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In almost every important
respect, Restoration drama was far inferior to the Elizabethan. Where the
earlier playwrights created powerful and original characters, the
Restoration writers were content to portray repeatedly a few artificial
types; where the former were imaginative, the latter were clever and
ingenious. The Elizabethan dramatists were steeped in poetry, the later ones
in the sophistication of the fashionable world. The drama of Wycherley and
Congreve was the reflection of a small section of life, and it was like life
in the same sense that the mirage is like the oasis. It had polish, an edge,
a perfection in its own field; but both its perfection and its naughtiness
now seem unreal.
The heroes of the Restoration comedies were lively gentlemen
of the city, profligates and loose livers, with a strong tendency to make
love to their neighbors' wives. Husbands and fathers were dull, stupid
creatures. The heroines, for the most part, were lovely and pert, too frail
for any purpose beyond the glittering tinsel in which they were clothed.
Their companions were busybodies and gossips, amorous widows or jealous
wives. The intrigues which occupy them are not, on the whole, of so low a
nature as those depicted in the Italian court comedies; but still they are
sufficiently coarse. Over all the action is the gloss of superficial good
breeding and social ease. Only rarely do these creatures betray the traits
of sympathy, faithfulness, kindness, honesty, or loyalty. They follow a life
of pleasure, bored, but yawning behind a delicate fan or a kerchief of lace.
Millamant and Mirabell, in Congreve's Way of the World, are among the most
charming of these Watteau figures.
Everywhere in the Restoration plays are traces of European
influence. The Plain Dealer of Wycherley was an English version of
The
Misanthrope of Molière; and there are many admirable qualities in
the French play which are lacking in the English. The Double Dealer
recalls scenes from The Learned Ladies (Les femmes savantes); and Mr.
Bluffe, in The Old Bachelor, is none other than our old friend Miles
Gloriosus, who has traveled through Latin, Italian and French comedy. The
national taste was coming into harmony, to a considerable extent, with the
standards of Europe. Eccentricities were curbed; ideas, characters, and
story material were interchanged. The plays, however, were not often mere
imitations; in the majority of them there is original observation and
independence of thought. It was this drama that kept the doors of the
theater open and the love of the theater alive in the face of great public
opposition.
Soon after the Restoration women began to appear as writers
of drama. Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was one of the first and most
industrious of English women playwrights. Her family name was Amis (some
writers say Johnson). As the wife of a wealthy Dutch merchant she lived for
some time in Surinam (British Guiana). Her novel, Oroonooko,
furnished Southerne with the plot for a play of the same name. After the
death of her husband, Mrs. Behn was for a time employed by the British
government in a political capacity. She was the author of eighteen plays,
most of them highly successful and fully as indecent as any by Wycherley or
Vanbrugh. Mrs. Manly and
Mrs. Susannah Centlivre, both of whom lived until
well into the eighteenth century, also achieved success as playwrights. The
adaptations from the French, made by Mrs. Centlivre, were very popular and
kept the stage for nearly a century.
Although the Puritans had lost their dominance as a political
power, yet they had not lost courage in abusing the stage. The most violent
attack was made by the clergyman Jeremy Collier in 1698, in a pamphlet
called A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage, in which he denounced not only Congreve and Vanbrugh, but
Shakespeare and most of the Elizabethans. Three points especially drew forth
his denunciations: the so-called lewdness of the plays, the frequent
references to the Bible and biblical characters, and the criticism, slander
and abuse flung from the stage upon the clergy. He would not have any
Desdemona, however chaste, show her love before the footlights; he would
allow no reference in a comedy to anything connected with the Church or
religion; and especially would he prohibit any portrayal of the clergy. Next
to the men in holy orders, Collier had a tender heart for the nobility. He
said in effect that if any ridicule or satire were to be indulged in, it
should be against persons of low quality. To call a duke a rascal on the
stage was far worse than to apply such an epithet to plain Hodge, almost as
libellous as to represent a clergyman as a hypocrite. Collier made the
curiously stupid error of accusing the playwrights of glorifying all the
sins, passions, or peculiarities which they portrayed in their characters.
He had no understanding of the point of view of the literary artist, nor any
desire to understand it.
Collier's attack, unjust as it was, and foolish as certain
phases of it appear today, yet it made an impression. The king, James II,
was so wrought up over it that he issued a solemn proclamation "against vice
and profaneness." Congreve and Vanbrugh, together with other writers, were
persecuted, and fines were imposed on some of the most popular actors and
actresses. Dryden, Congreve and Vanbrugh made an attempt at a justification
of the stage, but it did little good. D'Urfey, Dennis, and others entered
the controversy, which raged for many years. The public buzzed with the
scandal set forth in The Short View, but did not stay away altogether
from the playhouses. The poets answered the attack not by reformation, but
by new plays in which the laughter, the satire, and the ridicule were turned
upon their enemies.
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