All posts tagged Moliere

Aulularia (The Pot of Gold) by Plautus (c.200 BC)

Aulularia or the Pot of Gold

Aulularia literally means little pot but this play’s title is most often translated into English as ‘Pot of Gold’. It’s a classic ‘new comedy’ in that it is entirely domestic in focus and revolves around an obstructive father blocking a happy marriage of the younger generation although, as you’ll see, the focus is really on the psychological problems of the father, namely his monomaniacal miserliness, rather than his blocking tactics.

All the other characters are really incidental to milking the comic potential of this one obsessive old man. Thus the young ‘hero’ only appears three times and his daughter, Phaedria, the love interest, never appears at all, we just hear one line of her from inside Euclio’s house as she cries out in labour, something I was surprised by in this play but, once I came to read the same event occurring in other Plautus plays and even in plays by Terence, I came to realise was a stock convention.

From a translation/editorial point of view the most notable thing about this edition is that the editor, E.F. Watling, himself wrote i.e. invented, the final quarter of the play, which is missing from all manuscripts.

The plot

Prologue by Lar familiaris

Euclio is an old man and miser. His house is protected by a household god, Lar Familiaris, who knew his grandfather and father. This household god gives a prologue in which he explains that the grandfather was a miser who buried a pot of gold in the house. His son inherited the house but was mean and tight-fisted so the household god didn’t reveal his secret to him. When he died his son inherited, the current owner of the house, Euclio. He also is a tightwad, but his grown up daughter, Phaedria, is lovely to the god and brings offerings to his shrine almost every day and so the spirit has just revealed the pot of gold to Euclio solely so that the latter has a dowry with which his daughter can be married off.

For good measure, the household god tells us that she is already in love with the stereotypical handsome young man, Lyconides, that in fact they’ve slept together already. The god’s plan is for the old neighbour, the bachelor Megadorus, to propose marriage to Euclio, which will put the young man, Lyconides’s proposal in a favourable light and make it more likely to be accepted.

But in the short term the problem is that the discovery of a stash of gold in his house, far from delighting Euclio, has turned him into an over-sensitive, paranoid bundle of nerves, petrified that other people will discover it, steal it, are talking about it and conspiring behind his back. It is, he tells us, driving him off his head with worry (p.15).

Introducing Euclio

Which explains why the first scene opens with Euclio barging his elderly female slave Staphyla into the street and accusing her of spying on him. He threatens to beat her, send her to the gallows or poke her eyes out (!). She for her part is bewildered by his recent irrational tempers, which will make it all the harder to reveal to him that his daughter is pregnant!

Anyway, Euclio has to hustle off because the head of his ward is distributing a donation (no footnote to explain this, or any other historical references). Euclio is paranoid that if he doesn’t go along to claim his share everyone will realise he is rich, so he scuttles off.

Euclio’s neighbour Megadorus

The set consists of two houses next to each other. Out the front door of the other one emerges Euclio’s neighbour Megadorus being pushed by his sister Eunomia. Megadorus is a genial old confirmed bachelor. However, Eunomia gives him a hard time telling him it’s about time he got married. Megadorus nearly shrieks with horror and they argue. Finally, Megadorus says his sister can stop nagging him because, OK, yes, he will get married and he has his eye on someone – the beautiful daughter of his next door neighbour Euclio. Eunomia grudgingly accepts this and goes back inside.

At this moment along comes Euclio on the way back from his meeting and Megadorus politely greets him and starts chatting. But Euclio is convinced he’s only doing so because he’s heard about the pot of gold or is fishing for it and rudely bustles into his house to check the pot is still there.

Megadorus asks to marry Euclio’s daughter

He returns somewhat reassured, the conversation resumes and Megadorus makes his pitch, asking if he may have Euclio’s daughter’s hand in marriage. Ever paranoid, Euclio is convinced Megadorus, from a well off, high status family, is mocking him. Megadorus is politely trying to reassure him when Euclio hears the clink of a spade and breaks off to go running back into his house, convinced burglars are digging up and stealing the pot of gold.

When Euclio returns for a second time Megadorus reassures him that one of his men is digging in his garden, that must be what he heard. Anyway, does he agree to let him marry his daughter? Euclio does, but on the clear understanding that he is a poor man and so she comes with no dowry. Yes, yes, fine, says Megadorus, and they shake on it. And how about the ceremony? Can it be held later today? Certainly replies Euclio, setting up what will become the main setting or event of the second half, the preparations for a wedding party.

Strobilus and the cooks

We cut to a scene with Megadorus’s steward, Strobilus, who has been to market and returned with all the necessaries for a big feast, including live sheep, some flute-girls (Phrygia and Eleusium) and a couple of argumentative cooks, Anthrax (!) and Congrio. Strobilus has been ordered to split them up, assigning some to Euclio’s house to prepare the wedding feast, so he takes them round, knocks on the door and gets Euclio’s ageing serving woman Staphyla to accept them

Euclio comes home and, finding the door open and people’s voices inside immediately jumps to the conclusion that he’s being robbed. So he rushes inside and starts battering the cook and his assistants with a plank of wood. They all run out shouting, the cook Congrio running down into the audience, asking what the hell Euclio is doing while Euclio stands on stage shouting down at him that he’s a liar and a thief.

He nips back inside and re-emerges with the pot of gold under his cloak. Now he’s holding it he feels more confident and yells at the cook and his assistants to go back into his house and finish their work, which they grumblingly do.

Megadorus on the evils of dowries

Enter Megadorus who delivers an extended soliloquy about the evils of dowries, how a wife that comes with a big dowry expects her husband to treat her and lavish her with services from every kind of women’s parasite, the best clothes, make-up etc. No, there should be a national reform, dowries should be abolished, women should be married with no money so that they are entirely at the mercy and under the thumb of their husbands! (p.30).

Euclio thinks Megadorus must be after his gold

Euclio intrudes on this soliloquy but when Megadorus makes an ambiguous remark about his good fortune Euclio in his paranoia thinks he’s referring to the pot which Euclio is that moment holding under his cloak and becomes rude and angry. But I am sending you a lamb for the feast and cooks and flute girls and a casket of wine, says Megadorus – but Euclio ungratefully criticises each of these items. When Megadorus good humouredly says they’ll get rolling drunk tonight, Euclio in an aside tells the audience Megadorus wants him dead drunk so he can sniff out his gold and steal it. The play really should have been titled The Paranoid.

Well, Megadorus refuses to be made angry and goes into his house, leaving Euclio to tell us that he is going to stash his pot of gold in a shrine which has been onstage all this time, a shrine to Fide, the god of faithfulness. He goes into this little building.

Enter the canny slave

Enter the slave of Lyconides. Lyconides is the handsome son of Eunomia, Megadorus’s sister, making him Megadorus’s nephew. The slave is never given a name. He enters now and gives a little speech about how a good slave is always looking out for his master, anticipating h is needs, and heading off problems before they develop. Lyconides has just heard that his beloved Phaedria is contracted to be married to Megadorus and so has sent the slave to spy out the lie of the land and he takes a seat by on one side of the shrine of Good Faith.

At which point Euclio emerges by the other door from the shrine and gives a little speech explaining that he’s deposited his pot of gold in the shrine where it will be safe, then he heads off for his house. The slave overheard all this. ‘Well, well, well, a pot of gold, eh?’ So he goes into the shrine to find it.

Euclio and the slave fight

But at that moment Euclio comes running back, spooked by a raven which croaked on his left side, a bad omen. He runs into the shrine and of course discovers the slave who he sets about beating and hitting and accusing of being a thief, dragging him out of the shrine and onto the stage, where he fires accusations at him and thoroughly searches under his cloak and under his shirt. But the slave doesn’t actually have the pot, finally extricates himself from Euclio’s clutches and goes off cursing him.

Euclio emerges with the pot of gold and decides he’s going to bury it in a lonely grove of Silvanus outside the walls, and he sets off. The slave overheard this and rejoices, saying he’ll hide, watch where Euclio buries it, then steal it. It’ll serve him right for beating him!

Lyconides and his aunt Eunomia

Enter the young lover Lyconides talking with his mother Eunomia and telling her how much he loves Phaedria. At that moment they both her Phaedria shouting from inside Euclio’s house in her labour pains. She is giving birth! (This is very unlike the traditional comedy idea of the sweet virginal young maiden.) Lyconides begs his other to talk to her brother, Lyconides’ uncle, Megadorus, and see if he can be persuaded not to marry Phaedria after all. Eunomia agrees, and goes into Megadorus’s house to talk to him.

The slave has the pot of gold

Enter the slave bouncing with glee because he did, indeed, follow Euclio, watch him bury his pot of gold and depart, and then stole it. He is holding it now! He hears Euclio approaching and runs off.

Enter Euclio in the utmost misery, out of his mind with unhappiness. He went back to where he’d buried the pot and, of course, discovered it gone. Now he’s run onstage hysterical, and accuses everyone of stealing it, with a lot of fourth wall-breaking interaction with the audience, asking if they’ve stolen it or know who’s stolen it, and where it’s gone etc?

Lyconides asks to marry Euclio’s daughter

At this moment young Lyconides exists his uncle’s house and bumps into Euclio and there is a classic comic misunderstanding. Lyconides mistakenly thinks that Euclio is in such a state because he has discovered his daughter is having a baby, whereas he is of course, distraught about losing the pot of gold.

So there’s a page of comic verbal misunderstanding where Lyconides abjectly apologies for taking what is ‘his’ (Euclio’s) and laying his hands on ‘his property’ and there’s no excuse except he was drunk, and so on – with Lyconides referring to getting drunk and sleeping with Euclio’s daughter while Euclio thinks he’s referring to his gold!

The misunderstanding comes to an end when Euclio demands his property back and Lyconides, of course, can’t give back the girl’s virginity. Now Lyconides announces the startling news that he has persuaded his uncle not to marry Phaedria but to let him, Lyconides, marry her instead. The clinching argument being, of course, that she just happens to be having Lyconides’ baby right now!

Euclio is appalled, and further appalled to learn he will be attending the wedding as a grandfather as Phaedria is giving birth just about now. So off he goes back into his house.

The slave tells Lyconides he has the pot of gold

At which point the slave enters, very pleased with himself. He announces to Lyconides that he’s found a four-pound pot full of gold and stashed it back at their place and – now can he have his freedom?

(It’s worth stopping to reflect how many times slaves do this in Plautus, do a good deed for their masters, discover a fortune or secure the virgo for him – and immediately request their freedom. Did the millions of slaves in the ancient world live in hope of doing the one good deed which persuades their master to free them? Or is this entirely a stock situation and standard sentiment in comic plays – the slave who’s always banging on about being set free?)

Anyway, Lyconides rudely rejects the suggestion at which point the slave abruptly changes his tune and says he was just joking. Lyconides orders him to get the bloody pot of gold but his slave leaps out of his reach and runs off.

Watling’s reconstruction

At this point the original manuscript breaks off and the last eight pages, about a quarter of the Penguin text, has been ‘reconstructed’ by Watling. In his introduction he explains that manuscripts of plays by Plautus and other authors had ‘arguments’ added by later Roman editors, which summarised the entire plot. From these we know that Euclio recovered his money and made a present of it to his daughter and future son-in-law. On that slender basis Watling has concocted his own final scenes. It means we can’t use anything in these final 8 pages as evidence.

Watling’s reconstruction is much more lucid and logical than the plays often are. Thus in his next scene Megadorus encounters Lyconides and, instead of stumbling into even more convoluted complications, they both simply explain the situation to each other, namely: Megadorus has neatly got out of marrying Phaedria, which he was only doing to please his pushy sister, and Lyconides has gotten Euclio to agree to him, Lyconides, marrying her. So on the face of it the plot is resolved.

The pair cook up a resolution which is more balanced and elegant than those of Plautus’s actual plays. When Lyconides says he’s a shrewd idea his slave has stolen Euclio’s pot of god, Megadorus explains there’s a way that one simple pot can produce great happiness for three people: if Lyconides gets it back off his slave he can a) set his slave free for his good work, b) restore it to Euclio who will be delighted, c) it can be used as a dowry to accompany Phaedria and d) all this gets Megadorus off the hook of getting married which is the last thing he wants to do!

Lyconides runs off to find his slave, leaving Megadorus onstage as Euclio emerges from his house, chucking out all the cooks and their kit and yelling at them that the wedding’s off! He tells Megadorus that he and his family have made this the worst day of his life and goes on to accuse him of stealing his pot. Megadorus calmly demurs, saying it wasn’t him but he thinks he knows who did steal it.

And there is a comic quibble as Euclio turns to tell the cooks to finish dousing the fires, pack up and leave, upon which Megadorus immediately countermands his orders, and tells the cooks to go back into Euclio’s house and finish preparing the wedding feast – leaving Euclio muttering and grumbling that he is no longer even master in his own house!

But at that moment Lyconides enters with his slave and carrying the famous pot of gold. Euclio doesn’t see it, just turns his back and refuses to speak to Lyconides. So the latter hands the pot of gold to his uncle and asks Megadorus to present it to Euclio. He persuades Euclio to turn back to him and hands it over. Euclio is, of couse, ecstatic! He goes to thank Lyconides but Lyconides says it was actually his slave who found it and wished it returned (we know this isn’t true, but it sounds good) and that’s why, Lyconides declares, he has set his slave free!

There’s some comic business when Euclio recognises the slave as the lad who was hanging about the shrine of Good Faith and who he in fact beat up not so long ago. The slave is on the verge of telling the truth about how he followed Euclio, stole his pot of gold and very much didn’t want to give it back, but Lyconides nudges him and the slave remembers he’s only just been given his freedom and falls in line with the official story.

In a comic touch Euclio fulsomely thanks him for his honesty and, after poking around in the pot, gives him the smallest possible coin as a reward.

Lyconides then tries to move the conversation onto the topic of the marriage and suddenly, abruptly, Euclio hands him the pot. He has a charged little speech in which he declares how unexpectedly coming into a fortune has brought him nothing but misery. He’s been on tenterhooks of fear and anxiety every since it was discovered. Now he gladly hands it over to Lyconides as dowry for his daughter, saying: ‘Spend it wisely, my boy’. And now, for the first time in ages, he will be able to sleep soundly at night.

With that they turn to go into Euclio’s house to celebrate the wedding feast, till Lyconides nudges his uncle, asking hasn’t he forgotten something. Oh yes – Megadorus turns to address the audience, tells them he would gladly invite them to the feast but there isn’t quite enough for 600, so he merely wishes them good feasting once they get home and for their thanks and applause.

Thoughts

Greed

Well the soul-corrupting effect of greed is obviously the main theme, depriving the miser of sleep, making him over-sensitive to every sound and, above all, ruining his relationships with his fellow men, exemplified in the appalling way he treats his old housekeeper, Staphyla, the cooks, his neighbour, everyone. Greed isn’t just a personal failing, it is a socially destructive vice.

Freedom-wanting slave

Next and most striking for me is the role of slaves in all these plays, the way they all soliloquise to the audience about wanting their freedom, with some even achieving freedom as a reward for good deeds. Was real life like this? Were slaves always whining about wanting to be set free?

Invisible women

It is striking that the ‘love interest’ of the play, Euclio’s daughter Phaedria, doesn’t even appear onstage, though she does have the grand total of one line to cry out as she’s giving birth.

It would be easy to take a feminist view and write that women, young women in particular, are treated like commodities to be traded among the men. This is true as far as it goes, but is arguably only a sub-set of the larger truth which is that everyone is treated like a commodity by the author, pushed and positioned by the plot, often into very unlikely behaviour, and dropping out of sight once they’ve served their purpose, solely at the service of the plot and to get a laugh.

Improbabilities

In fact the silent woman issue is overshadowed by the huge improbability that Euclio lives with his adult daughter and has failed to notice that she is heavily pregnant. Compounded by the wild idea that she gives birth during the play itself and yet this a) doesn’t interfere with the smooth running of the plot, which carries on regardless and b) doesn’t interfere with the attitudes of Megadorus or Lyconides. I.e. his lover has just given birth to his child but he is utterly indifferent to the fact and more concerned with tying up the plotline around the pot of gold.

All the characters are mechanical functions of the plot which is itself a machine designed to elicit laughs.

In his introduction Watling says all this is excused in an actual production of the play by what he calls ‘optique du theatre’, a phrase I hadn’t read before and apparently means that logical holes in a plot are obscured by the immediate impact of scenes on stage. Later he refers to this as Plautus’s impressionistic technique whereby any kind of event, speech or joke is exploited for and justified by its immediate effect, regardless of logical inconsistencies.

Therefore the invisible woman Phaedria crying out in childbirth has no subtle implications. It is just used to intensify that particular moment onstage, to emphasise the housekeeper Staphyla’s momentary panic about what to do. Once that moment and that scene is over the entire issue of giving birth and the existence of a baby are simply forgotten in the headlong momentum of the performance.

The dowry

But in regard to women, another striking element is the important of the dowry. Living in a dowry-free society it’s almost more difficult for me to understand the concept that when a young woman got married she had to be accompanied by a large cash sum, than slavery. The notion that a woman can only be married if she is accompanied by a cash lump sum and that, if she can’t, it is a great shame on her, her father and the entire family (as in this play and also in Trinummus) comes from a world beyond my comprehension.

Ubiquitous and yet very casual slavery, and the way young women are treated like commodities and must be accompanied in marriage by a dowry – these are two elements which bring me up short every time they feature in a Plautus play.

By Hercules!

Characters swear by Hercules on pages 14, 21, 23, 28, 38 and 42, although they do invoke other deities, too, mainly Jupiter.

But Plautus wasn’t alone. From what I’ve read, Hercules was a dominating cultural presence all round the Roman world. Hercules is also the only deity invoked in Plutarch’s Life of Marius:

When [Jugurtha] had been thrust down naked into the dungeon pit, in utter bewilderment and with a grin on his lips he said: “Hercules! How cold this Roman bath is!” (Marius 12)

In Sallust’s Jugurthine War Hercules is said to have led an army in Spain (18) and also to have founded the Numidian city of Capsa (89).

Hercules’ ubiquitous presence around the Mediterranean is explored and explained at length in Richard Miles’s history of Carthage.

Moliere

Like all Plautus’s plays Aulularia was translated and/or copied by numerous other writers over the millennia. The most famous reincarnation of the miser Euclio is the miser Harpagon in the 17th century French playwright Molière’s 1668 version of the story, L’Avare (which is simply French for The Miser).

Credit

Page references are to the Penguin paperback edition of The Rope and Other Plays by Plautus, translated by E.F. Watling and published by Penguin in 1964.

Roman reviews

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by Simon on March 21, 2022  •  Permalink
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Notes on William Congreve

This short post consists of the interesting points from the introduction to the 1985 Penguin edition of Congreve’s plays, introduced and edited by Eric S. Rump. (I’m afraid I find it funny that a man who edited a book full of smutty jokes was called Rump.)

Congreve was born in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1670. His family moved to Ireland where he was educated at Kilkenny College – where he met fellow student Jonathan Swift, b.1667 – and at Trinity College in Dublin.

Aged 19, in 1689, Congreve left Ireland to travel to London and make his fortune as a wit. Aged 22 he published a novel titled Incognita: or, Love and Duty reconcil’d, whose title sounds like a play.

He befriended John Dryden, the leading literary figure of the age, who supported him through the rest of his career, writing rave reviews and introductions to his plays.

A year later his first comedy, The Old Bachelor, was performed. In all, Congreve write just four comedies, and in a relatively short career of seven years. They are:

  • The Old Bachelor (1693)
  • The Double Dealer (1693)
  • Love for Love (1695)
  • The Way of the World (1700)

And one tragedy:

  • The Mourning Bride (1697)

Congreve abandoned the stage for good in 1700, just as he turned 30.

A ‘good’ run for a play in those days was fourteen nights. Thus The Old Bachelor was a runaway success and played for… fourteen nights! A failure ran for three nights, the bare minimum required to cover its costs, a fact referred to in several of the plays themselves. William Wycherley’s second play, Love In A Wood, was not a success, ran for just 6 nights, and was never revived in his lifetime.

The Old Bachelor is, according to Rump, ‘a play in which a young, talented writer is content to re-explore the comic territory earlier mapped out by writers such as Etherege and Wycherley, but in doing so, is able to bring to the material’. It has freshness and distinctiveness.

It is also notable for the skill with which Congreve gives each character their own speech rhythms. Some critics claim you could be given any bit of dialogue from any of his four plays and be able to identify the character solely from their speech rhythms and idiolect. Rump thinks that’s pushing it a bit, but the fact people suggest this shows the care Congreve took to give each character their own distinctive speech patterns.

Congreve’s fourth and final play, the Way of The World, followed a gap of five years and was much-anticipated. It opened to great expectation and was presented by an all-star cast – but it was a relative failure. Why?

Well, it was by 1700 twelve years since the Glorious Revolution had swept away the Stuart kings and their world of carefree aristocratic hedonism. The new queen, Mary II, was more like Queen Victoria. She was not amused by the stage’s persistent attacks on marriage and conventional morality.

The times had changed. The overthrow of James II in 1688 represented not just a change in monarch but the triumph of the new mercantile class over the libertine aristocrats of Charles’s court.

Did Congreve intend to cease writing for the stage after The Way of the World bombed? He was certainly stung by the criticism of his plays included in the detailed critique of the stage written by Jeremy Collier (A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage), so much so that he wrote a long reply, Amendments of Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations.

But Collier was merely reflecting what many people felt by the late 1690s. The Society for the Reformation of Manners had been founded in 1692 and began to bring lawsuits against playwrights for outraging public morality. So did Congreve abandon the stage with an aristocratic flourish of disdain? No.

The record shows that Congreve continued his association with the stage after The Way. He shared with Vanbrugh the management of the new Queen’s Theatre in the Haymarket; he wrote the libretto for an opera, Semele, set first by Eccles and a lot later by Handel. He translated the works of Molière, and produced over the next ten years a trickle of poetry and translations of Latin classics for various collections – in other words he continued to be active in the theatre and in literature and letters. But he never again wrote a play.

In 1714, on the accession of the Whig Hanoverian King George, Congreve was given financial security with the award of a sinecure, Secretary to the island of Jamaica. He never married but had dalliances with several aristocratic ladies, most notably Henrietta Godolphin, second Duchess of Marlborough, daughter of the famous general, John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough. They probably met some time before 1703 and the duchess subsequently had a daughter, Mary, who was believed to be his child. Upon his death, Congreve left his entire fortune to the Duchess of Marlborough.

William Congreve died in London in January 1729 and was buried in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Reviews of William Congreve

Reviews of other Restoration comedies

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Introduction to The Plays of William Wycherley by W.C. Ward (1893)

Old literary criticism is often valuable because it sees works of literature in the round, as a whole. Its judgements are often mature, made by people who have seen a lot of life and often had other full-time careers, as lawyers, politician and so on. So their opinions are aware of and take into account a range of audiences and their essays are written in a language designed to be accessible to all literate readers.

All this contrasts with the highly professionalised nature of contemporary literary criticism, generally written by people who have little or no experience of life beyond the academy; written in fierce competition with other academics and so often focusing on narrow and highly specific aspects of works or genres where the author desires to carve out a niche; and written in a jargon which has become steadily more arcane and removed from everyday English over the past forty years or so.

This kind of modern literary criticism is contained in expensive books destined to be bought only by university libraries, or in remote articles in any one of hundreds of subscription-only specialist journals. It is not, in other words, designed for the average reader. Nowadays, literary criticism is an elite discourse.

Older criticism can also be humane and funny, and can afford to be scathingly critical of its authors, in a way modern po-faced and ‘professional’ criticism often daren’t.

The 1893 edition of The Plays of William Wycherley which Project Gutenberg chose for their online library includes an introduction to Wycherley’s plays by the edition’s editor, W.C. Ward, followed by an extended biographical essay by Thomas Babington Macauley which dates from even earlier, from the 1850s.

(If this appears very old fashioned a) it is, and b) several of the Wikipedia articles about Wycherley appear to be cut and pastes of the relevant articles from the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.)

Introduction by WC Ward

Comedies of Manners Ward describes the Restoration comedies as Comedies of Manners, contrasting them with Shakespeare’s plays which he calls Comedies of Life.

Aristocratic audiences Restoration comedies only illustrate one aspect of life, and that the most superficial – the courtly badinage of aristocrats having affairs. They were initially designed for a tiny, upper-class clientele, and kept that sense of targeting a select audience which ‘gets’ its attitude and in-jokes.

Displays of wit The plays were designed to display Wit and Ingenuity – all other human activities, all other human emotions and psychology, are simply omitted in pursuit of these goals. Their dialogue is not intended to reveal the characters’ psychology or development. It exists solely to display the author’s Wit and to further the ‘Plot’, which also exists solely to demonstrate the author’s ingenuity.

Robot characters The characters are not people, they are ‘simulacra… puppet semblances of humanity’. They only copy human behaviour insofar as is required to further the clockwork plots.

This narrow mechanical aspect of the characterisation is, in Ward’s view, paradoxically a redeeming factor when we come to consider the plays’ indecency and immorality.

Licentiousness always superficial The very fact that the characters are barely human, are really flashy automata, means that their licentiousness and cynicism has no real depth. It doesn’t affect us in the way the same speeches put into the mouths of real characters would affect us, because we know they are the baseless vapourings of toys.

Designed to amuse Ward also defends the plays against the frequent charge of licentiousness by pointing out that they are designed solely to amuse and make us laugh – they don’t even have the deeper ambition of Ben Jonson’s comedies, ‘to laugh us out of vice’.

Antidote to lust And, Ward says, the kind of superficial laughter they prompt on every page is in fact an antidote to lustful thoughts. The plays do not inflame the audience with genuinely licentious and immoral thoughts because the characters are so one-dimensional and the plots are so extravagantly ludicrous that real sexual thoughts never enter our heads.

Virtue triumphs Other critics charge that Restoration comedies only being Virtue on stage to be mocked and ridiculed, which is a bad thing. Ward admits that most of the characters lose no opportunity to mock honesty, hard work, sobriety, the law, business, chasteness and loyalty and fidelity and love. All true. But at the same time, love does eventually triumph (after a superficial fashion) the qualities of loyalty and virtue do, in the end, triumph.

Women of virtue And each play contains at least one female character, and sometimes a man, who is significantly less cynical than the other characters and becomes almost a defender of virtue. For example, Alithea in The Country Wife and Fidelia in The Plain Dealer are unironic emblems of Goodness and Virtue – and they and their values do, eventually, win the day.

Marriage mocked Other critics lament the way the sanctity of Marriage is routinely mocked, at length, continuously, throughout all the plays. Ward puts the defence that when you look closely, the specific examples of marriage being mocked are the marriages of ludicrous characters such as Pinchwife or Vernish. (This defence, in my opinion, is nowhere near adequate; all the characters mock marriage as a school for adulterers and cuckolds far more powerfully and continuously than Ward acknowledges.)

Wycherley’s poetry Ward goes on from Wycherley’s plays to discuss Wycherley’s poetry, which was published in two volumes late in his life and about which he is entertainingly rude. The poems are, in Ward’s opinion (and everyone else’s – he quotes Wycherley’s contemporaries) utterly worthless, beneath criticism. ‘Wycherley had no spark of poetry in his whole composition’.

It’s good to have this confirmed, as I thought the short poems which appear scattered through Wycherley’s plays were utterly lifeless.

Wycherley’s character As to his character:

It is not to be doubted that Wycherley participated in the fashionable follies and vices of the age in which he lived. His early intrigue with the Duchess of Cleveland was notorious.

The success of his plays drew him into aristocratic court circles which really did value the behaviour he describes.

Alexander Pope Late in life, Wycherley became a kind of mentor to the very young Alexander Pope, when the later was only 16 or 17 years old, and their correspondence, and also memoirs written about the great John Dryden, show that Wycherley was loved as a good friend by many of his contemporaries.

Essay by Thomas Babington Macauley

According to Joseph E. Riehl’s book about Charles Lamb and his critics, Macauley wrote his criticism of the Restoration dramatists at least in part as an attack or counter to Charles Lamb’s strong defence of them. Macauley argued that Restoration comedy is degrading to human relationships, and that it promoted ‘evil, perverted or shameful conduct’. I sympathise.

In the 22-page essay on the Gutenberg website, Macauley describes Wycherley’s life and character in some detail, with comments on the plays. Key points are:

Early life Wycherley was born in 1640. Young Wycherley was sent to France as a teenager, where he converted to Catholicism. After the Restoration of 1660, he went to Oxford, left without a degree, studied law at the Inns of Court just long enough to be able to make comic butts of lawyers and their hangers-on, as in The Plain Dealer.

Religious conversion Shrewdly, Wycherley converted back from Catholicism to Anglicanism. Macauley has a droll sense of humour and a nice turn of phrase:

The somewhat equivocal glory of turning, for a short time, a good-for-nothing Papist into a very good-for-nothing Protestant is ascribed to Bishop Barlow.

The Restoration court He gives a vivid sense of the promiscuity of Charles’s court:

The Duchess of Cleveland cast her eyes upon [Wycherley] and was pleased with his appearance. This abandoned woman, not content with her complaisant husband and her royal keeper, lavished her fondness on a crowd of paramours of all ranks, from dukes to rope-dancers.

The Dutch Wars He comments scornfully on the Dutch Wars:

The second Dutch war, the most disgraceful war in the whole history of England, was now raging. It was not in that age considered as by any means necessary that a naval officer should receive a professional education. Young men of rank, who were hardly able to keep their feet in a breeze, served on board the King’s ships, sometimes with commissions and sometimes as volunteers.

The Royal Navy There’s debate about whether Wycherley – like many other completely unqualified ‘gentleman’ – volunteered for the navy, but it would be nice to think so and that it gave verisimilitude to his depiction of Captain Manly and the sailors in The Plain Dealer.

The Country Wife he describes as:

one of the most profligate and heartless of human compositions… the elaborate production of a mind, not indeed rich, original or imaginative, but ingenious, observant, quick to seize hints, and patient of the toil of polishing.

Marriage and prison Wycherley was such a royal favourite that Charles appointed him tutor to his illegitimate son, the Duke of Richmond. However, Wycherley ruined his reputation with the king and swiftly lost the post of tutor by unwisely marrying the Countess of Drogheda, ‘a gay young widow’ in 1679. She was jealous and kept a close eye on him till she died young in 1685. He hoped he would leave her a fortune, but she left him a long and ruinous legal case. Possibly as a result of this, Wycherley was thrown into the Fleet prison where he languished for seven long years. The story goes that the newly crowned King James II (ascended the throne 1685) happened to see a performance of The Plain Dealer, asked about the author, was shocked to discover he was in gaol, paid his debts and settled an annuity on him.

Released, he was nonetheless impoverished, unable to sustain his old lifestyle, and unable to write another play. In 1704, after 27 years of silence, a volume of poetry appeared – ‘a bulky volume of obscene doggerel’.

Alexander Pope It was in the same year he formed the friendship with the young sickly hunchback Alexander Pope, who he mentored, took about town, and who in turn offered to rewrite and ‘improve’ the older man’s verse. Quite quickly Pope realised how dire Wycherley’s poetry was and that nothing could save it. Quite a few of their letters survive which shed light on both men.

Literary reputation Rests entirely on his last two plays, The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer. His characters are often little more than mouthpieces for the contrived wit of the time.

It was alleged he was a slow and painstaking author, but Pope claims he wrote The Plain Dealer in three weeks! Having just read both his hit plays, I am inclined to believe the slow and painstaking version. They both feel slow and laboured.

In truth, his mind, unless we are greatly mistaken, was naturally a very meagre soil, and was forced only by great labour and outlay to bear fruit which, after all, was not of the highest flavour.

Widow Blackacre Macauley is correct to say:

The widow Blackacre [is] beyond comparison Wycherley’s best comic character

In full flood she struck me as being almost a female Falstaff. But these few words of praise don’t stop Macauley taking every opportunity to damn Wycherley:

The only thing original about Wycherley, the only thing which he could furnish from his own mind in inexhaustible abundance, was profligacy.

Degrading French originals By which he means his low, mean, degraded subject matter. Macauley accuses him of taking the fine and graceful character of Agnes in the French play L’Ecole des Femmes and turning her into the degraded imbecile Mrs Pinchwife in The Country Wife.

Wycherley’s indecency is protected against the critics as a skunk is protected against the hunters. It is safe, because it is too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach.

Similarly, Macauley accuses him of taking the light and chaste character of Viola in Twelfth Night and turning her into the much narrower and lewder Fidelia, an attempt at loyalty and fidelity who in fact acts as a pimp for her master; and of taking the misanthropic but essentially noble character Alceste in Moliere’s Le Misanthrope and turning him into the much cruder and more vengeful Manly.

So depraved was his moral taste, that, while he firmly believed that he was producing a picture of virtue too exalted for the commerce of this world, he was really delineating the greatest rascal that is to be found even in his own writings.

Wow. Not the kind of unashamed contempt a modern literary critic would allow themselves. These two pretty old essays bring Wycherely’s life and times and character and works to life far more vividly than anything else I’ve read about him. And hence the value of older literary criticism. It tends to paint a fuller picture of the man, the times and the works. And not be afraid to give pungent judgements.

Related links

Reviews of Wycherley’s plays

Other Restoration comedies

1 Comment
by Simon on July 27, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Literary criticism, Theatre
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Posted by Simon on July 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/27/william-wycherley-w-c-ward/

The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)

‘I’ll have no leading-strings; I can walk alone: I hate a harness’
(Manly in The Plain Dealer, Act One)

William Wycherley wrote four comedies during the Restoration era. The Plain Dealer is the fourth and final one and is generally thought to be the best. It is a free adaptation of The Misanthrope (1666), one of the best-known plays of the French dramatist Moliere (1622 – 1673).

The protagonist, Manly, is a sea captain now returned to shore. His ship sank (he is said to have scuttled it after being trapped by Dutch enemy ships) and now he is back on land in lodgings. In any case, he only went to sea to get away from people, who he loathes:

You must pardon me, I cannot wish well to pimps, flatterers, detractors, and cowards, stiff nodding knaves, and supple, pliant, kissing fools

Manly prides himself on his plain-speaking and plain-dealing – in stark contrast to the society around him which he thinks is made up of fawning, lying hypocrites.

What, thou art one of those who esteem men only by the marks and value fortune has set upon ’em, and never consider intrinsic worth! but counterfeit honour will not be current with me: I weigh the man, not his title

Inevitably, his boasted plain dealing strikes others as rudeness and cruelty.

Manly has a friend or confidante, Freeman, who is the auditor of his extended soliloquies about society’s hypocrisies. Freeman is ‘a gentleman well educated, but of a broken fortune, a complier with the age’. I like that description, a complier with the age. Am I a complier with my age, I wonder.

In fact, Manly brusquely tells Freeman that the latter is not his friend; he (Manly) has only one friend, one true deep friend (and even as he says this, the reader suspects that this ‘friend’ is fated to betray him).

Manly is in love with Olivia, a wealthy woman who is tough and misanthropic in her own right. He is so confident of her love he has deposited with her some £6,000 of his fortune including a pile of jewels.

Olivia, also, purports to hate ‘the filthy world’. She has a cousin, Eliza, who is her confidante i.e. who she can confide in, and who is a sarcastic, ironic foil to her, in their first scene together listening to Olivia’s long description of how she despises the world and then, when Novel visits, embarrassingly proving that she is in fact an expert at all the hypocritical practices she has just condemned (gossiping, criticising etc).

OLIVIA: Hold, cousin, hold; I hate detraction. But I must tell you, cousin, his civility is cowardice, his good-nature want of wit; and he has neither courage nor sense to rail: and for his being always in humour, ’tis because he is never dissatisfied with himself.

Manly is beloved by Fidelia, who dressed up as a man to serve aboard his ship, won his trust and now, back on land, continues to dress as a man, all the time professing her love for Manly, declaring in an aside to the audience that she owes him her:

 love, faith, and duty to you, the bravest, worthiest of mankind

Then there’s a flotilla of secondary, comic characters, including a couple of sailors who sailed with Manly and now do him the office of doormen or bouncers, tasked with keeping all his callers at bay, plus:

  • Novel – ‘a pert railing Coxcomb, and an admirer of novelties’ who tries to woo Olivia
  • Major Oldfox – ‘an old impertinent Fop, given to scribbling’, who is wooing Widow Blackacre
  • Lord Plausible – ‘a ceremonious, supple, commending Coxcomb, in love with Olivia’
  • Widow Blackacre – ‘a petulant, litigious Widow, always in law, and Mother of Squire Jerry’
  • Squite Jerry – feeble, hen-pecked son of the Widow Blackacre

The scenes with Novel and Plausible are particularly funny. As the play progresses, so do the complications.

Act 2 starts with Olivia explaining at length how she also despises society, and rejects company and visits, to her foil Eliza. Which makes it funny when she is promptly paid lots of visits – by the dandies and fops, Novel and Lord Plausible, and indulges in the very kind of catty gossip she has just criticised to Eliza.

Half-way through this scene Manly, Freeman and Fidelia arrive and, from a secret vantage point (one of the conventions of Restoration comedy) watch Olivia consorting with the fops. Manly overhears Olivia criticising him, a tone she continues once they’ve fully walked onstage and announced their presence. In fact Manly’s arrival prompts Olivia to make the shock declaration that she is married, a revelation which staggers all Manly’s hopes.

MANLY: I wish I never had seen you.

Olivia tells the assembled cast that she is married to an honourable gentleman and I, for one, immediately suspected this will be none other than ‘the one man’ Manly esteems as friend.

Manly and Olivia part with vehement curses of each other. But, during the visit, Olivia has taken a fancy to young Fidelia, dressed as a man, who was accompanying Manly.

When Lady Blackacre is announced, Freeman declares he will stay and woo her, impossible though she is, in order to inherit her money and to pay off his own debtors. Freeman’s bare-faced attempt to chat the Widow up turns into a comic scene as he competes with Lady Blackacre’s constant companion, a dried-up older man, Major Oldfox, who mostly exists to provide a comic foil to Freeman. The scene morphs into a parody of a courtroom confrontation, with either side flinging legalistic accusations at each other in order to prove their ’cause’, i.e. the widow’s hand and money.

The Widow is given a magnificent series of imaginative, long insults which match Falstaff at his finest:

WIDOW BLACKACRE: Thou withered, hobbling, distorted cripple; nay, thou art a cripple all over: wouldst thou make me the staff of thy age, the crutch of thy decrepidness?

Act III Westminster Hall Manly has been summonsed there to be a witness in Lady Blackacre’s law suit. There is a touch of Jarndyce and Jarndyce about a character entirely consumed by one never-ending law suit, and it gives Manly and Freeman the opportunity for conventional criticisms of the law and lawyers.

Enter Fidelia who says she’ll do anything for him, so Manly asks her to go and win back Olivia on his behalf. Obviously, Fidelia is appalled at being given a task which runs directly counter to her own wishes.

Enter Widow Blackacre surrounded by a flock of cavilling lawyers named Blunder, Quaint and Petulant, Buttongown and Splitcause, Quillit and Quirk. When the Widow exits, Freeman takes the opportunity to chat up her poor, put-upon son, Jerry, lending him money to buy a book, encouraging his hopes.

FREEMAN: Steal away the calf, and the cow will follow you.

To which the fabulous Widow replies:

WIDOW: What sir, d’ye think to get the mother by giving the child a rattle?

Anyway, Freeman arranges for one of Manly’s sailor-servants to pinch the Widow’s bags full of years of legal papers which she had left with Jerry to guard. When Jerry re-enter to say they’re all gone, the Widow is distraught, Jerry is mortified, and Freeman gets the sailor-servant to drag Jerry off to Manly’s apartments. I smell a scam!

Manly re-enters and tells Freeman that he has managed to get into three lawsuits already, just by candidly telling some lawyers and a poet what he thinks of them, before going on to dispense with a suite of other characters, Oldfox, various lawyers, an aldermen and a City merchant with withering humour, commented on by Freeman. You realise it is a deliberate gallery of London types, of men of the world – all of them fawning cheats, in Manly’s opinion.

Act IV Scene 1 Manly’s lodging: Dialogue between Manly and Fidelia (still dressed as a man). He hopes she has come back from Olivia’s to say she won her round to his cause. Instead Fidelia says the diametric opposite, that Olivia extravagantly insulted Manly and then took her (Fidelia) in her arms and showered her with kisses and would have done more but they were interrupted, and Olivia begged her to return for an assignation.

Manly leaps to the conclusion that Fidelia is in love with Olivia, and has made the story of her abusing him up and begins attacking her.

Freeman enters and joins in a philosophical trio about Love. Then the Widow Blackacre and Major Oldfox enter. Oldfox has penned some poetry to the Widow but she comically counters with her writs and lawyer’s letters, her preferred genre of writing.

Then Freeman enters with Jerry: he has successfully corrupted the boy, who now wants to escape his mother’s apron strings and live the London life of theatres, pubs and brothels. In a confrontation the boy demands his right to a life of his own (backed up by Freeman) – but the Widow reveals that Jerry was born out of wedlock, is a bastard and so shall not inherit her jointure

Jointures crop a lot. A jointure is: ‘an estate settled on a wife for the period during which she survives her husband, in lien of a dower.’

Act IV Scene 2 Olivia’s lodging: Novel and Lord Plausible compete with each other, claiming Olivia is vowed to them. Her servant gives them each identical letters, stating she despises their rival and loves only them… except that they swap and read them out loud and realise she is tricking both of them.They leave. Olivia enters, dispenses with her serving boy and prepares to meet Fidelia in the dark, as she had earlier arranged. Except that in the darkness a new character named Vernish arrives and embraces her, Olivia enthusiastically responding. He is, we discover, her husband!

After Olivia cleverly covers her initial mistake thinking of thinking Vernish was her secret lover, we learn that Vernish has been out of town five days; it is during that time that Manly rearrived in town i.e. after encountering the Dutch in the Channel, sinking his ship and making it back to shore; and that Olivia and Vernish have deliberately conned Manly out of his money, she persuading Manly to give her his £6,000 while he appears to have given Vernish some £1,000 guineas to be held at a goldsmith’s.

They now plan to be so cruel to Manly as to encourage him back to sea where, hopefully, he will drown. Vernish goes. Olivia soliloquises, making it clear she plans to swindle him, as well.

Enter Fidelia (still dressed as a man) trailed at a distance by Manly. Olivia instantly starts kissing her but when Fidelia asks about Manly, Olivia is crushingly honest, saying she never loved the brute, only wanted him for his money – which Manly, in hiding, hears.

Olivia says she’ll just pop into the other chamber and lock the doors. This gives Manly and Fidelia time to discuss Olivia’s treachery. Manly is initially for murdering her, which Fidelia talks him out of, but then comes round to a more savage revenge, and slips into the darkened room after Olivia, presumably to ravage her pretending to be Fidelia.

But just moments later he slips out of the room again and says his savage revenge would be pointless if no-one witnesses it. Therefore he tells Fidelia to tell Olivia that she (Fidelia) has to leave, but will return same time tomorrow night. By which time Manly will have set up his scam.

Olivia returns and Fidelia successfully feigns illness (‘the falling sickness’) and so says she must leave – but promises to return tomorrow night. But she has no sooner exited than she hurries back onstage saying a man is coming up the stairs with a candle. ‘Tis Vernish! Olivia disappears into the inner room – but Vernish catches Fidelia, thinking she is a male adulterer, draws his sword and threatens to stab her.

At which point Fidelia confesses she is a woman. Vernish pulls off her wig then squeezes her breasts. Yes, she is a woman! Still angry and puzzled, Vernish says he’ll have one final proof that Fidelia is a woman and drags her towards the bedroom, obviously to **** her. Fidelia starts screaming.

At which point a servant enters to tell Vernish that an alderman has sent his ‘cashier’ round with some money he had promised money, and the servant is is even now coming up the stairs. Forced to abandon his attempt at ravishment, Vernish gets the servant to help him push Fidelia into an adjoining room and lock the door.

Act V scene 1 Eliza’s lodgings Eliza is just telling Olivia off for the bad reputation she’s acquired when enter Vernish who promptly tells Olivia off for consorting with a woman dressed in men’s clothes.

Olivia is greatly confused, thinking Fidelia must have persuaded Vernish that ‘he’ is a woman. Then it begins to dawn on her that Vernish might be telling the truth, that Fidelia might be a woman in disguise!

Either way, Vernish lets slip that he terrified the girl by pretending he was going to ravish her – at which point Olivia finds an opportunity to accuse Vernish of being a heartless ravisher, and in the first month of their marriage, too!

So Vernish finds himself having to apologise and gives Olivia 200 of the guineas he has just received from the cashier. He then asks Eliza to accompany i.e. take Olivia home. Vernish leaves, at which point Eliza teases Olivia about this woman dressed as a man who was no doubt the lover and gallant Olivia was boasting about, and this turns into an almighty argument, with both women ending up damning each other.

Act V Scene 2 The Cock pub in Bow Street Fidelia is back in her costume as a man explaining to Manly how s/he managed to persuade Vernish that s/he was a woman. Manly is now desperate to know what Olivia’s husband looks like, but Fidelia didn’t get a clear view (the room was darkened). So in a bid to find out, Manly insists that Fidelia send a note telling Olivia she will visit again, tonight, at seven.

Enter Freeman who asks Manly why, now that he’s poor (he gave Olivia all his money), he doesn’t call on old friends and old obligations. This is a prompt for Manly to give an extended explanation of his misanthropy.

Disappointed in Manly, Freeman leaves to carry on his schemes re. the Widow Blackacre.

Enter Vernish to meet Manly amid a great display of enthusiasm and, sure enough, he does turn out to be the One Good Friend In The World Manly thinks he has while the audience, of course, knows Vernish is gulling and robbing him.

The conversation turns immediately to Olivia and Vernish joins in hypocritically damning her for a mercenary… Until Manly claims to have slept with her, at which point Vernish (who we know is Olivia’s ‘secret’ husband becomes genuinely angry. Manly sends him, as his best friend, to ask if Olivia will give him even a little of his money back.

The buzzing fops, Novel, Lord Plausible and Oldfox barge into Manly’s room, leading to comedy at their pretensions and foibles, namely stupid Novel insisting it is a sign of great wit to make loud noises and break windows.

This is just business to pass the time during which Vernish is supposed to have gone and asked Olivia for some of Manley’s money. Now he re-enters the room, and Manly kicks the fops out. Vernish tells Manly that Olivia told him to go to hell.

Vernish is still uncertain whether Olivia’s slept with Manly or not but, in any case, in an aside, confesses he would gladly slit Manly’s throat. Some friend!

In a scene drenched in dramatic irony, Manly laughs with Vernish about what a poor, wretched cuckold Olivia’s husband must be, about how he has been sending a go-between to Olivia who persuaded the fool he was a woman, and how he – Manly – now has an appointment with Olivia, as the time is coming up to 7.30 at night.

Vernish is confused and angry, he’s sure Fidelia was a woman, why is Manly describing him as a man? (Because Manly doesn’t yet realise that Fidelia is a woman, that’s why.) Manly goes to keep his appointment and Vernish shares his bewilderment with us, his plan to catch them at it (whatever it is) and his abiding hatred of Manly. He is a genuinely bad man.

Cut to Manly arranging with Freeman for the latter to scour all the drinkers in the pub and bring them all to Olivia’s place in half an hour precisely. Manly wants as many people as possible to witness his humiliation of her.

Scene 3 another room in the Cock pub Widow Blackacre suborns some professional perjurers and lying witnesses she will need in her next court case.

She has barely finished and dispatched them before Major Oldfox appears with a waiter who overcomes the widow and ties her to her chair and gags her! Is Oldfox going to rape her? No. Worse! He is going to read her his poetry!!

But he hasn’t even started before Freeman, Jerry, three bailiffs a constable and his assistants all burst into the room. They untie the Widow, Oldfox scarpers, but they haven’t come for him, they’ve come to serve an enormous suit on the Widow for ten thousand pounds!

This has all been cooked up by Freeman who now tells the Widow there’s only one way out of it which is to marry him. But the Widow is a legal expert, and suggests instead that she pays all his debts and settle an annuity on him. Hmmm, Freeman throws in £40 a year for Jerry (and free access to the Widow’s maid’s bedroom) and it’s a deal. He has lawyers at hand to draw up a contract.

Scene 4 Olivia’s lodging Olivia has barely welcomed Fidelia (followed silently by Manly) into her darkened chambers and is leading her to the bed, than there are sounds at the door, which is locked and starts to be forced.

Panicking that it is her husband, Olivia tells Fidelia they’ll climb out the window down a rope made of curtain.

In the dark Olivia just has time to give Manly – thinking he is Fidelia – her purse and cabinet (presumably containing all the money she took from Manly) and disappear out the window, before Vernish forces the door and charges at Manly with his sword out.

In the pitch black, Manly unswords Vernish and throws him to the floor, Olivia returns and embraces Manly thinking him Fidelia, at which point Freeman, Novel, Plausible, Jerry and Widow Blackacre all barge in carrying torches.

So it is finally revealed that Vernish, pinned to the floor – Manly’s best friend – is Olivia’s husband. Manly is appalled.

In the struggles Fidelia’s wig has fallen off and she is revealed as a woman! She makes a speech about how she has loyally loved and followed Manly everywhere. Realising the depth of her loyalty, Manly pledges his love to her, too, and gives her the cabinet and purse.

Olivia and Vernish exit after being admonished, and now condemned to live as faithless man and wife in poverty.

Fidelia announces her family name is Grey and her father left her £2,000 a year. Money money money is always the ultimate subject of Restoration comedy.

The philosophy of Love

For thousands of years writers have been anatomising, categorising and philosophising about Love. Huge swathes of these Restoration comedies are devoted to this subject of apparently endless fascination and are stuffed with sweeping generalisations about men, women and Love.

MANLY: Why, what did you hear me say?
FREEMAN: Something imperfectly of love, I think.
MANLY: I was only wondering why fools, rascals, and desertless wretches, should still have the better of men of merit with all women, as much as with their own common mistress, Fortune.
FREEMAN: Because most women, like Fortune, are blind, seem to do all things in jest, and take pleasure in extravagant actions. Their love deserves neither thanks, nor blame, for they cannot help it: ’tis all sympathy; therefore, the noisy, the finical, the talkative, the cowardly, and effeminate, have the better of the brave, the reasonable, and man of honour; for they have no more reason in their love, or kindness, than Fortune herself.
MANLY: Yes, they have their reason. First, honour in a man they fear too much to love; and sense in a lover upbraids their want of it; and they hate anything that disturbs their admiration of themselves; but they are of that vain number, who had rather show their false generosity, in giving away profusely to worthless flatterers, than in paying just debts. And, in short, all women, like fortune (as you say) and rewards, are lost by too much meriting.

I find this stuff quite exhausting to read. It is tempting to skim over this eternal opinionising about men and women and Love in order to get to the plot, where people discuss actual events and plans and schemes, and where there is a lot more comedy.

Anti-women propaganda

  • MANLY: Yes; for she is not (I tell you) like other women, but can keep her promise
  • MANLY: for women’s wants are generally the most importunate solicitors to love or marriage.
  • OLIVIA: Well, we women, like the rest of the cheats of the world, when our cullies or creditors have found us out, and will or can trust no longer, pay debts and satisfy obligations with a quarrel, the kindest present a man can make to his mistress, when he can make no more presents.
  • FREEMAN: Well, you see now, mistresses, like friends, are lost by letting ’em handle your money; and most women are such kind of witches, who can have no power over a man, unless you give ’em money: but when once they have got any from you, they never leave you till they have all. Therefore I never give a woman a farthing.

Insulting servants

Olivia calls her servant, Lettice, ‘you dowdy’, ‘insatiable creature’, you buffle-headed stupid creature you’, and the boy who serves her ‘you little unthinking fop’, ‘you heedless little animal’ and so on. Manly curses his sailor-doormen as rogues

The Widow Blackacre

Is a quite marvellous comic creation. All the scenes with her come vividly to life. Her language is supercharged with vitriol and imaginative insult. She is a kind of female Falstaff, and a magnificent invention. Voltaire, himself a playwright, considered her ‘the most comical character that was ever brought upon the stage’ (Letters Concerning The English Nation, 1733).

Related links

Other Restoration plays

Reviews of other plays

1 Comment
by Simon on July 24, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Comedy, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on July 24, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/24/the-plain-dealer-william-wycherley/

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