The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611)

‘Perhaps for my mad going some reprove me:
I please myself and care not else who loves me.’
(Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl)

According to Elizabeth Cook, editor of the New Mermaid edition of The Roaring Girl, Middleton was for centuries dismissed as just another member of the flock of playwrights who swarmed in London between about 1590 and 1630 and who collectively produced over 600 plays of all styles, shapes and sizes.

It was T.S. Eliot’s 1927 essay about Middleton which made a solid claim for him being second only to Shakespeare among the playwrights of the era, not least because he wrote enduring plays in both the major genres, of tragedy (The Changeling and Women Beware Women) and comedy (The Roaring Girl and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside), and which began the 20th century rise of his reputation.

The Roaring Girl stands slightly to one side of Middleton’s comedies, firstly because it was a collaboration (with Thomas Dekker). (It is fascinating to learn that the majority of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were collaborations, because of the furious demand of theatres which often only staged new plays for a week or two before requiring yet more audience fodder.)

It is also slightly unusual because it is based on contemporary fact, namely the life of Mary Frith, a notorious character of the time, widely known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’, who had gained a reputation for wearing men’s clothes and behaving like a young tough. Contemporary accounts describe her as ‘wearing men’s clothes, appearing on the stage, drinking, swearing, making “immodest and lascivious speeches,” prostitution, pick-pocketing, forgery, and highway robbery’. Frith inspired numerous contemporary accounts, including a chapbook written by John Day titled The Mad Pranks of Merry Moll of the Bankside (1610) and appearing in Nathaniel Field’s Amends for Ladies (1611).

Cast

Moll, the Roaring Girl

The posh men

Sir Alexander Wengrave
Young Sebastian Wengrave, his son – the ‘hero’
Neatfoot, his servant
Gull, his page
Ralph Trapdoor, his spy
Sir Adam Appleton
Sir Davy Dapper
Jack Dapper, spendthrift son to Sir Davy
Sir Guy Fitzallard
(Mary Fitzallard, his daughter, in love with Sebastian Wengrave – the ‘heroine’)
Sir Beauteous Ganymede
Goshawk, a deceiving gallant
Laxton, another deceiving gallant
Greenwit, assistant to Laxton in some scams

Curtilax, a Sergeant
Hanger, his Yeoman (both commissioned by Sir Davy Dapper to arrest his spendthrift son, Jack)

City merchants and their wives

Tiltyard, a Feather-seller
Mistress Tiltyard
Openwork, a Sempster
Mistress Rosamond Openwork – Goshawk tries to seduce her
Hippocrates Gallipot, an Apothecary
Mistress Prudence Gallipot – Laxton tries to seduce her

Act I

Oddly, Moll, the start of the play, doesn’t appear for the entire first act. Maybe one aim was to make her eventual arrival onstage that much more ‘dramatic’. Instead both scenes of act one are set in Sir Alexander Wengrave’s grand house where he is grandly entertaining guests.

Scene 1 is set in the chambers of his son, Sebastian, into which is shown a young woman dressed as a disguise. This is quickly revealed to be Mary Fitzallard who Sebastian is in love with. Why, she asks, has he been ignoring her? Because, he explains, his father is grand and ambitious and is demanding a huge dowry from her parents. But Sebastian has a plan which he now explains: he has not seen Mary for a while because he is pretending to be in love with the notorious man-dressing, roaring girl, Moll Cutpurse. His father will be so worried about that match that he will see marriage to Mary as the preferable alternative.

Scene 2 introduces us to Sebastian’s father, Sir Alexander, who is grandly hosting a party of posh friends who he proceeds to share his sadness that his son is driving him to an early grave by being in love with a ‘man-woman’, Moll Cutpurse. Father and son have a flaring row in front of everything and Sebastian stomps out and the guests leave. At which point a new servant presents himself, one Ralph Trapdoor who has been recommended to Sir Alexander. This is handy. Sir Alexander orders Trapdoor, and to find Moll, inveigle himself into her good books and find some way to destroy her.

Act II

Scene 1: The three shops The gallants who had been Sir Alexander Wengrave’s guests in act 1, are now seen drifting between three London shops, chatting to the shopkeepers, flirting with their wives and ribbing each other. We see Laxton flirting with Mistress Gallipot of the tobacco shop, borrowing money from her and telling the audience, aside, that he doesn’t like her much but strings her along with promises of a sexual dalliance, meanwhile borrowing money from her to spend on other women.

Finally, enter Moll Cutpurse, chatting and joshing with the shopwomen. Laxton – who has emerged as the randiest and most cynical of the gallants – pesters her to make a date with him and eventually she gives in and agrees to meet him at Gray’s Inn Fields at 3 that afternoon.

Trapdoor then enters, spots Moll, and quickly offers to be her servant, flirts and fawns over her. She’s suspicious but agrees to meet him, also, in Gray’s Inn Fields between 3 and 4. The gallants go off to chase a duck with spaniels on Parlous Pond!

Scene 2: A street Sebastian makes a soliloquy about love during which his father enters, unseen, and spies on him. Sebastian notices this (‘art thou so near?’) and steers his speech round to indicating he is in love with Moll Cutpurse, to his father’s predictable dismay. Moll herself enters, accompanied by a porter carrying a large viol on his back (?) and Sebastian woos her. She is polite but rebuffs him – “I have no humour to marry: I love to lie a’ both sides a’ th’ bed myself” – saying she is chaste and will never marry.

Enter a tailor and there’s some crude joking about him taking her measurements for a pair of breeches, an item of clothing normally worn only by men, which Sir Alexander watches with predictable horror.

Sir Alexander comes forward and rebukes his son, saying that Moll will disgrace him because she is a whore and a thief, throwing in the fact that all the worst women in London are called Moll. Sebastian defends her against these general slurs – ‘Would all Molls were no worse’ and exits.

Sir Alexander is genuinely upset and, on this reading, I began to feel sorry for him. But he resolves to pursue and shame Moll. In a final soliloquy, Sebastian decides that he must share his plan with Moll in hope that she will help him and Mary.

Act III

Scene 1 – Gray’s Inn Fields Laxton is hanging round waiting impatiently for Moll to keep her appointment. When she arrives, dressed as a man, he doesn’t at first recognise her. But when he does, she delivers a brilliantly impassioned speech in defence of women and attacking all lecherous men like Laxton who think that just because she smiles and jests and drinks a toast a woman is hot for sex, whereas she is just being human, and Moll draws her sword and forces him to fight, ferociously wishing Laxton was all men who think like him, so she could punish the entire sex.

LAXTON: Draw upon a woman? Why, what dost mean, Moll?
MOLL: To teach thy base thoughts manners: th’ art one of those
That thinks each woman thy fond, flexible whore
If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee;
Turn back her head, she’s thine, or amongst company,
By chance drink first to thee. Then she’s quite gone;
There’s no means to help her, nay, for a need,
Wilt swear unto thy credulous fellow lechers
That th’ art more in favour with a lady
At first sight than her monkey all her lifetime.
How many of our sex by such as thou
Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name
That never deserved loosely, or did trip
In path of whoredom beyond cup and lip?

‘Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name?’ It’s a rousing speech that rings down the ages and is still true. Moll cuts Laxton, he refers to the blood running and needing a surgeon and runs off shocked. — He has demonstrated his lack of manliness, his lack. He lacks stones i.e. testicles.

Enter Trapdoor enters. Moll, still dressed as a man, bumps rudely into him, flicks his face and taunts him to attack her. It’s only when he refuses, that she reveals her identity and he immediately fawns and asks to be her man. She calculatingly agrees, promises to pass on to him her hand-me-downs and they exit off to St Thomas Apostle’s, east of St Paul’s. — Trapdoor also shows himself to be all mouth and no trousers, when he refuses to fight with Moll-as-man.

Scene 2 – Master Gallipot’s house And now to another unmanly man, the nagged ‘apron husband’ Gallipot, whose wife despises him for being weak and feeble. This, we realise, is why she wishes an affair with Laxton (although in act 2 we saw how Laxton, in reality, despises her and only strings her along to extract loans from her).

Laxton has smuggled her a letter in which he blethers her with sweet words before coming to the point that he needs £30. She is just agonising over how to get this for him (and her anxiety about money, pawning some belongings but maybe being found out – in a flash reminded me of Madam Bovary and the horrible mess of debts she gets into 250 years later) when her husband comes in, wondering why she’s left the dinner party they’re hosting for friends.

Gallipot spies his wife reading but as he calls to her (‘Pru’) she tears up the letter and invents a sob story on the spot, saying that she and Laxton were engaged to be married, but he went off to the wars, she heard he was dead, and so she married Gallipot, but now Laxton is back and wants to claim her as his wife. Gallipot is horrified as he loves his wife and has had children by her which us why, when she cunningly suggests buying Laxton off with thirty pounds, he readily agrees.

The dinner party guests come out and comment on Mistress Gallipot’s unhappy appearance with much bawdy and obscene double entendres, some of them guessing that Master Gallipot is having an affair, that’s why she looks so upset. They say their goodbyes.

Whereupon Laxton himself enters, complaining about apothecaries (remember we last saw him being cut and slashed by Moll). In what is presumably a comic scene, Mistress Gallipot quickly conveys the lies she’s told her husband (that she and Laxton were engaged), Laxton picks it up quickly, and they both smile as Master Gallipot begs him to accept £30 to make all right between them. Gallipot goes into his house to organise the money and Laxton genuinely praises her for her quick-witted deceitfulness.

Scene 3 – Holborn Street Sir Alexander with some of his grand friends. Enter Trapdoor who silkily tells him that Sebastian and Moll plan to meet at 3 o’clock in his (Sir Alexander’s) chamber to have sex. So. They will trap the pair. To give a cover to their meetings, he instructs Trapdoor to behave as an angry debtor, and so the spy leaves.

His friends, Sir Adam Appleton and Sir Davy Dapper come over to talk to Sir Alexander and the latter reveals that his own son, Jack, is far worse than young Sebastian, he spends a fortune whoring, drinking, and gambling. Sir Davy explains he has decided to teach young Jack a lesson: he will arrange to have Jack arrested, hoping a few days in the Counter (the debtor’s prison) will make him realise the value of money and hard work.

Alexander and Appleton exit, and two officers enter, namely Sergeant Curtilax and Yeoman Hanger. Sir Davy gives them their commission to arrest young Jack and indicates the pub he’s drinking in, just over there, and leaves the pair to capture him.

Just at this moment Moll and Trapdoor stroll up and, spying Curtilax and Hanger in hiding, realise they’re about to arrest someone, Moll decides to save whoever it is. And so when Jack Dapper and his servant Gull emerge from the pub, and just as Curtilax and Hanger move in, Moll and Trapdoor run forward, holding the officers off and telling Jack and Gull to leg it, which they promptly do. Moll’s thoughts: ‘A pox on ’em! Trapdoor, let’s away.’

Act IV

Scene 1 – Sir Alexander’s chamber Sir Alexander and Trapdoor await Moll and Sebastian. Sir Alexander gets Trapdoor to place various valuables around the room, confident that Moll will steal them and, when they bring constables to catch her with them later, it will guarantee she’s thrown into prison, if not executed. They hide.

But instead, Sebastian enters not only with Moll, but with his true love, Mary Fitzallard, dressed as a pageboy. Moll comments wryly as Sebastian kisses Mary, in a boy’s outfit, and then expresses her gratitude to Moll for helping them. Moll observes the valuables laid out as if on purpose to tempt a thief but says that, since she is no thief, they do not tempt her. Instead Sebastian invites her to play on the viola de gamba which she turns out to be skillful on, and accompanies herself singing a couple of songs.

Sir Alexander steps forward and interrupts the playing but it has no great dramatic effect at all. None of the three seem surprised or worried to see him. The conversation carries on, whereby Sebastian appears to have been securing the money – forty shillings – to pay her (I think; I didn’t understand this passage). His father quizzes Moll who claims to be a music teacher and Sir Alex asks her to play the ballad about the witch.

Then Sir Alexander gives his son four ‘angel’s’, being gold coins worth ten shillings each. He has marked them somehow, maybe pierced them. His Cunning Plan is Sebastian will give the marked coins to Moll and, later, Sir Alex will get the constables to arrest her saying they were stolen.

This is act 4 and, for me, absolutely none of this love plot intrigue is working in the slightest. The Roaring Girl feels less engaging than any of the Restoration comedies I read.

Scene 2 – Openwork’s house Two of the merchants’ wives we’ve meant moan about how pathetic their menfolk are. Mistress Openwork laments that Goshawk told her a pack of lies about her husband being in Brentford with a whore, and told her he’d take her there to prove it. It was all lies, as Openwork discovered when she confronted her husband who is now standing in the shop waiting for Goshawk to arrive so he can give him a beating.

For her part, Mistress Gallipot laments that Laxton turned out to be a lying, unmanly deceiver, ‘a lame gelding’. Men get it in the neck in this play. It’s like a feminist manifesto.

This morphs into a long and really unfunny scene. Goshawk now arrives and wants to hurry Mistress Openwork into the boat he’s got waiting but first she insists on bringing Mistress Gallipot with them, which he reluctantly agrees to, then Master Openwork comes up and she furiously accuses him to his face of having an affair with a whore at Brentford. Master Openwork is vehement that this is a lie and then starts demanding who told her this lie and – to cut a really long story short – she admits it was the (now terrified) Goshawk. Enraged, Master Openwork draws his sword and Goshawk piteously begs for forgiveness.

Now, I suppose this is intended as one more proof that sweet-talking gallants are full of ****, but it took pages to get there and I found none of it either funny, or particularly well written. Master Openwork has a little soliloquy opining that the world is a rotten place full of cheats and liars. Well spotted, mate.

In part two of this scene, a young man dressed as a summoner enters and delivers a summons to Master Gallipot. It claims to be a legal document summonsing the Gallipots to court for breach of contract. This has been arranged by Laxton. We learn that after the thirty pounds he was given a few scenes ago, he asked for a further £15. Now Master and Mistress Gallipot threaten the summoner with violence who quickly takes off his wig and reveals himself to be one of the gallants’ associates, Greenwit.

Mistress Gallipot had gone along with the deceit earlier, but now snaps at the size of the sum being extorted. She turns to her husband and confesses everything – that Laxton led her on, but this was all a lie, she was never betrothed to Laxton. Furious, Gallipot now turns to Laxton who is trembling with fear.

With surprising chivalry, Laxton quickly makes up a version of a ‘confession’ which completely exonerates Mistress Gallipot, claiming he set out to seduce her as a challenge, when she claimed to him and his friends that women were virtuous, but she stood solid and unflinchingly loyal to her husband etc etc, and thus Gallipot is mollified and calmed down.

In fact so calmed down that he promptly forgives Laxton and invites him in for a celebration feast (!?).

So, by the end of Act 4, two merchants’ wives – citizens’ wives – have had their virtue assailed by two upper-class ‘gallants’ – Laxton and Goshawk – who both turn out to be lily-livered eunuchs. The women are smarter than the men and their husbands are made of finer stuff, loving and forgiving. And, it feels like half the play is over, as the forgiving merchants invite the foolish gallants in for a feast – something which generally only happens at the very end of a play.

Act V

Scene 1 – A street Enter Jack Dapper, Moll, Sir Beauteous Ganymede and Thomas Long. Moll tells Jack how it was she who saved him from the sergeants and he thanks her. As a sidenote she explains she spotted Trapdoor was a spy and has disposed of him as a player shoves a halfpenny across the board. They are joined by Lord Noland.

At which point Trapdoor enters, like a poor soldier with a patch over one eye, accompanied by a sidekick, Tearcat, all in tatters. They approach Moll and her friends and, at first, pretend to be poor, maimed soldiers from the wars and beg for money. But the account they give of their foreign fighting and travels is so obviously garbled that Moll and her friends realise they are fakes.

Moll tears to eyepatch off Trapdoor’s face – the kind of stylised gesture which is taken to transform someone’s appearance in these plays and suddenly render someone in disguise, recognisable. Then, in a peculiar passage, Trapdoor shows off his skill at using canting terms, and Moll interprets his stream of canting for the benefit of her educated friends (Jack Dapper, Moll, Sir Beauteous Ganymede, Thomas Long, Lord Noland) so much so that they egg the couple on to a canting duel, telling Trapdoor they’ll give him some alms if he performs for them, and this eventually leads into Moll, Trapdoor and Tearcat singing a song entirely in canting language.

Paradoxically, this was one of the few parts of the play I really understood, because the situation – educated, well-off people patronise beggars – is easily graspable, and because the posh people’s dialogue is remarkably and unusually lucid. Thus after Trapdoor uses the term ‘niggling’, Jack says: ‘Nay, teach me what niggling is; I’d fain be niggling’ and a moment later Sir Beauteous comments: ‘This is excellent.’

Trapdoor is paid off and departs. I rather liked him, he was an honest rogue.

Now enters a gallant cutpurse and four or five followers, who threaten to attack our chaps, but brave Moll a) interprets all the cutpurses are saying in their slang and b) outfaces them i.e. intimidates them into abandoning their plan to rob our chaps. They are scared of her and her swaggering reputation. In fact, they truckle to her. Moll declares a particular purse was recently stolen from a man attending the Swan theatre and demands it be returned. The leader of the cutpurses meekly says he’ll see what he can do and they all exit.

The real-life Mary Frith was, apparently, known for righting wrongs and returning stolen purses (sounds a bit too Robin Hood to me) and this encounter prompts the other characters to say how she has been unfairly criticised by society. Now she gives a long speech declaring her innocence of all crimes, saying she merely is acquainted with criminals and knows their cant and tricks solely to help innocent victims. It is a speech in support of all people calumniated by society, not just her but all the women called whores and men called cuckolds who are entirely innocent. People call her Moll Curpurse and blacken her name because she dresses, does and says what she likes – the implication being that people resent and are jealous of her freedom.

MOLL: Good my lord, let not my name condemn me to you or to the world.

If Mary Frith had commissioned this play it could hardly give a more favourable portrait of her!

And so after this long scene of canting and cutpurses leading up to Moll’s second Great Speech, they all head off to the pub.

Scene 2: Sir Alexander’s house The love plot of the play is resolved, namely Sebastian and Mary’s Cunning Plan works. Sir Alexander is still under the misapprehension that Sebastian is madly in love with and planning to marry Moll Cutpurse. He is at home with some of his friends and advisers when a servant comes in to tell them Sebastian and Moll have been seen landing at the Sluice on the Lambeth side of the Thames. But just as they’re planning to go and intercept them, Trapdoor (so we get a bit more Trapdoor) arrives to say the couple have been seen alighting at the Tower i.e. in the opposite direction. Sir Alexander is stung with indecision.

At this moment enters Sir Guy Fitzallard, mother of Mary Fitzallard that Sebastian is in love with. From the start he is aggressively angry towards Sir Alexander, telling him his (Guy’s) daughter wasn’t good enough for him, he blocked his son and Mary’s romance, well much good it’s done him and he hopes he’s happy that his son is now marrying one of the most disreputable women in London, ‘that bold masculine ramp’, Moll Cutpurse. He mocks him, saying he will soon be grandfather to a ‘fine crew of roaring sons and daughters’ who will stock the suburbs with crime.

Well, Sir Guy says – what would tortured Sir Alexander give if he – Sir Guy – could intervene and prevent it happening? He goes on to say, in front of the other nobles present as witnesses, that bets his entire wealth that he can prevent this marriage and, caught up in his enthusiasm, Sir Alexander, accepts the bet, saying he will immediately give Sebastian all those lands he had planned to, if he simply doesn’t marry Moll.

The authors really drag these final scenes out. Enter Moll (dressed as a man) for just a minute or so, just enough time for Alexander to berate her and her to mock him for his greed and short-sightedness, then exits.

So I wasn’t amused but irritated when the authors drag out Alexander’s and our agony even further by having Sebastian enter, accompanied by Sir Guy as if this is the final version of the wedding, and hand in hand with… Moll… wearing a mask. Sir Alexander is delighted his son has married anyone but Moll… but then she takes off her mask and he collapses prostrate that all his plans lie in ashes. God, get on with it!

Moll delivers a comic speech, telling him how lucky he is to have a roaring girl as a daughter in law, men will fear him, crooks will avoid him, and so on. Sir Guy asks Sir Alexander if he will hold to his bet (all Sir Guy’s estate against half Sir Alexander’s) but Sir Alexander insists – now he’s won the bet (the bet that Guy would be able to prevent the marriage of Sebastian and Moll, and it looks like he’s failed), at which point….

Moll steps aside and Sir Guy introduces the real bride who is, God be praised, Mary Fitzallard after all, ceremonially accompanied by Lord Noland and Sir Beauteous Ganymede, and followed by all the London merchants and their wives, so that all the characters are on stage for the happy finale.

Sir Alexander is in flights of ecstasy and in heroic verse praises his son and gives him half his wealth and lands – as promised – and then his beautiful new daughter-in-law, and they graciously accept. Moll points out that she has done everyone a favour organising this happy outcome and Sebastian says she will be rewarded. Sir Alexander apologises for misjudging her.

Enter Trapdoor (hooray, the only character I really like) who kneels before Moll and abjectly apologises for scheming against her, explaining that he laid out the valuables in Sir Alexander’s chamber, hoping to snare Moll, and that he also gave Moll the four marked gold coins (angels) as part of a scam to have her arrested. Moll is surprised, the onlookers are shocked, Sir Alexander abjectly humiliated, and apologises.

I found Sir Alexander’s explicit and clear statement that he has learned from his experiences not to judge people by their reputations and not to listen to rumour, more effective than the savage punishments which conclude Ben Jonson plays:

Forgive me; now I cast the world’s eyes from me
And look upon thee freely with mine own:
I see the most of many wrongs before thee,
Cast from the jaws of envy and her people,
And nothing foul but that. I’ll never more
Condemn by common voice, for that’s the whore
That deceives man’s opinion, mocks his trust,
Cozens his love, and makes his heart unjust.

Sir Alexander ends the play by saying this happy day will be celebrated every year, and he hopes all who have watched it will go away as pleased as he is.

Thoughts

Not funny

Maybe I read it on an off day, but I didn’t find The Roaring Girl at all funny. It contains scenes which are theoretically humorous, but failed to raise any smile to my lips. It lacks the delightful whimsy of The Shoemaker’s Holiday or, at the other end of the spectrum, the savage farcicality of Ben Jonson and his scheming grotesques.

It inhabits an odd no-man’s-land, in which everyone is a gull or crook of one kind or another but none of them really inspire entertainment. Moll’s speeches about how easily women are calumniated were the only things which really woke me up, that and the character of Trapdoor who I warmed to as the nearest thing to a Jonsonian imp, like Mosca in Volpone.

Overall I felt there was something clever, calculating and rather mechanical about it, and kept returning to T.S. Eliot’s words:

The comedies are long-winded; the fathers are heavy fathers, and rant as heavy fathers should; the sons are wild and wanton sons, and perform all the pranks to be expected of them; the machinery is the usual Elizabethan machinery; Middleton is solicitous to please his audience with what they expect; but there is underneath the same steady impersonal passionless observation of human nature. (Thomas Middleton by T.S. Eliot)

Gender etc

Clearly ‘gender’ is a major theme of the play insofar as Moll is a woman behaving as men are supposed to, and not just men generally, but roistering, swaggering, canting, drinking, fighting men. And the play goes to some lengths to demonstrate how feebly unmasculine just about every other man in the play is, compared to her.

Feminist art and literary critics long ago developed a rhetoric about neglected women artists or authors and female characters who rebel, buck the trend and subvert the patriarchy, which make them all sound the same. They make ‘the patriarchy’ sound as if it was the same thing in 1603 or 2003, and rebel women all sound as if they had the same ‘smash the patriarchy’ mindset as contemporary gender studies professors. In other words, they make the past boring by being so predictably and narrowly ideological about it.

Obviously the figure of Moll is striking but what’s a bit more interesting is the way she was not suppressed by The Patriarchy for wearing men’s clothes and swearing etc. What is hiding in plain sight in the simple existence of this play, is the fact that, far from being in any way suppressed or silenced – as feminists love their heroines from the past to have been – Mary Frith was in fact lionised, widely written about and – in this play at any rate – praised to the heavens, depicted as a moral exemplar, teaching true Christian morality (judge people by their deeds not their reputations).

Feminist critics like to write about Moll ‘subverting gender norms’ and ‘transgressing gender-based rules of clothing and behaviour’ as if it was a thrilling conspiracy which only you and I, paid-up members of the feminist gang, can understand. And yet here she was up on stage in a play written to unstintingly praise her, to the applause of a fee-paying audience, in a play which was widely reprinted through the ages.

In other words, if she was ‘subverting’ anything, that ‘subversion’ was very comfortably accommodated in a best-selling play performed to approving audiences.

In other words, Moll entirely conforms to the deeply entrenched stereotype of the rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold figure which dates from at least Robin Hood through to any number of 20th century ‘rebels’, and which Hollywood has made billions of dollars carefully crafting and presenting to audiences who, for a happy couple of hours, can thrill to the ‘subversive’ exploits of James Dean or Bruce Willis or whoever the rebel-with-a-heart-of-gold figure of the hour happens to be, before going back to their suburban homes and their workaday world.

Yes, the figure of Moll may well ‘transgress’ half a dozen easy-to-list rules of Jacobean England – dresses like a man, swaggers like a man, drinks like a man, familiar with the criminal underworld like a man and this ooh-so-daring audacity gives timid feminist critics multiple orgasms – but at a meta-level I’d have thought it’s pretty obvious that Moll entirely conforms to the enduring stereotype of the naughty boy or naughty girl whose exploits we love sharing for a couple of hours at the theatre or cinema, before the entertainment ends.

In a really deep sense, maybe that’s what entertainment – of all types – actually consists of: whether at the circus or a funfair or the cinema or a theatre – it’s entering into a world of excitement and thrills and kings and queens or cops and robbers or thrilling rides – all of which we pay for because, by definition, they are outwith the reality of our boring everyday lives, shopping, cooking, eating sleeping, and commuting to boring jobs in shops and factories and offices.

So when feminists rhapsodise that Moll ‘subverts’ the social norms of her day, all they’re really saying is that she’s in a play. Macbeth subverts the values of the time by being a king killer. Othello subverts the values of the day by murdering his wife. Volpone subverts the values of the time by being an outrageous crook. All the tricksters in hundreds of these city comedies ‘subvert’ the values of the time by virtue of being crooks and criminals. Is there a play from the period where the lead characters do not subvert one or other ‘social norm’ of the time?

Feminists just valorise and prioritise one among the many, many types of ‘subversion’ which occur in almost all these plays, because it is the one dearest to their heart, the only issue which counts for them, the issue of gender, the ‘issue’ which justifies their existence.

But, not being feminists, we are not constrained and blinded by their ideology, and so can read everything they have to say, assimilate it, take it on board, add it to our perspective, but still see that the play contains many other non-gender ideas and themes and images, as did the society of its day.

One of the most obvious is the language of crime…

Canting

Canting was one of the contemporary words used to describe the prolific growth of slang and argot used by thieves and cozeners. There was a very rich literature describing these, even at the time. Indeed, whenever there was a periodic outbreak of plague, such as in 1603 and the theatres went into lockdown, writers like Dekker and Middleton switched to writing satirical or descriptive pamphlets about London life, mostly concentrating on lowlife and criminals.

Dekker wrote a number of pamphlets about contemporary events, but his ones focusing on criminals or ‘cony-catchers’ include The Belman of London (1608), Lanthorne and Candle-light, Villainies Discovered by Candlelight, and English Villainies and he gives an often-quoted definition of ‘canting’:

‘It was necessary that a people, so fast increasing and so daily practicing new and strange villainies, should borrow to themselves a speech which, so near as thy could, none but themselves could understand; and for that cause was this language, which some call pedlar’s French, invented…. This word canting seems to be derived from the Latin verb canto, which signifies in English to sing, or to make a sound with words, that’s to say, speak. And very aptly may canting take his derivation a cantando, from singing, because amongst these beggarly consorts that can play upon no better instruments, the language of canting is a kind of music, and he that in such assemblies can cant best is counted the best musician…’
(Lanthorn and Candlelight by Thomas Dekker)

Anyway, the point is that this play is stuffed with canting terms and street argot, so much so that not only does the Mermaid edition feature notes at the bottom of each page explaining key words, but also (and unusually) a seven-page appendix devoted to canting terms. Highlights include:

darkmans = the night
lightmans = the day
shells = money
stamps = legs
curbers = thieves who hook goods out of open windows using a long stick with a hook at the end
cheats = the gallows
bing = to go
nip a bung = steal a purse
Rom-ville = London

And Act 5 scene 1 is a festival of canting – it contains the canting exchanges between Moll and Trapdoor-as-beggar, who drops entirely into canting terms to impress and/or confuse his educated interlocutors.

TRAPDOOR: My doxy? I have, by the salomon, a doxy that carries a kinchin mort in her slate at her back, besides my dell and my dainty wild dell, with all whom I’ll tumble this next darkmans in the strommel, and drink ben, and eat a fat gruntling cheat, a cackling cheat, and a quacking cheat.

Before Moll, Trapdoor and Tearcat then deliver a canting song! The footnotes again say that one of the best explanations of the profession or trade of cutpurse is again given by Dekker, who provided a neat explanation of key roles and terms, in this clip from The Bellman of London:

He that cuts the purse is called the nip.
He that is half with him is the snap, or the cloyer.
The knife is called a cuttle-bung.
He that picks the pocket is called a foist.
He that faceth the man is the stale.
The taking of the purse is called drawing.
The spying of this villain is called smoking or boiling.
The purse is the bung.
The money the shells.
The act doing is called striking.

You can look up these and numerous other obscure terms in the online version of the play, linked to below.

Jacobean comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1611)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Elizabethan art

Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

17th century history

Restoration comedies

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 23, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Tagged Appleton, cant, canting, cheapside, citizen comedy, comedy of intrigue, corruption, cross-dressing, Curtilax, Dekker, Elizabeth Cook, Elizabethan plays, English Villainies, Fitzallard, Goshawk, Gray's Inn Fields, Greenwit, Gull, Hanger, Hippocrates Gallipot, Jack Dapper, Jacobean plays, John Day, Lanthorne and Candle-light, Laxton, London, marriage, Mary Fitzallard, Mary Frith, Mistress Gallipot, Mistress Openwork, Mistress Tiltyard, Moll Cutpurse, music, Nathaniel Field, Neatfoot, New Mermaid, Openwork, Parlous Pond, Prudence Gallipot, Ralph Trapdoor, Robin Hood, Rom-ville, Rosamond Openwork, Sebastian, sex, Shakespeare, singing, Sir Adam Appleton, Sir Alexander Wengrave, Sir Beauteous Ganymede, Sir Davy Dapper, Sir Guy Fitzallard, slang, St Paul's cathedral, St Thomas Apostle's, T.S. Eliot, The Bellman of London, the Roaring Girl, The Shoemaker's Holiday, thieves’ argot, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Middleton, Tiltyard, Villainies Discovered by Candlelight, viola da gamba, Young Sebastian Wengrave

Posted by Simon on September 23, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/23/the-roaring-girl-thomas-middleton-thomas-dekker/

The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)

It is the spring of 1607 and a play is just about to start in the Blackfriars theatre. Unlike Shakespeare’s Globe theatre across the river, the Blackfriars is not open to the elements but roofed, and it is also small, meaning tickets are more expensive (sixpence compared to a penny admission at the Globe). Not surprisingly, it caters to a more upmarket audience, including courtiers and men-about-town who like to think themselves a cut above the middle-class merchants and artisans of ever-expanding London. The Blackfriars was a venue for ‘coterie drama’ for gentleman ‘wits’, in contrast to the more popular drama of writers like Shakespeare and Thomas Heywood across the water in Southwark.

One last point. The Blackfriars theatre was associated with the fashion for boy actors who grew increasingly popular from the turn of the century, specifically the members of the troupe called The Children of the Queen’s Revels. These boy actors were generally between the ages of 8 and 12! Yes, boys originally played all the roles in this play and many like them. Girls, women, heroines, matrons and old ladies, dashing heroes and crotchety old men – all played by boys.

The prologue

Anyway, a new play is about to begin and the actor playing the Prologue steps forward dressed in a long, black velvet cloak and a garland of bays to address the audience, setting the scene for the troupe’s new play which is entitled The London Merchant. But he hasn’t even completed three lines of the prologue before he is rudely interrupted by a member of the audience, who climbs up onstage to talk to him.

It quickly becomes clear that this man is George, a London grocer, and he starts decrying the new play before it’s even begun, moaning that it’s another one of those satires which mock honest merchants like himself.

Taken aback, the Prologue asks what he’d like instead. The merchant replies he wants to see something which stars a merchant like himself, and tales of romance and adventure. At which point his wife, Nell, starts yelling from down in the audience that she wants to see a play about a grocer who is a knightly hero and kills a lion with a pestle! – a random, off-the-wall suggestion which the loudmouth grocer promptly takes up.

The Prologue complains that they should have told him this request month ago, it’s too late now, they’ve rehearsed the new play and have no boys free to play a merchant. ‘I’ve got the solution’, says the merchant, ‘let my boy Rafe play him, his acting and impersonations are the highlight of every party’. And he promptly gets Rafe to prove it by hauling him onstage and getting him to declaim part of Hotspur’s speech from Henry IV part 1, loudly and confidently.

The Prologue reluctantly agrees that Rafe is pretty good, and tasks one of the assistants to take him backstage to be rigged up in acting apparel, then the Prologue asks for the merchant and his wife to be seated. Comically, they hustle and bustle themselves among the stools on the stage. (This was another feature of the Blackfriars theatre – that supposed wits and gallants paid extra to sit onstage throughout the play, making comments on it or chatting among themselves or grandstanding to the audience.)

By sitting on the stage you have a signd patent to engrosse the whole commodity of Censure; may lawfully presume to be a Girder; and stand at the helme to steere the passage of scaenes; yet no man shall once offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of an insolent over-weening Coxcombe…. If you know not ye author, you may raile against him, and peradventure so behave your selfe, that you may enforce the author to know you.
(The Gull’s Horn-Book by Thomas Dekker, 1609)

The grocer and his wife now rudely push themselves and their stools in among these posh gentlemen, presumably causing amusement in the wider audience down in auditorium at this breach of decorum.

Now the Prologue recommences his speech and out of this initial confusion it emerges that the play is going to have three distinct strands:

The original plot of The London Merchant in which two young men – gentle but stupid Humphrey and charismatic but unpredictable Jasper Merrythought – vie for the hand of the merchant Venturewell’s daughter, Luce, with the usual round of complications.
Rafe’s narrative – The Knight of the Burning Pestle – in which he dresses as a traditional knight errant of romance, is assisted by his squire and page (a fellow apprentice named Tim and a dwarf named George), declaims high heroic poetry and has a series of mock heroic adventures, some of which are based on Cervantes’ recent novel Don Quixote, but many of which stem from the same Iberian romances and mock heroic romances.
Finally, the continual interruptions and commentary from George and his wife, specially whenever Rafe enters – applauding his every move when he’s onstage, and barracking the other actors and demanding his return whenever he’s absent, plus their running commentary on almost everything else, including the reactions of the audience and the gentlemen on stools.

It’s funny but it’s a real ragbag. Jasper, the rascally apprentice, is fired by merchant Venturewell, but manages to ravish young Luce off to the romantic venue of Waltham Forest. There’s an episode where the couple lie down to sleep, and Luce indeed falls asleep, at which point Jasper undergoes a curious transformation and decides he will wake her, threaten her with his sword, declaring he must have her blood to avenge her father’s wrongs (in booting Jasper out of his apprenticeship). This is ludicrous to begin with but is made doubly so by the immediate intervention of Nell the grocer’s wife, who’s never liked him and now starts damning his behaviour.

Later the pallid, useless apprentice Humphrey enters and confronts Jasper, who promptly beats him black and blue, leading Nell the grocer’s wife to not only berate him again, but cross over to poor HUmphrey and offer him several herbal remedies for his poor bruises.

Meanwhile we learn that Jasper’s parents are Old Merrythought and Mistress Merrythought, and their younger son, Michael, still lives with them. Old Merrythought is a strange ‘comic’ creation, he speaks almost entirely in songs, unstoppably answering every question and accusation and request by singing an excerpt from one of the many popular songs of the time.

OLD MERRYTHOUGHT: I would not be a serving-man
To carry the cloak-bag still,
Nor would I be a falconer
The greedy hawks to fill;
But I would be in a good house,
And have a good master too;
But I would eat and drink of the best,
And no work would I do.

He is utterly spendthrift, gay and merry, giving absolutely no thought for the morrow, and so drives his wife mad with his careless insouciance. In fact his wife has determined to leave him because he has spent all their money on drinking and partying.

OLD MERRYTHOUGHT: This it is that keeps life and soul together, mirth; this is the philosopher’s stone that they write so much on, that keeps a man ever young.

Nell, the grocer’s wife, once again is fiercely critical of Old M, not least in the scenes where he shows his complete indifference to his wife, for being ‘an ingrant old man to use his bed-fellow so scurvily’.

The London Merchant moves towards a big scene in the final act, where Venturewell has recaptured his daughter Luce, from Jasper, and locked her in his house, preparatory to her marrying the good apprentice, Humphrey. Jasper concocts a Cunning Plan, which is to pay a boy and some carriers to convey a letter to Venturewell saying that he, Jasper, has died and he has one dying request, can his corpse be conveyed into Venturewell’s house so that Luce can pay her last respects, say goodbye, and be ready to marry Humphrey.

As you might expect, this is a scam, the coffin arrives and Jasper is in it alright, lying still under a black velvet cloth. Venturewell allows it into the living room and leaves Luce to weep and mourn and declaim a page of sad verse over the body of her beloved, before Jasper suddenly leaps up out of the coffin and nearly scares her to death. He quickly gets her to swap places, covers her with the velvet cloth and gets the boy and carrier to convey her out, as if carrying Jasper to a cemetery.

Meanwhile, Jasper hides and covers his face in white flour so that, when Venturewell comes back on stage, Jasper suddenly appears like a ghost, terrifying Venturewell and threatening to haunt him for the rest of his life until he makes things right, beats and punishes Humphrey. Poor Humphrey enters at this stage and is promptly beaten for the second time in the play.

This is more or less the climax of the main play as Venturewell promises to do absolutely anything to make things right with the ghost and avoid being haunted – at which point Jasper reveals that he is not in fact dead, invites Luce back onstage, and gets the relieved Venturewell to agree to their being married. Finally.

Meanwhile, this narrative has been interwoven with a series of comic mock-heroic escapades featuring Rafe.

RAFE: My name is Rafe; I am an Englishman,
(As true as steel, a hearty Englishman,)
And prentice to a grocer in the Strand

It is clear from the moment he comes back onstage, hurriedly dressed up in the best knightly costume that the boy players can be spared, and sets about telling his squire (Tim the apprentice) and George the dwarf that they must no longer call him Rafe but address him as ‘the Knight of the Burning Pestle’ and so on, that his segments are going to be the most amusing.

RAFE: I charge you that from henceforth you never call me by any other name but “the right courteous and valiant Knight of the Burning Pestle;” and that you never call any female by the name of a woman or wench, but “fair lady,” if she have her desires, if not, “distressed damsel”; that you call all forests and heaths “deserts,” and all horses “palfreys.”

Three of his adventures stick out. He and his liegemen travel out to Waltham Forest (where their tracks cross, at various points, Jasper and Luce, and Mistress Merrythought and her son, Michael) and put up at the Bell Inn which is transformed, in his imagination, into a castle.

The host of the Bell twigs to the joke and then Rafe to visit the cave of the monster Barbaroso who is, in fact, the village surgeon-barber, and where they find three ‘victims’ languishing in his ‘dungeons’, who are in fact a customer having his hair cut and two others undergoing the totally quackish treatment Elizabethan surgeon-barbers were famous for. (The red and white swirly pole outside barbershops to this day recalls the times when surgeon-barbers let blood as well as shaving and trimming their customers.)

And lastly Rafe leads a number of his fellow prentices out to Moorfields in what, onstage, amounts to half a dozen small boys drilling with toy weapons, but in Rafe and the grocer’s imagination, becomes an army training before setting off to the wars in France.

But, Nell, I will
have Ralph do a very notable matter now, to
the eternal honour and glory of all grocers.

All the way through Rafe’s high-blown heroic poetry and noble sentiments, especially when he meets a damsel in distress (for example Mistress Merrythought when she gets lost in Waltham Forest), are undercut by the fact that he occasionally lets slip that he is in fact a grocer’s apprentice whose girlfriend is Susan, a cobbler’s daughter from Milk Street.

What’s odd because it’s inconsistent about these scenes is that we all understand they have been extemporised i.e. they’re not part of the rehearsed play being performed for us – and yet Rafe and the other characters in his ‘romance’ parts of the plot – the innkeeper and his daughter, the barber Barbaroso and his victims – all play along with the gag. This doesn’t really make sense – how could all these people be prepared, dressed and rehearsed with no time?

And it’s even weirder, because they are not only – on the face of it – extemporising with impressive speed, they are extemporising a play within a play within a play: because not only is Rafe 1. performing a play whose scenes 2. have been inserted into The London Merchant, but 3. he is shown explaining to the actors playing an innkeeper or a barber, that they in fact need to 3. speak and act on another level, as heroic characters from romance.

Some of Rafe’s scenes closely echo scenes in Cervantes’ long fiction Don Quixote, the first part of which had been published only a few years earlier, in 1605, although there is scholarly argument about whether Beaumont took the scenes from Cervantes or from earlier mock heroic comedies which are common sources for both.

The Rafe plot concludes after the grocer and his wife loudly demand a heroic ending for their Rafe and so, once the Jasper-Luce-Venturewell happy ending is tied up and they’ve exited the stage, Rafe staggers onstage with a fake arrow through his neck, as if mortally and heroically wounded in the wars, before delivering a long and ‘moving’ death speech and expiring to the floor – despite the disapproval of one of the main players:

WIFE: Now, good husband, let him come out and die.
CITIZEN: He shall, Nell.—Ralph, come away quickly, and die, boy!
BOY: ‘Twill be very unfit he should die, sir, upon no occasion — and in a comedy too.

Nell the grocer’s wife is beside herself with emotion, and immediately makes Rafe get to his feet and take a bow and introduces him to the fine gentlemen sitting on their stools and commends him to the audience. Everything has a happy ending and the audience go away happy.

The title

The title has about three sources and/or meanings. The pestle was one of the many signs hanging outside the shops of tradesmen in London, the pestle from a mortar and pestle used to grind up the spices sold at a grocer’s shop.

The pestle can also be thought of as a kind of weapon, along the lines of a club, and appears as such on the heraldic shield which the players quickly knock up for Rafe. And on the level of sexual innuendo which absolutely drenched Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, it symbolises a penis, and the burning sensation can be attributed to the very common sexually transmitted diseases of the period, syphilis and gonorrhea.

Jacobean comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1607)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1609)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Elizabethan art

Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

17th century history

Restoration comedies

Leave a comment

by Simon on September 21, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 21, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/21/the-knight-of-the-burning-pestle-francis-beaumont/

Volpone or The Fox by Ben Jonson (1606)

Michael Jamieson edited the old Penguin paperback edition of Ben Jonson’s three greatest hits which are Volpone (1606), The Alchemist (1610) and Bartholomew Fair (1614). Jonson is often depicted as Shakespeare’s greatest rival in the second half of his career, as Christopher Marlowe (d.1593) was the leading figure right at the start. Maybe – but there were other notable playwrights around during this period, such as Beaumont and Fletcher.

The real point of linking their names is that Jonson was working in a completely different comic tradition from Shakespeare and so his comedies present the sharpest possible contrast with Shakespearian comedy.

Shakespeare’s comedies are light and graceful, generally set in a fantasy world (Midsummer Night’s Dream) or a faraway land (the fictional Illyria of Twelfth Night) and, although they do include lower-class characters who are clumsy, stupid and bawdy, for the most part the plot is about fine lords and ladies (the Duke of Athens, the Queen of the Amazons and the like), who speak in elegant poetry, and the plays’ comic complications are rounded off by wonderful marriages.

The humour is light throughout. They are Romantic comedies. They aim to delight by transporting you into an often magical otherworld.

By contrast, Jonson’s humour is harsh and satirical. His plays aim to instruct the audience by exposing the errors of city dwellers. They are set very much in the contemporary world – two of his three greatest hits are set in contemporary London. The characters are low lives, thieves and deceivers, frauds and imposters, their gulls and victims, and although they do speak in blank verse, it is a less elegant verse, stuffed with the street argot and slang of the time. And none of his plays end in happy marriage celebrations – the reverse, they end in the exposure and humiliation of the central crooks.

Shakespeare’s comedies have to do with festivals and magic. Jonson’s aim is completely different, he comes from a tradition which, as the poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney (d.1586) put it, believes that:

Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life, which the poet presents in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be.

In the prologue to his earlier play, Every Man In His Humour, Jonson very clearly distinguishes between the two traditions, one of wonder and fancy, one of realistic satire. He dismisses the first type as dominated by special effects and impossibilities, where babies are born, grow to manhood and old age all in one play, where huge wars are represented by a couple of actors with rusty swords who nip backstage to get fake blood put on fake wounds, the kind of plays which:

… make a child now swaddled, to proceed
Man, and then shoot up, in one beard and weed,
Past threescore years; or, with three rusty swords,
And help of some few foot and half-foot words,
Fight over York and Lancaster’s king jars,
And in the tyring-house bring wounds to scars.

He [the current author] rather prays you will be pleas’d to see
One such to-day, as other plays should be;
Where neither chorus wafts you o’er the seas,
Nor creaking throne comes down the boys to please;
Nor nimble squib is seen to make afeard
The gentlewomen; nor roll’d bullet heard
To say, it thunders; nor tempestuous drum
Rumbles, to tell you when the storm doth come;

Instead Jonson vows to portray the everyday world as it actually is, as his audience actually experiences it:

… deeds, and language, such as men do use,
And persons, such as comedy would choose,
When she would shew an image of the times,
And sport with human follies, not with crimes.

To ‘show an image of the times/and sport with human follies, not with crimes’ – this is a handy distinction: comedy deals with folly and stupidity, tragedy deals with crimes. That’s the dividing line. And he repeats the idea in the prose preface to Volpone itself, emphasising:

the doctrine, which is the principal end of poesie, to inform men in the best reason of living.

And he invokes the example of ‘the ancients’,

the goings out of whose comedies are not always joyful, but oft times the bawds, the servants, the rivals, yea, and the masters are mulcted; and fitly, it being the office of a comic poet to imitate justice and instruct to life.

So:Shakespearian comedy exists to enchant and delight; Jonsonian comedy is designed to teach and instruct, that was his often-expressed intention. How well does he achieve it in Volpone?

Volpone

Volpone is set in Venice, a city associated at the time with mercantile greatness, huge wealth and great corruption. (According to Martin Seymour-Smith’s edition of Every Man In His Humour, Venice was described in another contemporary play as ‘the best flesh-shambles in Italy’ and ‘Venetian whores the best in Europe’).

The central character Volpone, is a monster of greed and duplicity. In fact Jonson provides a verse summary of the plot in the form of a seven-line acrostic poem spelling out his name:

Volpone, childless, rich, feigns sick, despairs,
Offers his state to hopes of several heirs,
Lies languishing: his parasite receives
Presents of all, assures, deludes; then weaves
Other cross plots, which ope themselves, are told.
New tricks for safety are sought; they thrive: when bold,
Each tempts the other again, and all are sold.

I.e. Volpone persuades a series of dupes to make him gifts of gold, jewels etc, leading all of them on to believe they will be made heirs to his fortune when he dies. In other words, they are as greedy and selfish as he is.

Cast

VOLPONE, a Magnifico.
MOSCA, his Parasite.
VOLTORE, an Advocate.
CORBACCIO, an old Gentleman.
CORVINO, a Merchant.
BONARIO, son to Corbaccio.
SIR POLITICK WOULD-BE, a Knight.
PEREGRINE, a Gentleman Traveller.
NANO, a Dwarf.
CASTRONE, an Eunuch.
ANDROGYNO, an Hermaphrodite.
GREGE (or Mob).
COMMANDADORI, Officers of Justice.
MERCATORI, three Merchants.
AVOCATORI, four Magistrates.
NOTARIO, the Register.

LADY WOULD-BE, Sir Politick’s Wife.
CELIA, Corvino’s Wife.
SERVITORI, Servants, two Waiting-women, etc.

Animal imagery in Volpone

Anyone with a smattering of Italian would have realised the main characters have names which are simply Italian words for animals, and in any case each animals name is translated and explained on the character’s first appearance: Volpone = fox, Mosca = fly, Voltore = vulture, Corbaccio = raven, Corvino = crow. Mosca refers at one point to a physician named Signior Lupo = Mr Wolf, Lady Would-Be is at one point referred to as a kite, at another to a she-wolf.

But these are not just any kind of animals, these are all animals which feed on carrion, i.e. other dead animals and rotting meat. Volpone knows this – at one point he consciously plays the part of an almost dead, already rotting corpse, in order to attract society’s scavengers:

Now, now, my clients
Begin their visitation! Vulture, kite,
Raven, and gorcrow, all my birds of prey,
That think me turning carcase, now they come;

Mention of wolves echoes or maybe deliberately invokes the Latin proverb which dates back at least as far as Plautus in the 2nd century BC, namely: ‘ Homo homini lupus est’ meaning ‘A man is a wolf to another man’, or people are wolves to each other, or simply – humans are like wolves. That is very much the worldview of the play.

Act 1

It opens with Volpone waking up in the big bed which dominates the stage and asking his servant Mosca to throw open the cabinet full of his wealth, a scene in which Volpone explains his situation (parentless, wifeless, childless) and how he has been duping his greedy clients out of precious gifts for three years, by pretending to be at death’s door and implying he will leave them each, everything.

This draws new clients daily, to my house,
Women and men of every sex and age,
That bring me presents, send me plate, coin, jewels,
With hope that when I die (which they expect
Each greedy minute) it shall then return
Ten-fold upon them;

Volpone and Mosca mock people who work for a living, poor fools. Volpone’s way is far better, better even than robbing churches!

Almost immediately Mosca brings on Volpone’s servants consisting of a dwarf, a eunuch and a hermaphrodite, vivid symbols of the unnatural infertility of Volpone’s household, and they perform a ridiculous little masque mocking, of all things, Pythagoras’s theory of the transmigration of souls.

Then visits are paid by some of the greedy scavengers, namely Voltore the lawyer who has brought Volpone a golden plate, and Corbaccio who brings him a bag of bright chequins i.e. Venetian gold coins. The comedy – and it is very funny – derives from the way Mosca plays on the hopes of these deluded fools, and the extent to which he can push them e.g. he persuades doddery old Corbaccio to draw up a will disinheriting his own son, and naming Volpone his heir. Mosca assures him that Volpone will do the same and he is bound to predecease him, at which point Corbaccio will inherit all.

There is plenty of theatrical business such as Volpone hurrying to get dressed in old man’s clothes before he sees Voltore, and psyching himself into the role of an ailing old man at death’s door; or simple gags such as Corbaccio is hard of hearing and keeps comically misinterpreting Mosca who is forced to shout, but which allows him to mutter insults which the audience can hear:

MOSCA [quietly]: Your worship is a precious ass!
CORBACCIO: What say’st thou?
MOSCA [loudly]: I do desire your worship to make haste

This could be a line from panto or Allo Allo, from broad farce four hundred years later.

Next to pay a visit is Corvino, who has brought a precious pearl. To all of them Volpone acts as at death’s door while they chat to Mosca who leads them on and strings them out with a world of false promises. Directly contrary to Jonson’s comedic theory, a lot of the pleasure derives from watching two expert con-men at work.

After Corvino pushes off, Mosca and Volpone rejoice at their morning’s work. Lady Politic Would-be the English nobleman’s wife arrives at the door but Volpone doesn’t want to see her. He wants to drink and revel like the Turk. The conversation turns to Corvino’s wife, a legendary beauty named Celia. Immediately Volpone says he must have her. Mosca warns that she’s protected by a guard of ten spies each. Hmmm. They’ll concoct a plan.

Act 2

Scene 1 Peregrine, an English gentleman abroad and one of the few honest and sensible characters in the play, has bumped into Sir Politic Would-be and quickly realises the latter is a gullible fool, prepared to believe every conspiracy theory, and regales him with ‘wonders’ from back home in England e.g. a whale swimming up the Thames, which Sir Politic knowingly explains to Peregrine is probably a Spanish spy. The man’s an idiot.

Which is confirmed when Volpone turns up with Mosca, dressed up as a famous mountebank or snake-oil salesman, Scoto of Mantua. They set up a bank or bench, raise a crowd, and Volpone proceeds to give an extended and long-winded sales pitch.

Why he’s bothering to do it in this out-of-the-way corner of Venice becomes clear when he calls for money for his wonder, cure-all elixir and the window above him, in the wall against which he’s set up his stall, and the beautiful Celia throws down her handkerchief with money in it. Volpone sings her praises, just as her jealous husband, Corvino, arrives home and tells Volpone to buzz off, beating him as Volpone flees.

Scene 2 Back at his house, Volpone tells Mosca he’s in love. He tells his loyal servant that all his plate and treasure is at his disposal if he can find some way to get him to Celia, and ‘horn’ her husband i.e. make Corvino a cuckold i.e. have sex with Celia.

Scene 3 Enter a furious Corvino dragging Celia behind her and accusing her of being a whore for opening the window and revealing herself to the mob below. Corvino is mad with jealous rage:

First, I will have this bawdy light damm’d up;
And till’t be done, some two or three yards off,
I’ll chalk a line: o’er which if thou but chance
To set thy desperate foot; more hell, more horror
More wild remorseless rage shall seize on thee,
Than on a conjurer, that had heedless left
His circle’s safety ere his devil was laid.

Scene 4 Mosca arrives. Corvino is initially hopeful that Volpone has died and left him his fortune, but Mosca dashes him by telling him it’s the reverse: Volpone has made a recovery after taking Scoto of Mantua’s elixir. This makes Corvino even more furious, seeing as it as Scoto he caught chatting up his wife in front of a vulgar crowd.

Mosca then changes the tune somewhat, explaining that four doctors from the College of Physicians are even now at Volpone’s and, having discussed a range of colourful Renaissance cures, have agreed one common cure – Volpone needs sex with a ravishing young woman! Now, the thing is, whoever provides that young woman and cures Volpone will almost certainly be made his new heir – one of the doctors has already offered his daughter!

So Mosca now explains to Corvino it’s a race against time to remain Volpone’s heir. Corvino makes the obvious suggestion, let’s hire a whore, but Mosca was ready for that. No, he explains, it must be someone without tricks and guile: does he not know a pure simple virginal woman who he can control and guide?

Corvino steps aside to soliloquise: is it a sin? sex is a mere bagatelle, in the end. No-one will know and he stands to inherit a fortune. Mosca watches him agonise and we the audience watch the con-man work his magic.

Corvino returns to Mosca and agrees: hurry back to Volpone and tell him he will send his wife immediately. Mosca tells him to wait till he calls. Yes, dear Mosca, says Corvino, loyal Mosca, good Mosca. And Mosca hurtles off chortling.

Scene 4 Corvino calls Celia back to him. She enters weeping after the terrifying dressing-down she received earlier. Now Corvino amazes her by telling her he was just fooling! He’s not a jealous man at all! And to prove it, he tells her to dress up in all her finest outfit and jewellery and make-up, they’re invited to a feast at Volpone’s that evening.

Act 3

Scene 1 Enter Mosca with a wickedly gleeful soliloquy about how great it is to be a parasite:

I fear, I shall begin to grow in love
With my dear self, and my most prosperous parts,
They do so spring and burgeon; I can feel
A whimsy in my blood: I know not how,
Success hath made me wanton. I could skip
Out of my skin, now, like a subtle snake,
I am so limber. O! your parasite
Is a most precious thing, dropt from above,
Not bred ‘mongst clods, and clodpoles, here on earth.

Who should come along but Bonario, son of old Corbaccio who we saw Mosca persuading to disinherit in Act 1. He tells Mosca he despises him. Mosca bursts into tears and assures him he has his best interests at heart, why, even at this moment, Mosca knows that Bonario’s father is writing him out of his will. Bonario says: ‘show me’.

Scene 2 Volpone is bored. He gets his three zanies, the dwarf, the eunuch and the hermaphrodite to begin a competition to explain which of them is best and why but hasn’t got very far before a servant announces the arrival of Lady Would-Be.

Lady Would-Be is immensely vain, bullying her two serving women when she discovers even a hair out of place. Volpone is appalled at her arrival and oppressed at her domineering conversation. When he says he feels ill she assails him with a flood of medicines and remedies, then moves on to art and poetry, naming a long list of favourite poets, while Volpone gives us raging asides. Basically she is the stereotype of the unbearably garrulous pseudo-intellectual woman, the bluestocking, letting loose ‘a hail of words’. Her unstoppable verbiage and Volpone’s comic agony at her presence reminds me a bit of Captain Haddock and Madam Castafiore.

Mosca arrives in the nick of time, and relieves Volpone by telling Lady Would-be he has just seen her husband being rowed in a gondola with the most notorious courtesan in Venice towards the Rialto. She hurries out to catch him. Volpone is overcome with gratitude.

Now Mosca leads Bonario in and hides him with a view to letting him see or overhear his father disinheriting him.

Unfortunately, Corvino chooses this moment to arrive with Celia who, as we have seen, he intends to prostitute to Volpone. Mosca is appalled. He told him to wait till called. Now there’s going to be a train crash of clients. Mosca parks them on another part of the stage, then tells Bonario to walk apart in a gallery, the other end of the gallery, to wait there till called. Bonario does so but, unsurprisingly, is suspicious.

Back to Corvino. He is shown at length persuading Celia that having sex with Volpone is nothing, is good for his health, the man can barely walk, it will be nothing, if he was giving her to a lusty Italian or Frenchman, why, yes, that would be remiss – on he drones making up excuses, while Celia grows more and more horrified and begs for mercy, as he drags her towards Volpone’s bed, says she’d rather drink poison, eat burning coals.

Mosca advises Corvino to leave them, so they both exeunt and it is a tremendous moment when Volpone, who had up till then been lying feebly on a couch coughing, suddenly bounds to his feet, full of energy and life, terrifying poor Celia even more. He proceeds to give a dazzling speech about how they will be true lovers, he will give her all his treasure, they shall eat off gold and dissolve pearls in their wine, and then envisions them recreating all the Greek myths of sex before playing the parts of all the modern nations i.e. acting out a million sexual fantasies.

Celia persists in her honour and begs to be defaced or given leprosy so her beauty ceases to provoke and she can live in virtue. At which point Volpone loses patience and goes to simply rape her. At this critical moment Bonario springs out of his hiding place, throws Volpone to the floor and like a Romantic hero, takes her away from this den of infamy, vowing vengeance on the foul fiend.

On the floor Volpone, bemoans this sudden reversal and possible crushing of all his plans. Enter Mosca who has been beaten up by Bonario on the way out and is bleeding. What shall they do? There is a knocking on the doors and Volpone panics, thinking it is the police sent by Bonario, and says he can already feel a red hot brand as punishment being seared into his forehead.

Enter old Corbaccio who is surprised to see Mosca bruised and bleeding. Quick-witted, Mosca explains to Corbaccio that his son, Bonario, has heard about the plot to disinherit him and came to murder Volpone and him, Corbaccio, but Mosca fought him off. Corbaccio is taken in and vows even more to disinherit his son.

However, during this explanation, Voltore the lawyer has also entered and overheard part of this, and sneaks up on Mosca and calls him a parasite and liar, leading him on just like he’s leading Corbaccio on. So now Mosca has to think on this feet again and comes up with the story that he is egging on Corbaccio in the hope that his son murders them both i.e. his father Corbaccio and Volpone – at which point Voltore will inherit! He’s doing it for him, honest. In fact he goes on to tell about Bonario being in hiding and grabbing Corvino’s wife – who he had brought on an innocent social visit – and fighting his way out of the house with and cock and bull story about Volpone being about to rape her. If he succeeds, Volpone will be imprisoned and Voltore will never inherit!

Now Voltore is a lawyer, so he immediately starts thinking how to defeat Bonario. He and Corbaccio exit. Mosca collapses exhausted. Volpone congratulates him on spinning such a dazzling tissue of lies!

Act 4

Scene 1 A street in Venice Peregrine, ‘a gentleman traveller’, appears to be a decent honest chap, and we find him being lectured by Sir Politic Would-be who has a whole string of projects afoot, each more preposterous than the next, from a monopoly of herring to a scheme to identify whether the plague is aboard quarantined ships, a wise piece of advice to the Venetian state to ban the use of match boxes, and so on.

Enter the equally verbose Lady Would-be with a servant, escorted by Nano. If you recall, she was told by Mosca that her husband was dallying with a notorious courtesan. Now she storms up to him and accuses him of infidelity, then turns on Peregrine and accuses him of being a woman in disguise! Sir Politic is so outraged he storms off and Peregrine stands his ground in astonishment.

Enter Mosca. When Lady Would-be says she is assailing the courtesan he (Mosca) told her about, Mosca says no no no no it is not this gentleman, he is a man and he saw him land this morning. No, the courtesan in question has been arrested and taken before the Senate. Lady Would-be humbly apologies to Peregrine, in fact overdoes it so much it seems almost like a sexual offer, before Mosca takes her off towards the Senate to see the true culprit. The viewer has a shrewd suspicion this will turn out to be Celia. Peregrine stands there astonished at the bizarre couple he has just met.

Scene 2 The Scrutineo or Senate House Mosca has assembled the three gulls, Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore, and keeps all the plates spinning by telling them all he’s working just for them. He has briefed them to lie.

Enter judges, Bonario and Celia. The four magistrates discuss what they’ve heard from Bonario and Celia i.e. the plot to prostitute her and how Bonario saved her, and all agree that the youth has a good reputation and she is of spotless virtue.

But then Voltore starts speaking and turns the story upside down, making Bonario a wicked murderer who has been having a licentious affair with the girl and stormed into Volpone’s house expressly to murder his father and claim the inheritance. He lines up his witnesses, namely Corbaccio he swears his son is an unnatural parricide, and Corvino who swears his wife is a hot whore.

It is notable that they both use animal imagery, reinforcing the sense that we are dealing with humans who have sunk to bestial level.

CORBACCIO: I will not hear thee,
Monster of men, swine, goat, wolf, parricide!
Speak not, thou viper.

And:

CORVINO: This woman, please your fatherhoods, is a whore,
Of most hot exercise, more than a partridge,
Upon record… Neighs like a jennet.

Corbaccio, Corvino and Voltore pile calumny on calumny until Celia faints in horror. Mosca is next to give testimony and says his wounds (obviously clearly visible) are proof of the young man’s violent attack. He then says there is yet another witness, this time of Celia’s debauchery, and they call Lady Would-be who enthusiastically points out Celia as a harlot, joining in the animal theme by calling her a chameleon and hyena. (She is not in on the scam; surely this is because she is just stupid and gullible. NB No. In act 5 it is made clear she, too, was briefed and lied against Celia consciously.)

Finally, Volpone is brought in on a stretcher. Voltore makes much of his feeble condition and mockingly asks if this wreck of a man could be a lecher and rapist when he can’t stand and is barely breathing. The magistrates are convinced by Voltore and when they ask Celia and Bonario for their defence the latter say they trust to their innocence and heaven, to which the magistrates, with unconscious satire, reply that that is no proof in this court.

Volpone is carried out and the two young people are sent to the cells while the magistrates tut about young people these days.

Finally, Mosca deals with each of the gulls in turn – Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore and finally Lady Would-be herself, assuring them, one by one, that they are the sole heirs of Volpone’s riches. And so they all depart.

Act 5

Scene 1 Volpone’s house Enter Volpone and Mosca who can’t believe they got away with it. Volpone has palpitations, they’ve never done ‘the act’ before in public, and in a court of law, God, the stress! Mosca emphasises that it is their masterstroke, they daren’t go any further.

That said, Volpone immediately conceives a new height of knavery. They will pretend he’s died. He’ll get the servants to put it around town that he passed away as a result of the stress of the trial… and that Mosca has inherited it all. Quickly he asks Mosca to hand him one of the standard will templates which are in the closet and scribbles Mosca’s name into it. They cackle over how the three men and woman lied their heads off in the court.

Barely have the servants gone to raise a hue and cry about Volpone’s death than they hear the first knock on the door. Mosca arranges the desk with notes and papers as if he’s reviewing the estate and Volpone hides so he can watch the Humiliation of the Dupes.

This proceeds in a highly structured way with Voltore, Corbaccio, Corvino and Lady Would-be arriving quickly to find Mosca concentrating on going through a long list of possessions. He hands them the will and one by one they pass it round, each in turn asking Mosca, ‘Surely this is a joke?’ and Mosca giving each one quite a lengthy speech describing their greed and vanity and how stupid they’ve been and telling them to go home and repent.

With each humiliation we cut away to Volpone behind the arras clapping his hands with glee. When they’ve finally all gone, Volpone comes out and congratulates Mosca for a rare entertainment. To cap it, he suggests that Mosca dresses as a commendatoro or court official and walks the streets to find the four victims and twist the knife.

Actually, Mosca says, he knows a commendatoro personally. He’ll get him drunk, pinch his costume and bring it back to Volpone. (This reminds me of Brainworm getting Formal drunk and stealing his clothes in Every Man In His Humour).

Scene 2 At Sir Politic Would-be’s lodgings Suddenly an entirely new sub-plot. Peregrine, irked by his encounter with the Would-bes earlier, has conceived a practical joke. He has dressed up as a merchant and paid three other merchants to join in. Now he pleads hasty admittance to Sir Would-be’s presence and hastily tells him that evidence has been sworn against him that’s he’s been overheard scheming to betray Venice to the Turk. They are coming for him! They will torture him!

At that moment the three merchants Peregrine has recruited start banging on the door and shouting. In a mad panic, Sir Politic begs Peregrine to help him clamber into a giant tortoise shell he keeps in his rooms. He will pretend to be a tortoise! He quickly tells his servant to burn all his notes lest they incriminate him.

The three merchants burst in and ransack the place then come over to the giant tortoise. They play their role of state officials and Peregrine pretends to be an innocent bystander. They start kicking and goading the tortoise. Slowly it moves and in doing so reveals garters and gloves i.e it is a man. They lift the shell off him and fall about with laughter.

Peregrine takes off his disguise, introduces himself as the man he and his wife plagued this morning, says now they are quits, and departs. Sir Politic, by himself, laments that the story will be told in pubs and piazzas and he will become the laughing stock of the town. He will leave Venice.

Scene 3 Volpone’s house I suppose that little sketch gave Volpone and Mosca the stage time they needed to have got hold of their costumes. Now we see Volpone masquerading as a Commendatore and Mosca as a Clarissimo. They congratulate each other on their disguises and Volpone exits. At which Mosca soliloquises that he plans to scam his boss and become owner of all. This final scam is called The Fox Trap.

Scene 4 A street Volpone in disguise encounters and badgers Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore, guying them by congratulating each in turn on coming into their fortunes now the old fox is dead. Of course this drives them to distraction with chagrin and humiliation. Corvino, for one, threatens to turn violent but, at key moments, Mosca walks across the stage, now wearing the fine clothes of a Clarissimo. The point is that these fine clothes denote his new rank as a member of the aristocracy, putting him on the same rank with the three dupes, he – a former servant – to their vast chagrin.

Scene 5 The Scrutineo The magistrates and most of the cast, being Bonario and Celia, Corvino, Corbaccio and Voltore. His final galling encounter with Volpone-in-disguise seems to have turned Voltore’s brain. It appears to be at that moment that he realises what a fool he’s been.

VOLPONE: When I provoked him, then I lost myself.

Now, in front of the whole court, he recants all his former testimony, says it was a lie and he was put up to it by Mosca. Celia thanks heaven. The other two gulls, Corvino and Corbaccio, swear Voltore’s gone mad, cleaving to their story even when the magistrates question them.

Scene 6 A street Volpone alone curses his stupidity on always wanting to take the joke further.

VOLPONE: To make a snare for mine own neck! and run
My head into it, wilfully! with laughter!
When I had newly ‘scaped, was free, and clear,
Out of mere wantonness! O, the dull devil
Was in this brain of mine, when I devised it…
… These are my fine conceits!…
What a vile wretch was I, that could not bear
My fortune soberly? I must have my crotchets,
And my conundrums!

Indeed. Now he bumps into the dwarf and eunuch and hermaphrodite who tell him that Mosca told them to go and holiday,m and give him the keys. In a flash Volpone realises that Mosca means to seize his house and fortune. And remembers that he gave him a version of the will with his name written into it!

Scene 7 Back at the Scrutineo The magistrates are now inclined to believe Voltore and that Bonario and Celia are innocent, but call for Mosca to be brought. Volpone is still in disguise and makes a few answers about Mosca, but then reveals himself to Voltore – says he is still alive and that Voltore is still his heir.

One of the magistrates had earlier referred to Voltore acting like a man obsessed. Volpone now suggests that he really do act like a man possessed, fall to the floor, froth at the mouth, then return to the original story (Bonario is a would-be parricide, Celia is a whore), save Volpone and be made heir to his fortune.

Quite unbelievably Voltore agrees, promptly falls to the floor, froths, raves etc. The other two desperate liars, Corvino and Carbaccio, egged on by Volpone (in disguise) swear they see a devil fly out of his mouth in the shape of a bat. Then he slowly recovers his wits and, when the magistrates ask if he recognises the paper in which he has written down the (true) series of events says that, Yes, he recognises the hand (Volpone watching all this trembles) but everything written in it is false (Volpone silently cheers) throwing the magistrates into even deeper amazement, and Celia back into despair.

At this point Mosca arrives, dressed very grandly, in fact so grandly that one of the four magistrates makes an aside that he’d make a good husband for his daughter. Volpone has room to elbow his way over to him and whisper in his ear that things are desperately hanging in the balance (‘All’s o’ the hinge’), Voltore spilled the beans once, but now he’s got him safely back onside. Mosca must reveal that Volpone is still alive.

But he doesn’t. Despite Volpone hissing in his ear, Mosca answers the magistrates with the candour of a sad and honest man that, alas, poor Volpone is dead. There follows a furiously frenzied interplay as Mosca dolefully tells the magistrates his master is dead, while Volpone hisses in his ear that he’ll give him half his estate. Not enough, Mosca whispers back.

At that point there’s a further complication because when the magistrates ask who told them that Volpone was still alive, some of them turn to Volpone-in-disguise-as-an-officer and say it was this officer. Well, declare the magistrates, have him taken away and whipped for a liar.

Thus it is, that facing the prospect of an immediate whipping, facing the prospect of Mosca inheriting his entire estate, and overhearing the fourth magistrate musing out loud about marrying his daughter to Mosca, blow it! Volpone decides he might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb and strips off his disguise, revealing to an astonished cast that he is still alive!

Swiftly he accuses Mosca and the three men as being conspirators and gulls. To be honest I don’t think he gives nearly enough of an explanation to clarify the full sequence of events but, be that as it may. the judges proceed to pass swift and exacting justice.

Mosca, as a servant masquerading as a citizen, is ordered to be whipped and condemned to the galleys for life.

Volpone is told that, as a gentleman, he cannot be whipped, but his entire treasure will be confiscated and given to a hospital. And since he has acquired his fortune by faking the symptoms of gout, palsy etc he will be thrown into prison and set in chains until he does actually develop those symptoms.

Voltore will be struck off as a lawyer and exiled.

Corbaccio is deprived of all his estate, which is given to his son, and sent to a monastery to study how to die well.

Corvino will be rowed around the canals wearing a hat with long asses ears before being put in the stocks, and is ordered to send his much-wronged wife back to her father with her dowry trebled.

Let all that see these vices thus rewarded,
Take heart and love to study ’em! Mischiefs feed
Like beasts, till they be fat, and then they bleed.

Thoughts

Volpone is obviously a big leap forward on Every Man In His Humour in terms of dramatic coherence and power. The central figure of Volpone and the trope of his gulling all the ‘clods and clodpoles’ unifies the play, and the double act of Volpone and Mosca has tremendous verve and power.

So much so that the critique I developed for Every Man seems even more true here, namely the fundamental contradiction which I’ve tried to summarise as Jonson’s Divided Morality.

What I mean is that, on the surface – in his prologues and introductions and dedicatory epistles and other critical writing – Jonson insisted that comedy plays a didactic role and should aim to mock and ridicule foolish, crooked behaviour onstage in order to leave the audience feeling chastened by seeing their own foibles and pettinesses taken to extremes and made absurd onstage.

However, what you see onstage tends to have the opposite effect. Everything in the poetry and action and dialogue and gags and scams that you actually see onstage attracts you to the baddies, makes you laugh or gasp at their outrageous scams, and you find yourself cheering whenever they reappear after an absence. Imaginatively you are on the side of the huge outrageous liars.

That said, this neat dichotomy is complicated by the fact that, maybe it’s the dupes who are meant to play the role of instructing the audience.

I can see how, for example, the audience watching Corvino hot to prostitute his wife for a fortune, or Corbaccio who is constantly on the verge of suggesting to Mosca that they actively murder Volpone – watching either of these grotesques, members of the audience might detect in themselves thoughts which have, in some times and places, tended along the same lines and so be horrified to see them taken to such outrageous extremes. Maybe that is what Jonson intended.

Everyone who sees or reads the plays agrees that the punishments seem very harsh. There’s a surface-level way of assessing them for their time and place, comparing them to actual punishments in Italy or England for the kinds of ‘crimes’ the malefactors have committed.

But there’s also a more psychological interpretation. I’m tempted to think that Jonson-the-moralist, in dishing out such aggressive humiliation and punishment to his creations, is overcompensating for the moral laxity and imaginative indulgence which Jonson-the-playwright has given his characters all along.

At some level, Jonson the strict moralist is administering a beating to his own wayward, anarchist imaginative impulses. He is punishing himself.

Jacobean comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1607)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Elizabethan art

Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

17th century history

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 18, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 18, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/18/volpone-ben-jonson/

Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston (1605)

Six salient facts:

1. Eastward Ho and Westward Ho were the cries of the watermen who plied on the Thames, telling customers which way they were headed.

2. Eastward Ho! was a collaboration between three leading playwrights of the era, George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston. Scholars have been arguing for centuries about who wrote which bit.

3. Eastward Ho! was staged at the Blackfriars Theatre by a company of boy actors known as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, granted a patent by King James I in 1604. Boy actors! So imagine everything that follows being played by boys! All the double entendres and jokes about pricks and purses, Gertrude making eyes at Quicksilver, Sindefy the whore, all the vamping… boys.

4. Eastward Ho! was performed at the Blackfriars Theatre. This was an enclosed theatre which catered to a financial elite, charging sixpence admission, compared to 1 pence at the more popular and open-to-the-elements Globe Theatre.

5. Eastward Ho! includes references to and parodies of popular contemporary plays such as The Spanish Tragedy, Tamburlaine and Hamlet. Even the play’s title is a reference, a riposte to the recently performed Westward Ho! by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, who then went on to write Northward Ho! as a response to Eastward. Jacobean theatre was a tightly packed, highly competitive, self-referential little world.

6. The play contained scathing satire on all manner of subjects to do with contemporary London life, but one of these was the widespread animosity against the many Scots who had accompanied the new king, James VI of Scotland who became James I of England upon the death of Queen Elizabeth in March 1605, down to London. Chronically poor from the start of his reign, James quickly became notorious for selling knighthoods for £40. 900 were sold in the first year of his reign. This created a mercenary atmosphere of corruption, that all that mattered was money, a sense that you could get rich and climb the social ladder overnight by clever scams. This is the corrupt vision which lures Quicksilver, Petronel and Security, the play’s three baddies, who all hope to get rich quick by various scams – and who are balanced by Touchstone, standing for the bourgeois virtues of hard work, and Golding, who stands for loyalty and honesty.

Having read the play I’m surprised that the handful of satirical references to the Scots and the selling of knighthoods are relatively trivial, you could blink and miss them.

1. When Sir Petronel Flash is washed up on the Isle of Dogs two passing gentlemen mock him, and then one – out of tune with his preceding remarks – says something in a Scots accent:

FIRST GENTLEMAN: On the coast of Dogs, sir; y’are i’th’ Isle o’ Dogs, I tell you, I see y’ave been washed in the Thames here, and I believe ye were drowned in a tavern before, or else you would never have took boat in such a dawning as this was. Farewell, farewell; we will not know you for shaming of you. I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights.
SECOND GENTLEMAN: No, no, this is he that stole his knighthood o’ the grand day for four pound given to a page; all the money in’s purse, I wot well.

It’s peculiar the way this one-off remark and its odd Scottish impersonation sticks out from the text around it, as if it’s been cut and pasted onto the rest of his speech in English. It’s an oddly random moment in the text

2. In the pub, the gentlemen who are joining the expedition to Virginia ask Captain Seagull what it’s like and he sets off on a long deceitful description of how it’s overflowing with gold,m in the middle of which he suddenly segues into a passage about Scots, and the jokey idea that it would be lovely if all the Scots in London could be magically transported to America.

SCAPETHRIFT: And is it a pleasant country withal?
SEAGULL: As ever the sun shined on; temperate and full of all sorts of excellent viands: wild boar is as common there as our tamest bacon is here; venison as mutton. And then you shall live freely there, without sergeants, or courtiers, or lawyers, or intelligencers, only a few industrious Scots, perhaps, who indeed are dispersed over the face of the whole earth. But as for them, there are no greater friends to Englishmen and England, when they are out on’t, in the world, than they are. And for my part, I would a hundred thousand of ’hem were there, for we are all one countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort of them there than we do here.

Someone reported the playwrights to the authorities as disrespecting the new king. Marston got wind of it and went into hiding, but Jonson and Chapman were briefly imprisoned for lèse majesty.

Ten years later, Jonson told Drummond of Hawthornden (a Scots writer who he stayed with on a visit to Scotland) that they thought they might have their ears and noses slit.

It’s very difficult for us to really assimilate the casual violence and casual death of the Elizabethan/Jacobean period. Tens of thousands died of the periodic outbreaks of plague. There were plenty of other ailments to die of in between. You were liable to be conscripted for one of the endless wars. Jonson is known to have killed a fellow actor in a duel. The plays refer to the common punishment of being whipped. And here are a couple of poets in gaol for a few weeks wondering if they’ll publicly have their ears cut off or noses slit! As I say, difficult for us to really imagine what life was like.

What happened to Jonson and Chapman? The pair wrote letters to every influential patron and person they knew asking for their intercession. These letters are included as an appendix in the New Mermaid edition of the play and very interesting reading they make, too. Eventually, they were released, whereupon they threw a big banquet for their friends and supporters.

Cast

There’s quite a large cast (all played by boys!):

Touchstone, a goldsmith.
Quicksilver, and Golding, apprentices to Touchstone.
Sir Petronel Flash, a shifty knight.
Security, an old usurer.
Bramble, a lawyer.
Seagull, a sea-captain.
Scapethrift, and Spendall, adventurers bound for Virginia.
Slitgut, a butcher’s apprentice.
Poldavy, a tailor.
Holdfast, and Wolf, officers of the Counter.
Hamlet, a footman.
Potkin, a tankard-bearer.

Mistress Touchstone.
Gertrude, and Mildred, her daughters.
Winifred, wife to Security.
Sindefy, mistress to Quicksilver.
Bettrice, a waiting-woman.
Mrs. Ford, Mrs. Gazer, Coachman, Page, Constables, Prisoners, &c.

Eastward Ho! plot summary

Master Touchstone is an honest but tetchy goldsmith. He has two daughters and two apprentices. The elder daughter, Gertrude, is ‘of a proud ambition and nice wantonness’, the younger, Mildred, ‘of a modest humility and comely soberness’. So with the apprentices who are nicely paired & contrasted, Quicksilver is a graceless unthrift ‘of a boundless prodigality’, but Golding is ‘of a most hopeful industry’, a model of industry and sobriety.

Act 1 scene 1 The play opens with Touchstone and Frank Quicksilver arguing, the latter insisting he is the son of a gentleman and is off to the pub to hang out with gallants and gull them out of money. Crossly, Touchstone says that he rose by hard work and repeats his catchphrase, ‘Work upon it now!’ Touchstone exits and Golding is left alone with Quicksilver, who insults Touchstone for being a flat-capped bourgeois, swears a lot and it is in this speech that Quicksilver says Golding shouldn’t face West to the setting sun, but look out for himself and fare Eastward Ho!

As the play develops East is associated with:

the rising sun
the mythical castle in the country which Sir Petronal Flash claims to own
the direction down the Thames the ship to America will take

Act 1 scene 2 Proud Gertrude is impatiently awaiting the arrival of her suitor, Sir Petronel Flash, while meek and mild sister Mildred watches her dress up in pretentious finery, mock the lowly origins of her own parents, and look forward to becoming a fine lady. Her tailor, Poldavy, encourages her to prance and bob like a ‘fine lady’. She is a type of the pretentious bourgeois.

Enter Sir Petronel Flash who quickly comes over as a superficial fool. Mistress Touchstone is as keen to be rich as Gertrude and the two of them, plus Flash, make a bevy of pretentious fools. Mistress T explains that Sir Petronel is one of the new knights, a reference to James I’s innovation of selling knighthoods. Gertrude wishes him to take her away from all this to his big house in the country. She uses the affected pronunciation of city-dames, namely saying ‘chity’ and ‘chitizen’.

The pretentious threesome exit leaving the stage to Touchstone, Mildred and Golding. Rather surprisingly Touchstone marries Golding to Mildred. She is all filial loyalty and so meekly agrees, Golding swears his devotion to his master and they go in to have a little wedding meal. Touchstone, alone on stage, explains that he is running a little experiment:

This match shall on, for I intend to prove
Which thrives the best, the mean or lofty love.
Whether fit wedlock vow’d ’twixt like and like,
Or prouder hopes, which daringly o’erstrike…

There is no mention of any love or affection whatsoever between the young couple. It is a striking example of Jonson’s didactic theatre, utterly lacking either the magical romance of Shakespeare’s comedies, or the innocent mirth of Dekker’s Shoemakers’ Holiday.

Act 2 scene 1 Next morning outside Master Touchstone’s shop. He calls Quicksilver to him, who is hungover and explains he got smashed at the party to celebrate Gertrude and Sir Petronel’s wedding. He staggers off to drink some more. Touchstone retires and listens to the conversation of Golding and Mildred which is exemplary for love and devotion. At this point Quicksilver staggers back on stage, positively drunk and asks first Golding, then Touchstone if he can borrow money.

Touchstone has had enough and throws him out, giving him his indenture and all other belongings. Very drunk, Quicksilver quotes the opening speech from Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy, then swears at Touchstone:

Quicksilver: Sweet Touchstone, will you lend me two shillings?
Touchstone: Not a penny.
Quicksilver: Not a penny? I have friends, and I have acquaintance; I will piss at thy shop-posts, and throw rotten eggs at thy sign.

As Quicksilver staggers offstage, Touchstone abruptly frees Golding from his apprenticeship, offers him a handsome dowry and promises to host a marriage feast even more spectacular than Petronel’s. Golding, modest and sober, demurs, saying it would be profligate and wasteful and he and Mildred will be happy to have a small ceremony with just Touchstone present, and then consume the cold leftovers from Petronel’s feast. Touchstone remarks that his daughter is now impatient to seat off Eastward to her knightly husband’s country pile.

Act 2 scene 2 At Security’s house. Security has a little soliloquy in which he introduces himself as Security, the famous usurer, who keeps people’s belongings, in this case the fine clothes of Quicksilver, who in the past has nipped in here to swap his prentice clothes for fancy togs to go meeting his gallant mates.

Enter hungover Quicksilver climbing into his swagger clothes. The notes explain the business relationship between the two: Quicksilver pretends friendship to city rakes and gallants, lends them money, then pretends to be in debt, persuades them to sign a bond for a commodity or an exorbitantly high-interest loan payable to Security, for which they are responsible. In other words, Quicksilver dupes his ‘friends’ into getting into deep debt with Security: which is why Security keeps his clothes and minds his affairs for him.

Security is married to a young woman, Winifred but has a sexy servant, Sindefy, ‘Sin’ for short, who comes bearing the rest of Quicksilver’s posh clothes. Quicksilver calls Security ‘Dad’. After lengthy speeches about how they rely on no trade, preferring to make money out of money, (which are designed, I think, to make the audience despise them) Security lays out their latest plan: Quicksilver will get Sir Petronel Flash into his debt. They’ve learned that Flash married Gertrude to get his hands on her inheritance, to convert it to cash and take ship for Virginia as a ‘knight adventurer’.

They devise a Plan: Gertrude has not yet gone down to the country to visit her husband’s (fictional) castle, but is still in London. Quicksilver will visit her and will help the introduction of Sindefy who will take on the character of a gullible young woman just up from the country – you can just imagine this will lead to an orgy of ridiculous social pretentiousness.

Just before they pack up, Security is called offstage by his wife (?) Winnie, leaving Quicksilver alone. Out of Quicksilver’s mouth oozes pure, malicious evil, as he insults Security behind his back and says he hopes to live to see dog’s meat made of his flesh. This sounds like Ben Jonson. It is exactly the tone of vicious hatred which animates Mosca in Volpone. Coming from the bonhomie of The Shoemakers’ Holiday, this kind of thing is like treading in dog poo.

Act 2 scene 3 Quicksilver is at Petronel’s London lodging as the latter prepares to set off. He wants to flee London to escape his wife, who he can’t stand. He readily admits he has no castle in the country, something Gertrude will shortly find out. With what I think of as typical Jonsonian heartlessness, Petronel hopes Gertrude will hang herself in despair.

Quicksilver persuades Petronel to stay and get Gertrude to sign over her inheritance, give it in bond to Security who will increase its value. Enter Gertrude now dressed grandly and swanking with grand manners, telling the men when to doff their hats and when to put them back on.

Security presents to her Sindefy, demurely dressed, and preposterously describes her as a simple country girl who intended to become a nun but has come up to the big city seeking advice. In her pretentiously lofty manner, Gertrude agrees to employ her as her personal maid.

Security invites Petronal to come and dine with him but Gertrude is hen-pecking him, and refuses to let him go, insisting they dine at home so she can quickly take him to bed. Quicksilver and Security make cheeky asides about her being bossy. Finally it is agreed that Petronel will visit Security the following morning.

Act 3 scene 1 The next morning at Security’s house, he has just given Petronel a fine breakfast feast. They exchange extravagant compliments, Security promising to make Petronel godfather to his first child, while Petronel gives him a diamond to give his first-born, and Security makes his young wife, Winifred, kiss him. Security’s lawyer, Bramble, has drawn up documents.

Enter the captain of the ship taking Petronel, Captain Seagull and Spendall who say they must haste and leave under cover since the ship is taken out in a false name.

Act 3 scene 2 An inn-yard where the harassed coachman and servant makes haste to prepare Gertrude’s coach. She is obsessed with being the wife of a knight and having a coach. Two city women, Mistresses Gaze and Fond, line up to watch the show and shout encouragement to Mistress Gertrude, who is accompanied by her mother, Mistress Touchstone, equally impatient to be a Great Lady.

Petronel himself arrives and asks her to wait, but she says she is impatient to decorate his castle for his arrival. Quicksilver also enters and tells Gertrude her father has just officiated at the wedding of Golding and Mildred. Gertrude is disgusted at her father for marrying her sister to a common apprentice: henceforth he (her father) will have to call her ‘Madam’.

Enter Touchstone, Mildred and Golding. Gertrude is appalled her sister got married in such a common hat. Touchstone disowns her for snobbery. Gertrude insults Golding for marrying her sister. Golding is tactful and considerate of his master.

Enter Security and his lawyers and they cozen Gertrude into signing away her inheritance, she thinking it’s a minor property in town and the money will be used to beautify the castle. She and Mistress Touchstone and Sindefy, her maid, depart in the coach. Petronel and Quicksilver discuss the very great disappointment Gertrude is going to have when she discovers he has no castle – but by then Petronel will have fled the country.

Petronel expects Security to bring him the money they’ve discussed at Billingsgate. There then follows a complicated sequence during which Petronel reveals to Security that he is in love with the wife of Security’s lawyer, Bramble. He would like, as a favour, Security to take Bramble out for a drink, while he steals Bramble’s wife away. Security enters into the spirit of the plot and exits. Only then do Petronel and Quicksilver reveal that, while Security is out with Bramble, Petronel will steal away Security’s wife, Winifred. Quicksilver and Petronel are fretting about how to disguise her, when Security unexpectedly re-enters and says the best disguise will be his wife’s cloak and hands it over.

Act 3 scene 3 Captain Seagull and his men (Spendall and Scapethrift) are at the Blue Anchor tavern, Billingsgate, awaiting Petronel. His dim men ask about Virginia and Seagull confidently tells them the streets are paved with gold, says the expedition there of 1579 was a great success and the Englishmen intermarried with the natives.

Petronel arrives and they toast the success of the voyage. Security and Bramble arrive, impressed with the toasting and confidence of the crew. Quicksilver arrives with Security’s wife in disguise and wearing a mask. Petronel explains, ostensibly for the benefit of Bramble, that it is a cousin come to see him off who doesn’t want to be recognised in a low tavern.

She is crying and so Petronel asks Security, as a favour, to comfort her. This is designed to elicit howls of laughter from the audience, as Security is all unknowingly comforting his own wife, telling her she is well shot of ‘an old jealous dotard’ and will soon be in the arms of a young lover! About six times various characters make the joke that the ship is bound that night for Cuckold’s Haven, a real place, on the Thames below Rotherhithe.

Increasingly drunk, Petronel suggests to the company that they hold their farewell feast aboard Sir Francis Drake’s old ship, and they dance round the silent, disguised woman to celebrate the idea. Bramble tells Security the mystery woman is wearing Security’s wife’s clothes, but Security just laughs at him, confident that she is Bramble‘s wife – everyone in the audience, of course, laughing at him.

Security and Bramble go their ways but the rest of the company calls for a boat to take them to Sir Francis Drake’s ship, where they’ll get even more drunk, before setting off to be put aboard their final ship. The pub’s drawer watches them go, remarking that the tide is against them and a storm is brewing and it is a fool’s errand.

Act 3 scene 4 A very brief scene, just long enough for Security to return home, find his wife not there, discover that she is at Billingsgate, make the deduction that she is the mystery woman and is sailing with Petronel, and run off yelling for a boat.

THE STORM

Act 4 scene 1 Cuckold’s Haven There’s a storm blowing and the Thames is turbulent, A fellow named Slitgut is climbing up a tree at Cuckold’s Haven to attach cuckold’s horns to it, after an ancient tradition when he spies a ship going down in the river. He gives a running commentary of a man struggling through the waves who comes ashore and proves to be Security, who moans his wretched luck and crawls away. He has been crushed down to the earth.

The Slitgut sees another person wallowing in the weltering wave, a woman, and describes how she is rescued by a man who brings her to shore. It is the drawer from the Blue Anchor tavern who came down to visit a friend at St Katherine’s and he has rescued Winifred. She asks him to go fetch her bundle of clothes which she left at the pub, but begs him to keep quiet about her or it will ruin her reputation. A would-be whore, she has washed ashore by St Katherine’s monastery.

Next out of the water is Quicksilver, washed ashore capless by the gallows reserved for pirates. He bewails the fact the storm has sunk the ship and ruined all his plans.

Next to stagger ashore are Petronel and Seagull who are drunkenly, confusedly convinced they have washed ashore in France until two men passing by assure them they are on the Isle of Dogs and briskly make off, but not before making the joke that one of them (i.e. Petronel) looks like a thirty-pound knight.

I ken the man weel; he’s one of my thirty pound knights.

This is obviously written to be said in a Scots accent and was the most obvious bit of anti-Scots satire, which caused its authors to be thrown into gaol. Petronel and Seagull are now united with Quicksilver and all bewail their fate. They had not, in fact, made it as far as the main ship which was to take them to America, but worry that that ship will now have been seized (there was something illicit about it which I didn’t quite understand).

Petronel is all for giving in, but Quicksilver suddenly changes the subject by declaring he has the specialist knowledge to make copper look like silver: he’ll restore their fortunes yet. The other two adore him and they depart.

Enter the Drawer and Winifred now dressed in dry clothes. He has brought her near to the pub where he works, and very nobly leaves her to continue alone i.e. uncompromised by being seen with a strange man. Which is when she bumps into her husband, Security! Quickly Winifred ad libs and lies that she has come out expressly to look for him, that she was fast asleep when he returned to see her (at the end of act 3) and his shouting stirred her and she was about to call back but he ran off in such a hurry. Thus, lying her head off, she is restored to her husband and he ends up apologising, promising that every morning he will go down on his knees and beseech her forgiveness. They exit.

At which point Slitgut, who has been up his tree watching each of these encounters, climbs down saying he won’t continue the ridiculous pagan custom, and bids the cuckold tree farewell.

Act 4 scene 2 A room in Touchstone’s House Touchstone has heard that Petronel and Quicksilver’s ship was sunk. He tells us he has also heard that his ungrateful daughter, Gertrude, and his wife and the maid, discovered there was no castle anywhere and so ended up sleeping in the famous coach until they crept back to London, repentant.

Golding appears and in his guileless way reports that he has been voted Master Deputy Alderman. He had already been taken into the livery of his trade, so Touchstone is thrilled that he is progressing in his career and doubts not that he will soon be more famous than Dick Whittington.

Then Golding tells Touchstone that the rascally crew were shipwrecked as they took a ferry boat down towards Blackwall, were washed ashore and are returning in dribs and drabs to London and Golding has organised a reception committee of constables. Touchstone’s reaction is what I think of characteristically Jonson, and the reason I didn’t like this play:

TOUCHSTONE: Disgrace ’em all that ever thou canst; their ship I have already arrested. How to my wish it falls out, that thou hast the place of a justicer upon ’hem! I am partly glad of the injury done to me, that thou may’st punish it. Be severe i’ thy place, like a new officer o’ the first quarter, unreflected.

Revenge, the fiercer and severer the better, is the Jonson theme. A mood continued when Gertrude and her mother and Sindefy enter. Mistress Touchstone is thoroughly mortified by the discovery that Petronel was a liar, but Gertrude remains comically obstinate, persisting in the belief she is a lady and owes nothing to her father who ought to bow to her. She flounces out.

A constable enters to announce the arrival of Petronel and Quicksilver. Touchstone is gleeful. He insists that Golding (in his new rank of deputy alderman) judges the rascals. The Shoemakers’ Holiday was about forgiveness and festivity. Eastward Ho! is about judgement and punishment. Golding lays out the accusations against both Petronel and Quicksilver in detail, and is seconded by a vengeful Touchstone. Then they instruct the constable to take them away pending further judgement.

Act 5 scene 1 At Gertrude’s lodgings Gertrude and Sindefy bewail the hard times they’ve fallen on. Gertrude has pawned her jewels, her gowns, her red velvet petticoat, and her wedding silk stockings and all Sin’s best apparel. She wishes she could sell her ladyship. She fantasises about finding a jewel or gold in the street, anything which could save her from poverty.

Her mother enters and laments all her ambitions and decisions to become a lady, but Gertrude blames her and asks how much she’s stolen from her cursed father. But she weeps bitterly. It’s not a funny scene. Eventually Mistress Touchstone advises that she goes and throws herself on the mercy of her good sister Mildred.

Act 5 scene 2 Goldsmith’s Row Wolf comes who is a gaoler of ‘the Counter’ where Petronel, Quicksilver and Security are imprisoned. He has brought letters from them begging for help and then describes their reformations. Touchstone is tempted to forgive but exists rather than give way to pity. Golding, true to his immaculate character as Good Man gives Wolf some money and messages of hope to take back to the prisoners.

Act 5 scene 3 The Counter i.e. prison. Lawyer Bramble visits Security who has gone half mad in captivity and can’t stand the light. Two anonymous gentlemen comment on the extent of Quicksilver’s reformation, who gave away all his fancy clothes, has penned a wonderful apology for his life and helps the other prisoners write petitions.

Wolf arrives back from Golding with the message of hope and a little money. Quicksilver has completely changed. He genuinely thanks Golding, then asks Wolf to distribute the money to other prisoners. The two gentlemen who have observed this noble gesture, remark on Quicksilver’s reformation.

Next, Golding himself arrives in disguise. He has a Plan. He asks Wolf to let him into the prison, then take his ring to Touchstone and say that he, Golding, has been imprisoned for a debt to some third party, can he (Touchstone) come quickly. Then they will work some kind of resolution. Wolf agrees, lets Golding into the prison, sets off with the message to Touchstone.

Act 5 scene 4 Touchstone’s house Mildred and Mistress Touchstone try to intercede on behalf of Gertrude but Touchstone insists his ears are stoppered like Ulysses’ against the sirens. Until Wolf arrives with the token, with Golding’s ring, which Touchstone recognises and instantly promises to come to his aid.

Act 5 scene 5 The Counter Touchstone enters with Wolf. Petronel and Quicksilver enter, and a prisoner and two gentlemen are present to listen to Quicksilver’s sincere and moving song of repentance. It’s a long doggerel poem and various bystanders applaud, ask for more and, at every interval. In an aside, Touchstone tells us that his hard heart is melting. By the end he is quite convinced of Quicksilver’s reformation and forgives him. He goes bail for Quicksilver, Petronel and half-mad Security and they are all released.

Gertrude, Mildred, Mistress touchstone, Sindefy and Winifred all arrive i.e. all the main characters are on stage. Gertrude finally repents and asks Touchstone’s forgiveness, and also her husband’s forgiveness and he begs her forgiveness for deceiving her. Is anything missing? Only that Quicksilver should marry his punk, Sindefy, and make a decent woman of her. Which he instantly volunteers to do.

Bad tastes

I didn’t like this play for at least three reasons:

The contrasts set up right at the start between Dutiful Daughter and Haughty Daughter, and Conscientious Apprentice and Spendthrift Apprentice, feel too mechanical, to put it mildly. Like many other aspects of the play the characters of Golding, who is Peter Perfect, and Mildred, who barely exists as an individual, feel schematic and lifeless.
The rascal characters are all too inevitably riding for a fall and, when they hit it, are judged very inflexibly and harshly. They don’t just fall, they are crushed into the dirt and ground underfoot, reduced to miserable penury in prison. Security goes mad. The harshness of their fate feels cruel.
And at countless incidental moments along the way, the characters are vile. Gertrude’s haughtiness to her father is meant to be funny, but can easily be read as just horrible. Much worse is the way Quicksilver and Security conspire against Petronel, but then Quicksilver and Petronel conspire against Security. They’re all scum. The basic attitude was epitomised for me by the way Petronel said that, once his deceived wife discovers there is no castle, she will be so angry, that she’d be doing Petronel a favour if she hanged herself. A kind of Tarantino level of heartlessness and hate underlies the whole thing. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

The quality of justice

Feels contrived. The rascals’ repentances have no real psychological validity. Gertrude in particular is a bitch up to the last moment – and believable and funny as such, probably the funniest character in the play – till she suddenly turns up in prison right at the last minute, a changed woman. It is literally unbelievable.

In my opinion there is something necessarily shallow about Jonson’s entire view of human nature, shallow and extreme. He sees people as viciously cynical and wicked right up to the last few pages… when they suddenly undergo miracle conversions. The cynicism is unpleasant and the conversions are insultingly shallow and contrived.

But the cardboard stereotypes are an inevitable result of the strictness of his theory of comedy. He thinks comedy should hold up folly and vice to ridicule. But this is a very ideological and schematic ambition, and explains the metallic inflexibility of the play. The precise details may be unpredictable but the ultimate outcome – the crushing humiliation of the rascals and fools – is never in doubt and feels profoundly unconvincing.

As C.G. Petter points out in his introduction to the New Mermaid edition of the play, there is a marriage at the play’s end, the rather tediously inevitable requirement of any comedy – but it is the marriage of an upstart social pretender (Quicksilver) to a whore (Sindefy) whose dowry is paid by a usurer (Security). Gertrude and Petronel’s marriage is a sham from the start, he only marries her for her money. And the marriage of Golding and Mildred in the first act has absolutely no romance or emotion about it whatsoever because it is the union of two wooden puppets.

The intellectual and psychological crudity of so much of this is typified by the thumpingly crude final moral, delivered by Touchstone. Having forgiven Quicksilver after the latter has read out his very poor, doggerel poem of repentance, Touchstone offers Quicksilver decent clothes to change into from his prison rags. But the newly penitent Quicksilver nobly turns down the offer, preferring to walk through the streets of London in his prison clothes to set an example to the children of Cheapside. At which Touchstone intones the final lines of the play:

TOUCHSTONE: Thou hast thy wish. Now, London, look about,
And in this moral see thy glass run out:
Behold the careful father, thrifty son,
The solemn deeds which each of us have done;
The usurer punish’d, and from fall so steep
The prodigal child reclaim’d, and the lost sheep.

Could anyone seriously expect that plays as wooden and contrived and stereotypical and obvious as this could be expected to ‘reform’ vice and folly? What a ludicrous idea. They’re a night out at the theatre, full of jokes, lots and lots of sexual innuendo, absurd farce, ironic reversals, sentimental speeches and a big round of applause at the end.

Elizabethan comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1607)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1609)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Art

Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

Restoration comedies

17th century history

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by Simon on September 16, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Tagged adultery, America, Ben Jonson, Bettrice, Billingsgate, Blackfriars Theatre, Blue Anchor tavern, Bramble, Captain Seagull, Children of the Queen's Revels, city comedy, Coachman, comedy, Constables, cuckold, Cuckold's Haven, drama, Drummond of Hawthornden, Eastward Ho, England, George Chapman, Gertrude, Globe Theatre, Golding, Goldsmith's Row, Hamlet, Holdfast, humour, Isle of Dogs, Jacobean drama, James I, James VI, John Marston, John Webster, justice, King James I, London, marriage, Mildred, mirth, Mistress Touchstone, Mrs Ford, Mrs Gazer, Page, Petronel, Play, Poldavy, Potkin, prison, Prisoners, Queen Elizabeth, Quicksilver, revenge, River Thames, Rotherhithe, satire, Scapethrift, Scotland, Seagull, Security, Sindefy, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Petronel Flash, Slitgut, Spendall, St Katherine's monastery, Tamburlaine, Thames, the Counter, The Spanish Tragedy, theatre, Thomas Dekker, Touchstone, Virginia, Westward Ho, Winifred, Wolf

Posted by Simon on September 16, 2020

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The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)

Nothing is purposed but mirth. (Preface to The Shoemaker’s Holiday)

This is a city comedy. City comedy was a sub-genre of comic plays which developed right at the end of the reign of Elizabeth I (died 1603) and flourished into the first decade of the reign of her successor, James I.

City comedy rejects all the magical and supernatural elements which characterise many of Shakespeare’s bourgeois comedies, most of which are set abroad, and instead portrays the gritty realities of contemporary London life, with large casts of rascals and fools who are often portrayed with quite harsh satire.

During Elizabeth’s reign London had boomed, becoming the chief port of northern Europe, and its population had exploded from an estimated 50,000 in 1530 to about 225,000 in 1605. In its over-populated, filthy streets, crime and vice, crooks and con-men of every kind flourished, and these were the kinds of people city comedies set out to depict.

Two caveats: One, after emphasising that The Shoemaker’s Holiday is a city comedy, it has to be pointed out that it’s also something of a history play, since the Lord Mayor who is the central character, Simon Eyres, was a real historical figure who was appointed Sheriff in 1434 and Lord Mayor in 1445 in the reign of Henry VI.

Two, the editor of the Mermaid edition of the play, D.J. Palmer, makes the simple but important point that plays like this should not be taken as documentary evidence of London life, far from it. Palmer explains how Dekker used narratives and characters from several printed sources, and cast them into a parallel series of fairly stereotyped storylines in order to create this ‘genial and light-hearted comedy’.

The plot

Three plotlines are interwoven:

Lacy loves Rose
Simon Eyre becomes Lord Mayor
Hammon tries to seduce Jane

The current Lord Mayor of London, Sir Roger Oatley, dispatches troops raised in London to the wars in France. The Earl of Lincoln, by his side, discusses his nephew, Rowland Lacy, who disgraced himself by burning through his inheritance and learned the shoemaker’s craft in Wittenberg, before returning to England. Now he is meant to be going off to the wars with everyone else. But both men know that Lacy is madly in love with the Lord Mayor’s daughter, Rose. Lincoln disapproves of this because his nephew is an aristocrat and the Lord Mayor is simply a puffed-up greengrocer; the Lord Mayor disapproves of Lacy because he is a wastrel, and so has dispatched Rose to an out-of-the-way house out in Bow where she is being minded by Sybil, a maid.

Enter the dominating figure of the play, Simon Eyres – a ‘madcap fellow’ with a light heart – a master shoemaker with a phenomenally bombastic way with language, his much-put-upon wife Margery, and his entourage of journeymen – Hodge, Firk and Ralph. The backchat among this crew is wonderfully colourful, stuffed with Elizabethan slang, double entendres, technical terms of the shoemaker’s trade,

Where be these boys, these girls, these drabs, these scoundrels? They wallow in the fat brewiss of my bounty, and lick up the crumbs of my table, yet will not rise to see my walks cleansed. Come out, you powder-beef queans! What, Nan! what, Madge Mumble-crust. Come out, you fat midriff-swag-belly-whores, and sweep me these kennels that the noisome stench offend not the noses of my neighbours.

Where ‘brewiss’ means ‘broth’, ‘queans’ means ‘prostitutes’, ‘kennels’ means ‘gutters’. It is great fun to sit back and listen to him and his employees swap great hunks of exuberant vituperation. They are all lamenting because young Ralph, one of his shoemakers, has been conscripted for the wars, lamenting most is his brand-new wife Jane, amid much bawdy humour about pricking of honour etc.

One fine morning a Dutch itinerant shoemaker turns up at their shop and asks for work. Simon is for turning him away but Hodge and Firk say they need an extra pair of hands and so the man, who says he’s named Hans Meulter, is hired. But Hans is in fact none other than Rowland Lacy, who’s skived off his army unit and taken on a disguise in order to find out where his beloved Rose is, to find and woo and wed her.

Meanwhile Rose and Sybil are out walking when some aristocrats ride up in pursuit of an escaping deer. One of them, Hammon, falls in love with Rose in the process of a flirtatious dialogue. The Lord Mayor (Rose’s father) rides up and welcomes the two hunters to his nearby lodge, and then soliloquises to the audience that this Hammon would make a fine husband for his daughter.

Hans/Lacy fixes up a deal with a Dutch skipper for Simon to buy a cargo of exotic goods at a bargain price, using the money Lincoln gave him to go to the wars. The deal makes Simon very wealthy.

The Earl of Lincoln had sent a spy, Dodger, to keep tabs on Lacy at the wars. Now Dodger returns and tells Lincoln of a famous battle with the French but that Lacy was not there. His place was taken by his cousin Askew while Lacy snuck back to England. Lincoln immediately realises Lacy has bunked off the war in order to marry the ‘puling girl’ Rose, the Lord Mayor’s daughter. Well, he’ll put an end to that if it’s the last thing he does.

The Lord Mayor comes to supervise Hammon and Rose’s betrothal but she rejects him, saying her heart is given to another. Irritated, Hammon says he’ll go look up an old girlfriend at the Exchange. The Lord Mayor dismisses his daughter at which point Dodger arrives with a message from Lincoln that Lacy never went to France but is in hiding or disguise somewhere in London. Simon has arrived to see the Lord Mayor who says he will make Simon a Lord Sheriff.

Cut to Margery and the journeymen i.e. Firk, Hodge and Hans-in-disguise. Enter Ralph from the French wars. He is in terrible shape. He was obviously wounded, his legs are permanently damaged and he is walking on crutches. Once he’s been welcomed by his friends he is distraught to learn that, soon after he left, Jane left the household and they don’t know where she is.

These lamentations are interrupted by the startling news that Simon has been elected Sheriff of London and makes a grand entrance. He swaggers and swells over his wife and the apprentices, then says they’re all invited to the Lord Mayor’s house out in Bow.

Cut to the Lord Mayor’s house in Bow where the Lord Mayor welcomes Simon, wife and journeyman, introduces them to Rose and laments that she wouldn’t marry a fine aristocratic suitor. At this moment Simon’s crew arrive dressed as morris men and dance. Rose notices how like Lacy ‘Hans’ looks. Lacy is desperate to talk to her but has to stay in character. The Lord Mayor gives the dancers money and says he has to return to London

Rose admits to Sybil that Hans is none other than her love, Lacy. Sybil says she’ll help Rose get into London and elope with him.

Act 4 Meanwhile Hammon approaches the Exchange in disguise and his old girlfriend turns out to be none other than Jane, Ralph’s new wife who absconded from Simon’s household. Hammon puts in a sustained barrage of wooing, refusing to take no for an answer and as his masterstroke, when he learns Jane is married to one Ralph Damport, he pulls out a report of the recent wars and shows that Ralph’s name is on the list of the dead. Jane is distraught, Hammon keeps on trying to take advantage of the fact she is free to hammer her into marrying him.

Act 4 scene 2 Cut to Simon’s workshop with Firk, Hodge, Ralph and Hans all singing and working. Enter Sybil who, after some bawdy chat, tells them her mistress Rose requires Hans to come and fit her shoes.

Act 4 scene 3 In a separate scene a servant arrives at the shop and finds Ralph answering and gives him an order: his master requires a pair of new shoes like the ones he hands over, for a wedding first thing the next morning of a woman to his master, Hammon. Ralph is astonished because this is the very shoe he gave his wife Jane before he set off to the wars! Exit the servant and enter Firk, who Ralph tells the amazing story. Firk is dismissive, but Ralph says he’ll assemble a crew of shoemakers to attend this wedding and find out whether the bride really is his wife.

Act 4 scene 4 Lacy and Rose are together, and tell each other their love. Lacy casually lets slip that, because of the abrupt death of several aldermen, Simon has been voted Mayor. He tells her to meet him at Simon’s house and they’ll be married. Enter the Lord Mayor (Rose’s father) and Lacy just remembers to pretend to be Hans fitting a shoe. The Lord Mayor approves then calls Rose away because the Earl of Lincoln has arrived. Lacy’s uncle!? What the devil does he want here? Panicking, Rose suggests they flee immediately.

Act 4 scene 5 Lincoln apologises to the Lord Mayor saying he thought perhaps he was deliberately harbouring the fugitive Lacy. Why of course not, replies the LM, my respect for your honour would forbid. At that moment Sybil comes running in to announce that Rose has just run off out of the house with a shoemaker!

Lord Mayor Oatley is just cursing and ranting that he will disinherit her for marrying a commoner, when Firk enters bearing shows as if for Rose. Firk is a sarcastic tricky customer. His role here are to 1. spin an elaborate yarn and delay the two men from chasing after the couple 2. mislead them into thinking the couple are planning to get married at St Faith’s church tomorrow morning. In fact it is Hammon and Jane who are planning to get married at St Faith’s – and Ralph is organising a posse of shoemakers to interrupt them – while Lacy and Rose are planning to marry at the faraway Savoy chapel.

If it wasn’t obvious before this is the scene which really brings out the so-called ‘class war’ of the play i.e. in which the ‘knave’ Firk thoroughly enjoys tricking and deceiving two higher-ranking men who had, at his first arrival, dismissed him as a lowly servant.

Act 5 scene 1 At Simon Eyre’s house. He is lording it as Lord Mayor. Lacy has revealed he is not Hans but Rowland Lacy. Eyre is, typically, amused by the disguise and fully approves of Lacy and Rose getting married, not least because he owes to Lacy-Hans the deal with the Dutch skipper that made him a fortune and paid for the fine clothes he is wearing! He promises to arrange everything, and in addition give a grand feast to all shoemakers in the city since it is Shrove Tuesday.

Act 5 scene 2 The journeymen are assembled, Hodge, Firk, Ralph and others. Only that morning Ralph fitted the new shoe he’d been commissioned onto Jane’s feet but he was so changed by the wars that she didn’t recognise him, and he didn’t want to make himself known in a stranger’s house.

Now Hammon enters with Jane and his entourage. The shoemakers intervene, take hold of Jane – at which Hammon defies them and his entourage threaten to fight – but when they present her with Ralph, admittedly sunburnt and lame, nonetheless he is her true love and she declares he is her real husband and contemptuously asks Hammon why he lied about Ralph’s death.

She does, of course, prefer humble honesty to dressed-up deceit. Some critics spin this out into ‘class war’ but in fact it’s a conceit which goes back to ancient times, that true love is worth more than wealth.

JANE. Whom should I choose? Whom should my thoughts affect
But him whom Heaven hath made to be my love?
Thou art my husband, and these humble weeds
Make thee more beautiful than all his wealth.

Still it is not over, though, because Hammon – egged on by his supporters – now offers to buy Jane from Ralph for twenty pounds in gold. Hodge and Firk cry Fie Fie and, indeed, good Ralph spurns the offer with contempt. Utterly beaten (again – remember his attempt to woo Rose on Bow), Hammon gives them the money anyway and withdraws with his entourage.

At this moment the Lord Mayor and Earl of Lincoln enter. They address Firk and accuse him of deceiving them when he told them that Lacy and Rose would be married at St Faith’s church. Now Jane had, before her wedding, been wearing a mask or visor. At the two men’s approach Firk had told her to put it back on. Firk is thoroughly enjoying himself and now tells the men that here are Lacy and Jane in disguise, Lacy pretending to be a lame shoemaker, Jane wearing a mask (it is only at this moment that we learn from the text that Ralph has all this time been using a crutch, maybe a pair of crutches, as he now threatens to hit anyone who touches his wife with it).

When Jane takes off her mask and Ralph really continues hobbling Oatley and Lincoln realise they have been thoroughly conned and turn on Firk, calling him a ‘base crafty varlet’. But here, as throughout the play, Firk begs to differ, calling himself a member of the Gentle Craft – and by the stage in the play, we have heard references to the Gentle Craft so often that it has acquired a real sense of class solidarity or the camaraderie of the craft.

FIRK: O eternal credit to us of the gentle craft! March fair, my hearts! Oh rare!

At this point the spy Dodger appears to inform Lincoln and Oatley that their children have got married at the Savoy Chapel and that the new Lord Mayor – Simon – vows to stand in their defence. Lincoln says they’ll go petition the king about this.

Our crew are planning to go to feast with the new Lord Mayor when the pancake bell rings and Firk delivers a long paean of praise to all the fine food they’re going to eat.

FIRK: O musical bell, still! O Hodge, O my brethren! There’s cheer for the heavens: venison-pasties walk up and down piping hot, like sergeants; beef and brewess comes marching in dry-vats, fritters and pancakes comes trowling in in wheel-barrows; hens and oranges hopping in porters’—baskets, collops and eggs in scuttles, 11 and tarts and custards comes quavering in in malt-shovels.

Other prentices rush out of their buildings and tell them the new Lord Mayor has invited all the city’s apprentices to a grand feast. Hooray! Hooray!

Act 5 scene 3 A brief scene in which advisers tell the king the new Lord Mayor – Eyres – is a madcap. The king says he wants to see this eccentric.

Act 5 scene 4 Eyres is in a heightened mood even for him, as he commands some four hundred prentices to be fed! When he is told the king is on his way, he becomes even more faluting. When his wife Margaret warns him to mind his language with the king, this is his response:

EYRE. Away, you Islington whitepot! hence, you barley-pudding, full of maggots! you broiled carbonado! avaunt, avaunt, avoid, Mephistophiles! Shall Sim Eyre learn to speak of you, Lady Madgy? Vanish, Mother Miniver-cap; vanish go, trip and go; meddle with your partlets and your pishery-pashery, your flewes and your whirligigs; go, rub, out of mine alley! Sim Eyre knows how to speak to a Pope, to Sultan Soliman, to Tamburlaine, an he were here, and shall I melt, shall I droop before my sovereign? No, come, my Lady Madgy! Follow me, Hans! About your business, my frolic freebooters! Firk, frisk about, and about, and about, for the honour of mad Simon Eyre, lord mayor of London.

Act 5 scene 5 The king forgives Lacy for going absent without leave to pursue his love and is thoroughly amused by Eyres’ mad way of talking. Then Otley and Lincoln arrive who first of all claim Lacy is a traitor – having abandoned the king’s army – only to be told the king has pardoned him. And then beg to prevent the pair marrying. But it is too late, they are wed. But she is so beneath him, wails Lincoln, at which the king reads him one of the first rules of romantic comedy:

KING: Lincoln, no more.
Dost thou not know that love respects no blood,
Cares not for difference of birth or state?
The maid is young, well born, fair, virtuous,
A worthy bride for any gentleman.
Besides, your nephew for her sake did stoop
To bare necessity, and, as I hear,
Forgetting honours and all courtly pleasures,
To gain her love, became a shoemaker.
As for the honour which he lost in France,
Thus I redeem it: Lacy, kneel thee down!—
Arise, Sir Rowland Lacy! Tell me now,
Tell me in earnest, Oateley, canst thou chide,
Seeing thy Rose a lady and a bride?

He is a fairy tale king. The actual king the real Simon Eyres served as Lord Mayor under was Henry VI but Dekker is careful not to name him, thus making the play feel contemporary, but – with its repeated mention of wars against the French – invoking the presence of Henry V.

The shoemakers all shout their loyalty. The king declares the new hall built near the Exchange shall be called Leadenhall because they discovered the lead in the foundations which they will use to roof it. Eyres kneels and begs the shoemakers may have the honour to sell leather there two days a week which the king agrees. And then one boon more, he invites the king to join them at their feast. Which the king agrees. In fact the very last lines of the play are suddenly and a bit surprisingly belligerent, for the king declares he’ll feast this day, but then continue with his plans to war with France.

KING: Eyre, I will taste of thy banquet, and will say,
I have not met more pleasure on a day.
Friends of the gentle craft, thanks to you all,
Thanks, my kind lady mayoress, for our cheer.—
Come, lords, a while let’s revel it at home!
When all our sports and banquetings are done,
Wars must right wrongs which Frenchmen have begun.

But maybe the idea is to really emphasise the loyalty and the readiness to fight of the loyal company of shoemakers.

Commentary

The Shoemakers’ Holiday has no very great intellectual themes, its passages of poetry are pretty run-of-the-mill, the most vibrant sections come whenever Simon Eyres appears on stage with his hyper-charged language and, to a lesser extent, the jolly roistering prose of his journeymen, Hodges and, especially, Firk. And yet I found it hugely enjoyable.

In his introduction, D.J. Palmer makes a distinction between two types of comedy. The first is the high-minded, moralising comedy described by Sir Philip Sidney in his Apologie for Poetry (1595):

an imitation of the common errors of our life, which he [the poet] represents in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be, so as it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one.

This is designed to embarrass and shame viewers by holding up exaggerated versions of the follies and vices we are all prone to. It is meant to be a corrective. This is the tough-minded theory embodied in the prefaces and plays of Ben Jonson.

To define the second type, Palmer quotes from a much earlier play, one of the earliest imitations in English of the Roman comic playwright, Plautus, Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roster Doister (c.1552). The prologue reads:

What Creature is in health, eyther yong or olde,
But som mirth with modestie wil be glad to vse
As we in thys Enterlude shall now vnfolde,
Wherin all scurilitie we vtterly refuse,
Auoiding such mirth wherin is abuse:

‘Avoiding such mirth wherein is abuse’, is a crystal clear indication that the play will avoid precisely what Sidney, and especially Jonson, thought plays should do which is cruelly mock the follies and vices of the age. Instead, Udall proposes a completely different idea of comedy based on this key word Mirth:

Knowing nothing more comendable for a mans recreation
Than Mirth which is vsed in an honest fashion:
For Myrth prolongeth lyfe, and causeth health.
Mirth recreates our spirites and voydeth pensiuenesse,
Mirth increaseth amitie, not hindring our wealth,
Mirth is to be vsed both of more and lesse,
Being mixed with vertue in decent comlynesse.

Mirth promotes good health, leads to long life, refreshes our spirits, drives off depression, increases friendship. Mirth has therapeutic properties and a social function.

At the end of a Jonson comedy the criminals are punished, often by a very severe judge. At the end of a mirth comedy, the king joins in the conviviality and merry-making. It is festive comedy, associated with popular festivals and, as in this play, with actual holidays, days on which workers cease work and join together in feasting and drinking and celebrating their solidarity.

If the shoemakers, on their festive day, kick over traditional restraint, so, in their ways, do other characters. Lacy and Rose defy parental authority and class barriers to insist on their love. Jane is liberated by the physical threat of the shoemakers from the hold Hammon has over her. The rise of Simon Eyres from master shoemaker, through sheriff to Lord Mayor symbolises this escape from class barriers, and his madcap prose is a deliberate contrast with the poised, blank verse of the snobs Oatley and Lincoln.

In a comparable way, Firk is the trickster of the play, but he operates not only on the level of action but of language, too. Not only are his lies and fibs (to Lincoln and Oatley) a key moment in the plot, but throughout the play Firk is addicted to turning everything almost anyone says into a bawdy double entendre. As Palmer points out, he liberates the secondary and tertiary meanings of words and phrases said in all seriousness which he reveals to have a bawdy and disreputable side. To continue the class war theme, Firk undermines the bourgeois respectability of language with his working class puns and dirty laugh.

All this ‘subversion’ and liberation may sound good, but if you started assessing the characters with the serious Morality of a Jonson, you would begin to get into trouble. Lacy may be the romantic hero but there is no doubt he is a deserter from the army, able to skip free in sharp contrast to poor Ralph who is pressed into the army with no escape and returns badly injured. Lacy then uses the money given him by Lincoln to raise and supply troops instead to pay for a dubious business deal with a Dutch skipper which makes Eyres rich.

What all this suggests to me is that the Jonsonian theory of comedy – that by putting egregious examples of folly and vice onstage you force the audience to confront it in themselves and so ‘reform’ them – is exactly wrong. Palmer doesn’t draw the conclusion but he provides plenty of the evidence to suggest that Mirth arises from release, release from the usual laws and regulations and restrictions we all live under.

Mirth does the audience good, it is liberating and mentally uplifting and creates a sense of social solidarity among an audience united by laughing at the scrapes and cons and scams of the rogues onstage. Thus I don’t think anyone ‘judges’ Lacy for deserting from the army because a) all his behaviour is justified by him being a stereotypical stage lover who will go to any lengths for his lady love, aaaah, and b) his scam of pretending to be a Dutchman is, quite simply, funny and life-affirming: in the many scenes where he appears with his fellow shoemakers he brings life and banter and humour, plus he buys everyone drinks!

In a phrase: festive celebration (love, food, beer and scams) trump narrow definitions of ‘morality’.

This, I think, is the downfall of Jonsonian comedy. In theory, the more outrageously characters like Volpone and Mosca behave, the more we should despise and condemn them. But the reality is that – although, admittedly, they are not exactly likeable – nonetheless, their cons and scams are thrilling, they have a tremendous verbal and theatrical energy which the audience, far from finding disgusting and repellent, finds energising and enlivening.

Jacobean comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1607)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1609)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Jacobean history

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 14, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Play, Theatre

Posted by Simon on September 14, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/14/the-shoemakers-holiday-thomas-dekker/

Every Man In His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)

‘O, manners! that this age should bring forth such creatures! that nature should be at leisure to make them!’
(Ned Knowell, Every Man In His Humour, Act 4, scene 5)

When he came to oversee the collection of all the poetry and plays he wished to preserve in a Folio edition of his Works in 1616, Jonson chose to open the volume with Every Man In His Humour, ignoring all the earlier plays he’d written or had a hand in and asserting that this was his first mature play.

He didn’t just tweak the play, but subjected it to a major overhaul, changing the setting from an unconvincing Florence to a vividly depicted contemporary London, anglicising the names of all the characters, cutting speeches, making the thing more focused. Since the earlier version of the play had been published in a Quarto version in 1601, students of the play are quickly introduced to the existence of these two versions and invited to play a game of ‘Compare The Versions’.

The other issue you’re quickly made aware of as you read any introduction to the play, is the issue of ‘humours’. This seems to be simpler than it first appears. The ancient Greeks (starting with Hippocrates, then Galen) developed a theory that the human body consisted of four elements or humours – blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These were quickly associated with the four elements which make up the world, as posited by Empedocles, namely earth, air, fire and water – and over the next 1,500 years the theory was elaborated into a system of vast complexity, drawing in the star signs of astrology and much more.

The basic idea is that the ‘humours’ must be in balance for the body to be healthy. All illnesses can be attributed to an imbalance or excess of one or other ‘humour’. If you were ill, doctors would diagnose the imbalance of your ‘humours’ and submit you to any one of hundreds of useless treatments, the most florid being the ‘purges’, or bleeding, which poor King Charles II was repeatedly subjected to on his death bed.

But it wasn’t just illness – human character could be attributed to the excess of a particular humour. Thus blood was associated with a sanguine nature (enthusiastic, active, and social); an excess of yellow bile was thought to produce aggression; black bile was associated with depression or ‘melancholy’, in fact the word melancholy derives from the Greek μέλαινα χολή (melaina kholé) which literally means ‘black bile’. And an excess of phlegm was thought to be associated with apathetic behavior, as preserved in the word ‘phlegmatic’ i.e. unmoved by events.

Jonson applies the theory to comedy by making the theory of humours into the basis of psychology. The idea is that every person has a hobby horse or leading passion or quirk or obsession. He explains the idea at length in a speech given to a character in the play’s sequel, Every Man Out of His Humour:

ASPER: So in every human body,
The choler, melancholy, phlegm, and blood,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of humours. Now thus far
It may, by metaphor, apply itself
Unto the general disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour…
CORDATUS: He speaks pure truth; now if an idiot
Have but an apish or fantastic strain,
It is his humour.
ASPER: Well, I will scourge those apes,
And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror,
As large as is the stage whereon we act;
Where they shall see the time’s deformity
Anatomised in every nerve, and sinew,
With constant courage, and contempt of fear.

So the title of the play means something like ‘Every man looked at in the context of his guiding passion or eccentricity’. A really blunt translation might be ‘People as obsessives’.

It is really just a variation on the idea of comic stereotypes or types, which flourished in Roman comedy and has formed the basis of comedy down to the present. Dad’s Army springs to mind with its collection of comic types – the pompous bank manager, the lugubrious public schoolboy, the shady spiv, the weedy mummy’s boy, the excitable veteran, the gloomy Scot and so on.

But for Jonson, as for other Renaissance theorists, mere entertainment wasn’t enough, and his criticism and the plays themselves are full of snarling animosity at poets who churned out haphazard entertainments. In Jonson’s view, the comic portrayal of characters dominated by their humours or obsessions serves a purpose: by showing people behaving ridiculously on stage, comedy should make the audience reflect on their own obsessions, on their own quirky and irrational behaviour, and thus teach them to behave more rationally and charitably.

Hence the hundreds of references to the same basic idea, which is that comedy ‘scourges the follies of the time’ or ‘laughs people out of their follies’, and so on.

I, for one, don’t believe for a minute that watching a comic play for a few hours will change anyone’s behaviour. If so, if satire did change anything, how come there has always been an endless need and market for it? People are people and human nature goes very deep and laughing at a handful of caricatures for a couple of hours is not going to change anyone’s personality or behaviour.

Also there’s a subtler reason. There’s a case for saying that Jonson’s own practice undermines his theories, in the sense that all the prologues and prefaces and dedicatory letters and even characters within his plays certainly repeat ad nauseam variations on the same idea the ‘Comedy Laughs The Age Out of Its Follies’. And yet, when you actually experience the plays onstage, as dramatic experiences, it becomes vividly clear that Jonson loves the follies of the age. They’re what energise and inspire him.

Cast

KNOWELL, an old Gentleman, laments the old days and jealous of his son’s debauchery
EDWARD KNOWELL, his Son
BRAINWORM, the Father’s Man, looking to curry favour with the son and heir
MASTER STEPHEN, a Country Gull (‘he is stupidity itself’)
MASTER MATHEW, the Town Gull
GEORGE DOWNRIGHT, a plain Squire
WELLBRED, Kitely’s half-Brother, suave and sophisticated friend of Ed Knowell
CAPTAIN BOBADILL, a Paul’s Man, a bragging liar, close relative of Shakespeare’s Pistol in Henry IV
JUSTICE CLEMENT, an old merry
KITELY, a merchant driven out of his mind by obsessive jealousy of his wife
THOMAS CASH, KITELY’S Cashier
DAME KITELY, KITELY’S Wife
MRS. BRIDGET his Sister.
OLIVER COB, a simple water-bearer
TIB Cob’s Wife

Every Man In His Humour

Act one

Old Knowell dotes on his scholar son Edward until he intercepts a letter to him (Edward) from his student buddy, Master Wellbred, inviting him to debauchery. More specifically, the letter is sent from Wellbred who lives in Old Jewry (a street in the City of London) to Ned Knowell who lives in Hoxton, a few miles to the north, telling him not to be a stranger, to evade his controlling father, to pop down and see him because he is being visited by a couple of pompous idiots who will be worth his entertainment.

Scandalised, Old Knowell tells his servant, Brainworm, to pass the letter on to his son, not mentioning that he (the father) has read it. Brainworm delivers it to young Ned alright, but fully mentions that his father has read it and we begin to

During the whole act both Knowells and Brainworm are plagued by Ned’s cousin, the blowhard Stephen who combines idiocy – he has splashed out on an expensive hawk without knowing anything about hawking, and now feebly asks old Knowell if he has a book on the subject – with untimely belligerence e.g. he threatens to get into a duel with the delivery boy who brings the letter from Wellbred and is quick to imagine anyone turning their back on him or muttering is slighting him – but when faced up, quickly and feebly backs down.

Master Matthew pays a visit to the very humble abode of Cob the water carrier to see the braggart soldier, Bobbadil who is lodging with him. All three characters are played for laughs, I like the passage where the captain asks Matthew not to tell anyone where he’s staying, not because it’s too humble and squalid but because he doesn’t want to be inundated with visitors 🙂 And when Bobbadil offers to defend Matthew against the foul insults of Squire Downright, Wellbred’s elder brother, it is very funny the way Matthew praises the captain’s immense martial skill and the captain poo-poohs him while enjoying the praise, before putting him through a farcical rehearsal of sword fighting.

Act 2

At Kitely’s house. Kitely tells Squire Downward he took in a foundling and has made him his cashier and runner and named him Cash. Then he gets on to his main point which is lamenting that he ever allowed Wellbred to come and lodge with him, for he has turned the house into a tavern and brothel with loose company at all hours. Kitely now asks Downward – as Wellbred’s older brother – if he can politely ask Wellbred to leave.

During this dialogue both characters reveal their ‘humours’. Downward is quick to anger and expresses it in a volley of cliches and oldd proverbs. Kitely, for his part, reveals that the real root reason for wanting Wellbred to leave is he is consumed with jealousy about his recently-married wife.

Bobadill and Matthew briefly intrude on the scene looking for Wellbred, giving Matthew just enough time to insult Downward, who goes to draw his sword while Kitely restrains him and the others quickly exit.

Kitely has a long speech about how his doubts about his wife’s infidelity have slowly become his obsession. Two points: 1. It is (arguably) part of Jonson’s didactic strategy to have his humour-ridden characters soliloquise about them – in the sense that their description of their symptoms helps the audience identify (and counter?) them. Here is Kitely giving a vivid description of Jealousy:

But it may well be call’d poor mortals’ plague;
For, like a pestilence, it doth infect
The houses of the brain. First it begins
Solely to work upon the phantasy,
Filling her seat with such pestiferous air,
As soon corrupts the judgment; and from thence,
Sends like contagion to the memory:
Still each to other giving the infection.
Which as a subtle vapour spreads itself
Confusedly through every sensive part,
Till not a thought or motion in the mind
Be free from the black poison of suspect.

2. Martin Seymour-Smith, editor of the edition I read, suggests that Kitely’s envisioning of his wife being debauched is so vivid because, not very far from the surface, Kitely wants his wife to be ravished and wants to watch. Obviously Dame Kitely is oblivious of her husband’s feverish imaginings.

Scene 2 Moorfields, Brainworm is disguised as an army veteran and bumps into Ned Knowell and the idiot Stephen heading south to visit Wellbred. There is comedy when Brainworm tells whopping lies about his army record (mentioning battles which are nearly 100 years old) tries to sell Stephen his rapier and Knowell tries to stop stupid Stephen buying the rusty bit of trash.

Cut to Knowell making his way south to spy on his son. A soliloquy lamenting how corrupt the times are and how fathers corrupt their sons – the timelessness of this kind of sentiment confirmed when you learn that a lot of it is copied from the satires of Juvenal, written in the second century BC.

He encounters Brainworm in his disguise as a disabled soldier. Brainworm wheedles on and on begging for some alms, Knowell disapproves and asks him if he is not ashamed to be a beggar, and finally tells him to follow him and do him honest service in return for money.

Brainworm soliloquises. His ultimate aim is to ingratiate himself with young Knowell who will be his future. But meanwhile he gleefully tells the audience he will have fun doing his master mischief.

Act 3

Scene 1 Ned Knowell and his gull Stephen finally meet Wellbred, who is with Bobadill, and there is a festival of stupidity. Basically, Knowell and Wellbred are the clever ones, the ones who egg on the stupid gulls – boasting Bobadill, Matthew and Stephen who pretends to have fashionable melancholy – to display their foibles and follies in dialogue while the two smart or superior ones give a running commentary in asides to each other, and to the audience.

They are just discussing the sword Matthew bought off Brainworm, when the latter arrives onstage, still in disguise as the begging soldier. They argue about the sword he sold Matthew, more importantly Brainworm takes Ned Knowell aside and reveals his true identity, explaining that his father has tracked him and is even now putting up at Justice Clement’s house, a little further down Old Jewry, where it turns into Coleman Street.

Scene 2 At Kitely’s house. He has business to attend to but us seized with jealousy, at the thought of what Wellbred and his friends will do to his wife if he leaves the house i.e. rape her. He calls his servant, Cash, and spends a couple of pages telling him he’s going to tell him a secret, but then repeatedly pulling back at the last minute, from extreme paranoid fear, and then ultimately leaves on business for the Exchange, leaving orders to have a message sent if Wellbred shows up.

Cash realises something is up and wonders how he can exploit it. In rolls Cob the water carrier for a scene designed to showcase his dimness and allow a little aside about the nature of ‘humour’:

Cob. Humour! mack, I think it be so indeed; what is that humour? some rare thing, I warrant.
Cash. Marry I’ll tell thee, Cob: it is a gentlemanlike monster, bred in the special gallantry of our time, by affectation; and fed by folly.

‘Affectation fed by folly’, there’s a working definition of the the kind of ‘humour’ Jonson sets out to lambast.

Then enter Knowell and Wellbred marvelling at and congratulating Brainworm for his splendid disguise as the begging soldier. This leads into a complicated scene featuring Cash, Cob, Matthew, Stephen, Brainworm, Knowell and Wellbred, in which the fools interact in various comic ways, Bobadill at one point cudgelling poor Cob, apparently because he speaks ill of tobacco after Bobadillo has made a long speech in praise of it (Cob, if you remember, currently being Bobadill’s very humble landlord).

Quite a comic aspect is the way Stephen the fool is impressed by Bobadill’s big oaths but completely garbles them when he tries to repeat them.

Scene 3 At Justice Clement’s house, Cob enters to tell Kitely that a crowd (the gang of lads we have just watched) is arriving at his house, Kitely immediately begins feverishly imagining them kissing his wife and sister and worse, much worse, which puzzles Cob who last saw them all bickering about tobacco in the street.

Kitely exits leaving Cob to vow vengeance on Bobadill for beating him up at which point enter Knowell, Judge Clement and his man Roger Formal. Cob tries to get his attention to punish Bobadill for beating him, but when he explains the reason for the beating, that Cob spoke against tobacco – in a humorous twist, Clement loses his temper and tells Formal to condemn Cob to prison because he, also, immoderately worships the fine pleasures of tobacco and won’t have anyone talking against it.

Act 4

Scene 1 Squire Downright discussing with his sister, Dame Kitely i.e. Kitely’s wife. Kitely’s unhappiness at having gangs of loose livers visiting the house. And at that moment the gang enter, being Matthew, Bobadill, Wellbred and Ned Knowell, Stephen and Brainworm. The two clever ones encourage Matthew to take out some of his verses and read them to Bridget (Kitely’s sister) while they take the mickey, it appears most of them are cribbed from Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander.

Downright disapproves of all this and finally bursts out angrily at Wellbred for keeping such rowdy company, for encouraging braggart soldiers and simpletons, and takes out his sword, at which point Wellbred takes out his and the others start screaming and/or intervening.

At which point Kitely arrives home and his servants force them all to put down their swords. Wellbred, Knowell et al all leave the stage to Downright who explains why he was so angry to his brother. The women i.e. Dame Kitely and his sister, Bridget, swear there was one among them who was a true gentleman and showed his parts. They use the word to mean honour and good nature, Kitely takes it to mean sexual parts and is immediately stricken with his morbid jealousy.

Scene 2 Cob bangs on his own front door till his wife answers it. He shows her the bruises he got from Bobadill, briefly describes his encounter with Justice Clement, then makes her swear to lick the door and not let Bobadill in the house.

Scene 3 In the Windmill tavern Knowell and Wellbred agree with Brainworm some cunning plan which the audience does not hear explained, he exits, then Wellbred teases Knowell that he fancies Wellbred’s sister, i.e. Bridget, and promises he will make her his.

Scene 4 In Old Jewry, the London street, Brainworm in his disguise of the old soldier rejoins Knowell senior, who asks where the devil he’s been – good question, since Brainworm hasn’t exactly been much at his service since their first encounter. Anyway, now we get to hear of the boys’ cunning plan as Brainworm tells old Knowell that his son, Ned Knowell, has discovered that he – Old Knowell – read the famous letter. Anyway, Brainworm spins a florid story about how the gang of them kidnapped him but he managed to escape and overheard young Ned’s plan to go to the house of one Cob the Water Drawer for a rendezvous with a Mistress Bridget. Ha! says Old Knowell, I will go there and catch him red-handed and exits, leaving Brainworm chuckling.

Brainworm then chats to Justice Clement’s servant, a simpleton named Formal who invites him for a beer and to tell him stories about the wars.

Scene 5 In Moorfields, Bobadill swells monstrously and brags to Knowell that he and nineteen hand-picked fellows could hold at bay an army of 40,000. And he swears he will cudgel the rascal Downright next time he sees him – at which point Downright strolls onstage and, when confronted with a real threat, Bobadill piteously says he’s just remembered he had a notice of peace served on him so is not allowed to draw. Downright calls him coward and beats and disarms him, before storming off in disgust. Bobadill makes a further, hilarious excuse, that it was astrology, sure he was struck by an unlucky star that paralysed his sword arm.

In his fury Downright has stormed off leaving his cloak behind. Knowell’s companion, Stephen, picks it up, says finders keepers. Knowell warns him that wearing it might carry a cost.

Scene 6 At Kitely’s house, where he is berating brother Wellbred for egging on the fight, as Dame Kitely and sister Bridget look on. Wellbred makes a throwaway remark to the effect that Kitely’s suit of clothes might as well be poisoned which sets Kitely off in a hysterical terror that his clothes are poisoned – and the other three are all astonished at the power of his imagination, that his thoughts can make him ill. It is this scene which underpins Martin Seymour-Smith’s assertion that Jonson anticipates Freud by 300 years in attributing illnesses of the body to humours (obsessions, neuroses) of the mind.

KNOWELL: Am I not sick? how am I then not poison’d? Am I not poison’d? how am I then so sick?
DAME KNOWELL: If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.
WELLBRED: His jealousy is the poison he has taken.

Enter Brainworm disguised as Justice Clement’s man, Formal, who says the Justice wants to see Kitely straightaway. Reluctantly the latter exits. Wellbred sees it is Brainworm and asks how he got the disguise, viz he got the real Formal dead drunk and stole his clothes. Now Wellbred instructs him to go tell Ned Knowell to go to the Tower. He (Wellbred) will bring along Bridget and the pair will get married.

Re-enter Kitely who at some length gets his servant, Tom Cash, to promise to guard Dame Kitely, to note everyone who enters the house and, if it looks like they’re going to a bedroom, to intervene. OK? Got that? He departs.

Wellbred determines to stir up trouble and now tells Dame Kitely, his sister, that Dame Cob keeps a bawdy house and that her husband, Kitely, is often hanging round it. Well, she cries in dudgeon, she will off to catch him in the act and exits, Wellbeing watching her, chuckling at the mischief he’s stirring up.

Then he turns to his sister Bridget and tells her that Ned Knowell loves her and wants to marry her at the Tower. Not surprisingly, she points out this is all a bit sudden, and is surprised that her brother has turned pimp.

At which point Kitely returns, asking after his wife, and is horrified to learn that she’s set off for Cob’s house? What? To cuckold him? And he runs off after her. Come sister, says Wellbred, let’s go meet Ned Knowell. It’s all getting very complicated.

Scene 7 Matthew and Bobadill are in the street, Bob still explaining why he refused to fight and ran away. They bump into Brainworm, still in the disguise of Justice Clement’s man and ask him to petition the Justice for a warrant for the arrest of Downright. Brainworm/Formal says, Alright, but it’ll cost them ‘a brace of angels’, about a £1. They have no money but Bobbadil takes off and gives him his silk stockings and Matthew gives him a jewel from his ear. Brainworm comes up with another snag which is that they will need someone to serve the warrant, them both being too scared to give it to Downright directly. So Brainworm says he’ll procure a varlet, a sergeant for them and they approve and leave.

Brainworm cackles with glee. He now has the stockings and jewel which he will pawn, along with Formal’s clothes that he’s wearing, then procure a new suit and pretend to Matthew and Bobadill to be said varlet. Money and fun!

Scene 8 Cob’s house Old Knowell arrives. Now he’s been told this is where his ne’er-do-well son is. Tib opens the door, says she’s never heard of no Knowell, and slams it in his face. Dame Kitely arrives, brought here by Wellbred’s lie that her husband attends this brothel. Knowell sees her arrive and thinks she is his son’s mistress.

Dame Kitely knocks, Tib opens and denies any knowledge of her husband. At that moment Kitely enters, muffled up in his cloak. Knowell, observing, jumps to the conclusion that it is his son, Ned, come to meet his mistress. Dame Kitely recognises her husband and accuses him to his face of coming here to meet his mistress.

Replying furiously to her accusations, Kitely accuses his wife of being a bawd and making him a cuckold with him, and indicated Knowell and accuses him directly of being a shameful old goat for debauching his wife. Knowell of course denies it all and begins to suspect someone has pulled a prank on him. Kitely says he’ll take his wife to find a justice.

At this point Cob comes home and asks his wife what all this fuss is. When Kitely accuses her of being a bawd and permitting adulterous meetings on the premises Cob starts berating and beating his wife. Knowell intervenes and says, ‘let’s all go before a justice comes to sort it out’.

Scene 9 A street Brainworm soliloquises explaining why he is wearing the costume of a city-sergeant. Enter Matthew and Bobadill, and Brainworm tells them that he is the arresting officer hired by Formal. They are pleased to point out Downright as he walks onstage.

Except that it isn’t Downright. Remember how, in scene 5, Stephen picked up Downright’s abandoned cloak? Well, the figure they all think is Downright is in fact Stephen in Downright’s cloak. So there is a moment of mild comedy when Brainworm goes to present his warrant to the wrong man. But fortunately the real Downright enters at that moment. Brainworm serves the warrant on Downright but things start to go wrong. Downright really is downright. He goes to attack Bobadill and Matthew with his cudgel till Brainworm tells him to desist. OK.

At which point Downright spots Stephen and demands his cloak back. Stephen claims he bought it at a market but Downright contemptuously dismisses this as an obvious lie and gives money to Brainworm-as-city sergeant to arrest Stephen and bring him before the justice.

This is getting a bit much for Brainworm who now tries to wriggle out of it by saying Stephen has offered to give the cloak back, all’s well etc. But Downright will have none of it and raises his cudgel, threatening Brainworm, who is now trapped into going reluctantly with the others before the justice.

Act 5

Scene 1 Justice Clement’s house. Enter the first group of miscreants, namely the people involved in the brawl at Cob’s house – Cob and his wife who he beat, Dame Kitely who thinks her husband is being unfaithful, Kitely who thinks his wife is being unfaithful, and Knowell who he thought was her lover.

When they all tell him that one person, Wellbred, told them all to go there, Justice Clement immediately realises they’ve all been had.

Next a servant enters to Clement that a soldier is waiting for him. There’s some comic business as Justice Clement insists on getting into soldier’s armour himself and going down to meet Matthew and Bobbadil, who piteously pleads that he was set upon and beaten in the street. Clements pooh-poohs him for a sorry apology for a soldier.

Next arrive Downright and Stephen and Brainworm in disguise as a city-sergeant. Clement listens to them bickering about whose cloak it is, but more to the point, quickly establishes that the first two, Bobbadil and Matthew, had got his man Formal to raise a warrant against Downright. So where is it?

Realising this is the dangerous moment for him, Brainworm says there never was a written warrant but he was ordered to do it by Clement’s man, Formal. It now emerges that this was all done on Brainworm’s say-so with no authority. Clement terrifies him by brandishing his enormous sword over his head and threatening to cut off his ears. Then tells his servant to take Brainworm to prison.

At which point Brainworm throws off his disguise (as the city-sergeant) and reveals himself as Brainworm, and is immediately recognised by his master, Old Knowell. Clement is amused by this and asks for a bowl of sack to drink while Brainworm tells his story. Brainworm explains to Knowell how he dressed up as the veteran soldier.

As well as explaining how he told Kitely to go to Cob’s, Brainworm now reveals how both Kitely and Dame Kitely were sent there to get them out the way, so Mistress Bridget could be taken by Wellbred to meet young Knowell.

Clement is so impressed by the elaborateness of the scam, that he sends a man to invite the newly married couple back to his house. But what’s become of Formal? Brainworm explains how he got him dead drunk and borrowed his clothes.

Rather improbably, Justice Clements forgives him and tells all masters present to forgive him also. At that moment Formal arrives dressed in a suit of armour. It was all they had in the bar where he woke up from being dead drunk and almost naked, so he asked the bar staff if he could wear it home! Clements forgives him his folly, also.

Enter the happy couple and friend i.e. New Knowell and his newly married wife, Bridget, and friend Wellbred. Clement welcomes them and toasts them. All are welcome – except for Bobadill and Matthew. Wellbred intervenes for Matthew, saying he is an amusing poet, if packed with prompts.

They rifle Matthew’s pockets and bring out piles of pre-written poetry, Clement is appalled and commands that they make a big pile of it and set it on fire. It blazes up, reaches a peak, then dies down – Sic transit gloria mundi.

Clement says everyone is welcome to the big wedding feast, except these two, the sign of a soldier and the picture of a poet i.e. the two pretenders Bobadill and Matthew. They will be set in the courtyard to meditate on their sins. And Formal in his suit of armour will watch over them.

As to Stephen, the cloak-stealer, Clement says he will have dinner in the kitchen with Cob and his wife who he orders to be reconciled. As must everyone. Clement tells the lead offenders to put off their humours, Downright his anger, Kitely his jealousy and Kitely does indeed give it up, recite some verse about letting it fly away into the air.

So the play ends with three happy newly-made or remade couples: Kitely and Mrs Knowell and Bridget; Cob and Tib.

Jonson’s split morality

The conclusion is fairly brief – the fifth act is by far the shortest – and its judgements seem harsh. Well, not harsh, but unfair. Bobadill and Matthew are only idiots, who boast and brag a bit, and yet they are harshly punished – whereas Brainworm is a cunning trickster, a thief and mocker of the Queen’s justice, impersonator of an officer – you’d have thought he’d be hanged by the law of the day. While Wellbred deceived Kitely and his wife, setting them at loggerheads and almost ruining their marriage.

Surely all of that is worse than being a bad poet and a pretend soldier?

Taking the theory of humours literally for a moment, Justice Clement’s final speeches claim to ‘purge’ the most humour-ridden of the characters, namely Kitely and Downright. But in my opinion, there’s quite a big gap between this purging idea and actual justice for wrong-doing, either moral or legal, according to which, as I’ve said, a different set of crooks should surely have been punished.

That play reveals that the psychological basis of the humour theory – that Jonson’s concern is to purge hobby horses and obsessions – is strangely at odds with conventional legal or moral values. There seems to be a big contradiction here and I’m not the only one to notice it. Seymour-Smith quotes the critic A. Sale as saying that Jonson: ‘is a thoroughly unorthodox moralist; it is the morality of the enemies, not the pillars, of society’.

That seems spot-on to me. The more you consider the way that the fierce Justice, Clement, takes to the crook and impersonator Brainworm as to a lost brother, pardons him his multiple crimes and toasts his health, the weirder it seems. Jonson appears to be celebrating a massive subverter of law and order.

It’s odd. Jonson’s prefaces and prologues ding on about justice and society – and yet his actual fictions are wildly anarchic and throw all their sympathy behind the biggest anarchists.

Seymour-Smith quotes the critic Elizabeth Woodbridge who long ago commented that the demarcation line in the play isn’t drawn between the good and the bad, but between the witty and the dull, and that it celebrates rogues and crooks simply because they’re quick-witted and sympathetic. The witty prevail and the stupid are punished. ‘Such a play can scarcely be called moral.’

This wonky view of justice prepares us for the imaginative thrust of his two most famous plays, Volpone and The Alchemist, in which all the best poetry and imaginative force is given to the topsy-turvy subverters of established order and morality.

Elizabethan comedies

The Merry Wives of Windsor by William Shakespeare (1597)
Every Man in His Humour by Ben Jonson (1598)
The Shoemakers’ Holiday, or The Gentle Craft by Thomas Dekker (1599)
Eastward Ho! by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston (1605)
Volpone by Ben Jonson (1606)
The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont (1607)
The Roaring Girl by Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker (1607)
Epicoene, or the Silent Woman by Ben Jonson (1609)
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson (1610)
A Chaste Maid in Cheapside by Thomas Middleton (1613)
Bartholomew Fair by Ben Jonson (1614)

Elizabethan art

Elizabethan Treasures @ the National Portrait Gallery

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 11, 2020 • Permalink

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Selected Poems by John Dryden edited by Donald Thomas (1993)

John Dryden was the most successful poet, playwright, critic, translator and man of letters of his time, that time being roughly the late-1660s through to his death in 1700.

Early life

Dryden was born into a Puritan family in Northamptonshire in 1631. He was sent to the prestigious Westminster private school in 1645, the year Charles I’s army was defeated at the Battle of Naseby. In 1649 Charles I was executed in front of the Banqueting House in Whitehall, just a few hundred yards from Dryden’s classroom. He went up to Cambridge in 1650 and four years later returned to London to work as clerk to his cousin, Sir Gilbert Pickering, who was Cromwell’s Lord Chamberlain. When Lord Protector Cromwell died in 1658, Dryden wrote a set of Heroic Stanzas about him, but when Charles II was restored to the throne eighteen months later, Dryden wrote a poem celebrating this event too – Astraea Redux.

To modern eyes this abrupt switching of allegiances might look like hypocrisy, but the editor of this selection of Dryden’s poetry makes two points:

Dryden was merely following the mood of the entire nation which switched, with surprising speed and conviction, in favour of the restoration of Charles II.
Stepping back from the politics, what these two early examples of his work show is Dryden’s natural predilection to be a poet of politics and political power.

Marriage and public poetry

In the mid-1660s Dryden made a fashionable marriage to Lady Elizabeth Howard but he was not making money. He decided to make a conscious career decision to commit himself to ‘the poetry of public life and political argument’, to writing poems on public occasions and poems about political life. The first great example was Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders 1666, 1,200 lines of verse divided into 304 quatrains.

Annus Mirabilis online

Three points.

1. The obvious one is that the poem deals with major public events – in the first half some of the sea battles which were part of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665 – 1667), in the second half the Great Fire of London. It isn’t love poetry or elegiacs or pastoral poetry.

2. Second, Dryden rewrote history to cast Charles as the hero of the age. The poem emphasises Charles’s wisdom and strategic prowess during the war, and his heroism during the fire, and how his prayer to God for help was answered. Dryden was a conservative: he believed in hierarchy and the monarch and law and order. All his poetry supports the existing order against the constant threat of factions and politicking which, he feared, would lead to anarchy and civil war. Annus Mirabilis earned Dryden his reward. In 1668 he was made Poet Laureate with an annual salary of £200 and a barrel of sack, and two years later was appointed Historiographer Royal (although he continued to be for many years, relatively hard up). Here’s Dryden sucking up to Charles:

This saw our King; and long within his breast
His pensive counsels ballanc’d too and fro;
He griev’d the Land he freed should be oppress’d,
And he less for it than Usurpers do.

His gen’rous mind the fair Ideas drew
Of Fame and Honor, which in dangers lay;
Where wealth, like Fruit on precipices, grew,
Not to be gather’d but by Birds of prey…

He, first, survey’d the Charge with careful eyes,
Which none but mighty Monarchs could maintain…

His pensive counsels, his grieving for his country (abused by the Dutch), his generous mind, ready to pluck fame and honour from their dangerous precipice, his ‘careful’ eyes (careful in the modern sense but also full of care and responsibility), trademark of a mighty monarch… and so on. Top brown-nosing, Dryden deserved his £200 a year.

3. Thirdly, Annus Mirabilis wasn’t an original work – it was a polemical riposte or reply to an earlier work by someone else. It was part of a literary dialogue. In 1661 a seditious pamphlet titled Mirabilis Annus: The Year of Prodigies had predicted God’s vengeance on a nation which tolerated a sinful king and a wicked government, and was followed by other pamphlets using the same title. Dryden’s poem is a deliberate and polemical response. It isn’t a Wordsworthian inspiration. It is arguing a case about the nature of Charles’s rule and society in the 1660s.

This is what becoming a ‘poet of political argument’ meant – that his works more often than not actively engaged in public debates and controversies, often as direct replies to previous publications by other writers with contrary views.

Drama

But public poetry wasn’t the only string to Dryden’s bow. In 1663 he published his first play, The Wild Gallant, and for the next 20 years produced a stream of comedies (Marriage-a-la-Mode) and heroic tragedies (All For Love, The Conquest of Granada). Some of these were original works but, rather as with the political poems, it’s notable how many weren’t. All For Love is based on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and The State of Innocence is a dramatised version of Paradise Lost. These are pretty obvious large-scale copyings, but Dryden was also to be criticised throughout his career for plagiarising lines and entire passages from other poets.

This volume includes some of the many prologues and epilogues he wrote to his plays, as well as poems addressed to specific actors and fellow playwrights such as George Etherege and William Congreve.

Satire – Absalom and Achitophel

Writing plays under the Restoration required a thick skin since new works were savaged by scores of wits and self-appointed critics. The plays themselves often contained scabrous satire about the values of the times and sometimes lampooned specific individuals. To write and publish almost anything involved exposing yourself to extremes of ridicule and abuse.

So that by the time the Popish Plot (1678) had evolved into the Exclusion Crisis (in which leading Whig politicians three times tried to pass an Act of Parliament excluding Charles II’s Catholic brother, the future James II, from the succession) Dryden had developed a thick skin and a razor-sharp pen. And he used it, as the king’s Poet Laureate, to savage and ridicule the king’s Whig enemies. The result was his masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel.

In the Bible (2 Samuel xiv-xviii) handsome young Absalom is encouraged by the sinister old politician Achitophel to rebel against his father, King David. In Dryden’s work scheming old Achitophel is a portrait of the Earl of Shaftesbury, who emerged as leader of the radical Whigs and led the three attempts to exclude James II from the succession. Absalom stands for King Charles’s illegitimate son, James Duke of Monmouthshire, charming but gullible, who was egged on by the canny Shaftesbury to position himself as the rightful, Protestant heir to the throne. Various other key political figures appear under Biblical names and the and poem leads up to a grand speech by King David from the throne which echoes Charles’s final speech to his recalcitrant Parliament before he dissolved it for good in 1681.

Absalom and Achitophel on the Poetry Foundation website

Horace versus Juvenal

When it came to satire, Thomas makes the point that Dryden, like many others, drew a distinction between the satires of Horace – which were designed to laugh men out of their follies – and those of Juvenal, which expressed what he called his saeva indignatio, his fierce contempt for the vices of his time.

Horace is often amiable and funny; Juvenal is rarely funny, his satire is full of wit and attack. Absalom and Achitophel is a Juvenalian satire. It is grounded in the grim and bitter reality of the political struggles of the Exclusion Crisis and aims to give insightful, psychologically perceptive and devastating criticisms of its key characters. It is not intended to be funny. But Dryden was just as capable of a completely different style of satire, the laughable and ludicrous.

The mock heroic – Mac Flecknoe

As 17th century literary critics discovered and popularised classical ideas about poetry, so the notion spread that the highest achievement a poet could aspire to was to write a great Epic Poem, in the lineage of Homer and Virgil. Dryden was no exception:

A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest Work which the Soul of Man is capable to perform.

He nurtured ambitions to write some kind of national epic tracing the history of Britain and dedicated to his hero Charles II as Virgil had dedicated the Aeneid to the Emperor Augustus. But it was not to be. His long-meditated epic was never written. Instead Dryden ended up helping to develop the anti-epic, written in the so-called mock heroic style. This consisted in applying all the trappings of the epic poem – lofty diction, elaborate similes, mythological trappings, men mighty as gods – to subjects which were low and pathetic, in order to create a comic disjuntion, to create burlesque and travesty.

Dryden’s early poem, Annus Mirabilis, had already used many of the exaggerated trappings of heroic poetry, notably the extended epic simile and the direct involvement of heavenly powers (or gods or angels).

Heavenly powers

To see this Fleet upon the Ocean move,
Angels drew wide the Curtains of the Skies:
And Heav’n, as if there wanted Lights above,
For Tapers made two glaring Comets rise.

Extended epic simile

So Lybian Huntsmen on some Sandy plain,
From shady coverts rouz’d, the Lion chace:
The Kingly beast roars out with loud disdain,
And slowly moves, unknowing to give place.

But if some one approach to dare his Force,
He swings his Tail, and swiftly turns him round:
With one Paw seizes on his trembling Horse,
And with the other tears him to the ground.

So far, so epic but, as Thomas explains, the mock epic, like the epic itself, needs to address one central theme – and Annus Mirabilis is more of a series of episodes or incidents strung together, impressively so, but it is a scattered work.

It’s this idea of uniting everything in one central theme which is what makes MacFlecknoe Dryden’s masterpiece of the mock-heroic. Basically, it is a hilarious 217-line demolition of one of Dryden’s rivals in the theatre, the poet Thomas Shadwell, renowned for being dull and unimaginative, who is transmuted via Dryden’s mock-heroic style into a monstrous burlesque figure.

The aim of the mock-heroic is to attribute to a trivial person or subject such ludicrously over-inflated actions and qualities as to make them ridiculous. Thus the poem describes the not-very-successful poet Thomas Shadwell in superhuman terms and attributes him a royal progress and coronation, garlanded with biblical and imperial comparisons. But his ‘throne’ is set up among the brothels of Barbican and instead of the royal orb he holds a Mighty Mug of Ale in his hand, and every other detail of the poem is carefully undermined and burlesqued.

The name Mac Flecknoe derives from the comic notion that Shadwell is the son (‘mac’ in Gaelic) of Richard Flecknoe, an even more obscure poet, who appears in the poem declaiming a grand abdication speech, before comically disappearing down through a trapdoor, leaving Shadwell the undisputed ruler of the land of Nonsense. It is all blown up to enormous proportions in order to be mocked and ridiculed.

Dryden was extremely proud of Mac Flecknoe because it was, at that point, the most complete and finished example of its kind in English. Relatively brief though it is, it was to form a template or inspiration for the mock epics of a later generation, most notably Alexander Pope’s Rape of the Lock (1712) and then his enormous satire on the literary world, The Dunciad (1728).

Poetry of religion 1. Religio Laici

Dryden published two major poems about religion.

Religio Laici or a Layman’s Faith (1682) consists of 456 lines of rhymed couplets arguing against the fashionable Deism of the time and defending the Church of England against Roman Catholicism. It is characteristic of Dryden, as we’ve seen, that many of his works are responses to previous publications and Religio Laici is a good example. An English translation had recently appeared of a theological book by a Frenchman, Father Richard Simon, A Critical History of the Old Testament which laid out the many ways in which the text of the Old Testament is compromised and imperfect. In the Catholic Father’s view, Protestantism relied too heavily on the (highly imperfect) text of the Bible; it was wiser for Christians to base their faith on the unbroken traditions of the (Catholic) church as an institution.

Dryden’s poem directly addresses Father Simon’s ideas and points out that, if the Biblical text can err, so can tradition. Both need to be supplemented or informed by God’s revelation. In this, Dryden was defending the Anglican media via between the extreme reliance on the Bible of the Puritans and deference to a tradition cluttered with saints and absurd legends which characterised Catholicism.

Several things strike me about Religio Laici. For a start it is preceded by an enormous preface which is longer (4,317 words) then the poem itself (3,573 words). And this brings out just how disputatious a poet Dryden was. Even after he has cast his elaborate series of arguments into verse, he cannot stop, but has to repeat or anticipate them in a long prose preface.

Having just struggled through the poem twice, with the help of notes, I think I’ve understood most of its meaning. But when I studied English at university, it was a standard strategy to read any text on at least two levels – on one level for the overt sense or meaning; but at the same time, alert for key words, themes or ideas which recur, and work on the reader at a less logical level, by virtue of their repetition.

So the third or fourth time I read the word ‘safe’, I began to realise that although Religio Laici consists of a series of theological points, at a deeper level it works on a polarity between the twin extremes of safety and danger. To put it more clearly, Religio Laici doesn’t come from an era when a person could speculate about religion and God and the Bible in calm and comfort. On the contrary, Puritan views had, in living memory, contributed to a catastrophic civil war which had led to the execution of the king, the overthrow of traditional institutions and a military-religious dictatorship; and more recently, scare rumours about a Catholic plot to murder the king and seize control of the state had led to a mood of hysterical witch-hunting. Speculation about religious belief was fraught with danger.

Dryden’s use of the word ‘safe’ points to the fundamental message of the poem which is that all speculations on this subject should remain private, personal and moderate, in order to preserve the peace of the realm. He espouses moderation in belief and behaviour because his generation are acutely aware what lack of moderation leads to.

And after hearing what our Church can say,
If still our Reason runs another way,
That private Reason ’tis more Just to curb,
Than by Disputes the publick Peace disturb.
For points obscure are of small use to learn:
But Common quiet is Mankind’s concern.

Poetry of religion 2. The Hind and The Panther

However, just five years later Dryden published The Hind and the Panther, A Poem in Three Parts (1687) a much longer and more complex poem. At 2,600 lines it is much the longest of Dryden’s original poems (i.e. excluding the long translations he made at the end of his life) and it comes as quite a surprise because he now rejects the theological position of the earlier poem and wholeheartedly embraces Roman Catholicism.

Dryden converted to Roman Catholicism in 1687, a couple of years into the reign of the openly Roman Catholic king James II in 1685, much to the disgust and mockery of his many enemies. The Hind and the Panther is divided into three distinct parts and derives its title from part one, which presents an extended allegory or animal fable in which the different religious denominations in the England of the day appear as animals, namely Roman Catholic as ‘A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged’, the Church of England as a panther, the Independents as a bear, the Presbyterians as a wolf, the Quakers as a hare, the Socinians as a fox, the Freethinkers as an ape, and the Anabaptists as a boar.

Critics from Dryden’s day to our own praise the skilful use of verse, vocabulary and imagery, but lament the fact that the animal fable was a poor way to convey complex theological arguments and positions, which would have been much more effective if plainly stated. Dr Johnson commented that it was a good poem despite its subject matter.

Translator

Unfortunately for Dryden, his new patron, the Roman Catholic King James II, only lasted three years on the throne before being booted out by the so-called Glorious Revolution. He was replaced by William III who was not just a Protestant but a Calvinist, a humourless man ruthlessly focused on the essentials of international power politics, and completely indifferent to art, culture, plays or poems. All officials in William’s new court were required to take oaths of allegiance including clauses pledging allegiance to the Church of England. As a newly devout Catholic Dryden couldn’t do this and so he was sacked as Poet Laureate and, in one of the supreme ironies of literary history, replaced by the man he had expended such labour ridiculing in Mac Flecknoe, Thomas Shadwell.

Deprived of all public offices Dryden now had to live by his pen and – after the public poems of the 1660s and 70s, his many plays, the satires of the Exclusion Crisis and the poetry of religious debate, in his final decade Dryden turned to literary translation.

In 1693 he published translations of the satires of Juvenal and Persius which he prefaced with a Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire. In 1697 his translation of the works of Virgil, including a complete translation of the Aeneid was published by subscription and brought him the notable sum of £1,400. And in 1700 he published Fables Ancient and Modern which included translations into contemporary English of tales Chaucer, Ovid and Boccaccio.

Heroic couplets

In Thomas’s account, the 1610s and 20s produced poets who liked far-fetched comparisons and irregular verse forms, such as John Donne (d.1631) or George Herbert (d.1633). Later generations dubbed them the ‘metaphysical poets’ (the expression was first used by Dr Johnson in 1780 but in fact Dryden himself had already referred, in an essay, to Donne’s ‘metaphysicals’). The Caroline poets of Charles I’s court similarly wrote lyrics and other forms in sometimes complex metres and forms, although with markedly less convoluted similes and metaphors.

But the future lay with neither of these groups but with the much more open, smooth and regular form of the rhyming couplet. The medium of two rhyming iambic pentameters had long ago been used by Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales.

Bifel that, in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At night was come in-to that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a companye,
Of sondry folk, by aventure y-falle
In felawshipe, and pilgrims were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde;
(Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, lines 19 to 26)

and couplets were a familiar device in Elizabethan theatre to bring a speech in unrhymed verse up to a kind of boom-boom conclusion.

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
(Claudius in Hamlet, Act 3, scene 3)

Many of Robert Herrick’s short poems from the 1630s are in rhyming couplets, and so on. But the use of nothing but rhyming couplets over extended distances was revived in the mid-17th century by poets like Edmund Waller (1606-87) and Sir John Denham (1615-69). Denham is remembered for his bucolic poem, Cooper’s Hill with its lulling melliflousness. These are its best-known lines, two out of a long series of smooth rhyming couplets:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear, though gentle, yet not dull,
Strong without rage, without o’er-flowing, full.

Relaxing, isn’t it? Dryden’s achievement was to take the rhyming couplet, use it for extended poems, and hugely expand its potential, turning it into a versatile medium for panegyric, satire, political argument, theological debate or straightforward narrative. In the right hands these couplets have all sorts of potential. Individual lines can be used to make sharp distinctions or antitheses:

They got a Villain, and we lost a Fool.

Or in this description of the Duke of Buckingham, who would do anything for amusement.

Beggar’d by fools, whom still he found too late:
He had his jest, and they had his estate.

The couplet lends itself to express maxims or pearls of wisdom, the end-rhyme of the second line giving it a kind of proverbial or didactic power:

What cannot praise effect in mighty minds,
When flattery soothes, and when ambition blinds!

But the obvious risk with the rhyming couplet is that each set of paired lines becomes a unit in itself, the temptation being to provide a boom-boom payoff at the end of the every second line, so that each couplet ends up standing alone, and reading them becomes like having hiccups – every ten seconds another clever rhyme, so that an extended poem comes to feel like a sequence of same-shaped bricks, and that this becomes wearing and tedious over the long haul.

But Thomas demonstrates how Dryden expanded the form’s potential by breaking through this barrier, to create units of meaning across multiple lines, letting the logic of his thought overflow the potential boundaries of the couplet to create what are, in effect, fluid verse paragraphs. These are particularly suitable to argufying and putting a point of view:

What shall we think! Can people give away
Both for themselves and sons, their native sway?
Then they are left defenceless to the sword
Of each unbounded arbitrary lord:
And laws are vain, by which we right enjoy,
If kings unquestion’d can those laws destroy.

They’re still rhyming couplets but the thought, the argument flows through them, so that it no longer feels like a series of stops and starts. Moreover, the way the logic of the argument flows over the cat’s eyes or bumps of each couplet’s end-rhyme creates a complex mental pleasure – the reader processes the cleverness of the rhyme but doesn’t stop at it because the flow of the argument carries you forward. There’s a kind of counterpointing, or two rhythms going on at the same time, which is not unlike musical counterpoint.

Poetry

The Cavalier Poets: An Anthology edited by Thomas Crofts

History

Restoration art

British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain (2020)

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 9, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Literary criticism, Poetry

Tagged A Critical History of the Old Testament, Absalom and Achitophel, Alexander Pope, All For Love, allegory, Annus Mirabilis, Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders 1666, Æneid, Battle of Naseby, Bible, Boccaccio, Charles I, Charles II, Chaucer, Church of England, criticism, Cromwell, Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, Dr Johnson, Earl of Shaftesbury, Edmund Waller, Emperor Augustus, epic poem, Exclusion Crisis, fable, Fables Ancient and Modern, George Etherege, George Herbert, Glorious Revolution, Great Fire of London, heroic tragedy, Homer, Horace, James II, John Donne, John Dryden, Juvenal, literary criticism, Literature, Mac Flecknoe, man of letters, Marriage-a-la-Mode, metaphysical poets, Old Testament, Oliver Cromwell, Ovid, playwright, Poet Laureate, poetry, Popish Plot, Puritans, Religio Laici or a Layman's Faith, restoration, Richard Flecknoe, Richard Simon, Robert Herrick, Roman Catholicism, saeva indignatio, satire, Second Anglo-Dutch War, Shakespeare, Sir Gilbert Pickering, Sir John Denham, The Conquest of Granada, The Hind and The Panther, The Wild Gallant, theatre, Thomas Shadwell, translation, Virgil, William Congreve

Posted by Simon on September 9, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/john-dryden-selected-poems-donald-thomas/

The Cavalier Poets: An Anthology edited by Thomas Crofts

This is a volume of the cheap and cheerful Dover Thrift Editions. It cost £1 and is 94 pages long including index. In his very short introduction, Thomas Crofts tells us that by the 1630s there were roughly speaking two ‘schools’ of English poetry, the followers of John Donne and followers of Ben Jonson.

It was Dr Johnson who, in 1780, first used the term ‘metaphysical poets’ to refer to Donne and his school, but in fact John Dryden a hundred years earlier had criticised Donne for using complex and philosophical ideas not only in his satires but in his love poetry. Not just philosophical ideas – metaphysical poetry characteristically invokes abstruse imagery from mathematics and the sciences, astronomy and theology. The most famous example is the short lyric love poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning in which Donne compares the souls of himself and his love to the two legs of a compass.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Clever – too clever and contrived in the opinion of both Dryden and Johnson. Other poets usually put in the metaphysical category include George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne and Richard Crashaw. Their poetry is intense, intellectual, full of clever and sometimes grotesque conceits, ideas, similes and comparisons. Sometimes the style is applied to love poetry, but also to very intense religious meditations, notably in Donne and Herbert’s religious works.

The other school followed Ben Jonson, the tremendously successful author in the 1600s of a series of ‘city comedies’, scathing satires on the follies and vices of his fellow Londoners, who then transitioned to writing a large number of masques for the court and aristocratic patrons in the 1620s and 30s, as well as a steady stream if incidental poetry.

Jonson is much blunter. He celebrates wine, women and the well-stocked larders of fine country mansions. Maybe his most famous poem is the lyric To Celia:

Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

Nothing obscure or taxing about that song. The younger generation of poets who started writing in the 1620s generally followed Ben, indeed a group of them self-consciously referred to themselves as the Sons of Ben. They became associated with the Royalist cause, celebrating aristocratic life, fine living, the arts, all flourishing under the patronage of good king Charles.

Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

Herrick was the oldest of the Tribe of Ben and wrote at least five poems to the older poet. Herrick is master of the blithe lyric, bringing a sane, balanced joie de vivre to amorous songs, satiric couplets, drinking songs and devotional poetry. He dealt with English country life and its seasons, village customs, complimentary poems to various ladies and his friends, themes taken from classical writings and a solid bedrock of Christian faith.

Herrick was ordained in 1623 and in 1629 became the vicar of Dean Prior in Devonshire, which is surprising when you read the casual sensuality of his love poetry, for example the poet imagining himself a vine which spreads over his beloved’s body, encompassing her breasts and then her private parts, or has a vision of a woman in the woods with her skirts tucked up to reveal ‘the happy dawning of her thigh’.

Herrick was ejected by the Puritans in 1647 for refusing to sign the Solemn Covenant but reinstated on the Restoration. He had, after all, written poems celebrating the births of Charles II and James Duke of York in the 1630s, and had dedicated to the Prince of Wales his major volume of verse, Hesperides, published 1648, which contains quite a few poems praising Charles I. His loyalty was rewarded.

Herrick writes directly and clearly. Life is sweet, life is beautiful, life is full of good things, the seasons, the country, the fruits of the earth and the love of God, and we should enjoy it all while we can.

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.

His most famous lines are the opening of To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying.

Thomas Carew (1595? – 1639)

Carew began his professional career as assistant to the English ambassador to the Netherlands in 1616 and was sacked for insulting the ambassador and his wife. He went on to have a successful career as poet and courtier, being appointed to King Charles’s Privy Chamber in 1628. He acquired a reputation for mischief and debauchery, and his poems have an edge. He feels more varied than Herrick: there are the usual lyrics to haughty mistresses named Celia, but also some genuinely moving elegies, for example to Lady Mary Villiers. The three most impressive poems are a long hymn of praise to Saxham, a country house owned by Sir John Crofts, the poem being an example of the ‘praise of a country house, its setting, household and host’ which was popular at the time, whose best example is Jonson’s poem To Penshurst. There’s also a page-long poem praising Jonson himself, though it appears to surprisingly tell the Master that his newest play is not as good as Volpone. The third outstanding work is the long elegy to John Donne:

An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr. John Donne

In the middle there’s an extended section where he says Donne’s predecessors and contemporaries were servile imitators who pretend to a mimic fury, pretend to be possessed by a divine fire copied from the classics such as Anacreon or Pindar…

The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds
O’erspread, was purg’d by thee; the lazy seeds
Of servile imitation thrown away,
And fresh invention planted; thou didst pay
The debts of our penurious bankrupt age;
Licentious thefts, that make poetic rage
A mimic fury, when our souls must be
Possess’d, or with Anacreon’s ecstasy,
Or Pindar’s, not their own…

But Donne purged this overgrown garden, cleared away ‘the lazy seeds of servile imitation’ and planted ‘fresh invention’. In terms of poetry the age was bankrupt but Donne paid off its debts and set it up anew. Then, embedded in the following lines and amid this extended argument, are a couple of standout lines:

… the subtle cheat
Of sly exchanges, and the juggling feat
Of two-edg’d words, or whatsoever wrong
By ours was done the Greek or Latin tongue,
Thou hast redeem’d, and open’d us a mine
Of rich and pregnant fancy; drawn a line
Of masculine expression, which had good
Old Orpheus seen, or all the ancient brood
Our superstitious fools admire, and hold
Their lead more precious than thy burnish’d gold,
Thou hadst been their exchequer, and no more
They each in other’s dust had rak’d for ore.

Opened us a mine of rich and pregnant fancy – that expertly captures the way Donne invented something utterly new, in his poetry’s concentration, its intellectual demandingness, its extravagant intellectualism, its unexpected and dazzling imagery. The lines after it describe that Donne and Carew’s contemporaries as ‘superstitious fools’ for admiring ‘the ancient brood’ of classical poets, for considering their ‘lead’ more precious than Donne’s ‘burnished gold’ – but goes on to make the Donne-ish image that, had Orpheus (the legendary founder of poetry and song) and the ancient Greeks known about Donne, ‘thou hadst been their exchequer’, that’s to say, they would have been able to draw an indefinite supply of money i.e. poetic imagery, from him, and wouldn’t have had to rake around in each other’s dust i.e. copy each other’s ideas and images.

It’s an extended argument, which combines imagery and metaphors in a dense a knotty way which Donne would have appreciated, though it lacks the lightness, and the spare and unexpected line lengths of a Donne poem.

Sir John Suckling (1609 – 41)

Rich and good looking, Suckling was also swashbuckling. Aged just 22 he volunteered to fight in the army of Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus in the Thirty Years War. Back in Charles I’s court, he wrote poems and some of the masques which Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria loved (and acted in!). He led his own troop of soldiers on the king’s side in the first Bishop’s war with Scotland and then had a series of improbable adventures. He is said to have been involved in a Royalist plot to release the Earl of Strafford from the Tower of London and forced to flee to Paris. From here he was, apparently, also forced to flee after a love affair, then he was in Spain, where he was said to have been arrested by the inquisition, before settling in Holland. Eventually, crushed by poverty and debts, he took his own life, just as the civil wars began.

His tone of voice is ‘witty, decorous, naughty’ as well as cultivating a certain military swagger, entirely appropriate in a writer who, though he wrote comparatively little, in some ways epitomises the bravura qualities of the Cavalier Poet. When I was young I memorised his song:

Why so pale and wan fond lover?
Prithee why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee why so pale?

Why so dull and mute young sinner?
Prithee why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t?
Prithee why so mute?

Quit, quit for shame, this will not move,
This cannot take her;
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her;
The devil take her.

‘The devil take her!’ It has the real insouciant tough-mindedness of the true cavalier. It entirely anticipates the amused cynicism of the Restoration wits. And, rereading this book, I was surprised to rediscover just how cynical and unillusioned Suckling is. His poems argue against love, against ‘fruition’ i.e. possessing your beloved, because love quickly turns stale, how the excitement is all in the game, in the chase.

Women enjoy’d (whate’er before th’ have been)
Are like romances read, or sights once seen :
Fruition’s dull, and spoils the play much more
Than if one read or knew the plot before.
‘Tis expectation makes a blessing dear ;
Heaven were not heaven, if we knew what it were.

There’s a genuinely funny little dialogue between J.S and T.C., which stands for Thomas Carew (presumably they were friends) which contrasts their differing approaches to watching a noted beauty walk through the ornamental gardens at Hampton Court. TC expresses the traditional lover’s rhetoric, that the passing beauty woke the flowers, her voice was like music etc, while J.S. is having none of it and says he spent his time undressing her with his eyes and if she’d only taken one last turn round the gardens, he’d have succeeded in stripping her naked, dammit!

Upon My Lady Carlisle’s Walking in Hampton Court Garden

There is a Farewell to love, a comic poem comparing wooing a woman to laying siege to a town (imagery that crops up in many Restoration comedies), a poem telling a pale-faced lover to stop bloody whining. Suckling is having none of that nonsense. I particularly liked the poem comparing love and debt i.e. only the man who is free of both can be called happy. He runs through all the poets and professions which are rich in this or that but still prey to debt or still prey to love.

But he that can eat beef and feed on bread which is so brown
May satisfy his appetite, and owe no man a crown:
And he that is content with lasses clothèd in plain woollen,
May cool his heat in every place, he need not to be sullen,
Nor sigh for love of lady fair; for this each wise man knows,
As good stuff under flannel lies, as under silken clothes.

Richard Lovelace (1618 – 1658)

Lovelace was heir to an old Kentish family which was distinguished in Elizabeth’s reign. He was a soldier and fought for Charles. Just as the war was about to break out, he presented a Royalist petition to Parliament in April 1642 and was imprisoned for a couple of months for his pains. Upon his release, he raised a militia and joined Charles at his headquarters in Oxford. When Charles surrendered himself to the Scots, Lovelace fled abroad and offered his services as a soldier to King Louis of France. He was wounded at a battle at Dunkirk. He returned to England in 1648, during the period of the second civil war and was promptly locked up again, this time for a year. He was released in 1649 and died in poverty in 1658.

Crofts makes the simple, central point that the carpe diem mode, the gather ye rosebuds, live for today mindset was very appropriate for supporters of the king who were oppressed by a sense of the gathering storm, and then watched their side go down to defeat. Life is beautiful, sweet and full of pleasure but, as the soldiers among these poets knew, could be ended in a moment. Lovelace expresses this feeling sweetly and simply.

To Lucasta, Going to the Wars

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

That said, Lovelace struck me as the most Donne-like of the four, routinely using quite complex or our-of-the-way conceits in his love poetry. The Grasshopper is an example of an unusual subject, just as mention of the ostrich in another poem suggests a drive to include or use unusual imagery. But there’s one poem that not only adopts a Donne-like tone i.e. lectures his beloved with an elaborate metaphysical argument, especially in the 3rd and 4th stanzas – but actually echoes a famous rhyme of Donne’s.

To Lucasta, going beyond the Seas

If to be absent were to be
Away from thee;
Or that when I am gone
You or I were alone;
Then, my Lucasta, might I crave
Pity from blustering wind or swallowing wave.

But I’ll not sigh one blast or gale
To swell my sail,
Or pay a tear to ‘suage
The foaming blue god’s rage;
For whether he will let me pass
Or no, I’m still as happy as I was.

Though seas and land betwixt us both,
Our faith and troth,
Like separated souls,
All time and space controls:
Above the highest sphere we meet
Unseen, unknown; and greet as Angels greet.

So then we do anticipate
Our after-fate,
And are alive i’ the skies,
If thus our lips and eyes
Can speak like spirits unconfined
In Heaven, their earthy bodies left behind.

The hyperbole that the lovers’ faith and troth control ‘all time and space’ is very Donne, as is the notion that in some other, higher sphere, their souls ‘greet as Angels greet’. What attracted the derogatory description ‘metaphysical’ is the way the poet is taking a fairly run-of-the-mill sentiment – telling his beloved they’ll still be in love even though he’s going abroad – and using this hyperbolical language of time and space, higher spheres and angelology.

As to the echoed rhyme, compare and contrast with The Good Morrow by Donne:

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love, all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.

Summary

So Herrick is happy-go-lucky, Carew is knotty, Suckling is cynical and Lovelace is the most metaphysical, in the sense that his poems are often making a case and use unusual and arcane imagery to do so. A good example is his densely argued poem about his mistress’s glove.

Elinda’s Glove

Thou snowy Farm with thy five Tenements!
Tell thy white Mistresss here was one
That call’d to pay his daily Rents:
But she a-gathering Flowers and Hearts is gone,
And thou left void to rude Possession.

But grieve not pretty Ermine Cabinet,
Thy Alabaster Lady will come home;
If not, what Tenant can there fit
The slender turnings of thy narrow Room,
But must ejected be by his own doom?

Then give me leave to leave my Rent with thee;
Five kisses, one unto a place:
For though the Lute’s too high for me;
Yet Servants knowing Minikin nor Bass,
Are still allow’d to fiddle with the Case.

Where ‘minikin’ means treble, so that the final couplet means that even servants who know nothing about music are allowed to touch the case (of an instrument) and in the same way the poet claims that actual music-making on a lute – by which he means making love to, fondling the actual snow-white hand of his mistress – is far above his status but nonetheless, just like servants who know nothing about music are allowed to fiddle with music cases, so he, knowing nothing about love, is allowed to touch and revere love’s implement, the empty glove of his lover.

Quite packed, isn’t it?

Restoration art

British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain (2020)

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 7, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Literature, Poetry

Posted by Simon on September 7, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/the-cavalier-poets-thomas-crofts/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 7 – the reign of James II

Because King Charles II died in February 1685 without a son and heir – without, in fact, any legitimate children from his marriage to Catherine of Braganza – the throne passed automatically to his brother, James Duke of York, who ascended the throne as King James II.

Catholic James was a professed Roman Catholic and a zealous reformer. He wished to lift the multiple legal restrictions which had been placed on his fellow Catholics and, as a balancing gesture, to lift legal constraints on the Puritans and non-conforming Protestant sects. However, within three short years he managed to alienate almost every party and profession in the country, and especially the powerful Whig politicians.

The seven bishops The crisis came to a head over two big issues. First James made the error of trying seven Anglican bishops for seditious libel. To be precise, in April 1688, encouraged by the Quaker leader William Penn with whom he had struck up an unlikely friendship, James re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence first promulgated by his brother, and ordered Anglican clergy to read it in their churches.

When seven Bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted a petition asking the king to reconsider this request, they were arrested and tried for seditious libel, the trial taking place in June 1688. This looked like a full-frontal attack on the Church of England which was, by now, central to almost everybody’s concept of the English political system.

A Catholic son Secondly, his Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, who he had married in 1673, bore him a Catholic son and heir, James Francis Edward, on 10 June 1688. Now, when James’s only possible successors had been his own two Protestant daughters – Mary and Anne – from his first marriage to Anne Hyde (who had died in in 1671) most Anglicans could put up with James’s pro-Catholic policies in the belief that they were a temporary aberration from what was essentially a Protestant succession. But the young prince’s birth at a stroke made it seem likely that Britain would become a Catholic dynasty and that the unpopular religious policies James was ramming through would become permanent. All kinds of former loyalists began to think again.

The supposititious child And so did the people. Rumours quickly spread about the baby, irrational sometimes hysterical rumours, the most lurid of which was that the baby proclaimed as the Prince of Wales hadn’t been born to Mary of Modena. The rumour went that the royal couple’s actual baby had been stillborn and so a new baby was smuggled into the Palace in a warming pan, purely to satisfy Jame’s dynastic ambitions. It doesn’t make sense, but it can be seen as a fairly simple piece of wish fulfilment: people just didn’t want it to be true that James had sired a Catholic heir.

Prince William Channels of communication between English Parliamentarians and nobles who opposed James and the solidly Protestant William, Prince of Orange (a state of the Netherlands) had been open since the 1670s. William was in fact the grandson of Charles I, being the son of Charles’s daughter, Mary and so, before the birth of the baby, had been third in line to the throne. And he had himself married his cousin, James II’s daughter by from his first marriage, another Mary who – until the baby was born – had herself been first in line to the throne. In other words William had close blood ties twice over to the English ruling family. James II was his father-in-law.

For these reasons Protestant William’s position as a possible successor to Charles II, instead of Catholic James, had been widely canvased among Whig politicians during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81. In the event the crown passed peacefully in 1685 to James but, as he alienated more and more sectors of British society, William’s name began to reappear in political conversations – not as a direct replacement, but maybe as some kind of regent or protector, nobody was quite sure what.

William the defender What Kishlansky’s account brings out that William was totally aware of all these developments in England and their implications for him. And not just for himself, but for his country. Since he turned of age William had played a key role in the Netherlands’ ongoing resistance to King Louis XIV of France’s ambitions to seize its territory. From the Exclusion Crisis onwards he was alert to the possibility that England, with its great wealth, its army and its powerful navy, might, in some form, come under his control. But how? What form would it take?

Thus William had well-placed spies and ambassadors in London who not only kept him informed of events but acted as propagandists for his cause, promoting him as a defender of Protestantism and traditional English liberties against the Francophile, Catholic James.

The Immortal Seven All these tendencies crystallised in the sending of a letter to William, on 30 June 1688, jointly signed by a group of seven Protestant nobles and clerics which invited the Prince of Orange to come to England with an army. In fact William and the dissidents had been discussing what constitutional or legal forms could be used to justify his invasion since April the previous year. The letter of invitation wasn’t a spontaneous gesture but a carefully calculated contrivance agreed by both sides.

The letter The letter asked William, who was a nephew and son-in-law of James II, to use military intervention to force the king to make his eldest daughter, Mary, William’s Protestant wife, his heir. The letter alleged that the newborn prince was an impostor. The letter told William that if he landed in England with a small army, the signatories and their allies would rise up and support him. The Invitation reprised the grievances against King James and repeated the widely held claim that the king’s son was ‘supposititious’ (the technical term for fraudulently substituted). The letter then went on to give advice about the logistics of the proposed landing of troops.

The courier It was symbolic of the widespread disaffection throughout the English military and navy that the message was carried to William in The Hague not by a spy or diplomat but by Rear-Admiral Arthur Herbert (the later Lord Torrington) disguised as a common sailor, and identified by a secret code. It was also importantly symbolic that the seven signatories (who became known as ‘the Immortal Seven’) were not all dyed-in-the-wool opponents: five were Whigs, but two were Tories, traditionally the party of the Court.

Louis offers help By September it had become clear that William planned to accept the invitation and to ‘invade’ England. Louis XIV could see this, too, and he offered James French support, but James a) thought his own army would suffice b) didn’t want to become even more unpopular by inviting French Catholic troops onto English soil. He also c) couldn’t believe that his own daughter, Mary, would conspire against him.

Defections What he hadn’t anticipated was that when William did finally arrive with his Dutch army, landing at Brixham in Devon on 5 November 1688, many Protestant officers would defect from his army and join William, as did James’s younger, unmarried daughter, Anne.

James runs away James had joined his army in Salisbury preparatory to marching south-west to engage William who had made his base at Exeter but, as key commanders and their troops defected, he lost his nerve and took horse back to London. On 11 December James tried to flee to France, first throwing the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames. He was captured by local fishermen in Kent hunting for just such fleeing Catholic priests and officials, but released and placed under Dutch protective guard. But William didn’t want to try or officially dethrone James, that would cause all kinds of complications and remind everyone of the execution of Charles I – it was much more convenient to occupy a throne which had been vacated – in other words to create the convenient fiction that James had abdicated of his own free will.

And so William let James escape on 23 December and take ship to France, where he was received by his cousin and ally, Louis XIV, who offered him a palace and a pension.

James’s Catholic crusade

What Kishlansky’s relatively brief chapter on James’s reign brings out, that I’d forgotten, is the astonishing speed and thoroughness with which James tried to recatholicise England.

The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion In 1685, soon after Charles’s death, James’s opponents in exile conceived a large-scale invasion of Britain, with a landing in Scotland to raise Protestants who had suffered under the Stuarts, and one in the West Country. The Scottish rising under the Earl of Argyll failed to materialise but Charles II’s oldest and most charismatic son, James Duke of Monmouth, landed in the West Country and raised a large army which gathered support as it marched towards Bristol. James dispatched an army to the West of England which massacred the rebel army at the Battle of Sedgmoor on 6 July 1685. But what Kishlansky emphasises is that James ensured that as many officers as possible in the winning army were Catholics.

It’s a stock A-level history question to ask why the English establishment and army gave James their full support when he crushed the Monmouth rebellion in the summer of 1685 and yet just three years later, abandoned him in droves and let him be overthrown?

Recatholicising policies The answer is simple. In the summer of 1685 the nation as a whole didn’t yet know what to expect from James, but three short years later, they had learned the scale and thoroughness of his Catholicising ambitions. Just some among James’s many recatholicising policies include that he:

allowed the creation of Catholic seminaries in London, sent a message to the pope and supported newly-established Catholic presses in London and Oxford
set priests to convert his leading ministers and daughter Anne and sent one to convert Mary in the Netherlands
replaced half the royal judges with Catholics
appointed four Catholics to the Privy Council and composed an inner council including his Jesuit confessor
this council set about trying to retire JPs across the land and replace them with Catholics
Catholic officers were drafted into the militia and into the standing army
the two universities had Catholic officials imposed on them and when the fellows of Magdelen College Oxford refused to accept a Catholic warden, he had them all sacked and replaced with Catholics
he sent the Catholic Tyrconnell to be lieutenant-general of the Irish army and he immediately set about purging the army of Protestants; hundreds of Protestant gentry fled
insisted the bishops restrain anti-Catholic preaching by vicars under their charge, and set up a commission to charge Anglican officials who didn’t carry this out

All this by the end of 1686. In 1687:

London was stripped of Anglican aldermen, militia captains and members of livery companies
all Lords Lieutenant were issued three questions to ask potential JPs which required the latter to support repeal of the Test Acts

The Dissenters do not rally Throughout his aggressive recatholicisation, James had hoped that the many Dissenters and Non-conformists who had been persecuted under Charles’s long reign would welcome change and religious toleration. But they didn’t. The Dissenters James was counting on to help him remained largely silent. He underestimated the strength of their enmity to Catholicism, with its devotion to a foreign pope and its overtones of political absolutism.

The Anglicans weary James also took it for granted that his Anglican subjects would passively obey him, and so they did, to begin with… but ultimately he miscalculated the extent of their tolerance, building up reservoirs of opposition at every level of the political system.

James tries to engineer a supportive Parliament Then, in November 1687, the public learned that Mary of Modena was pregnant. James redoubled efforts to set up a compliant parliament by sending commissioners to check the loyalist character of its electors around the country. More Tories were put out of their seats and replaced with Catholics or dissenters. He used whatever expedients he and his ministers could devise to ensure the selection of a parliament compliant to the recatholicising project.

The Declaration of Indulgence So it was against this background that James reissued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered it to be read in every Anglican pulpit, that the seven bishops petitioned for this order to reconsidered and James, a man in a tearing hurry, had them tried for seditious libel, an extraordinary proceeding. They were acquitted by a London jury.

Considered in this much detail, it’s hard to see James’s policy as anything other than a thorough and concerted attack on the Church of England and Anglican belief at every single level of society.

William of Orange’s plans

William the defender Meanwhile, Kishlansky goes into just as much detail about William of Orange’s position and aims. William, born in 1650, was a Protestant prodigy whose sole aim in life was to protect the Netherlands from the France of Louis XIV. Ever since he had married James II’s daughter, Mary, in 1677, England had played a part in his diplomatic calculations, and Dutch ambassadors and propagandists had been at work for some time presenting himself as a friend, and possibly saviour, of Protestant England.

William’s awareness He had watched the political crises at the end of Charles II’s reign, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, with a canny eye, looking for his best advantage. Thus, as he saw James’s government set about alienating everyone in England and important factions in Ireland and Scotland, William was constantly aware of its impact on him and his wife, and on her and his succession to the throne.

The geopolitical threat The birth of the Prince of Wales not only pushed him and his wife further down the order of succession, it helped to crystallise the real geopolitical threat the Low Countries faced. Louis XIV was again making belligerent noises and informed sources expected him to make a renewed attack on the Netherlands in 1689. Like his brother before him, James was a confirmed Francophile and was actually on the payroll of Louis XIV, who was subsidising his government.

Thus the situation for William was one of cold political realities: he needed to neutralise England by any means necessary in order to avoid an attack not just by France, but France in alliance with England.

William had been in touch for some time with opponents of James’s regime in England who had developed a network of dissidents and gauged the extent of opposition, not just in political circles but, crucially, in the army and navy – and the birth of the Prince of Wales triggered action on both sides.

William suggests the letter It was William who actively asked the seven leading British political figures to write him a letter and suggesting the subject, making it an invitation to him to come and investigate a) the circumstances of the birth of James’s son and heir and b) to protect English liberties.

Even so it took four long months for William to mount an amphibious landing on England’s shores, and this period was long enough for James to discover what was being planned.

James suddenly reverses direction In Kishlansky’s account it is almost comic the way that James, suddenly realising how many people he had alienated, set out on a charm offensive to rebuild his reputation. He suddenly announced that no Catholics would be allowed to sit in the upcoming parliament. He restored the bishop he had suspended and abolished the hated Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes. He restored all the Anglican fellows he’s sacked from Magdelen College. He abrogated all the charters on cities and boroughs since 1679, which had the effect of reinstating Tory Anglican mayors, aldermen and councillors. In the counties Tory lords lieutenant and JPs were reinstated.

William of Orange’s declaration It was too late. In October William published a declaration in which he announced he planned to come to England in order to preserve and maintain the established laws, liberties and customs’ of the nation. Another plank of William’s strategy was to be claiming to defend the hereditary rights of his wife, Mary, as one in line to the throne, by investigating the alleged ‘supposititious’ birth of the Prince of Wales. In other words, his declaration carefully laid out a suite of arguments designed to appeal to Tories and traditionalists.

William’s invasion fleet William assembled a huge invasion fleet, 500 ships carrying 20,000 of his best soldiers and 5,000 horses. He warned supporters to expect him on the North or West but let himself be guided by the wind which carried him down the Channel (and kept the English fleet in harbour) making landfall at Brixham in Devon on 5 November, an auspicious day for Protestants. It took two weeks to disembark his army which he marched to Exeter.

James’s army On 17 November James left London for Salisbury where his own army was encamped. On paper he commanded 25,000 men and could expect local militias to supply at least as many again. On paper, it looked like things were heading towards an epic battle to decide the future of England. But there was no battle.

James panics As soon as he arrived at Salisbury, James’s nerve broke. He suffered from insomnia and nosebleeds. He decided his army wasn’t large enough. Two of his most senior commanders defected. On 23 November he returned to London to discover his other daughter, Anne, had deserted him and gone to the Midlands, where insurgents for William had already taken major towns. His advisers told him to call a parliament and send envoys for peace and to ‘pardon’ William.

Negotiations On the short wet December days the envoys struggled to make William an offer. William’s Whig advisers weren’t, in fact, that keen for a parliament to be called since they needed to time to assure their support around the country. While these negotiations were stuttering forward, all sides were astonished by the news that James had fled London. His last acts were to officially disband his army, destroy the writs required to summon a Parliament, then he threw the Great Seal into the Thames i.e. James did everything he could to sabotage the machinery of government.

Anti-Catholic riots When Londoners learned James had fled there was an outbreak of anti-Catholic violence with rioters attacking and burning Catholic chapels. And it was now that James, in disguise, was captured by local fishermen in Kent hunting for just such fleeing Catholic priests and officials. After he was recognised, James returned to London where at least some of the crowd cheered his arrival.

William orders James to leave William had begun his march on London and he and his supporters were stymied by this sudden reversal in the situation. After pondering all the alternatives, William sent an order to James to vacate the capital within ten hours, and an escort of Dutch guards to assist him to do so and to accompany him to Rochester.

Second time lucky The great mystery in all of this is why James didn’t stand his ground and rally whatever patriots he could find against what was clearly a foreign invasion. But he didn’t. He meekly went along with the Dutch guard who were given instructions to let him slip away at the first opportunity and now, for the second time, James made an escape to the Kent coast, and this time successfully took ship to France.

What do we do now? At this point the situation became humorous with the kind of comedy we find in the history of human affairs again and again, because – Nobody knew what to do. The Tories would certainly not have welcomed William’s invasion if they had thought of it as such, as a conquest by a foreign prince. The Whigs were William’s natural supporters but were themselves divided, some saying William should place Mary on the throne, convene a Parliament to ratify her succession, and then retire to become merely a king-consort. The more full-blooded Whigs wanted William as king. The leading figure of the day, Lord Halifax, pithily summed up the confusion:

As nobody knew what to do with him, so nobody knew what to do without him. (quoted on page 283)

The Convention Parliament When he arrived in London, William summoned the Lords Temporal and Lords Spiritual to assemble, and they were joined by the privy councillors on 12 December 1688. On 26 December they were joined by the surviving MPs from Charles’s last Parliament, the one he held in Oxford (none from James’s tainted Catholic Parliaments). This assembly in turn summoned the Convention Parliament, consisting of Lords and Commoners, which recommended setting up of a ‘Convention’ to decide a way forward, which was formally opened on 22 January 1689.

The key fact was that nobody wanted civil war or the outbreak of rebellion in either Scotland or Ireland. The solution had to be fast. And so it was that the knottiest problem in English history was solved by the Convention Parliament in just two weeks!

Lords and Tories In the House of Lords some, especially the bishops, wanted a simple restoration of James, the rightful king. Other Tories suggested that William and Mary might rule as ‘regents’ until the death of James II, and then Mary would reign as rightful queen thereafter. William, Mary and Anne all let it be known that they opposed this option, the two women deferring to the male monarch.

Whigs In the House of Commons, Whigs put forward a formula that James had abrogated the contract between a sovereign and his people by abdicating. But 1. the notion that monarchy rested on some kind of voluntary contract between sovereign and people was unprecedented and revolutionary in implication, and 2. it was far from clear that James had, in fact, abdicated. He had been ordered to leave.

Plus 3. the whole point of a hereditary monarchy is that the throne is never vacant: the moment one monarch dies, his or her heir succeeds. Even if James had abdicated, then his son the Prince of Wales automatically became the rightful heir – but nobody at all wanted rule by a baby (referred to by many of the debaters as ‘the brat’, according to Kishlansky). And 4. the notion that abdication created a sort of vacuum which had to be sorted out by the people implied another revolutionary idea – that the people in some sense elected their monarch. An elective monarchy.

Reluctant acceptance Nobody wanted to explicitly say this, as it made a mockery of the fixed hierarchical principles on which the whole of English society rested. But nonetheless, this notion of an agreement by the people to choose a sovereign was the formula which was eventually accepted for the simple reason that the alternative – that the king had been overthrown by an armed invasion – was worse. That idea would legitimise the violent overthrow of the rightful monarch and take everyone back to the constitutional chaos of the 1640s.

Arguments The differing arguments were played out in disagreement between the Commons, which accepted the new reality, and the Lords who held out for significant rewording the Act agreed by the Commons. The deadlock dragged on for days until William, always a busy man, threatened to go back to Holland and leave the English with a broken country.

The Lords capitulated and both Houses passed an Act declaring William and Mary joint King and Queen of Britain.

The Declaration of Rights While the politicians had been arguing, the nation’s top lawyers had been drafting a Declaration of Rights. Like the Act, the Declaration had to be very careful in its language, ambiguous at a number of key moments in order not to alienate the different groupings of Whigs and Tories.

A compromise Like many other constitutional documents (the Magna Carta or the American Constitution) The Declaration of Rights was less a bold statement of timeless principles than a fix-up designed to be acceptable to the largest number of the political nation. As it progressed through drafts, it evolved into a ringing restatement of old and existing laws and liberties, sweeping away James’s innovations, but not proposing anything new.

Even then, the situation called for equivocation. If William had been forced to agree to the Declaration, he would have become in effect an elected monarch and the monarchy and elective monarchy – something which was anathema to most of the bishops and lords and Tories throughout the land.

A tricky coronation William’s coronation had to be accompanied by the Declaration but not dependent on it. Hence the peculiar fact that at William’s more-elaborate-than-usual coronation on 11 April 1689, the Declaration was read out before William was crowned, and he referred to it in the speech after his coronation as embodying the principles for which he had entered the country – but it was carefully made clear that his crowning was in no way dependent on accepting the Declaration. And no-one mentioned abdication or contracts or elective monarchies or anything like that. Shhh.

Muddling through Once again the English had managed their way through a massive constitutional crisis on the basis not of logical principles, but of fudging and mudging, of masking ambiguity and unclarity in robes and orbs and high ceremonial. Was it a triumph of enlightened constitutional principles, or of English pragmatism, or of barely concealed hypocrisy?

However you interpret it, what came to be called ‘the Glorious Revolution’ certainly solved one immediate and pressing problem, but laid up a whole series of longer-term challenges for the future.

Restoration art

British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain (2020)

Restoration comedies

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by Simon on September 4, 2020 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on September 4, 2020

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Charles II: His Life and Times by Antonia Fraser (revd. 1993)

Lady Antonia Fraser published her life of Charles II in 1979. 14 years later she published this big hardback version which is basically a large-format coffee-table book with the text drastically cut back in order to make room for hundreds of beautiful and fascinating full-colour illustrations.

As I have detailed the political events leading up to the civil wars in other blog posts, this review will focus on snippets and insights into Charles’s private life, seeing the events of this turbulent time from his personal perspective.

Birth Charles was born on 29 May 1630, one year into his father’s Personal Rule i.e. determination to rule without troublesome parliaments.

Heredity Charles had a swarthy complexion. He was nicknamed the Black Boy and this is the origin of hundreds of pubs of the same name across England. Through his father Charles I, Charles was one quarter Scots, one quarter Danish (his grandfather James I was married to Anne of Denmark), through his mother Henrietta Maria one quarter French, one quarter Italian. Hence the ‘foreign’ look which many commentators pointed out.

Charles I’s wife, Queen Henrietta Maria, bore nine children, six of whom survived infancy. It was in the marriage contract between Henrietta Maria and Charles I that all their children should be suckled only by Protestant wet-nurses.

Trial of Strafford Charles’s idyllic early childhood was overshadowed by clouds of approaching war. As Prince of Wales, aged just ten, he sat through the entire seven-week trial of Charles I’s adviser, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, who’d acquired the nickname of ‘Black Tom Tyrant’. When Parliament passed an Act of Attainder declaring Strafford a traitor sentenced to death, 10-year-old Charles was sent to Parliament with a petition for mercy, which was rejected.

Orange In 1642 Charles’s sister, Mary, aged just nine, was married off to Prince William of Orange, aged 12. Their marriage produced a son who was to become William III of Britain 46 years later.

Wedding portrait of William II, Prince of Orange, and Mary Stuart, daughter of Charles I, future parents of King William III, by Anthony van Dyck

Nottingham As the political crisis deepened Charles I kept his sons, Charles and James, by his side, leaving his other children in London when he fled the capital in 1642. They were with him when Charles raised his standard of war at Nottingham Castle on 22 August 1642.

Edgehill Charles was nearly captured by a troop of Roundheads at the Battle of Edgehill, 23 October 1642. In a much-repeated anecdote, the 12-year-old drew his sword and prepared to fight, before Royalist soldiers came to the rescue. Charles accompanied his father to Oxford where a Royalist Parliament was set up. His youngest siblings, Elizabeth and Henry, had remained in royal nurseries in London, where they were seized by Parliamentarians and given Roundhead governesses.

Hyde Aged 14, early in 1645, Charles was given nominal leadership of the Royalist Western Association and departed Oxford. He was never to see his father again. He was to be supervised by Sir Edward Hyde, a lawyer who had initially attacked Charles’s policies in Parliament, but came round to being an advocate for a new type of constitutional Royalism, became firm friends with Charles I, and then the trusted guardian and mentor of his son for the next 20 years.

Flight The battle of Naseby, 14 June 1645, was the decisive military engagement of the first civil war in which the Royalist army was soundly beaten, followed by further Royalist defeats in the West. Young Charles had moved between Bristol and Bridgewater. Now he clearly needed to flee. His party were pushed by advancing Roundheads down into Cornwall and then took ship to the Scilly Isles. Charles was thrilled by the sea journey and at one point took the tiller himself, whetting an appetite for sea sports which was to resurface after the Restoration.

In Bristol, in Bridgewater, in Cornwall and in the Scillies, argument had raged about where Charles should ultimately flee. Hyde was insistent he remain on British soil, for its symbolic importance. But eventually Charles gave in to the wishes of his mother, Henrietta Maria, who had fled back to her native France in July 1645.

Puritan iconoclasm To give a sense of Roundhead iconoclastic zeal, when Henrietta had fled London, Parliament voted to destroy her private chapel at Somerset House and to arrest the Capuchin friars who maintained it. In March, Henry Marten and John Clotworthy forced their way into the chapel with troops and destroyed the altarpiece by Rubens, smashed many of the statues and made a bonfire of the Queen’s religious canvases, books and vestments.

Charles in Paris King Louis XIV of France was Charles’s cousin (the son of his mother, Henrietta Maria’s, brother) and eight years younger i.e. 8 when the 16-year-old Charles arrived in Paris. Henrietta Maria received a small pension from the French court, but Charles received nothing at all – for political reasons on both sides – and had to ask his mother for maintenance, a situation which led to increasing discord. He was reunited with his boyhood friend, the Duke of Buckingham and they both acquired reputations for laziness and ‘gallantry’.

Holland The next two years were spent among the bickering little court of Royalist exiles around Henrietta Maria. In 1648 a Scottish army invaded England. Charles was invited to put himself at the head of it but was fatally deterred by his advisers and instead sent to Holland where part of the British fleet had mutinied. Here he was reunited with his younger brother James. They sailed in the fleet to Yarmouth, optimistic that the Royalist uprising would soon result in the liberation of Charles I who was in prison on the Isle of Wight.

Preston But young Charles and the invading Scots engaged in the same old argument about whether Presbyterianism would be imposed on England, and during these squabbles Cromwell led an army north and destroyed the Scots forces at the Battle of Preston, 17 August 1648.

Birth of Monmouth So Charles’s little fleet sailed sadly back to Holland where he became dependent on the personal charity of the Prince of Orange, living in the Hague. He took a mistress, Lucy Walter, who on 9 April 1649 bore him a son, James, the future Duke of Monmouth, who was to lead a rebellion against Charles’s brother, his uncle James, in 1685.

Execution of Charles I While the Royalists squabbled amongst themselves, the pace of events in England speeded up. It took a while for news to come through that King Charles was to be put on trial, and even then it took some days for young Charles to realise his father might actually be killed. Henrietta Maria sent a letter to Parliament begging to be with her husband but this was ignored, and lay unsealed and unread for decades. Charles sent an envoy to plead with the Dutch Estates General to send official envoys to intercede, but by the time they arrived in London it was too late.

Legend has it that Charles signed a blank piece of paper to be given to the Roundhead court, indicating that he would agree to any terms at all, so long as his father was spared.

Tearful farewells This is a very personal history and so Fraser dwells on the last meeting between the doomed Charles I and his two youngest children who had been kept in Parliamentarian care since the outbreak of war, 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth and 8-year-old Henry Duke of Gloucester, who both broke down in tears. Accounts of this meeting, plus Charles’s last loving letters to his wife, helped to shape the image of Charles the gentle, saintly martyr, which became so powerful in subsequent royalist propaganda.

The Covenanters In September Charles and advisers sailed back to Jersey, with a view to preparing to raise a Royalist rebellion in Ireland. But while they waited, fretted and argued, Cromwell crushed Irish resistance. The royalist party sailed back to the Netherlands. Scotland remained the only hope. An embassy of Covenanters visited Charles in April 1650, insisting that he agree to impose Presbyterianism on all three kingdoms. Charles set off for Scotland and very reluctantly signed the Covenant, the grand document of the Scottish rebels. However, the army of Scots Covenanters which invaded England was crushed by Cromwell at the Battle of Dunbar on 3 September 1650. In any case, Charles had grown to hate the Covenanters and their narrow, bickering worldview.

King of Scotland Defeated in battle, the Scots Covenanters now realised they had to ally with the Royalist Scots if they were to mount a successful invasion of England. To this end, it was arranged for Charles to be crowned King of Scotland on 1 January 1651. He went on a tour of north and east Scotland to raise support. He turned 21 on 29 May 1651. Divisions continued among the Scots, some of whom refused to join the army being raised to invade England. Again.

Worcester The Scots were defeated at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1653. Charles fought bravely, escaped and went on the run. His experience of being hidden in the homes and priest holes of recusant Catholic families was to influence his thinking about this loyal but persecuted minority when he was restored. Maybe as a result of being locked up in various tiny hidey-holes, Charles in later life developed claustrophobia.

At one point Charles was disguised as a servant to Jane Lane, accompanying her on a visit to Bristol. He cut south to Lyme, expecting to rendezvous with a ship but when this didn’t appear, was forced back inland. Fraser tells the story with breathless excitement but then, it was a genuinely exciting adventure.

European travels Eventually Charles took ship from Brighton back to the Continent. His sojourn in Paris is brought to an end when the French decide they want to ally with Cromwell’s England and Charles was given ten days to pack his bags. He went to Spa in Belgium, then Cologne, then Dusseldorf. He conceived the plan of an alliance with Spain so went to the Spanish Netherlands, settling in Bruges.

The Restoration I have given a detailed account of the negotiations leading up to the Restoration in another blog post. The procession from Dover, wine flowing in the streets, garlands of flowers. The actual coronation the next year, on 23 April 1661. In the same month, the first awards of the Order of the Garter for a generation.

Catherine of Braganza His people and traditionalists expected magnificence but this came at a cost and Charles was soon spending more than the million or so pounds he was awarded by Parliament. Hence betrothal to Catherine of Braganza. The poor woman was 23, had been raised in a convent, and was sold to Charles along with a dowry of two million crowns or £360,000. But almost all this money was mortgaged before she even arrived in the country. She brought Dunkirk as part of her dowry but in 1662 Charles was forced to sell it to the French (at the admittedly impressive price of £400,000).

Infertility When she was introduced to Charles’s mistress, Barbara Villiers, Catherine had a fit, burst out crying and collapsed on the floor. Over time she learned to manage herself and her feelings in the alien court with its alien religion, surrounded by scheming courtiers, and her husband’s open dalliances with various mistresses. And then it turned out she was ‘barren’ (as we used to say), infertile, incapable of having children. She couldn’t get pregnant. She visited Bath and other spas to take the healing waters. No effect. It must have been incredibly hard.

Frances Stuart The traditional image of Britannia is based on the beautiful but maddeningly virtuous Frances Stuart, who Charles became infatuated with.

The cabal I found it interesting that Fraser thinks, or thought, that every schoolchild ought to know that the word cabal is an acronym for the five statesman who administered Charles’s affairs after he had dismissed the unpopular Earl of Clarendon, who was made to take the blame for the unpopular and humiliating Dutch war – namely Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley and Lauderdale (p.156). Does every schoolchild know that? Ought they to?

Painting of Charles II in his coronation robes

King Charles II in his coronation robes by John Michael Wright

Sporty Charles was physically restless and interested in all forms of activity. He was notorious for his fast walking pace which wore out younger companions. He played ‘real’ tennis almost every day. He liked swimming in the Thames. He liked fishing. All of these activities might see him rising at 5am to indulge. He was definitely not a lazy slugabed.

Horse racing Charles loved hunting game in the royal forests e.g. the New Forest and Sherwood Forest, which he had restocked. Charles was an excellent horseman, he loved horse-racing, instituted the Epsom Derby, was no mean jockey himself, and regularly visited the racing at Newmarket. A famous stallion of the day which was used to breed a vast progeny was named Old Rowley and some people nicknamed the king Old Rowley for Charles’s similar tendencies.

St James Park Charles threw open St James’s Park to the public and had the lake built, which he liked to swim in. When it froze over Pepys wrote about the new Dutch fashion for skating or ‘sliding’ as it was called. Birdcage Walk is named after Charles’s interest in rare birds and the aviary he had constructed.

Science Charles loved clocks. He had at least seven in his personal rooms, which all kept different time and struck the hour at random, driving his servants crazy. It was part of his general love of gadgets which fed into serious interests in mathematics and the new sciences – the so-called Scientific Revolution which had seen him found the Royal Society in 1662.

Final illness Fraser’s description of Charles’s death is harrowing. He woke in the night, was feverish, struggled through to morning, let out a great shriek while being shaved, and was thereafter subjected to the monstrous interventions of half a dozen doctors, which included letting a staggering amount of blood, administering cantharides, red hot pokers to his shaved skull (!), cups, blistering and so on. The historian Macauley commented 150 years ago, that Charles was killed by his doctors.

Deathbed conversion to Catholicism Even more dramatic is the story of his deathbed conversion to Catholicism, laden with pathos since the priest who received him into the Catholic church was none other than the Father Huddleston who had helped hide Charles in the homes of local Catholics after the crushing defeat at Worcester all those years ago. He was procured and brought in secret to Charles’s bed-chamber by his brother, James. Fraser’s description of the catechism Huddleston administered and Charles’s conversion are very moving. After 45 minutes Huddleston left. Only his brother James and two other hand-picked gentlemen witnessed it. The great throng of nobles and all the Anglican bishops who had assembled, had been pushed out into ante-chambers and had no inkling of what was taking place.

An exemplary death But Charles didn’t die at once, he lingered. In fact, with characteristic politeness, he apologised to the gentlemen surrounding his bed for being so long a-dying. He called his wife and his two final mistresses in to see him. His many children were brought in and he blessed them one by one. It was an exemplary death from a man who had, throughout his life, striven to be noble and decent. A final example of his loyalty to those who helped him, and his confident way with the people who he so easily mixed with, in St James’s Park or Newmarket, sailing or racing, which endeared him to ‘the people’.

Parliaments Fraser’s account leaves you feeling that Charles wanted to be, and had the abilities to be, genuinely the father of his people. It was his Parliaments, the early ones determined on vicious revenge against Puritans and dissenters, the later ones obsessed by the Catholic threat, which poisoned the politics of his reign, especially the last seven or eight years.

If only Henry Duke of Gloucester, Charles I’s youngest son and widely admired as a young man, had not died in 1660, aged just 20, maybe Charles would have accepted the Whig attempts to exclude James II from the succession in favour of Protestant Henry, and all the disruption which followed would have been avoided.

If only Catherine of Braganza had borne him at least one child who would have been raised a Protestant and ensured the Stuart succession.

But Henry died and Catherine could not get pregnant, and so James Duke of York was left as the most legitimate successor to Charles, and so on 6 February 1685 his doomed reign began.

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British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain (2020)

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by Simon on September 2, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History

Tagged 17th century history, Anne of Denmark, Anthony van Dyck, Arlington, Ashley, Barbara Villiers, Battle of Dunbar, Battle of Edgehill, Battle of Naseby, Battle of Preston, Battle of Worcester, Biography, Birdcage Walk, Black Boy, Black Tom Tyrant', Buckingham, Cabal, Catherine of Braganza, Catholicism, Charles I, Charles II, Civil Wars, Clifford, Covenanters, Cromwell, Duke of Buckingham, Duke of Monmouth, Dunkirk, Earl of Strafford, early modern Britain, Edward Hyde, England, Epsom, Father Huddleston, fishing, France, Frances Stuart, Henrietta Maria, Henry Duke of Gloucester, Henry Marten, history, horse racing, Isle of Wight, James II, Jane Lane, John Clotworthy, Lady Antonia Fraser, Lauderdale, Louis XIV, Lucy Walter, Macauley, Newmarket, Old Rowley, Parliament, presbyterianism, Protestantism, Puritanism, restoration, Roman Catholicism, Roundehads, Royal Society, Royalism, Rubens, Scientific Revolution, Scotland, Somerset House, St James's Park, Thomas Wentworth, Wars of Three Kingdoms, William of Orange

Posted by Simon on September 2, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/02/charles-ii-life-and-times-antonia-fraser/

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