SIR SAMPSON LEGEND: You are hard to please, madam: to find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.
The humour of a Restoration comedy often starts with the cast list – the names are always inventively comic in their literalness, and the character profiles are often very droll. Thus:
Cast
The men
Sir Sampson Legend – father to Valentine and Ben
Valentine – fallen under his father’s displeasure by his expensive way of living, in love with Angelica,
Scandal – his friend, a free speaker
Tattle – a half-witted beau, vain of his amours, yet valuing himself for secrecy
Ben – Sir Sampson’s younger son, half home-bred and half sea-bred, designed to marry Miss Prue
Foresight – an illiterate old fellow, peevish and positive, superstitious, and pretending to understand astrology, palmistry, physiognomy, omens, dreams, etc.; uncle to Angelica
Jeremy – servant to Valentine
Trapland – a scrivener
Buckram – a lawyer
The women
Angelica – niece to Foresight, of a considerable fortune in her own hands
Mrs. Foresight – second wife to Foresight
Mrs. Frail – sister to Mrs. Foresight, a woman of the town,
Miss Prue – daughter to Foresight by a former wife, a silly, awkward country girl
This one is fairly full and meaty though markedly less expansive and funny than those of Wycherley’s characters in The Plain Dealer, and this first impression is confirmed by the play, which I found rather dull and slow to get started.
The plot
Valentine Legend is a young wastrel aristocrat who’s spent all his money and is heavily in debt. His father won’t pay off his debts unless he signs over his rights to the family estate to his younger brother, Ben, who’s been an officer at sea for some years. (Money – note how money is the prime driving force of the play, and is the first thing to be carefully explained.) Although Valentine is skint, he is in love with fair Angelica who hasn’t shown much opinion of him either way.
Valentine is chaffed by his long-suffering servant, Jeremy, and then visited by his side-kick / number two / confidante, Scandal, who acts as his foil throughout the play, allowing Valentine to explain his situation at each stage of the plot.
Like all the other Restoration comedies there is also a ridiculously mannered fop. Each one of these has a slight quirk, a distinctive variation on the theme, and the fop in this play, Tattle, prides himself on his tact and diplomacy but is, in reality, constantly blabbing and giving things away.
Debt collectors come calling, who Valentine’s man, Jeremy, manages to put off for another day, then an officer called Trapland, also come to collect debts, who they treat to a glass of sack. Mrs Frail visits and there are crude double entendres at her expense.
Act 2
Scene 1
Clever Angelica ridicules her uncle Foresight’s absurd superstitious beliefs in astrology etc and makes lewd suggestions about his and the silly old Nurse’s midnight rituals. She exits.
Valentine’s father Sir Sampson arrives and he turns out to be nearly as much of a pedantic superstitious astrologer as Foresight, a bombastic, swaggering old bombast. Enter Valentine who tries to explain about his inheritance but the conversation gets diverted into a discussion of Valentine’s parentage and then of his servant Jeremy. Legend warns that Valentine’s younger brother, Ben, is due to arrive tonight or tomorrow at which point he plans to sign over his inheritance to him.
Mrs Frail and the second Mrs Foresight are sisters. They return from swanning around town. They bitch at each other then swear to be pinkie friends. Mrs Frail is worried about her prospects. She announces she’s setting her cap at Legend’s younger son, Ben, due any minute back from sea. Mrs Foresight’s step-daughter, Miss Prue, is slated to be Ben’s wife, but she has recently become enamoured of the silly fop, Tattle, something Mrs Frail wants to encourage so as to leave Ben for herself.
A little scene where Tattle has to teach the very innocent unworldly Miss Prue how to behave like a London flirt, which is almost enjoyable because it’s almost sweet.
Act 3
In front of Angelica and Valentine, Tattle proves himself the soul of indiscretion, by overtelling several gossipy stories, showing off and implicating various posh women. He is, in other words, an epitome of Indiscretion as Foresight is of the mad old astrologer, and continually regretting having said too much:
TATTLE: Gadso, the heat of my story carried me beyond my discretion, as the heat of the lady’s passion hurried her beyond her reputation. But I hope you don’t know whom I mean… Pox on’t, now could I bite off my tongue.
Ben finally arrives and turns out to be a roister-doister sailor, not that interested in matrimony, a girl in every port etc. His dad leaves him alone with Miss Prue but his blunt ways quickly alienate her and they end up insulting each other. Just as Mrs Foresight and Mrs Frail come along, which falls pat into their plan, as Mrs Frail fancies Ben for herself, insofar as he is heir to Sir Samson’s estate. This sequence is rounded out by Ben and his sailors singing a song and having a dance.
For his part, Scandal embarks on a plan to persuade Foresight that he is unwell, coming down with something, in order to get him out of the way so he can make love to Mrs Foresight. She is initially scandalised by Scandal’s boldness, but slowly he talks her round.
I can’t put my finger on it, but all this is boring. It lacks the pizzazz of The Plain Dealer. Valentine just isn’t very interesting, Scandal is boring, Tattle is sort of funny as an over-talkative fop, but none of them are as funny as Novel and Lord Plausible from The Plain Dealer.
Act 4
Valentine pretends to be mad. This means the lawyer Sir Samson has brought – Buckram – considers him unfit to sign the document assigning his portion of the inheritance to Ben. Seeing this and realising Ben will not be rich, Mrs Frail immediately reconsiders her plan of marrying Ben, and takes the opportunity to have a fierce argument with him – making him think she’s gone mad.
In the same scene Scandal talks aside to Mrs Foresight and seems to be saying that they spent the previous night together, something Mrs Foresight rejects or denies. Maybe I’m in the wrong mood, but I didn’t find any of this funny. It seemed laboured and contrived.
Mrs Foresight conceives the plan of presenting Mrs Frail as Angelica to Valentine when he’s mad, getting him to sign the marriage papers and tumbling them into bed together, then they’ll be married. Scandal gets wind of this scheme and he and Valentine agree it will be amusing to egg them on.
Then Angelica herself arrives and Valentine drops his madness in order to talk to her straight. Unfortunately, she was inclining towards him precisely because she thought he had gone mad – for unrequited love for her! When Valentine explains that, on the contrary, his madness is a scheme designed to get his father to drop the plan of handing his portion to brother Ben – i.e. it is an entirely mercenary plan and nothing to do with love – Angelica reverts to being standoffish and aloof.
ANGELICA: How! I thought your love of me had caused this transport in your soul; which, it seems, you only counterfeited, for mercenary ends and sordid interest.
I think a lot of my dislike of this play is down to the character of Angelica: there are strong female leads playing more or less the same role in all the other comedies I’ve read – for example Florinda and Hellena in The Rover or Alithea in The Country Wife – but they had fire and vim; Angelica just comes over as irritatingly non-committal and contrary.
JEREMY: What, is the lady gone again, sir? I hope you understood one another before she went?
VALENTINE: Understood! She is harder to be understood than a piece of Egyptian antiquity or an Irish manuscript: you may pore till you spoil your eyes and not improve your knowledge.
Act 5
Angelica – improbably – makes up to Sir Sampson, an old man in his 50s. She wants to marry him, now, and he gets very over-excited at the idea, tells her to get a lawyer and a priest.
Enter Jeremy who is encouraging Tattle in his mad scheme to disguise himself as Valentine and woo Angelica.
Enter Miss Prue whose father has told her she no longer has to marry Ben – since he renounced his inheritance and says he prefers to go back to sea – and so she now wants to marry Mr Tattle, who she had such a frank exchange of flirting with back at the end of Act 2. Clearly, she is now an embarrassment to Tattle, who tries to put her off, saying no man of fashion is consistent to a woman for 2 days in a row! Fie, madam!
Enter Mr Foresight (who of course has foreseen none of these complex twists and turns). His daughter Miss Prue complains that she needs a man, she wants a man, but Foresight says poo, nonsense and tells her Nurse to take her home.
At which point Ben arrives and tells the assembled company (Scandal, Foresight, Mrs Foresight) that his father (Sir Sampson) has gone mad. Howso? Because he’s preparing to marry Angelica (who is Foresight’s niece). So now Valentine is mad, Sir Sampson is mad, this news prompts Mrs Foresight to go mad, and Foresight says he’ll go mad if Mrs F does. So this conceit or theme of madness has turned out to be the play’s guiding one. And, of course, Scandal sees his friend Valentine’s plan to win Angelica by feigning madness, going badly wrong.
Enter Sir Sampson and Angelica fawning over each other and their lawyer Buckram. Sampson confirms it to everyone, asks Foresight to give his niece away at the forthcoming wedding. Scandal runs off to tell his friend Valentine about this abrupt turn of events. Ben advises his father to be wary but Sir Sampson takes advice very badly and blusters and huffs that he will disinherit him, and asks the lawyer to be sure Ben will inherit nothing, at which there are bad words between Ben and the lawyer.
Sir Sampson’s bombastic turn of phrase and his irritable readiness to disinherit both his sons is another major thread in the play.
Enter Mr Tattle and Mrs Frail who have calamitous news – they are married by mistake! Tattle thought he was marrying Angelica, and Mrs Frail thought she was marrying Valentine, and so both are undone! This is sort of funny, especially the way they are rude and dismissive of each other,
TATTLE: Gad, I never liked anybody less in my life. Poor woman! Gad, I’m sorry for her too, for I have no reason to hate her neither; but I believe I shall lead her a damned sort of a life…
MRS. FRAIL: Nay, for my part I always despised Mr. Tattle of all things; nothing but his being my husband could have made me like him less.
The happy twist
It probably has a technical name, but in every one of these Restoration comedies the leading man and the leading woman resist each other, scorn and mock each other right up till three minutes before the end, when they suddenly undergo a miraculous reversal of attitudes and suddenly realise how much they love each other.
And so it is here that, when Sir Sampson calls on Valentine to sign away his inheritance, Valentine prepares to do so and when his friend Scandal tries to stop him, Valentine makes a noble speech about how he only ever wanted the money in order to make Angelica happy. Aaaah.
SCANDAL: ’Sdeath, you are not mad indeed, to ruin yourself?
VALENTINE: I have been disappointed of my only hope, and he that loses hope may part with anything. I never valued fortune but as it was subservient to my pleasure, and my only pleasure was to please this lady. I have made many vain attempts, and find at last that nothing but my ruin can effect it; which, for that reason, I will sign to – give me the paper.
ANGELICA: Generous Valentine! [Aside.]
Angelica happens to have the bond in question in her hand and promptly tears it up in front of everyone and declares her love for Valentine. Turns out her heart was always his all along – she was just pretending to be haughty and aloof! He goes down on his knees to her – it’s a deal!
Angelica takes the opportunity to tell old Sir Sampson he must reform, become a better father, relent his ‘unforgiving nature’ – confirming my sense that that was one of the themes of the play. Infuriated, Sir Sampson curses Foresight and his stupid belief in astrology and storms out, at which point Tattle (who, remember, has married Mrs Frail by mistake) has a funny line:
TATTLE: If the gentleman is in disorder for want of a wife, I can spare him mine.
The musicians have arrived who were to serenade Sir Sampson’s wedding. Scandal tells ’em to play on to celebrate Valentine and Angelica. And it’s Angelica who has the last word.
Many critics, and most feminist critics, berate Restoration comedy for its alleged misogyny. So it is worth pointing that the last word of this long play is given to a woman, who uses it to criticise men and their vain expectations and self-serving rhetoric:
’Tis an unreasonable accusation that you lay upon our sex: you tax us with injustice, only to cover your own want of merit. You would all have the reward of love, but few have the constancy to stay till it becomes your due. Men are generally hypocrites and infidels: they pretend to worship, but have neither zeal nor faith. How few, like Valentine, would persevere even to martyrdom, and sacrifice their interest to their constancy! In admiring me, you misplace the novelty.
The miracle to-day is, that we find
A lover true; not that a woman’s kind.
Thoughts
I found this play the most dry and dusty, contrived and unsatisfying of the ones I’ve sampled so far. I smiled once or twice, but I just didn’t find the vast expense of verbiage expended on Foresight’s belief in astrology or Sir Sampson’s bombastic bad temper or Miss Prue’s childish innocence or Tattle’s inability to keep a secret, made them that funny.
Probably on stage Love For Love comes to life much more, and I could see the comic aims and intentions of all these humorous characters and contrived situations – but I found it quite a dry and laboured read.
In his introduction to the Penguin edition, Gamini Salgado makes several points about the play and its position late in the history of Restoration comedy. By the time it was performed in 1695, the early merry days of King Charles II were long gone (his brother James had been deposed in favour of a foreign, Protestant king with a completely different set of values, in 1688) with the result that Valentine comes over as a lot less of the heartless libertine than the classic hero of Restoration comedy, and Scandal also is a lot milder in his support of his friend. And I think that’s one of the things I disliked, they both had less energy than previous male pairs.
This is related to the fact that the target audience was now wider than it had been for Etheredge or Wycherley – the earlier plays were mostly performed at the Drury Lane theatre which was favoured by royal patronage and attended by aristocrats, whereas Love For Love was performed at a new theatre in Lincolns Inn Fields for a broader, more middle class audience.
Somehow Valentine’s subterfuges – pretending for a page or two at the start to become a poet, pretending later on to be mad – feel silly and superficial. They lack the sustained bite of Manly’s misanthropy in The Plain Dealer or the snappy repartee of Dorimant and Medley throughout The Man of Mode. This, Salgado suggests, was partly a response to a broader, less arrogant audience, and to a general softening of the times.
Is there a connection with the fact that Money is most to the fore in this plot, in the sense that the key driver of the story is which of his sons Sir Sampson is going to leave his estate to? Does the softening of the aristocratic arrogance of earlier comedies, and the new emphasis on money (and the prominence of the sailor son) indicate that Britain had become a much more mercantile and bourgeois society by the 1690s than it had been in the 1660s?
When I read the Wikipedia article about The Way of The World, the answer seems to be a resounding yes:
In 1700, the world of London theatre-going had changed significantly from the days of, for example, The Country Wife. Charles II was no longer on the throne, and the jubilant court that revelled in its licentiousness and opulence had been replaced by the far more dour and utilitarian Dutch-inspired court of William of Orange. His wife, Mary II, was, long before her death, a retiring person who did not appear much in public. William himself was a military king who was reported to be hostile to drama. The political instabilities that had been beneath the surface of many Restoration comedies were still present, but with a different side seeming victorious.
One of the features of a Restoration comedy is the opposition of the witty and courtly (and Cavalier) rake and the dull-witted man of business or the country bumpkin, who is understood to be not only unsophisticated but often (as, for instance, in the very popular plays of Aphra Behn in the 1670s) either Puritan or another form of dissenter. Until 1685, the courtly and Cavalier side was in power and Restoration comedies belittled the bland and foolish losers of the Restoration. However, by 1700, the other side was ascendant…
The 1688 revolution which overthrew James II created a new set of social codes primarily amongst the bourgeoisie. The new capitalist system meant an increasing emphasis on property and property law. (The Way of the World Wikipedia article)
All of which maybe explains why Love For Love lacks the extreme aristocratic attitude of the earlier plays, and is more suffused by the language of money and contracts.
Books & Boots 