Restoration Drama

INTRODUCTION: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF RESTORATION DRAMA
Author(s): Robert Markley

Source: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 24, No. 2, A Special Issue on Restoration Drama:
Theories, Myths, and Histories (Spring 1983), pp. 91-102
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The
Eighteenth Century,
vol. 24, no. 2, 1983
INTRODUCTION:
HISTORY,
IDEOLOGY
AND THE STUDY OF RESTORATION DRAMA
Robert
Markley
The Restoration has
always
had
something
of a bad
press among
literary
historians and critics. The
tendency
to devalue the
period
and its
literary products
stems in
part
from the moral controversies
that have swirled around
-
and often threatened to
engulf
-
much
of its drama and a fair
portion
of its verse.
Many
of the erstwhile
defenders of Restoration
comedy
have tried to sanitize it
by
echo-
ing
Lamb's comment that the
plays
of
Dryden, Etherege, Wycher-
ley,
and
Congreve
are ahistorical retreats into a
"Utopia
of
gallan-
try,"
a
fragile,
circumscribed world of wit and diluted
Jonsonian
satire.1 The difference between
seeing
later
seventeenth-century
drama as frivolous and amoral
or,
as
Jeremy
Collier
contends,
frivolous and immoral is
finally
not much of a
difference;
both
views trivialize the drama and distort the
period
in which it was
produced.
More
recently,
some critics have
argued
that Restora-
tion drama is
packed
with
religious significance;
what Collier finds
blasphemous Aubrey
Williams finds
providential.2
In
short,
no true
consensus exists about either the drama or the critical reactions it
has
engendered.
The Restoration theater remains a kind of
Rorschach test for its students.
The obsession of
many
critics with the
morality
or
immorality
of
the
stage
has tended to obscure the contextual
problems
that sur-
round Restoration drama. As the
essays
in this
special
issue of The
Eighteenth Century suggest,
the essential
challenge
to critics of the
period
is historical. From the efforts of recent
scholars, among
them A. H.
Scouten,
Robert
Hume, Judith
Milhous,
and Harold
Love,3
we have learned a
good
deal about the
history
of the late
seventeenth-century
theater
-
its
management, repertories,
finan-
ces,
and audiences. But as
James Thompson suggests
below in his
analysis
of three recent works on the
theater,
we do not have
any
theoretical
grasp
of
"history" itself, any
true
understanding
of the
1. The Works
of
Charles Lamb, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (London, 1924),
1:650.
2. See Williams, An
Approach
to
Congreve (New
Haven: Yale, 1979).
3. Scouten and Hume, "Restoration
Comedy
and its Audiences, 1660-1776," Yearbook
of English
Studies
10(1980):45-69; Hume, The
Development of English
Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford:
Claren-
don, 1976); Hume, ed., The London Theatre World, 1660-1800 Carbondale: Southern Illinois, 1980); Milhous,
Thomas Betterton and the
Management of
Lincoln's Inn Fields
(Carbondale:
Southern Illinois, 1979);
and
Love, "Who Were the Restoration Audience?" Yearbook
of English
Studies 10(l980):20-44.
91
92 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
complex relationships
between Restoration drama and its
ideologi-
cal
substructure, assumptions,
and values.
History,
for most
literary
critics,
becomes whatever
they
want it to become: a collection of
intellectual
postures,
an
aggregation
of
biographical facts,
a series
of
dates,
statistical data that are
necessarily incomplete, or,
most
numbing
of
all,
an
arbitrary
selection of ideas that turns the
past
into sets of arthritic caricatures. The
problem
of
defining history,
though,
is
hardly
restricted to critics of Restoration
drama;
it is
symptomatic
of some of the difficulties that
currently
characterize
the academic
study
of
Anglo-American
literature.
1
Literary history
as a
discipline
is in the throes of an
identity
cri-
sis.
Contemporary
historians and
philosophers
of
history
-
following
the
examples
of Michel Foucault and
Hayden
White4
-
have
increasingly
turned
away
from
attempts
to describe
history
objectively, concentrating
instead on
describing
the
ideological
relationships
that exist
among
social
institutions, psychology,
eco-
nomics, politics, philosophy,
and
-
significantly
-
the
languages
in
which
they
are constituted. The new
historiography,
in this
regard,
spends
less time
analyzing particular incidents, trends,
or
personal-
ities than it does
studying
the structures of
perception
that
pro-
duce,
and are in turn
produced by, language, thought,
and
history.
In this
regard,
White's or Foucauls
conception
of
history
differs
fundamentally
from what Richard Levin criticizes as the "ideas of
the time
approach"
to
literature,
the
supposition
that individual
works can be
interpreted by invoking unitary
contexts or back-
grounds
to
explicate
their
meanings.5
For
many
of its more radical
theorists,
history
becomes a dialectical
process,
a
complex
of
changing ideological
attitudes and
perceptions
rather than a
simple
chronological unfolding
of events.
This
perception
of
history, though
often difficult to articulate
fully,
is
gradually changing
the
ways
in which we think and write
about
literature,
forcing us,
in
effect,
to
question
the
assumptions
and values that characterize traditional
approaches
to
texts,
authors,
and
periods. Increasingly,
the
postmodern
revolution in
criticism is
challenging
formalist notions about how
we,
as scholars
and
readers, perceive literary
texts. This movement
may
at times
4. See
particularly Foucault, The Order
of Things:
An
Archaeology of
the Human Sciences
(New
York:
Pantheon, 1971) and
White,
Metahistory:
The Historical
Imagination
in Nineteenth
Century Europe (Balti-
more:
Johns Hopkins, 1973).
5. New
Readings
vs. Old
Plays:
Recent Trends in the
Reinterpretation of English
Renaissance Drama
(Chicago: University
of
Chicago Press, 1979).
MARKLEY- HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY 93
seem either
glacially
slow or
precipitously rapid,
but most scholars
versed in
contemporary theory
would
probably acknowledge
that
New Criticism has fallen on hard times and that its formalist
successors
-
structuralism and
poststructuralism pressed
into the
service of
reading
and
interpretation
-
have been attacked for
either their inherent or
presumed
antihistorical biases.6 No consen-
sus, however,
has
developed
about what criticism is now
supposed
to do. Few critics have
openly questioned
their own
ideological
positions
or
analyzed
the
necessary
fictions
they employ
to sustain
their roles as
interpreters
-
and
guardians
-
of a collective
literary
heritage.
This
generalization
holds true for most critics of Restora-
tion drama.
Many
of the recent studies of the
period's
theater are
concerned with either
interpreting
historical data
(Hume's
Devel-
opment of English
Drama in the Late Seventeenth
Century
and
Susan Staves's
Players' Scepters:
Fictions
of Authority
in the Resto-
ration1)
or
attempting
to chart the thematic mainlines of individual
plays (Williams's
An
Approach
to
Congreve).
As
Thompson sug-
gests below,
these works remain aloof from
contemporary
theoret-
ical debates about the natures of literature and criticism. This is
not to
suggest
that Restoration
scholarship
is in
any
sense
outdated;
it is not behind the times but
caught up
in them. Like the disci-
pline
as a
whole,
Restoration drama criticism
occasionally
seems to
be
treading
air somewhere between
theory
and
interpretation.
By explicitly challenging
the value of
interpretation
as a critical
activity,
the new
historiography
is led to ask fundamental
ques-
tions about how and
why literary
works are
produced.
It
suggests,
as Michael McKeon does in his
essay,
that
literary
texts do not
pas-
sively
reflect dominant
systems
of
belief,
modes of
thought,
or
codes of ethics and
behavior;
literature itself becomes a
significant
part
of the historical
process, bearing
witness to the dialectical
interplay
of tradition and
innovation,
convention and individual
perception.
The
text,
in other
words,
becomes
contextually
as well
as
intrinsically significant.
To consider
seriously
this
expanded,
dia-
lectical
perception
of
history,
one soon
realizes,
is to
recognize
the
theoretical,
even
imaginative, significance
of much recent Marxist
criticism. Yet such a
recognition
does not
imply
a surrender to ster-
ile, programmatic responses
to
particular
texts or
periods.
On the
contrary,
the new
historiography attempts
to examine the forma-
tion of social institutions and
ideologies,
to
explore
what Frederic
6. See
particularly
Frank Lentricchia, After
the New Criticism (Chicago: University
of
Chicago Press,
1980).
7.
(Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1979).
Jameson
calls the
"political
unconscious."8 More
specifically,
it
may
redirect our attention to the Restoration as a crucial
period
in
the transition of
England
from a feudal and aristocratic
society
to
a
bourgeois,
mercantile nation. The
literary products
of the
period,
then, reflect, participate
in,
and
help
create the
radical,
often
paradoxical,
tensions that characterize later
seventeenth-century
history.
In
brief,
our
responses
to Restoration drama and literature are
formed,
to some
extent, by
how we
perceive
the era
itself,
define
its often
contradictory tendencies,
and deal with its
deep-seated
ambivalence to traditional notions of
morality
and
authority.
For
many
recent
critics,
the historical
significance
of Restoration
drama lies
precisely
in its transitional nature
-
its
attempts
to
articulate aristocratic values
(and
reaffirm the Christian culture in
which
they
are
rooted),
even as individual
plays
become more
and more concerned with the
social, moral,
and economic values
of a nascent
capitalist society.
The title of Norman Holland's sem-
inal
study
of Restoration
comedy-
The First Modern Comedies-
is
instructive,
suggesting
a
good
deal about recent
perceptions
of
seventeenth-century theater;
it
implies
that the roots of our con-
temporary
notions of
comedy
lie in
Etherege's, Wycherley's,
and
Congreve's
concerns with the natural and artificial in human
behavior.
Yet,
as
John
T. Harwood
points
out,
this view of the
Restoration's
modernity,
whether Holland's or his
followers',
is an
essentially
intuitive rather than historical reaction to the
plays.9
Used in this
manner,
"modern" becomes an evaluative term
linked
implicitly
to
attempts
to
argue
for the aesthetic
quality
and
moral seriousness of Restoration
comedy.
It describes a notion of
modernity
divorced from
history.
"Modern,"
in this
sense,
does
not define a transition between two distinct eras or
ideologies but,
as Holland himself seems to
realize,
a fundamental
aspect
of
psy-
chology.
Restoration drama is the
product
of a confused and often con-
fusing
era. Its
history,
as Michael Neill
suggests,
cannot be
divorced from the histories of its
playwrights, actors, audiences,
patrons,
and detractors. One of the first critics to
explore
some of
the
ideological implications
of Restoration
literary history
is
Samuel
Johnson,
whose
perceptive
comments in The Lives
of
the
English
Poets on the social conditions that fashion both the writer
and his work often
go
unremarked.
Johnson,
of
course,
is
hardly
8. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1981).
9. Critics, Values, and Restoration Drama (Carbondale: Southern Illinois, 1982), pp.
15-18.
Foucault, White, or,
for that
matter, any
of the contributors to this
special
issue. Yet what he has to
say,
often in
passing,
about the
relationships
of
poetry
and drama to Restoration
history,
to "the
times"
themselves, helps
to define
many
of the
underlying
assumptions
that have
historically shaped
debates about the mor-
ality
of the
period
and its theater.
In the Lives
Dryden, Congreve,
and
Otway
become embodi-
ments of their
age. Johnson
seems to subvert
deliberately
the dis-
tinctions between the individual and the circumstances
-
usually
money
or
"applause"
-
that enticed him to write for the
stage.
Though Johnson's
biases are
explicitly moral,
his comments on the
ways
in which these men
comported
themselves
socially,
artisti-
cally, morally,
and
religiously
reflect his
abiding
concern with the
politicization
-
and with what a Marxist critic
might
call the
commodification
-
of art
during
the
period.
For
Johnson,
moral
laxity, time-serving, flattery,
"the
corruption
of the
times,"10
and
the
degeneration
of literature to the status of commercial
object
are
integrally
related. He is
acutely
sensitive to the financial
aspects
of
writing
and their
potentially corrupting
effects on the
writer: "it is
impossible
not to detest the
age
which could
impose
on
[Dryden]
the
necessity
of such solicitations
[for money],
or not
to
despise
the man who could submit to such solicitations without
necessity" (p. 404).
The
relationship
between the man and "the
age"
is
symbiotic. Johnson's
attitudes towards the Restoration are
rooted in his
disgust
at the
prospect
of its
literary products
becoming commodified, objects
to be sold or bartered for
money, status,
or influence. His ambivalence about
Dryden
lies in
his view of his
predecessor's willingness
to unite
"politicks
with
poetry,"
to become
"profitably employed
in
controversy
and flat-
tery" (pp. 373, 384).
If
Dryden
is
given
to
"profaneness"
and
"meanness and
servility
in
hyperbolical
adulation" of his aristo-
cratic
patrons,
he is
guilty
of
simply "accomodating
himself to the
corruption
of the times"
(pp. 399, 404). Johnson
thus sees the
age
corrupting
the writer as writer:
"Dryden
has never been
charged
with
any personal agency unworthy
of a
good
character: he abet-
ted vice and
vanity only
with his
pen" (p. 398).
11
Johnson's
comments on Restoration authors are
especially
valu-
able because
they suggest
some of the
ways
in which
viewing
literary
artifacts as
products
of a
particular
culture as well as of a
10. Lives
of
the
English Poets, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1905),
1:404. All future references
to this edition will be cited
parenthetically
in the text.
11. For a
slightly
different interpretation
of
Johnson's Life of Dryden , see K.
J.
H. Berland, Johnsons
Lite-
Writing
and the
Life of Dryden,"
The Eighteenth Century: Theory
and
Interpretation
23:
(1982):
197-218.
particular
individual
may complicate
both our aesthetic and moral
responses
to them. His reaction
against Dryden's
era
is,
at
once,
moral and
ideological. Johnson
is concerned not
merely
with the
"vice and
vanity"
of
Dryden's plays
and
poems
but with what he
perceives
as the broad
range
of cultural conditions under which
they
are
produced.
In his
biographies
of Restoration
figures,
"the
times" themselves become
part
of criticism
proper.
In this
respect,
one of
Johnson's important
contributions in the Lives is
his subtle
yet
insistent
recognition
that
poetry, politics, economics,
and
history interpenetrate, shaping
and
being shaped by
each
other.
Ideology, though,
however one defines
it,
is not an invention of
the Restoration or a
by-product
of a well-defined rise of bour-
geois
culture
during
the late seventeenth and
eighteenth
centuries.
That the structures of
language, perception,
and
thought
are
polit-
ical forms of
power
is a truism of much recent social and
literary
theory; yet applying
this
insight
to
literary
criticism can often be a
disorienting experience
for both critics and their readers. The
recent
special
issue of Genre edited
by Stephen Greenblatt,
The
Forms
of
Power and the Power
of
Forms in the Renaissance
, cap-
tures some of the
revealing potential
of
postmodern approaches
to
literary history. By seeking
to
reintegrate plays
and
poems
into
history,
Franco
Moretti, Harry Berger, Stephen Orgel,
and
Jona-
than
Goldberg, among others, explore
the self-conscious
mythos
of the Elizabethan
era,
its will to
power
and
attempts
to celebrate
aristocratic
authority.
Restoration drama is
similarly
a
promising
area for theoretical and dialectical
inquiry,
as Neill and McKeon
suggest
in their
essays, precisely
because of its
sensitivity
to its
political
and
ideological substructures.
Many
of the basic dramatic
conventions of the era
-
the double
plot,
the incessant warfare
between the
generations
and between the
sexes,
the
flouting
of
traditional
morality,
and the often obtrusive
attempts
to restore
order at the
play's
conclusion
-
verge
on the
openly ideological:
aristocratic artiface set in conflict with
emerging bourgeois
atti-
tudes about
politics
and
society.
Yet one seldom sees on the Res-
toration
stage
a
consistent,
deliberate
working
out of a
political
or
ideological position; instead,
as McKeon
argues,
one observes the
essentially
dialectical
processes by
which
ideology
takes
shape,
dissolves,
and manifests itself in its
always
diluted forms. From
this
perspective
one
might argue
that
many
of the theater's more
astute critics are
responding
to the
muted,
and
occasionally open,
warfare that exists in an aristocratic
society trying
both to reassert
and restructure the
premises
on which its
privilege
and
authority
rest.
Notions of the Restoration's
modernity, then,
are
finally
not so
much anachronistic as
inherently problematic. Every
era under-
goes
its
particular
crises of
modernity,
its
attempts
both to
deny
and to accomodate the
processes
of historical and
technological
change;
and
every
modern era
eventually
becomes the
mytholo-
gized past
from which
-
or to which
-
its successors are
trying
to
escape.
In this
respect, modernity
cannot be defined
chronologi-
cally. Inevitably, conceptions
of
modernity
become
part
of the
dialectical
process:
the
present
and
past struggling
to envision and
shape
the future. As Marshall Berman
points
out in his brilliant
study
of our own
post-Enlightenment modernity,
All That is Solid
Melts into Air
,
the
experience
of
modernity
is almost
by
definition
disorienting: assumptions
about and
perceptions
of the world dis-
integrate, reform,
and transform themselves and their
world;
values
change; hope
and
despair
define antithetical
responses
to
the historical
process
itself.12 In Berman's
sense,
the Restoration's
crises of
modernity may
seem
imaginatively
accessible to modern
critics
precisely
because the trauma of historical
change
is an
important
constituent of human
perceptions
of culture and self.
The Restoration seems modern to some not because it is existen-
tial or its
experiences
mirror our own but because its
responses
to
change
and to the traditional aristocratic values it
simultaneously
asserts and travesties are
necessarily
ambivalent. As Neill
suggests,
Restoration writers'
perceptions
of their era's
precarious stability
and their own
ideological
fictions describe the dialectic Rochester
details in his letter to his wife: heroic heads
resting
on humble
tails.
The crises of the late seventeenth
century, then,
are those of
both faith and
experience,
belief and
history.
It is
significant,
in
this
regard,
that one of the dominant modes of discourse in the
1660s and 1670s is the assertion of
patriarchal infallibility
-
cutting
off
argument,
in other
words, by appeals
to what Staves describes
as the "fictions of
authority."
This
invoking
of absolute
authority
is
grounded firmly
in traditional Christian
perceptions
of the uni-
verse
(Milton's God,
for
example,
as well as the more
problematic
assertions of divine
perfection by
Newton and
Boyle), yet
it often
shades into the secular
realm;
witness Collier's-
appeals
to critical
tradition as well as to
religious authority
and the overt absolutism
of much of the Restoration's heroic
tragedy.
But these assertions
12.
(New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
of
authority
are often
qualified
or undermined
by
the writer's
nagging skepticism.13 Dryden's
heroic
tragedy,
for
example,
at
times
verges
on farce: the more
hysterically
his characters assert
their absolute
love, honor,,
and
power,
the closer
they
come to
self-parody.
The
Restoration,
the
age
of "failed
epic"
as Staves
calls
it,
lacks the
equivalent
of
Sidney's
Arcadia or
Spenser's
Faerie
Queene
-
elaborate
poetic attempts
to
mythologize
the
existing political
and moral order. Celebration tends to
give way
to
satire;
the
great age
of failed
epic
is also one of the
great ages
of
literary
vandalism. Rochester's licentious
"Satyr
on Charles II"
would have been inconceivable in the
1570s;
it uses the
King's phi-
landering
to undermine the
authority
of his
position
as well as his
person.
The
poem's closing couplet
-
"All monarchs I
hate,
and
the thrones
they
sit
on,
/From the hector of France to the
cully
of
Britain"14
-
underscores Rochester's
implicit
connection of libertin-
ism with a radical
disregard
for the
political
and moral mecha-
nisms that structure Restoration
society.
Shadwell's The Libertine
similarly
dismantles its fictions of
authority.
The
play's flouting
of
conventional
morality
is
part
of its
larger ideological rejection
of
the
very
forms of the drama that
help
ensure such
stability.
The
play's
true
fictions,
its best
jokes,
in
effect,
are its
plot
and struc-
ture. Its
morality
is desecration. Don
John acknowledges
what is
sacred in Restoration
society,
the order and
authority represented
by
the
patriarchal figures (ghostly
and
otherwise)
who inhabit the
play, precisely
so he can violate
everything they represent,
from
religious scruples
to aristocratic honor. As Neill
argues
in his dis-
cussion of the
play,
The Libertine is in
many ways
characteristic
of its time. It
rejects
both
political
and aesthetic order and
glori-
fies the radical
energy
of satire and mock
epic,
themselves
generic
diminutions of their culture's heroic
aspirations.
2
The
essays
in this issue of The
Eighteenth Century
are united
less
by
a
specific
outlook or
approach
than
by
the kinds of
prob-
lems that
they
choose to
explore. They
deal in various
ways
with
history, authority, morality, power,
and
contemporary
critical
interpretations
of Restoration drama as
problems
to be examined
rather than as
assumptions
to take for
granted. Building
on the
foundations of
previous scholarship,
these
essays
deal with both
13. See, for one
example, J.
R.
Jacob, Robert
Boyle
and the
English Revolution (New York: Burt
Franklin,
1977)
on
Boyle's
crises of faith.
14. The
Complete
Poems
of John Wilmot, Earl
of Rochester, ed. David Vieth
(New Haven:
Yale, 1968), p.
61.
MARKLEY- HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
99
specific plays
and the reactions
they
have
engendered.
As Levin
suggests, carefully evaluating
the contributions and failures of
past
criticism has become an
increasingly significant undertaking;
and
as Harriett Hawkins and
Thompson
demonstrate
below,
meta-
criticism
-
sorting through
and
analyzing
what has
already
been
done
-
is
beginning
to restructure our
thinking
about the
purposes
of Restoration
scholarship.
Recent
approaches
to late
seventeenth-century
theater
have,
on
the
whole,
tended to
complicate
our
perceptions
of,
and re-
sponses to,
the drama. Rose Zimbardo has
recently argued
for
seeing
the
years
between 1660 and 1700 less as a "vestibule" to the
eighteenth century
than as a "culmination" of the crises and con-
flicts that dominated the seventeenth.15 Her
suggestion opens up
some
intriguing possibilities
for scholars of the
period by implic-
itly asking
us to examine the
relationships
between the Restoration
and its
literary past.
To take
only
one
example,
most students of
Restoration drama are aware of the
extravagant praise
accorded
John
Fletcher
by Dryden, Langbaine, Denham, Congreve, Drake,
and other
contemporary
writers on the theater. Yet what
exactly
late
seventeenth-century
drama owes to his
example
remains,
at
best,
obscure. That Fletcher's
plays,
as
Dryden
notes,
were
revived twice as often as
Shakespeare's
and
Jonson's
seems less an
historical aberration than a crucial means of
identifying early
Res-
toration theatrical tastes. An
analysis
of
why
Fletcher was so
pop-
ular with critics and audiences
might
reveal much about how
Dryden
and his
contemporaries perceived
their theatrical
heritage.
Also,
one has to wonder
why
certain
plays
in the Beaumont and
Fletcher canon were revived and
others, seemingly
closer in form
to the
comedy
of manners
(The Scornful Lady ,
for
example),
were seldom
performed during
the 1660s. Such a
study
would
necessitate
investigating
the
perceptions
and unwritten
assump-
tions of Restoration critics as well as the formal rules
that, say,
Dryden
and
Rymer
are
adept
at
setting
forth.
The
underlying
notion of
history
that this
project
entails seems
closer to
Hay
den White's or
James Thompson's
than
Allardyce
Nicoll's. It underscores
disjunction
and dialectic rather than linear
progression;
it
calls, too,
for an
attempt
to understand criticism as
Dryden
and his
contemporaries perceived
and
practiced
it
-
an
often ambivalent
attempt
to
justify
their own heroic
presumptions
15. "Dramatic Imitation of Nature in the Restoration's Seventeenth Century
Predecessors," in From Renais-
sance to Restoration:
Metamorphoses of
the Drama, ed. Robert
Markley
and Laurie Finke (Cleveland:
Bell-
flower Press, 1983), forthcoming.
by emphasizing
their efforts to assimilate and
surpass
their
literary
past.
In this
endeavor, many
Restoration critics and
preface-
writers seem to
recognize
that
they
are the inheritors of
something
more than a
pristine, pre-Commonwealth utopia
of letters cut
loose from its social and
political moorings. Dry
den's
image
of his
Elizabethan
predecessors
as "the
Gyant Race,
before the Flood"16
is
extremely suggestive;
its
overlay
of biblical allusion and
literary
judgment
evokes the author's heroic frame of
reference, calling
attention to his
attempts
to obliterate the
memory
of the
Interreg-
num, glorify English
theatrical
tradition,
and resurrect what he
perceives
as his
generation's
claims to a
nearly mythic lineage.
In
this
respect, Dryden's invoking
of the
"Gyant
Race" of
Fletcher,
Shakespeare,
and
Jonson impinges
on both
myth
and
history.
Implicitly,
it raises
questions
about how "the Flood" affects his
and his era's
responses
to earlier
seventeenth-century history
-
theatrical and otherwise.
There
are,
I
believe,
historical events rooted in the conscious-
ness of
virtually
all Restoration writers which
shape
their reactions
to their
literary past
and to the
ideological
function of art. The
beheading
of Charles
I,
the fate of individual
family
fortunes and
family
members
during
the civil
war,
the wide
currency
of mille-
narianism, skepticism, enthusiasm, radicalism,
and conservative
reactions
against
them
during
the 1650s and
early 1660s,
and the
return of the
monarchy
all underlie Restoration literature. The
overt reactions to these events and conditions are
political,
reli-
gious, social, moral,
and
economic;
so too are the
imaginative
and
psychological responses
manifested in the drama. As Neill
sug-
gests, history
itself
-
the
imaginative
recreation of
ideological
conflict
-
becomes one of the Restoration
stage's
most durable
subjects. History, however,
in this sense
implies
more than
simply
drawing
or
perceiving parallels
between individual characters or
plays
and actual
people
or events. The
nightmare
of civil war
-
seized
lands,
exiled
relatives,
slain
kinfolk,
and a dead
king
-
become the dark underside of the Restoration
myth
as well as
fodder for anti-Puritan satires like The
Mulberry
Garden or Cutter
of
Coleman Street .
The tumultuous
history
of the mid-seventeenth
century
is ulti-
mately
the source of the moral
ambiguities
that underlie and
inform Restoration drama. Since the advent of the Collier con-
troversy,
critics have
argued
about the
morality, immorality,
and
16. "To
my
Dear Friend Mr.
Congreve," in The
Complete Plays of
William
Congreve, ed. Herbert Davis
(Chicago: University
of
Chicago Press, 1967), p.
123.
amorality
of individual
plays
and the drama as a whole. It is
fairly
easy
to see that
Macaulay,
for
example, imposes
his own stand-
ards of
morality
on Restoration drama
anachronistically
to attack
everything
he dislikes about it. It is more difficult to acknowl-
edge,
as Harwood
argues,
that
many
modern critics have done
the same sort of
thing
to
justify
their own reactions to the
plays.
Hawkins
suggests
in her
critique
of
providentialist
criticism that
the values of Restoration audiences
-
like those of
any
audience
-
are
likely
to be too
complex,
too
ambiguous,
to
pigeonhole neatly.
Collier and
Congreve,
for
example,
have
vastly
different notions
of what constitutes
morality
and what constitutes
sacrilege. They
also have different ideas about the affective
power
of drama:
does it inculcate virtue or
gild
vice? These antithetical reactions
are not the exclusive domain of Restoration drama critics
but,
as
Hawkins
notes,
inhere in
age-old
debates about the
stage
and its
power
to
question
or
challenge
moral orthodoxies.17
Exactly
how
the Restoration's
particular
visions of
history,
its reactions to its
Stuart and Commonwealth
pasts,
influence its notions of
morality
and
immorality may
be an area worth
exploring.
To
study
the
relationships
between
history
and
morality
one
must move
beyond collecting
data or
analyzing
texts to
explore
the
social, economic,
and
political
conditions of theatrical
produc-
tion
during
the Restoration and their effects on individual
play-
wrights.
Such influences are often
extremely
difficult to
pin
down. Few
critics,
for
example,
have done more than note in
passing
that
Etherege, Wycherley,
and
Congreve
retired from the
stage
in their thirties and never returned to
it, although
all three
later found themselves in financial straits.
(Wycherley actually
spent
several
years
in debtors'
prison.) Although
our
biographical
information on these dramatists is
sketchy,
none of it
suggests
a
compelling
reason that
prevented any
of them from
writing
for
the theater
again.
In
contrast, Dryden
returned to
composing
plays
after 1688
despite
his
deteriorating
health. The
early
retire-
ments of
Etherege, Wycherley,
and
Congreve point up
the fact
that,
besides our lack of hard
biographical facts,
we know little
about the collective
psychology
of the Restoration
playwrights,
their fascination with
youthful
heroes
rebelling against
the kind of
patriarchal authority
-
moral, familial,
and
political
-
that the Res-
toration
supposedly
had restored. The lives of
Etherege
and
Wycherley
in
particular
seem to
spill
over into
myth,
ironic fic-
tion, or,
for the Colliers of the
world,
moral
exempla:
the drama-
17. Likenesses of
Truth in Elizabethan and Restoration Drama
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1972).
tist retires from the theater and suffers the fate of his fools and
hypocrites, falling prey
to circumstances rather than
controlling
them. The near
legendary
existences of
"loose, wandring,
Ethe
-
rege ,
in wild Pleasures tost"18 and
"Manly Witcherly
'19
after their
exits from the world of the theater
suggest something
of the
ambivalence of Restoration
society
towards both its
myths
and
writers.
History, literature,
and
biography,
as
Johnson insists,
are
mutually revealing.
In The Debt to Pleasure
John
Adlard introduces a brief
analysis
of Rochester's character with Wilhelm Reich's observation that
"what is called the cultured human" is "a
living
structure com-
posed
of three
layers:"
On the surface he carries the artificial mask of
self-control,
of
compulsive,
insincere
politeness
and of artificial
sociality.
With this
layer,
he covers
up
the
second
one,
the Freudian
"unconscious,"
in which
sadism, greediness,
lasci-
viousness, envy, perversions
of all kinds . . . are
kept
in
check,
without how-
ever, having
in the least lost
any
of their
power.
This second
layer
is an arti-
fact of a
sex-negating culture; consciously,
it is
mostly experienced only
as a
gaping
inner
emptiness.
Behind
it,
in the
depths,
live and work natural social-
ity
and
sexuality, spontaneous enjoyment
of
work, capacity for
love.20
The "natural
sociality"
of human
beings may
be either a
discovery
or creation of the Freudian
Left,
but the "artificial
sociality"
of
the Restoration is
clearly
an historical
product.
To write
history,
in one
sense,
is to
explore
Reich's first and second
layers,
the
ways
in which
society
tries to
deploy
its mechanisms of
repression
to
keep
human nature "in check." How it tries to fill the
"gaping
inner
emptiness"
that these mechanisms create is both an historical
and artistic
question.
Restoration
drama,
as Holland and others
recognize,
offers its share of
opportunities
to
investigate
"artificial
sociality"
and the Hobbesian "unconscious" it conceals. But it also
goes beyond
textbook formulations of the individual's conflict
with
society
or the
opposition
of nature and art.
Shadwell,
Wycherley,
and
Etherege
often seem as
skeptical
about the thea-
ter's claims to
authority
as
they
are about their
society's
self-
righteous pretensions.
Their
sensitivity
to the dilemma of "the cul-
tured human" stranded
upon
a
particular
bank and shoal of time
is what
gives
their
plays
their
peculiar
and
disturbing
richness.
18. Thomas
Southerne, "To Mr.
Congreve,"
in Davis, Plays of Congreve, p.
31.
19.
Dryden,
"To
my
Dear Friend Mr.
Congreve," p.
123.
Dryden
of course is
playing
on the name of
Wycherley's
hero in The Plain Dealer. That
Wycherley
took to
signing
himself "The Plain-Dealer"
(see
the
1704 edition of his
poems) suggests
a kind of
self-mythologizing,
his
assuming
a
persona
that his audience
abstracted from his
play.
See also Katherine
Rogers, William
Wycherley (New
York:
Twayne, 1972).
20.
Reich, The Function
of
the
Orgasm (New York, 1961), p. 204; quoted
in
Adlard, The Debt to Pleasure
(Manchester: Carcanet, 1974), pp.
7-8.

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INTRODUCTION: HISTORY, IDEOLOGY AND THE STUDY OF RESTORATION DRAMA

Author(s): Robert Markley

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