so prove it, That the probation bears no hinge or loop, To hang a doubt on;—or wo— PUZ A little more terror upon woe—wo-o-e, like a mastiff in a tanner’s yard—w-o-o-e— [They answer each other—w-o-o-o-e, &c.]. BOUN

—quoted in Wilkinson 1795: 244–5 His mockery of tragic accents that “grind” and of tragic pointing that becomes ridiculous also gestures toward the movement and physical skill of a gifted comedian with a rubber face. Edward Shuter was alternately praised and denounced for his comic gifts for manipulating his “strong features, disposing and altering the muscles of his face

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into a variety of laughable shapes, which, though they may sometimes border on grimace, are, however, on the whole irresistibly comic” (Theatrical Biography 1772: 2:54). Motion and velocity provide the pantomime choreography for comic bodies to follow, tweaking the precise results in a range of embodied action: “As a Performer, his Perfection is to become what he performs, to be capable of representing all manner of Passions, which Passions have all their particular Gestures; and that those Gestures be just, distinguishing and agreeable in all Parts, Body, Head, Arms and Legs” (Weaver 1721: 166). Reluctant to render the specific action or “points” of the comic body in the way that Le Brun’s passions or Lang’s “points” do, Thomas Betterton emphasized the body in imitative motion, the “Feet, hands, and Looks of such a Person . . .” pieces of animated bodies that must nonetheless be “all of a Piece” and never “indifferent” (1741: 48).4 He described particular parts in motion such as “a rolling Eye, which is quick and inconstant in its Motion” and “argues a quick but light Wit. . .and in Women in gives strong Proof of Wantonness and Immodesty” (Betterton 1741: 41). The pieces of the body make the comic whole, but that whole is only tricked off in air as the comedian’s quick motion, which defies static recording strategies, verbal or visual. Comic bodies moved in the theatrical landscapes newly available to them after the 1717 renovations at Lincoln’s Inns Fields and subsequent improvements at other houses. The 2017 Clarence Brown Theatre’s Busy Body celebrated some of these technical innovations as realized at Lincoln’s Inn’s Fields, where the comedy became a mainstay of the repertoire after the 1730s. Companies took advantage of the improved grooved flats to speed scenes along, allowing companies to “draw off” a scene more easily and move almost instantly to the next. The musical staff provided entr’acte music as well as the accompaniment to songs embedded in the play to realize its entertainment potential. We used entr’acte music to cultivate a spirit of constant entertainment, and, as Lincoln’s Inns Fields did, to cover up the sound of the scraping flats. Our house was a former theater in the round, which we cut into a modified proscenium with a shallow apron, which meant we had to manage transitions without the stage depth of the rectangular old Lincoln’s Inn Fields, converted from the former Lisle’s Tennis Court. Our self-consciously theatrical ornamentation included footlights, the mask of tragedy and comedy, and red velvet curtains to conceal the wings and our multiple flats. Playing The Busy Body for a twenty-first-century audience meant interacting with the audience. The voms, aisles, and the moat were all playing spaces to cultivate the “public intimacy” of audience and performer that the play’s direct addresses make to the audience. The collusion with our twenty-first-century audience was constant in order to teach them the style of interaction that the play demands. The proximity of audiences to stage comedy, which typically played on the forestage in eighteenth-century houses, meant that actors had to

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be aware of and interact with the other bodies in the room. Our staging honored that tradition while solving a new problem, the muted responses likely from an audience trained into fourth-wall thinking by both theater and film. House lights never went fully down, and occasionally, an actor leaped from the stage, or entered or exited through the audience. Charles Pasternak’s Marplot launched through the audience during key entrances and exits with an acrobatic velocity that signified a self out of control, which, in reality, requires a great deal of physical prowess and control. The effectiveness of the play’s invitations for non-verbal reactions and audience interactions was one of the great discoveries of the production. Printed “asides” only accounted for about thirty percent of the asides as we experienced them, and each was a moment of bonding with the audience that shifted my understanding of acting style heavily toward the dynamic. Betterton’s note on eye rolling proved durable and emerged naturally in the performance of Charlotte Munson as Miranda. Her many wonderful side-eye reactions and shifts of attention to the audience used body isolation and strong, even exaggerated action that established character while cultivating the audience as allies to her plan. At the same time, these comedies called for a notion of character that, if not Stanislavskian, nonetheless involved inhabiting even the lightest of comic roles with dimension and presence. Colley Cibber’s reports of both Elizabeth Barry,

FIGURE 5.1: Charlotte Munson (Miranda), Charles Pasternak (Marplot), and Brian Mani (Sir Frances) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

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who entered “into the nature of each sentiment; perfectly changing herself, as it were, into the Person” (Cibber 1742: 23) and Thomas Betterton, who “kept his mind in the same temperament” (Aston 1747: 77) from dressing to the end of the play suggest a methodology closer to a Stanislavskian theory of embodiment married to action than the caricature of Restoration and eighteenthcentury mannerisms. Barry, who originated the roles of Mrs. Loveit (The Man of Mode), Hellena (The Rover), and Mrs. Marwood (The Way of the World), succeeded in both comedy and tragedy, suggesting the ways that comic exaggeration and velocity might also work within a more sustained and potentially engaging character that most theater historians associate with later (and more often, tragic) acting styles. After the first three acts had coached the audience into an interactive responsiveness, Marplot’s rejections drew sighs of sympathy, sometimes quite extended, from the audience between their bouts of laughter. Patch (Emily Kicklighter) and Whisper (Aaron Orlov), two servants who are key to the plot, blended Midlands diction choices with comic slouching, looser walks, and periodic affectation that proved readable to modern audiences without specialized historical knowledge.

HARLEQUIN DANCER While much of the history of comic embodiment in the eighteenth century must be sketched in the gaps, omissions, and interstices of the print record, the influence of continental practices, especially commedia dell’arte, is writ large. Commedia troupes toured England by the mid-sixteenth century had woven their stock characters, the zanni (servants), the old men, the lovers, and the military men, into Elizabethan comedy. Commedia’s groups of characters included low working-class tricksters, the “odd bodies” of the old men (pantaloons), soldiers (the Miles Gloriosus, Il Capitano), the doctor, and the hunchbacked servant (Pulcinella), along with the lovers (including Columbina, the witty servant), providing a set of types realized as actions. Particular Renaissance players, including Richard Burbage and the clown Will Kemp, were directly involved with commedia productions. Commedia was thus both part of the English comic tradition and its useful other, illustrating the superiority of English wit and humor over pantomime’s low physicality. Yet commedia also had some elite ties. John O’Brien argues that the resurgence of pantomime in the eighteenth century strengthened its Stuart connections through court masques under Charles I and the early commedia adaptations of the Restoration stage, including Ravenscroft’s Scaramouch a Philosopher (1677) and Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687). O’Brien sees in Britain’s adopted commedia legacy a logic of Foucauldian “governmentality,” which imagines a population and its management through entertainment (O’Brien 2004: 45). His thesis about the political significance of pantomime and commedia grounds

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FIGURE 5.2: Nicholas Bonnart, illustration from “Characters from La Comedie Italienne (Commedia dell’arte),” Paris, c. 1700. Photo by Nastasic/Getty Images.

my approach to the kinetic logics that made bodies readable through the grammar of embodied affect and emotion that subtended the stage comedies of the eighteenth-century British stage. Harlequin himself, the king of all the commedia “zanni,” has a legacy that goes back to ancient buffoons, perhaps even back to the Roman buffoon Sannio, which demanded physicality in the service of humor (Beaumont 1926:10). His famous “slap stick,” the origin of the term for later physical comedy, was both a mock sword and a magician’s wand, with a flat wooden paddle and a piece of leather attached to it to enable a cracking “slap” sound. If the comic fop owed something to harlequin, via either English fairs, the early Restoration harlequinades, or encounters with the Italian versions on the Grand Tour, then we might also consider how harlequin’s possible range, from trickster to dullwitted fool, enlivened a range of choices to physicalize moments of social striving and failure in Enlightenment comedy. Commedia presented masked characters, with the exceptions of Pedrolino, who became the French Pierrot, and Columbine, who morph into romantic leads. That history in mask may

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have encouraged mimicry in the form of facial exaggeration, which great eighteenth-century comedians like Quin and Pack were known for. Likewise, structural features of commedia “lazzi,” the short scenic components of a commedia performance, are at work in eighteenth-century comedies like The Recruiting Officer, The Beaux’ Strategem, She Stoops to Conquer, and The School for Scandal. Key exchanges like Sargeant Kite’s schtick with the devil under the table or Aimwell’s feigned fit require choreography, but they also take on a life of their own as self-contained beats. The influence of commedia was even more apparent in afterpieces, many of which were harlequinades. Commedia also shaped the mainstage comic repertoire, which favored The Rover over The Way of the World and, even in Shakespearean comedy, Merry Wives over As You Like It. Centlivre’s intensely embodied comic style shines forth in scenes that form interlocking lazzi, at times frenetic in their demands on actor’s bodies yet coordinated in a constant dance. Her own The Man’s Bewitched (1709) was turned into a harlequinade, but she also had access to the form in popular afterpieces like Behn’s The Emperor of the Moon (1687), her own adaptation of Spanish comic plots, and the flood of practitioners after the 1702 crackdown on fairground performers in Paris sent many commedia actors to London (Nellhaus 2016: 311). Both Gildon’s Life of Betterton (1710) and John Weaver’s An Essay Towards an History of Dancing (1712) provide contemporary and useful reflections on the deep connection between pantomime, commedia, and anglophone stage comedy before the great harlequin boom that John Rich launched in late 1717. Betterton argues that all acting goes back to mimes and pantomimes, hence “actor” from “action” (1741: 23). Weaver traces the history of performance through pantomimes that created “a new sort of Diversion, tho’ grafted on an old Stock” (1712: 119). Initially, he reasons, it existed to corral the depraved taste of audiences lured from Terence by rope-dancers and to play out the stories of antiquity. Weaver emphasizes two domains of comic bodily motion: feet and hands. The feet enjoy the greatest share of agility, while the gestures of the hands and body require more judgment, and they correspond to brisk and grave modes (1712: 163). Weaver’s agile, calculating, protean, and variable body gave life to the macaronic signatures of the zanni, Pantaloon, Columbine, and Harlequin that would be embodied in the more well-known characters in the anglophone stage tradition. Through this lens, the strut of Sir Fopling Flutter and its amplification in Lord Foppington; the leer of a Sir Francis Gripe; the lope of a Sargeant Kite; the swagger of a Captain Plume; or the flutter of a Margery Pinchwife speak volumes of human and national history. Like Harlequin, who was often disassembled into dancing body parts in a combination of puppetry and acrobatics, comic bodies isolate and exaggerate body parts in gestures and signature moves, but they must also reassemble the social/corporeal bodies they

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play into wholes, proving the worthiness of Pope’s vehicle to describe graceful writing in his Essay on Criticism that “those move easiest who have learn’d to dance” ([1711] 1963: 155, l.363). The genealogy of eighteenth-century commedia runs through living descendants, including our director for The Busy Body, John Sipes. Sipes trained with Etienne Decroux (1898–1991), widely considered the father of modern mime. Our conversations over the last eight years about the long history of corporeal mime, the development of character through gesture, and Alexander principles of working from the outside in for movement as they relate to the long eighteenth century have shaped my thinking about late Restoration and early eighteenth-century movement. Sipes’s teacher Decroux had trained with Jacques Copeau, legendary for early twentieth-century revivals of Molière’s and Shakespeare’s comedies. Copeau studied theater history obsessively and had his first play (at the age of sixteen) produced at the Noveau-Theatre, which dates back to Richelieu and was home to one of the first female directors, Fortunee Hamelin. Copeau was famed for breaking down the barrier between audience and player in a style that returned to the interactive spaces of the eighteenth-century playhouse. His company, the Vieux-Colombier, eventually rivaled Stanislavski’s Moscow Art Theatre. Sipes’s training also puts him in the kinetic lineage of Carlo Goldoni (1707–93), the Italian playwright who united the influence of Molière and commedia, through the twentieth-century Piccolo Teatro, where Giorgio Strehler developed his passion for commedia, beginning with his 1947 Arlecchino (Goldoni’s A Servant of Two Masters), the standard for modern productions of Goldoni. Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1832), the great Regency clown, and the silent clowns after him who adopted his greasepaint white and red, is another part of that lineage, running through Decroux, whom Marcel Marceau called “the grammarian of mime” (Gener 2011). This embodied history of comic movement shaped the choices and preparation that went into our production. After our first reading, Sipes moved our actors through exercises to prepare them for the high-velocity comic pace the play demands. The emphasis was on verticality with ease, beginning with the thought that the head is the seat of the self, with the body falling and following below, to set the context for the more explosive possibilities of comic exaggeration. The standard of graceful harmony he mapped out for all the characters, even those who fail to meet it, was built on the release of tension in that verticality. The narrow walk for men and women alike reduced the back and forth movement of a modern gait; actors practiced by walking along a line without kicking out or stepping on the heel. He outlawed posing, the forced stance that comes after a hard step, but encouraged arriving with ease at a mark in a way that signaled release, built around the open fourth position that provides the basis for bows and “curtsies” (from “courtesy”). The sense of dynamism traveled back and forth between practice and the archive; following

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Bulwer and other elocution masters, we constantly pushed back against the mannered pose with a single instruction: action. Sipes’ direction drew on the description of the “easy manner of Motion” performed in walking, from Weaver’s Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures Upon Dancing: For as we stand in fourth Position, both Feet equally bearing on the Ground, the Line of Propension (as had been before observ’d) will fall between both Feet, and form the Triangle call’d Isosceles, or Equicrural; and from this Position it is, that Nature forms, and brings about several Motions, from whence Walking takes its Rise . . . The hind-most [foot] so lengthen’d, is presently rais’d from the Ground, the three Joynts, of the Hip, Knee, and Foot, being a little bent by their proper Muscles, which supports less than a fourth Part of the Human Weight, and by the Force gain’d by the foregoing Impulse, and from a Bending, or Inclination forwards of the Head and Breast, the Hind-foot moves forwards, and is fix’d on the Ground beyond the Position or Situation of the firm Foot: by which Means a second Station is attain’d; and then the Hind-foot operating at the same Time, in like manner as before, a progressive Motion is continued. —Weaver 1721: 116, 118–19 Like Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” this triangle, beginning with feet in fourth position and proceeding along a line, forms the basis of movement that grounds both the elegant and the exaggerated actions that made comic performances tick. The centering of weight, bowing from the hips rather than curving the back, and keeping an open space between the legs while descending into the bow, defined the elegant movement of the main lovers. Extremes of extension in the overly-deep bow of Marplot, the stiffness of the older men, and the bobbing curtsey (knees out, feet together) of the maids built on the same grammar of action that made comic variation signify against the model of grace outlined by Weaver. Reading for Centlivre’s lazzi through the lens of Weaver’s lectures proved useful as an approach to embodying the rhythm and movement of the play’s comic beats. The “dumb scene,” in which Miranda refuses to speak to Sir George Airey, follows the “money lazzi,” where Sir George has bargained with her guardian/pantaloon Sir Francis Gripe for an hour’s meeting. In it, Miranda refuses to speak to Sir George for two very good reasons. First, he has paid her guardian Sir Francis Gripe a hundred guineas for the privilege of speaking with her. While she recognizes the interest he is expressing, she finds the arrangement offensive. Second, and more importantly, Sir George already knows her as the veiled “incognita,” but if she opens her mouth, he will realize that the racy, exciting lady he hopes to seduce and the heiress he hopes to marry are one and

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the same, and Miranda will lose her chance to test her future husband. The scene is an excellent example of Centlivre’s virtuosic physical comedy and her manipulation of degrees of awareness to comic effect. The original scene was long, about 3,400 words; we cut it by a third, paring the flirtation back to moments of action and the embedded stage directions, which are fully present in the text. Fluidity within the principle of verticality, via Decroux, and a Cartesian approach to head and mind as the self, with the heart as the seat of the soul, set the playful yet controlled tone of the scene. George bows, kisses her hand, advances, toying up her arm, and then crosses behind her, encircling her with his comic pleas. Like Centlivre’s Fainwell, Sir George (the part originally rejected by Wilks) is a delightfully “meta” role, the lover playing the actor playing the lover, and a chance to showcase graceful comic ease. The physical exchanges of these scenes are in the stage directions and the lines themselves. Whether it was the pantomime underneath the money exchange or the tension between the immobility of Miranda’s body and mouth and Sir George’s maneuvering around her as he courts her, movement guided and dialogue supported meaning: . . . ha? not yet, sure she is dumb—thus wou’d I touch thy beauteous hand, [Takes hold of her hand] till by degrees I reach’d thy snowy breasts . . .[Embraces her in extasie.] MIRANDA [Struggles and flings from him. Aside] Oh Heavens! I shall not be able to contain my self. SIR FRANCIS [Running up with his watch in his hand.] There’s three quarters of the hour gone, Sir George—adod, I don’t like those close conferences— SIR GEORGE More interruptions—you will have it, Sir. [Lays his hand to his sword.] SIR FRANCIS [Going back.] No, no, you shan’t have her neither. SIR GEORGE [Aside] Dumb still—sure this old dog has enjoyn’d her silence; I’ll try another way . . . SIR GEORGE

—Act 2, Scene 1: 11 Centlivre’s script is notable for its unusual number of physical details. The generous stage directions, here and in other moments, such as Charles’s attempt to visit Isabinda in her room, anchor the blocking for each key lazzi. Whether provided by playwright or printer, they underscore how significant comic action was to the play. In the case of Charles’s visit, Patch averts disaster by pretending it is a “charm for the tooth-ache” and sets up Isabinda to block the door with a faked fainting episode. The self-conscious slapstick physicality of the scene provides a bridge between its commedia heritage and later descendants, including The Carol Burnett Show, still available to modern audiences, as the footage in the documentary illustrates.

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FIGURE 5.3: Lauren Pennline (Isabinda), Emily Kicklighter (Patch), and Terry Weber (Sir Jealous) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

In other scenes, the lines themselves provide the blocking. The famous “monkey scene,” itself a sanitized revision of the china scene from Wycherley’s The Country Wife, includes scant actual stage directions, but the exchange dictates the necessary comic movement: A monkey, dear Madam, let me see it; I can tame a monkey as well as the best of them all. Oh how I love the little miniatures of man. MIRANDA Be quiet, mischief, and stand farther from the chimney—you shall not see my monkey—[Striving with him] MARPLOT For Heaven’s sake, dear Madam, let me but peep, to see if it be as pretty as my Lady Fiddle–Faddle’s. Has it got a chain? MIRANDA Not yet, but I design it one shall last its life—time: nay, you shall not see it—look, Gardee, how he teases me! MARPLOT

—4.5.41 Marplot’s mounting desire to see the monkey, which Pasternak accentuated by joyfully rounding the apron of the stage, culminates in his peeping behind the chimney board to find our 6’3” Sir George, Jeff Dickamore, stashed there by Miranda when Sir Francis unexpectedly returned from an outing. When Marplot’s shriek brings Sir Francis back, he covers Sir George’s exit by breaking

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the china and then blaming it on “Bamboo” the monkey, the creature Restoration and eighteenth-century philosophers used to think about the human qua animal. The ghosts of Rochester and the not-yet-ghostly Wycherley animate the scene, transforming the cynical sex of The Country Wife and the materialism of Rochester’s legacy into a playful and more humane physicality of velocity and substitution. The pleasures of Wycherley’s play depend upon a Brechtian alienation effect, in which comedy, as J.L. Styan observed, works because the audience is not emotionally involved with the drama. Wycherley’s city comedy plays with the bodies of the women (and men) in the scene in a libertine game aligned for the pleasure of the master gamer, Horner, who glibly controls the event. By contrast, the tricks, substitutions, and revelations in The Busy Body (as in Centlivre’s The Wonder) preserve the integrity of all the bodies in the scene, male and female, and encourage the audience’s investment in their well-being. The more materialist and libertine Wycherley stages a world of animal urges masked by a veneer of civility; Centlivre works out a plot to reconcile her embodied, conscious, feeling characters to the social world of laws, contracts, and promises (Anderson 2010). China, transmogrified from the phallic “rolwaggon” of Horner into decoys thrown by Marplot to save the young lovers, allows their vulnerable bodies to find a quick exit in the confusion of things and persons. At a visual level, the chimney stands in for the female body, and both Sir George’s entry and Marplot’s surprise map their positions as desiring lover and oblivious sexual naif. Like the screen scene in The School for Scandal, physical properties and actions on stage stand in for sex acts, whether accomplished or attempted. Such eighteenth-century comic strategies have been described as part of the fall of comedy from verbal wit into pantomime or farce, but they foreground how much social life is on the surface of human interaction, and how power relations are made visible in bodies that are either free, immobile, frantic, or absent.

EASY LOVERS AND FOPS The witty lovers of the Restoration informed the bourgeois ease and “naturalness” of the comic performances of Wilks, Barry, Oldfield, and Garrick, while the expansion of roles for lower and laboring class characters provided contrast with characters like Sargeant Kite (The Recruiting Officer), Patch (The Busy Body), and Gibby (The Wonder, a Woman Keeps a Secret), who police the boundaries of polite, bourgeois behavior long before the socio-political critiques of Beaumarchais’s “Figaro” trilogy. Against these embodied comic “originals,” the bodies of the lovers could take their more elegant shape. Three key Restoration types, the witty woman, the rake, and the fop, inform the particular Helenas, Lady Townleys, Sir Fopling Flutters, Dorimants, Mirabells and

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Millamants of wit comedies, which embodied the behaviors indexed to class and gender. But these types were, by the early eighteenth-century, generating new modes of identity on the stage and, perhaps, influencing audiences through them. Between the fop and the rake, bourgeois masculinity took its shape. The opposition of masculine types, like the extremes of Charles Hart’s Horner and Joseph Haynes’s Sparkish made a space for Kynaston’s Harcourt, with his gentler, feminine, and civilizing qualities. Later, that space makes possible Bevil (The Conscious Lovers), Fainwell (A Bold Stroke for a Wife), Aimwell and Archer (The Beaux’ Stratagem), and Sir Harry Wildair (The Constant Couple, or a Trip to the Jubilee) all examples of the species “bourgeois male.” Robert Wilks, the early eighteenth-century’s comic leading man, embodied that elusive quality necessary to the genteel male lover: ease. His performances softened the sharp edges of the rake while borrowing some of the rake’s sexual energy. He still played rakes from time to time, including revivals of The Country Wife, where he was cast as Horner against Cibber’s Sparkish. But his prime roles were as the leading men for Centlivre’s and Farquhar’s comedies, including The Busy Body, which he threw down in the first rehearsal and swore that “no body would bear to sit to hear such Stuff” (Mottley 1747: 189). Wilks soon learned that Centlivre’s (and Farquhar’s) comedies were good for him, and he for them. While Sir Harry Wildair from Farquhar’s The Constant Couple became his signature role, his performances as Sir George Airey, Don Felix, Fainwell, Captain Plume, Archer, along with a few Restoration revivals like Wilmore (The Rover), and Loveless (Love’s Last Shift and The Relapse) made him the romantic lead of the age. Wilks was said to have never taxed the prompter for his lines “and never wrong(ed) the poet by putting in any of his own” (Betterton 1741: 38). Betterton claimed he internalized the restraint Hamlet called for in his speech on acting, not only in suiting the action to the word and the word to the action, but in avoiding the ad-libbing and laughter at his own performance that would have cheapened a scene into farce. Female bodies map within a more contained range that emphasizes the dangers of female desire, with the country/city axis prominent, as in the contrasts between Margery Pinchwife and Lady Fidget (The Country Wife), or Hoyden and Berinthia (The Relapse). These contrasts mark the negative space of bourgeois femininity as that which avoids extremes yet still inhabits the comic landscape, as Alithea (The Country Wife) and Amanda (The Relapse) do. Female comedians and characters included raucous bodies, like the crossdressing Sylvia, who has the “constitution of a horse” and sneaks out in her brother’s clothes in The Recruiting Officer. But the main leading roles depended on sprightly touches to animate the upright carriage and class-aspiring bodies of actresses like Susanna Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, and Frances Abington, all of whom played in The Busy Body. Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Mrs. Abington as the Comic Muse (c. 1768) shows a relaxed body leaning on a draped pedestal,

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FIGURE 5.4: Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Abington (c. 1737–1815) as the Comic Muse. Waddeston (National Trust). Bequest of James de Rothschild, 1957. Photo courtesy of the Waddesdon Rothchild Collection.

head tilted, a leg crossed beneath a flowing dress and sandaled feet peeking out beneath. The half-smile and bright eyes engage the viewer without any of the facial distortion ascribed to the comic “grotesque” or grimace of male comedians. As Shearer West notes, the pose was a common one for male full-length portraits but not for female (1991: 124). Both her draping and the expression link Abington to the sumptuous portraits of Castlemaine and Gwyn, but here fully covered and in control. Her assertiveness marks a path of class mobility that, just a few years before, seemed unlikely. Cibber, writing of Anne Oldfield’s performance as Lady Townly in The Provok’d Husband (1728) noted that,

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had her Birth plac’d her in a higher Rank of Life, she had certainly appeared in reality what in this Play she only, excellently, acted, an agreeably gay Woman of Quality, a little too conscious of her natural Attractions. I have often seen her, in private Societies, where Women of the best Rank might have borrow’d some part of her Beahvior, without the least Dimunition of their Sense, or Dignity. —Cibber 1728: n.p. Susannah Verbruggen’s “unaffected manner” became a model for class mobility. As William Byrd III wrote to Lady Betty Cromwell in 1703, “She had more of nature in her action than any other player I ever see, & was mistress of so easy, so unaffected a manner, that nothing but the stage coud [sic] make one distinguish betwixt the reality and the representation” (quoted in Dawson 2005: 223). The audience could then indulge in the pleasures of engaging with the fantasy of her body as a model of public comportment and also as a cipher, the natural, artless body of self-authenticating class privilege. The visual appeal of our lovers drew both on Weaver’s eighteenth- and Sipes’s twenty-first-century instruction to animate the legacy of the graceful young commedia lovers, Columbine and Pedrolino, and their capacity to break from that elegant frame in quick motion without descending into low farce.

FIGURE 5.5: Jeff Dickamore (Sir George), Charlotte Munson (Miranda), and Brian Mani (Sir Francis) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

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The main plot point they must accomplish in The Busy Body is overcoming a case of mistaken identity. Miranda and Sir George have already fallen in love, but Sir George believes that Miranda is two different women, his “incognita,” always veiled in public, and the beautiful ward Miranda, whom he has never heard speak. Miranda is in a position of cognitive mastery from the beginning, which gave actress Munson an opportunity to play Miranda’s bifurcation of body and mind as a comic site of power and pleasure. Miranda needs to exploit her roles to get her estate from Sir Francis, while buying enough time to test Sir George and determine that he is sincere, worthy, and available to make their escape. Her dilemma as a comic heroine is thus the eighteenth-century woman’s dilemma: deprived of full access to a discourse of rights that would recognize her as a full person, she could be parceled out into mere chattels, corpus, a corpse. Miranda wants to reunite body and mind, but she also wants to claim her legal selfhood, tied up in the materiality of her estate, which Sir Francis is trying to keep from her through his own marriage to her. If accomplished, the marriage to her guardian would eclipse her completely, but Miranda is too lively and comically adept for that trap; Munson’s bright red dress painted her energy on the surface and accented her bold movements. The audience was in on the joke and saw Miranda’s intentions, disappointments, and disgust through embodied asides, many of which were accomplished by Munson’s slight moves to the apron and generous side-eye, followed by a direct, often exasperated direct gaze in appeal to the audience. The erotic potential of the courtship erupted in asides, and ultimately in the “dumb scene,” in which Sir George’s tender addresses almost overcome her body’s ability to sustain the split. Her desire for him, signified in slight melting movements when he looked away or when she appealed to the audience for help in “containing” herself turned the joke on a model of bloodless bourgeois femininity. The audience takes pleasure in Miranda’s pleasure and her desire to reunite her body/mind self publicly, while enjoying the erotic persistence of Sir George along with their cognitive mastery of his blindness. Miranda and George swap the relations of agent and object, briefly untethering from the power marker of gender, yet return to the heterosexual imperative that determines the ending. Against the bodies of the elite lovers, the fop’s body acquires its meaning. Thomas King fleshes out the origins of a queer male body through the remapping of the royal and male aristocratic body onto elite males who serve as the sexual, economic, and political other to the emerging bourgeois male heterosexual. Catchphrases like Cibber’s “stap me vitals” had material counterparts in the gestures such as “the tottering knee, the sudden stare, the plotting look, nay, the taking out of the handkerchief” (Theatrical Biography 1772: 1:149–50). The delicate balance of the fop, embodied by Cibber in both Sir Fopling Flutter and Lord Foppington, weighs the crimes of class mobility against the crimes of a

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FIGURE 5.6: Jeff Dickamore (Sir George) and Charlotte Munson (Miranda) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

masculinity that tries to assert itself through objects but thereby endlessly performs its own phallic failures. In this dynamic, wigs become feminizing veils and masks, and handkerchiefs signs of a too-fluid body. Later in the century, Boaden comments that Dodd, the great late-century fop, in his “pink heels” appeared to be the “soul of empty eminence. As he tottered rather than walked down the stage, in all the protuberance of endless muslin and lace in his cravats and frills, he reminded you of the jutting motion of the pigeon” (Boaden 1825: 1.55). The fop takes it on the chin for bourgeois culture and capitalism; he is a body overwhelmed by delicate things, hairs and handkerchiefs, and misled by his desire to “see himself all raund” like Lord Foppington, mastered by the audience’s gaze. He provides a physical marker of the gender problem that emerging bourgeois masculinity presented, especially as it had been mapped by Ned Kynaston, whose more delicate Harcourt provided a positive alternative to the uber-rake, Horner. The fop guaranteed bourgeois masculinity’s virility. The figure animated the dynamics of a heteronormative bourgeois masculinity that needs an other to define itself, but we resisted reading Marplot or the legacy of the fop directly as proto-homosexual types, preferring instead to savor the complexity of class and gender under construction. These comic bodies are also mating bodies in that oldest of comic lineages, but the chaos factor and star of the play, Marplot, remains outside the

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FIGURE 5.7: Charles Pasternak (Marplot) and Charlotte Munson (Miranda) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

reproductive network. Unlike most of his predecessor fops, he doesn’t show even an opportunistic interest in women and so can’t be the object of potential cuckolding. His structural function in the plot queers his body, but the results are distinct from earlier Restoration fops. His sociable longing for acceptance softens the sexual aggression of Restoration comedies. The Busy Body and its sequel, Marplot, use Marplot’s body to show the embodied errors of social class as well as the pleasures of judging and laughing in a more humane context that promises redemption. Marplot, unlike his predecessors, is located in a familial network (he and Miranda are both wards of Sir Francis Gripe). His needs are for affectionate acceptance rather than glory or mastery, and this punishment for his errors is gentle forgiveness rather than humiliation. His unfailing goodheartedness mark him as a “fop 2.0.” There is no question that The Busy Body is Marplot’s play. Charles Pasternak, our Marplot, showed up to rehearsal with a copy of Styan’s Restoration Comedy in Performance, and began to search out what about Marplot is different from Sir Fopling Flutter or Lord Foppington. Translating this variation on type to audiences that had probably never seen a Restoration comedy meant that Pasternak would deal in what Richard Schechner called “restored behavior” using kinetic signatures, asides, and affectations that both referenced our historical sources and cultivated audience sympathy and laughter on their own terms.

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FIGURE 5.8: Jeff Dickamore (Sir George), Jude Vincent (Charles), and Charles Pasternak (Marplot) in The Busy Body. Photo Brynn Yeager, 2017.

His choices to render Marplot as not climbing but rather longing for social inclusion spun the character in the direction of a queer asexuality. From his first entrance, he was placed closer to the audience, coming in from the aisles or jumping off the stage to use his harlequin sprightliness as a means to comic intimacy. The fop’s relation to objects, which seem to master him, became an excessive number of hand props, including the snuff box, a spy glass, an ear trumpet, and his ever-present cane. The Hobbsean principle of laughter as sudden glory found a softer, gentler use as audiences laughed at Marplot’s physicalized longing for acceptance, signaled when he moved too swiftly toward another character, snuck into a scene, or misunderstood plans, the foible which gave him his name. We agreed that while Thomas King’s arguments about the “aristocratization of homosexuality” (2008: 64) were instructive, they should not be restrictive or reproduce twenty-first-century stereotypes. Marplot’s sexual ambiguity is part of his fop heritage and the class anxieties expressed through the fop, but within the plot, it depends on his being both amorously objectless and endlessly attached to his friends. The fan adoration archived in generations of engravings with King, Garrick, and Woodward as Marplot suggests the popularity with which Marplot repurposes elements of the fop in an amiable sociability through a relation to the audience. Marplot is thus not “not queer” but also not reducible to a sexed body of gendered affects.

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The meta-theatrical deception of the guardians and cultivation of audience empathy through asides embody the pleasures of humane judgment and laughter in Centlivre’s humane yet partisanly Whig comedy. It promises, however unrealistically, freedom and agency to every body willing to take the stage. Centlivre hands us this philosophy in scenes that interlock like a series of comic lazzi, demanding a quick pace and a constant dance of knowing cooperation between the actors. Uniting the dynamism for which the play calls with the grace and verticality demanded by costumes and our own sense of the play was a short course in the kinetic ballet buried in eighteenth-century comedies. After all, the “money shot” of our The Busy Body involved a very tall man crawling behind a chimney board, then springing from it, launching Marplot’s frenzy of china breaking. Congreve’s brilliant The Way of the World, with its sophisticated verbal wit, complex plot, but limited range of physical motion was eclipsed by Centlivre’s and Farquhar’s more physical comedies, a fact Byron would later lament. While not all comedies included such wild bodies in motion, the kinetic potential of a play like The Busy Body drove its commercial success and can help us understand the gestures, affects, and expressions that animated Enlightenment comedies. The archive of eighteenth-century comic movement, that most delicate yet persistent form of memory, has a traceable genealogy and a notation system buried in the scripts themselves that can lead us close, if not to, a producible performance history.

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CHAPTER SIX

Politics and Power APARNA GOLLAPUDI

On November 22, 2018, someone changed the photo of President Trump on Wikipedia to that of a penis. In 2016, cartoonist Steve Bell showed Prime Minister David Cameron naked on roller skates lighting a firecracker stuck in his anus to critique the way he was negotiating Brexit. These modern instances of obscene political humiliation are used as a preamble for considering the 1740 print (Figure 6.1) that literalizes young men having to “kiss Walpole’s arse” for getting ahead because historical distance can change the questions we might ask of such modes of humor. It is easy to enjoy the lewd audaciousness of this “cheeky” eighteenth-century print because we are not burdened by the affective intensity of immediate political strife. We don’t question the necessity of such degrading humiliation of Walpole, see it as merely a partisan attack, or turn our censorious eye on the creator of the print as contributing to a general devolution of political discourse. We are not motivated to condemn the print’s ploy of focusing on a giant butt and conspicuously absent testicles as profit-mongering cheap sensationalism that made no meaningful political intervention and probably worsened the already uncivil public climate. But these are precisely the kind of responses present-day viewers with varied partisan views and imbricated in ongoing political debates could have toward the obscene ridicule of modern political leaders. And so, we must allow for the anti-Walpole print above to have evoked equally ambivalent responses and valid concerns about the general impact of such ridicule, of it being a party squib. The juxtaposition between past and present political humor thus strains the definition of both comedy and politics; it problematizes the relationship between comic and political discourse, raising questions about the strategies, purposes, and limits of political comedy. 143

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FIGURE 6.1: Idol Worship or the way to preferment. Satire on Robert Walpole, c. 1740. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

A similar slipperiness marks the semantics, nature, and function of “comedy” and “politics” in the various species of “political comedy” in the long eighteenth century. So, to clarify the terms of engagement in this chapter: “comedy” here is a wide-ranging term implying multifarious modes of comic discourse as manifested in drama, poetry, and graphic prints. It encompasses generic considerations—for example, dramatic works labeled comedies or farces in the

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century—artistic approach to the subject represented—satiric, parodic, ridicule, burlesque, caricature, etc.—as well as affect aimed at—for instance, laughter, contempt for ridiculed figures, or approving smiles at a desirable resolution. It also includes the “comic realm in which raillery, mocking, and spoofing of the ‘official,’ continues as a routine accompaniment to national life” (Corner et al. 2013: 32). “Politics,” on the other hand, is more narrowly defined as having to do with structures of state and the people who govern, which in the eighteenth century would include the monarchy, court, Parliament, ministers, and political parties. However, insofar as governance includes a dialectic between these rulers and their subjects—the public, the people, citizens, or the “masses”—and the two sides are continuously engaged in communicative events both legal and cultural, political discourse is inextricably intertwined with more general issues of power and representation. Indeed, as the humiliating treatment of political leaders in the eighteenthcentury satiric print “Idol Worship” above and in the case of the Wikipedia image switch, suggest, the comic is often in itself a deployment of power. Certainly, this was an important strain in eighteenth-century ideas about humor. Thomas Hobbes says, for instance, people laugh because of a sense of “Sudden Glory . . . caused either by some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves” (Hobbes [1651] 2010: 37). The notion that laughter is based on a perceived superiority of self over others fits neatly into the Hobbesian construction of humans as driven by selfish appetite. But even when the source of laughter is not momentary pleasure from perception of others’ inferiority as compared to our own puissance, it might be an exercise of power. As Shaftesbury says in “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” “natural free spirits . . . imprisoned and controlled, will find out other ways of motion to relieve themselves in their constraint and, whether it be in burlesque, mimicry, or buffoonery, they will be glad at any rate to vent themselves, and be revenged on their constrainers” (Shaftesbury [1711] 1999: 34). The conception of humor as symptomatic of shaking off control and restraint for the release of “free spirits” conveys the empowering experience that laughter entails. Thus, if the comic impulse is an expression of power or at least of perceived power over the object evoking laughter—like laughing at Walpole and his big buttocks in the caricature above—then it has the potential for challenging established hierarchies. However, comedy as the exercise of power by other means can be a two-edged sword, used for reinforcing power differentials already in place: as Joel Weinsheimer states, very often, “the truly effective means of repression is not persecution but ridicule” (1995:179). This essay considers the deployment of comic discourse in moments of political disquiet in Britain—the Exclusion Crisis, the Jacobite rebellion in 1715, opposition to the Robinocracy—with a glance towards comparative trajectories

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in France, in order to suggest broad patterns of interaction between the power of comedy and of politics in the period.

THE EXCLUSION CRISIS Even though six plays were suppressed in the first two decades after Restoration, “controlling the content of plays was neither a high, nor a consistent priority for the government,” and plays most likely to be banned were those that “ridiculed religion, real individuals and the government,” especially “Christian religion, important individuals and the party in power” (Kinservik 2001: 38, 41). More important than the top-down mechanism of censorship and regulation in England though, the period’s royalist politics influenced comedy ideologically. The earliest original comedies in the period, such as The Rump (John Tatham, 1660), The Cutter of Colman Street (Abraham Cowley, 1661), The Committee (Robert Howard, 1662), and The Old Troop (John Lacy, 1664) satirize the Puritans and Parliamentarians responsible for replacing the monarchy with the Commonwealth, often showing virile Cavalier rakes tricking them out of estates gained from sequestration along with their women. Some comedies such as James Howard’s The English Monsieur and Thomas Shadwell’s The Humorist (1670) depart from such comedic plotting of sex, money, and class; but such plays are few and far between (Owen 2001: 129). Typically, the attitude toward and aptitude for sex connotes political identities in Restoration comedy: the Stuart monarchy is associated with virility and sexual dominance, while their political opponents are consigned to marital failure and socio-sexual impotence. These sexual politics were artificial insofar as monarchists “shared with the Parliamentarians—and everyone else—an assumption that lewdness and debauchery were bad”; but because the new Stuart regime “associated itself in its own propaganda with fruitfulness, bounty, and sensual pleasure” (Weil 1993: 137), such comedies were part of the “official discourse” (Canfield 1997: 1). Some of the most popular comedies of the period heroize sexual conquests. George Etherege’s The Comical Revenge (1664), Thomas Betterton’s The Amorous Widow (1671), Edward Ravenscroft’s The Careless Lovers (1673), John Crowne’s Country Wit (1675), William Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1676), and George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1677), for example, are manifestations of such royalist politics without engaging directly with political events. However, the Exclusion Crisis in the early 1680s strained these sutures between royalism and sexual behavior as it split the court and the country in two: Whigs, who lobbied for the Catholic James’s exclusion from the line of succession, and the Tories who argued for the sanctity of established hereditary succession despite his conversion. The emergence of these two factions would become the basis for party strife lasting through the century and would deeply

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mark both politics and comedy in the period. England’s case is different than other continental countries without party systems such as absolutist France or the German empire where traveling companies were the norm till late in the eighteenth-century which prevented ideologically coherent political polemic. In England, the bawdry of early Restoration comedies shifted to what Canfield has called the “cit-cuckolding” comedies of the Exclusion Crisis and Popish Plot era (1996). These are satires aimed at city tradesmen or merchants, “cit” being short for “citizen.” In comedies such as Otway’s The Soldier’s Fortune (1680), Ravenscroft’s The London Cuckolds (1681), Behn’s The Round-Heads (1681), D’Urfey’s The Royalist (1682), and Crowne’s City Politiques (1683), the “perfect, potent bodies of Cavalier rakes dominate over the imperfect, impotent bodies of Cits” by seducing their wives, thus diffusing the “explicit threats to . . . Stuart hegemony in the form of a middle class that needs to be put in its place” (Canfield 1997: 2, 31). Such Exclusion Crisis comedies by supporters of the State thus use laughter as a disciplinary mechanism against political threats during a crisis of power. In contrast to the spate of Tory cuckolding comedies as a means of political warfare in the theater, Whig comedies are fewer and tend to articulate their political bias through anti-Catholic satire rather than tropes of sexual conquest. For instance, The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, an anonymous farce that features the Pope making deals with the devil and dependable English workmen saving coronation day for a grateful monarch, was popular at fairs but not particularly sexual. Similarly, The Woman Captain (1681) and The Lancashire Witches (1681)—Thomas Shadwell’s Whig salvo during the Exclusion Crisis conflict—either side-step sexual desire altogether or use it in ways that only confuse his political polemic (Marsden 1995). The problem with Whigs using sexualized comic plotting as a vehicle for their politics was that it had already been appropriated as a vehicle for the Stuart regime’s patrilinear monarchism—precisely what they opposed in the Exclusion Crisis. Also “anti-patriarchal. . . . Whig country gentry values of . . . moderation, patriotism, Protestantism” clashed with the desire to “demonstrate that Whig anti-Papists are not whey-faced Puritans (contrary to Tory assertions), but can be part of the aristocracy of taste which appreciated The Country Wife” (Owen 2000: 162). These internal contradictions between established comic idiom and political ideology can be seen in a Whig comedy like Rome’s Follies: or, the Amorous Fryars, performed privately in 1681 that “both satirizes and revels in the friars’ libertine ingenuity” and Sedley’s Bellamira, plotted as a Terentian sex comedy about a courtesan and her keeper but also “mock[ing] rakish behavior . . . [and] question[ing] the entire philosophy behind it” (Owen 2000: 162, McGinnis 2013: 27). Whiggish dramatists had little freedom to experiment with new, more suitable politicized stage tropes during the Crisis anyway. Killigrew, for instance, excised large portions of Lancashire Witches

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before he allowed it on stage and eventually Shadwell’s political bias effectively shut him out of the court patented theaters. Shadwell responded by publishing his censored play with the banned speeches italicized to highlight them. This act of defiance suggests that anti-monarchical satire in the Restoration period, especially during the Exclusion Crisis, was more likely to be seen in print rather than on stage.1 Poetry lampooning all sorts of political personages was popular, appearing in collections called Poems of Affairs of State. The bawdiest of these were most likely by writers of the “in-group” at court and circulated in manuscript before being published without permission in these anthologies (Hume 2005). But, such anti-royalist poetry could be curated and published to further the Whig cause during the Exclusion Crisis; for instance, Rochester’s smutty verse, such as “Satyr on Charles II” (also known as “The Scepter Lampoon”), “A Ramble in St. James’ Park,” and “Signior Dildo,” while not written directly in response to the Exclusion Crisis, could be used as ammunition against the Stuarts because his “public stance was Whiggish” (Robertson and Libhart 2012: 507). Rochester’s mock praise of Charles II in the “Scepter Lampoon,” as a man with the “proudest, peremptoriest prick alive” whose “scepter and prick are of a length,” satirizes his political absolutism while also showing his personal vulnerability to sexual manipulation for “she may sway the one who plays with th’ other”—both apropos themes for the Whiggish objections to him during the crisis (Rochester [1674] 1968: 60–1). Similarly, making “Signior Dildo” the Pope’s nephew who accompanies Mary of Modena to England suits Whigs’ anti-Catholicism. John Oldham’s Sardanapalus, composed between 1676 and 1681, also uses an explicitly libertine plot wherein the eponymous Assyrian king’s sexual achievements in a coital contest are praised with mock-celebrations of his “Pintle’s high Commands” and his “Tarse’s vast Dominion” as far as “Nature spreads her Thighs,” reworking the established comic theme of Stuarts’ phallic and political absolutism (Oldham 1987: 345). Thus, while the Tories had clearly mastered sexualized plotting in stage comedies to demean and emasculate Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis, an element of “libertine Whiggism” using obscenity as a tool for political satire can be traced in print (Robertson and Libhart 2012: 519). Shut out from the “official” comic discourse as manifested in stage comedies, but not immune to the epistemic linkages between sex and politics in the period, opposition to the court seems to have manifested in anonymous attacks using obscenity to ridicule individuals associated with the king and his brother. A lampoon against the Duchess of Cleveland, one of Charles II’s mistress, for instance, uses the Tory technique of sexual humiliation in their cit-comedies when she prefers to be “fuckt by Porters, and Car-men” rather than James’s allies in the crisis, “C[hurchill], and G[erman].”2 “An Essay on Scandal” (1681), on the other hand, uses obscenity to satirize not only his mistresses but Charles himself. Referencing Parliament’s refusal of funds to Charles, it asks, “Why art thou poor, O King?”

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and answers “Embezzling cunt/ That wide-mouthed, greedy monster, that has done’t” (Wilson 1976: 63). Obscenity can be, as James Robson notes in his study of Aristophanes, “highly emotive” and used to “provoke, amuse, and even disgust [the] audience” (Robson 2006: 120). While what is considered obscene is always culturally and historically coded, it is most often based on names of sexual organs, sexual acts, and scatology (Robson 2006: 115). Invoking these socially indecorous words and actions usually censored in “civilized” or “polite” society for comic purposes evokes transgressive laughter and insofar as obscenity, by its very nature, “subvert[s] the status quo by its complete and absolute denial of reverence for it” the use of it is apropos for challenging political hegemonies that seem to be colluding to impose on the nation James II as a monarch (Robson 2006: 116). However, using this rhetoric also means that instead of taking the high road while critiquing Stuarts’ sexual and financial self-indulgence, as later Whigs would do, these obscene lampoons and libels lower the discourse to the level of the debauchery being attacked. As the burlesque play Sodom (variously titled Sodom and Gomorrah and The Farce of Sodom or the Quintessence of Debauchery) suggests, the discourse may be lowered so much that it changes the nature of laughter possibly provoked. A play too sexually graphic to ever be performed, Sodom was possibly composed in the mid-1670s and circulated widely in manuscript before it was published in 1684, 1689–90, and in 1707 when it was prosecuted for lewdness (Trumbach 1993:193). Though often attributed to Rochester, the authorship of this “protoWhig” and “anti-Court” farce is disputed (Love 1999: 497; 1993: 325). Most recently, Nicholas Nace has, with meticulous support, suggested that Thomas Jordan, a London city poet, might be its author, or at least represent “a cultural formation of city ideology during . . . the late 1670s and early 1680s” responsible for creating the play. Sodom can thus, says Nace, be seen as a “plebeian entertainment associated with city pageantry and the ballad tradition of Smithfield, not as a product of and for the court” (2017: 296). Nace’s scholarship is important to the politics of Sodom, making it an outside burlesque attack on royal power and privilege by “cits” who, around the time it was written, were routinely being cuckolded and derided in “official” comedies on the stage. The farce, which concretizes “the graphic crudeness of much Restoration satire” exemplifies what might be the edges of obscenity’s humorous potential as political discourse (Elias 1978: 424). Sodom’s brand of comedy begins with its bizarrely named characters—King Bolloxinian, his queen, Cuntigratia, their children Prince Pricket and Princess Swivia, and courtiers such as Fuckadilla, Clitoris, Buggaranthos, and Flux the Physician. It is likely that most readers who do not immediately turn away offended upon first encountering these characters in the Dramatis Personae, would be hard pressed to prevent a shocked bark of laughter or a nervous titter from escaping them. The affective impact of

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anointing as royalty words, body parts, and actions usually shamefully hidden from view is like that of a Freudian taboo which unites repressed pleasure associated with the body along with fear at the abjected. The play opens with another breaking of a taboo: the king confesses that “I no longer Cunts admire,” so he lifts the ban against buggery (von Romer 1904: 11). Richard Elias has convincingly argued that this royal proclamation is a topical political attack, closely mimicking Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence that allowed religious liberty to nonconformists and Roman Catholics (1978). The consequence of lifting the ban far exceeds political or ideological analogy, however; what follows is a Rabelaisian explosion of what R.E. Pritchard calls “polymorphous-perverse sexual energy” (2012: 64). Courtiers present their posteriors to the “Royal Tarse,” frustrated women turn to dildoes and dogs, and incest occupies the royal offspring; the play dissolves into sperm, female cum, menstrual blood, and flux ending with a plague of biblical proportions with venereal disease, impotence, syphilitic madness, and ulcerated wombs—all in a mock-heroic manner. The play’s insistent use of vulgarity can be seen as a carnivalesque inversion of political hegemony and its self-affirming cultural narratives: a topsy-turvy fabliau of sorts, in which the oft-cuckolded cits of comedy write to humiliate court rakes and their fine ladies. Indeed, Harold Love feels that “the play’s presentation of sex is comic not erotic” (1993: 332). But, as Harold Weber confesses in his essay on Sodom, there is something about the play’s obscenity which evokes a primal dis-ease that transcends any ideological or rational justification for its use of obscenity. A certain stink seems to cling to the play; a colleague felt “sickened” by the material, for instance, notes Weber (1995: 68). Any value as political satire in such a work is closely linked to its complex affect: the overlap of laughter and disgust. Disgust ranks high on “the scale of unpleasurable affects” but has long been linked with laughter in “gross out humor” (Menninghaus 2003: 1). “[E]xcrement, bad smells, repulsive sex,” have always been “the stuff of jokes” where the inclination to “laughing is like vomiting” (McGinn 2011: 212). In the long eighteenth century, disgust as a sensation took on a “life of its own” as “an unconditional given of human nature, as an elemental reaction type of very considerable importance for the physical, intellectual, moral, and social spheres of life” (Menninghaus 2003: 2). An important focus for this new cultural interest in disgust was the grotesque body rife with “disgusting zones . . . through which the world enters the body or emerges from it” (Menninghaus 2003: 57, quoting Bakhtin). It is this body that is at the center of Sodom, and the farce is as much about disgust as sex or obscenity. For instance, here is Bolloxinion’s justification for renouncing vaginal sex for sodomy: So ’tis with cunt’s repeated dull delights Sometimes yo[u]’ve flowers for sauce, and sometimes white[s],

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Or crablice which like butter’d shrimps appear, And may be serv’d for garnish all the year. —von Romer 1904: 38 The description of the lice-infested vagina leaking menstrual blood (“flowers”) and other discharge produces the “crisis of self-preservation in the face of an unassimilable otherness” that manifests as disgust (Menninghaus 2003: 1). That which should be “outside” is “inside”; that which is “unassailably other” such as expelled fluids or vermin is here conflated with that which is visceral through the food imagery. Sodom is saturated with such triggers for disgust. Although most of these images are, as Weber has noted, deeply misogynistic, Sodom’s affective net implicates everyone on stage; the scatological stinks up the sexual in Bolloxinion’s claim that “Arse of all kinds I follow by the scent” or in Prince Prickett being syringed—i.e., given an enema—on stage or in descriptions of diseased penises (Love 1999: 310, 313). Indeed, more than even specific passages, the cumulative effect of the relentlessly orgiastic is nauseating: inasmuch as disgust is also a function of excess or satiety, “like a sweet that is all too sweet” as Menninghaus says, the farce tips over the line pretty quickly (2003: 7). Yet, Sodom is also a mode of comic discourse which critiques Charles’s “authoritarianism . . . and arbitrary political power,” burlesquing his court’s “self-congratulatory and unashamed vulgarity” with gross obscenities packaged in heroic couplets (Chernaik 1995: 60; Weber 1995: 84). However, the complex affect produced in readers by Sodom’s disgusting comedy overshoots specific party or political ideology. The simultaneity of disgust and humor in its “fluid mechanics,” the momentary delight in what should only make us cringe and shudder destabilizes the very binarism that makes for effective oppositional political comedy (Shank 2014: 31). In the grimace of revolted laughter, the horror is embraced; instead of “a simple rejection” it symptomizes “a rejection of rejection, an overcoming of disgust and its integration into an economy of pleasure” (Menninghaus 2003: 10). Unlike the anti-cit sexual action of Restoration comedy which provokes mirth by conferring superiority, or the Hobbesian “sudden glory,” Sodom implicates the reader in its “Dionysian . . . or polymorphous-perverse libido” (Menninghaus 2003: 10). Any laughter is at the cost of moral judgment and psychological abjection. Sodom’s refusal to respect difference in its grotesque intermingling of bodies and conflation of repulsive and pleasurable affect means it also transcends specific political satire altogether connoting a nihilistic dissolution of all order. Whether Tory sex comedy or Whig scurrilous satire, though, women’s bodies do not fare well in such battles using mockery and humiliation. Insofar as obscenity is “tantamount to exposing what should be hidden,” the higher standards of sexual modesty imposed upon women in patriarchies across history makes much obscene humor innately misogynist as well (Henderson 1991: 2).

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Certainly in these late seventeenth-century works where obscene humor is politically valanced, the exhibition of female genitalia—and, more significantly, genitalia of particular named women in the court—is dangerously misogynistic in its specificity. The most important players in the succession conflict were men of course, and the persistent use of women’s bodies to ridicule opponents emblematizes the homosociality of such obscene political humor. Behn’s Tory cuckolding comedies might eke out some personal agency for women but her royalist politics also complicate her proto-feminism. Certainly, the obscene humor of verse satire exploits wives, daughters, and mistresses of powerful men in the court, describing their sexual transgressions, real and imagined, with humiliatingly voyeuristic vulgarity, thus violently inserting women’s bodies in the political conflict in which they had no formal voice.

THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION A different sort of appropriation of women’s bodies in political discourse can be seen in parodic prints of Queen Mary of Modena when, in 1688, a son was born to her and they baptized the royal heir as a Catholic. The prints of Mary of Modena below show how Whigs’ perpetuated a seventeenth-century version of the “birther conspiracy” by casting doubt upon the heir’s legitimacy through the use of parody. The first (Figure 6.2) is an “official” print commemorating and celebrating the birth of the king’s son, James Francis Edward, in June 1688. The second (Figure 6.3) parodies the celebratory print to wrest the political narrative away from royal hands. Insofar as parody is repetition with subversive differences that undercut the authority and value of the original text, the print’s comic strategy echoes its interrogation of real versus fake prince. For it was rumored that the baby was not really James’s, and Edward Petre, Mary’s Jesuit confessor, had smuggled in a miller’s son, passing him off as the new royal heir. Here, a dark and foreign-looking Petre (though he was English) caresses the queen’s bosom and she wantonly seems to respond; a small white windmill on the baby’s blanket suggest his true parentage. Such seditious parodies inflamed political opposition to James, catalyzing his frightened flight to the continent with his family, and paving the way for William III and Mary to take the throne. Though the revolution was peaceful, the presence of the exiled Stuarts meant the Jacobite threat to the throne was a perpetually simmering undercurrent in politics—hardening the Whig–Tory divide, boiling over in 1715 when James II’s son, the Old Pretender, attacked England with the help of powerful Tory lords, and finally put down decisively with extreme brutality at Culloden in 1746. William began legitimizing his new unorthodoxly acquired regime immediately by vigorously espousing Protestantism and sober morality as a counterpoint to the deposed monarch’s Catholicism and sexual-moral

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FIGURE 6.2: An “official” print commemorating and celebrating the birth of the king’s son, James Francis Edward, in June 1688. Bernard Lens II, Mary of Modena with the Prince of Wales (1688). ©Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

corruption. The Whigs, prime supporters of the revolution, appropriated the moral platform as a political talking point, painting Tories as sharing the Stuarts’ easy sexual morality. William’s pardon of the Jacobite priest Jeremy Collier, well-known for his moralizing in A Short View of the Profanness and Immorality of the English Stage, set the tone for politics as well as comedy: the old Stuart sexual glamor was recast as debauchery and predation. After the Glorious Revolution vice was, as Dudley Bahlman pithily puts it, “Stuart vice, Jacobite vice, Popish vice, French vice” (1957: 8).

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FIGURE 6.3: Satirical print of Mary of Modena with infant James Stuart and Father Petre. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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After 1688, the Whig ascendancy thus marked not only politics but theaters. Playwrights such as John Crowne, who derided Whigs during the Exclusion Crisis in City Politiques (1683) now satirized Jacobites in The English Friar (1689). Shadwell, shut out of the theater for his Whiggism now returned triumphantly with The Squire of Alsatia. Others such as the Jacobite Dryden adapted old Molière and Plautus classics as in Amphitryon or The Two Socias (1690), amusing audiences with two identical husbands and servants but also capturing the politically puzzling universe recently come into being where there were two kings of England and knowing the real from the fake one seemed impossible. Indeed as I argue below, this trope of “confusion through duplication” becomes central to political and comic discourse of the period with the “Pretender” taking on double valence as rightful claim and duplicity. While aristocratic rakes and comic cit-cuckolding did not disappear from the stage, new comedies featured characters and plots more amenable to a progovernment Whiggish middling-class demographic. Comedies such as Thomas Shadwell’s The Squire of Alsatia (1688), John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse (1698), Mary Pix’s The Beau Defeated (1700), and George Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707) undercut primogeniture, the basis of James II’s monarchical claim, in valorizing highly meritorious younger brothers disadvantaged by inheritance laws. Others such as Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722) critique aristocratic values such as pedigree and dueling to defend masculine honor. William’s political investment in the rhetoric of national moral reclamation corresponded to new comic plot formulas: reform comedy used morality as an ideological tool, showing flawed protagonists being redeemed of Stuartassociated vices like philandering, extravagance, idle pleasures, French fashions, etc. Especially, wife-reform plots emerged as a favorite plot for Whig ideologies of political power in comedies like Cibber’s The Lady’s Last Stake (1707) and The Provoked Husband (1728), Steele’s The Tender Husband (1705), Taverner’s The Artful Husband (1718), and Charles Johnson’s The Masquerade (1719). Using a wife’s marital duty as a model for the political subject suited post-1688 governments: a woman was free to choose a husband, but once that choice was made a wife must voluntarily submit to a benevolent spouse just as good subjects must submit to the new monarch. As Rachel Weil notes, “whigs before 1688 certainly did not celebrate the authority of husbands in the same way they did afterwards” (1999: 111). French drame bourgeois or comédie larmoyante of the same period, which shared some of the socio-moral attitudes with Whiggish English comedy, had a rather different positionality vis-à-vis politics. Plays such as Destouches’ Le Médisant(1715), Le Philosophe Marié (1727), Le Glorieux (1732), Pierre Marivaux’s Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (1730) and Les Fausses Confidences (1737), Voltaire’s Nanine (1749) which was inspired by Richardson’s Pamela, and Denis Diderot’s Le Fils naturel (1757) and Le Père de famille (1758) deal with

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middling-class issues such as finding a virtuous and sensible spouse, family relations, economic decisions, social ambition, and the like. However, though often quite sentimental like the Whiggish comedy across the channel, their political force lies in prioritizing concerns of non-aristocrats in an absolutist monarchy privileging the innate superiority of the nobility. Their subversive potential lies in “substituting equality of feeling for equality of rank” (Brereton 1977: 216).

THE ’15 In England, the spread of party politics meant common people’s engagement with national politics was often routed through their allegiance to a particular faction. Polarization of the polity along party lines encourages “politically homogeneous enclaves” thriving on the “demonization, hostility, prejudice and violence” towards “ideological outgroups,” and insofar as satiric ridicule, mockery, and laughter are a mode of discursive violence, the emergence of Tories and Whigs in the period powerfully shapes the course of humor in the century (Valdesolo and Graham 2016: 1). This is nowhere clearer than in the political rivalry between Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the first Jacobite rebellion in 1715. The ’15 was a home-grown uprising of English and Scottish Jacobites against George I on behalf of the Old Pretender, led by powerful Tories like the Earl of Mar, the Duke of Ormond, and the Earl of Oxford (Szechi 2006: 2). And though not all Tories were Jacobites, they were guilty by association and so, on the defensive. In contrast the Whigs were jingoistically fired up. Comedy of the period was implicated in this divide because the two playhouses, not unlike present-day cable channels, were seen as serving “rival party interests” often involved in dramatic “tit for tat” (Loftis 1980: 85). Drury Lane was seen as the Whig house and Lincoln’s Inn Field sympathetic to Tories. Unsurprisingly, the two sharpest anti-Jacobite comedies from the period premiered at Drury Lane: Charles Johnson’s farce The Cobler of Preston (1716) borrowed Shakespeare’s drunken cobbler from The Taming of the Shrew, topically placing him in Preston, a Jacobite stronghold that saw considerable fighting during the rebellion, while Colley Cibber’s The Non-Juror (1717) has a Jacobite squire, Sir John Woodvil, manipulated by a devilish non-juring clergyman, Dr. Wolf. Both comedies created a maelstrom of public controversy and print wars: Whigs praised the politics and aesthetics of the plays while Tory and Jacobite publications damned both (Miles 1919). George I came to see The Non-Juror at Drury Lane, laughing at those who had recently threatened his throne, and Cibber was rewarded for his political loyalty a few years later when he was named Poet Laureate. Comedy and politics colluded to suppress dissent at this time of national crisis. The fate of Johnson’s farce was more intriguing, though the politically disciplinary impulse of its humor was similar. The comedy demonstrates both

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FIGURE 6.4: The frontispiece to The Cobler of Preston. Project Gutenberg.

general generic techniques for proscribing political opposition as well as its particular manifestation in the Jacobite context. Sly, the Jacobite cobbler, is the “greatest Politician” and the “great Sot” perpetually “confounded with the Fumes of Ale and Faction” (The Cobler of Preston 1716: 3), echoing popular associations of Jacobites with “tavern culture . . . [as] a conscious affront to the supposedly ‘puritan’ sobriety” of the Williamite supporters (Monod 1989: 98). Also, seditious toasts to the Stuarts or the “king over the water” were seminal to the “everyday practice of treason” in Jacobite culture: predictably, The Cobler of Preston’s frontispiece (Figure 6.4) shows Sly with ale under one arm shouting “Mmackintosh,” indicating that he is toasting Mackintosh of Borlum, an important Scottish army leader at the Battle of Preston (Monod 1989: 125). The Latin tag on the frontispiece means, “Shoemaker Not Beyond the Shoe.” Two important political strategies often used in comedy are evident in the frontispiece. Sly’s drunken stuttering reduces his Jacobitism to mere phôné rather than logos—incoherent comic utterance, not the political discourse implicit in Jacobite toasts. And the anti-democratic proverb “discount[s]

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populism as a viable political mode . . . merely . . . symptomatizing ignorance and stupidity” (King 2012: 270), a sentiment echoed often in eighteenthcentury caricatures of politics-obsessed common folk.3 Cibber’s The Non-Juror too, for instance, refuses to see expressions of popular Jacobitism by lower classes—toasts to “King James,” wearing white roses or oak leafs to symbolize Stuart allegiance, donning garlands of turnips and horns to mock King George’s German heritage and adulterous queen—as real commitment to a political cause, constructing them instead as acts by riffraff being paid to create trouble. Furthermore, after 1688, Jacobitism had existed as a political “underworld,” a “widespread clandestine network” of “religious and social solidarities” that cut across classes; amongst those arrested for traitorous activities were ex-army officers, Irish immigrants, tailors, shoemakers, coachmen, and dockyard laborers (Monod 1989: 96, 106). Mocking Sly is thus as much about putting lower classes in their place as about discrediting rebellious Jacobites. Accordingly, the patriotic local squire and his friend teach him a lesson, carrying him home in a drunk stupor and dressing him as a Spanish lord. On awakening, Sly is befuddled by the “flattering Dream” but happy to lord it over servants, a trick neatly showcasing his uppityness (The Cobler of Preston 1716: 6). His cobbler’s raiment is put on a butler, creating a confusion of identities for everyone around, especially Sly’s wife, Joan, who is no less stumped by the proliferating husbands than Alcmena in Dryden’s Amphitryon. The topos of real vs. fake spouses—or kings—which resonates persistently in this period is sounded in Sly’s query to his “servants”: “Are you sure . . . I am your natural Lord and Master? I am devilishly afraid I am but a Pretender” (1716: 36) The line was very politically incendiary in the theater; Whigs in the audience applauded while Tories booed (Genest 1832: 2.575–6; Doran 1877: 232). Sly is, of course, browbeaten into submission as the play ends, pledging to henceforth mix “Loyalty with my Liquor” and instead of his usual “Traytor’s Healths” he ends with “Live King George!” (The Cobler of Preston 1716: 47) Such “noisily Whig . . . [and] pugnacious insistence on its own loyalty” at Drury Lane put Lincoln’s Inn Field, seen as the Tory house, on the defensive, unable to retaliate openly in fear of seeming seditious (Loftis 1963: 64). So it put forward a mix of clever comic strategies—some conciliatory and some slyly subversive—against its political and commercial competitor. The conciliatory tone of new comedies appearing in Lincoln’s Inn Field in the period manifests as a refusal to engage in partisan politics and take the high road in comedy instead. Prologues frequently announce that unlike the “other house” their plays remain true to the great tradition of true English satire: John Leigh dedicates his comedy Kensington Gardens or The Pretenders (1720) to the pro-Jacobite Tory minister Lord Brooke,4 but says in the prologue “Satire, the Writers of the present Age / Have long since banish’d from the British Stage,” and, “Shunning the Paths their Forefathers trod,” weigh “Wit . . . in

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Party-Scales.” He, on the other hand, promises “those Antient Schemes [to] advance” lashing “modish Crimes” from “proud Monarch” to “the Peasant” (1720: vi–vii). As the defeat of the rebels gradually became a reality, comedies in Lincoln’s Inn Field became more pacifist in tone. The rebellion, badly organized, “disintegrates piecemeal” with occasional sporadic shows of resistance continuing till about 1719 (Szechi 2006: 2); plays from the early 1720s, such as Sturmy’s The Compromise and Griffin’s Whig and Tory overtly make political reconciliation and pacifism a part of their plot as young lovers are thwarted in their union by the political differences of their fathers, who belong to different parties. Griffin’s “happy ending” thus proclaims, “Let us bury in Oblivion those Feuds and Party threats, so destructive to our Peace and mutually study each other’s interest” (1720: 86). In addition to embracing party neutrality as a comic and political strategy, Lincoln’s Inn Fields also responded to Drury Lane’s two partisan blockbuster Whig comedies The Cobler of Preston and The Non-Juror with a rather tonguein-cheek maneuver that echoes Dryden’s trope of confusion through duplication in Amphitryon. As Johnson’s anti-Jacobite satire was in rehearsals, creating a lot of buzz, Christopher Bullock managed to acquire the script, and penned a oneact farce also titled The Cobler of Preston in record time, fast-tracking its performance so that it premiered a week before Johnson’s play. The comedy also uses Sly from Shakespeare’s Induction to The Taming of the Shrew, but otherwise it is an apolitical rollicking farce that has little in common with Johnson’s play. Bullock says mischievously in the Preface, “no single Person . . . has a Patent for plundering Old Plays” even plays “penn’d for the particular service of a Party” (The Cobler of Preston 1716: vii; reverse italics). Most scholars hitherto have seen Bullock’s motivation as, in Loftis’s words, “mercenary rather than political,” but while commercial gain was surely an aim, the trick was very much off-stage political comedy (1963: 70). As George Akerby says of this trickster-like sleight of hand a few years after the incident: “Mr. Bullock, who always prided himself upon his Attachment to the Principles of Toryism” not only “robb’d the . . . ingenious Mr. Charles Johnson of great Part of the large Profits which he expected from the Run of a Farce, which was wrote, so much to the Support, and the Defence of the H[anove]r Succession . . . turning into Burlesque and Ridicule all Mr. Johnson’s Thoughts and Designs, and giving Spirit to that Party which Mr. Johnson had rendered contemptible and Spiritless” (Akerby 1729: 24). Akerby’s comment constructs Bullock’s maneuver as having an element of comic discursivity insofar as it burlesques Johnson’s earnest political intentions. His mimicry of Johnson’s title perpetrates confusion through duplication, just as the presence of a second Sosia undercuts the identity of the first. Thus, when Cibber produced The Non-Juror, Bullock immediately produced The Perjuror. Both his comic doppelgangers were

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popular, but more significant perhaps is the spilling over of comic strategy from on stage to off stage.

ROBERT WALPOLE The complex interpenetration of comic and political discursivity is particularly relevant to the satiric attacks on Robert Walpole, leading up to the Stage Licensing Act of 1737, which muzzled on-stage political satire. Walpole’s unprecedented accumulation of ministerial power began in 1721 when he took over important cabinet posts such as Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and leader of the House of Commons. A staunch Whig, by the time he left office in 1742 he was one of the most influential as well as despised men in power. He had opponents in the corridors of power as well as amongst common people; even many in his own party vehemently disagreed with him. Anti-Walpole sentiment united people of all political stripes: Jacobites, court Tories, Country Whigs, and radical religious sects, leading to an opposition bloc in Parliament. He also had his supporters, of course, and Drury Lane managers were seen as Walpole loyalists. That allegiance cost them when John Gay took his unexpected runaway hit, The Beggar’s Opera to rival manager, John Rich, at Lincoln’s Inn Field after Cibber refused it. Whatever Cibber’s regrets about turning down a comedy that ran for sixty-two consecutive nights, political considerations often factored into a theater’s choice of new comic offerings—as seen during the first Jacobite rebellion—and “[s]electing a play lampooning Walpole—and the greater risk of appearing in it— would have been theatrical suicide” for Cibber (McGirr 2016: 93). Gay’s politically incendiary comedy, noted for its anti-Walpolean stance also exemplifies a new approach to political satire. Often termed a satiric ballad opera, its incorporation of music and popular ditties gives it a jolly and lighthearted air that belies its savage and wide-ranging attack. Set in Newgate Prison, The Beggar’s Opera satirizes social order, family, business, law, and politics in its topsy-turvy alternate universe that is both deliciously bourgeoise-seeming as well as rapaciously criminal. But exactly how it satirizes Walpole is notoriously difficult to pin down. There is no coherent allegorical characterization wherein one character is supposed to represent him. Nor are there any clear signposts critiquing particular Walpolean policies or governmental actions. There is, as Robert Phiddian says, a “ ‘where’s Walpole’ game” at the epicenter of the play— the “Great Man” is and is not referenced in characters such as Peachum, Lockit, and Macheath (2017: 143). Sometimes he’s like Peachum who ruthlessly profits from the laws he is supposed to uphold, at others he might be embodied in Macheath’s “greatness” as a highway robber. The point is that these satiric correspondences are ever shifting and fluid. Gay conveys the moral and political zeitgeist of Walpole’s administration with

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excoriating humor without ever clearly naming names. The trick to this mode of political comedy at a time when governmental and legal repercussions were a real possibility was maintaining “plausible deniability” (Phiddian 2017: 145). Gay systematically grafts on to his characters all the sins attributed to Walpole by his critics in the press and in private: levying taxes that were highway robbery, using the legal machinery to line his own pockets and do away with his enemies, bribery, self-aggrandizement through ostentatious accumulation, adultery, etc. Yet, these accusations are general enough that taking offense at them would reveal more a guilty conscience than righteous indignation. If The Beggar’s Opera invented new weapons for comedy to attack those in power, it also catalyzed new models for those in power to respond to criticism. Walpole himself went to see the comedy and so obvious were Gay’s satiric thrusts at him that every eye in the theater often turned to see his reaction to the potshots rather than attend to the action on the stage. And Walpole seemed to laugh along with the rest, even saying during a particular aria, “that was leveled at me!” but he was definitely not amused (McGirr 2016: 95). Walpole’s public facade of good humor despite open ridicule parallels the tradition of the White House Correspondents dinner where journalists get to roast the president—except that in Gay’s case, the witticisms were neither an institutionalized containment of politically subversive humor through licensed release, nor did they remain unpunished. Polly, Gay’s sequel to The Beggar’s Opera, was suppressed before it ever came on stage. More importantly, the cultural moment signifies a new mode of publicly performed response by politicians to subversive humor which Phiddian terms “functional shamelessness” (2017: 147). Walpole’s response to the comic affront departs from the “honour culture” of early modern politics where even perceived insults required open rebuttals; instead, it anticipates the ability to shamelessly brush off public slights that “we now recognise as essential to any long-term politician beholden to public opinion” (2017: 147). Walpole “wore the damage, and struck back only covertly” which “shows a new relationship between power and political emotions, a performance of good humour that deflects the contempt for corruption that emerges from such plays” (2017:148–9). However, the Stage Licensing Act of 1737 shows that political stage satire could also trigger more overt repressive state machinery. The Licensing Act had two main provisions: it criminalized non-patent playhouses and it mandated that every script be reviewed before its production instead of suppressing objectionable plays in performance. The act was aimed at controlling a proliferating theater scene in London. Small theaters had sprung up in Goodman’s Field and Haymarket; Rich moved to the new Covent Garden theater, but occasionally used Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Instead of well-established acting companies with powerful managers, loosely organized groups of performers and writers came together in these venues to perform a variety of popular entertainments. As

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Burlington’s The Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage 1700-1737 shows, in the 1730s, new ballad operas, burlesques, farces, pantomimes, and masques far exceed “regular” comedies. Most are anonymous and lost to history. But these offerings from 1733 suggest what audiences were laughing at: John Kelly’s Timon in Love is a generalized misanthropic satire featuring a speaking ass, Theophilus Cibber’s The Harlot’s Progress is a musical romp caricaturing contemporary life with debauchees, pimps, country lasses, and a harlequin figure, and Eliza Haywood and William Hatchett’s The Opera of Operas is a mock opera featuring Tom Thumb. Such multimedia entertainments often seem either quite apolitical if we peruse the words on the page, but as John O’Brien suggests, “pantomime was drawn into partisan political debate by opposition writers as a symbol for the corruption of the Walpole regime” (2004: 182). But certainly, the period manifests the ratcheting up of comic offerings without traditional dialogue in a variety of venues, escaping the controls on theater that royal patents were originally meant to institute. However, it is the prolific Henry Fielding who seemed to challenge governmental control most often. Nevertheless, the role of his “adversarial playwriting” in triggering the Licensing Act has provoked debate: at one end is Joel Schechter for whom Fielding is an eighteenth-century “Brechtian,” a “writer . . . and activist . . . who initiated comic, public forms of resistance” to Walpole, not unlike Brecht himself who adapted The Beggar’s Opera and resisted the growing power of Nazis (Schechter 2016: 77, 9). At the other end of the spectrum is Robert Hume, who suggests that “Fielding clearly enjoyed tugging the great man’s tail when paid for doing so, but nowhere before 1737 does he display fundamental disapproval for Walpole, either moral or ideological” (1988:118). Likely, Fielding’s subversiveness lies somewhere between these two extremes. After all, his The Modern Husband (1732) was dedicated to Walpole and produced by the pro-ministry Cibber at Drury Lane. Nevertheless, by 1737 the state and the stage were for Fielding often conflated as sinks of corruption, incompetence, and greed, with Walpole heading one and Cibber the other. He attacked both in plays like The Historical Register and Pasquin (in which he had Charlotte Charke mimic her father as Lord Place) by using the play-within-aplay, “rehearsal” format. Politically, Pasquin, Euridyce Hissed, and The Historical Register for 1736 were particularly radioactive; Thomas Davies writes in 1780, “provocations from Mr. Fielding, in his plays and farces, just before that time [i.e., in 1737]” motivated Walpole to “stop the current of stage abuse against him, which then ran very high” (1780: 2.205). While Fielding was certainly responsible for much of the anti-Walpole satire on stage preceding the Licensing Act, it is instructive to compare his Historical Register with a very different comedy from the same year that also raised ministerial hackles but is rarely mentioned in conjunction with the muzzling of drama: Robert Dodsley’s The King and the Miller of Mansfield. In The Historical

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Register, Medley’s play is in rehearsal and rapid scene shifts offer topically satirical vignettes. For example, Fielding overtly attacks the recent Excise Act, which met with so much resistance that Walpole had to withdraw it: “Hang foreign Affairs, let us apply ourselves to Money,” says one politician; “Ay. . . All we have to consider relating to Money is how we shall get it . . . I have consider’d the Matter, and I find it must be by a Tax” says another (Fielding [1737] 2011: 419). Particularly inflammatory is the closing scene, referencing ongoing political tensions about possible war with Spain, which many supported in hope of better trade prospects but Walpole opposed. Four Patriots argue whether war or peace is better for the country, when Quidam, a Walpole caricature, comes in and pours a sackful of gold coins on the table. Having distracted them, he leads them out of the stage fiddling, while they dance to his tune, unaware that the coins are falling from holes in their pockets, ready for Quidam to sweep back into his own purse. The play ends on that dismal note of political dysfunctionality with the debate on war hijacked by Walpole-Quidam and the Patriots corrupted. Unlike Fielding’s nihilistic hilarity, Dodsley channels sensibility for political critique. A King is lost in the forest while “[his] Courtiers take Care of [themselves], whatever becomes of [their] Master” (1737:6). Found by a bluff patriotic miller who shelters him for the night without knowing his eminence, the king learns about the corrupt and “selfish Sycophants” in his court like Lurewell. Labeled a “Great Man”—Walpole’s satiric moniker—he has debauched the miller’s daughter, Peggy, and cheated her honest swain Dick (1737: 47, 44). Dodsley’s comedy encodes a sentimentalized plot of political “virtue rewarded” as the wicked courtiers are punished, the meritorious miller is knighted, and Peggy reunited with Dick. “[B]ourgeois sententiae” as Laura Brown calls them (1981: 148), saturate Dodsley’s court critique, as evidenced in Dick’s conversation with the Miller: What! would the great Man thou wast recommended to, do nothing at all for thee at last? . . . is plain Honesty then a Recommendation to no Place at Court? DICK It may recommend you to be a Footman, perhaps, but nothing further, nothing further, indeed. If you look higher, you must furnish yourself with other Qualifications: You must learn to say ay, or no; to run, or stand; to fetch, or carry, or leap over a Stick at the Word of Command. You must be Master of the Arts of Flattery, Insinuation, Dissimulation, Application, and [Pointing to his Palm] right Application too, if you hope to succeed. MIL

—Dodsley 1737: 24–5 Dodsley targets—like Figure 6.1, above, and The Historical Register—corruption and “ass-kissing” in Walpole’s court, but uses a very different affective strategy.

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Instead of irreverent and superior laughter at Walpole’s humiliation, he provokes sentimentalized indignation at the helpless Peggy and her earnest suitor, Dick. Lurewell’s treatment of them is “shocking to Humanity” as the King says and there are tears aplenty (1737: 43). Its anti-court bias and valorization of rural values subversively propagates Country Whig values of the Opposition to Walpole. But it ostentatiously preserves political order insofar as it flatters the monarch in order to critique the minister. David Erskine Baker called its “satire poignant, yet genteel” (1782: 2.179). Despite the differences, both comedies are linked in “the iniquitous surmises” of The Gazetteer which represented “The Historical Register, as aiming, in Conjunction with The Miller of Mansfield, at the Overthrow of the M[inistr]y” (n.p.). This demonstrates that the sentimental vein in eighteenth-century comedy could be as politically subversive as Fielding’s wild satiric humor. Also, that the Walpolean establishment found Fielding’s pointed attacks and Dodsley’s generalized moral critique equally threatening suggests that comedy’s political potential lay as much in extrinsic factors such as authorial reputation and reception as in actual content. Dodsley’s rather tame court critique was filtered through his known allegiance to the Opposition. By 1737 the Prince of Wales, long estranged from his father, openly sided with the Opposition to Walpole’s ministry; and Dodsley was close to the literary-political figures who gathered at the heir’s abode in Leicester House. Also, the Prince of Wales had been using stage comedy to further his own politics. He went to plays such as Pasquin, Eurydice Hissed, and The Historical Register and openly laughed at the satire against his father’s court. He also supported Dodsley’s The Toy Shop and commanded at least three performances of The Miller of Mansfield (Tierney 1988: 17–28). He attended the first of these command performances, an author’s benefit night, with his wife, and so crowded was the theater that, as The London Stage notes, “The Boxes, not being equal to the Demand for Places, for better Accommodation of the Ladies, Boxes will be made on the Stage” (Avery et al. 1960: 635). The scene suggests that even when comedy seems most powerfully resistant to entrenched political hegemonies, as in these pre-Licensing Act plays, the show on stage could itself be co-opted into the performance of opposing power blocs. This is reinforced in the climactic act of the absurd comedy that led to Walpole pushing through the Stage Licensing Act in the Parliament. Purportedly, a mysterious anonymous comedy called The Golden Rump was sent to Henry Giffard, the manager at Lincoln’s Inn Field. It was such a scurrilous satire on the court that the shocked Giffard immediately informed Walpole about it who, equally scandalized, showed it to the other Parliament members. So terrible a sign was the farce of how far playwrights would go to make a buck by ridiculing the royal court that Walpole’s bill muzzling the theater was passed without too much opposition (Thomas et al. 2007: 33–6). The offending comedy itself was,

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FIGURE 6.5: The Festival of the Golden Rump (1737). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

of course, immediately destroyed—a textual absence constructing political comedy as gorgon, so terrible that none should be allowed to cast eyes on it. All this may have been act of political script-writing by Walpole. It has long been suggested that he paid for the scabrous farce to be written, opportunely using a recently published satiric prose piece called A Vision of the Golden Rump and the print inspired by it to pretend that some comic hack (perhaps Fielding) had adapted them for the stage.5 The scatological print presents George II as a satyr with a ponderous posterior on an altar raising one leg to fart while the queen, as priestess, applies an enema and a potbellied Walpole, the “Chief Magician,” presides over the ritual with peers on the right deferentially carrying vessels on their heads (liquid for more enemas?) while those on the left are dressed in robes with rumps emblazoned on them. Significantly, the print primarily ridicules the august royal couple, rather than Walpole, which made it especially explosive, creating a specter of comedy as the devolution of civil discourse and order into unruly intoxicated public lewdness and laughter. Indeed, Schechter suggests that in this situation, Walpole himself can be seen as the “Other Fielding”’ creating a damning parliamentary

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drama around the “fictive creation” of a monstrous satirist whose “danger existed only in the imagination of the legislators” (Schechter 2016: 86). As Matthew Kinservik has amply proven, the fear of such danger was not just in the imagination of the legislators but very much a part of a long tradition of philosophical and social debate about the role of comedy in the period. The top-down exercise of political power that silenced certain kinds of comic critique in 1737 was surely an extremely repressive measure with detrimental impact on the generic variety and the socio-political potential of comedy to effect ideological change. However, the idea of a ‘free stage’ in the eighteenth century meant, as it often does in the present, “not a stage free from governmental oversight” but “a stage free from degradations of the profit motive” (Kinservik 2014:168). And, what we now see as a “happy growth and proliferation” of stage offerings in the 1730s, contemporaries saw as a “time of crudely commercial and senseless drama badly in need of state intervention” with Fielding as a writer who “designed merely to make money and score satiric hits and, in the process, . . . debase the stage” (2014: 162, 153). Colley Cibber calling Fielding in his Apology, a “Drawcansir in Wit” after the comically drunken, blustering knight of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672), who kills off soldiers of both sides simply because he can, says that he too “seem’d to knock all Distinctions of Mankind on the Head: Religion, Laws, Government, Priests, Judges, and Ministers, were all laid flat, at the Feet of this Herculean Satyrist!” (Cibber 1740: 164). Cibber, of course, had perhaps too much reverence for the power structures he inhabited—at least in public—but his criticism of Fielding’s comedy captures a central crux of political comedy: when must comedy stop its structural dismantling for it to be effective as a political tool? When might it become a runaway bulldozer razing all when it was meant only to raze condemned buildings? When might a satirist with a rapier become a Drawcansir? Perhaps the answer is suggested by Fielding’s ironic adoption of the eidolon of Sir Drawcansir many years later in his Covent Garden Journal, suggesting that for a satirist, “this sort of aimless violence seems inevitable if one is to survive without sinking to become a political rag” (Powell 2012: 101). It is also relevant, though, that theatrical comedy came under the most severe circumscription rather than the press or prints: this can be partially understood as the communal affect theater evokes. As Jean Marsden argues, the affective power of a staged performance derives from the “collective response of a body of spectators who share in the same event at the same time and in the same space,” and as they watch they “share their response with those around them, creating a synergy that impacts even the literary work itself” (2017: 301). And laughter is particularly contagious in a theater; the raucous popularity of Fielding’s plays in the Little Theatre, versus the dull and fragmented reading they make for today can partially be explained by this phenomenon. Not only

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is his comedy very performance oriented, full of farcical action that would provoke mirth, but the group dynamic of laughing at political bigwigs together has subversive affective energy. Fielding’s plays might not have initiated riots but only channeled the discontent that spilled on to the streets in protests such as those against the Excise Act or the Gin Act; nevertheless, insofar as the theater is a “very good place to spread emotions” the riot of laughter provoked by his political farces in Little Market every evening was a cultural riot all the same (Nicholson 2013: 20).

POST-WALPOLE POLITICAL COMEDY The Licensing Act did diffuse dramatic attacks on Walpole and his ministry but did not erase them completely as older comedies were not impacted by the new law. So, in August 1737, soon after the Act was passed, Lincoln’s Inn Field showed The Beggar’s Opera. The first new comedy to be suppressed by the act was John Kelly’s The Levee in 1741, which ridiculed Walpole for misuse of political patronage, just as the Idol Worship print does (Figure 6.1). Unlike in the theater, there was no pre-publication censorship in print media; comic drama was clearly deemed more dangerous to the State. But after the fall of Walpole in 1742, stage comedy’s antagonist edge toward the government fades away. Unlike the divided houses during 1715, the second Jacobite rebellion in 1745 found all theaters embracing popular jingoism; the tradition of singing Handel’s anthem “God Save the King” during the course of every evening’s entertainment was initiated at this time. Pro-Jacobite satiric prints occasionally appeared after 1745 especially aimed at Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, second son of King George and the commander of his forces, nicknamed “the Butcher of Culloden” for his ruthlessness. The print reproduced in Figure 6.6, which Horace Walpole thought had “more humour than I almost ever saw in one of that sort,” ridicules Cumberland’s porcine girth as well as his amour with a street musician, showing the “butcher” as a smitten swain ([1749] 1818: 65). But after mid-century, Jacobitism was no longer the primary anxiety coloring English politics. Instead, in the late eighteenth century intersections between comedy and politics were more often mediated through the lens of British nationalist identity, as the rise of empire, loss of American colonies, and the hopes as well anxieties evoked by the French Revolution dominated the scene rather than the issue of monarchical succession. Comedies such as Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771), Foote’s The Nabob (1772), Inchbald’s The Mogul Tale (1784) and Such Things Are (1787), Coleman’s Inkle and Yarico (1787), Starke’s The Sword of Peace (1788), and Cowley’s A Day in Turkey (1792) defined and refined what a just colonial empire run by virtuous Britishers should look like. Often such comedies, like Dodsley’s Miller of Mansfield, used sentiment and

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FIGURE 6.6: John of Gaunt in Love, Or Mars on his knees (1749), showing Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland brought low by love for a Savoy street musician. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

sensibility to convey their political critique. Few individual politicians in the period drew as much animosity as did Walpole, though John Wilkes’s colorful radicalism certainly compares as a vortex for political satire. His political popularity amongst the masses, his libertinism, as well as his journalistic attacks on a range of targets from Hogarth to the Scotch minister Lord Bute to the king himself, opened him to caricature and satire. The pre-performance censorship instituted by the Licensing Act was particularly useful to the state when the revolution began in France. Patent theaters were strictly discouraged from responding to the events across the channel. But as John Dent’s celebratory burletta The Triumph of Liberty, or the Bastille (1789) suggests, smaller unpatented performance venues like Sadler’s Wells and the Royal Circus, where “regular” spoken drama was not allowed, did manage to engage more directly with the revolution. However, by the 1790s as the full extent of revolutionary terror unfolded, sensitivity to possible Jacobinism became heightened. Even comedic sympathy for the persecuted poor seemed a sign of radicalism, as Inchbald learned from riots against her Every One Has His Fault (1792). Indeed, satiric poems and prints increasingly attacked Jacobinism: Richard Pohlwele’s The Unsex’d Females excoriated pro-

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revolution women such as Wollstonecraft while Gillray’s The New Morality (1798) caricatured the new democratic sensibility. As evidenced by the satiric poetry and prints from Restoration onwards, print censorship was less strenuous than that of stage comedy and at the end of the century this led to the boom in political cartoonists such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank. The fate of drama in France during the years of revolution was more interesting of course. The relaxation of theatrical censorship in revolutionary France, and its complete abolition in 1791, echoed the cherished principle of liberté, with provisions like, “any citizen was free to establish a public theatre and produce any type of play in it” (Rodmell 1990: 19). Many new theaters sprang up in Paris as a result with bawdily anti-clerical or politically topical comedies, but most suffered losses and failed. Soon, though, the new republic chafed under the disruptive potential of comedy. In 1793 Jean-Louis Laya’s L’Ami des lois, critiquing Robespierre and Marat as unscrupulous demagogues fomented public response boisterous enough to interrupt Louis XVI’s trial (Darlow 2011). Also, Laya’s comedy symptomizes the emerging factionalism amongst Jacobins as it supports Girondin views against the Montagnards in power, not unlike the use of comedy for party ideology in early eighteenthcentury England. Authorities’ objections to Laya’s comedy symptomized that “1793 saw the Revolution change into reverse gear as far as theatrical freedom was concerned” coming down hard on drama deemed harmful to the republic and encouraging “‘patriotic’ propaganda” (Rodmell 1990: 33). Soon, theater censorship was re-established. In the next few years, as the revolution lurched along, theaters struggled to keep up with new ideological dictates and power blocs—the old Comedie Francaise, lately christened Theatre de l’Egalite, reopened in 1794 without boxes meant for the erstwhile aristocrats, and its imprisoned actors were released to perform old politically inoffensive comedies such as Piron’s La Metromanie and Marivaux’s Les Fausses Confidences. In 1795, as reaction to extremist Jacobinism set in, the populace rioted at theaters that profited during the Terror. One of the most popular comedies that year was Charles-Pierre Duncancel’s anti-Jacobin L’intérieur des comités révolutionnaires, ou Les Aristides modernes which is a revenge fantasy with members of the Revolutionary Committees arrested to be dragged through the city in front of the innocents they had terrorized. The most intriguing aspect perhaps of comedy’s role in the revolution years though, is suggested by Marvin Carlson who points out that on the day Marie Antoinette was guillotined, crowds flocked to Monvel’s fantasy comic opera, Urgande et Merlin, and even as the Girondists were being executed, Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes premiered a highly successful production of the Harlequin comedy, Arlequin gardien des femmes (Carlson 1966: 177). Similarly, Emmet

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Kennedy notes that the most popular play in Paris between 1789–99 was Pierre Desforges’ comedy, Le sourd ou L’auberge pleine, totally farcical with no overt political engagement (Kennedy 1996: 51–8). The popularity of such plays suggests that more than meaningfully engaged political comedy, audiences craved comedies that offered escape from the turbulent politics. Ultimately, the instability of comedy during the revolution years—a sign of democratic freedom, a tool of faction, threat to political order as well as its prop, a signpost of changing dominant ideologies, and last but not the least, an escape from politics itself—indicates its protean roles in the political life of a nation. Furthermore, as the overview of the English example suggests, the muchvaunted potential of comedy for speaking truth to power is often equivocal if not totally illusory. Vulgar humiliation of august personages, such as Walpole’s caricature as a colossal unbreeched butt, or Trump’s as a penis and Cameron’s with a firecracker up his behind, often seems to devolve political discourse rather than contribute to it constructively; nevertheless, the power of political comedy to discomfit those in charge remains its most precious potential. Furthermore, insofar as comedy is a cultural form, and thus part of the discursive tensions in a particular socio-political formation, it can never be free of manipulation itself. Political comedy and politics are, in a sense, locked in mortal combat and it is in the tension generated by that death grip that both are kept on their toes.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Laughter Enlightenment Philosophies of Laughter, from Superiority Theory to Incongruity Theory ANDREW BENJAMIN BRICKER

This chapter offers an overview of the radical retheorization of laughter during the long eighteenth century. I begin by tracing the various strands of the classical inheritance. For millennia, philosophers and writers had argued that laughter was intimately coupled with and often indistinguishable from ridicule and malice. This largely negative view of laughter, today most broadly known as Superiority Theory, identified a troubling ethical dimension to all forms of the humorous and comic. When we laugh, such theorists argued, we express our sense of superiority over the object of our laughter. Though some writers attempted to mitigate the supposedly vicious condescension of laughter, this overarchingly pessimistic conception went largely unchallenged during the medieval and early modern periods. During the mid-seventeenth century, Superiority Theory found its most notorious expression in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, the focus of my second section. Hobbes offered a nuanced understanding of the psychology of laughter, but nonetheless retained the seemingly obvious and, to many of his contemporaries, unsettling conclusion that laughter always seems to entail laughing at someone else. As Hobbes wrote, laughter was “nothing else but a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others” ([1640] 1969: 42). But Hobbes was also careful to observe the ambivalence of laughter. It was, he argued, not merely the sudden glory of superiority, but also a psychological 171

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symptom of pusillanimity: he who laughs most knows his own inferiority. In short, Hobbes’s account of laughter was hardly straightforward—we do not simply, or solely, laugh at the expense of others—and yet his theory was grossly caricatured and routinely argued against by Enlightenment-era writers, who detected in his account of laughter a worryingly antisocial aspect of human nature itself. In their opposition to such superior and often hostile explanations of laughter, writers, critics, and philosophers began to devise a new theory. Today known most generally as Incongruity Theory, this new philosophy, built up over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, holds that laughter is not the byproduct of some splenetic superiority over others, but the almost involuntary recognition of comic disparities and mismatches that frequently extend from verbal incongruity. As the philosopher Francis Hutcheson argued, “the cause of laughter is the bringing together of images which have contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in the principal idea” (1750: 19). Such conceptions gave laughter an intellectual innocence, transmuting a once socially divisive and even vindictive act down to a merely cognitive amusement in language: it was a pleasure in disparity itself, rather than the disparity between people. What worked in theory, however, proved more difficult in practice. As many onlookers observed, even those who tenaciously defended laughter as innocent amusement, Incongruity Theory seemed just as partial as Superiority Theory, a wishful assertion of our own native goodness in the face of so much disquieting evidence to the contrary. In an attempt to understand the limitations of both theories alongside the Whiggish rise of “amiable humour” during this same period, I turn briefly, in my final section, from active debates about the philosophy of laughter across the Enlightenment to the comic and satiric literature of the eighteenth century. My goal in this final section is not to suggest that historians of laughter, satire, and comedy have misunderstood the evolution of the philosophy of laughter, but to explore some of the troubling ways in which literary practice lagged behind the emerging theories of the eighteenth century that claimed to explain, justify, and exonerate the worst elements of laughter. Such a shift from theory to practice—from the philosophy of laughter to the literary forms that occasioned it—offers another way to think about these anxious Enlightenment debates around humor: to explore the perceived limitations of not only Superiority Theory but also Incongruity Theory among a group of writers who remained worryingly aware that the laughter of their readers and audiences revealed something not only distressingly antisocial about both of them, but also, perhaps, about human nature itself. My larger goal in this chapter is to document a profound philosophical sea change during the Enlightenment, from harsh, condescending, superior laughter to its supposedly innocuous, socially acceptable, and even sociable form built

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around a theory of innocent incongruity. This conceptual shift came in large measure to dominate theories of humor during the last half of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and set the groundwork for many of our philosophical and psychological theories of laughter today (Morreall 2016). Moreover, this newfound conception of laughter—that humor is produced through comic mismatches and the violation of mental patterns and expectations—was important because it actively countered what many thought to be the most alarming implication of Superiority Theory: the way it presumed, and seemingly affirmed, the inborn viciousness of human nature, momentarily glimpsed in an involuntary snicker at the suffering of another. This narrative of shifting philosophies, which transferred laughter from a potential symptom of social division to a sign of humankind’s natural sociability, offers a fascinating account of how those in the eighteenth century drastically reconceptualized an aspect of everyday life. But this is also a narrative about comic and satiric literature during this same period—a story, that is, about the theoretical triumph of amiable humor during the Enlightenment, when writers and philosophers alike began radically to rethink what it means to laugh.

FROM RIDERE TO DERIDERE: LAUGHTER AND DERISION To understand how comprehensively theories of laughter were revised during the eighteenth century it is worth reviewing the negativity that had traditionally dominated accounts of laughter. For millennia, philosophers, religious writers, and critics had warned of the dangers of laughter, arguing that it was both intimately coupled with and frequently indistinguishable from ridicule and malice. As Quintilian put it, noting the close orthographical link between ridere (laughing) and deridere (derision), “a derisu non procul abest risus” (laughter is not far from derision) ([c. 95 CE ] 2002: 66–7).1 To put it in our own terms, one always seemed to laugh at, rather than with, someone. For Socrates, “the malicious man is somehow pleased at his neighbor’s misfortunes” ([fourth century BCE ] 1987: 10). There is, in short, a “curious mixture of pleasure and pain that lies in the malice of amusement” (12). Plato in turn found laughter to be deeply vindictive, filled with seeming Schadenfreude. Aristotle too was deeply skeptical about laughter. He defined joking as “a sort of abuse” and deemed wit nothing more than “well-bred insolence” ([350 BCE ] 1984: 2.1780, 2214). Religious writers proved little more optimistic. References to laughter in the Bible, for instance, often view it as hostile (Morreall 1999: 150–4). As Irven M. Resnick has shown, unlike their Old Testament forebears, “New Testament authors and early Christian writers tend to take a harsher view of laughter of any kind” (Resnick 1987: 93). For instance, in the fourth century, Jonathan

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Chrysostom, the Archbishop of Constantinople and an early Church Father, argued that jesting and its attendant laughter were potentially venial sins (Stenger 2017: 166–86). Thomas Aquinas was equally skeptical, linking the elation of laughter with the “pleasure” associated with “the joking reproach of others,” “derision,” and “mock[ery]” ([thirteenth century] 1964: 28.365–6). Such hostile views of laughter tenaciously endured throughout the early modern period. For René Descartes, ridicule and scorn were “a kind of joy mixed with hatred, which results from our perceiving some small evil in a person whom we consider to deserve it” ([1649] 1985: 1.393). Moreover, laughter proved an intriguing bridge between moral and natural philosophy, as early modern developments in medical science offered a synthetic account of laughter that coupled psychology and physiology (Morton 2017: 109). As Descartes argued: although laughter seems to be one of the chief signs of joy, yet joy cannot cause laughter except when it is moderate and mixed with an element of wonder or hatred. . . . Experience also reveals that in every situation which may cause such laughter to burst forth from the lungs, there is always some slight occasion for hatred, or at least for wonder. —[1649] 1985: 1.371 Such early modern psycho-physiological accounts suggested that laughter was an involuntary humoral response that found its source literally in the spleen. As another seventeenth-century theorist put it, laughter was produced by an impression made in our Senses, and by them in our Phancy, of some agreeable, unusual, and un-foreseen Object, when the same slips into it unawares. Which Object, exciting Joy in us by the Dilatation of the Spirits, which is made first in the Arteries of the Brain, and thereby insinuated into these of the Heart which opens to that Joy; those dilated Spirits swell the Blood in the Veins which accompanies them; so that not being containable in their own place, the Veins and Arteries swell till they make a reflux in the Brain, Diaphragme, Lungs, Face, and all the parts of the Body. —A General Collection 1664: 149 Viewed from one perspective, physiological explanations of laughter came as a relief. Suddenly laughter was the product of not some vicious personal failing but the humoral structure of the body itself. Viewed from a different perspective, however, the physiological account raised its own concerns by naturalizing the inborn human propensity for derision. A personal moral failing we might correct—or, at the very least, we might suggest that it is the failing of somebody else. But the humoral explanation had the perverse tendency to normalize the

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ugliest aspects of this most common and misanthropic behavior—it tended, that is, to suggest that the antisocial cruelty of laughter was a natural feature of human psychology, the product of a physiologically constant if variable humoral source. Historians of laughter have often taken such early accounts of laughter’s derisive dimensions to represent the emergence of the Superiority Theory (Le Goff 1997: 43; Critchley 2002: 25). The theory holds that “laughter is the expression of a person’s feelings of superiority over other people,” even if not all early theories of laughter were entirely negative (Morreall 1983: 4). Michael Billig and Mary Beard have shown that Aristotle, for instance, was remarkably inconsistent in his views on laughter (Billig 2005: 38–9; Beard 2014: 29–36). Moreover, although laughter was always ethically suspect, writers tended to be more queasily preoccupied with its application than with the act of laughing itself. Take the authors of the Hebrew Scriptures, who often condemned laughter, but also permitted it when accompanied by “joy, wonder, or admiration” or when it was “properly derisive or scornful of evil” (Resnick 1987: 91).2 By the eighteenth century, as Ashley Marshall has observed, we can identify a growing ambivalence about laughter. As she writes, “Wholesale condemnation of laughter is far less common than more moderate warnings about its misapplication, its misuse on subjects worthy of serious treatment” (2013: 47). Despite this second guessing—that laughter might, perhaps, be permissible given the right frame of mind or an appropriate object—it is worth reminding ourselves that throughout antiquity and all the way up to the eighteenth century many writers routinely doubted laughter’s capacity to serve a positive social function (Morreall 2009: 91–2). Many, in fact, found laughter inseparable from malice—what Ronald de Sousa has called its “phthonic” dimension (from the Greek phthonos for “malicious envy”) (1987: 289–95). Perhaps most importantly, many of those who wrote about laughter worried that it hinted at an insidiously antisocial element in human nature. Laughter seemed to reveal an inborn malevolence, motivated by a ghastly aspect of human psychology, that was always in need of careful management. In theory, at least, we might laugh with joy or use laughter to deride evil; but in practice, as philosophers noted and onlookers anxiously observed, laughter was an involuntary physiological response to an invidious perception of difference or inferiority. For those who began radically to rethink laughter during the Enlightenment, no philosopher had so trenchantly captured the sublimated ugliness of laughter— and supposedly, in the process, so wholly misrepresented human nature—as Thomas Hobbes. Despite his careful hedges and prescient insight that laughter often entails a complicated mix of dubious superiority and self-perceived weakness, Hobbes became over the course of the eighteenth century a scapegoat for any author a bit too eager to exonerate laughter and its alleged ethical innocence.

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THE PROBLEMS OF SUPERIORITY: HOBBES AND HIS CRITICS During the Enlightenment, Hobbes became the philosophical face of phthonic laughter. But since its appearance in the mid-seventeenth century, his claim that laughter often entails mixed feelings of superiority has been caricatured and grossly oversimplified, becoming a straw man for later critics, and even some historians and theorists of humor today, who have opposed Superiority Theory and its troubling assumptions about the inherent antisociality of human nature. Hobbes’s critics have usually pointed to a pithy passage in his Elements of Law Natural and Politic, in which he claims that “The passion of Laughter is nothing else but a suddaine Glory arising from suddaine Conception of some Eminency in our selves by Comparison with the Infirmityes of others, or with our owne formerly” ([1640] 1969: 42). Readers both in the eighteenth century and up to today have, however, tended to read this passage selectively, isolating his notion of the “suddaine Glory” in our “Eminency” over others while neglecting the self-censure of our own former “Infirmityes.” That is, creeping behind our laughter, even at others, is an awareness of how we ourselves might have been laughed at. By the time The Elements of Law had first appeared in 1640, this complicated interplay between one’s latent sense of inferiority and one’s superficial superiority was already becoming an aspect of some theories of laughter. As Quentin Skinner has observed, writers during the early modern period argued that laughter occurs when you perceive “some contemptible vice or weakness in your own former self or (even better) in someone else, and you must have been made aware of it in such a way as to produce a joyful feeling of superiority” (2001: 424). This account of the cause of one’s laughter—not only the direct object’s surface inferiority but also the lingering perception of the laugher’s own frailty, whether real or imagined, whether past or present—offered a subtle shift in laughter’s psychological dynamics. Indeed, laughter and derision were largely inseparable for seventeenth-century thinkers; but early modern accounts also suggested that one’s sense of superiority was more precarious than any simple theory of laughter demonstrated. For many thinkers in the early modern period, including Hobbes, derision was always present in laughter, both for another and often oneself, but this did not mean that laughter consequently produced unalloyed feelings of eminence. As a result, one might say, Hobbes’s philosophy of laughter hardly fits so cleanly within the box of Superiority Theory (Skinner 2004: 139–64). Hobbes later returned to the source of laughter in Leviathan. There he expanded and refined both elements of his account—not only that we laugh at others, but also that our laughter reveals some anxious recognition of self. As Hobbes writes,

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Sudden Glory, is the passion which maketh those Grimaces called LAUGHTER; and is caused by either some sudden act of their own, that pleaseth them; or by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another, by comparison whereof they suddenly applaud themselves. And it is incident most to them, that are most conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves; who are forced to keep themselves in their own favour, by observing the imperfections of other men. And therefore much Laughter at the defects of others, is a signe of Pusillanimity. For of great minds, one of the proper workes is, to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves onely with the most able. —[1651] 2010: 37–8 For Hobbes, once again, laughter arises when either we do something, even something entirely innocuous, that pleases us, or when we compare ourselves “to some deformed thing in another.” Many have chosen to emphasize this latter, crueler account of laughter, however, while neglecting his observation that the person most likely to laugh is he or she possessing the “fewest abilities”—faint-hearted cowards, lacking courage or fortitude, a kind of moral weakness or “Pusillanimity.” As Skinner has likewise observed, rather than simply or only being the product of that much reviled “suddaine Glory” we feel when comparing ourselves to our inferiors, “laughter is fundamentally a strategy for coping with feelings of inadequacy” (2004: 163). Laughter, that is, “is incident most to them, that are most conscious of the fewest abilities in themselves”—the provoking suggestion that to laugh at all is not so much to giddily revel in one’s supremacy as to tacitly acknowledge one’s own feebleness. To put it mildly, Hobbes was, at least to some degree, ambivalent about laughter. It was not solely the “Sudden Glory” he found at the psychological core of the laughing impulse, though it was this phrase that stuck in the minds of his later supporters and his most virulent critics. Moreover, though many Enlightenment-era writers tended to caricature Hobbes’ conception of laughter and, by extension, his seemingly cynical view of human nature, they also began to build a second theory of laughter, one that mitigated laughter’s antisociality. This newer theory—part of the revolution in laughter in the eighteenth century, which has in large measure shaped how we think about laughter today—was most clearly promulgated by the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. For him, the sudden-glory theory simply failed to square with the emotions of his own breast. We do not always automatically compare ourselves to the object of our laughter, nor do we always laugh when “we observe an object in pain” (1750: 7–11). The source of our laughter, he argued, is not the disparity between the laugher and the object of his or her comic scorn, but the juxtaposition of ideas present in burlesque, a kind of “overstraining of wit.” As he put it, “the cause of laughter is the bringing together of images

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which have contrary additional ideas, as well as some resemblance in the principal idea: this contrast between ideas of grandeur, dignity, sanctity, perfection, and ideas of meanness, baseness, profanity” (1750: 19). Such a shift in thinking brings us closer to Incongruity Theory, which came in large measure to dominate theories of humor from the latter half of the eighteenth century on (Morreall 2009: 9–15). It holds that humor, rather than being the aggressive byproduct of some vindictive sense of our own superiority, is occasioned by comic mismatches and the violation of mental patterns and expectations (Morreall 1983: 4). To some degree, we can detect hints of Incongruity Theory even before the eighteenth century. Aspects of such a theory show up, for instance, in the writings of Aristotle and Cicero, even though neither was wholly able to reconcile these moments of comic mismatch to their larger philosophies of laughter as an expression of one’s self-perceived eminence (Morreall 1983: 16). Early modern theorists, with their emphasis on laughter’s physiological aspects, also sometimes found the partial cause of laughter in comic mismatches, though they too had difficulty extricating the burlesque element of humor from the supposed vindictiveness that so often occasioned laughter. As one seventeenth-century theorist observed, it is “Disproportion that makes us laugh, . . . some species not well according together” (A General Collection 1664: 148). Even then, though, this mismatch fails to produce laughter unless it is also seemingly triangulated by the observer’s sense of his or her own superiority. We laugh, for instance, when we look upon some odd ill-contriv’d countenance, or when we find little sutableness between the Objects which are represented to us; as an Oldman making Love, a huge Hat upon a small Head, one intending to make a graceful Reverence, or cut a fine caper and falling all along; in brief, every thing that is said or done incongruously besides our expectation; especially if no other more violent Passion interpose, as Fear, Respect, and Pity, which suppress Laughter. We laugh at a Man that falls down, but should he break his neck with the fall, our Laughter would give place to Compassion. —A General Collection 1664: 148 Incongruity might have been a growing feature of early modern conceptions of laughter. But hardly could the burlesque element in humor be wholly isolated from the sense of eminence that was always seemingly coupled with laughter itself. Nonetheless, Hutcheson’s conception of incongruity at the heart of humor was part of a radical post-Hobbesian rethinking of laughter. Again, it is worth keeping in mind that, for many onlookers in the eighteenth century, the involuntary churlishness of laughter was a physiological rebuke to any simple Shaftesburian belief in the innate goodness of human nature. To laugh at all, some worried, was to refute implicitly the so-called sensus communis or natural human

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inclination to “the common interest, love of the community or society, natural affection, humanity, obligingness, or that sort of civility which rises from a just sense of the common rights of mankind” (Shaftesbury [1711] 1999: 48–51). For many in the eighteenth century, laughter was an ugly manifestation of our worst psychological tendencies. Hobbes’s theory of laughter was provoking not because it was so self-evidently wrong, but precisely because it proved a cautious articulation of an idea that had always seemingly held at the periphery of social consciousness—the notion that, despite our best efforts to dissemble our own worst inclinations, human nature is, at its core, inherently vicious. Hutcheson’s reconceptualization in turn gave laughter, this almost wholly involuntary and entirely common human behavior, a much-needed ethical innocence. Incongruity Theory thankfully suggested that laughter was nothing more than a pleasure in disparity itself, rather than the disparities between people. Such a reconceptualization reduced a potentially divisive and even latently sadistic act down to a mere cognitive pleasure in the interplay of language and resemblance. Incongruity Theory finally found its fullest expression in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Immanuel Kant, for instance, claimed “Laughter is an affect arising from a strained expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing” ([1791] 2007: 161). In a similar manner, Arthur Schopenhauer argued that the source of laughter was the “very incongruity [between] sensuous and abstract knowledge,” because “the latter always merely approximates to the former” ([1818] 1907: bk. 1, sect. 13). We laugh, “in every case,” upon “the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real objects which have been thought through it in some relation.” For these later thinkers, even laughter seemingly occasioned by a sense of eminence, however, could be understood as an expression of a fundamental incongruity. As Schopenhauer continued, “the laughter of others at what we do or say seriously offends us so keenly” because laughter itself “asserts that there is a great incongruity between our conceptions and the objective realities. . . . The laugh of scorn announces with triumph to the baffled adversary how incongruous were the conceptions he cherished with the reality which is now revealing itself to him” ([1818] 1907: bk. 1, ch. 8). For Søren Kierkegaard the entire source of the “comical” was incongruity—or what he called “contradiction” ([1846] 1941: 459–68). This newfound theory of laughter based on comic incongruity thus offered in the eighteenth century an important counter to Hobbesian conceptions of both laughter itself and human nature. The problem remained, however, that Incongruity Theory appeared to many onlookers just as one-sided and partial as any simple notion of superiority. Even Hutcheson conceded that we sometimes laugh at the most horrifying things, such as “the contortions of the human body in air, upon the blowing up of an enemy’s ship” (1750: 30). Moreover, even if vocal proponents of sociability and politeness argued that we ought to abhor the barbarity of such laughter, it was difficult for them to

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deny the lingering presence of laughter’s most vindictive qualities. To titter involuntarily at the suffering of another was simply to reveal what many had always worried to be fundamentally true: that laughter was merely the obdurate physiological mechanism by which we not only tacitly asserted our sense of personal eminence over others but also carelessly revealed the inherent antisociality of human nature itself. Those claiming that humor was fundamentally a pleasure in incongruity also had tremendous difficulty isolating the innocuous element of burlesque from the ridicule implied in our laughter at particular people or even general types. In fact, the examples offered by such theorists undermine any crisp account of laughter that overemphasizes its ethically neutral elements. In his hunt for incongruous examples, Francis Grose, for instance, found himself rummaging around in the stockpile of comic characters, including “a cowardly soldier, a bandy-legged dancing-master, a corpulent or gouty running-footman, an antiquated fop or coquet, a Methodist in a brothel, a drunken justice making a riot” (1788: 22). But even these examples tend to erode any sharp distinction between our laughter at particular individuals and our laughter at incongruity itself. This was the riddle almost every apologist for laughter faced. Any post-Hobbesian philosophy of laughter that failed to recognize the perhaps not essential but commonly phthonic elements of laughter was seemingly only propagating a fiction about the evolution of politeness itself. Such accounts about how we laugh, as Mary Beard has argued, are “loaded stories of human progress and refinement.” For such storytellers, “part of the point was to show that their predecessors had laughed more coarsely, or more lustily, than they did” (2014: 50). The belief that at least some forms of humor involved a Hobbesian denigration of others endured throughout the eighteenth century, though attempts were made to isolate this less desirable trait. Such efforts often resulted in careful semantic parsing. For some, the mistake was not to associate laughter with superiority but to assume that all forms of laughter entailed it. Such derisive laughter, some contended, was nothing more than a subspecies of laughter better known as ridicule (Beattie 1776: 326; Home 1762: 1.341). And ridicule, as one critic put it, was a “weapon” that could “cut indiscriminately, right or wrong” (The Hypochondriack 1782: no. 57). Indeed, such writers argued, the cruelest forms of laughter should be thought of as “wit” rather than “humour” (Wickberg 1998: 36). Or perhaps one needed to distinguish between good-hearted and gentle raillery and the brutal admonition of ridicule, as Corbyn Morris argued (1744: 36–8). Some even sought to vindicate ridicule itself. Joseph Addison, for instance, believed that ridicule could be potentially useful, returning to an old argument about not laughter per se but its application. He was nonetheless forced to note that the comic is “generally made use of to laugh Men out of Virtue and good sense, by attacking everything that is solemn and serious, Decent and Praise-worthy in human life” (1711: 2.467).

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This meticulous taxonomizing, this anxious desire to isolate this substrain of laughter, was nonetheless often easier said than done, as many in the eighteenth century were forced to concede and as many critics have since argued.3 For Swift, the distinctions between types of laughter were clear enough, but too often the signal got lost in the noise of dullness: So, the pert dunces of mankind Whene’er they would be thought refined, Because the difference lies abstruse ’Twixt raillery and gross abuse, To show their parts, will scold and rail, Like porters o’er a pot of ale. —“To Mr. Delany” [1718] 1983: ll. 45–50 Hence the difficulty of separating innocent laughter directed at comic incongruity from object-oriented laughter at an individual. Take Thomas Rowlandson’s print Laughter, in which a bumpkinish man chortles at a cat dressed like an old woman or maid (Figure 7.1). What, in fact, is the source of the humor? For laughter’s apologists, the comedy of this scene ought to lie in the print’s incongruity, the overt disparity between the perplexed feline and its old-maid garb. But for the more skeptical, this would entail laughing at the cat per se, the supposed humor of fusty old women and doddering maids, or even, one might argue, the rube for whom such idiotic humor was the height—or depths—of comic sensibility. Intriguingly, in their attempts to mitigate the antisociality of laughter, such apologists tended to point to our laughter at animals. For example, one letter writer to Mist’s Weekly Journal offered an anecdote about the salubrious effects of laughter: A certain Person, who had lost both his Wits and his Fortune by an ill Run in the Stocks, was standing at his Window in Suspence, whether he should throw himself out or send for three Pennyworth of Ratsbane, when a Man with a wooden Leg, who is Master of a Company of Players, consisting of one Bear and two Monkeys, happened to pass by; they acted a Play, in which the two Monkeys were to decide a Quarrel by Sword and Pistol upon the Back of the Bear, they behav’d so gallantly that both were wounded, so that the fore Leg of each was tied in a Scarf; the whole Scene occasioned so much Laughter, and so diverted his Melancholly that he immediately applied himself to repair his Affairs, and is now in a Way of making a very good Fortune by an honest Employment (not Stockjobbing). —perhaps Henry Fielding ([1728] 1989: 284–99); see Battestin 1983: 85–94

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FIGURE 7.1: Thomas Rowlandson, Laughter (1800). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

What is so interesting about such demonstrations of laughter’s intellectual innocence is how they actively displace human objects as the subject of that laughter. Indeed, what makes such scenes so funny is their incongruity, a kind of low burlesque: the way they take undignified animals and imbue them with the surface dignity of humans—in this case, two monkeys engaged in an

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aristocratic duel of honor upon the back of a bear. And yet such comic juxtapositions might also operate at a deeper level, exposing the hypocrisy of animalistic man and the false hierarchy of being. Animals might elicit from us a simple laugh at their incongruity, but a longer visual tradition had always used animals to expose the bestial hypocrisy of those who deigned to walk on two feet. Think only of singeries, or “monkey-trick” paintings, a millennia-old visual tradition that was still being practiced in the eighteenth century (Garnier-Pelle, Forray-Carlier, and Anselm 2011). Such paintings depict monkeys, in their comic imitations of human behavior and society, “as a symbol of downgraded humanity” (Duffy 2003: 267). On their surface, the humor of such paintings is largely a product of their comic juxtapositions; but, perhaps at a deeper satiric level, such singeries exposed the cuckooland of man’s pretense to higher being. In that sense, singeries precipitated laughter nominally at animals that always, inevitably, evinced a partially displaced misanthropy. As the caption for one such singerie (Figure 7.2) from 1798 poignantly asked, “Men laugh at Apes, they men contemn; / For what are we, but Apes to them?”

FIGURE 7.2: James Caldwall, Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis (1798). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Whether incongruity was the basis of humor or not, laughter itself remained a problem for some thinkers. The philosopher David Hartley, for instance, agreed that the primary source of “Mirth, Wit, and Humour” was the “apparent and partial Agreements and Disagreements, as in Words, and indirect accidental Circumstances” (1749: 1.440). But for an empiricist like Hartley, who felt we came to our knowledge of things through the Lockean association of ideas, this passion for incongruity could also lead to intellectual dissipation. By hunting after such false associations, he argued, “a Man must by degrees pervert all his Notions of Things themselves.” For Hartley, laughter was not fundamentally antisocial, even if he was also willing to grant that incongruity could encompass our condescending laughter at such things as “the little Mistakes and Follies of Children” (1749: 1.440). The larger problem for Hartley was that laughter had potentially pernicious short- and long-term cognitive effects: it displaced actual thought in the moment and intellectually corrupted those habitually disposed to mirth. As a result, a second set of arguments about the intellectual degradation of incessant laughter, separate from its ethics, also emerged during this period. Some simply worried that frequent and incessant laughter was a kind of cognitive opiate. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge would later remark, laughter “is the most potent Producer of Forgetfulness, of the whole Pharmacopoeia, moral or medicinal” ([1814] 1956–71: 3.506). In some instances, the eighteenth-century opposition to laughter was not only social or intellectual but also aesthetic. As a matter of decorum, the ethics of it aside, Lord Chesterfield argued that “Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill-manners. . . . In my mind there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill-bred, as audible laughter” ([1774] 1992: 72). Chesterfield’s admonition against gross public laughter was perhaps not so odd—Swift, it was said, laughed only twice in his life (Pilkington 1754: 3.155)4—but his views do represent the extreme end of the agelastic spectrum, as Vic Gatrell has shown (2006: 163–5, 170, 176). The “disagreeable noise that it makes” was bad enough, Chesterfield reasoned, but even worse was “the shocking distortion of the face that it occasions” ([1774] 1992: 72). There was simply a synesthetic grotesqueness about audible laughter with its noisy physicality and its horrifying ties to the lower stratum: the booming chortle, the gaping mouth, the contorted face, the epileptic convulsions of the body. It was for good reason, Samuel Butler noted, that “Men cannot laugh heartily without shewing their Teeth,” an involuntary exposure of our essentially animalistic natures (Farley-Hills 1974: 267). Hence too Thomas Worlidge’s unsettling depiction of three misshapen old men laughing (Figure 7.3)—a physiognomic surfacing of self, as if decades of unmitigated cackling had slowly distended their bulbous noses and produced the deformities of their now goblinish faces. The limits of theory: this was the problem philosophers, critics, and writers came back to time and again. Superiority Theory perhaps made perfect sense in

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FIGURE 7.3: Thomas Worlidge, three grotesque heads of big-nosed old men, laughing, print, c. 1720–66. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

some instances, but with its permissive rationalization of the worst tendencies in human nature it also seemed like a cynically reductive account of a much more complicated phenomenon. Incongruity Theory, in turn, gave laughter an intellectual innocence, but seemingly failed to explain those moments of creeping eminence that occasioned so many snickers and guffaws. Nonetheless, over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Incongruity Theory came almost entirely to displace Superiority Theory. As a result, later literary historians have generally accepted Stuart M. Tave’s conclusion that eighteenthand early nineteenth-century writers endorsed, at least philosophically, the rise of “amiable humour” (1960: ix). Indeed, alongside and in tandem with Incongruity Theory a new set of conventions around the philosophy of the

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comic did emerge during this period. But within this Whiggish account, and in the implied laughter of those eighteenth-century readers and audiences who so hungrily consumed the abundant comic and satiric literature of this period, we can also detect the lingering residues of a disconcerting superiority—fleeting moments when the practice of laughter occasionally outpaced, or perhaps lagged behind, the theories that so many writers and philosophers during the Enlightenment were so eager to promote and believe.

LAUGHTER IN PRACTICE: THE LIMITS OF AMIABLE HUMOR For comic and satiric writers and dramatists of the long eighteenth century, the discomfiting awareness that laughter always potentially contained a whiff of vicious antisociality meant that laughter needed not only to be carefully managed but also, very often, awkwardly justified. We can see this anxiety not only in the prefatory apologia of the period—the hand-wringing prologues and epilogues, the declamatory introductions to vaguely satiric novels and jousting mock-epics—but also in carefully worded defenses of satiric attack, all cautious hedges against the lingering malevolence of readerly laughter (Bricker 2014: 911). Eighteenth-century comic and satiric literature complicates any simple story we might tell about the triumph of Incongruity Theory during the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, most scholars have accepted Stuart M. Tave’s conclusion that there was, over the course of the eighteenth century, a pronounced shift from harsh to sympathetic laughter (Marshall 2013: 239). However, as Tave himself noted, his was a study of the “theory” of the comic, not an exhaustive account of laughter in practice (1960: vii–ix). Pungent counterexamples exist and are worth reviewing. Those counterexamples tell a slightly different story about laughter during the Enlightenment: although the theory of laughter underwent a radical reversal—the source of laughter, by the end of the eighteenth century, was predominantly believed to be incongruity—the literary forms that so often occasioned laughter remained at times shockingly Hobbesian. There was, we might say, a form of cognitive dissonance between laughter as it was openly conceived of and theorized in the eighteenth century and laughter as it was practiced in the comic and satiric literature of this same period. In what follows, I offer a few of those counterexamples in an attempt to round out our views of laughter during the eighteenth century, suggesting how contemporary literary practices were sometimes at odds with those same theories that sought to vindicate laughter itself. For many in the eighteenth century, no writer had offered a clearer defense of satiric laughter than John Dryden (Bricker 2017a: 153–9). In his Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693), he argued that satire

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possesses the potential ability to reform either its victims or its readers. “ ’Tis an Action of Virtue to make Examples of Vicious Men,” Dryden reasoned (Dryden [1693] 1956–60: 4.60). “They may and ought to be upbraided with their Crimes and Follies: Both for their own amendment, if they are not yet incorrigible; and for the Terrour of others, to hinder them from falling into those Enormities, which they see are so severely punish’d, in the Persons of others.” Ethically successful works of satire were thus general, not particular, attacking a man’s corrigible foibles rather than the man himself. Moreover, laughter was central to Dryden’s reformative conception of satire. Laughter was the means to the end of reform itself—the spoonful of sugar needed for such corrective medicine. As he wrote, “the best and finest manner of Satire . . . ’Tis that sharp, well-manner’d way, of laughing a Folly out of Countenance” ([1693] 1956–60: 4.81). Such a laughing conception of satire has, in fact, come to inform even today’s literary definitions. Critics and historians have routinely argued that humor, or some sort of comic agent, is what distinguishes satire from mere invective (Marshall 2013: 2–3). But even Dryden was skeptical that laughter alone was enough to reform a reader or victim or that it could be so easily attained. Varro, for instance, was too “studious of laughter,” he reasoned. “[H]is business was more to divert his Reader, than to teach him” (Dryden [1693] 1956–60: 4.47). Even Horace’s “perpetual Grinn” was to some degree ineffective: it was more likely to “anger than amend a Man” ([1693] 1956–60: 4.70). Hutcheson likewise endorsed the reformative potential of laughter, but placed similar limits on it: “smaller vices . . . are more effectually corrected by ridicule, than by grave admonition. Men have been laughed out of faults which a sermon could not reform” (1750: 35). For all of Dryden’s grand theorizing, however, it was particularly difficult to extricate and quarantine the most vicious subspecies of ridicule when present in satiric works. As Dustin Griffin has pungently observed, satirists are “connoisseurs of abuse” (1994: 169). Moreover, for many onlookers, ridicule and satire went hand in hand. As Samuel Johnson put it, “Wit, cohabitating with Malice, had a son named Satire” ([1750] 1969: 3.123–4). Any careful categorization at the level of satiric theory was likely to be stymied in practice (Vilmar 2009: 7–8). One thinks, for instance, of Pope’s vicious attack in An Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot on Lord Hervey—or Sporus, as he was known in the poem: Yet let me flap this Bug with gilded wings, This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings; [. . .] His Wit all see-saw between that and this, Now high, now low, now Master up, now Miss, And he himself one vile Antithesis. Amphibious Thing! that acting either Part,

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The trifling Head, or the corrupted Heart! Fop at the Toilet, Flatt’rer at the Board, Now trips a Lady, and now struts a Lord. Eve’s Tempter thus the Rabbins have exprest, A Cherub’s face, a Reptile all the rest. —Pope [1734] 1963: 608; ll. 309–10, 323–31 Just as awful were Pope’s repeated shots at Hervey’s close friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Interestingly, the (possibly apocryphal) precipitating event was Montagu’s “immoderate fit of laughter” when Pope offered some sort of romantic “declaration” (Montagu 1977: 37). That moment of unbridled laughter led to a series of venomous satiric assaults on “Sappho,” Montagu’s literary namesake, as Valerie Rumbold has catalogued (1989: 156–8). None is perhaps better remembered than Pope’s accusation that Montagu had contracted gonorrhea: From furious Sappho scarce a milder Fate, P-x’d by her Love, and libell’d by her Hate. —[1733] 1963: 616; ll. 83–4 Nonetheless, Montagu seems to have had the last laugh. More than a decade after Pope had died, she showed a young traveler “her Commode, with false back of books, the works of Pope, Swift and Bolingbroke.” “They were the greatest Rascals,” she explained, “but she had the satisfaction of shitting on them every day” (Halsband 1979: 245). Despite their anxiety about laughter, however, satirists tended to follow Dryden, at least publicly, in defending laughter as a critical weapon in the satirist’s arsenal of censure and reform. Pope, for instance, was perfectly optimistic about satiric laughter. As he would later write, in his touchy thirdperson apologia in the Dunciad Variorum, “our Author, in his very laughter, is not indulging his own Ill nature, but only punishing that of others” (Pope [1729] 1963: 323).5 Such defenses of satiric laughter were part of a larger socio-literary agenda not only to elevate satiric practice but also to demonstrate its at least theoretical capacities as an ethical agent of social reform (Bricker 2014: 910–14). As Swift proclaimed, in his tongue-in-cheek self-eulogization, “His satire points at no defect, / But what all mortals may correct” ([1739] 1983: ll. 467–8). Such claims about the moral and ethical functions of satire sought to promote the notion that the satirist, rather than a spiteful sniper fueled by ad hominem animus, was some disinterested Habermasian public servant, almost half-unwilling to skewer for the sake of the public good. As Pope wrote to his friend John Arbuthnot, “To reform and not to chastise, I am afraid is impossible. . . . To attack Vices in the abstract, without touching

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Persons, may be safe fighting indeed, but it is fighting with Shadows” ([1734] 1956: 3.419). Laughter was likewise not only inevitable but also welcome in comic productions, though it too required careful stage managing. Fielding, for instance, worried that laughter was a symptom of antisociality. As he privately wondered in one letter, “[I] am in doubt whether that laughter which entitles to the general Character of Good Humour, be not rather a Sign of an evil than a good Mind” ([1741] 1993: 18). This Mandevillean sourcing of motive—the notion that overt acts implicitly denote the state of one’s mind—Fielding would awkwardly grapple with throughout his career (Bricker 2017b: 65–87). He was also careful to argue in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, for instance, that “The only Source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is Affectation” (Fielding [1742] 1967: 7). Even such a careful delimitation is subtly undermined, however, by the hedge of his narrator’s pregnant parenthesis: the ungovernability of laughter means that, even if we might know its proper objects, forms of ethical laughter could always be subverted by its involuntariness. Moreover, as Simon Dickie has shown, for all of Fielding’s attentive handling of his readers’ laughter, “It was almost impossible to convince people that an absent-minded idealist like Adams was not there to be laughed at. . . . And these mistakes (if that is the right word) are typical of early reactions to the book as a whole: to a vast majority of its initial readers, Joseph Andrews was farcical and irreligious. Many simply ignored its claims to moral or literary seriousness” (2011: 158). One of the questions that crops up again and again in satiric and comic works from this period is how to isolate the source of one’s laughter—how to separate and silo off one’s laughter at the embodied object of humor from the incongruity that was ostensibly its precipitating cause. For many satiric and comic writers, context became the critical determining factor in the ethics of laughter, even when that laughter seemingly reinforced the Hobbesian forms of superiority and denigration that they, like Incongruity Theorists before them, were so eager to avoid. Fielding, for instance, was meticulous in separating the affectation that was the cause of laughter from the affectatious individual. As he put it in his Preface to Joseph Andrews, with all of his usual argumentative twists and backbends, Surely he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness, Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any Man living, who meets a dirty Fellow riding through the Streets in a Cart, is struck with an Idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he should see the same Figure descend from his Coach and Six, or bolt from his Chair with his Hat under his Arm, he would then begin to laugh, and with justice. In the same manner, were we to enter a poor House, and behold a wretched Family shivering with Cold

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and languishing with Hunger, it would not incline us to Laughter, (at least we must have very diabolical Natures, if it would); but should we discover there a Grate, instead of Coals, adorned with Flowers, empty Plate or China Dishes on the Side-board, or any other Affectation of Riches and Finery, either on their Persons or in their Furniture; we might then indeed be excused, for ridiculing so fantastical an Appearance. Much less are natural Imperfections the Objects of Derision: but when Ugliness aims at the Applause of Beauty, or Lameness endeavours to display Agility; it is then that these unfortunate Circumstances, which at first moved our Compassion, tend only to raise our Mirth. —Fielding [1742] 1967: 9 In his careful delimitation of the “true Ridiculous,” Fielding anxiously sought to isolate his readers’ laughter, even when they seemingly laughed at objects deserving of our sympathy rather than our scorn. According to him, the supposedly inferior were only coincident with laughter to the extent that their inferiority was thrown into relief by the disparity between who they are and who, through affectation, they wished to appear. A poor man was only funny when he sought to appear rich; the ugly woman, when she appeared vain; the crippled old man, when he attempted grace. We are not laughing at them, Fielding carefully and perhaps even wishfully asserted; we are laughing at their affectations. Later eighteenth-century satiric poetry, despite the growing theorization of amiable laughter after mid-century, was often just as cruel as anything that Dryden, Pope, or Swift published decades earlier. As David Fairer has trenchantly observed, the eighteenth century was “an impolite world that talked much about politeness” (2003: 2). But little surprise. Particular satire had always been an experiment in casual defamation. As one poet quipped in his scatological history of satire, A Sequel to the Dunciad: The famous British Shitters: In filthy and excrementitious Vein, Our modern uninstructed Authors strain; . . . Insipid their Productions, in a word, The same in Substance, as a vulgar T—d. —1729: 22 In discussing satiric laughter during the late eighteenth century, one thinks perhaps of John Wolcot, better known both then and today by his pseudonym, Peter Pindar. A respected satirist for more than two decades starting in the early 1780s—William Wordsworth, for instance, held him alongside Nicolas BoileauDespréaux and Pope as the “great names” in satire ([1796] 1967–93: 1.156)—

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Pindar today has been largely forgotten. His works were just as cutting and personal as anything before them. Take his Lyric Odes, to the Royal Academicians for 1782, a relentless skewering of the Royal Academy, “The nursing dame of many a painting ape,” in which he first used his new pseudonym (Pindar 1782: 3). Pindar has choice words for a host of painters, and especially Thomas Gainsborough, for his rustic tableau, Girl with Pigs (1782): And now, O Muse, with song so big, Turn Round to Gainsb’rough’s girl and pig, Or pig and girl I rather should have said: The pig in white, I must allow, Is really a well painted sow: I wish to say the same thing of the maid. —Pindar 1782: 7 No figure was beyond Pindar’s scoffing reproach, not Thomas Paine and certainly not one of his favorite whipping boys, James Boswell, especially for his fame-grubbing off of Johnson (Pindar 1786). Peter Pindar was also not alone in such attacks. Equally famous—and just as cruelly personal—were Charles Churchill’s satires, built so manifestly on the models of both Dryden, whom Churchill openly acknowledged as his poetic predecessor, and Pope. A prominent member of the Nonsense Club, which included Bonnell Thornton, George Colman, William Cowper, and Robert Lloyd, Churchill was virtually unknown until his mock-heroic poem The Rosciad was published in 1761 (Bertelsen 1986: 75ff). A wide-ranging attack on actors, acting and theatrical critics, the poem is built around a thespian succession, from the Roman actor Quintus Roscius Gallus, a touchstone of good acting from at least the Renaissance on (Hall 2002: 419–34), to David Garrick, who is praised and eventually crowned by two judges, William Shakespeare and Johnson. The poem turns out to be mockmock-heroic: the succession is actually desirable, from one great ancient actor to his worthy, modern successor. To get to the praise, though, Churchill takes the long route, savaging dozens of Garrick’s contemporaries along the way. His nasty shot at Thady Fitzpatrick, for instance, was Sporus all over again—a vaguely homophobic allusion to his purported “fribbling” (as Johnson defined it in his Dictionary, a fribbler was “one who professes rapture for the woman, and dreads her consent”). Garrick had similar fun at Fitzpatrick’s expense, first in his farce Miss in her Teens (1747), where he was Fribble, then in the appropriately named Fribbleriad (1761). Churchill took the joke to its furthest logical extension, breaking the butterfly on the wheel. The sexually amorphous Fitzpatrick attempts to occupy the seat of judgment, though with little success:

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A Motley Figure, of the Fribble Tribe, [. . .] Came simp’ring on; to ascertain whose sex Twelve sage impannell’d Matrons would perplex. Nor Male, nor Female; Neither, and yet both; Of Neuter Gender, tho’ of Irish growth; A six-foot suckling, mincing in Its gait; Affected, peevish, prim, and delicate; Fearful it seem’d, tho’ of Athletic make, Lest brutal breezes should too roughly shake Its tender form, and savage motion spread O’er Its pale cheeks, the horrid manly red. Much did It talk, in its own pretty phrase. Of Genius and of Taste, of Play’rs and Plays; Much too of writings, which Itself had wrote, Of special merit, tho’ of little note, For Fate, in a strange humour, had decreed That what It wrote, none but Itself should read; Much too It chatter’d of Dramatic Laws, Misjudging Critics, and misplac’d applause, Then, with a self-complacent jutting air, It smil’d, It smirk’d, It wriggled to the chair; And, with an awkward briskness not its own, Looking around, and perking on the throne, Triumphant seem’d, when that strange savage Dame, Known but to few, or only known by name, Plain Common Sense appear’d, by Nature there Appointed, with plain Truth, to guard the chair. —Churchill [1761] 1956: ll. 141–68 From there, Churchill gains speed, working his way through actor after actor, minutely documenting their every failing, including their weak voices, lack of grace, clumsy movements, faulty memories, butchering of playscripts, and inability to wed nature to art. Churchill continued on this vein for three more years, until his untimely death in 1764 at the age of thirty-two. But during this short stretch he produced quickly (too quickly, his critics pointed out) a series of immensely churlish if riotously funny personal satires. Despite the manifest cruelty of so many of Churchill’s satires—and the general disdain of the reviewers for their “personal reflections”—his poetry was both popular and lauded. Most readers had to admit that his poems were actually quite good. Later, Lord Byron and William Cowper would list him among the century’s greatest satirists, lamenting only his early death, rather than his bent for the

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personal. One wonders how our late eighteenth-century histories of satire, and by extension of laughter itself, might have been different if Churchill had lived past his thirty-second year. Pindar and Churchill represent two notable late eighteenth-century satirists from a catalogue that could run to dozens of pages.6 The larger point to all of this is that we ought to temper our accounts of the shift from Superior to Incongruous laughter during the late eighteenth century, especially in the presence of such wild disparities between philosophical theory and literary practice. Hutcheson’s reconceptualization of humor was built cautiously around the recognition that not all laughter was superior, a purposeful overcorrection against philosophical accounts that entirely neglected the burlesque inappropriateness that was seemingly required of all humor. Most theorists from this period, in fact, proved remarkably evenhanded: even the most vocal proponents of Incongruity Theory noted, with a hint of regret, that comic disparity was often inextricably alloyed with a noxious superiority. As Hutcheson himself conceded, laughter in practice tended to jumble together those elements that philosophers were so eager to isolate: any little Accident to which we have joined the Idea of Meanness, befalling a Person of great Gravity, Ability, Dignity, is a matter of Laughter, for the very same reason; thus the strange Contortions of the Body in a Fall, the dirtying of a decent Dress, the natural Functions which we study to conceal from sight, are matter of Laughter, when they occur to Observation in Persons of whom we have high Ideas: nay, the very human Form has the Ideas of Dignity so generally joined with it, that even in ordinary Persons such mean Accidents are matter of Jest; but still the Jest is increased by the Dignity, Gravity, or Modesty of the Person; which shews that it is this Contrast, or Opposition of Ideas of Dignity and Meanness, which is the Occasion of Laughter. —Hutcheson [1729] 1971: 7.115–60 Mark Akenside would later return to this precise example, finding in it a degree of moral censure: “the ridicule would [be] irresistible and just, because the incongruity [i.e., between the gentleman’s pretensions and his bedraggling] is real” (Houpt [1944] 1970: 55). This is not to deny the general philosophical current of this era: Incongruity Theory came, in large measure, to displace Superiority Theory. But that change was gradual and uneven, especially in this period’s literary and readerly practices. For so many living during the last half of the eighteenth century, Incongruity Theory felt more like a wishful conception of what so many wanted laughter to be rather than an accurate account of what so many laughed at. Nonetheless, early versions of Incongruity Theory served a critical function and perhaps even produced an essential fiction of the eighteenth century by

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shifting the argument around laughter from one of essential human nastiness to a mere pleasure in burlesque mismatches. Whether Hobbes’s ideas about laughter were a combination of “palpable Absurdity” and “ill-natur’d Nonsense,” as one commentator put it, his arguments needed to be rejected ([Arbuckle] 1734: 1.78). Moreover, such writers sought to fill the vacuum that opposition to Superiority Theory entailed. As Tave has observed, in the wake of Hobbes many writers “were intent upon denying the unpleasant qualities of laughter, confuting the arguments that tend to equate it with self-love, ridicule, and animosity” (1960: 56). They were, instead, “eager to set up their own counter-theory to prove its amiable nature.” The intensity with which this minor argument in Hobbes’s corpus was singled out for attack, however, perhaps signals less a uniform belief during the Enlightenment in the wholesale wrongness of Superiority Theory than a creeping awareness that Hobbes had perhaps rightly singled out the true ugliness of both laughter and human nature itself. When combating Hobbes, critics like James Beattie, for instance, were flabbergasted that such superior laughter could be endorsed by not only an egoist like Bernard Mandeville but also someone like Joseph Addison (1776: 332–5).7 By the end of the century general views of laughter had, nonetheless, radically shifted. What had once been a socially divisive and repellant physiological response to difference had come in large measure by the nineteenth century to resemble our own notions of laughter: not only was laughter an innocuous response to incongruity; it was also a symptom of sociability and a cure for melancholy. Hutcheson, for instance, suggested that the “very contagiousness” of group laughter was a symptom of a deeper interpersonal connection we all share (1750: 27). “Our whole frame is so sociable, that one merry countenance may diffuse cheerfulness to many,” he reasoned. In this sense, Hutcheson anticipated a more recent understanding of jokes in particular. For the philosopher Ted Cohen, the end goal of a joke is laughter itself, which creates between the teller and the listener a “community of amusement” (1999: 29). For Hutcheson, moreover, laughter itself could lower antisocial barriers: “We are disposed by Laughter to a good opinion of the person who raises it,” with the all-important proviso, “if neither ourselves nor our friends are made the butt.” As a result, he concluded, “Laughter is none of the smallest bonds of common friendship” (1750: 27). Shifting views of laughter were also in part the product of newfound philosophical and literary discourses of affective propriety—a newly sociable and amiable view of laughter found its wellspring, if not wholly convincingly, in the rise of sentimentality, with its anxious negotiation between sociable ideals and the queasily antisocial behaviors that were seemingly endemic to human nature (see, e.g., Dickie 2011: 14, 116, 224). In a similar manner, this rethinking of laughter, which had always been viewed through the prism of physiological

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FIGURE 7.4: George Cruickshank, Laugh & Grow Fat [1818?]. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

involuntariness, found itself like sensibility at the intersections of mind and medicine. “Laugh and grow fat” went the adage (see Figure 7.4): a psychosomatic merging of mind and body and a salutary corrective to one’s own lugubrious melancholia.8 Laughter, this new theory went, was not only sociable but also good for you. By the end of the century, laughter really was the best medicine.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

Ethics MELVYN NEW

From a literary point of view, ethics can be defined simply as the values authors reveal in their writings. Serious authors will rarely publish works they deem “unethical”; readers, both contemporary or centuries later, may find a work to be so, but one would expect authors to object. To take a fringe example from the end of our period, the Marquis de Sade may be said honestly to have revealed in his writings the sadism that subsequent psychiatry has suggested is buried in us all. The barbarisms of twentieth-century techniques of incarceration, from stalags and concentration camps to the American prison system, might well convince readers that his writings concerning this aspect of human nature were, in his eyes, an ethical project, however appalling we find them. Honesty is certainly a primary aspect of authorial ethics, the ability to reflect oneself or the world as one has experienced it—or might want to experience it. Almost any other ethical notion we might suggest would be subsumed by honesty: “responsibility” and “righteousness,” for example, as ethical terms are easily reduced to “honesty”: writers must be honest in order to be responsible and righteous in their own minds. As for love or charity, even the fiercest satirical writers hope their work will somehow do good. This is obviously a reductive view of ethics, but it will suffice: the authors discussed below would have strenuously objected to labeling their literary efforts unethical or even unhelpful. Laurence Sterne speaks for them all: “every time a man smiles,—but much more so, when he laughs . . . it adds something to this Fragment of Life” (Sterne 1978: 1.n.p). Between 1650 and 1800 transatlantic society inched very slowly away from the social and political structure in which Church and State were closely identified, to one in which they were distinctly separated. It is no accident, then, that the 197

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first amendment to the American Constitution (1787), the most enlightened political document of the period, reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” That simple sentence represents Europe’s exhaustion after three centuries of religious warfare between Catholics, Protestants, and other Protestants. While both sides still believed in their own legitimacy, the collective decision not forcibly to convert those who thought differently was significant. Religious toleration, which today we associate with the injunction to “love one’s neighbor,” is a relative newcomer to religious practice; if, after all, wrong beliefs doom others to eternal damnation, is it not a loving act to convert them to right beliefs, by persuasion if possible, force if necessary? Enlightenment suggested otherwise. Underwriting this change in the way religion was conceived were numerous motivating ideas emerging from the period’s theologians, philosophers, historians, scientists, social observers, and literary artists.1 First, the notion of the human being as rational and perfectible took hold, in contrast to the previously dominant notion of original sin and our essentially irrational and sinful nature. The new faith in rationality was aided by science and its reduction of superstition and false beliefs by careful observation and experiment. For example, telescopes could reduce Earth’s sun to a tiny star amid countless similar stars, while microscopes could see an infinite world of activity in a drop of water; both perspectives provided a new sense of human proportion that plays a significant role in the age’s comedy. Enlightenment became, then, the need either to separate religion from rational thought, or to reconcile them. Reconciliation proved difficult, however, in the face of the seemingly irrational beliefs (the Mysteries) of Christianity, including Resurrection, Trinity, Holy Communion, and the existence of an afterlife. These essential elements of seventeenth-century Christianity became suspect under the glare of empiricism and science. Moreover, this new perspective on humanity combined with the new faith in science to create a utopian urge in political thought, the belief that through education, widening representation (equality), and economic prosperity, the state and its inhabitants could constantly be altered for the better. Faith in humankind and its everimproving future is Enlightenment’s guiding ethical principle. The best writers, no matter how revolutionary, will root themselves in the past, and it is to be expected that comic writers, despite Enlightenment’s forwardlooking optimism, often looked behind. For example, Restoration comic playwrights, however innovative, looked back to Shakespeare and Molière. Still, given multiple options to begin a discussion of the ethics of Enlightenment comedy, two other authors, both considered pre-Enlightenment, are even more relevant to the discussion: Cervantes and Milton. And to push even further back in time, Erasmus’s Encomium Moriae (In Praise of Folly) might well be considered the theological underpinning for much of Enlightenment comedy.

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Don Quixote is an obvious choice, being one of the most profound works of comedy in the western tradition. It is difficult to find comic writers after Cervantes who fail to pay homage, but perhaps the most important aspect of Cervantic influence between 1650 and 1800 is the shifting attitude toward Cervantes’s hero, a shift accurately mirroring Enlightenment’s ethical evolution. Paradise Lost, on the other hand, will seem an odd choice; its title alone announces tragedy, and its subject matter, the loss of Eden because of the original sin, hardly seems a source for comedy. Nonetheless, essential elements of eighteenth-century comedy can be found in this Christian epic, read and reread by every author during this period. Paradise Lost explores the theological mystery of an omnipotent and merciful God presiding over an imperfect world, inhabited by imperfect creatures. How did human beings separate themselves from the eternal and perfect Creator, and how can that breach be mended? Milton shared with his Christian community the answer provided by Adam’s fall from grace, and the sacrifice of the second Adam, Jesus Christ, which reconciled God to the world by belief in his Son. This restoration of grace is imaged in comedy primarily by the happy ending of marriage, the union of a good (or reformed) hero and heroine reflecting the larger divine comedy, when humanity and God are again united. It would be an error to assume that Milton or others necessarily believed in a literal Garden and equally erroneous to assume they understood the Fall and its consequences as myth or allegory. Religious belief takes place within a broad spectrum between blind literalism and blind figuralism, and so also comedy operates in a spectrum that allows us to relish the “perfect marriage,” while still knowing its impossibility in a world governed by time, chance, and error. Hovering over the best comedy is an awareness of our mundane world of imperfection, our “comedy of errors,” in which “all’s well that ends well” is a foreshadowing of the happiness that might occur, but only after death and judgment. Whether the last act of a play or last page of a novel, comedy always stops just before returning us to reality. We are temporarily in Eden, but only until we shut the book or walk out of the theater, and return to the world of time and accident, “looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld / Of Paradise, so late thir happy seat” (Milton 1957: 12.641–2, 468). The second element of Paradise Lost found in Enlightenment comedy is that evil in the world (Milton’s Satan) exists only by the “will / And high permission of all-ruling Heaven,” so that he will “Heap on himself damnation” (Milton 1957: 1.211–15, 216–17). Satan is the dupe of the comedy of Paradise Lost, God’s instrument, indeed puppet, both when he tempts Adam and Eve and when he serves to expose the folly of willful separation from God. Evil-doers in Enlightenment comedy often embrace the same error, that their will is autonomous, free from the restrictions of church or family. The urge to sow chaos by tempting others to similar freedoms is one pervasive way comic villains

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FIGURE 8.1: Francis Hayman, “The Expulsion,” illustration for Paradise Lost (1749); reprinted in PL 1668–1968: Three Centuries of Commentary, ed. Earl Miner et al. Photo courtesy of Harold and Mary Jean Hanson Rare Book Collection, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida.

mimic Milton’s Satan. Theologically and artistically, however, these villains are trapped by logic: they think they can overpower omnipotence, whether God’s or the author’s. For believing Christians, despite the tragedies implicit in a world where sin and death hold sway, evil remains an absurdity. For knowing readers, despite all the advantages accruing to the villain, the literary work in their hands will signal in numerous ways that it is comedy and hence that the villain is a selfdeceiving fool. If tragedy is captured in Gloucester’s observation that “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, / They kill us for their sport” (KL 4.1.36–7), comedy offers the opposite, an immanent and caring God: “Are not two sparrows

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sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Mt. 10:29). The stage exit of comic villains is telling: “Curses! Foiled again!” The virtuous, on the other hand, have us believing, as the curtain falls, that they will live “happily ever after.” Both are literary clichés, simplicities that serious literature will complicate. Cervantes recognized them as the guiding principles of romance, stories of virtuous knights triumphing over villains, protecting innocence, and, after hundreds of perilous adventures, ending with hero and heroine living “happily ever after.” To believe that such stories mirror reality, as does Quixote, is madness, a confusion of an imperfect world with our dreams of perfection. The quest to restore the world to its original prelapsarian state is to assume the mantle of Christ, to become the second Adam; it is a self-deception, a failure to acknowledge human limitations that in tragedy lead to irreversible consequences, but in comedy to reversible and hence laughable ones. Early in Cervantes’s opening volume, Quixote recites at length to a company of shepherds the perfections he plans to restore, a world in which there is “no fraud, no deceit, no malice intermixed with plain-dealing truth: justice . . . undisturbed and unbiassed by interest and favour, which now impair, confound, and persecute her . . .” (Cervantes 2003: 74). The speech precedes the first of many similar inset tales, often masterful versions of the idyllic fictions he writes against: here Chrysostom dies of love, rejected by the beautiful Marcella. Replete with shepherds, poetry, a funeral procession, and Quixote’s interlardings of his readings in romance, the story is abruptly halted when Marcella insists on what might be called an empirical analysis: a lover’s desire for her in no way necessitates reciprocation. Indeed, she finds the object of her love in nature rather than in her suitors, and demands the right to reject them. In brief, she speaks eloquently both for and against Quixote’s mission. She is, in the knight’s words, “the only person in the universe who lives in such a chaste and laudable intention” (Cervantes 2003: 94). Both Quixote and Chrysostom are willing to die in order to fulfill their desire for a beautiful, harmonious, and peaceful world, whether found in the books read by the Don, or in the woman loved by the shepherd, but their desire for a return to Eden entails no reciprocal response from the world. Indeed, as Quixote all too often discovers, his attempts arouse hostility and comic dismissal from those he intends to convert to his own foolish vision of the good. On the other hand, Cervantes and his readers surely knew these scriptural verses: “Where is the wise? . . . hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?” (1 Cor. 1:20). The verse is at the heart of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, and should be recalled in recognizing both writers as foundational to the ethics of Enlightenment comedy. Erasmus states the proposition thus: “the entire Christian religion seems to bear a certain natural affinity to folly, and to relate far less clearly to wisdom . . . . [Y]ou see that no fools are more distracted than

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FIGURE 8.2: William Hogarth (1697–1764), “The Funeral of Chyrstom & Marcella vindicating herself.” Illustration from Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Photo by: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.

those whose ardent zeal for Christian piety has wholly eaten them up. They discard their belongings, swallow insults, put up with trickery, . . . subsist on fasts, vigils, tears, toils, and humiliations. They shun life, seek death . . . as if their souls existed somewhere else, not in their bodies” (Erasmus 1989: 82–3). The conclusion of Praise of Folly is replete with difficult ironies and paradoxes but importantly it opens a counterintuitive pathway for the appraisal of Quixote as anything but a mere fool; he now becomes, theologically, a “fool for Christ.” As the Enlightenment progresses, the two “fools” will merge into a composite. Quixote becomes an admired, indeed beloved, but secular idealist, a stubborn reformer who, in the words of his twentieth-century incarnation, will dream “impossible dreams.” Where Erasmus’s fool attempts to gain salvation by

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reenacting the simplicity and sacrifice of Christ, Enlightenment’s fool wages war on the ills of the world in the belief that humankind can be saved by human effort. No longer a fool, no longer a fool for Christ, the new Quixote is a force for social and political good. It is no accident that the Enlightenment followed centuries of religious warfare, culminated in the American and French revolutions, and perhaps died in the twentieth century at the hands of secularism’s triumph in the likes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. If, then, Paradise Lost looks to the past to explain how error and death now shape a world so unlike our conception of the ideal (Eden), Don Quixote looks ahead, at least in the interpretation of the newly enlightened, to the creation of a new Eden through social, political, and economic change. Despite this difference, Milton and Cervantes significantly share the same literary device to lodge their ethical comedy, the love story, Adam and Eve, obviously, Chrysostom and Marcella, as representative of many ensuing couples. Whether characterized as love or lust, rational or irrational, spiritual or sexual, desire for oneness with another forms the central issue of almost all stage comedy and most prose fiction written between 1660 and 1800. Every society, of course, invests heavily in controlling mating rituals, and authors have always reflected that concern. Moreover, that love poetry in the west shares its vocabulary with scripture is no accident: everlasting love is the hope and promise of both. Two of the finest examples of Restoration comedy, Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675) and Congreve’s Way of the World (1700), well illustrate the ethics of comedy by way of the mating ritual during Enlightenment’s early years. The central figure of Country Wife is Harry Horner, a serial seducer who discovers an easy method to satisfy his appetites. By pretending to impotence, he wins the trust of husbands, which enables sufficient access to their wives to inform them, by word and deed, that he is fully able to service them, an important word, for Horner and the women he mounts act more like animals in heat than human beings in love. The customs of polite approach codified by tradition is portrayed as hypocrisy, embodied in the self-named women of the “Virtuous Club,” who regard only the appearance of virtue as important. What is noted about men in this world, that they “are the contraries to that they wou’d seem,” is equally true of its women (Wycherley [1675]1979: 257). The play is licentious, filled with bawdy innuendos and ridicule of innocence and marriage; it is also very funny. Wycherley solicits laughter, but also ethical understanding: the recently married naïve country-wife, Margery Pinchwife, rushes to embrace the false knowledge Horner provides, but for most in the audience, he represents an uncontrollable obsession with sex, comedy’s surest way to indicate our fallen nature. The climax (ill-chosen word) of the play is the famous china scene (4.3), where after satisfying (off-stage) one Virtuous Club member with a piece of his “china” he must confess to the next importunate mistress: “Upon my honour I

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have none left now” (322). While the women crave animal-like consummation from Horner (“we think wildness in a man, as desireable a quality, as in a Duck, or Rabbet; a tame man, foh” [343]), Horner has in fact been reduced from man to animal to a worn-out machine. Like Milton’s Satan (Horner’s name refers to cuckolding, but perhaps also to Satan’s horned image), he is the dupe of his own scheme, his “perfect” way to unending satisfaction. What he encounters, however, is the equal desire of women: in a fallen world of unbridled human appetite, the devil is worked to death trying to satisfy insatiable desires. Wycherley is certainly not preaching a sermon on continence, but within the ethical framework his audience carried into the theater, he effectively dramatizes the self-defeating nature of lust and pride, not with threats of damnation but with bawdy ridicule. The dream of infinite sexual conquest becomes the reality of an exhausted stud and his stable of demanding mares, both never satisfied in a world that offers only incomplete and time-bound pleasure. Wycherley’s ethical base belongs to his century, and, although condemned by some moralists because of his sexual frankness (perhaps “Virtuous Club” members), his vision is quite in harmony with sermons from the pulpit. One of Wycherley’s most important ethical insights was to provide women with as much sexual appetite as men, a fair share of the inheritance of original sin. Congreve’s achievement was to provide women with knowledge and wit equal to men’s, but these gifts are used to control appetite (their own and that of others) in order to produce that “other Eden,” a perfect marriage. To do this, a woman needs to know “the way of the world,” and have the wit to defend herself, but since knowledge comes from experience, and wit most often in Restoration comedy from jaded skepticism, the virginal and hopeful heroine must find other sources. The stage answer was grace, a word equally useful for describing natural gifts or supernatural virtue. In creating his heroine, Millamant, Congreve provided her with the ability to escape the labyrinth of the postlapsarian world, where time, chance, and change endanger every hope of living “happily ever after.” Moreover, in her world the strong prey on the weak, the knowing on the innocent, and, in the gender interaction of the period, men on women. To make her situation even more dangerous, Millamant has one particular weakness, her love for Mirabell, an experienced man of the town. Physical grace makes Millamant desirable, but spiritual grace provides the “soul equality” of religious doctrine (before God, male and female souls are indistinguishable and hence equal) that served protofeminists a century before Enlightenment’s political arguments took hold—arguments that, despite best intentions, often diminished women by idealizing them. Congreve champions Millamant’s cause in the brilliant “proviso” scene, in which, after setting forth her many conditions for a balanced and rational marriage, she consents, perhaps, to “dwindle into a Wife” (Congreve [1700] 2011: 2.184). When Mirabell exits, however, she voices her true feelings:

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“Well, If Mirabell shou’d not make a good Husband, I am a lost thing;——for I find I love him violently” (2.187). The most important line in the play, it demonstrates Millamant’s capacity for both love and self-control, her claim on a “perfect” marriage. However, as is typical of comedy, we are not shown that marriage; Millamant has waged her battle against the world of sin, but time will move the couple further and further from the play’s “happily ever after,” each new day filled with changes and chances. The pleasure of Way of the World is Millamant, a testament to our redemptive responsiveness to graciousness. In many ways, she begins the rehabilitation of Quixote from a romance-ridden fool to an idealist capable of creating a better world. Congreve’s audience still believed the world could be redeemed only by faith in the Son, but it also wanted to believe that extraordinary goodness and love, in imitation of Christ, could make a difference. Way of the World reaffirms this dual ethical structure: full redemption awaits death and judgment, but in this pilgrim’s progress that is life, Gospel lessons do count, and God’s grace is available to those opening themselves to love. For the many who find this account of Restoration comedy too pious for the comic Muse, a discussion of satire as comedy will seem even further afield. Nonetheless, because Enlightenment Britain saw satire reach an unparalleled zenith, it is important to recognize that, despite rebukes of meanness and illtemper, satirists have always been among the best comic writers in the literary canon. For example, Pope’s mock-heroic Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714) echoes Cervantes’s comic discord between the elevations of romance (or epic) and the realities of life, producing both humor and ethical concern in Belinda’s failure accurately to measure her own insignificance. Because disproportion so often informs the ethics of comedy and satire, this early poem foreshadows many of Pope’s later works, although it is Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) that epitomizes the comedy of disproportion. One recalls most obviously the Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians, but in book IV Swift vividly complicates Enlightenment aspirations with a choice that critics have not yet unraveled: are we Yahoos or Houyhnhnms? At worst we are capable of sinking to animalistic depths (witness Horner), at best of moving toward, but never reaching, perfection (witness Millamant). Whenever we diminish or inflate ourselves we become objects of ridicule, but readers who find only harsh condemnation without comic sympathy in book IV miss something of Swift’s ethical design. Like Balaam and his ass (Num. 22–24), human beings are capable of blindness and insight; unable to see the “angel of the Lord” that his beast sees, Balaam is nonetheless enabled to articulate to the Moabs the words of God. Milton has the Angel Michael take the fallen Adam to a hilltop to see the promise of Christ (book 11); similarly, Balaam is sent to a high place to receive the preserving words of God on Israel’s behalf. Gulliver, sent to an island governed by rational horses, is able to return

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not merely to condemn mankind, but with a promise as well: there is a path back to divine perfection, though not in the pure rationality of the Houyhnhnms. Swift ultimately shares with Milton the divine comedy that shapes a believing Christian’s view, first, of this world, an awareness that after Christ’s sacrifice, we are ourselves now animals capable of right reason (grace), and then of the next world, an understanding that our acceptance (or avoidance) of the gracious gift of right reason will be judged. It is important, however, not to confuse this promise of future glory with Enlightenment’s promise of present triumph. For both Pope and Swift, an inflated sense of self was the primary sin of modern mankind, often particularized by Pope as failed authorship, by Swift as failed religion. Their reflections on the so-called war between Ancients and Moderns epitomize their response to this Enlightenment promise. To believe that modern knowledge, whether scientific, theological, literary, or political, was on the highway to human omniscience was culpable and comical, sinful and ridiculous. When the bad writers of The Dunciad (1742) receive their inspiration from Jove’s odorous evacuations or engage in a “pissing contest,” we find Pope’s laughter as well as his “savage indignation” (Pope [1742] 1963: 2.83ff., 2.157ff; 738–9, 741–2).2 Similarly, when Swift shocks readers of A Tale of a Tub (1704), the best satire ever written on the mindset of Enlightenment, by suggesting that new and better religious doctrines will arise from a “Pair of Bellows” applied to the preacher’s “breech,” with the result that “their Doctrines and Opinions” will now be delivered “by Eructation” (Swift [1704] 2010: 100), we should recognize not only his effort to defend traditional doctrines but also his absolute delight in constructing a ludicrous image. That both Pope and Swift use the body to ridicule Enlightenment pretensions to reason and progress is significant: the body, its physical appetites and final disposal (“dust to dust”), is a certain check to the inflated claims of a flawed mind and corrupted spirit, the results of original sin. The ethics of comedy and satire merge, both finding unity in undermining schemes, whether shaped as political actions, scientific projects, or religious reformations, that promise vast improvements by somehow changing our mental, social, or spiritual capacities. These are judged quixotic efforts that ignore our inability, autonomously, to undo the failure in the Garden. In one brilliant couplet, John Dryden captures this sentiment: “The tampering world is subject to this curse, / To physic their disease into a worse” (Dryden 1987: ll.809–10, 198). Dryden’s poem is a political allegory structured, significantly, as a demonic temptation of innocence to sally forth and challenge rightful authority in the name of “doing good.” Enlightenment satirists rarely escaped the influence of Milton and Cervantes in setting forth the antirevolutionary value system against which they measured the aspirational rhetoric of worldly progress. One might be tempted to suggest that comedy and satire thrive only in opposition to the dominant trends of any era—a check and balance, through

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FIGURE 8.3: Jonathan Swift, Tale of a Tub, illustration “The Tub Preacher.” Photo by Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo.

laughter and measure, to whatever is society’s prevailing direction. Hence, while Restoration comedies and the satires of Pope and Swift are considered among the finest literary achievements of their era, it is perhaps to be expected that stage comedy and satire (verse and prose) would fade in importance as Enlightenment, despite their efforts, takes hold. However, while some literary modes languish, others flourish, and none more so than the emerging genre of the novel, the literary form that finds great nourishment in Enlightenment principles. Four strands are joined in what we can define as a comedy that promotes rather than denigrates these principles: (1) Locke’s political philosophy of toleration and equality, along with his epistemology, which opened a space for autonomous personality to prosper; (2) Newton’s scientific breakthroughs, ushering in an age of empirical truth-telling; (3) the Earl of Shaftesbury’s philosophy of optimism toward human sensibility (sentiment); and (4) Christian theology’s gradual attenuation of the doctrine of original sin under the combined influence of Arminian and Pelagian tendencies, culminating

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in Methodism’s encouragement of a return to oneness with God by means of extraordinary but available human efforts. None of these strands is in itself ethical or unethical; hence, writers who believed in Enlightenment values certainly considered themselves as ethical as those who did not. This observation perhaps undercuts the categorical validity of an “ethics of Enlightenment comedy.” The great works of literature mentioned herein were all written by authors convinced their vision of life was ethical, no matter how greatly they differed from each other in form, thought, and content; the lesson we might take from this is that our own ethical system may not matter very much when weighing literary achievement. Shaftesbury’s social optimism and the ebbing of the importance of original sin are of particular significance because they opened the way to the sensibility and sentimentalism that came to dominate character portraits in mid- and latecentury drama and fiction. Stage comedy found it particularly difficult to thrive in an age dominated by the self-approving celebration of feeling hearts and awakening sensibilities; being human was conflated with being humane, and the laughable became the lovable. The Tatler and Spectator (1709–14) essays of Addison and Steele were adept at popularizing this new vision of humanity, but it was Steele’s highly successful comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722) that set the pattern for the remainder of the century. Shirley Strum Kenny well summarizes its ethical innovations: “the doctrine of benevolence, the theory that doing good for others brings joy to the heart of the doer, with the corollary notion that weeping for others in their distress is also ennobling . . . . [Steele] preferred to address himself to the goodness of the heart” (Kenny 1968: xix). The challenge of making successful stage comedies out of sentimentalism proved daunting; even the best later comedies, Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Sheridan’s Rivals (1775) and School for Scandal (1777), are reprisals of Restoration characters softened by sensibilities almost inimical to comedy. Although theatergoing remained popular throughout the century, few playwrights achieved enduring success. We may perhaps suggest that as stage comedy became more difficult to write, the novel took its place as the primary purveyor of both comedy and sentiment; it was certainly the most successful genre by century’s end. Two novelistic masterpieces of mid-century England are of particular importance to the ethics of comedy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4). Fielding makes our Miltonic parallel easy: Tom is sent into exile from Paradise Hall, the result of his own follies and the machinations of the evil Blifil. A third cause is equally important, the misjudgments of the Hall’s master, the good Mr. Allworthy. Although a godlike presence in the novel, he is actually quite vulnerable to deception and errors in judgment; despite good intentions, perfect justice is demonstrated to be impossible in our fallen world.

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Like Quixote, Tom battles the world with his honesty (naïveté) and good will; he is beaten as often as he triumphs, and within a few chapters of the end, because of his inability to avoid sexual indiscretions, he has possibly committed incest and murder, and is about to be hanged. At the same time, following Steele’s new pattern, Tom is good at heart, a young man who must learn—as he pursues Sophia (i.e., Wisdom)—that in a fallen world discretion and self-control are necessary to achieve happiness. Without these mundane safeguards Tom is vulnerable to the envy and false testimony of his enemies, as well as to the erroneous judgments of his friends. The comedy of Tom Jones is that all Tom’s travails are resolved by the adroitness of authorial plotting. The author plays God, his plot mirroring divine intervention. At the same time, Fielding’s ironic tone (lacking in Steele’s Conscious Lovers) keeps us aware of the distance between reality and his constructions of hopefulness. The novel’s last sentences echo the romances that drove Quixote mad: “To conclude, as there are not to be found a worthier Man and Woman, than this fond Couple, so neither can any be imagined more happy. They preserve the purest and tenderest Affection for each other, an Affection daily encreased. . . . And such is their . . . Beneficence to those below them, that there is not a Neighbour . . . who doth not most gratefully bless the Day when Mr. Jones was married to his Sophia” (Fielding 1975: 981–2). Only Fielding’s self-conscious narrative voice, like Cervantes’s similar presence in Don Quixote, keeps his work comical rather than sentimental. It informs us of a reality marred by sexual and other appetitive temptations, human jealousy and greed, violence and mayhem. Even more telling, this is a world of unavoidable errors, changes, and mischances in which the good and innocent are as liable to suffer as the guilty. Fielding’s intrusive voice keeps us alert to the quotidian, but also, vital for understanding mid-century comedy, to his artful celebration of quixotic goodness, reflected not only in Tom and Sophia but also in others, usually the poor and marginalized, in whom Fielding prefers to embody ideals of generosity and kindness. Fielding threads a path between Milton’s tale of fall and exile and the Enlightenment’s emerging expectation that human beings endowed with good hearts, right sentiments, and a bit of wisdom (prudence and judgment) can create a new Eden. The storyteller can freeze his story just short of tragedy, indeed at the peak of bliss, but a “daily encreased” affection tells us that their married life exists in time, where changes and chances hold sway, and what increases can also decrease. Richardson does not often appear in discussions of comic writers but one might well argue that his novels are indeed comedies, beginning with the most obvious, Pamela (1740–1). In our present construct, Pamela loses her Edenic life when her mistress, Mr. B.’s mother, dies and she is forced into the real world of sexual appetite. Mr. B. demonstrates the ludicrous side of evil; Pamela’s quixotic venture, to turn the lecherous villain into a loving husband,

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succeeds. Moreover, Richardson abets another platform of the Enlightenment project, to put an end to class structures, all humans being created equal. Although Pamela’s claim of “soul equality” is a Christian notion, and she does seem to be under divine protection, the distinction between master and servant seemed firmly fixed as a scriptural absolute, and the criticism that met Pamela and its seeming to overturn social and economic structures led directly to Richardson’s second “comedy,” Clarissa (1747–8). Obviously the pursuit of innocence by a far more vicious villain, resulting in the rape of the heroine, is tragic, not comic, but the novel in fact reflects the divine comedy of Christian ethics as outlined in Paradise Lost. Like Adam, Clarissa is given sufficient insight into the future to die certain that her suffering is over; in her famously deceptive promise to return to her father’s home, Clarissa returns to oneness with God, “happily ever after.” Some of Richardson’s more romance-oriented readers pleaded with him to marry Clarissa and Lovelace (a devilish man appeals to the Eve in all of us), but he insisted that the story he was writing and the instruction he was offering was intended to promote an ethical vision his readers were too quickly abandoning: acknowledgment of the human need for divine redemption. Clarissa is the ultimately failed quixotic figure; her goodness and innocence cannot change the world, cannot change her greedy and jealous family, much less her increasingly irrational pursuer. Richardson may indeed be the last important author to write a fiction based on a happy reunion with God, but it is important to recognize that his effort resulted in a work of epic proportions, an ethical Christian comedy diametrically opposed to many if not all the tenets of Enlightenment thought. While reluctantly recognizing his achievement, Richardson’s readers continued to lean toward comedy that better reflected secular resolution—wealth, health, and happiness forever. In his final novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–4), Richardson almost found a way to write what we might label a pragmatic or empirical Christian comedy. His eponymous hero is not only a very sane Quixote, but an eminently successful one as well. He makes his entrance by bodily rescuing the beautiful heroine, Harriet, from the clutches of another incompetent villain, and to the end is consistently triumphant. He imparts valid social wisdom and goodness in equal shares, alters everything and everyone he touches with prosperity and reformation, and loves the heroines with purity, sincerity, and elegance. He is, in fact, everything Quixote wants to be, a Christ-like figure redeeming the world. Having learned, however, from his earlier attempts the problems of fictions that offer either an unrealistic or unworldly notion of perfect happiness, Richardson confronts his perfect hero with a worldly truth, indicated above in heroines, not a misprint, but the worldly dilemma by which Grandison’s perfection is severely challenged. In what becomes a refrain in the novel, Grandison observes early on that in the greatest of our enjoyments, we will always feel incompleteness, even pain. Sir

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Charles is engaged to an Italian Catholic, Clementina, when he first meets (and rescues) his English Protestant, Harriet. The novel concludes with Harriet the happy bride, but with Clementina’s story unresolved, leaving the married couple unsettled. Again readers clamored for comedy, the sort of conclusion that Fielding had so neatly provided; again Richardson resisted, addressing the complaints with a particularly astute statement of the purpose of his ethical comedy: “the conclusion of a single story is indeed generally some great and decisive event; as a Death, or a Marriage: But in scenes of life carried down nearly to the present time . . . all events cannot be decided . . .; since persons presumed to be still living, must be supposed liable to the various turns of human affairs” (Richardson 2015: 189).3 That is to say, ethical comedy, despite the Enlightenment, would still have to acknowledge that only death can ensure enduring happiness; all earthly happiness is subject to time and chance. Progress toward a new Eden will be, realistically as well as theologically, always incomplete, always subject to the accidents and errors inherent to the postlapsarian world. Sir Charles must choose, leaving the second woman disappointed and the story incomplete. Richardson resists the dual (or multiple) coupling of much comedy, from Shakespeare to the present day, insistent that, in Pope’s formulation, “Man never Is, but always To be blest” ([1733–4] 1963: 508; 1.96). Writing into a world in which enlightened secular thought was slowly replacing religious dogma, Richardson’s ethical sense insisted that the truth of literature, and especially of comedy, must portray an imperfect world and hence incomplete enjoyments. To have done otherwise might have produced a quixotic romance or an Enlightenment utopia, but he eschews both, producing instead what might be called a pragmatic, empirical Christian comedy. Although somewhat an oversimplification, almost all novels of the next half century tiresomely repeat patterns of comedy laid out by Fielding and Richardson. Three publications of 1759, however, warn us against thus limiting our discussion. Variously described as novels, satires, apologues, farces, philosophical tales, or comedies, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, Voltaire’s Candide, and the first two (of nine) volumes of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy together make that year the annus mirabilis of whatever we might finally decide are the ethics of Enlightenment comedy. Despite enormous differences between their authors, Candide and Rasselas share so many similarities that Johnson had to defend their “wonderfully similar . . . plan and conduct,” saying, as reported by Boswell, had they “not been published so closely one after the other that there was not time for imitation, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest [Rasselas] was taken from the other” (Boswell 1980: 241).4 And when Sterne outlined for his printer the format he desired for Tristram Shandy, he specified the appearance of Rasselas; and he alluded to Candide in his mock dedication: “Bright Goddess, If thou art not too busy with CANDID and Miss

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FIGURE 8.4: Engraved illustration to Voltaire’s Candide, chapter 29. Caption: “Tu peus me tuer encore, mais tu n’épouseras pas ma soeur de mon vivant.” Published edition 1809, Paris. Photo by Culture Club/Getty Images.

CUNEGUND ’s affairs,—take Tristram Shandy’s under thy protection also” (Sterne 1978: 1.16–17).5 In what will sound particularly familiar in light of the discussion above, the young Candide “in this best of all possible worlds” is driven from its “finest of castles” because of sexual indiscretion (Voltaire 2005: 4), while Rasselas leaves the “perfect life” of “Happy Valley” because, despite having all his desires fulfilled, he is tempted by ennui (Johnson 1976).6

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As for Tristram, his story begins with his conception being interrupted by an untimely question about winding a clock, so that his “misfortunes began nine months before ever he came into the world” (Sterne [1759] 1978:1.4). All three heroes embrace the Enlightenment: Candide carries an enlightenment vision of a perfect world into a very imperfect one; Rasselas ventures forth to find an enlightened “choice of life” that will ensure future happiness, but finds only a world “in which nothing can be concluded”; and Tristram, following his father and uncle in turn, tries to conquer the disorders of life first by ideas, and then by sentiments, but produces instead a chronicle of the inadequacies, confusions, and absurdities of the human mind and heart in the postlapsarian world. Comedy results, as with Pope and Swift, when these erstwhile heroes fail to recognize just how impotent, ludicrous, contradictory, indeed, unenlightened, are their efforts. Candide’s infamous faith that this is “the best of all possible worlds” is belied as early as the second chapter: he must choose between taking twelve bullets in his skull or running the gauntlet of 2,000 soldiers thirty-six times (Voltaire ([1759] 2005: 7). Voltaire’s comedy resides in both Candide’s stubborn optimism no matter what disasters overwhelm him, and in the impossible recoveries that accompany them. Pangloss, too, is “hanged, and dissected, and beaten,” but survives and still believes the world is for the best because as a philosopher it would be improper for him to recant (88). Voltaire finds comic hyperbole effective for puncturing the excessive hopefulness of enlightenment. The human mind fails dismally to return society, social or political, to Eden, now defined as perfect harmony with the natural world (Leibniz being Voltaire’s specific philosophical target); spiritual union with the supernatural order of God through his Son is replaced with an intellectual oneness with the natural order of existent things. While his participation in the French version of Enlightenment rendered it unlikely he would return to Milton’s vision of fall and redemption, Voltaire did recognize just how often quixotic efforts to fix the world were susceptible to comedy. He also recognized the importance of balance and measure to claims of the mind; our inability to overcome our own mental conflicts, in concert with the willfulness of our bodies, seems rather obvious, whether we embrace original sin or just look out our windows. Voltaire’s comedy is directed at those who shut their eyes. Few would consider Johnson a comic writer, but the sense of balance and measure that defines his conversation and writing is, as with Voltaire, the source of his comic vision. This is particularly evident in Rasselas, in which multiple enlightened suggestions for converting uncertainty into certainty are weighed and found wanting. The parallel to Voltaire is readily apparent: “The prince soon found that this was one of the sages whom he should understand less as he heard him longer. He therefore bowed and was silent, and the philosopher, supposing him satisfied . . . rose up and departed with the air of a man that had co-operated with the present system” (Johnson 1976: 88–9). Rasselas’s

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dissatisfaction with every answer to his search for happiness is Johnson’s response to increasingly loud claims of enlightenment as the century progressed; he was not at all a blind adherent of the past, but comedy could well test his age’s “solutions,” and as often as not he found them inadequate, at times ludicrous. Most important, Johnson wrote within an empirical framework defined by the implications of both the Fall and the quixotic. An empirical (pragmatic) examination of life made it evident to him that every enjoyment, every amelioration, every change carried with it incompleteness and dissatisfaction, the inescapable result of sin and death defining human experience. Observation also made clear to him, however, that human efforts to improve the conditions of life, foolish though they might be in their hopefulness, reflected a divinely inspired soul that will always aspire to a perfection it cannot reach by earthly endeavors alone; these efforts are of use to mankind, and, thus, in an important turn in his imitation of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, Johnson rejects stoic inaction for a more active role, guided not by quixotic dreams but by a religious faith that can arouse the “stagnant Mind,” rescue it from “Ignorance sedate,” and direct it toward the Good, even while leaving “to Heav’n the Measure and the Choice” (Johnson 1974: ll. 344–55, 132). Rasselas ends with a “conclusion, in which nothing is concluded” (Johnson 1976: 149), because Johnson is using life’s dissatisfactions to direct us elsewhere. As Nekayah decides, “the choice of life is become less important; I hope hereafter to think only on the choice of eternity” (149). As with Grandison, whatever “choice” Rasselas makes, life remains inconclusive, caught as it is within time and chance. Milton poetically has time and death enter the world because of the Fall, but surely their presence is also an empirical truth. It took no garden myth for ancient wisdom to observe that we can “call no man happy before he dies,” an observation so obvious that many different authors are credited with its first utterance. Where Johnson may differ from earlier Christian writers is his sharing with Voltaire—and with the changing view of Quixote from culpable fool to admired idealist—a belief that human efforts, if carefully weighed and directed toward pragmatic (that is, charitable and humanitarian) ends, could change the human condition for the better. His devastating review of Soame Jenyns’s Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), in which his ridicule of social complacency becomes a test of truth, reflects Johnson’s thoughtful embrace of the ameliorations promised by Enlightenment (Johnson 2004: 397–432). Universal education, for example, has never been more effectively defended: “The privileges of education may sometimes be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to with-hold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy [and] indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed” (Johnson 2004: 410). Johnson’s high seriousness here suggests the difficulty of writing Enlightenment comedy,

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removing as it does a favorite device of comedy, our less than benevolent delight in seeing others discomforted. As earlier noted, Tristram Shandy begins with a scene of coitus interruptus, certainly an apt metaphor for the incomplete enjoyments of our existence; indeed, the term serves to characterize all nine volumes of Sterne’s work, as well as his later fiction, A Sentimental Journey, published just a few months before his death. In that work he has his alter ego, Parson Yorick, address incompleteness with a decidedly sexual bent: “But there is nothing unmixt in

FIGURE 8.5: Adam Buck, “Yorik, The Monk, and Madame L— in the inn courtyard at Calais,” illustration from A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne. London 1803. Photo by Getty Images.

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this world; and some of the gravest of our divines have carried it so far as to affirm, that enjoyment itself was attended even with a sigh—and that the greatest they knew of, terminated in a general way, in little better than a convulsion” (Sterne 2002: 6.116). To ensure the bawdy intent is not missed, Yorick recalls the “grave and learned Bevoriskius” (who observed copulating sparrows as a sign of God’s blessings to “his creatures”), and laments his own sexual reticence: “Ill fated Yorick! that the gravest of thy brethren should be able to write that to the world, which stains thy face with crimson, to copy in even thy study” (6.117). Like Swift, Sterne famously used the human body and its desires as a comic counterweight to excessive claims of human minds (ideas and opinions) and hearts (emotions and sentiments). It is no accident that Sterne points to Cervantes as one model, Rabelais as another; or that Swiftian satire is scattered throughout Tristram, as in this frontal assault on the forces of Enlightenment: “Thus,—thus my fellow labourers and associates in this great harvest of our learning, now ripening before our eyes; thus it is, by slow steps of casual increase, that our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, . . . and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it (most of ’em ending, as these do, in ical) have, for these two last centuries and more gradually been creeping upwards towards that Αχμή of their perfection, from which, if we may form a conjecture from the advances of these last seven years, we cannot possibly be far off” (Sterne 1978: 1.71–2). Sterne belittles the claims of learning everywhere in Tristram Shandy, but always with a contradictory delight in perusing scholarly books and the scholars who wrote them. For example, naming a dozen Renaissance figures and their claims to early genius, he concludes with a typical bit of scatology: “But you forget the great Lipsius . . . who composed a work the day he was born;—— They should have wiped it up, said my uncle Toby, and said no more about it” (2.494). Having exhausted the possibilities of rational thought with Walter’s theory of auxiliary verbs (1.483–7), Sterne moves to the possibility of Enlightenment by means of “heart,” that is, the kind and generous impulses that will not allow Uncle Toby to hurt a fly (1.130–1). Sterne’s age was tempted by this vision of human nature and there is much in it that appeals to our self-image. In the constant struggle taking place within us, the tragic option of our fallen natures seems always less desirable than the comic possibility that we are as good as Uncle Toby. Sterne’s comedy laughs at these pretensions as well as those of the mind, often using the tactic employed by satirists from Petronius to modern stand-up comics: bodily functions. The conclusion of Tristram returns to sexual shame, the first result of the Fall, aiming at the clash between our necessary appetites and the masks (fig leafs) we use to hide them. We are, we want to believe, too “exalted and godlike a Being” to be humbled by our bodies: “wherefore, when we go about to make and plant a man, do we put out the candle? and for what reason

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is it, that all the parts thereof—. . . the preparations—the instruments, and whatever serves thereto, are so held as to be conveyed to a cleanly mind by no language, translation, or periphrasis whatever?” (2.806). Sterne copied this observation almost verbatim from a seventeenth-century writer—it is noteworthy that it also anticipates what we now label as Victorian thinking. The ethics of comedy (critical on one end of the spectrum, caressing on the other) confronts us always with the discrepancies and distortions accompanying our inability accurately to measure reality against our collective vision of better selves and a better world. Three additional British fictions will provide an apt coda to our discussion, Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and Richard Graves’s The Spiritual Quixote (1774). Justice cannot be paid to their works within the space remaining, but two of them, obviously, can be related to the quixotic, the other, by allusion, to Paradise Lost. It is unfair to Lennox to call attention to her penultimate chapter, “Being in the Author’s Opinion, the best Chapter in this History,” which has often been tied to Lennox’s friendship with Johnson, but it valuably summarizes the theme of incomplete enjoyment suggested as the heart of Enlightenment comedy. Arabella reaches a point when her many quixotic distortions produce a crisis of body and mind. The wise cleric brought in to heal her imagination does so in language that echoes ideas we have traced from Wycherley through Sterne, beginning with what will also be his conclusion, that her story contains “some very mortifying Reflections on the Imperfection of all human Happiness. . . .” (Lennox 1989: 369). Arabella immediately rejects this pragmatic observation, considering it censure for her failed attempt to live the quixotic life, and the cleric begins again, arguing that the observation that perfect happiness is not “attainable in this World,” alludes not to the fate of wickedness, but rather to the fact that even when we add “Virtue . . . there will yet be something wanting to Happiness” (370). The cleric also points to the violence and unreasonableness of love and battle in romances, and suggests that they make it impossible to preserve our “Alliance with all human nature” or to keep awake that “Tenderness and Sympathy . . . implanted in us as an Incentive to Acts of Kindness” (381). Arabella is not only converted from her quest for a perfect world but also directed to a view of universal sympathy with others, an Enlightenment vision, a comic resolution prevalent in the second half of the century. Her virtue can indeed better the human condition, but only after she acknowledges the limits imposed by error, chance, and death, the realities of existence. Accepting this truth restores her to “Reason”; she is able, in the final chapter, to ask her lover’s acceptance, “with all my remaining Imperfections” and the two are “united . . . in every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind” (383). One assumes they live “happily ever after.” The Spiritual Quixote harks back not only to Cervantes but also to Swift, in that Graves, also a cleric, portrays Methodism as a quixotic claim to spiritual

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enlightenment, reminiscent of Swift’s earlier attack on spiritual innovators. Not Swift, however, but Richardson is invoked in Graves’s “Prefatory Anecdote”: “I am convinced that Don Quixote or Gil Blas, Clarissa or Sir Charles Grandison, will furnish more hints for correcting the follies and regulating the morals of young persons . . . than volumes of severe precepts seriously delivered and dogmatically inforced” (Graves 1967: 3). Geoffry Wildgoose is indeed a pattern of foolish reformatory zeal, but not of madness, and Graves offers a quixotic figure who has almost fully imbibed the Enlightenment ethos. Thus, for example, Wildgoose shares Methodism’s concern for ameliorating the conditions of the poor, and Graves allows for the goodness of its intentions before gently chiding its excesses. Invited to a splendid dinner late in the work, Wildgoose “could not forbear making a comparison between the elegance with which Sir William lived, and the scenes of misery . . . amongst the poor people in the village” (384). The suggestion that he depart immediately to alter their deprivations is met, however, with the counterargument that Jesus told Christians to attend the wedding but sit “in the lowest room,” and after a short interval, in which Wildgoose harps “upon the same string,” the food is brought in and “the savoury smell . . . soon put to flight Mr. Wildgoose’s spiritual ideas . . . and [he] began to fancy himself in the land of promise . . .” (385). The shift from sexual to gustatory appetite is one indication of many that Graves eschewed a Swiftian satire for a comedy in the Enlightenment spirit. We are amused and perhaps there is some moral education here for “young people,” but Graves’s comedy is wedded to Enlightenment sensibility, a belief in essential human goodness and the toleration of difference that is also reflected in the century-long evolution of Quixote from madman to idealist hero. As an author Graves mirrors that change, his initial desire to skewer Methodism with a character named Wildgoose concludes with a “moral or rather . . . religious maxim”: “THAT , where we do not obstinately oppose its benevolent intentions, nor presumptuously persist in a wrong course of life, Providence frequently makes use of our passions, our errors, and even our youthful follies, to promote our welfare, and conduct us to happiness” (473). To be sure, even as Spiritual Quixote demonstrates this changing attitude toward the quixotic, it holds fast, as its “moral” indicates, to Milton’s divine comedy: omniscient Providence controls all things, punishes the willfully evil, and turns error and folly toward the good. Satan and Adam remain under the divine order imposed in Eden after the Fall. Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield returns us to the expulsion theme of eighteenth-century comedy, the Primrose family forced out of their comfortable home by the sin of an emerging commercial society, the loss of fortune. The world into which they are driven rehearses several biblical stories, including the Book of Job and the return of the prodigal son, but it is the Vicar’s journey to redeem his daughter, seduced by the satanic Thornhill, that seems particularly pertinent to our idea of comedy: “The

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pursuit of a father to reclaim a lost child to virtue” (Goldsmith ([1766] 1966c): 93). After a course of tribulations akin to Candide’s, the family is restored, not by their own efforts but through the interventions of Burchell, a disguised providential figure who has tested the family’s virtues and vices and found them, while often in error, worthy of saving. In a sermon the Vicar delivers in prison, he revisits incomplete enjoyment: “In this life then it appears that we cannot be entirely blest; but yet we may be completely miserable!” (Goldsmith ([1766] 1966c): 160). However, where Milton offers a scriptural explanation for the human condition, the Vicar echoes Johnson’s more pragmatic outlook: “Why . . . our wretchedness should be requisite in the formation of universal felicity, why, when all other systems are made perfect by the perfection of their subordinate parts, the great system should require for its perfection, parts that are not only subordinate to others, but imperfect in themselves? These are questions that never can be explained, and might be useless if known” (161). Still, where philosophy’s answers are weak, “religion comforts in a higher strain”: “the promises of happiness in heaven should be peculiarly dear; for if our reward be in this life alone, we are then indeed of all men the most miserable” (162, 164). Having reached this conclusion, the Vicar is rewarded with a Job-like turn of fortune: Burchell proves an effective Quixote, righting the evils that had befallen the family and restoring the Primroses to primrose paths. While one hears this echo of Quixote in the work, perhaps the stronger influence on Goldsmith’s comedy is Erasmus, the Vicar being most assuredly a fool for Christ. Naïve and inadequate, incompetent to deal with the follies of wife and daughters, and unable to distinguish between the honest and dishonest, he remains a virtuous man, standing firm against temptations no matter how foolish his behavior appears to others. Writing in the 1760s, Goldsmith seems deliberately to ignore the Enlightenment, returning to a comedy steeped in the tale of fall and redemption. Perhaps Enlightenment was just not as favorable to the comic muse as was religious faith.

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Series Preface 1. Umberto Eco ([1980] 1995), “The Comic and the Rule,” in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, 269–78, trans. by William Weaver, London: Minerva.

Introduction 1. In the words of Peter Gay, “the name ‘Enlightenment’ is almost as complex as the historical reality it designates” (1973: 13). 2. In Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 2002), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno argued that “for enlightenment, anything which does not conform to the standard of calculability and utility must be viewed with suspicion. . . . Enlightenment is totalitarian” ([written 1944] 2002: 3–4). 3. Andrew Stott notes that the absence of a clear authorial position in A Modest Proposal “has made his satire appeal to widely disparate groups; both English and Irish nationalists have claimed him as theirs; the Protestant and Catholic churches see him as a defender of their faiths; Marxists read in his satire a withering critique of bourgeois capitalism; and ‘despite his association with misogyny’, Swift has been celebrated as one of the ‘Fathers of Feminism’ ” (Stott 2005: 113). 4. See Georgina Lock’s excellent essay on the variety of burlesques or “comedic lampoons” on the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English stage (2015: 1.178). 5. As Eric Weitz observes “[a]lthough no two people will always agree on what constitutes ‘successful’ humour . . . we can note the conditions generally present when someone does find something funny” (2009: 65). 6. A set of production notes published in 1917 for English teachers notes that She Stoops to Conquer “is a favorite with schools and colleges” and “has held the [professional] stage successfully since its first production at Covent Garden in 1773” (Dorey 1917: 619). 221

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7. The sitcom as genre privileges didacticism; Seinfeld deliberately set itself against that (and other) generic norms (Hurd 2006: 767). The ending of the Seinfeld series, however, broke its own rule of “no hugging, no learning” in its condemnation of the central characters’ “selfishness, self-absorption, immaturity, and greed” (Schick 2000: 183).

Chapter One 1. For example, the most rigorous attempt to construct a definition of comedy I have seen is Elder Olson (1968). Olson’s is an elegant construct based on Aristotle’s Poetics, but it excludes most works normally identified as comedy. 2. See Alastair Fowler (1982). My understanding of form has been greatly informed by Fowler. 3. Thomas Shadwell (1927), “Preface” to The Sullen Lovers (1668) and “Preface” to The Humorists (1671); John Dryden (1971), Of Dramatic Poesie: An Essay, and Dryden (1970); John Dennis (1943), “A Defence of Sir Fopling Flutter, a Comedy” and “Remarks on a Play Call’d The Conscious Lovers, a Comedy”; Richard Steele (1965), The Spectator, Nos. 65 and 75; Steele (1971), “Preface” to The Conscious Lovers (1723). 4. I use “humours” throughout when I refer to the four humours and their application to the literature I discuss in this essay. When “humor” is used in its modern sense, I use current American spelling. 5. See Robert D. Hume (1976: 265–7) for a good summary of the critical debate. 6. See Brian Corman (1984). 7. Kenny (1977). My description is based on this important article. 8. Arpana Gollapudi (2011) makes a persuasive case for the centrality of moral reform in post-1688 comedy. 9. My understanding of the ongoing changes to humours characters is informed by Tave (1960). 10. See, for example, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury ([1711] 1999) and Francis Hutcheson ([1725] 2004). 11. See Johnson (1755: s.v. novel). 12. The term, emphasizing the combination of erotic and sentimental love, is from Ros Ballaster (1992). 13. See, for example, R.S. Crane (1952) and Sheldon Sacks (1964). 14. Simon Dickie (2011) points to the ongoing popularity of jest books and other forms of comic entertainment that maintain the crueler side of the Jonsonian tradition. See especially chapter 4, “Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate.” 15. See Ashley Marshall (2016: 495).

Chapter Two 1. Fielding continues: “its Action being more extensive and comprehensive; containing a much larger Circle of Incidents, and introducing a greater Variety of Characters” (1967: 4).

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2. Although an understanding of the “rules of drama” existed well before d’Aubignac, he is credited with having codified these rules in La Pratique du théâtre (The Practice of Theater, 1657, trans. as The Whole Art of the Stage, 1684). The work emphasized the importance of verisimilitude in drama, thus the action of a play should take place during only a few hours and that it should be confined to one space with very few changes of scene. 3. Although the identities of the three gentlemen joining “Neander” have not been firmly established, they are often believed to be Sir Robert Howard (Crites), Charles Sackville, Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius), and Sir Charles Sedley (Lisideius). See the headnote to the Essay for a detailed discussion of the challenges of attribution ([1668] 1971: 352–5). 4. “A bold, immodest, or wanton girl or woman,” Oxford English Dictionary. 5. In the case cited here, the players at Lincoln’s-Inn Fields were found guilty, a verdict that, the Post Man and the Historical Account states piously, it is hoped will be much to the satisfaction of all Friends to Religion and Vertue, and deter for the future such as shall write plays, from using any Lewd and Immoal expressions. Post Man and the Historical Account, February 17 to February 19, 1702. This event was related using the same language in several other London newspapers. On February 16, 1702, Drury Lane Theatre was tried on similar charges but found not guilty. 6. Benjamin Victor, one of Steele’s supporters in the pamphlet war surrounding The Conscious Lovers, even evoked the ancients (although not by name) to support Steele’s approach to comedy, claiming “It was the Opinion of all the Antients, that Love (the usual Argument of all comedies) is best written where it is most distress’d, and in despairing Passion; that part of Comedy seeming best that is nearest Tragedy” (1722: 11). By contrast, he notes, the ancients banished plays that depicted parasites, fools, courtesans, and immodest words. Dennis took particular exception to Steele’s comments on a “joy too exquisite for laughter,” commenting: “When Sir Richard talks of a Joy too exquisite for Laughter, he seems not to know that Joy, generally taken, is common like Anger, Indignation, Love, to all Sorts of Poetry, to the Epick, the Dramatick, the Lyrick; but tht the kind of Joy which is attended with Laughter, is the Characteristick of Comedy” ([1723] 1943: 2.260). 7. Welsted also wrote an epilogue to the play that praises its moral worth and concludes by presenting the virtue of the heroine and hero within a national context: “The Nymph with Indiana’s Worth who vies,/A Nation will behold with Bevil’s Eyes” (Steele 1971: 382). 8. My thanks to Meradith McMunn for her assistance in translating de La Chaussée’s prologue and in understanding its nuances. 9. Voltaire’s L’Enfante prodigue (The Prodigal Son) was staged in 1736, only three years after False Antipathy, and Nanine, ou le préjugé (Nanine, or Prejudice Vanquished) in 1749. Nanine is loosely based on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, however in Voltaire’s play the hero is an honorable aristocrat rather than a rake and the heroine refuses his offer of marriage to protect him. The “prejudice vanquished” of the subtitle is that of class bias.

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Chapter Three 1. Kinservik (2002: 93) argues that this was not the only cause of the Licensing Act. 2. Here and throughout this section, I have relied on the database Eighteenth-Century Drama: Censorship, Society, and the Stage. 3. On theatrical production during the Commonwealth period, see Dale B.J. Randall (1995) and Susan Wiseman (1998). 4. Dickie (2011) persuasively makes this case through many examples throughout this book, but see in particular the introduction.

Chapter Four 1. Sir George then attempts to prove his socially conservative and epistemologically anxious point, posing a challenge with the entrance of a Mr. Flutter: “Here comes an illustration. Now I defy you to tell from his appearance whether Flutter is a privy councellor or a mercer, a lawyer or a grocer’s ’prentice” (Cowley [1780] 2001: 2.1. 287–91). 2. In Act 3, Scene 1 of Behn’s The Feigned Courtesans, Galliard uses a dark lantern to trick Tickletext, a rival suitor.

Chapter Five 1. An open-source documentary about the production with footage from the performance is available at https://theatre.utk.edu/the-busy-body/; it provides a point of reference for many of the observations that follow. 2. The Baby Lock Valiant embroidery machine can be seen in production at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkkvsEL-4FM 3. See Marsden (2006); Greenfield (2013); Stewart (2010) and Thompson (2012). 4. See also Le Brun ([1734] 1980: 200–1); Lang (1727).

Chapter Six 1. Though printing seditious satire was not without risk—as the carpenter Stephen Colledge, a flamboyantly activist Whig, discovered at the cost of his life. Colledge’s 1681 satiric print called “The Raree-Show,” showed King Charles as a two-headed peddler, half-protestant and half-papist (to denote his Catholic sympathies) carrying his raree peep show box from one town to another to mock his moving the court from London to the more sympathetic Oxford. This offence seemed to be the last straw in the Colledge’s long list of offences against the crown during the turbulent succession crisis for which he was hanged, drawn, and quartered. See George (1957): 55–61. 2. This lampoon was published anonymously but has been attributed to Rochester. Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough, and Henry Jermyn were the Duke of York’s supporters during the succession crisis. Also see Robertson and Libhart (2012) for a sustained political reading of this lampoon. 3. In Henry Wildair (1701), George Farquahar shows an apprentice pretending to be a beau obsessed with politics; Addison satirized the upholster turned politician in his Tatler Nos. 155, 160, 178, and Steele mocked a similarly inclined haberdasher

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named Beaver in The Spectator (No. 49). Charles Johnson showed another politicsmad character—Postscript in The Generous Husband or The Coffee-House Politician (1713), and the motif was to continue in Henry Fielding’s Rape upon Rape (1730) and Arthur Murphy’s 1758 farce, The Upholsterer. 4. See Fritz (1975). 5. Probably written by Jacobite William King that appeared in Common Sense.

Chapter Seven 1. However, these two Latin cognates might have been used to denote many types of laughter. See The Oxford Latin Dictionary (2012). 2. See, for instance, Abraham’s joyous laughter when he discovers he shall receive a child at the age of 100 and with his septuagenarian wife Sarah (Gen. 17:17). 3. See, for example, Sigmund Freud, who acknowledged the existence of “innocent” jokes, but found most jokes “tendentious”: that is, obscene, aggressive, hostile, or cynical ([1904] 1956–74: 8.106–46); Roger Scruton and Peter Jones, who argue that “laughter de-values its object in the subject’s eyes” and that such “de-valuing” is “the amusement itself” (1982: 208–9); or Charles R. Gruner, who argues that aggression undergirds all forms of joking, even the lowest forms of humor, such as puns and riddles, which lead to contests of one-upmanship with winners and losers (1997: 136). 4. My thanks to Darryl P. Domingo for his help tracking this citation down. 5. This passage, from “A Letter to the Publisher, Occasioned by the present Edition of the Dunciad” (Pope [1729] 1963: 318–24), included in the prefatory materials to the Dunciad Variorum, is signed by William Cleland, Pope’s friend, though scholars have generally concluded that Pope authored “The Letter” himself but used Cleland’s name with his permission (Pope [1729] 1963: 324n2). 6. For more on satire during the later eighteenth century and the Romantic era, see Lockwood (1979); Wood (1994); Dyer (1997); Jones (1994, 2000); and Strachan (2007). 7. For Addison’s discussion of Hobbes, see nos 47 ([April 24, 1711] 1965: 1.200–4) and, more skeptically, 249 ([December 15, 1711] 1965: 2.465–9), in Addison ([1711] 1965). 8. On the psychological origins of melancholy as a mental rather than humoral illness, see Foucault (2013: 113ff); and, for an early contemporary example, Cheyne (1733).

Chapter Eight 1. The literature is vast, but two recent studies offer useful introductions to the thinkers underwriting Enlightenment ethics as discussed here: Norton (2012) and Müller (2007). 2. “Savage indignation” (saeva indignatio) is part of Swift’s self-composed epitaph, which can be translated: “Here is laid the Body [of Swift] where savage indignation can no longer tear his heart . . . .”

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3. Richardson made a pamphlet of this long letter for distribution to his circle of correspondents. 4. Boswell goes on to add that the “proposition illustrated by both” is the same: “in our present state there is more evil than good . . . .” 5. In an October 5, 1759, letter to Robert Dodsley (Sterne 2009: 7.96), Sterne had asked for “2 small Vols, of the Sise of Rasselas, & on the same paper and Type.” 6. See esp. ch. 3, “The wants of him that wants nothing.”

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A General Collection of Discourses of the Virtuosi of France (1664), trans. G. Havers, London. A Sequel to the Dunciad: Being The famous British Sh—rs. A Satire (1729), London. Addison, Joseph ([1711] 1965), The Spectator, 5 vols, ed. Donald F. Bond, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ahnert, Thomas E. and Susan Manning (2011), “Introduction,” in Thomas E. Ahnert and Susan Manning (eds), Character, Self, and Sociability in the Scottish Enlightenment, 1–20, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Akerby, George (1729), Spiller’s Jests, London. An Essay on the Stage; or, the Art of Acting (1754), Edinburgh: Printed and sold by John Yair in the Parliament-Closs, and B. Bourn under the Royal-Exchange, London. Anderson, Misty (2010), “Embodying Centlivre’s Comic Vision: A Bold Stroke for a Wife and The Wonder; a Woman Keeps a Secret in the Classroom,” in Bonnie Nelson and Catherine Burroughs (eds), The MLA Guide to Teaching British Women Playwrights of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 93–109, New York: MLA. Aquinas, Thomas ([thirteenth century] 1964), Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I. Litzinger, in The Collected Works of St. Thomas Aquinas, 46 vols, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company. [Arbuckle, James] (1734), Hibernicus’s Letters, 2 vols, London. Aristotle ([350 BCE] 1984), Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, ed. Jonathan Barnes, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aston, Anthony ([1747] 1889), A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber Esq, his Love of the Famous Actors and Actresses, in Colley Cibber, An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, vol. 2, London: John C. Nimmo. Avery, Emmet et al. (1960), The London Stage, 1660–1800; a calendar of plays, entertainments & afterpieces, together with casts, box-receipts and contemporary comment, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Bahlman, Dudley (1957), The Moral Revolution of 1688, New Haven: Yale University Press. 227

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INDEX

Abington, Frances 73, 134–5 Absalom and Achitophel 46 actresses 2, 21, 72–4 Addison, Joseph 14–15, 84, 180, 194, 208 Adorno, Theodor W. 8 The Advancement of Learning 95 The Adventures of Five Hours 31 affect, of comedy 50 affective propriety 194 Akenside, Mark 193 Akerby, George 159 Alembert, Jean le Ronde d’ 8 amatory fiction 43 American Constitution (1787) 198 L’Ami des lois 169 amiable humour 172, 185, 186–95 Amphitryon; Or, The Two Sosia’s 113, 115–16 Anatomical and Mechanical Lectures Upon Dancing 130 animale rationale, humankind as 8 Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber 73–4, 166 Aquinas, Thomas 174 Aristophanes 9–10, 149 Aristotle 28, 49, 52–3, 60, 120, 173, 175, 178 Arlecchino 129 Arlequin gardien des femmes 169 Arne, Thomas 38

Ars Poetica 50 As You Like It 94, 95 asides 125, 141 The Atheist 35 audiences audience response 62, 90 English 30 interacting with 124–5 Austen, Jane 45–6, 69 The Authors Benefit Pasquin (etching) 40 Bacon, Frances 95–6 ballad operas 37–8, 76–7, 82 Baptiste-Poquelin, Jean. See Molière Barbauld, Anna Letitia 11, 15 Le Barbier de Séville (la precaution inutile) 65 The Basset Table 91–2 Beard, Mary 175, 180 Beattie, James 49, 194 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin 21, 65 The Beaux’ Stratagem 36, 91, 98 bed tricks 109–12 The Beggar’s Opera 16, 37, 73, 76–7, 82, 90, 160–1, 167 The Beggar’s Wedding 77 Behn, Aphra 34, 35, 42, 85, 94, 107–9, 112 Bellamira 147 The Belle’s Stratagem 103–7 Betterton, Thomas 124, 126 243

244

biases, class 5 Bible 109, 173 Bickerstaff, Isaac 38, 39 Billig, Michael 175 Blair, Hugh 62–3, 66 bodies comedy and proximity 120–6 comic bodily motion 128 easy lovers 133–7 female 134–7, 151–2 the fop 137–41 harlequin dancer 126–33 the queer male body 137 used to ridicule Enlightenment pretensions 206 A Bold Stroke for a Husband 41 A Bold Stroke for a Wife 36, 100–1 Boutell, Elizabeth 73 Bracegirdle, Anne 73 Bratton, Jacky 121 Brecht, Bertold 77 The British Novelists 15 The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy 82 Buck, Adam 215 Buckingham, Duke of (George Villiers) 16, 35 Bullock, Christopher 159 Burbage, Richard 126 Burke, Helen 123 burlesque comedies/operas 35 Burney, Frances 15, 23, 45, 90 Bury-Fair 36 The Busy Body 120, 124, 133, 137–41 Butler, Samuel 46, 184 Byrd, William III 136 Caldwall, James 183 Candide 8, 211–13 Canfield, J. Douglas 113, 147 Carey, Henry 38 Carlson, Marvin 169 The Carol Burnett Show 131 Carolean comedy 36 Cecilia 15 censorship 69, 146, 148, 161, 167, 168, 169 (see also Licensing Act 1737) Centlivre, Susanna 36, 37, 91–2, 97, 100–1, 121, 128, 130–1, 134, 141

INDEX

Cervantes, Miguel de 5, 199, 201, 203, 209 The Characters 93 characters angry 85–6 of Enlightenment comedy 16–18 Harlequin 80–1, 127, 128 received 59 Restoration 88 stock characters 15, 93, 126, 127 Characters and Caricaturas 11 “Characters from La Comedie Italienne (Commedia dell’arte)” (illustration) 127 Charke, Charlotte 122 Charles I 70–1, 126 Charles II 28–9, 62–3, 71, 72, 74, 148–9, 150, 151 Charleton, Walter 43 Chaucer, Geoffrey 109 Chaussée, Nivelle de La 64 The Cheats of Scapin 35 The Checklist of New Plays and Entertainments on the London Stage 1700-1737 162 Chesterfield, Lord 184 Christianity 8, 198, 199, 200, 202–3, 206, 207–8, 210–11 (see also religion) Chrysostom, Johnathan 173–4 Churchill, Charles 46, 191–3 Cibber, Colley 36, 58–9, 96, 110–11, 125–6, 135–6, 137–8, 156, 159, 160, 162, 166 Cibber, Theophilus 162 Cicero 178 Le Cid 52, 53 cit-cuckolding 147, 149, 155 City Politiques 35 The Clandestine Marriage 41 Clarence Brown Theatre 120, 124 Clarissa 43, 210 class biases 5 class identity 97–100 class mobility 135–6 elite classes 83–4 merchant class 97 middle class 113 classics, veneration of the 8 Clive, Catherine 35 The Cobler of Preston 156–8, 159

INDEX

Coffey, Charles 76, 77–8 Cohen, Ted 194 Coleman, Catherine 72 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 1, 184 Collier, Jeremy 21, 58, 83, 87, 153 Colman, George (Elder and Younger) 41 colonialism 167–8 Comedie Francaise (Theatre de l’Egalite) 169 comédie larmoyante 6, 64–5, 155–6 comedy comedies of manners 29, 33, 34, 72, 75, 82 comedies on stage 76–82 comic didacticism 21, 56–7 comic fiction 42–3 (see also novels) comic motifs 18 comic novels. See novels comic relief 28 comic theater. See theater(s) comic types 15, 16–17, 123 corruptness of 62–3 defined 9 England and France 54–5 Enlightenment 9–23, 93–4, 95–7 goal of 59–60 Greek comedy 9 New Comedy 31, 61–2, 67, 93 Old Comedy 27, 29, 47 origins of 28 proximity and 120–6 Roman comedy 10 term 144–5 as an unstable genre 64 The Comical Revenge 32 commedia dell’arte 15, 93, 126–9 The Committee 31 Congreve, William 36, 37, 43, 73, 87, 97–8, 121, 141, 203, 205 The Conscious Lovers 17–18, 36, 37, 60, 61, 62, 73, 82–3, 88–90, 121, 208, 223n.6 The Constant Couple 134 Cook, William 63 Cooper, Anthony Ashley (third Earl of Shaftesbury) 4, 5, 145, 207, 208 Copeau, Jacques 129 Corneille, Pierre 51–4 The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 147

245

corruptness, of comedy 62–3 costumes 72 The Country Girl 40 The Country Wife 34, 73, 84, 132, 133, 134, 147, 203–5 Covent Garden Journal 166 Covent Garden Theatre 75 Cowley, Hannah 41, 82, 103–7 criminal literature 42, 43 The Critic 35 Cromwell, Oliver 71 cross-dressing 73 Crowne, John 35, 155 Cruickshank, George 195 cuckoldry 112–16 cit-cuckolding 147, 149, 155 Culloden, battle of (1746) 152 culture(s) comedy and 11 cultural changes 36 cultural imperialism 10 Enlightenment 2, 16, 23 new cultural norms 37, 42 Cumberland, Richard 41, 64, 66 Cumberland, William Augustus, Duke of 167, 168 dark lanterns 112, 115, 117 Davenant, William 71–2 Davies, Thomas 162 Declaration of Indulgence 150 Decroux, Etienne 129 Defoe, Daniel 43 demographics, changing 97 Dennis, John 49, 60–2, 84 Dent, John 168 derision, laughter and 173–5 Descartes, René 2, 174 Desforges, Pierre 170 The Devil of a Wife 35 The Devil to Pay: Or, the Wife Metamorphos’d 76, 77–80 Dickamore, Jeff 136, 138, 140 Dickie, Simon 78, 90, 189 Dictionary 42, 51 Diderot, Denis 8, 65 Discours des trois unities (Discourse on the Three Unities) 51–2, 54 Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire 186–7

246

discourses comic 151 obscenity and 149 official 146 disgust 150–1 A Dissertation on Comedy 122 The Diversions of a Morning 123 Dodsley, Robert 162–4, 167–8 Don Quixote 199, 201–2, 203, 209 Donmar Warehouse 90 The Dragon of Wantley 38 drama England and France 50, 54–5 the rules of 51–8 dramatic comedy 28, 42 drame bourgeois 6 The Drummer 14–15 Drury Lane theatre 74, 156, 160, 223n.5 Dryden, John 21, 30, 32, 46, 50–1, 52, 54–5, 56, 57, 66, 113–16, 155, 186–7, 206 The Duenna 38 A Duke and no Duke 35 Duke’s Theatre 72 Duncancel, Charles-Pierre 169 The Dunciad 46, 206 Dunciad Variorum 188 Eco, Umberto xiv education 214 Eighteenth-Century Drama: Censorship, Society, and the Stage 75 Elements of Law Natural and Politic 176 Elias, Richard 150 elite classes 83–4 embodiment, of female agency 121 (see also bodies) Emma 28, 45–6 The Emperor of the Moon 35 Encyclopédie; ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers 9 England comedy and 11 comedy, farce and 51 criticism in 66 drama and 50 English Civil War 1, 22, 71 Glorious Revolution (1689) 1–2, 4, 35, 152–6 Jacobite rebellion (1715) 156–60

INDEX

Jacobite rebellion (1745) 167 Jacobitism 152, 158, 167, 168–9 Licensing Act (1737) 15, 39, 69, 75, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167 London as a world capital 100 The English Rogue (novel) 42 The Englishman Returns from Paris 102 Enlightenment culture 2, 16, 23 Enlightenment comedy 9–23, 93–4, 95–7 Enlightenment ideas 2–9 prevailing characteristics of 9 religion and 198 term and dates of 1–2 The Ephesian Matron (novella) 43 Epicoene (The Silent Woman) 55–6 Erasmus 201–3 Erickson, Robert 87 Erwin, Timothy 11–12 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 96 Essay of Dramatick Poesie 52, 54–5, 56 Essay on Criticism 129 “An Essay on Scandal” 148 An Essay on the Art of Acting 120 “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour” 145 “Essay on the Theatre; Or, A Comparison between the Laughing and Sentimental Comedy” 20, 63 An Essay Towards an History of Dancing 128 Etherege, George 32, 33, 34, 83–4, 85 ethics authorial 197 of comedy 206, 208, 217 of laughter 189 novels and 207–19 satire and 205–7 ethnic minorities 123 Evelina (novel) 23, 45, 90 An Evening’s Love 32, 34, 50–1 Every One Has His Fault 41, 168 Exclusion Crisis 146–52 Fairer, David 190 False Delicacy 41 Fane, Francis 109–10 farce 32, 35, 50–1, 96, 112 Farquhar, George 36, 90–1, 98

INDEX

Fausse Antipathie (False Antipathy) 64 The Feigned Courtesans 108–9, 112 The Female Quixote 217 Fenton, Lavinia 73, 77 fiction, comic 42–3 (see also novels) Fielding, Henry 11, 15–16, 17, 21, 35, 38–9, 43–4, 45, 50, 69, 162–3, 166–7, 189–90, 208–9 ’15, the. See Jacobite rebellion (1715) Le Fils naturel (The Natural Son) 65 Finnis, John 94 Fitzpatrick, Thady 191 Fletcher, John 28–31, 47 Flora 122 Foote, Samuel 39, 101–3, 122, 123 fop 137–41 forms, the nature of 27 Fowler, Alastair 28 France censorship 169 comedy and 10–11, 64 drama and 50 drame bourgeois/comédie larmoyante 6, 64–5, 155–6 the Enlightenment and 2, 7–8 French Revolution 168–70 influence of French sources 32 neoclassical theory 52 theory of drama and 64–5 Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil 214 Gainsborough, Thomas 191 The Gamester 37, 63–4, 97 Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy (portrait) 23, 24 Garrick, David 20, 23–5, 40, 75, 105 Gatrell, Vic 184 Gay, John 16, 37–8, 73, 76–7, 160–1 Gay, Peter 2, 7 The Gazetteer 164 gendered identities 73 A General Collection 178 Genesis 29 109 genres 28, 50, 51, 64–5, 76 George I 156 George II 165 Giffard, Henry 164 Gildon, Charles 128 Gillray, James 169

247

Girl with Pigs 191 Glorious Revolution (1689) 1–2, 4, 35, 152–6 The Golden Rump 164–5 Goldoni, Carlo 129 Goldsmith, Oliver 6, 18–19, 46, 63, 64, 82, 83, 84, 86, 92, 98–100, 208, 217, 218–19 Gollapudi, Aparna 97 grace 204, 205 Graves, Richard 217–18 gravity 4–5 Gray, Thomas 46 Greek comedy 9 (see also New Comedy) Griffin, Benjamin 96, 159 Griffin, Dustin 187 Grimaldi, Joseph 129 Grose, Frances 180 The Guardian 90 Gulliver’s Travels 14, 21–2, 43, 205–6 Gwyn, Nell 21, 73 Harlequin 80–1, 127, 128 The Harlot’s Progress 162 Hartley, David 184 Hatchett, William 162 Hayman, Frances 200 Haywood, Eliza 43, 162 Head, Richard 42 Hebrew Scriptures 175 Henrietta Maria of France 71, 72 heroic plays 31 Hill, Aaron 120 Hippisley, John 122 historic change, comedy and 27–8 The Historical Register for the Year 1736 38–9, 162–4 Histriomastix: The Player’s Scourge, or Actor’s Tragedy 71 Hoadly, Benjamin 41 Hobbes, Thomas 2–3, 145, 171–2, 176–86, 194 Hogarth, William 11–13, 40, 202 honesty 197 Horace 50 Horkheimer, Max 8 Howard, Robert 31 Howe, Elizabeth 21 Hudibras 46 human nature 179, 180

248

INDEX

humane comedies 36, 121 humankind, as animale rationale/rationis capax 8 Hume, David 5, 11, 96 Hume, Robert 162 humor 13–14 The Humorists 57 humors, comedy of 56, 57, 58 humours characters 29, 33, 36, 37, 38, 56, 57 Humphry Clinker (novel) 45 Hutcheson, Francis 5, 172, 177–8, 179, 193, 194

James III of England and Ireland/James VIII of Scotland. See Stuart, James Francis Edward Jane Shore 76 Jenyns, Soame 214 Jevon, Thomas 35 John of Gaunt in Love, Or Mars on his knees (print) 168 Johnson, Charles 111–12, 156–8, 159 Johnson, Samuel 38–9, 42, 51, 187, 211, 213–15, 219 Jonson, Ben 28–30, 31, 47, 55–6, 66, 93 Joseph Andrews (novel) 43–4, 50, 189

identity(ies) bed tricks 109–12 class 97–100 comedy and 50 cuckoldry and the dark lantern 112–16 English 100 feigning foreignness 100–7 female 110–11 gendered and sexual 73 mistaken identity 93–4, 97, 100, 110–11, 116, 137 national 10–11, 50, 103 nationalist 167 political 146 sexual virtue 107–9 social identity 11, 97, 98, 107 Idol Worship (print) 167 impact, common practice and 82–92 imperialism 10 Inchbald, Elizabeth 41, 42, 69, 121, 168 Incognita (novella) 43 incongruity, comic 179–80, 183–4 Incongruity Theory 172, 178, 179, 185, 186, 193–4 Inkle and Yarico 41 L’intérieur des comités révolutionnaires, ou Les Aristides modernes 169 Italy comedy and 10 commedia dell’arte 15, 93, 126–9 opera 37–8

Kant, Immanuel 8, 179 Kelly, Hugh 41 Kelly, John 162, 167 Kemp, Will 126 Kennedy, Emmet 169–70 Kenny, Shirley Strum 36, 121, 208 Kensington Gardens or The Pretenders 158–9 Kierkegaard, Søren 179 Killigrew, Thomas 72, 74, 147–8 The King and the Miller of Mansfield 162–4, 167–8 King, Thomas 140 King’s Theatre 72 Kinservik, Matthew 166 Kynaston, Ned 138

Jacobite rebellion (1715) 156–60 Jacobite rebellion (1745) 167 Jacobitism 152, 158, 167, 168–9 James II 4, 35, 149, 152, 153, 154

Laclos, Pierre Choderos de 23 The Lancashire Witches 35, 147–8 language, comedy and 21–2 Laugh & Grow Fat (print) 195 laughter amiable humour 172, 185, 186–95 comic incongruity 179–80, 183–4 decorum and 184 derision and 173–5 ethics of 189 Incongruity Theory 172, 178, 179, 185, 186, 193–4 laughing comedy 82–3, 90 the nature and cause of 3, 145 negativity towards 173, 174, 175 in practice 186–95 psycho-physiological accounts 174–5 religion and 173–4 satiric laughter 186–7, 188, 190–1

INDEX

shifting views of 194–5 Superiority Theory 171–2, 173, 175, 176–86, 194 Laughter (print) 181, 182 Laya, Jean-Louis 169 Lazarillo de Tormes (novel) 42 Leigh, John 158 Lennox, Charlotte 217 Letter Concerning Enthusiasm 4–5 The Levee 167 Leviathan 2–3, 176–7 Les Liaisons dangereuses 23 The Liar 101–3 Licensing Act (1737) 15, 39, 69, 75, 160, 161, 162, 164, 167 The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus 35 life, in a state of nature 2–3 Life of Betterton 128 Lillo, George 6 Lincoln’s Inns Fields 124, 156, 158–9, 160, 164, 167, 223n.5 Linley, Thomas (Sr. and Jr.) 38 Little Theatre 166 Locke, John 3–4, 96, 207 The London Cuckolds 35, 90 The London Merchant 6 The London Stage 76, 164 Love for Love 36, 73 Love, Harold 150 Love in a Sack 96 Love in a Village 38, 39 Love in a Wood 32 Love in the Dark 109–10 The Lover’s Vows 69 Love’s Last Shift; or, The Fool in Fashion 36, 58, 96, 110–11 The Lucky Mistake (novella) 42 Lyric Odes, to the Royal Academicians for 1782 191 Lyrical Ballads 1 Mac Flecknoe 21, 46 The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter 34, 59–60, 62, 83–4, 85, 88 Mandeville, Bernard 194 Mani, Brian 136 Manley, Delarivier 43 manners, comedies of 29, 33, 34, 72, 75, 82 Mannings, David 25

249

The Man’s Bewitched 128 Mansfield Park 69 Marmontel, Jean François 9–11, 14, 20–1 Marplot 139 marriage 4, 107 Marriage á la Mode (Dryden) 32 Marriage A-la-Mode (Hogarth) 11–13 The Marriage of Figaro (Le Mariage de Figaro) 21, 65 Marsden, Jean I. 166 Marshall, Ashley 175 Mary of Modena 152, 153, 154 masculinity, bourgeois 134, 138 The Masque (photo) 105 masques 71, 72, 126 McKeon, Michael 97 Menaechmi 93 merchant classes 97 Mercier, Louis-Sébastien 65 Methodism 208, 217–18 (see also religion) Midas 38 middle classes 113 Millais, J.E. 95 Milton, John 199–201, 203, 205, 219 mime 129 misogyny 151–2 The Mistaken Husband 113–14 Mist’s Weekly Journal 181 The Modern Husband 162 modernity 95 Modest Proposal 9 Molière 14–15, 23 monarchy, absolute 3 Montagu, Mary Wortley 188 Moody, Jane 69 Moore, Edward 63–4 morality comedy and 37, 58–9, 62, 63, 84 innate moral sense 4 moral sense philosophy 6 Mountfort, William 35 Mrs. Abington as the Comic Muse (painting) 134–5 Much Ado About Nothing 31–2, 107 multi-plot comedies 32 Munson, Charlotte 125, 136, 137, 138, 139 Murphy, Arthur 39 music, comedy and 37, 38, 124

250

Nace, Nicholas 149 naming conventions 122 Nashe, Thomas 42 nation-states 10–11 nationalism 8, 54, 61–2, 66, 100, 167 nature, state of 2–3 neoclassical theory, French 52 New Comedy 27, 29, 31, 47, 61–2, 67, 93 The New Morality 169 Newcastle, Duke of 32 Newton, Isaac 207 The Non-Juror 156, 158, 159–60 Nonsense Club 191 Norman, Larry F. 15, 20–1 Noveau-Theatre 129 novels 42–6, 207–19 (see also individual novels) Noverre, Jean-Georges 24 Novum Organum 95 Nussbaum, Felicity 73 O’Brien, John 80–1, 126, 162 obscenity 149–52 O’Hara, Kane 38 Oldfield, Anne 73, 135–6 Oldham, John 148 opera ballad operas 37–8, 76–7, 82 Italian 37–8 The Opera of Operas 162 Origins of the English Novel 97 Oroonoko 32 Otway, Thomas 28, 35 Pamela 15–16, 43, 80, 209–10 pantomime 80–2, 126, 128 Paradise Lost 199–201, 203, 205–6 parodies 35, 152 Pasquin 38 Pasternak, Charles 125, 139–40 patent theaters 70, 71, 74, 148, 168 patriarchy 151 peace 3 Pepys, Samuel 21, 32, 72 Peregrine Pickle (novel) 45 performance spaces 69–72 performers, advent of the actress 72–4 The Perjuror 159–60 Phiddian, Robert 160 philosophy, moral sense 6

INDEX

picaresque novels 45 Piccolo Teatro 129 Pinder, Peter 190–1 Plato 173 Plautus 10, 93 Plutarch 10 Poems of Affairs of State 148 poetic justice 84 Poetics 49, 52, 60, 120 poetry politics and 148 satiric 46 scripture and 203 Pohlwele, Richard 168–9 politics party politics 156 poetry and 148 political comedy 143, 167–70 political identity 146 political satire 15, 29, 39, 148, 152, 160 sexual 146, 148 term 145 theatres and political instability 35 Polly 77, 90, 161 Pope, Alexander 22, 46, 187–9, 205–7 Popple, William 120 power, comedy and 145–6, 170 Praise of Folly 201, 202 Prince of Wales. See Stuart, James Francis Edward print media 167 (see also novels) Pritchard, Hannah 105 Pritchard, R.E. 150 The Prompter 120 props 72, 112, 115, 117 prose fiction 42–6 (see also novels) Protestant Reformation (1517–1638) 7–8 The Provok’d Husband 135–6 Prynne, William 71 public sphere, women in the 73 Puritans 71 queer male bodies 137 Querelle du Cid 52 Quintilian 173 Ragussis, Michael 123 rake-heroes 33–4, 36 The Rape of the Lock 46, 205

INDEX

Rasselas 211–13, 213–14 rationis capax, humankind as 8 Ravenscroft, Edward 35 reason 9 received character 59 The Recruiting Officer 36, 90–1 “The Reeve’s Tale” 109 regulation 146 The Rehearsal 16, 35 The Relapse 36, 58 religion Christianity 8, 198, 199, 200, 202–3, 206, 207–8, 210–11 the Enlightenment and 198 failure of 206 France and 8 laughter and 173–4 Methodism 208, 217–18 the state and 4 Renaissance comedy 94 repartee 56, 57 repertoire comedies 121 Resnick, Irven M. 173 Restoration Comedy in Performance 139 Restoration period (1660–85) 1–2, 28–30, 33, 71, 72 Reynolds, Joshua 23, 24, 134–5 Rich, John 128, 160, 161 Richards, Kenneth 6, 23 Richardson, Samuel 15–16, 22–3, 43, 80, 208, 209–10 ridicule 4–5, 60–1, 180, 187 rights, of women 4 The Rivals 6, 208 Roach, Joseph 119 Robson, James 149 Rochester, Earl of. See Wilmot, John Roderick Random (novel) 45 Roman comedy 10 Romance, comic 43 Rome’s Follies: or, the Amorous Fryars 147 The Rosciad 46, 191 The Rover 34, 85–6, 107 Rowlandson, Thomas 44, 181, 182 Royal Circus 168 royalists 71 Rymer, Thomas 84 Sade, Marquis de 197 Sadler Wells 168

251

Sancho Pancho 5 Sardanapalus 148 satire of Churchill 192 the Enlightenment and 8 ethics and 205–7 laughter and 186–7, 188, 190–1 political satire 15, 29, 39, 148, 152, 160 the risks of printing 224n.1 satiric fiction 43 satiric poetry 46 social 29, 35 scenery, moveable 72 (see also props) “Scepter Lampoon” 148 Schadenfreude 87, 173 Schechner, Richard 139 Schechter, Joel 162, 165–6 The School for Lovers 41 School for Scandal 6–7, 41, 208 Schopenhauer, Arthur 179 science 198 The Scowrers 36 Secret Love 32 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 84–5 Sedley, Charles 147 Seinfeld 19, 222n.7 self-love 95–6 sensibility, human 4 sentimental comedies 6, 22, 41, 63–4, 82–3, 92, 121 A Sentimental Journey (novel) 45, 215–16 A Sequel to the Dunciad: The famous British Shitters 190 serious genre 65 sex comedies 35 sexual identities 73 sexual politics 146, 148 sexual virtue 107–9 Shadwell, Thomas 33, 35, 36, 46, 56–8, 59, 147, 155 Shaftesbury, third Earl of. See Cooper, Anthony Ashley Shakespeare, William 28, 66, 75, 94, 95 Shamela 15–16, 43 She Stoops to Conquer 6, 18–20, 98–100, 208, 221n.6 She wou’d if she cou’d 33 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 6–7, 35, 41, 82, 208

252

A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage... 58, 59, 83, 153 Shuter, Edward 123–4 Siege of Rhodes 72 Simia quam similis turpissima bestia nobis 183 Sipes, John 129–30 Sir Charles Grandison 208, 210–11 Sir Martin Mar-all 32–3 skepticism 8, 9, 21, 23, 96 Skinner, Quentin 176, 177 slap stick 127 Smith, Adam 5, 6 Smollett, Tobias 45 social categories, instability of 97 social changes 35 social contract 2, 3–4 social identity 11, 97, 98, 107 social norms 83 social satire 29, 35 social stratification and mobility 97 socialized cognitive distortion 96 Societies for the Reformation of Manners 59 Socrates 173 Sodom 149–51 The Soldier’s Fortune 35 Le sourd ou L’auberge pleine 170 Sousa, Ronald de 175 Southerne, Thomas 32, 35 Spain comedy and 10 influence of Spanish sources 32 The Spectator 60, 83, 208 The Spiritual Quixote 217–18 The Squire of Alsatia 35–6 Stage Licensing Act. See Licensing Act (1737) states nation-states 10–11 religion and 4 Steele, Richard 15, 17, 36, 37, 59–62, 82, 88–90, 208, 209, 223n.6 stereotypes 8, 100 Sterne, Laurence 5, 45, 197, 211, 215–17 stock characters 15, 93, 126, 127 Stott, Andrew 5–6, 20–1, 22 Strehler, Giorgio 129 Stuart, James Francis Edward 156, 164 Stuart monarchy 146, 147, 149, 152

INDEX

Styan, J.L. 133, 139 subgenres comédie larmoyante 6, 64–5, 155–6 of comedy 30–3, 37, 38, 41–2 novels and 42 subversion, obscenity and 149 Such Things Are 42 The Sullen Lovers; or, the Impertinents 33, 56–7 Superiority Theory 171–2, 173, 175, 176–86, 194 The Suspicious Husband 41, 105 Swift, Jonathan 8, 9, 13–14, 16, 21–2, 43, 46, 181, 188, 205–7 A Tale of a Tub 206–7 taste, class and 5 Tate, Nahum 35 Tatler 121, 208 Tave, Stuart M. 37, 185, 186, 194 Terence 10 theater(s) Clarence Brown Theatre 120, 124 Comedie Francaise (Theatre de l’Egalite) 169 comic 37 Covent Garden Theatre 75 Drury Lane theatre 74, 156, 160, 223n.5 Duke’s Theatre 72 French influence on English 14–15 King’s Theatre 72 Lincoln’s Inns Fields 124, 156, 158–9, 160, 164, 167, 223n.5 Little Theatre 166 Noveau-Theatre 129 patent theaters 70, 71, 74, 148, 168 Piccolo Teatro 129 political instability and 35 proliferation of 161 Restoration theater 72 Royal Circus 168 Sadler Wells 168 Théâtre des Variétés-Amusantes 169 theatrical practice, impact and 82–92 theatrical productions 72 Theophrastus 93 Thomson, Hugh 19, 20 Threepenny Opera 77 Timon in Love 162

INDEX

Tom Jones (novel) 44–5, 208–9 Tom Thumb 35 Tories 148, 156 Tragedies of the Last Age Consider’d 84 tragedy 49, 50, 52, 58 Tragedy of Tragedies 16, 21 tragi-comedies 31–2 Tristram Shandy (novel) 5, 45, 211–13, 215–17 The Triumph of Liberty, or the Bastille 168 truth, scientific exploration of 2 Tuke, Samuel 31 The Unfortunate Traveler (novel) 42 The Unsex’d Females 168–9 The Upholsterer 39 Vanbrugh, John 36, 58 Venice Preserved 28 Verbruggen, Susannah 136 Vicar of Wakefield 217, 218–19 Vieux-Colombier 129 Villiers, George 16, 35 Vincent, Jude 140 virtue, sexual 107–9 Voltaire 8, 65, 211–12 Walpole, Horace 122 Walpole, Robert 15, 77, 143–4, 160–7 The Way of the World 36, 37, 87–8, 97–8, 141, 203, 205 Weaver, John 121, 128, 130 Weber, Harold 73, 150 Weil, Rachel 155 Weinsheimer, Joel 145 Weitz, Eric 10

253

Welsted, Leonard 61 The West Indian 41, 64 West, Shearer 122, 135 Westminster Magazine 63 The What D’ye Call It 76 Whig and Tory 159 Whigs 147, 148, 155, 156 Whitehead, William 41 wife-reform plots 155 The Wife’s Relief 111–12 Wilkes, John 168 Wilks, Robert 134 William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland 167, 168 William III and Mary 4, 35, 152–3, 155 Wilmot, John 46, 148 wit comedy 29, 31, 33–4, 36, 56–7 The Wives Excuse 35 Wolcot, John (Peter Pindar) 190–1 women advent of the actress 72–4 female agency 121 female bodies 134–7, 151–2 identities of 107, 110–11 learned 23 in the public sphere 73 rights of 4 sexual appetite of 204 Shakespeare’s 94 social identity of 107 on the stage 2, 21 wife-reform plots 155 The Wonder 91 wordplay 21 Wordsworth, William 1, 190 Worlidge, Thomas 184, 185 Wycherley, William 32, 34, 84, 203–5

254