‘Lord, how like a Torrent Love flows into the Heart, when once the Sluice of Desire is open’d! Good Gods! What a Pleasure there is in doing what we should not do!’
(Lady Brute)
Cast
The cast list is clipped and to the point i.e. not as entertaining as some.
The men
Constant
Heartfree
Sir John Brute
Treble, a Singing-Master
Rasor, Valet de Chambre to Sir John Brute
Justice of the Peace
Lord Rake, Companions to Sir John Brute
Colonel Bully
Constable and Watch
The women
Lady Brute
Belinda, her Niece
Lady Fancyful
Madamoiselle
Cornet and Pipe, Servants to Lady Fancyful
Brief plot summary
Sir John Brute is tired of matrimony. He comes home drunk every night and is continually rude and insulting to his wife. She is meanwhile being tempted to embark upon an affair with the witty and faithful Constant. Divorce is not an option for either of the Brutes at this time, but forms of legal separation have recently come into existence, and would entail a separate maintenance to the wife. Such an arrangement would not allow remarriage. Still, muses Lady Brute, in one of many discussions with her niece Belinda, ‘These are good times. A woman may have a gallant and a separate maintenance too’.
Belinda is at the same time being grumpily courted by Constant’s friend Heartfree, who is surprised and dismayed to find himself in love with her. The bad example of the Brutes is a constant warning to Heartfree to not marry.
The Provoked Wife is a ‘talk play’, with the focus less on love scenes and more on discussions between female friends (Lady Brute and Belinda) and male friends (Constant and Heartfree). These exchanges are full of jokes, but are also thoughtful and often have an air of melancholy and frustration.
After complications caused by a forged-letter, the play ends with marriage between Heartfree and Belinda and stalemate between the Brutes. Constant continues to pay court to Lady Brute, and she continues to shilly-shally.
Extended plot summary
Act 1
Lord Brute has a soliloquy about bored he is of being married – he encounters Lady Brute who asks an innocent question and sets off his surly angry replies – then Lady Brute has a soliloquy wondering what she did in her life to merit such treatment (although she admits 1. she married Brute for his money 2. everyone warned her about him, but she thought she could ‘change’ him.)
Enter Belinda, Lady Brute’s niece, and they have an extended dialogue about what a brute Lord Brute is. Belinda has spotted that her aunt is in love with Constant. Lady Brute gives a speech about how women ought to resist the temptation to flirt and coquette. Both then unite in critiquing the character of their neighbour, the exorbitant flirt and narcissistic Lady Fancyful.
Scene 2. Lady Fancyful’s dressing room
Where we meet the lady herself and there is comic interaction between her English maid – who tells the truth about her appearance – and her super-flattering French fashion adviser, Mademoiselle, who tells her what she wants to hear. A letter arrives containing a song some admirer has composed for her. Lady Fancyful calls for Pipe her musician who comes and sings it.
Another letter arrives, Fie! she is so popular! It is more prosaic, from an admirer who says he will tell her all her Faults if she comes to the Walk in St James’s Park. There follows a comic dialogue between Lady Fancyful, who feigns to be shy and nervous of meeting an unknown man. Mademoiselle hands her all her accoutrements and virtually drags her out the door.
(It is a notable feature of this scene that entire sentences from Mademoiselle are in French, indicating that the audience was expected to understand it. Does this indicate the openly educated aristocratic audience which plays were still targeted at, at this late date?)
Act 2
Scene 1. St James’s Park
Enter Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle. The letter writer turns out to be Heartfree, who they know already to be ‘a profess’d Woman-hater’. Heartfree proceeds to tell Lady Fancyful she’s a damn attractive woman but has made herself so prettified and pretentious that she has become a figure of fun. He says he will reform her. Lady Fancyful decries his awful manners, and they exit.
Heartfree is immediately greeted by Constant (who we know from Scene 1 that Lady Brute knows is paying court to her) and they have a dialogue which is, in effect, Cynicism (Heartfree) talking to True Love idealism (Constant). Heartfree provides one summary:
I persuade a Woman she’s an Angel, and she persuades you she’s one.
At greater length:
As for her Motion, her Mien, her Airs, and all those Tricks, I know they affect you mightily. If you should see your Mistress at a Coronation dragging her Peacock’s Train, with all her State and Insolence about her, ‘twou’d strike you with all the awful Thoughts that Heav’n itself could pretend to from you; whereas I turn the whole Matter into a Jest, and suppose her strutting in the self-same stately Manner, with nothing on her but her Stays and her under scanty quilted Petticoat.
Constant has loved Lady Brute since he first saw her at her wedding and wonders why she studiously avoids him. Heartfree says ‘Tis women for you’, but we know it’s actually because ‘Lady Brute’ does in fact love him but wants also to remain true to her principles.
Enter Lord Brute who is brutishly blunt about how he hates being married, though he concedes that Lady Brute is virtuous. He invites Constant and Heartfree to come out tonight, get drunk and bed some whores.
Scene 2. At Lady Fancyful’s
Lady Fancyful admits to Mademoiselle that Heartfree’s rudeness did in some manner affect her. Enter Mr Treble who has set a poem of Lady F’s to music. He sings it. She asks if there are any new songs in Town and Treble produces another one which they get Lady F’s singer, Pipe, to sing.
The chief characteristic of the poems in these plays is how utterly mechanical and unlyrical they are (like the plays themselves, like the taste of the times):
Not an Angel dwells above,
Half so fair as her I love.
Heaven knows, how she’ll receive me;
If she smiles, I’m blest indeed;
If she frowns, I’m quickly freed;
Heaven knows she ne’er can grieve me.
Lady Fancifull can’t get Heartfree out of her thoughts and agonises about writing a letter to him.
Act 3
Lord and Lady Brute and her niece Belinda are just finishing luncheon. He declares he will smoke and is anticipating being visited. The womenfolk wonder if the visitor is Constant and vow to stay in the room, despite his choking smoke. They deliberately prattle about their petticoats to wind up Sir John until he loses his temper, throws his pipe at them, and drives them out the room.
Heartfree and Constant arrive at this moment and ask Sir John what’s wrong and he curses all women. He invites them to sit and share a glass, he notices Constant is sad, because of a woman, is it? This is dramatic irony because it is, of course, because of Sir John’s own wife that Constant is sad. Sir John proposes a toast to Constant’s mistress, with the same ironic effect.
A servant announces some of his hearty friends (Lord Rake and Colonel Bully) are at the door calling him away to drink and make some kind of plan for the evening. He tells our two heroes to stay till he gets back. Heartfree realises this is an opportunity for Constant to forward his troth and agrees. Exit Lord Brute.
Enter Lady Brute and Belinda who good-humouredly spar with Constant (who feels faint with love for Lady B) and Heartfree, who allows himself to be taught how to be a Perfect Man by pert Belinda.
Enter Lady Fancyful (‘an Inundation of Impertinence’ as Lady Brute calls her) who lights up the stage very much as Lord Foppington lights up The Relapse. She proceeds to tell the ladies how rudely Heartfree addressed her and suggested she reform her entire appearance and manner and very amusingly to act out how clumsy and crude he would have her be.
Belinda realises that Lady Fancyful is in love with Heartfree, and decides to make her jealous by a little flirting with Heartfree. It works, as Lady Fancyful reveals in an aside to the audience: she does fancy Heartfree and Belinda flirting with him does make her jealous.
Heartfree grows bored, realises there’s no scope for Constant to advance his love suit to Lady Brute with the room full of women, and they leave. Lady Fancyful is very irked by the devout leave Heartfree takes of Belinda, while almost ignoring her. She vows to go home and study her revenge.
Re-enter Constant leading to a very elevated dialogue with Lady Brute, in which he declares his love and she replies with her Virtue.
LADY BRUTE: He who has Discretion enough to be tender of a Woman’s Reputation, carries a Virtue about him may atone for a great many Faults.
Const. If it has a Title to atone for any, its Pretensions must needs be strongest where the Crime is Love. I therefore hope I shall be forgiven the Attempt I have made upon your Heart, since my Enterprize has been a Secret to all the World but yourself.
LADY BRUTE. Secrecy, indeed, in Sins of this kind, is an Argument of weight to lessen the Punishment; but nothing’s a Plea for a Pardon entire, without a sincere Repentance.
CONSTANT: If Sincerity in Repentance consists in Sorrow for offending, no Cloyster ever inclos’d so true a Penitent as I should be.
You need your wits about you to really grasp the cut and thrust of these sharp remarks. There is something very intimate about such a deep and searching matching of wits, more so than in conventional love compliments. Constant and Lady Brute draw very close but at the end, when he asks for some token that he may have hopes his suit is heard, she tears his hand from hers and says that’s all she has time for and runs out.
When Heartfree re-enters Constant is in raptures that Lady Brute has at least given him Hope although, when Heartfree asks how she expressed it, it is comedy (and maybe an indication of how difficult it was even for contemporary audiences to follow such a cut-and-thrust dialogue) that Constant can’t remember the precise form of words she used. In fact, if you have to carefully reread the end of the dialogue to realise that she didn’t.
Scene 2
Sir John, Lord Rake, Colonel Bully in a pub, drinking and singing songs about going to the Devil. It is interesting that these songs are all cast in opposition to the government and the prevailing culture. They reference recent legislation about freedoms of speech and association, which they declare themselves against. It is the old aristocratic culture defying the new mercantile, legislative Whig culture of William III.
Scene 3. Lady Brute’s bedchamber
Lady Brute and Belinda have a complex dialogue in which they first declare that women only behave the way they do (wear uncomfortable stays, go to plays, walk in the dusty park, even live in smoke-filled London) with the aim of attracting men, as if they were trivial frivolities they could throw off at any moment.
They then go on to describe in minute detail all the artifices they employ at the theatre to show themselves off to men, to smile to show off their teeth, show a variety of facial expressions, Yes it is a ridiculous world in which women so perform for men. And yet, Lady Brute finishes, Nature has given them One Thing which ensures they will always be top.
Yet our kind Mother Nature has given us something that makes amends for all. Let our Weakness be what it will, Mankind will still be weaker; and whilst there is a World, ’tis Woman that will govern it.
Then they talk about their loves. Lady Brute confesses she is weakening under Constant’s constant attack and pledges of love. But she wishes she had a partner in crime and asks if Belinda will not surrender to Heartfree. He isn’t that interested, Belinda replies. They agree to see the two young blades again, in Spring Garden, but will wear masks next time for greater amusement.
Act 4
Scene 1 – Version 1
Lord Brute, Lord Rake and the Colonel refer to having stabbed someone i.e. in a drunken street brawl! They confirm their aristocratic, Royalist sympathies by accosting a passerby who turns out to be a dissenting i.e. non-confirmist tailor. They steal the vicar’s gown that the tailor was carrying, Lord Brute dresses up in it, and then they accost what the jovially refer to as ‘the enemy’ i.e. the constable and watch. Lord Brute attacks them with a club but the watch overcome him and arrest him (the others run off).
Scene 1 – Version 2
In 1725 the play was revived and Vanbrugh, still living, rewrote this scene to make the poor tailor who the posh drunks (the ‘Courtiers’ as he calls them) attack, a woman’s tailor – and he is carrying not just any woman’s outfit, but a dress he has made for Lady Brute!
Sir John Brute immediately requisitions it and puts it on so that, when they are stopped by the constable and the watch, the latter joke about him being an Amazon, and Sir John drunkenly jests that he is Boudicca:
SIR JOHN: Sirrah, I am Bonduca, Queen of the Welchmen; and with a Leek as long as my Pedigree, I will destroy your Roman Legion in an Instant—Britons, strike home!
This makes the repartee with the constable, and then with the justice of the peace they bring him before, much funnier, in the broad pantomime tradition of men dressing up as women – if he is the queen then his accompaniers must be his maids of honour and so on – there is much more scope for banter, but it doesn’t stop there.
David Garrick in Vanbrugh’s Provoked Wife, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane painted by Johann Zoffany (1763)
Still drunk, Sir John tells the justice that he is none other than Lady Brute. This raises things to a new comic level, with Sir John giving an extended impression of a rebellious, drunken, lawless wife and the justice and officers sympathising with the poor – and they think, absent – Sir John.
But I am intrigued: did Vanbrugh revise this scene because it made the plot tighter, tying in his wife even to Sir John’s wild nights out, and shedding a drunken ironic light on the marriage which is the subject of the play?
Or because, by 1725, ridiculing the clergy had simply become untenable in what, over the 25 years to the revised version, had become a much more restrained and bourgeois society? That it had become too controversial and disrespectful to appear in a ‘comedy’? Whereas grown men dressing up as women is not only timelessly funny, but politically safe?
Scene 2
Heartfree can’t get the thought of Belinda out of his head and when Constant joins him he can’t help revealing that he, too, is one of the party of unhappy lovers. A servant brings a letter, pretending to be from anonymous admirers but infact from Lady B and Belinda, inviting them to a rendezvous in Spring Walk that evening at 8pm. Heartfree says he is too lovestricken to go, but Constant persuades him.
Version 1
Drunk Sir John Brute in the disguise of a cleric is brought by the constable to the house of the justice who politely tries to get to the bottom of it. When asked his name Sir John hiccups and says his name is Hiccup and the justice asks if he is one of the Hiccups of Norfolk. After more banter the justice lets him go. On the way out Sir John asks the constable if he wants to go pick up a whore, and when the latter says no, curses him and staggers off into the night.
Version 2
As explained above, in the 1725 revision of the play, Sir John is dressed in his wife’s dress, and this allows for the a joke whereby drunk Sir John accuses the arresting officer of trying to ravish him! It is literally knockabout stuff:
SIR JOHN Sir, there may have been Murder, for aught I know; and ’tis a great Mercy there has not been a Rape too—that Fellow wou’d have ravish’d me.
SECOND WATCH: Ravish! Ravish! O lud! O lud! O lud! Ravish her! Why, please your Worship, I heard Mr. Constable say he believed she was little better than a Maphrodite.
JUSTICE: Why, truly, she does seem a little masculine about the Mouth.
SECOND WATCH: Yes, and about the Hands too, an’t please your Worship; I did but offer in mere civility to help her up the Steps into our Apartment, and with her gripen Fist—ay, just so, Sir.
[Sir John knocks him down.]
Scene 3. The Spring Garden
Heartfree and Constant meet with Lady Brute and Belinda wearing masks/disguises. All of them are shadowed and eavesdropped on by Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle, also in masks. Heartfree & Constant & Lady Brute and Belinda are just commencing some heavy bantering when Sir John enters the scene, still dressed as a doctor of divinity and roaring drunk. He hails Constant and Heartfree as friends and grabs both the women, assuming they are their whores. Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle retired in fear to a nearby arbour.
Heartfree, who never wanted to come anyway, leaves, Sir John starts insulting the ‘whores’, at which Lady Brute runs to Constant for protection and shows him her face. Heartfree re-enters, Belinda runs to him and shows him her face. Realising who the ladies are, Constant and Heartfree order Sir John to leave which, a little improbably, he does.
Belinda and Heartfree now have a fairly frank conversation in which he admits he loves her and might even go as far as marriage. It’s getting dark. She invites him to take a turn around the park and the exit. Meanwhile, Constant is chatting up Lady Brute and tells his friend not to hurry back.
Constant tells Lady Brute his love but she puts up objections; she is married and is not her virtue, her loyalty to her awful husband, part of what Constant likes about her? If she abandoned her virtue would it not destroy his love? And more of the same. Constant decides to storm the citadel and starts kissing her hand, her arm, her neck and pulls her towards a nearby arbour. Except this is the very arbour Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle are hiding in. As Constant and Lady Brute reach the entrance to it, Lady Fancyful and Mademoiselle come running out past them.
Because of this, Lady Brute is thrown into utter terror that they witnessed her kissing a strange man, her reputation will be shot, her virtue worthless, her life not living. Terribly upset, she grabs Belinda, who is now just returning from her stroll with Heartfree, and rushes her off home.
The last word goes to Lady Fancyful, who is herself upset at seeing Heartfree pay court to Belinda, and out of her upset emerges a determination to take revenge.
Act 5
Scene 1. Lady Fancyful’s house
A brief recapitulation of Lady Fancyful’s determination to be revenged.
Scene 2. Sir John Brute’s house
The men have come back to Lady Brute’s house i.e. there are Constant, Heartfree, Lady Brute and Belinda. The servant assures them Sir John was seen staggering blind drunk into a tavern and will be some while, so ladies invite the men to stay and play a round of cards. But they have barely settled before the servant reappears to announce Sir John was kicked out of the tavern and has unexpectedly arrived home!! Quick quick, a panic-stricken Lady Brute hides the men and Belinda in the closet!
Sir John staggers in, filthy and bloody, and is rude and insulting to his wife. He begs a kiss, and she is so disgusted he deliberately smothers her in kisses till she is as dirty as him, then ‘tumbles her’, presumably onto a couch or divan. First he wants a ‘cold tea’ and proceeds to kick open the door of the closet and discovers… Heartfree and Constant! Sir John is elaborately, drunkenly polite to them and Lady B begs them to leave which – after assuring Sir John of his wife’s virtue they do.
Sir John has a bit more rant, slumps into a high chair and falls asleep snoring. Lady Brute is thrown into a panic (again) about her reputation. Belinda comes up with A Cunning Plan. They’ll tell Lord Brute that Belinda and Heartfree are now a loving couple and that they hid in the closet to escape detection and rumour, Constant hid with them so as to protect her ladyship’s reputation. Belinda says she’ll even go so far in backing up the story as to marry Heartfree – which leads to more dialogue about suitable and unsuitable marriages.
Having arrived at this plan, they ironically curtsey to the stinking filthy slob in the chair and call a servant to clean him and put him to bed.
Rasor, the servant they give this task to, alone on stage, now reveals that he has overheard everything the women said and will use this information to tell the French maid he is in love with in order to win her favours!
Scene 3. Lady Fancyful’s house
Mademoiselle has told Lady Fancyful that her own paramour is Rasor from Lord Brute’s household i.e. she is the paramour Rasor was talking about a a moment ago. Lady Fancyful tells Mademoiselle to tell Rasor to tell Lord Brute everything that happened in the Spring Garden, masks, making love, kissing and all i.e. to betray Lady Brute’s adultery to him.
Exit Lady Fancyful. Enter Rasor who rushes over and snogs Mademoiselle, and then dangles his news in front of her, demanding kisses before he tells her everything he overheard i.e. Lady Brute loves Constant, the trio hiding in the closet, Lady Brute conspiring to help Belinda marry Heartfree.
But then Mademoiselle, conversely, dangles her news in front of him, demanding kisses as she tells him about the couple meeting in Spring Walk. She gets Rasor quite worked up and, for more ‘favours’, demands that he goes back and tells his master (Sir John) all she has revealed. He exits.
However, only seconds later, Lady Fancyful enters and regrets her course of action. It will probably lead to Belinda and Heartfree getting married, which is the last thing she wants. She tells Mademoiselle to call Rasor back!
Scene 4. Constant’s lodgings
It is, by now, the next morning. Heartfree and Constant are pondering how to talk Sir John out of his suspicions at finding the pair of them in his wife’s closet when a letter arrives. It’s from the ladies who say explain their Cunning Plan i.e. to tell Sir John the couple were hiding because of Heartfree and Belinda’s secret intention to get married, which they wished to keep hid.
Good plan, but Heartfree is reluctant and it leads to an extended dialogue about fidelity in marriage (that old, old, old chestnut).
Scene 5. Sir John Brute’s house
Constant and Heartfree rendezvous with Lady Brute and Belinda. Belinda asks Heartfree how he fancies the idea of matrimony and he says it’s a leap in the dark but he’s prepared to risk it (hardly young love).
Enter Sir John who is not unnaturally quite rude about finding two strange men in his wife’s closet. But Constant quickly rises to defend Lady Brute’s virtue and discovers (as Heartfree had told him) that the coward Sir John quickly backs down.
Sir John soliloquises, declaring he’s never loved his wife and she’s never loved him, he doesn’t know why she married him, and lamenting that he is without doubt a cuckold to the young stallion in front of him, who has threatened to draw his sword. The choice comes down to dying a hero or living a rascal. Oh well…
And so he gives his hand to Constant and, when Heartfree asks for the hand of Belinda, willingly gives it – all the while cursing and damning them both as dogs!
Two revelations
Meanwhile, Lady Fancyful has crept in in disguise, takes Belinda aside and reveals – in disguise – that she is an anonymous woman who is already married to Heartfree who made her swear not to tell anyone or he’d murder her! With wild improbability, instead of spotting this as a scam, clever Belinda is depicted as believing it and herself betrayed by Heartfelt’s bigamy.
At the same time a servant hands Heartfree an anonymous letter, supposedly from ‘a friend’, claiming the author has slept with Belinda, had a child by her and another is on the way!
Thus when Constant turns to ask the happy couple if they want to send for a priest, they both burst out with bitter accusations of the other, insisting the wedding be delayed, and start to chase each other round the stage!
Rasor, the servant, watching this, laments his part in their downfall and decides to set all right. He exits and returns a) dressed in sackcloth as a repentant b) pulling in Lady Fancyful and Madamoiselle.
He undoes all the complications of the plot. he tells the cast that Lady Fancyful lied in the anonymous letter as from a woman who was married to Heartfree; that the letter claiming Belinda was ever made pregnant was also a lie; and he tells Sir John that no illicit activity took place before the closet scene i.e. he is not a cuckold.
Rasor sets all straight and miserably apologises to the whole cast.
Belinda and Sir John ask who made him do it? Rasor claims he did it, he fell like Adam, out of Lust. Who was his Eve? He pulls off the mask of Mademoiselle. The company gasp! But behind her was the snake, Satan. Rasor pulls off the mask of Lady Fancyful!! The company gasp again!!
ALL: Lady Fancyful!
BELINDA: Impertinent!
LADY BRUTE: Ridiculous!
ALL: Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!
Lady Fancyful tries to put a brave face on it till the end, claiming that Belinda and Heartfree will make such a wretched couple she was doing them a favour – then pompously exits, followed by Mademoiselle.
Heartree and Belinda promptly forgive each other and prepare to go to church. Constant interrupts to sing a love song which, inappropriately, describes the sad fate of an innocent maid in ancient Greece who lets herself be ravished then is abandoned by her lover. Hmmm. In the last six lines Belinda and Heartfree say, nonetheless, they’ll risk it, and:
HEARTFREE: Then let’s to Church: And if it be our Chance to disagree——
BELINDA: Take heed—the surly Husband’s Fate you see.
Constant and Lady Brute are, however, no further forward in their love affair. It is an oddly muted and almost sad finale.
Thoughts
This play isn’t as good as The Relapse because a) its central the monster figure, Lady Fancyful, isn’t as epically monstrous as Lord Foppington was in that play, and b) there is something cramped and melancholy about the frustrated love of Constant and Lady Brute.
Unless I’m missing something, they don’t even speak in the finale, let alone get anywhere near marrying – for that would overthrow the premise of the play which is Lady Brute’s solid virtue.
Articles about The Provoked Wife describe it as ‘a talk play’ or even a ‘problem play’ i.e. one designed to prompt discussion of the ‘issues’ by the audience. I hazard the suggestion that this is to over-credit theatre audiences as moral philosophers rather than as, well, people out for a night’s entertainment.
If you went for dinner after seeing the play, in the middle class tradition. possibly one line of chat would be to discuss the rights and wrongs of Lady Brute’s behaviour – which is certainly complex. My opinion would be that she made the same mistake so many women do (I say this because I listened a few days ago to a radio news item about the new legislation being brought in to help battered wives in which the same way of thinking came up again and again) – that she could change a brute. She had an over-high opinion of her ability to change someone, and an under-real understanding of how difficult it is to change anybody. (I speak as the father of two teenagers who I have been trying to persuade to get up before noon and tidy their own rooms for what seems like several hundred years.) Changing people’s behaviour is hard; changing their character almost impossible.
So is she right to reject Constant and remain in her unhappy marriage? It certainly feels wrong to have played Constant along as far as she did, if she has no real intention of leaving her husband.
But in my opinion, the real talking point of the play is that it is marred. In a number of ways it doesn’t quite come off, it feels unfinished, it feels like it needed one more draft to make it mesh.
The most obvious aspect of this is the way the traditional ‘blocker’ of the happy marriage of the young couple doesn’t evolve organically from the setup but is introduced only at the end of the final act (Lady Fancyful’s scheme to discredit Heartfree and Belinda)… and then is promptly undone about two minutes later. These plays veer close to being farces, and this last minute complication and last second resolution feel stuck on with sellotape.
And the ad hoc, last-minute feel of the Complication goes some way to undermining the comic grandeur of Lady Fancyful. She has such epic comic promise in the first half, that we feel her determination to outdo Belinda and grab Heartfree for herself deserved some grander, wilder, more elaborate Scheme.
So maybe it is to some extent the ‘issues’ which it deals with which give The Provoked Wife its rather chewy, problematic flavour. But it is also the way the entire plot structure feels a little undercooked and leaves you feeling somehow cheated.
Vanbrugh’s style
That said, Vanbrugh’s prose style again shows itself much more clear, direct, comprehensible and therefore more obviously funny, than many of the other comedies I’ve read. This quote isn’t particularly funny, I give it as an example of his clarity.
BELINDA: Sure it must feel very strange to go to Bed to a Man.
LADY BRUTE: Um – it does feel a little odd at first; but it will soon grow easy to you.
‘A little odd’, I was just struck by the perfect naturalness of a phrase which we still use 320 years later.
Here’s another example.
BELINDA: And some careful Thoughts on your own, I believe, have hindered you from sleeping. Pray how does this matrimonial Project relish with you?
HEARTFREE: Why, ‘faith, e’en as storming Towns does with Soldiers, where the Hope of delicious Plunder banishes the Fear of being knock’d on the Head.
Hmm. Maybe what I like about it is its lack of subtlety and sophistication. Possibly I am not sophisticated enough to appreciate the more recherché and long-winded texts. Whatever the reason, I think there’s no denying Vanbrugh’s style is pithier, his phrasing more direct and accessible than his contemporaries.
Sir John Brute has a handy quote which sums up the thing I’m talking about, the way many characters in other Restoration comedies express themselves in such lengthy and convoluted phraseology, sometimes mixed up with legal or specialised jargon, that you need notes to understand them – and that the characters sometimes don’t even understand each other!
SIR JOHN BRUTE: Your People of Wit have got such cramp ways of expressing themselves, they seldom comprehend one another.
In my view, Vanbrugh is never like that. He is always lucid and forceful in his expressions.
(After writing that, I read the Wikipedia article which explains that The Relapse was deliberately phrased simply and bluntly ‘to be suitable for amateurs and minor acting talent’, but that The Provoked Wife was written for more versatile professionals including leading actors of the day, and so is deliberately more emotionally subtle. That may be true, especially the scenes in which Lady Brute and Belinda, or Constant and Heartfree, discuss the emotional subtleties of their situations – but I don’t think it disproves my basic point that, even in those situations, Vanbrugh has a gift for clarity of expression unmatched by his rivals.)
Misandry
BELINDA: Well, you Men are unaccountable things, mad till you have your Mistresses, and then stark mad till you are rid of ’em again. Tell me honestly, Is not your Patience put to a much severer Trial after Possession than before?
HEARTFREE: With a great many I must confess it is, to our eternal Scandal;
Misogyny
LADY BRUTE: We are as wicked, Child, but our Vice lies another way: Men have more Courage than we, so they commit more bold, impudent Sins. They quarrel, fight, swear, drink, blaspheme, and the like: Whereas we, being Cowards, only backbite, tell Lyes, cheat at Cards, and so forth.
As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, in my opinion these formulations aren’t intended to be the statement of some great philosophy or worldview, the reverse. They are the social clichés and stereotypes of their day, bromides and truisms which have little or no value as statements of fact, but are the oil which lubricates the complicated machinery of the comic plots.
HEARTFREE: I shou’d have, if I had a good Opinion enough of her’s, to believe she cou’d do as much by me. For to do ’em right, after all, the Wife seldom rambles, till the Husband shews her the way.
CONSTANT: ‘Tis true, a Man of real Worth scarce ever is a Cuckold, but by his own Fault. Women are not naturally lewd; there must be something to urge ’em to it. They’ll cuckold a Churl, out of Revenge; a Fool, because they despise him; a Beast, because they loath him. But when they make bold with a Man they once had a well-grounded Value for, ’tis because they first see themselves neglected by him.
You can choose to read this stuff as meaningful and so be upset by the way it transgresses our 21st century woke values. Or you can see it as the verbiage and small change of conversation which is required to make the plays go.
Books & Boots 
mshirniagmailcom
/ September 15, 2020I read somewhere (and am cursing that I cannot remember where) that Vanbrugh wrote two endings to this play. The first was considered so outrageous that he changed it to the one we have today. This may explain the ‘stuck on’ sense you get regarding the ending. I just wish I could remember where I read this!!!