All posts tagged cuckold

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

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

The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)

BELLMORE: Come, come, leave business to idlers and wisdom to fools; they have need of ’em. Wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation; and let Father Time shake his glass.

In his lengthy reply to the stinging criticisms of the contemporary stage contained in the polemical pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage written by the bishop and theologian Jeremy Collier, William Congreve tells us that he wrote his first play, The Old Bachelor, while recovering from ‘a fit of sickness’ aged just 19! It’s an astonishing achievement for one so young.

A few years later, in 1692, young William arrived in London and showed The Old Bachelor to the leading literary figure of the day, John Dryden who, with typical generosity, declared he had never seen such a good first play in his life, but that it needed a bit of work cutting down to length and re-ordering some of the scenes.

Once revised, The Old Bachelor was promptly accepted by the only theatre company then performing in London, the United Company, and opened in March 1693. It was a smash-hit and had an extraordinary run of fourteen nights, which was getting on for a record for a Restoration comedy; some new plays ran for the bare minimum of three nights!

If you think about it, these incredibly short runs tell you everything about the size of the audience for these plays. It was minuscule. Was it even in the thousands? And this puts in context the many prologues and epilogues to the plays. Often the playwright and the actors knew key members of the audience personally, and so were directly addressing known individuals in the prologues and epilogues.

The Old Bachelor‘s success was in part attributed to the skilful performances of veteran performers Thomas Betterton and Anne Bracegirdle in the roles of Heartwell and Araminta, respectively.

I was startled to learn in a footnote that the music for the play was composed by Henry Purcell.

Cast list

I find the cast lists of these plays not only useful, but sometimes amusing – the comic names and descriptions – in their own right:

MEN
Heartwell, a surly old bachelor, pretending to slight women, secretly in love with Silvia
Bellmour, in love with Belinda
Vainlove, capricious in his love; in love with Araminta
Sharper
Sir Joseph Wittol
Captain Bluffe
Fondlewife, a banker
Setter, a pimp
Tribulation Spintext, a Puritan preacher (who never actually appears in the play)
Mr Gavot, musician to Araminta
Servant to Fondlewife.

WOMEN.
Araminta, in love with Vainlove
Belinda, her cousin, an affected lady, in love with Bellmour
Lætitia, wife to Fondlewife
Sylvia, Vainlove’s forsaken mistress
Lucy, maid to Sylvia
Betty, maid to Belinda

It’s all set in London. As I’ve read more of the plays, I’ve realised that Aphra Behn’s setting her most successful play, The Rover, in Italy, is by far the exception not the rule of Restoration comedy. Almost all the comedies are set in the same city and the same time as the audience. They are completely contemporary.

Act 1

Bellmour and Vainlove are two weary rakes. Vainlove likes seducing women but is easily bored and actively dislikes it if they come on to him. He goes to show Bellmour but gives him the wrong one by mistake, it is a letter from Vainlove’s recently spurned lover, Sylvia, reproving him for abandoning her. It then comes out that Bellmour slept with her, apparently in disguise so she didn’t realise who he was! But she sincerely loves Vainlove and he has dumped her.

Next Vainlove gives Bellmour the letter he’d intended to show him, a love letter from Laetitia, the wife of the comic character Fondlewife – he paid her a few polite compliments and now she’s sent him a damn love letter telling him her husband will be out of town on business and to come and see her in disguise. He asks Bellmour to do him a favour and do it for him – but Laetitia’s lovely says Bellmour – yes, but I hate being forced into an affair, complains Vainlove. They discuss getting Vainlove’s tailor, Settler, to provide a disguise for Bellmour. They briefly discuss the feeble character of the husband, Fondlewife, then Vainlove leaves ‘on business’.

Bellmour complains that he is already in love with one woman, has a dozen or so mistresses, and now Vainlove is suggesting he take on his beloved, God it’s an exhausting business, being a libertine! He says this in the form of a soliloquy, alone onstage, at which point enter Sharper, whose role is to provide comic asides, and start with a good line:

SHARPER: I’m sorry to see this, Ned. Once a man comes to his soliloquies, I give him for gone.

Enter Heartwell who they both mock for being a grumpy old misanthropist who doesn’t believe in love. Heartwell in turn mocks Bellmour and Vainlove for expending so much energy in the pursuit of women, and has a particularly cynical speech about how, when you’ve finally gone through all this faradiddle in order to get married, your baby will end up looking like half the aristocracy of England because your wife will have been unfaithful with them all. Visitors coo and tickle the baby and say:

‘Ay, the boy takes after his mother’s relations,’ when the devil and she knows ’tis a little compound of the whole body of nobility.

Heartwell leaves ‘on business’ and Bellmour spots two stock comic characters, Sir Joseph Wittol, a foolish knight, and his companion, the cowardly bully, Captain Bluffe, who he points out to Sharper. Bellmour explains that the night before he came across Wittol being set upon by footpads and freed him, though Wittol ran off without identifying his rescuer.

Act 2 scene 1

Sharper follows Sir Joseph to the location where he was mugged the night before, then pretends to be his mysterious rescuer but says that, alas, he lost a hundred pounds in the affray, and starts trying to dun Sir Joseph for it. This blustering old fool is trying to find a way out, when his sidekick and defender turns up, the swaggering blustering bully Captain Bluffe, and there is a richly comic scene of Sharper egging both men on to silly heights of boasting and braggartry, Bluffe in particular being scandalised that his heroic escapades in the recent wars don’t seem to have been reported in the news gazettes!

Act 2 scene 2

Araminta, in love with Vainlove, squabbles with her cousin Belinda, who affects to despise men –

BELINDA: Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.

But is secretly in love with Bellmour. Araminta says Belinda dreamed of Bellmour last night, called out his name and embraced her (Araminta) as if she was him. Stuff and nonsense, cries Belinda, and calls her servant to prepare her things to go out, but at that moment a servant announces that Bellmour and Vainlove are visiting. After some indecision, Belinda decides to stay after all, in order to protect her cousin’s reputation, of course – though her cousin teases her it’s solely to see Bellmour.

Prolonged repartee during which all sides wittily cap each other’s allusions and barbs, with generalised sententiae about love and devotion. Araminta emerges as the quickest-witted of them – all of these plays feature one strong, determined and clever woman. There is a passage of particularly barbed banter between Bellmour who extravagantly paints his devotion and Belinda who scorns him. In fact when he asks her what she can do for her, she says shut up, which leads to a comic sequence where Bellmour continues his conversation in sign language until Belinda is so exasperated she lets him speak again.

Their musician, Mr Gavot, performs a song Araminta has written. This happens in most of the plays. Did Restoration aristocrats write songs this glibly and easily for their lady loves or is it purely a theatrical convention?

Act 3 scene 1

Sylvia is the woman Vainlove has jilted, and Lucy is her maid who, as so often, impertinently tells her boss the true state of affairs, namely that Vainlove will never love her again. Sylvia is consumed with envy for her love rival, Araminta, but Lucy says she has a Plan to fix that – send Vainlove a cloying letter as if from Araminta – a woman’s enthusiasm always puts Vainlove off.

LUCY: Contrive a kind letter as from her, ’twould disgust his nicety, and take away his stomach.

Meanwhile, here comes Heartwell – Lucy encourages Sylvia to make the best of a bad job and hook him. Soon she’ll be old. She needs to get a husband before she can.

Vainlove and Bellmour have tailed Heartwell to Sylvia’s house. They watch as the ageing foo hesitates whether to in or not and commit himself to the snare of womanhood. He does, as Bellmour and Vainlove stifle their mirth. Then Vainlove’s tailor, Setter, arrives: he has prepared a full set of clothes which allow Bellmour to masquerade as the earnest Puritan preacher Spintext.

Bellmour tells Setter to meet him with the costume later and exits. Setter launches into a comically high-minded speech about the relative merits of a manservant and a pimp. Lucy comes upon him and, as so often, a lead male character’s manservant is in love with a lead woman’s maidservant, their working class love affair echoing their betters’ affair but more crudely.

Congreve gives this kind of set scene an extra spin by having Lucy put on a face mask before talking to Setter and, given that his soliloquy was already laughably pretentious, the couple then launch into a parody of highfalutin’ tragedy, complete with what were obviously obscure and archaic words to convey their eminence and lofty sentiments. Lucy extracts from Setter that his master will be in Covent Garden later, then manages to get away without being covered in slobbery kisses.

Wittoll and Bluffe enter. Bluffe is cross that Sir Joseph has given Sharper £100, and works himself up into a fury of vengeance, declaring that if only Sharper were here, he would take his revenge and… at that precise moment Sharper and Bellmour appear onstage and Bluffe performs a comic blustering retreat. Sharper quickly detects how angry they are with him but also what cowards they are – and so takes to kicking Wittoll and beating Bluffe who swears he will have vengeance, but not now, not here, it’s too public and various other excuses.

Sharper and Bellmour exeunt laughing.

Act 3 Scene 2 Silvia’s lodgings

Enter Heartwell, the ageing anti-love exponent, the old bachelor of the title, and Sylvia, Vainlove’s jilted lover. Heartwell has laid on a dance, music and the performance of a song to impress Silvia. He then jangles his purse full of gold coins at her. His wooing of her is done in the higher, more poetic style the play occasionally drops into. Heartwell combines high-flown rhetoric with emotional clumsiness, for example offering to buy Sylvia outright. But when she beings to talk about marriage, he is suddenly very reluctant to marry her – because he thinks marriage is a fool’s estate – suggesting instead that she become his licensed mistress. Which makes Sylvia cry that she doesn’t want to live as a whore and burst into tears.

But when he finally leaves, after grabbing a few kisses, Sylvia turns to the audience and says:

SILVIA: Ha, ha, ha, an old fox trapped –

Suggesting that everything she said in their scene together, all the sighs and tears, were a ploy, a trap to get him to marry her, to get her hands on his money. (Money is never far from the surface of these plays; they reveal what a major role it plays in human relationships.)

Sylvia’s servant Lucy enters and says she’s contrived a letter to Vainlove as if from Amarinta which will wreck their love.

Act 4 scene 1

Bellmour dressed up as the Puritan Spintext:

BELLMOUR: I wonder why all our young fellows should glory in an opinion of atheism, when they may be so much more conveniently lewd under the coverlet of religion.

Exits. Enter Fondlewife who, in a soliloquy, reveals he is jealous of his beautiful young wife, Laetitia. Then a scene in which he suspects her of adultery and she, in comic asides, reveals she is frightened he knows her true intent i.e. to be unfaithful with Vainlove, whilst to Fondlewife’s face playing the aggrieved wife. They both use baby talk which makes the scene more funny. Finally, she manages, with umpteen kisses, to pack him off on the overnight journey he’s taking on ‘business’.

It is an important fact that Fondlewife has arranged for a chaplain or preacher to be with her and instruct her while he is away. This is the content of the letter she had sent to Vainlove and which he showed Bellmour right at the start of the play i.e. ‘my husband is going away for the night, come in the disguise of a preacher.’

Vainlove and Sharper. They read the letter they’ve been sent, as from Amarinta, but in fact by Lucy. She has done her work well, correctly predicting that by making Amarinta come on strong, puts Vainlove off her:

VAINLOVE: I hate to be crammed. By heaven, there’s not a woman will give a man the pleasure of a chase: my sport is always balked or cut short. I stumble over the game I would pursue. ’Tis dull and unnatural to have a hare run full in the hounds’ mouth, and would distaste the keenest hunter. I would have overtaken, not have met, my game.

So they plan to meet Amarinta at Covent Garden that evening, but Vainlove will now spurn her. (Sharper thinks he’s a fool.)

Act 4 Scene 2

Bellmour, in disguise as Spintext the preacher, is shown into Mrs Fondlewife i.e. Laetitia’s rooms. No sooner has the servant left before he throws off his disguise and reveals himself to Laetitia who feigns shock and surprise, mainly because she was expecting Vainlove. But the scene is devoted to showing Bellmour’s formidable seduction technique as he slowly wins her round and by the end, by pretending to have a fainting fit, he gets her to agree he can lie on her bed to recover, and they exeunt into her bedroom.

Act 4 scene 3 St James’s Park

Setting for the afternoon rambles of the layabout aristocracy. Enter Belinda and Amarinta. It is much more obvious that Belinda is meant to be pretentious and affected and tells Amarinta how she took it upon herself to correct the manners of a country family up in town for the first time.

They put on masks as Sir Joseph Wittoll and the boasting soldier Captain Bluffe approach and there is some comic banter before the ladies spy Vainlove approaching, and tell the two buffoons to bugger off, although Sir Joseph realises Amarinta is heiress to a vast fortune and tells us in an aside he’d like to marry her.

The point of the scene is for Amarinta and Vainlove to be left alone, so he can act cold and in a roundabout way berate her for the letter she sent him. But since she didn’t send him the letter, she has no idea what is going on and quickly becomes angry, storming off.

Act 4 scene 4 Fondlewife’s house

Bellmour and Laetitia have had sex and emerge from the bedroom to hear Fondlewife’s voice coming up the stairs. Bellmour gathers up the preacher costume and Laetitia bundles him into the bedroom before opening the door to Fondlewife and Sir Joseph.

In this farcical scene, Fondlewife announces that he needs to go into the bedroom to collect the papers he forgot to take for his ‘business’ and Laetitia desperately tries to think up pretexts to stop him, at one point bundling into Sir John when Fondlewife’s back is turned and claiming the old bodger tried to molest her; which Fondlewife believes and pushes Sir John out the door with vivid Biblical imprecations.

But Fondlewife is still determined to enter the bedroom (where Bellmour is hiding) and so Laetitia suddenly has a brainwave and tells her husband the preacher came round and was giving her lessons in piety but had an attack of stomach ache and is lying on the bed. Fondlewife buys this, tiptoes into the bedroom, sees the form of Bellmour on the bed, gets his papers and tiptoes out, telling Laetitia they must get the maid to look after the poor preacher when… he sees the book. A book on the floor. The book Bellmour brought with him. And is it a book of devotion and piety? No. Fondlewife picks it up and realises that it is a French novel, The Innocent Adultery! No priest would carry this. Bellmour is busted!

Angrily, Fondlewife calls for the unknown man to come out of the bedroom, while Laetitia pleads she has no idea who he is or what he was doing there, wretched please which Fondlewife now brusquely dismisses.

But this scene turns into a further demonstration of Bellmour’s mastery as he manages to outface the situation. He comes out of the bedroom and confronts Fondlewife, declaring he is a whoremaster who pinched Spintext’s costume, then pretended to have colic in order to lie on her bed and was about to call her in when Fondlewife appeared – so he never got as far as seducing Laetitia.

Bellmour exudes confidence. Laetitia talks babytalk to Fondlewife. The latter softens. She faints. He believes her. Thus gullible husbands.

Act 5 scene 1 The street

Bellmour meets up with Setter and tells him the disguise worked a treat. Then they both see Heartwell arriving at Silvia’s house. Setter exits and Bellmour chats up Lucy, Silvia’s maid, with a kiss (seems like she’s one his many conquests) and some money, and asks her to keep up the pretence that he is a preacher, so he can marry the silly couple.

Enter Vainlove, Sharper and Setter. Setter tells them that the letter which upset Vainlove, the letter pretending to come from Amarinta, was in fact concocted by vengeful Silvia. This clears the way for Vainlove to be back in love with Amarinta!

The final scenes get confusing. Bellmour in the guise of the preacher falsely marries Heartwell and Silvia, then takes her aside, reveals his true identity and promises he will find her a better husband. He pops back into the street and tells Setter and Sharper to keep their eyes peeled for a replacement husband then exits. At this point Sir John and Captain Bluffe come along.

Setter and Sharper then have a whole series of machinations, some of which happen in whispers, or offstage, in some of which they pretend information to dupe Sir John and the Captain, and also Heartwell who Sharper appears to torment by dragging him towards his own house, promising him a fine young wench who’s up for a shag… until Heartwell realises it’s the wife he’s just married that Sharper is talking about. I got lost in the maze. I read this passage a couple of times and still didn’t understand the ins and outs. Partly because they don’t clearly state what they’re planning to do, they disappear into corners to mutter with the people they’re gulling…the schemes they’re cooking up only become clear as they emerge in the final scene.

In the penultimate passage, Bellmour and Belinda, Vainlove and Amarinta, are invited to Heartwell’s house. Somehow Sharper has got Silvia out of the house and conspired to convince Heartwell that his wife of half an hour is already off whoring. The four leads tease Heartwell about his stupidity in marrying and his cuckolded state: Belinda in particular emerges as sharp tongued and witty.

As Eric Rump points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition, this tormenting of Heartwell amounts to bullying and triggers him to give a speech which echoes Shylock’s in The Merchant of Venice:

HEARTWELL: How have I deserved this of you? any of ye? Sir, have I impaired the honour of your house, promised your sister marriage, and whored her? Wherein have I injured you? Did I bring a physician to your father when he lay expiring, and endeavour to prolong his life, and you one and twenty? Madam, have I had an opportunity with you and baulked it? Did you ever offer me the favour that I refused it?

At moments like this does the comedy topple into something much more serious, into something momentarily closer to tragedy? Is it that much more serious precisely because it emerges from comedy, rather than one of the era’s over-wrought tragedies?

Eric Rump points out that the role of Heartwell – the Old Bachelor of the title – was taken by Thomas Betterton, the ‘Laurence Olivier of his day’, who also played tragic leads and so would have given the role more depth and seriousness than a purely comic actor. However you judge the effect, it is extremely impressive of Congreve to have touched this deeper nerve when he was barely into his twenties.

Anyway, our boys and girls goad Heartwell into declaring he will do anything to be rid of his married state, which is what they’re conspiring for all along – and we, the audience, know that he is not in fact married at all, since the ceremony was carried out by Bellmour in disguise.

On the last three pages the elaborate scam is revealed. Sharper and Settle have married Sir John and Captain Bluffe to two women they thought were Amarinta and Belinda – except they aren’t. The real Amarinta and Belinda now take their masks off to reveal themselves – to the two braggart soldiers’ shock and surprise – and when they turn to the women they have married – they reveal themselves as Silvia and Lucy.

SIR JOHN: Pray, madam, who are you? For I find you and I are like to be better acquainted.
SILVIA: The worst of me is, that I am your wife—

So Lucy is married to Captain Bluffe – who announces he will no more to the wars – Silvia is married to the insufferable Sir John, but does at least acquire a title. And Heartwell breathes a huge sigh of relief to realise he isn’t married after all.

And Bellmour – with the abrupt reversal in attitude for which these plays are notorious – declares he is happy to acquire the fetters of marriage with acid-tongued Belinda. It only remains for Vainlove to marry Amarinta and all the loose ends are tied up but Bellmour notices Vainlove, given his contrary psychology, showing signs of reluctance to marry her and so announces that he and Belinda will get married first the next morning, to set an example to Vainlove and Araminta.

Then there’s the traditional music and dancing.

Animal imagery

There’s a lot of animal imagery. Vainlove is referred to as an ass, Bellmour an ape and a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Heartwell an old fox, Sir John a lion, women as hares to be hunted or partridges to be covered, cuckolded men are like stags with horns. The references add colourful imagery to the endless truisms about love and marriage and adultery.

Maybe they link to Belinda’s comment about ‘filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man’, but I don’t see that there’s anything very deep going on here. All the Restoration comedies are based on a worldview which sees human beings as amoral animals devoted to quenching animal drives, lust being topmost, but also drunkenness and gluttony, and using their God-given minds not to seek a devout and spiritual life, but to concoct fantastically complicated schemes for their own debauchery.

SIR JOSEPH: Nay, Gad, I’ll pick up; I’m resolved to make a night on’t… Adslidikins, bully, we’ll wallow in wine and women. Why, this same Madeira wine has made me as light as a grasshopper.

Quite often, reading these plays, you can sympathise with Bishop Collier and his characterisation of the plays as deliberately encouraging lust, avarice, greed, gluttony, jealousy, anger and sometimes violence.

VAINLOVE: Why did you not find me out, to tell me this before, sot?
SETTER: Sir, I was pimping for Mr. Bellmour.
SHARP: You were well employed.

More noticeable is Congreve’s way with extended metaphors, or with a metaphor which allows him to bring in colourful imagery. Thus at the very opening Bellmour has a little speech which in four clauses contains four images from the game of bowls:

BELLMOUR: Business is the rub of life, perverts our aim, casts off the bias, and leaves us wide and short of the intended mark.

This is so contrived I wonder if the actor paused and waited for a ripple of applause from the audience at the author’s cleverness.

At the start of Act Five, Bellmour bumps into Setter who asks him how things went in the plot to have sex with Laetitia, and both of them jokily use an extended naval metaphor to describe the result:

SETTER: Joy of your return, sir. Have you made a good voyage? or have you brought your own lading back?
BELLMOUR: No, I have brought nothing but ballast back – made a delicious voyage, Setter; and might have rode at anchor in the port till this time, but the enemy surprised us – I would unrig.

So Bellmour has unloaded his cargo.

Misandry

Woke modern critics attack the Restoration comedies for their misogyny e.g. Sharper describing Araminta as:

a delicious melon, pure and consenting ripe, and only waits thy cutting up.

But it seems to me that all the characters, regardless of gender, age or class, manipulate and denigrate each other on the basis of an utterly heartless and cynical worldview. And for every dismissive generalisation the men make about women, the women make one about men, and the aristocrats make about their servants, and the servants make about their stupid masters.

BELINDA: Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.
LUCY: Man was by nature woman’s cully made:
HEARTWELL: Lying, child, is indeed the art of love, and men are generally masters in it
ARAMINTA to VAINLOVE: Thou hadst all the treachery and malice of thy sex

The plays may contain umpteen libels against women, but the biggest indictment is how the men talk and behave and Belinda has a vivid little speech about how, in the end, disappointing men are, after all the impressive wooing, once you actually marry them.

BELINDA:Thou art so troublesome a lover, there’s hopes thou’lt make a more than ordinary quiet husband.
BELLMOUR: Is that a maxim among ye?
BELINDA: Yes: you fluttering men of the mode have made marriage a mere French dish… You are so curious in the preparation, that is, your courtship, one would think you meant a noble entertainment – but when we come to feed, ’tis all froth, and poor, but in show. Nay, often, only remains, which have been I know not how many times warmed for other company, and at last served up cold to the wife.

The exhausted libertine

I think it’s Dorimant in The Man of Mode that critics point out sounds tired – or is it Belvile in The Rover? The point is that many of the plays start with the leading male character sounding exhausted.

Now, the critics I read appear to take this at face value as an indictment of the libertine lifestyle as a whole, as if the plays are observational documentaries. But something in Bellmour’s final words in this play made me realise there’s a simpler and less moralising interpretation.

Structurally, all the plays end with the lead characters marrying and many critics have pointed out the complete lack of psychological verisimilitude involved in witty, cynical characters who’ve spent four acts slagging off marriage as an institution for stubborn fools – suddenly decide marriage is a wonderful state and enter into it with boundless enthusiasm.

Seen from this perspective, the trope of the tired libertine makes more sense. It stands to reason that, in preparation for this last act about-face, hints should be dropped right from the start that the lead libertine is actually quite tired of his life of endless seduction and is, in fact, teetering on the brink of abandoning it.

And therefore that the male lead’s expression of these thoughts and feelings have little or no moral or psychological content, but are a structural necessity of the form, as formulaic as most other aspects of the plays.

In fact, almost all these Restoration comedies can be reinterpreted as the final acts in the libertine’s long career. They’re all plays about Life Changes and Conversions.

Reviews of other Restoration plays

The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1675)
The Man of Mode by George Etheredge (1676)
The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)
The Rover by Aphra Behn (1677)
The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)
The Double Dealer by Congreve (1693)
Love For Love by William Congreve (1695)
The Relapse by John Vanbrugh (1696)
The Provoked Wife by Sir John Vanbrugh (1697)
The Way of The World by William Congreve (1700)

Books & Boots

All posts tagged cuckold

Volpone or The Fox by Ben Jonson (1606)

Volpone

Cast

Animal imagery in Volpone

Act 1

Act 2

Act 3

Act 4

Act 5

Thoughts

Related links

Jacobean comedies

Elizabethan art

17th century history

Restoration comedies

Share this:

Like this:

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

Cast

Eastward Ho! plot summary

Bad tastes

The quality of justice

Related links

Elizabethan comedies

Art

Restoration comedies

17th century history

Share this:

Like this:

The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)

Cast list

Act 1

Act 2 scene 1

Act 2 scene 2

Act 3 scene 1

Act 3 Scene 2 Silvia’s lodgings

Act 4 scene 1

Act 4 Scene 2

Act 4 scene 3 St James’s Park

Act 4 scene 4 Fondlewife’s house

Act 5 scene 1 The street

Animal imagery

Misandry

The exhausted libertine

Related links

Reviews of other Restoration plays

Share this:

Like this:

Follow

Topics

Categories