THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 193
meaning. There are also instances where, in some plays, a
CHAPTER VIII
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS
THE Comedy of Manners has excited keen controversy in
recent years. On the one hand, it has been dismissed as 'trivial,
gross and dull'; 1 on the other a recent critic has described it
as the first 'modern'* coniiedy in English literature. The
advocates oftheformerview,claittt that it lacks 'the essential
stuff of human experience' and provides.at best 'cheap enter-
tainment to a society which 'was fundamentally bored' and
which 'badly ... needed to be enterta1ned,. 3 According to the
holders of the second view, 'something important is'. being said'
in this comedy and even its seemingly puerile sex jokes have 'a
serious social ,function'.' For the former group of critics this
comedy is 'one of the symptoms of a sick society'-'a society
that might easily have died'. 5 The other group, however;
sees a peculiar moral and inteUectuat 'Vitality in 'the naturalism,
libertinism and scepticism' of this comedy! ·
These conflicting points of view a're often expressed in
perhaps too extreme a form. But they are only broad simpli-
fications, each leaving out some vital part of the truth. The
fact is that the Comedy· of Manners is rieitlter wholly arti-
ficial nor wholly criticat .There are many playwrights in the
period who have liarcily any artisti~ or moral conscience at
all and whose sole aim is to prbvide entertainment to their
aristocratic patrons. It may even be correct to say that their
plays haye no intrinsic literary value and that at. best, in
Mr. Wain's words, they are only 'good documents' faithfulfy
exhibiting in their 'technical and moral confusion' life as
it was lived at the time. There are, however, other play-
wrights in the period-and some of them quite major ones-
who consistently claim that their plays have a social and moral·
1 L. C. Knights, Explorations, p. 149. :. , : .
2 Cf. Norman N. Holland, The First Modern Comedies (1959).
a L. C. Knights, op. cit., p 147.
, F. W. Bateson, Essays in Criticism, Vol. VII (January 1957), pp. 57, 59.
5 John Wain, Preliminary Essays, pp. 2, 1.
8 T. H. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit, p. I:;;,
playwright merely trifles with bis theme while in others
he has a serious purpose in mind. To add to our confusion
this occurs sometimes in the same play itself.
The situation therefore is puzzling and the desire to simplify
matters is not altogether unintelligible. Any simplification,
however, must distort the real picture. What we need to
realise more than anything else is the basis of this inherent
,confusion in the situation. This confusion, irrespective of
whether it is 'technical' or 'moral', has ultimately to oe
~ e d to a conflict in the Restoration period between
the old Elizabethan drama and the--iiew":-arama which the
Restoration age had evolved in response to its own ~ocial
and cultural needs. This conflict is v1s1l)le in e.very fieldo!
conte0,1porary drama, but much l!}OfC SO in the case of comedy,;>('
On the one hand, a serious attempt is made in this age to
ey9lve an artificial comedy suitable for high society ; on the
olher ,it is soon realised t~t the Engli.sh soil is hostile to any
but a mixed kind of comedy. lnev,itablythere area varietyof
compromises and adjustments in i tµe geriod and often .the
picture is not as clear as a modern reader would like it to
be. We are bound to find the comedy of Humours and the
comedy of Manners jostling against each other often in a
most awkward manner. But all this has to be accepted as a
part of the contemporary scene. We need not be surprised if
a, writer such as Shadwell acce.ets, wherever he can, the
values (both technical and moral) of the Comedy of Manner's;
and full Justice cannot be done to Congreve himself if we
consider _him merely as a master of the artificial comedy
and leave out his typically English traits-'the broad, the
realistic, the solid quality of hjs art' .1
The theory of comedy which emerges from, the scatterd
critical utterances of contemporary .playwrights naturally
reflects this continuing conflict. The satirical theory of comedy
was inherited. from the Renaissance. and Ben Jonson had
come to be recognised as the greatest exponent of this type
of comedy. But a new kind of comedy had to be evolved to
provide an adequate expression for the needs and temper
of the age. The Jonsonian comedy, therefore,- had to be
1 Lytton Strachey, Literary Essays, p. ~2.
13
194 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
rejected both in practice and theory. Since no rejection in
literary matters is ever complete, t_he °-l~_}9nsonian comedx
con!inues to exist in the period alongside the QQ!lledy of
Manners. Its theor~.J!Qwe!_~ is undermined -and Jarwly
superseded by the new theory that the age evolves an a
student of contemporary drama cannot hope to do more
than record the situation with all its critical implications.
I
Qnr_den realised with the sure instinct of a great critic
that ~ kind of comedy had to evolve if the needs
(#. the new aristocracy were to be adequately met. The old
comedy was totally incapable of meeting these needs. Jonson
might be the master of 'humour, .and contrivance of
Comedy',1 as Dryden admitted, but he belonged to another
age and to a different culture. However adequate for his
own times, the new age had little use for him. Hence Dryden
enunciated the fundamental dramatic principle :
They, who have best succeeded on the stage,
Have still conform'd their genius to their age,2
His contention was not that _he and his contemporaries were
superior to the Elizabethan or Jaco6ean playwrights-in
fact they were often inferior-but that they provided, in
Bateson's words, a more 'appropriate dramatic expression' of
the 'social revolution of the mid-seventeenth century' :
Yet though you judge (as sure the critics will).
That some before him writ with greater skill,
In this one praise he has their fame surpast,
To please an age more gallant than the last. 3
He was capable of extravagant praise for 'divine Shakespeare'
and he ~admired' Ben Jonson, but he recognised, as he tells
us in his commendatory verses prefixed to Congreve's The
1 Ker, I, p. 134-.
2 Ibid., p. 160
ll Ibid., p. 161.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 1~5
I?ou"f;lle-Dealer (1694), the supreme ".alue of Congreve for his
contemporaries :
In Him all the Beauties of this age we see :
Etheridge his courtship, Southern's Purity,
The Satire, Wit and Strength of manly Wicherly.
Heaven, that but once was Prodigal before,
To Shakespear gave as much : she cou'd not give him more.
The basic assumption of the new comedy is that g d~ffers
from the previous comedy in its class character. It deals with /'
the gallantries, intrigues and affectations of fashiofl!!>l~ I
and women and its primary aim is to underline the distinctive
features_ of the culture it refl._t!cts, its 'breeding', gallantry
and wit. It is the product of a homogeneous and well-organised
culture and feeds on the brilliance, freedom, excesses and
eccentricities of the latter. We may quarrel with the word
'Manners' as some modern critics have done, but there is
little doubt that this comedy does reflect the culture of
the upeer classes in which manners are supreme.Ttaftempts
to catcli what Professor Nicoll calls 'something brilliant
about a man o ~ t a humour but a grace,
orahabitofrefined culture'.1 Congreve's Lady Froth in The
Double-Dealer (II, i) is of course ridiculous and yet she is
fairly correct in suggesting what contemporary high society
would regard important in 'a pretty Gentleman'-'Some
di&tinguishing Quality, as for Example, the be! air or Brilliant
of Mr. Brisk ; the Solemnity, yet Complaisance of my Lord,
or something of his own that should look a little Je-ne-scay;.
quoysh'. ·
This comedy naturally rejects the rudeness and boisterous-
ness of Elizabethan£2.!!ledy-its naturalism, its 'crude, heart~:
open-air vigour' an<!_:_low' and 'mean' 'humours'. Dryden s
chief objection to Ben Jonson's comedy is the presence, in
the latter, of low and mean characters :
Thus Johnson did mechanic humour show,
When men were dull, and conversation low,
1 Restoration /Jrama (1952), p. 196.
I

i96 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
Then, Comedy was faultless, but 'twas coarse :
Cobb's tankard was a jest, and Otter's horse.
And, as their Comedy, their love was mean.1
The new comedy scrupulously avoids Cobb and his fellows.
It imitates 'the conversation of gentlemen' and thus reflects
'the improvement of our language since Fletcher's and John-
son's days' and more· especially the greater refinement in 'the
courtship, raiUery, and conversation' 2 ofcontemporary ladies
and gentlemen :
Wit's now arriv'd to a more high degree;
Our native language more refin'd and free.
Our ladies and our men now speak more wit
In conversation, than those poets writ. 3
This comedy depicts the finest aspects of fashionable life,
its sophisticatio:n, its emancipation from crude and convention-
al' moral standards, its easy and graceful manners. Hence
the pleasure it provides is_J\lore refined. Follies it may still
expose, but they should be the follies of gentlemen and not
of 'low' characters, for, as .Dryden said, 'Gentlemen wm now
be entertained with the folJies of each other ; and, though
they aJiow Cobb and Tib to speak properly, yet they are riot
much pleased with their tankard or with their rags' .4 'And
surely', Dryden ~dded, flushed with a sense of this new social
~uperiority, 'their conversation can be no jest to them on the
theatre, when they would avoid it in the street.'
· This rejection of 'low' characters was inevitable in view
of the new__ d_~filands made on comedy J>y its ari~toc_ratjf
patrons. As we are told by a contemporary playwright,
this · comedy had to deal with the gallantries and affecta-
tions of gentlemen aµd ladies of fashion else the entertain-
ment would not be· 'suitable to the Audience, which most
considerably doth consist of these' .5 Even Collier contended
that the 'l?iv€:~~jon ought to ~uited to the Audience j
1 Ker, I, p. 160.
2 Ibid., p. 140, 134.
3 Ibid., p. 161.
4 Ibid., p. 177.
5 Edward Howard, Preface to The Womens Conquest,
THE tOMEDY OF MANNERS 197
For nothing pleases which is diproportion'd to Capacity
and Gust'. 1 'The Rudenesses and broad Jests of Beggars', he
added, 'are just as acceptable to Ladies as their Rags, and
Cleanliness.' The author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry
(!698) suggested that in the interest of·moral instruction too
the characters in the new comedy should belong to the higher
classes. 'For as the greatest and best part of our Audience are
Qualityp, he said, 'if we would make our Comedies Instructive
in the exposing of Vice, we must not lash the Vices at Wapp;ng
to 'mend the Faults at Westminster' (p. 89). Dennis raised
an interesting theoretical point in this connection. He knew
the views of Aristotle on the question and in A Large Account
o[t!Je Taste in Poetry (I 702), he strongly favoured 'low' charac-
ters in comedy. Yet owing to the special needs of the
age, he enunciated the view that as subjects of comedy
'the Follies of the Great are the fittest, as being most
conspicuous and most contagious'. 2 'The Follies of the meaner
sort',headded, 'are often the Effects of Ignorance, and merit
Compassion, rather than Contempt. Affected Follies are the
most despicable; now ~ffectation is the Child of Vanity, and
Vanity of Condition.'
These views were clearly an innovation in the theory of
comedy and however congenial theymayhave been, they had
to come to terms with Aristotle-the chief law-giver on
questions of this type. Aristotle had demanded (in Dryden's
words) that chara.cters of comedy shou~_b_e ·only ofc:::~J:!l-~...Q!!
rank'-'lower and more familiar'. 3 But the new comedy had
no· use for such characters except in a very minor capacity.
To secure the sanction of classical doctrine for this comedy
it was therefore found riecessary to re-interpret Aristotle.
This accounts for Congreve's dictum that Aristotle- 'does not
mean the worse sort of People in respect of their Qual_ity,
but in _!~spe£t to their ~~nners',a the sort o(people, in fact,
whom-Congrev,e's Belinda in ~ Old Batchelor lV, xi) called
'the great Vulgar' as against the 'small Vulgar'. Ora e also
·offered a similar interpretation of Aristotle in his Ancient and
Modern Stages Surv':,!''4_(169~. 'By the baser sort ofPeople', he
1 A Short View, p. 205.
llHooker, J, p. 182.
a Ker, I, pp. 86, 120.
, Amendments etc. (1698), p. 8,
 ---~--~~
198 THEORY OF DRAMA. IN THE RllSTORATION PERIOD
said, 'Persons of low Extraction or Fortune are not here
meant, but Persons who by their practices and Conduct have
expos'd themselves to Scandal and Contempt' (p. 231). In
this manner the new comedy-a suitable entertainment for
'Fine Gentlemen and Ladies of Fashiou'-was made "consistent
with AristoteJian canons and playwrights were accordingJy
provided with a theoretical defence of their practice.
In these circumstances, it was only natural that Dryden, the
chief spokesman of the new age, shou]d find 'the low characters
of vice and folly' 1 in_ the _old comedy disgusting. He was
disappointed even in Beaumont and Fletcher, whom he had
once praised for imitating 'the conversation of gentlemen'
'whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in repartees,
no.poet before them could paint as they have done'.2 'I have
always acknowledged the wit of our predecessors', Dryden
said in his .{)efence ofth_e !Jpilogue (1672) about Fletcher and
his fellow-playwrights, 'but, I am sure, their wit was not tfoit
of gentlemen; there was ever somewhat that was ill-bred and
clownish in it, and which confessed the conversation of the
authors'. 3 It was not their fauJt, he patronisingly added, since
in 'the age wherein those poets lived, there was less of gallantry
lhan in ours ; neither did they keep the best company of
theirs'. Some years later, Robert Wolsely also found fault
w~th Fletcher. He praised Rochester's adaptation of Valentinian
(1685) more particularly because Rochester's 'constant living
at Court, and the Conversation of Persons of Quality, .to
which from his greenest Youth both his Birth and his Choice
had accustom'd him' had given him 'a nicer knowledge both
of Men and Mannerll, an Air of good Breeding, and a
GentJeman-like easiness in a11 he writ, to which Fletcher's
obscure Education and · tbe mean Company he kept bad
made him wholly a Stranger'."
This consciousness of a superior 'breeding' was so prevalentx
during this period that Shakespeare himseJf was brought
upon the stage to bear witness that his was a 'less polish'd
Age'. In the Prologue to Granville's TheJe.w of. Venice (1701),
filtakespeare's ghost confessed : · but also because 'they wanted the benefit of converse. ' 2 'Great-
1 Ker, I, p. 172.
2 Ibid., p. 8 I.
s Ibid., pp. 174-5.
" Spin~arn, JU, pp. 2-3,
THE OOMEDY OF MANNBRS 199
These Scenes in their rough Native Dress were mine ;
But now improv'd with nobler Lustre shine.
A still more arrogant sentiment was expressed in a Prolo_gue
'Yritte]! for a 1667 performance of James Shirley·~~
'1)i£!£:
That which the World call'd Wit in Shakespear's Age,
Is !aught at, as improper for ourStage. 1
What Engine, Arabella's waiting-woman in Ravenscroft's
The London Cuckolds III, i says about the 'noble Lustre' in
contemporary comedy is ighly entertaining. 'This Imploy-
ment was formerly stil'd Bawding and Pimping', she ironica1Iy
describes her role in the play, 'but our Age is more civiliz'd-
and our Language much refin'd-it is now a modish piece
of service only, and said, being complaisant, or doing a friend
a kind office. Whore-(oh filthy. broad word !) is now prettily
caJJ'd Mistress ;-'-Pimp, Friend·; Cuckold-maker, Gallant :
thus the terms being civiliz'd the thing becomes more
practicable, - what Clowns they were in former Ages.' This
cuJt of refinemen~_ !I!_ the a~ had gone ~.2- far indeed that
WycherJey turned it tq_account in a memorable reJ?.artee
in !J!e Country-Wif!.. (II, i) :
Sir Jasper : Stay, stay ; faith, to tell you the naked truth.
Lady Fidget: Fye, Sir Jasper, do not use that word naked.
I
II
This 'refinement' in the language of comedy was to be
attributed, in Dryden's words, to the 'improvement of our
Wit, Language and Conversl!tion' since the times of Jonson
and Fletcher. The old poets were unfortunate, Dryden tells
us, not only because they lacked 'education and learning',
ness was not then so easy of access', he expJained, 'nor con versa-
1 Cited by A. Nicoll, Dryden as on Adapter Q.[,S_hak~~are U922J, p. !J,
2 Ker, I, p. 166.
200 TEEORY OF DRAMA IN nm RllSTORA'tION PERIOD
tion so f ree.'1 Conditions · after the Restoration had greatly
changed and Dryden attributed 'the discourse and raillery
of [contemporary] comedies' 2 -their reputee, delicacy and
courtly air-to the social advantages of the period. The chief
cause of the general refinement, Dryden said, 'I must freely,
and without flattery, ascribe ... to the court; am]" injt, patti-
cuJarly to the King, whose example gives J! law to it.' 3 The
King had received •a gallant and generous education' and
had the opportunity of 'travelling, and being conversant in
the most polisqed courts of Europe'. 4 It is this influence of
French culture on the. English King and court which explains,
jn Dryden's opinion, the ease and grace of manner that we
find represented in contemporary comedy. With the King
as 'pattern', Dryden tells us, the English shook off thejr 'dull
and heavy spirits .•• [and] their stiff forms of conversation' an4
became •easy and pliant to each other in discourse.' 5 Thus,
Dryden tells us, as if 'insensibly, our way of living bec,ame
.more free ; and the fire of the English wit, which was before
stifled un~er a constrained, melancholy way of breeding,
began first to display its force, by mixing the solidity of our
nation with the air and gaiety of our neighbours'. 8
Dryden was not alone in thus attributing a general
dissemination of culture and refinement to the influence of
the court. 'Wit is refined, and Ingenuity made bright', we
are told by Samuel Pordage in his Qedication to The Siege
of Babylon (1678), 'not only by the Industry of Poets, and
endeavours of the Learned, but by the Example of the Court,
and encouragement of Princes, who diffuse it like Light to
all that know them:' The comic playwrights acknowledged
their debt to the social luminaries around the court in. most
generous, not to say flattering, terms. Dryden himself told
the Earl of Rochester in his Dedication to Marriage A-la-Mode
(1673), that •if there be anything in this play, wherein I
have raised myself beyond the ordinary lowness of my comed-
'ies, I ought wholly to acknowledge it to the favour of being
1 Ibid, p. 175.
2 Ibid., p, 175.
a Ibid., p. 176
4 Ibid, p. 176.
II Ibid., p. 176,
6 Jbid., p. 176.
- ., ±$1zf
TEI'! MMm:W OF MANNt!ks ' 2(}1
admitted into your Lordship's conversation'. Dryden spoke
on behalf of 'the best writers of·{his] age' who had 'copied
i the gallantries of courts; the delicacy of expression, and the
decencies of behaviour, from (his] Lordship'. Of these •best
writers', at least two have left their own testimony. Crowne
in his Dedication to Charles t~~ Eighth ~fFrance ( 1672} 'praisea
'the wit' of the Earl of Rochestt!r ·which your Lordship with
a gentile and careless freedom, sprinkles in your ordinary
,.. converse, and often supplies vulgar and necessitous wits
wherewith to enrich themselves'. Sir Francis Fane also compli-
mented the Earl on his 'miraculous wit' and 'most Charming
and,,-Instructive Conversation' in his Dedication to Love in
the Dark (1675). !~omas Southerne tolcrhis patron in his
Dedication to Sir Anthonl Love (1691) : 'if there be a quickness
in the Dialogue, and Conversati<m' of this Comedy, I owe it
in a great measure to:t:Q.ffamiliar~ty with' you'. Ev~p Congreve
expressed his I indebtedness to' the :lfflrl, qf Montague in his
~edicaticm to The_ WarP1_tli~ Worlaf 1790): 'l~it hashappen'd
1
m any part of this C0111(?dy, tha.t. have gam'd a Turn of
Stile, or Expression :qior¢ Correct, or at lea,stmqr~ Corrigible
than in those which t have formerly written,' I must, with
equal Pride and Gratitude, ascrib(it,to the HonourofYour
Lordship's admitting me into your Conversation.' He dragged
in a reference to Terence himself who in like manner learnt
t.!!e 'Purity of Stile.and Justness of Manners' frQm~eFreedoii
.~ of Conversation, which was permitted him with Lelius and
Spipio, two of the gre(ltest and most ,polite Men of his Age•:
The dependence of contemporary comip playwrights on
court circles was admirably summed up bY Otway•s Lad}'.
Squeamish in Friendship in FashionJI) when she said : · ~
asham'd any ~hould_ll!'etend to write a Comedy, that
does not know the nicer rules of the Court, and all the In-
tr.igues and Gaflanmesthatpass.'.
It was a widely held· belief in the period· that comedy:><
reflected polished and ~i!ty conversation .. in fashionable~
.society. Mrs. Behn's angry retort in her Prologue to The
Rover (1677) summed up the position. fairly correctly :
In Short, the only Witt that's now i:µ Fashion, ·
Is but the gleenings of good Conversation.
ttteri' • . . l l &,;,,_'
002 THEORY OF ] } ~ IN 't1'i Rlls,'tpR.AfION Pl!RIOO
Etherege, the father of the new comedy, specialised in this
kind of wit and it is no wonder that one of his contemporaries.
Captain Alexander Radcliffe, in his News from Hell repre-
sented him as damned · ladies who, like Carolina in Epsom Wells (l, i), 'long for an
for. writing superfine
With words correct in every Line ;
And one that does presume to say,
A Plot's too gross for any Play :
Comedy should be clean and neat,
As Gentlemen do talk and eat,
So what he writes is but Translation,
From Dog and Pa[r]tridge conversation.~
The new comedy, then, is _e_§_§_~Jially one of witty con-
versation in fashionable society. Repartee, in Dryden's words,
'is one of its chiefest graces', and the greatest pleasure that
such a comedy can provide to an audience is that of 'a chace
of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed'. 2 This
'chace of wit' dominates contemporary comedy both in
theory and practice. At a time in history 'when fundamental
questions of principles have been largely settled-or when,
at any rate, they are not raised in an acute form,' 3-and in
fashionable society no question need be 'raised in an acute
form' at any time,-minor questions, such as how to talk
brilliantly without meaning much, assume great importance.
It was one of those periods when among fashionable circles,
wit was cultivated as easily the most important of social
graces. Lee was not exaggerating when he said in his Prologue
to Gloriana (1676} :
Wit which was formerly but Recreation,
Is now become the Business, of the Nation.
I
In almost every notable comedy of the period, men of 'pleasure
and wit' and· women of 'quality'-equally witty in their
turn-'meet and clash'; That 'Nol>le Railerf, which Dennis
in his Letter to Congreve ( 1695) described as one of the most
1 The Ramble (1682), p. 5, cited by H.F.B. Brett-Smith, The Works of Sir
George Etherege, I, p. Jxx.
2 Ker, J, p. 72. · a Ibid., p. 194.
a J. R. Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Cent11ry Poetry, p. 42,
nm COMEDY OF MANNBllS 203
characteristic qualities of contemporary comedy, was a fashion-
able pastime. Even Shadwell-who waged a lifelong battle
against the craze for 'brisk' and witty writing-presented
acquaintance with witty men' and indulge in that ga11ant
sport of 'snip snap, hit for hit' which The Rehearsal (III' i)
had so splendidly ridiculed. ShadweJI, in his Dedication to
The Virtuoso (1676), contemptuously described this kind of
repartee in contemporary comedy as 'a tittle tattle sort of
Conversation' but he knew that without this 'Chit-Chat'1
no comedy could succeed on the stage.
When Professor Nicoll declares that t_he Come~ of Manners
did not have 'the force and the influence which we of to-day
postulate for [it J',2 he perhaps forgets that irrespective of
the number of plays which may properly be said to belong
to that school, the entire world of the theatre was dominated
by the values of the new comedy. It is not without significance
that playwrights who found the 'manners style ... too high to
be attained ... [and] who chose rather the humbler paths of
pure Jonsonian imitation'3 had usua1ly to.apologise for this
incapacity. The comedy of wit was the darling of the
period and anyone failing to provide it had to appeal for
'favours'. What Settle said in his Prologue to J!J.rahim (1677)
could perhaps pertinently apply to trre contemporary comic
playwrights :
On humble Writers let some favours fall,
Let not the Dons of Wit engros you all.
Mrs. Behn apologised in her Epilogue to The Dutch Lover
(1673) for not providing high comedy: -
Her humble Muse soars not in the High-rode
Of Wit transverst; or Baudy A-la-Mode.
Yet hopes her plain and easie style is such,
As your high censures will disdain- to touch.
1 Epilogue to The Squire of Alsatia (1688).
2 A. Nicoll, Resroration Drama (1952), p. 246.
~()4 TlIEORY OF b'RA~ fN' M RilSTORAri:ON PE1UOD
One of the most vociferous of the •Sons of Ben', Thomas
!;)urf~, complained in his ~rologue to A Fond Husband ( 1677) :
If Plot and Bus'ness Comical and New
Could please the Criticks that sit here to view,
The Poet might have thought this Play would do.
But in this Age Design no praise can get ;
You cry it Conversation wants, and Wit,
As if the Obvious Rules of Comedy,
Were only dull Grimace and Repartee.
Durfey still had illusions about the 'former' times when 'a Play
of Humour, or with a good Plot wou'd certainly please'/ and
he did not realise that for the high comedy which his contem-
poraries had evolved, repartee did constitute the most 'obvious'
rule.
In his J:etter to Mr. Durfey (prefixed_Jo the latter's The
Marriage-Hater Match'd) Gildon ridi~l!!ed the comedy of wit
as a mere 'Bundle of Dialogyes'. The Earl of Mulgrave too
Cf,>ndemned 'that silly thing men call sheer Wit' 2 and advised
the contemporary playwright to 'employ [his] carefull thoughts'
on 'Plot' or on 'Humour' 3 But the comedy of wit was an
expression of the unique culture of the period and could
not be thus sneered out of existence. However much the
Earl might dislike
••. the Dialogues, where jest and mock
Is held up like a .rest at Shittle-cock !4
the fact remained that the highest in the land patronised
this wit-combat in contemporary comedy.
'S!ieer wit' is such a dominant feature of the comedy of ';t.
manners that o~n it does violence both to character and p~
In his Preface to The Sullen_ Lovers ( 1668), Shadwell accused
the writers of this comedy of having destroyed all distinction
in characterisation. In 'the Writing of a Humor', he claimed,
'a Man is confin'd not to swerve from the Character, and
oblig'd to say nothing but what is proper to it : but in the
1 Dedication to The Eanditti (1686).
2 Spingarn, II, p. 294, · 1 Ibid., pp, 150-1
s Ibid., p. 292,
4 Ibid., p. 292.
-- ----- -----------~--
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 205
Playes which have been wrote of late, there is no such thing
as perfect Character, ... and there is that Latitude in this,
that almost any thing is proper for them to say'. 1 Dryden
d~fended the comedy of. manners against this. attack in his
Preface to An Evening's Love (1671). He had perhaps the
above-quoted words of Shadwell in mind when he said :
'Some enemies of repartie have observed to us, that there
is a great latitude in their cha:r;acters, which are made to
speak it: and that it is easier to write wit than humour; because,
in the characters pf humour, the poet is confined to m•
the person speak what is only proper to it. Whereas, all kind
of wit is proper in the character,ofa witty person. But, by
their favour, ~er~ are as different characters in wit as in fol!,y.
Neithef is all kind of wit proper in the mout,h ofevery in enious
person.' 2 It is sigmfic;ant, however, t at m his Parallelof
Poetry .and Paint;ng (1695) Dryden a.t last seems to recognise
the justip(; of. the accusation : :'l knew a poet. , . who; being 1
:~cm witty himself) c_ould draw nothing but wits in a e9medy
of his; even his fools were infected with the disease of their
author. They overflowed with smart reparties, and were
only distinguished from the intended wits by being called
coxcombs, though they deserved not so scandalous a name. ' 3
Congreve, like Dryden, believed that characters in comedy
-should be properly 'distinguished from each other and yet
in his own case, as he tells us in the De ication to The Wa
of the World, his contemporaries had iled 'to distinguish
betwixt the character of Witwoud and a Truewit'. It was
perhaps not entirely their fault. As the Earl of Mulgrave
rightly pointed out in his Essay upon Poetry (1682), a play-
wright addicted to 'sheer wit' inevitably ran such a risk :
That all his fools speak sence, as if possest,
And each by Inspiration breaks his jest;
If once the Justness of each part be lost,
Well may we laugh, but at the Poets cost.•
\
In her Epistle to the Reader "prefixed to The Dutch Lover, Mrs.
2 Ker, J, p. 140.
\,. 3 lbid.,'11, p.' 142.
, Spin-garn, II, p. ~94.

~06 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
Behn tightly complained that in contemporary comedy it
was impossible to distinguish between 'people of Wit, good
Humour, good Manners, and all that: ... if the Authors did
not kindly add their proper names, you'd never know them
by their Characters'. Crowne, however, seems to have realised
that too minute a characterisation would be incompatible
with the spirit of the comedy of manners. His English Frier
(1690) was attacked for lack of characterisation. 'The faults
they lay on the characters are', he tells us in 'his Preface,
that 'there is not enough of any one ofthem'. But Crowneis
not worried about this 'fault'. He is satisfied that the characters
'are pleasant, else never so little would be too much for them'.
The real position seems to be that characterisation is ·not
regarded as· the ch1ef conc~rn of thec.o~1eiiip~~ary comic
playwright. His function has been performed well enough
if he has made his characters say a number of 'smart and witty
things'; That ·plot, too, often exists to provide occasion for
'wit' is proved by the pertinent remarks of The /Jehearsal (HI, i}:
Smith : Yes, but the Plot stands still.
Bays : Plot stand still ! Why, what .a Devil is the Plot
good for,.but to bring in fine things.
Playwrights do not, of course, accept this position in theory.
William Burnabts views on the question are fairly representa-
tive in this respect. 'In Comedy', he says in his Critical Essay,
'the chief Thing is the ~able, or Plot' and though there may be
'room enough for Wii', 'that Comi~k Poet, that mal<es Wit, and
(Fhat we call) Dialogue, his chief Aim, ought to write nothing
but. Dialo~es, for he ca:n neyer obtain the name of a Drama·
tick Writer, with the best Jud~s·.1 In his Preface to The
Modish Husband (170~, he stated what is obviously a.very
reasonable proposition : 'In a good play there shou'd be
nothing but what rises from the Business of it; ... Thus Wit
itself is a Fault whep it is foreign to~_9ccasions of the
Story'.
Whatever the relative theoretical importance of the plot
and dialogue in a comedy, in actual practice no comedy
could ordinarily succeed in the period without an ample
1 The Dramatic Works of William Burnaby, ed, F. E, Budd, p. 459,
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 207
provision of wit. The case of Thomas Doggett, the actor-
playwright, is highly instructive inthis connection. His comedy,
The Country-Wake(l696), was not a comedy of wit and when
it failed on the, stage, Doggett offered the following rather
halting defence in his Dedication : 'I own there's a scarcity
of that which some call Wit, and what many Authors in this
Age run mad after, endeavouring to produce it out of every
body's Mouth, whether it belongs to their Character or not,
still losing the Man to goe out of the way for a Jest ; 'its what
I shall never labour for, ••. for he that will make Nature his
Study, will find more Charms in it, and a more certain way
to Applause .... ' The 'Applause' that he got was not, however,
owing to any 'Charms' of 'Nature', but to the farcical elements
in the play and as a comedy, as the Prologue points out, it
~I
I was •a meer out-of-fashion Play' having neither 'Chit-Chat
Repartee, nor Raillery'. Though most playwrights were not
!' able to provide 'repartee' to their patrons, it was taken for
granted throughout the period that comedy should have
'that pleasant turn, that ·gayetie ... that fine raillery, which is
the flower of wit'. 1 ·
III
This 'fine raillery' was an inevitable consequence of that
freedom in the English 'way of living', which Dryden attributed
to the influence of the court. The most significant feature of
this freedom was the emancipation of women. In Dryden's
The Wild Gallant (11,))--a play which is neither 'wild' nor
•gallant' enough to be a proper comedy of manners-the
heroine complained : 'Women are ty'd to hard unequ~I
Laws : The Passion is the same in us, and yet we are debarr'd
the Freedom to express it.' It was this 'freedom' of expression
that the new age guaranteed. Woman might not still have
the same freed om of action as man. Whereas the hero was
allowed, and even encoµraged, to be 'monstrous leud', the
heroine, however much she might threaten him with 'the
Penalty of Cuckoldom', was always above reproach. But
in the freedom of speech, she was in no way man·s inferior.
It was essential that she should enjoy this .equality. A
l: R. Rapin, Reflections (1674), p. 125.
 ~08 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
rnodest and a quiet heroine. would have been out of place
in the comedy of manners. As Lawrence Echard said in his
Preface to Terence's CfJmedies ( 1694), the age was 'all for
Humour, Gallantry, Conversation, and Courtship, and
shou'dn't endure the chiefLady in the Play a Mute, or to
say very little'. 'Oµr amorous Sparks', he added, 'love to
hear the pretty Rogues prate, snap up their Gallants, and
Repartee upon 'em on all sides.' 'We shou'dn't like to have
a Lady marry'd', he c<:mtinued, contrasting the comedies of
Terence with thqse Qf his con~mporaries, 'without knowing
whether she gives her consen( or no, (a Custom among the
Romaas) but wou'd be for hearing all the Courtship, all the
rare and fine things that Lovers can say to each other.'
· This type of heroine demanded an approach to love sharply
different from the tr~ditional one. Dryden attributed the
crudeness of the old COlnedy to its 'mean' love and to the
'melancholy way of breeding' of .the last age which 'stifled'
the free spjrit .of. 'gallantr)I'. It is precisely an emancipated
attitude to love and to gallantry which explains the distin-
guishing features of the new comedy. Vanbrugh in his
Prologue (on the Third daY) to The Relapse (1691), expressed '
what was then a common senti.r~ent :
This is an age, where all things w.e improve,
But most of all, the Art of making love.
Shadwell resented the new approach to love, but nevertheless
he too discarded the old 'whining Lover' in favour of the new
'Art ofmakitig Love'. Woodly's proposal to Carolina in Epsom
Wells (II, i) is interesting : 'Take your choice; I can make
Jove from the stiff formaI way of the year 42 to the gay bri~k
way of this present day and hour.' ,It is a natural corollary
of this 'gay brisk way' of making love that both man and wo-
maQ. are equally witty and emancipated. The wit-combat pre-
supposes two equals, since, as Congreve's Brisk in The Double-
Dealer (I, v) said : 'We it must be foil'd· by Wit i_CUt a Diamond
with a Diamond: no other way, l'gad..' It is the most essential
feature of the coinedy of manners that witty lover and an a
equally ·witty mistress wage a war of wit against each other,
till, ih the .end,' 'withoutany ,<. • '
or
trace romance or sentiment',-
' ~ I , , ~
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 209
in fact, very often 'purely to be rid of [ each other]' ,-they
'dwindle' into husband and wife.
The 'amorous Pair' of this comedy is 'in all things frank
and free'. 1 The hero is 'a gay, splendid, generous, easie, fine·
young Gentleman' 2-a 'Witty, Wild, Inconstant, free Gallant'
pressing his love suit with 'easy freedom, and a gay Address·. 3
The heroine, in Ravenscroft's words .(London Cuckolds, I, i),
is 'a little laughing, gigling, highty, tighty, pratling, tatting,
gossipping' mistress who knows the rules of the game as weU
as he. These rules were admirably summed up in a song in
The Old Batchelor (II, ix) by the greatest law-giver of the age
in such matters, William Congreve :
Would you long preserve your Lover ?
Would you still his Goddess reign ?
Never let him all discover,
Never let him much obtain.
The heroine of the comedy of manners fully understands
that if she errs, she does so at her peril.
The wit-combats of the 'gay couple' in the Restoration \
comedy presuppose a definite attitude to life on the part of \
playwrights, however difficult it might be for a vast majority
of them to sustain this attitude. That 'rationalization of sex~
which Bateson regards as the chiefcontribution of this comedy
to contemporary culture is only a natural corollary of this
attitude. It is clearly recognised that woman is neither a
goddess, as Platonic lovers 'treated her, _nor an instru_!l!_el!_t
f.or sexual gratification, as men like Rochester tended to
~™ She is the companion of man, with her own enchanting
personality, which is to be explored and won not by devotion
or lust, but by intelligence, grace; brilliance of wit and charm
of manners. The 'whining, sighing Consumptive' passion of
an Almanzor on the one hand, and the 'right-down honest
lnjoyment' of one of Mrs. Behn's characters on the other,
left no scope for inte1lectual companionship or for repartee
between the lovers. Either would have destroyed that fine
1 George Farquhar, Epilogue to The Constant Couple (1700),
.;
2 George Farquhar, Dedication to The Inconstant (1702).
a Nicholas Rowe, Epilogue to Farqubar's Th.e Inconstant.
 210 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION 11ERIOD
relationship-a subtle and de1icate stage between passion and
appetite-which this comedy claims to. present, and for which
alone, if for nothing else, it should have a strong appeal for
the modern mind. It must, of course, be admitted at once
that it does not always !;Ucceed in doing so. Both extremes,
the sentimental and th~~~ensual, each res.!!!!!!iLJl!_].
denial of the woman's right to_!Jii11k and choose,' do enter/
into Restoration comedy in one way or another and spoil
the tone of the plays. But at its best, it is the aim of this comedy
to present men and women who p]ay with emotion without
necessarily Jacking it ; who love each other and yet prefer
to 'disown the scandal of Love, and· call it Ga1lantry, Mirth
and Raillery'; 1 who engage their hearts and yet are able
to recall them at wiH, and who continue the game of love even
when the journey's end has come. 'Here the Chace must end',
, says Mirabel in The Way of the World (IV, v), but Miliamant
replies, 'No -I'll fly and be follow'd to the Jast Moment, .•.
I'll be soUicited to the very last, nay, ancl afterwards'. This
conception of love and courtship leads to an ideal marriage
in which the lovers prefer to retain, in Dryden's words (&!E:!J.
[.ove, V, i), 'the more agreeable names of Mistress and Gallant'.
One of Dryden's ladies in The Assignation (V, ii) promises her
lover that after marriage she would 'take care to be as little
a wife, and as much a mistress ... as is possible'.
This polished courtship in which, in Congreve's words
(Love/or Love, I, xiv), 'Passion ought to give place to... Man-
ners' reaches its earliest perfoction in ~therege's The Man of
Mode. Harriet knows the code perfectly and when Dorimant at
one stage grows a little too serious about love, she invites Bel-
lair : 'let us walk, 'tis time to leave him, men grow dull when
they begin to be particular'. When at a later stage Dorimant
protests : 'I will renounce all the joys I have in friendship and
in Wine, sacrifice to you all the interest I have in other Women',
Etherege realises that Dorimant is going too far-farther than
the rules of the witty sport permit-and down comes the
damper from Harriet: 'Hold-though I wish you devout, I
would not have you turn Fanatick'. This was the essence of
the new attitude. :rs;othing was to ,be in excess-neither fond-
ness nor deta. chment, neither passion no! indifference~either
1 SeeJ. H. ~mith, The <:f!i)' Couple in Restoration, Comed4 p. 42,
\
r
I
1
lllE COMEDY OF MANNERS 211
boldness in men nor coyness in women-the attitude was to
be perfect, easy and graceful.
The world of the comedy of manners, then, is one of dalli-
ance and agreeable trifling, of leisure and amusement, and it
lives by the sheer brilliance of its style, grace and artificiality.
The Comic Muse which presides over this world seems to say
to. its inhabitants . 'Come, come, leave Business to Idlers, and
Wisdom to Fools',1 and most considerations that dominate
the ordinary everyday world are left far behind. This comedy
may sometimes espouse the partisan spirit and may become
•a yell of triumph'-'We 're back, and the King's back, and
we'll see you don't forget it'-but essentially it is 'a prolonged
indulgence in wish-fulfilling fantasy'. 2 'Wit, be my Faculty,
and Pleasure, my Occupation ; and let Father Time shake.
his Glass' 3-that is the answer of this comedy to the universe.
Hen~_11o~hing matters but fof.!11.! What is important is not
what one does .but how ,one does it .. The manner of druiii..,.c:
thin s is everything, thin s themselves almost nothin . 'Oh
Gad I hate your hi eous Fancy', a mistress te s er gallant
in Congreve's The Old Batc}ielor (II, viii), 'if you must ~alk
impertinently, for Heavens sake let it be with Variety'. that
is the spirit of this comedy-nothing disagreeable, and nothinlg
disconcerting--'no loud passion or emphasis ; but a harmony
4
of agreeable voices "congreeing to a full and natural close"'.
It is, in short, man's 'holiday from the sublime and beautiful,
from the coarse and the real'. 5
IV
Moral satire would have interfered with the lightness of\
touch, the graceful gaiety and the amoral gallantry of this
world. The comedy of manners, therefore, largely eschews
moral satire. ln recent years, however, attempts have been
made to show that this comedy is essentially satirical. In an
otherwise important study of this comedy, Professor Fujimura
1 William Congreve, The Old Batchelor, I, i.
2 John Wain, op. cit. p. 4.
3 William Congreve,' The Old B{l(<;helor, l, i,
4 John Palmer, Comedy, p. 35. · ,
5 Ibid., p. 33,
2'12 THEORY OF DRAMA IN TBE RESTORATION PERIOD
makes much of its 'attacks on marriages of convenience,
on unnatural conduct, hypocrisy, and 'enthusiasm' , i and
asserts that pulsating 'beneath the brilliant surface of Restora-
tion high life ... is a substratum of human lust, malice, and
cynicism, which gives to Restoration Comedy its vitality and
force'. 2 He claims that the 'manners' interpretation of Restora'"/'
tion Comedy which confines itself only to 'the brilliant surface
of Restoration high life' and which ignores 'the malice of the
raillery passages, the sexual wit, the skepticism, and the
coarsely realistic scenes involving people like Gripe, Dufoy
and the Widow Blackacre' is 'a modern rather than a seven-
teenth century view, and without historical justification'.3
The 'brilliant surface of Restoration high life', however, is the
most dominant theme of the Comedy of Manners and it wouid
be highly ina~visable to reject the 'manners' interpretation
altogether. Moreover, the theory of comedy which emerges in
the period not only substantially corroborates the 'manners'
jnterpretation but also proves that this comedy is not essentially
(or even largely) satirical. For the first time in England, comedy,
attempted to achieve a purity of tone which is incompatible
both with moral satire and coarse realism. These latter elements
are, no doubt, present in contemporary comedy but to des-
cribe them as its distinguishing features-as the source of
its 'vitality and force'-would surely be misleading. At any
rate what contemporary playwrights have to say on this and
allied questions would be a highly relevant evidence in this
connection.
The seventeenth ce_ntury dramatic criticism is, of course,
full of claims that comedy must have a moral purpose and
that it must be a satire on men and manners. Two things,
however, need to be remembered before we decide to take
thJse daims too seriously. One, that moral satire is regarded
as an essential feature only of the comedy of humours and not
of the comedy of manners ; secondly, the real intellectual
and social climate of the age is best reflected in the demands
made on comedy by the Restoration audience. These demands
assume a special significance in this period more particularly
1 T. H. Fujimura, Tf,e Restoration <;<Jmedr of Wit, p. 4.
t eccentricities, or excesses and deficiencies in their own class,
I Ibid., pp. 8-9,
p Ibid.,?· 51
THE COMEtlY OF MANNER$ 213
beca~ it is these ,deman4s which :6.nally explain .and justify
contemporary comedy both .in th~ry and practice.
In spite of all that the playwrights and critics might clai~
at times, the new comedy was not designed to correct 'Vice
and Folly, by exposing them'. 1 The comedy, of manners is
obviously not the result of 'a spontaneous, or self-induced,
ove.dlow of powerful indignation' 2 which has justly been
described as the mood of a true satirist. Neither the
contemporary playwright nor his aristocratic patrons would
accept a comedy the chief aim of which should have
been to 'expose, or deride or condemn' 3 vices and follies.
Under attacks· from moralists, even a playwright like
Congreve might claim, as he did in his Amendments of Mr.
Collier's .. . Citations (1698) : 'Men are to be laugh'd out of
their Vices in Comedy .•. As vicious People are made asham 'd
of their Follies or Faults, by seeing them expos'd in a ridiculous
manner, so are good People at once both warn'd and diverted
at their Expence'. But such claims are made under duress
and. they .are not to be taken too ~eriously. It has rightly been
pointed out that 'we should have heard much less about the
corrective aims of comedy if the comic drama in England
had not been under constant attack, and some sort of prestige
advertising had not been required to justify it'. 4 There is a
considerable amount of this 'prestige advertising' in the
Restoration period and we would do well to be on our guard
against it. This is not to say that there is no satire in con-
temporary comedy. But the satire in this comedy is only
incidental and the attitude to life of the playwrights varies,
in Professor Sutherland's words, 'from an amused tolerance to
a cheerful or even delighted acceptance' .6 The re~son for this
attitude is o.bvious. For the comic playwrights of the period,
'the fashionable world was the only word, and the frivolous,
intriguing, leisured life of Restoration society was ultimately
the only good life. They might ridicule aberrations and
1 Charles Gildon, Letter to Thomas Durfey, prefixed to The Marriage-
Hater Match'd (1692).
: James Sutherland, English Satire (1958), p. 4.
a Ibid., p. 7.
4 Ibid., p. 9.
& Ibid., p, 3.
214 THEORY OF DRAMA IN Tim RESTORATION PERIOD
or laugh at aldermen and women of the Town; but they had
no real quarrel, other than occasional boredom, with that
world of which they were themselves among the leading orna-
ments, and which they mirrored with such amusement in
their comedies'. 1
Dryden's vieW/that the 'chief end' of this comedy ~s
'divertisement and delight' 2 was more or less acceptable to
the whole age. Mrs. Behn could speak in a most formidable
tone at times, but she rightly said in her Prefatory remarks to
The Dutch Lover (1673) that comedy was not meant 'either
for a converting or confirming Ordinance'. It was 'the best
divertisement', she added, and hence she 'studied to make
[her comedy] as entertaining as I could'. Crowne too believed,
as he tells us in his Prefatory remarks to Calisto, that the only
law that comedy recognised was 'the fundamental one to
please'. Its 'chief and prime business', we are told by the
writer of an anonymous pamphlet, is 'to divert the audience,
and relieve the mind fatigued with ... business'. What this
writer further says is quite representative of the usual attitude
to comic drama in the period. 'For my part', be says, 'when
I go to the theatres, it is with this intention alone, viz : to
unbend my thoughts from all manner of business, and by
this relaxation to raise again my wearied spirits ... ; the
mirth and jollity of the place, like a well prescribed cordial,
performs its operation, enlivens my drooping thoughts, and
passes clearly off, working a pleasing cure, and leaving no
impression behind it.' 3
To provide 'mirth and jollity', however, the comic play-
wright had to present contemporary follies and affectations
in a pleasant manner. Some little satire therefore there had
to be but, as we learn from the Epilogue to Mrs. ·Centlivre's
Platonick Lady (1707), this clearly was 'Satire for your Mirth
design'd'. Its intention was not to 'reform' or to 'chastise',
' it was merely to entertain. Hence it was mild and essentially
innocuous and, in Dryden's words, did not carry 'too sharp
an edge'. 4 It .was frankly not moral and instead of raising any
1 Ibid., p. 142.
2 Ker, I, p. 143.
\ a A Vindication of the Stage etc. (1698), cited by D. Crane Taylor, William
\mgreve, p, 124.
\ 4 frefatory remarks to Absalom and Achftophel.
\
\
'riIE· OOMEDY, oil· MANNBllS 215
fundamental questions, it trifled pleasantly with the · super-
ficialiti~s of behaviour. Its essence lay in that 'fineness of
raillery' 1 which distinguished the comedy of manners from
the older comedy. Consequently satire in the new comedy
avoided 'the mention of great crimes' and applied itself 'to
the representing of blindsides, and little extravagancies'. 2 Its
mood was often one of polite irony and it was rarely vehe-
·ment, bitter or indignant.
: This was but natural. 'The Mob of Gentlemen who wrote
with Ease' could hardly be expected to devote their time
and energy to any serious moral problems. 'Wit, by my Faculty,
and Pleasure, my Occupation'~summed up to a great extent
their life as well as that- of their stage characters. 'Easy'
Etherege, with 'that noble laziness,of the mind' 2 of which be
boasted to Dryden could hardly concern himself with what
went on in the world outside. He was content to follow
'quietly' 'the light within [him]' and leave serious questions
of religion and state to those 'who were born with' the
ambition of ·becoming prophets and legislators'.' What be
said in one of his letters to Dryden has a larger significance :
'Nature no more intended me for a politician than ,she :did
you for a courtier'. 5 He was such an ideal courtier himself
that he could hardly be expected to expose and lash out at
the vices of the fashionable life around him. Sir Fopling is a
man of 'great acquir'd Follies', yet he is hardly a satiric
portrait. Etherege once confessed. 'l am a fop in my heart.
-I have been so used to affectation, that without the help of
the air of the court, what is natural cannot touch me'. 6 This
is a perfect description of Sir Fopling himself, and it was no
mere slander on the part of Dean Lockier to think, as we learn
from Spence's Anecdotes, that Etherege 'was exactly his own
Sir Fopling Flutter'. The affectations of the fop provided
one of the refined pleasures of Restoration society and Etherege
-would certainly have agreed with bis own Lady Townley in
The Man of Mode (Ill, ii) : 'we should love Wit, but for Variety
1 Ker, II, p. 93.
s Ibid., p. 93
a The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege, ed. S; Rosenfield, p. 167.
, Ibid., p. 305
II Ibid., p 168.
• Cited by B. Dobree, RestCJration Comedy, p. ~O
 -----~=------:-:- - ~ - ' -- - ----
216 TIIEORY OF DRAMA IN nm RESTORATION PERIOD
be able to divert our selves with the Extra vagancies of those
who want it'. This 'diversion' is the speciality of the Restora-
tion comedy and though, .technically speaking, Sir Fopling-
and his whole tribe up to Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington in
The Relapse (1697)-is a 'fool' whose 'follies' are being 'expos-
ed', t-0 imagine that Etherege had the slightest intention to
'amend' him into a man of 'sense', would be completely to
misread the play. The world of Etherege would have been infin-
itely poorer if Sir F opling had decided to bebave like Bellair, the
nearest approach to a man of'sense' in the play, 'always comp-
laisant, and seldom impertinent'. Much of the sparkle of the
icomedy depends upon Sir Fopling and it would be perfectly
fotile to seek any serious moral purpose in this character.
Wycherley lacked the ease of Etherege. He did not bring
'in fools for the sake of variety, as Etherege did, nor did his
fools provide that pure entertainment which is the sole reason
for Sir Fopling's existence. Though he was a part of the
fashionable world he portrayed and could often accept the
values of his age which one of his characters in The Gentleman ·
Dancing-Master (I, i) described as 'a pleasant-wellbred-
complacent- free-frolick- good-natur'd -pretty-Age',
-his acceptance was neither complete nor graceful. He was
not able to hide his contempt for his fools nor the fact that he
detested his knaves.
Dobree has called Wycherley 'John Fox masquerading in
the habiliments of a Charles Sedley', and yet the light and
subtle quality of the comedy of manners is incomprehensible
both to the fanatic Puritan and the lecherous Cavalier.
Wycherley had qualities that none perhaps amongst his
contemporaries possessed-strength, courage, incisiveness and
rgreat dramatic skill- but he was not able to play the role
iof a courtier with the gay impudence of Etherege. In the
·Eli'zabethan age, he would have been a great dramatist :
in the Restoration age, however, he was a misfit and hence,
sin spite of all his qualities, in the last analysis, rather
unsatisfying.
We see the effects of this maladjustment in The Country
Wife (1675). When Wycherley came to write it, he had
before him as models both Etherege and Dryden. The comedy
of wit and gallantry which Etherege had' presented in bis
bm ·COMEDY OF MANNERS '2i7
She would if she could (1668) and which Dryden almost per•
fected in Celadon and Florimel [ Secret-Love (1668)] and later
in Rhodophil. Palamede, Doralice and Malantha [ Marriage
A-la-Mode (1673)] ,-not to mention attempts on the same
lines by minor writers,-Wycherley changed to suit his own
temperament. In his earlier plays, Love in a Wood(l672) and
The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1673), too, Wycherley had
more or less disowned the comedy which derived its .force
I.
I,
from a wit-combat between a gallant and a mistress, both
t equally witty and emancipated. In The Country Wife, his
revolt is disturbingly sharp. His Dorimant-Etherege's Dori-
mant had yet to come-is Horner and it is an essentialpart
of Wycherley's purpose that it is a Dorimant without a Harriet,
For Wycherley women are not companions : they are instru-
ments for sexual gratification and there are only two kinds
of them, eitlter country girls like Mrs. Pinchwife who are
always waiting for an opportunity to be 'toused and moused,'
or 'women of quality' like Lady Fidget whose sole concern
is their reputation : 'But first, my dear Sir, you must promise
to have a care of my dear honour'. The one type is all flesh,
the other all hypocrisy ~and both rule out that gallant court-
ship which is the very essence of the comedy of manners.
Sensuality destroys this essence : the men and women of this
comedy, in the words of Otway, 'hunt more for the love
of the sport, than for the sake of the prey'. Too easy a
compliance, in fact, annoys the gallant: 'By Heav'n', shouts
~ one of these too easily successful gallants in Congreve's The Old
Batchelor, 'there's not a woman, will give a Man the Pleasure
of the Chase : my sport is always balkt or cut short'. The
'Pleasure of the chase' -that is the real spirit of this comedy
and it is this spirit which Horner destroys. He is made to
say at one place in the true tradition of this comedy : 'But
methinks wit is more necessary than beauty ; and I think no
woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable
without it'. But neither Mrs. Pinchwife nor Lady Fidget
... nor any of his other clients has any wit about her and Homer's
real creed is expressed elsewhere : 'ceremony in love and
eating is as ridiculous as in fighting : falling on briskly is all
should be done on those occasions'. But it is not this 'falling
on briskly' that attracts the men and women of the comedy
~,1a THEORY OF, i>ilAMA IN THE REs"rORATION i>ERIOf>
of manners : it is something finer, something subtler-some
'bewitching whimsicality' that they notice in each other's
behaviour, or some distinction or brilliance in wit, intelligence
and demeanour,-which enchants them and with mischief
in their eyes and flashing youth in their hearts, they go for-
ward to chase the sport of love. There is nothing Platonic
about it, of course, but, as we are told by the heroine of The
Women Turn'd Bully (167$), •the face of Love• had 'very much
alter'd'. in that period and 'both Sexes [hadJ agreed, though
their designes be never so sensual, to disown the scandal of
Love, and call it Gallantry, Mirth and Raillery'. 1 It was this
agreement that Wycherley broke ia his creation of Horner.
He, in effect, said to his age-what might have been perfectly
true, and yet was not essentially comic : 'That is what all
your Gallantry. Mirth and Raillery come to'. Macaulay-it
hardly needs to be said-was grossly unjust to Wycherley, but
Wycherley was the first to have raised moral questions.
Wycherley's attitude is still more explicit in The Plain-
Dealer (1677). Horner was cynical, but Manly is bitter and
brutal. He does not reflect the Beau Monde at all. Wycherley
himself was perhaps conscious of it. In his Dedication to the
play,-a unique Dedication in the age for its bitterness and
disgust,-he addressed Mother Bennet. the noted procuress :
'the Vices of the Age are our best business'. Vices, how-
ever, were commonly regarded as outside the scope of a comedy
which was essentially artificial. To present vices, it was said,
would be to intrude 'Sentiments too grave for Diversion'. 2
Comedy was meant 'chiefly to ridicule Folly'3 and even the
folly that it ridiculed was not to be of too disturbing a nature.
Poets might assert that it was their function to present 'the
strictness of Poetical Justice', but, as Farquhar found to his
cost, the audience had no taste for moralising and stood up
'vigorously for •.. Poetick License'. The follies and affectations
of 'a Beau, Cully, Cuckold, or Coquet'4 were pleasant enough
subjects in the period~ but to raise fundamental questions
about human nature was clearly regarded as out of place in
a comedy. To 'rally up the Sins of th' Age' the poet could
1 Cited by J. H. Smith, op. cit., p. 42.
2 George Farquhar, Preface to The Twin Ri11a/s (1702).
I Ibid.
' Ibid.
· tlm COMEDY ()Ji MANNERS ~19
'bring each Fop in Town on th~ Stage' 1 but it was not his
function to expose 'human lust, malice and cynicism'.
2
That is exactly, however, what Wycherley tried to do in
The Plain-Dealer. He knew, of course, what the age wanted.
'Plaindealing', he tells us in his Prologue, was 'quite out of
fashion' as ladies wanted to be presented 'like Goddesses'
and men 'like Heroes'. This he boldly refused to do. His aim,
he asserted, was ·10 present life as he saw it rather than to
edit it for the amusement of the decadent and unthinking
patrons:
But the course Dauber of the coming Scenes,
To follow Life, and Nature only means:
Displays you, as you are.
Realism was expected of the comic playwright, but not this
aggressive realism. But even this does:not satisfy Wycherley.
He distorts the features of life and emphasises only the dark
spots. His Manly, the speaker of the Prologue, tells his audience
how the poet
makes his fine Woman
A mercenary Jilt, and true to no Man;
His Men of Wit, and pleasure of the Age,
Are as dull Rogues as ever cumber' d Stage:
He draws a Friend, only to Custom just;
And makes him naturally break his trust.
Manly alone is honest :
I only, Act a Part like none of you;
And yet, you'll say, it is a Fools Part too:
An honest Man; who like you, never winks,
At faults; but unlike you, speaks what he thinks.
Comedy-and more especially the artificial comedy of manners
-assumes that we 'wink' at faults. The moment we refuseto
do so we destroy the comic illusion and what remains may be
socially admirable but it is not comedy. It is perhaps strange
l Mrs. Behn, Prologue to The Amorous Prince (1671).
2 T.H. Fujimura, op. cit., p. 8.
226 THEORY OF b-;RAMA IN nm :ktlstORATION PEllIOD
that in an age when tragedy lacked courage to face life,
Wycherley's comedy attempted to do so. But he failed. Fjdelia
has no place in The Plain-Dealer. But it is obvious why
Wycherley introduced her. Whenever problems of good and
evil were raised in Restoration drama, good was always shown
triumphant, and Wycherley himself, in spite of his strength
and defiance, ultimately subscribed to that comfortable
creed.
Wycherley's age regarded him as its greatest dramatic
satirist and one of his contemporaries, John Evelyn the
Younger, in a poem entitled To Envy, proudly prophesied ;
As long as Men are false, and Women vain,
While Gold continues to be Vertue's bane,
In pointed Satyr Wicherly shall reign.
Dryden too complimented 'the author of the Plain Dealer'
on his obliging 'all honest and virtuous men, by one of the
most bold, most general, and most useful satires, which has
ever been presented on the English theatre' .1 It is significant,
however, that Dryden recognised the exceptional nature of
this play. In his Discourse concerning•.. Satire ( 1693), he noted
the similarity between Juvenal and his 'friend the Plain-
Dealer'.2 But Juvenal, in spite of Dryden's praise, wll,s not a
suitable model for the Restoration comic playwright. The
'true Raillery' of contemporary comedy differs as much from
the satire of Juvenal as 'the pleasant reproofs of a Gentleman
from the severity of a School-master'. 3 Juvenal 'could not
rally', Dryden rightly noted, 'but he could declaim'. 4 This
declaiming was understandable in the 'reign of Domitian'
when 'enormous vices' were being practised, but in the refined
age of Augustus, at least in fashionable comedy, Juvenal's
'vehement' indignation had to give place to Horace's 'fine
raillery'. 5 It was Horace and not Juvenal who was to be the
model of the Restoration comic satirist. Dennis in a famous
passage admirably summed up the fundamental difference
1 Ker. 1, p. 182.
2 Ibid., II, p 85,
a Thomas Sprat, Spingarn, II, p. 136.
4 Ker, II, p. 94.
s Ibid., pp. 87, 92.
nm COMEDY OF MANNERS 221
between the two. 'Horace argues, insinuates., engages, rallies,
smiles', he said, 'Juvenal exclaims, apostrophizes, exaggerates,
lashes, stabbs'. •There is in Horace', he added, 'almost every-
where an agreeable Mixture of good Sense, and of true
Pleasantry, so that he has every where the principal Qualities
of an excellent Cornick Poet. And there is almost every where
in Juvenal, Anger, Indignation, Rage, Disdain and the violent
Emotions and vehement Style of Tragedy'. 1 It was no wonder
that Juvenal had found a true disciple in the author of The
Plain Dealer. ,
Congreve also recognised the exceptional nature of
Wycherley's play. In his Prologue to Love for Love (1695), he
told his audience :
Since the Plain-Dealer's Scenes of Manly Rage
Not one has dar'd to lash this Crying age.
Wycherley had done something which the other comic
playwrights in the age did n-0t dare to do. Moreover it was
something that the comedy of manners was not even supposed
to do, and Congreve surely was not to accept Wycherley's
lead. In the Prologue to Love for Love, he described his own
position regarding the place of satire in comedy. He admitted
that he was not altogether to eschew satire :
We've something too, to gratifie ill Nature,
(Ifthere by any here) and that is Satire.
The quality of his satire, however, had to be different :
Tho' Satire scarce dares grin, 'tis grown so mild
Or only shews its Teeth, as if it smil'd.
Wycherley might be the master of the true satiric comedy
but he, Congreve, was not out to compete with him in that
sphere for a very good reason :
This time, the Poet owns the bold Essay,
Yet hopes there's no ill-manners in his Play.
l Hooker, II, p. 219.
222 THEORY OF DRAMA IN ,THE RESTORATION PERIOD
'There's no ill-maimers in his Play'-that is the crux of the
problem. 'Mild' satire, consistent with polite manners, could
be treated as a natural part of the comedy of manners but the
fierce invective of Wycherley had to be eschewed.
In The Double-Dealer ( 1694) alone Congreve was, perhaps,
following Wycherley's example. 'I design'd the Moral first',
he said in his Dedication to that play, 'and to that Moral I
invented the Fable.' In pursuance of this moral aim, he
presented characters who were 'Vicious and Affected'.
Naturally 'some of the Ladies [were] offended'. But he could
not help it, Congreve pleaded, since it 'is the Business of a
Cornick Poet to paint the Vices and Follies of Human-kind'.
Comedy was not meant to pay compliments to fashionable
men and women, he said, and they should not expect to be
'Tickled' by a comedy any more than 'by a Surgeon, when
he is letting 'em Blood'. Bnt this was precisely what the comedy
of manners did not claim to do : it did pay compliments, in
however subtle a way, to fashionable society, and it certainly
never cared to let 'Blood'. It was natural that Congreve's
patrons found the play unpalatable. 'The women thinke he
has exposed their Bitchery too much', Dryden wrote to William
Walsh, 'and the Gentlemen are offended with him; for the
discovery of their foUyes : and the way of their Intrigues,.
under the notion of Friendship to their La.dyes Husbands'. 1
Congreve did not write another play similar to The Double-
Dealer. In the Prologue to his very next play, Love for Love,
he confessed, as we have seen, that satire gratified only 'iii
Nature', and that if he ventured to present a little satire it
would be 'mild' and gentle, consistent with the manners of
polite society. He rightly confessed that his genius was not
essentially satirical. 'I profess myself an Enemy to Detraction',2
he said in a letter to Dennis, and like his Millamant, he
found 'Folly' more congenial than 'Malice'. He finally summed
up his creed~as well as that of his age-in his Prologue to
The Way of the World.
Satire, he thinks, you ought not to expect ;
For so Reform'd a Town, who dares Correct ?
1 The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward, p. 63.
2 Cited by D.C. Taylor, William Congreve, p. 87.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 223
To Please, this Time, has been his sole Pretence,
He'll not instruct, lest it shou'd give Offence.
That Dryden's 'sole Pretence' was always to 'please', he
never concealed. He frankly repudiated the moral function
of comedy. 'At least I am sure', he said, perhaps to appease
people like Shadwell, 'it [ i.e. instruction] can be but its
secondary end : for the business of the poet is to make you
laugh: when he writes humour, he makes folly ridiculous ; when
wit, he moves you, if not always to laughter, yet to a pleasure
that is more noble'.1 'And if he .works', he added, 'a cure on
folly, and the small imperfections in mankind, by exposing
them to public view, that cure is not performed by an
immediate operation.' The primary concern of the comedy
of manners, however, was not any such 'cure' at all. Its
essence was 'repartie' which Dryden called 'the very soul of
conversation' and hence 'the greatest grace of Comedy'. Its
2
real distinction, Dryden added, was 'the urbana, venusta, salsa,
faceta, and the rest which Quintilian reckons up as the orna-
ments of wit'.
In his Marriage-A-la-Mode (1673), he created a comedy of
this type. Lest he should be accused of neglecting satire
altogether, Dryden mentioned in his Epilogue that he had
provided a little satire too-just 'a Sample of the stuff' that
playwrights such as Shadwell clamoured for. His satire was
'well-bred', however, and he 'stript' his victims only 'to the
waste, and left 'em there', merely reminding his audience
that if someone else were in his place, the story would have
been different :
Some stabbing Wits, to bloudy Satyr bent,
Would treat both Sexes with less complement.
But when he came to write The Kind Keeper (1680-acted
1678), Dryden forgot to maintain the fine balance of the
comedy of manners and for once launched into 'bloudy
Satyr'. 'It was intended', he said in his Dedication to the play,
•for an honest satire against our crying sin of keeping.' The
1 Ker, L p. 143:
2 Ibid., p. 139.
 224 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
play miserably faiJed and Dryden realised, as he confessed
in the Dedication, that it had 'expressed too much of the vice
which it decried'. There was obviously too much of Juvenal
and too little of Horace in the play and his contemporaries
protested :
Dryden, good Man, thought keepers to reclaim,
Writ a kind Satyr, call'd it Limberham.
This a11 the herd of Lechers strait alarms,
From Charing-Cross to Bow was up in Arms ;
They damn'd the Play all at one fatal blow,
And broke the Glass that did their Picture show.1
Some satire there had to be to add piquancy to the comedy
but its tone was not to hurt the polite and the cultured. That
Dryden found it difficult to maintain this fine balance is
obvious from his angry complaint to the audience in his
Prologue to Mrs. Behn's The Widdow Ranter:
Fools you will have, rais'd at vast expence ;
And yet as soon as seen, they give offence.
It is Shadwell who most effectively illustrates how the age's
ideas about satire underwent a profound change owing to
the influence of the comedy of manners. He advocated the
comedy of humours as against the comedy of manners precisely
because the latter was indifferent to all moral questions.
In his Preface to The Sullen Lovers (1668) he described the
comedy of manners as 'that Indecent way of Writing' and
protested against the 'gay couple' employed by that comedy
-'a Swearing, Drinking, Whoring Ruffian for a Lover, and
an .impudent, ill-bred tomrig for a Mistress', who talked nothing
but 'bawdy, and profaneness, which they call brisk writing'. 2
In his Preface to The Royal Shepherdess ( 1669) too he referred
to the 'debauch'd people' who pass 'for fine Gentlemen' in
the comedy of manners-the chief attributes of the hero
again being •Swearing, Drinking, Whoring, breaking Windows,
beating Constables etc.' and the heroine priding herself on
being, in the words of the Prologue, 'Ayery, Witty, Brisk and
1 C. Clvee, 'A Short Satyr against Keeping' in Poems (1685), p. 91.
II Spingarn, II, pp. 150-1.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 225
Wild'. In his commendatory verses prefixed to Edward
Howard's The Six Days Adventure(161l), 'Sam. Clayat' compli-
mented the author on having 'banish'd from the stage their
Jill and Ruffian too'. But no serious attack was made on the
amoral hero and heroine of the comedy of manners even by
those playwrights who otherwise disapproved of'that Indecent
Way of Writing'. It is not without significance that ShadweU's
voice is heard only in Collier's Short View some decades later.
Collier described the 'fine Gentleman' of the comedy of
manners as a 'Whoring, Swearing, Smutty, Atheistical Man'.1
'The fine Ladies' of contemporary comedy also, Collier-said,
'are of the same Cut with the Gentlemen'. 2 The comedy of
manners, Collier said, contained nothing but 'Whoring,
Pimping, Gaming, Profaness'. 3 In essence Collier says nothing
which may cause even the slightest surprise to a student of
Shadwell.
In his Preface to The Humorists (1671), Shadwell claimed
that he had himself written a comedy which was fundamentally
different from the comedy of manners. His 'design' in The
Humorists, he said, was 'to reprehend some of the Vices and
Follies of the Age, which I take to be the most proper and
most useful way of writing Comedy'. 1 He attacked Dryden
for having insinuated 'that the ultimate end of a Poet is to
delight, without correction or instruction'. 'Methinks a Poet
should never acknowledge this', -Shadwell contended, 'for it
makes hi.m of as little use to Mankind as a Fidler, or Dancing
Master,· who delights the fancy onely, without improving
the Judgement.'5 It is interesting to note that Collier raised
precisely the same objection against Dryden. He was, however,
more dogmatic. Shadwell said rather reasonably: 'I confess a
Poet ought to do all that he can decently to please, that so
he may instruct' .e. But Collier is willing to give no concession.
'Indeed', he angrily declares, 'to make Delight the main busi-
7
ness of Comedy is an unreasonable and dangerous Principle.'
In actual practice Shadwell was still more reasonable. In spite
1 Spingarn. III, p. 225.
2 Ibid., p. 256.
3 Ibid , p. 263.
4 Ibid., II, p.153,
s Ibid., p, 153.
6 Ibid., p. 153.
· 7 Ibid., III. pp. 266- 7,
15
226 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
of his strong views regarding the moral purpose of comedy, it is
interesting to find Shad well imitating precisely those aspects of
the comedy of manners which he had condemned. He, too, tried
to create the usual 'gay couple' of the Restoration comedy,
and though he lacked the lightness of touch and the delicate
raillery of the masters of the comedy of manners, he achieved
considerable success in plays like Epsom Wells and Bury Fair.
The real influence of the comedy of manners, however, is
visible in the conception of comedy which finally emerges
from Shadwell's scattered comments on the subject in his
Prefaces. In his Preface to The Humorists, he demanded that
comedy should 'render their Figures of Vice and Folly so ugly
and detestable, to make people hate and despise them, not
onely in others, but (if it be possible) in their dear selves' .1
Punishment of folly and evil is a necessary part of the function
of a comic playwright according to Shadwell and he firmly
demands: 'For the sake of good men, ill should be punished:
... A man cannot truly love a good man, that does not hate
a bad one; nor a Wiseman, that does not hate a fool: this love
and hatred are correlatives, and the one necessarily implies
the other.' 2 But Shadwell seems to grow suddenly mild when
be declares that he would not 'fall upon the natural imper-
fections of men' but would choose for satire only certain super-
ficial aspects of contemporary life. The natural 'imperfections',
he says, •can never be made the proper subje.;t of a Satyr ;
but the affected vanities and artificial fopperies of men,
which (sometimes even contrary to their natures) they take
pains to acquire, are the proper subject of a Satyr'. 3 But these
'acquir'd Follies', as we have already seen in the case of
Etherege, exist to provide entertainment rather than instruction
and once they come to be treated as 'the proper subject of
a Satyr', the theory of the comedy of humours and satire is
largely undermined. The 'witwouds' of the Restoration comedy
who 'take pains to acquire' what Shadwell calls 'artificial
fopperies' are certainly not 'ugly and detestable': they are, in
fact, the most charming creatures in contemporary comedy
and it would be foolish to 'despise them'. Sbadwell's theory
1 Ibid., II. p. 154.
2 Ibid., p. 154-.
a Ibid., p. 154.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 227
of comedy is still further weakened when he declares that
''tis not your down-right Fool that is a fit Character for a Play,
but... your witty, brisk, aiery Fopps'. 1 These 'Fopps', however,
made a complete nonsense of the moral intentions of )he
writer. But the age wanted only such characters and not the
'Fools, Knaves, Whores, or Cowards (who are the people
I deal most with in Comedies)' 2 and Shadwell· therefore
angrily declared in his Epilogue to The Lancashire Witches
(1682) : -
A Poet dares not whip this foolish Age,
You cannot bear the Physick of the Stage.
What he said in his Prologue to this play also throws interest-
ing light on the contemporary attitude to satire :
The Ages soars must rankle farther, when
It cannot bear the Cauterizing pen :
When Satyr the true medicine is declin'd
Wh_at hope of Cure can our Corruptions find ?
It was obvious that the public did not want moral satire-
something that should make them 'despise ... their dear selves'
-it merely wanted its comic playwrights to trifle with lthe
social affectations and follies of fashionable men and women.
This Shadwell could not do well and, like Wycherley, he was
another misfit, although he was less sensitive and much more
ready to compromise.
In view of this inability of the age to accept a genuine satiri-
cal comedy, a compromise was perhaps inevitable. If play-
wrights were to give the audience what it wanted, they had
to steer clear of moral satire. The speaker of an Epilogue
rejoiced :
How harmlessly we've treated you to-day,
There is not one dangerous Line through all the Play.
There's no keen biting Satyr to enrage
The guilty Consciences of Half the Age.3
4 Ibid., p, 160.
liIbid., p. 156.
1 Epilogue to Thomas :Rawli~s· TunbridQe Wflls (1678).
228
THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
The Prologue to Maidwell's Loving Enemies (1680) bewailed
the utter incapacity of the age to tolerate a genuinely satirical
comedy: · He was a professional playwright and he knew that the
Who dares be witty now, and with just rage
Disturb the vice, and follies of the Age ?
With Knaves and Fools, Satyr's a dang'rous fault,
They wi 11 not let you rub their sores with Salt.
Thomas Griffith, a friend of Anthony Ashton, the comedian,
in his commendatory verses prefixed to the latter's The
Coy Shepherdess (1709) gave what was a perfectly sensible
advice:
But strive to Copy some gay Fop each Night,
Or just let Satyr Grin which must not bite,
Least we shou'd Ladies from the Boxes fright.
It had become clear both to playwrights and critics that the
contemporary audience was in no mood to accept a really
satirical comedy. In his Epilogue to The Fine Lady's Airs (1709),
Thomas Baker claimed that he was going to attract the
audience in the only way possible :
This Author wou'd by gentler Means persuade you.
And rather sooth your Follies than degrade you.
Otway was not able to accept this ·attitude of 'moral
eeutrality.'1 demanded of comic playwrights in the age. He
felt rather uncomfortable in high society and was not able
to accept the superficial values of his contemporaries. The
times were so corrupt, he felt, that their spirit could be ade-
quately expressed only in bitter satire. What he said in his
Prologue to The Orphan is highly significant :
Satyr's the effect of Poetries disease;
Which, sick of a lew'dAge, she vents for Ease.
But Otway himself lacked the courage to lash
1 A phrase used by Professor Sutherland (English Satire, p.
~--.c=cc_--------~
'1116 COMEDY OF MANNERS 229
... with a true Poet's fearless Rage,
The Villanies and Follies of the Age. 1
audience could starve him by damning his play and although
the fire burnt inwardly, lending a puzzling intensity both to
his tragedies and comedies, outwardly his attituderemained
that of a suppliant, as is clear from his Prologue to The
Orphan: .
The Author sends to beg you would be kind,
And spare those many faults you needs must find.
For he ne're call'd ye yet insipid Tools;
Nor wrote one line to tell you ye were Fools.
He ne're with Libel treated yet the Town,
Nay, never once lampoon'd the harmless life
Of Suburb Virgin, or of City Wife.
Lee is another exceptional figure in the period. He is too
morbid to accept the values of the comedy of manners. His
Prologue to Theodosius (1680) begins characteristically :
Wit long opprest, and fill'd at last with rage.
Thus in a sullen mood rebukes the Age.
His advice in the same Prologue to the contemporary comic
poet is unique in its bitterness :
The Wit and Want of Timon point thy.Mind,
And for thy Satyr-subject chuse Mankind.
That, however, was exactly what the contemporary comic
playwright was ·not to do. It is best demonstrated by Mrs.
Behn's attitude to a similar advice. In his Prologue to her
The City Heiress (1682), Otway told the audience:
But where such Follie~ and such Vices reign,
What honest Pen has patience to refrain ?
IOl. 1 Prologue to Caius Marius.
 230 THEORY OF bRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PE1UOf>
But Mrs. Behn was a more practical playwright and she knew
that the times had no use for Otway's honesty, and that
'Fantastick Wit' rather than serious satire would be more
pleasing to the 'sick Pa1ats' of her audience. Poets, she said
in her Epilogue to the II Part of The Rover, had to deny
themselves the temptation to satirize if they wished to succeed
with their patrons :
They [Poets] 've try'd all ways the insatiate Clan to please,
Have parted with their old Prerogatives :
Their Birth-right Satyring, and their just pretence
Of judging, even their own Wit and Sense,
And write against their Consciences, to show
How dull they can be to comply with you.
But the amoral comedy of brilliant wit was not Mrs. Behn's
sphere. She, therefore, chose, she teUs us in her Prologue to
1he Town-Fopp, 'a plain Story' overladen with intrigue and
incident :
••• that will give a taste
Of what your Grandsires lov'd i' th' Age that's past.
Thomas Durfey also regarded satire as the birth-right of the
comic playwright. In his Dedication to A Fool's Preferment
(1688), he admitted that though he knew 'the Humour of
the Town, and what is proper for Diversion', he could not
'always bring [his] inclination to flatter the (Would be Wits),
nor spare the exposing a notorious Vice, tho the price of a
Third Day were the fatal consequence of such an Indiscretion'.
The Prologue to the play, however, reveals how keen Durfey
was not to commit this 'Indiscretion' :
From Famous Fletcher's Hint, this piece was made.
All Mirth and DrolJ, not one reflection said.
For now-a-days poor Satyr hides his Head.
No who Isom Jerk dares lash fantastick Youth,
You wits grow angry, if you hear the Truth.
In his Prologue to Don Quixote, Part I, Durfey assured his
audience that he would not offend them by bitter satire but
would provide pleasant entertainment :
--~ -----===--=
'l'liE COMEDY OF MANNERS 23i
And you, the Contraries, that hate the Pains
Of Labour'd Sense, or of Improving Brains,
That feel the Lashes in a well-writ Play,
He bids perk up and smile, the Satyr sleeps to-day.
In his Prologue to The Canterbury Guests (1695), Edward
Ravenscroft also expressed a simifar sentiment. He too pro-
mised his audience that in his play satire slept, though for
slightly different reasons :
Today the ty'rd Satyr takes his rest,
And has at last himself a Fool confest ;
In vain is all his Malice, or his Art,
He jerks, you grin, and damn him when you smart.
This Ag's Crimes are past good Satyrs Cure,
He scarce can lash you more than you'll endure.
George Granville felt that 'Vice, like some Monster' had
'seiz'd the Town', and he resolved, as we learn from his
Prologue to The She-Gallants (16~6), 'to Combat with this
Motly Beast' and 'to strike One Stroke at least'. It did not
however prove as easy as he had thought, and before he
ended his prologue Granville found it necessary to apologise
to the ladies in the house :
If unawares he gives too smart a Stroke,
He means but to Corre<;t1 and not to Provoke.
But it was a difficult operation and demanded a lightness of
touch which most authors lacked. Henry Higden's case is
interesting in this connection. His Wary Widdow (1693) was
hissed off the stage by the victims of his satire, the 'Bully,
Pimp, grave Bawd and angry Miss', and his friend Caryl
Worsly, in his commendatory verses, gave him a proper
warning:
Strong painted Satyr cou'd expect no less.
You must write duller, if you'd have success:
Lay Physick by, and humour the disease,
For dry insipid Farce will only please.
Thomas Dilke to his cost completely disregarded this
2-3~ THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORAtION PERIOf>
warning. With the audience's 'kind Protection' to his Muse,
he said in his Prologue to The City Lady (1697), be proposed to
•. , proceed, and boldly Ridicule,
The sly state-Knave, as well as dressing Fool,
Each Vice shall share his Lash of Comic Pet,
From tawdry Crack, to Quality Coquet.
He was nevertheless mistaken about the quality of his audience
and deserved the reception he was given. In his Dedication
to the play, he confessed with despair: 'the Correcting of
Vice, and Reclaiming of Folly, in this headstrong Age, are
things not to be hearken'd to by the Generality of our present
Auditors:· But if their Palats are tickl'd with a gay brisk
Levity, or relish't but with a seeming Tartness, they will
greedily swallow the whole Entertainment, tho' not a Morsel
of the Meal can contribute to wholesom Nourishment'. John
Cory's testimony is equally eloquent on this point. In the
Dedication to A Cure for Jealousie (170 I), he said: 'I am afraid
"true Comedy will be rare, the Encouragement for such Labours
being very small. We must believe this, when we find an Audi-
ence crowding to a Jubilee-Farce, and Sweating to see Dicky play
his Tricks; as well pleas'd as if 'twere a Real Jubilee: After
this we can't expect The Plain-Dealer will again gratifie a
few good Criticks, to expose himself to a numerous Crowd of
111 Judges; Satyr is Banish'd the.Stage, and the Spectators
love to be Tickled, not Gaul'd.'
Such being the state of things, we have no choice but to
conclude that the intellectual and spiritual climate of the
age was utterly hostile to a genuinely satirical comedy. In an
article entitled Dr. James Drake and Restoration Theory of
Comedy, Edwin E. Williams asserts that Dryden's remark that
the chief end of Restoration comedy is 'divertisement and
delight' 'has been unduly emphasised'. i He also claims that Mrs.
Behn's Prefatory remarks to the The Dutch Lover where she
seems to support Dryden's views are ironical and we need not,
therefore, attach much importance to them. But it is not a
question of particular passages ; it is. that of the whole temper
of the age. We have already seen that a fair number of play-
' 1 Cited by Ed'>'in E. Williams, op. cit., pp. 183-4,
~ The Review of English Studies, Vol, XV, p. 183.
233
, 'l'HB COMEDY OF MANNERS
wrights and critics enunciate the. moral aim of comedy. But
in view of the social and intellectual needs of the :age, most
of these advocates of the moral aim of comedy either modify
their views or fail to make any impression on contemporary
audience. There is only one playwright, Wycherley, who is
not covered by this generalisation, but, as we have noticed,
he was regarded by his contemporaries as clearly an exception.
The case of Dr. James Drake himself is fairly instructive.
He completely endorsed the view of Collier. that 'The business
of Plays is to recommend Virtue, and discountenance Vice..•
to expose the Singularities of Pride and Fancy, to make Folly
and Falsehood contemptible, and to bring every thing that
is Ill under Infamy and Neglect' .1 He however considerably
modified Collier's view when he said : 'Comedy seems to be
designed to teach Men Civil Prudence, and a convenient
Management in respect of one another, rather than any thing
of Morality ; and their private duty'. 2 He wisely suggested
that 'Comdy deals altogether in Ridicule, and its Subject
consequently must be such as affords matter of ridiculous
Mirth'. 3 We may conclude with the evidence that John
Bancroft has to offer in this connection. What he says in his
Prologue to King Edward the Third(1691) sums up thecontem.-
porary approach to the whole question of realistic and satirical
comedy in the Restoration period :
Old Ben and Shakespear copied what they writ,
Then Downright Satyr was accounted wit ;
The Fox and Alchymist expos'd the Times,
The Persons then was loaded with their Crimes ;
But for the Space of Twenty years and more,
You've hiss'd this way of Writing out of door,
And kick and winch when we but touch the sore.
v
The Elizabethan 'way of Writing' was 'hiss'd out of door'
not only beacuse its satire was 'Downright' but also because
2 Ibid , p. 187.
a Ibid., p. 186,
~34 TIIEORY OF DRAMA IN Tim RESTORATION PllRIOb
its realism was coarse and crude. In his fomous Prologue to
Every Man in his Humour (1598) Ben Jonson had stated that
in his comedy he would
show an image of the times
And sport with human follies not with crimes.
But Jonson rarely made any fine distinction between 'follies'
and 'crimes'. What Asper says in the induction to Every
Man out of his Humour, perhaps reflects Ben Jonson's temper
more adequately :
Well, I will scourge those apes
And to these courteous eyes oppose a mirror,
As large as is the stage whereon we act;
Where they shall see the time's deformity
Anatamoised in evey nerve and sinew,
With constant courage and contempt of fear.
We have already seen that the Restoration age does not
subscribe to the view that the chief concern of a comic play-
wright is to 'scourge' human follies and vices. Comedy may
have satire but satire in high comedy has to be consistent
with the poJite culture of which such a comedy is the product.
Its realism too has to be radically different from that of the
Jonsonian comedy. It its attempt to 'show an image of the
times', this comedy rarely exposes 'the time's deformity'
and its tone is set, not by 'constant courage and contempt of
fear', but by urbanity and good manners. Inevitably it not
only softens the 'barbarous' satire of the old comedy, but
also refines its crude realism.
This refining process is apparent from the very beginning of
the Restoration period. In 1663 Sir Robert Colbrand, brother-
in-law to Thomas Southland, complimented the latter's
Love a la Mode in the following lines :
Now Fletcher's gone, I fear there are but few,
For neat expressions that can vie with you ;
And though you imitate his wanton strain,
Love well expresse'd as much applause may gain
As dull Mechanick humors, since your pen ,
Can hit the humor of wilde Gentlemen.
Ttm COMEbY OF MANNERS ~35
Imitating the •wanton strain' of 'wilde Gentlemen' was
precisely what the new comedy had to do. It had even to
excel that 'strain'. J. Kelynge, in his commendatory verses
prefixed to the play, invited the 'Criticks' to 'approach' and
. , . view what a streame of Wit
Th.rough this one Poem runs ; examine it :
I dare engage, each Act, each Scoene, each line,
Of purest Wit and Mirth's the richest mine
Ever sprung from English Pen .•.
•w. K.', another admirer of Southland, drew attention to
another striking feature of the play when he remarked how
both 'Wit and Language doth his Muse refine'. Here, then,
in the very first reference to the 'modern way of writing',
we have the essential features of the new realism. This comedy
has to deal chiefly with the 'wanton' superficialities ofupper-
class life, and even these are to be delicately 'refined'. Thus, as
in tragedy, so also in comedy, nature is to be 'help'd and
improv'd' .1 It was not an accident that Southland 'assumed 2
to [himself] a liberty of bettering and exalting Nature'.
The conspicuous role of this refining and 'bettering' process
became apparent within a few months of Southland's comedy. ~~
In March 1664, Etherege who was no enemy of 'Fletcher's Ju
Nature, or the Art of Ben', introduced his play, The Comical
Revenge, in the following words :
Our Author therefore begs you wou'd forget,
Most Reverend Judges, the Records of Wit,
And only think upon the modern way
Of writing, whilst y' are Censuring his Play.
Etherege was apparently conscious that he was attempting
something new and his contemporaries agreed with him, as
we learn from Rochester's An Allusion . .. To Horace :
Whom (Shakespeare and Jonson] refin'd Etherege coppy's not
at all,
But is himself a sheer Original.3
1 Thomas Rymer, Advertisement to Edgar.
2 To the Reader, prefixed to Love A La Mode.
a Spingarn, II, p. 283.

236 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
His originality, Dennis rightly emphasised, Jay in 'the trueness
of some of [his] Characters, and the purity and freeness and
easie grace of [his] Dialogue'. 1 These two aspects were em-
phasised by another critic in the eighteenth century. 'He drew
his characters from what they called the Beau mond e', Oldys
tells us, and 'spirited his dialogues, especially~in the courtship
of the fair sex ... with a sparkling gaiety which had but little
appeared before upon the stage. ' 2
The imitation of the Beau monde and its 'sparkling gaiety'
largely ddermined (and limited) the realism of the comedy
of manners. Sir Car Scroope in his Prologue to Etherege's
The Man of Mode told the audience :
For Heav'n be thankt 'tis not so wise anAge,
But your own Follies may supply the Stage.
He further said :
'Tis by your Follies that we Players thrive,
As the Physicians by Diseases live.
....
So among you, there starts up every day,
Some new unheard of Fool for us to Play.
~ But the fools
of the comedy of manners belong to a world
~ o~il"__C>Wn1 hardly to be matched in_ real life. Dryden had
perhaps given some thought to tli1s question and it is not
without significance that he substantially modified Sir Car
Scroope's view of the fool in contemporary comedy. In his
Epilogue to Etherege's play, he did not, of course, altogether
reject the realistic basis of the fool in contemporary comedy.
He too admitted that to be able to present a fool the comic
playwrights had to expose a real man so that he may resemble
the gallants. But h.e knew better than almost anyone else
in the period· that Sir Foppling was 'So brisk, so gay, sol
travail'd, so refin'd' as to be hardly an image of any one of l
his contemporaries :
From each he meets, he culls whate're he can,
Legion s his name, a people in a Man.
1 Hooker, I, p. 289.
2 Cited by H. F. B. Brett-Smith, op. cit., Introduction, pp. Jxx,Ixxi.
~--)
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS c:_.3;1
What Lady Townley says of Medley in The Man of Mode]
may in fact be cegai:ded as Rtherege's own comment on his
realism+-'But he improyes things so much one can take no
measure of the truth from him.' .
But Wycherley did not altogether accept the assumptions
of the new realism. What he said to the Duchess of Cleveland
in the Dedication to his first play, Love in a Wood, defines
fully bis approach to the question. 'I begin now', he told the
Duchess, warming up in the praise of her beauty and grace,
'to. write with the emotion and fury of a poet, yet the integrity
of.an historian'. The comedy of manners.., however, needed
neither the 'emotion and fury' of one nor 'the integrity' of
the other. But Wycherley is determined, as he tells us in his
Prologue to The Plain-Dealer, to present contemporary men
and women as he found them :
. .. the course Dauber of the coming Scenes,
· To follow Life, ami Nature only means :
Displays you, as you are.
ilis own Spark.ish in The Country Wife (III, ii) described the
point of view of the age when he complained that it was not
enough for playwrights to say that 'they .must follow their
Copy, the Age' since when ' [we] give money to Painters to
draw [us] like', the 'Painters don't draw the small Pox, or
Pi.mples on ones face'. It was a reminder to Wycherley
the Cynic f~om Wycherley the Wit that the age expected
from 4s playwrights. a rather flattering image of its gallantries
and escapades.
Congreve's aim was clearly to hide the 'pimples' of
contemporary life and to highlight its graceful and
sophisticated contours. This he achieved with the help of a.
polished style which enveloped everything with a peculiar
charm. John Marsh, in his verses prefixed to Congreve's .The
Old Batchelor, paid him this meaningful compliment :
Nature her self's beholden to your Dress,
Which tho' still like, much fairer you express.
'I believe', Congreve himself said in Concerning Humour in

238 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
Comedy (1695), 'if a Poet should steal a Dialogue of any length,
from the Extempor8 Discourse of the two Wittiest Men upon
Earth, he would find the Scene but coldly receiv'd by the
Town'. He was convinced that a playwright had to magnify
the features of life to make them presentable on the stage.
The 'distance of the Stage', he said in Concerning Humour in
Comedy, 'requires the Figure represented, to be something
larger than the Life; and sure a Picture may have Features
larger in Proportion, and yet be very like the Original'.
But Congreve does not merely enlarge, he also refines the
'figure represented'. It was the magic of Congreve's poetry-
for poetry it is-!hat transformed contemporary affectations
and follies into things of beauty. Even his fops have a rare
refinement and what Witwoud (The Way of the World, I, ix)
says about Petulant applies to almost all of them: 'the Rogue's
Wit and Readiness of Invention charm me.' When Dryden
praised Congreve in his commendatory verses prefixed to
The Old Batchelor, he rightly emphasised his 'Wit', 'Grace'-
Dryden repeated it twice in his eulogy-and 'the Sweetness
of [his] Manners'. These qualities, rather than any vigorous
realism, distinguished the comedy of manners.
But thanks to Collier's attack on drama, Congreve misstated
his purpose in his Amendments (1698) when he said [p. 93]:
'My Business was not to paint, but to wash; not to shew
Beauties, but to wipe off Stains.' What 'stains' did- he seek
to wipe off? Was he in fact seriously conscious ofany 'stains'
at all ? Whatever the effect of Collier on drama as such, his
effect on dramatic criticism was most unfortunate. Playwrights
and critics could defend contemporary comic drama only in
the name of realism. Hence they laid such stress on this aspect
as to give a completely misleading picture. The case of
. Vanbrugh is most interesting in this connection. In his Short
Vindication (1698), he made a statement on realism which is
perhaps the most emphatic in the period. 'The Stage is a
Glass for the World to view itself in; People ought therefore
to see themselves as they are; if it makes their Faces too Fair,
they won't know they :are Dirty, and by consequence will
neglect to wash 'em' (p. 46). Though this linking of realism
with moral intention became an effective argument in the hands
of the friends of drama it must not be forgotten that this was
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS
239
a part of the 'prestige advertising' which contemporary
drama often needed to defend and justify itself.
Dryden reflects the temper of the age perhaps more
adequately than any one else in the period. He treated realism
as a characteristic of the comedy of humours rather than that
of the comedy of manners. He praised Jonson for making 'men
appear pleasantly ridiculous on the stage', but he thoughtthat
Jonson's 'characters and representations of folly [were] only
the effects of observation,' 1 and the highest pleasure they
could give was 'to make you laugh'. The comedy of manners
was an altogether different matter. Its 'chiefest grace' being
'repartie', it had hardly anything to do with the 'natural
imitation of folly'. Dryden claimed that it did 'not always2
[move us] to laughter', but 'to a pleasure that is mo~e noble'.
Consequently, this comedy could not be explained merely in
terms of observation or realism. Dryden's special praise for
Jonson's 'judgement' was understandable for it was judgment
which assisted observation. But the comedy of manners was
not dependent on observation alone : It in fact needed fancy
rather than judgment since it is fancy that 'gives the life-
touches, and the secret graces to it'.3 To 'write humour in
comedy ( which is the theft of poets from mankind)', Dryden
added, 'little of fancy is required ; the poet observes only
what is ridiculous and pleasant folly, and by judging exactly
what is so, he pleases in the representation of it'. In the other
type of comedy, however, the poet's task was much more
difficult. The material that a playwright borrowed from life
or literature was the least important part of his work. It was
merely the •foundation', which was to be 'modelled by the
art of him who writes it' and, Dryden added, 'who forms it
with more care, by exposing only the beautiful parts of it
to view, than a skilful lapidary sets a jewel'. The 'employment
of a poet', Dryden concluded, 'is like that of a curious gunsmith,
or watchmaker : the iron or silver is not his own ; but they
are the least part of that which gives the value : the price
4
lies wholly in the workmanship'.
Robert Wolseley in bis famous Preface to Rochester's
1 Ker, I, p. 138.
2 Ibid., p. 143.
a Ibid., p. 146.
4 Ibid., pp. 146-7

240 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
Valentinian (1685), discussed this aspect of the matter at length.
Like Dryden, .he too expressed the view that 'the Wit of a
Poet' was not 'to b.e measur'd by the worth of his Subject'
but by his 'manner of treating it'. 1 An 'ill Poet will depresse
r.
and disgrace the highest [ subject he added, 'so a good one
will raise and dignifie the lowest'. 2 The important question
is not what a poet has borrowed from actual life, but what
his imagination has done to transform it. It is this creative
imagination which is the crux of the matter. As Wolseley
said, the poet's imagination 'will enter into the hardest and
dryest thing, enrich the most barren Soyl, and inform the
meanest and most uncomely matter; nothing within the vast
Immensity of Nature is so devoid of Grace or so remote from
Sence but will obey the Farmings of (its] plastick Heat and
feel the Operations of(its] vivifying Power, which, when it
pleases, can enliven the deadest Lump, beautifie the vilest
Dirt, and sweeten the most offensive Filth ; this is a Spirit
that blows where it lists, and like the Philosopher's Stone
converts into it self whatsoever it touches. Nay, the baser,
the emptier, the obscurer, the fouler, and the less susceptible
ofOrnamenttheSubject appears to be, the more is the Poet's
Praise, who can infuse dignity and breath beauty upon it,
who can hide all the natural deformities in the fashion of his
Dresse, supply all the wants with his own plenty1 and by a
poetical Daemonianism possesse it with the spirit of good
sence and9.racefulness, or who, as Horace says of Homer, can
fetch Light out of Smoak, Roses out of Dunghils, and give
a kind of Life to the Inanimate, by the force of that divine
and supernatural Virtue which, if we will believe Ovid, is the
Gift of all who are truely Poets.'3
In spite of the playwrights' protestations, it was not there-
fore the life around it which gave the comedy of manners its
distinction: it was the creation of a brilliant, youthful, viva-
cious world of witty men and women who laughed at every-
thing,- love, marriage, morals and, above all, 'Father Time'.
'Wit, be my Faculty, and Pleasure, my Occupation'-this
flaming motto was not the motto of a real world, however
1 Spingara. 111, p, 15.
2 Ibid., pp. 15·16.
a Ibid., p. 16.
JI
1:'Hll COMEDY OF MANNBRS
241
emancipated and free from care it might be. Nor was it the
defiance of a frightened epicure who knows that the Puritan
is waiting his turn,-as he inevitably always is. It was a
liberated world, liberated from all limitations, including those
of flesh. 'Let low and earthly Souls grovel 'till they have
work'd themselves six Foot deep into a Grave-Business is
not my Element-I rowl in a higher Orb',1-such outbursts
do not suggest the relaxation of a drunken leisured class. At
its best, this comedy transcends its times and, like all great
comedy, belongs to a bigger world. Even its cuckolds have
poetry in them. 'l sprout, I bud, I blossom' are the words
of a husband in Congreve's The Old Batchelor (IV, xxii), and
yet they seem to come straight from what Lamb called the
2
'Utopia of Cuckoldry'.
It was only natural for a comedy of this type to reject the
low and vulgar realism of Jonson. It was generally believed
at the time, as we learn from Edward Howard's Preface to
The Six Days Adventure (l671), that 'the wit and, beauty of
Poesy consist rather in manners feign'd than in (those] of
vulgar observation amongst men' _,..observed, especially in
low society in 'Taverns, French-houses, Coffee-houses' where
one frequently comes across 'the loose and debauch'd carriages
of men and women'. In his commendatory verses prefixed to
Edward Howard's play, Ravenscroft bewailed that realistic
comedy written in the vein of 'learned Johnson'-'that Strict
observer of mankind' -was not acceptable to the Restoration
audience :
But this age disesteems true Comedy
'C,rnse 'tis the mirrour of the times
That doth reflect mens follies and their Crimes:
So some affected Lady 'cause her glass
Shows her how ill she manages her face,
Is out of humour with't and throws it by.
Shadwell is the greatest advocate of realistic comedy in
the period. It was bis ambition to present, as his master Ben
Jonson had done, 'deeds, and language, such as men do use',
1 William Congreve, The Old Batchelor, I, i.
2 Charles Lamb, On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century.
16
 24~ fHEOiff OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORA'rION PERIO:f>
but the characters that he created-these being mostly 'Fools,
Knaves, Whores, or Cowards,1-were too realistic to be
pleasant to a fashionable audience. Sbadwell's theory of
humour inevitably led him to depict only those aspects of
human life which demanded crude realism. The sort of thing
he was doing, Dryden contemptuously declared, 'requires,
on the writer's part, much of conversation with the vulgar,
and much of ill nature in the observation of their follies'. 2
But Shadwell soon realised, as he tells us in his Epilogue to
The Woman-Captain (1680), that such heavy emphasis on the
observation of the 'Vulgar' was not very popular with his
patrons :
Your would-be Wits love what is slight and bright
In Tinsel-Wit, just like their own delight.
He also, therefore, tried to imitate the superficialities of
contemporary fashionable life. But he lacked the sparkling
wit of the writers of the comedy of manners, and quite early
in his career [in his Prologue to The Virtuoso (1676)], in a
mood which is at once apologetic and defiant, he confessed:
He's sure·in Wit he can't excell the rest,
He'd but be thought to write a Fool the best~
But even a •fool' in Restoration comedy had to be an airy
fop fit to entertain a polite audience. He too had to represent,
_ in however exaggerated a form, certain aspects of the culture
of the aristocracy. But Shadwell hardly shares in this aristo-
cratic culture. His whole attitude to life is that of a man of
the middle classes-earnest, practical and moral-and it is
not without significance that he wanted contemporary comedy
not to confine itself only to court intrigues. The 'Vices and
follies in Courts', he said in his Preface to The Humorists,
•concern but a few, whereas the Cheats, Villanies, and trouble-
some Follies in the common conversation of the World are
of concernment to all the Bedy of Mankind'.3 He is perhaps
1 Spingarn, II, p. 156.
2 Ker, I, p. 135.
a Spingarn, II, p, 154.
11'$ COMEDY OF MANNERS ~4:3
the only playwright of the time who ridiculed the writers of
the comedy of manners for their glorification of fashionable
life :
This Play is not well bred, nor yet well drest,
Such Plays the Womens Poets can write best:
...
l3ut know good Breeding shews its Excellence,
Not in small trifling Forms, but in good sense.1
Good sense was not, however, the ideal of the comedy of
manners and whether Shadwell liked it or not, ignorance of
'small trifling Forms' was fatal to a Restoration comic play-
wright. Bl:lt Shadwell could not help it. He was coarse and
boisterous by temperament and in his comedies there was
'much of the crude, hearty, open-air vigour of the
Elizabethans.' 2 But his patrons had no use for this 'vigour'
and, in fact, it frequently invited attack. His characters were
sometimes so vividly realistic that he was accused of having
presented particular living individuals. In his Preface to
The Humorists he challenged 'the most clamorous and violent
of my Enemies (who would have the Town believe that
every thing I write is too nearly reflecting upon persons) to
accuse me, with truth, of representing the real actions or
using the peculiar, affected phrases or manner of speech of
any particular Man or Woman living'.3 Even otherwise his
contemporaries found him irritating. He was attacked, he
tells u-s in his 'Dedication to The Virtuoso, by 'some Women,
and some Men of Feminine Understandings, who like slight
Plays only, that represent a little tattle sort of Conversation,
like their own : but true Humour is not liked or understood
by them'. Realizing that the ~Gallants' may not like Shadwell's
'Ware', Sir Charles Sedley,-and who should understand the
tastes of Gallants better ?-in his Prologue to Epsom Wells
(one of Shadwell's superior plays which should have been liked
even by the Gallants, many of its features being those of a
comedy of manners), appealed to the citizens to patronise him:
l Epilogue to The Virtuoso.
2 J, R. Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth Century Po,etry, p- 41.
3 Spingarn, II, p. 156.
~----=-----=--------=----=---=-~~-
244 THEORY OF bRAMA IN THE RES'rORAnON PERIOD
But you kind Burgers who had never yet,
Either your Heads or Bellies full of wit :
Our Poet hopes to please ...
Shadwell was. not, however, satisfied with the patronage
of the citizens. As with all his contemporaries he too desired
the patronage of the Beau monde. Despite his apparent con-
tempt for such things, he too tried hard to imitate the 'tittle
tattle sort of Conversation' of his contemporaries and in order
to be acceptable to ladies of quality and 'Men of Feminine
Understandings', he .even, modified his views regarding realism
in comedy. In his attack against the comedy of humours
Dryden had contended that characters in a realistic comedy
were merely 'the theft of poets from mankind'. Shadwell
should have normally accepted the truth of Dryden's statement.
But Dryden had concluded from this that the comedy of
manners was superior to the comedy of humours, precisely
because its distinction lay not in realism but in an artificial
and pleasant wit. In his atteQ1pt to prove that the comedy
of humours is not really inferior to the comedy of manners,
Shadwell too accepts the position that all types of comedy
must inevitably possess some wit and that too realistic a
comedy does not altogether succeed in being pleasant. He
rejects the view 'that a Poet, in the writing of a Fools Character,
needs but have a man sit to him, and have his words and
actions taken'. 1 If we should do so, he adds, 'no one fool,
though the best about the Town, could appear pleasantly
upon the Stage : he would be there too dull a Fool, and must
be helped out with a great deal of wit in the Author'. This
inevitably leads Shadwell to the view that ' 'its not your
down·right Fool that is a fit Character for a Play, but. .. your
witty, brisk, aiery Fopps'. 2 Shadwell is in fact saying that a
character like Sir Fopling-a man of 'acquir'd Follies'-would
be more suitable for contemporary comedy than his own
crude 'humorous' fool Clod plate in Epsom Wells who is rightly
described in the Dramatis Personae as 'a hearty true English
Coxcomb'. Such a recognition on the part of Shadwell is
highly significant for a student of the critical theory of con-
1 Ibid., p. 160.
2 Ibid., ~· 160.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 24!>
temporary drama. The important shift in Shadwell's theoretical
position shows most effectively the impact of the comedy of
manners on contemporary ideas. He was the bitterest enemy
of the manners school throughout the period and if he remain-
ed outside the sphere of the comedy of manners proper, it was
not for want of desire or effort on his part, it was simply because
he lacked the spark. Dryden's remark is rather unkind, when
applied to Shadwell, but it is true : 'no man ever will decry
wit, but he who despairs of it himself; and who has no other 1
quarrel to it, but that which the fox had to the grapes'.
Mrs. Behn also believed, as she said in her Epistle to the
Reader prefixed to The Dutch Lover (1673), that 'Comedy
should be the Picture of ridiculous mankind'. But in her
Epilogue to The Town Fopp (1676), she described that special
aspect of contemporary life which had become the chief
concern of comic playwrights in the age. The Epilogue is
spoken by Sir TimothyTawdrey, the Town-Fopp, who says:
Observe me well, I am a of Man Show,
Of Noise, and Nonsense, as are most of you.
Tho all of you don't s_hare with me in Title,
In Character you differ very little.
Tell me in what you find a Difference ?
It may be you will say, you're Men of Sense;
But Faith ...
\ Were one of you o' th' Stage, and I i' th' Pit,
He might be thought the Fop, and I the Wit.
On equal Ground you'll scarce know one from t' other ;
We are as like, as Brother is to Brother.
In contemporary comedy even the fops were not to be
delineated too realistically. Mrs. Behn, therefore, suggested
in her Epilogue to Sir Patient Fancy that though the 'unthink-
ing Tribe' of the 'half Wits' was to be copied by contemporary
comedy, it was to be copied 'Artfully'. It was, however, a
difficult operation and Mrs. Behn failed to perform it. Her
own plays are either farces or comedies of intrigue and they
rarely possess those delicate caricatures of contemporary
high life which are the chief distinction of the comedy of
manners. She, perhaps unjustly, tried to explain this deficiency
1 Ker, I, p. 139.
 ~~-
246 THEORY OF DRAMA IN TlHl ~ESTORATION PERIOD
in her comedies by finding fauh with the contemporary
•Sparks' whom she claimed to copy :
One eminent Grace does in that Land [i.e. France] abound,
Manners, wh,ich you sweet Sparks have never found.
James Drake's views on the place of realism in comedy are
quite dogmatic but it is obvious that the kind of comedy he
has in mind is the comedy of humours and not the comedy
of manners. In his Ancient and Modern Stages Surveyed (1698),
he says: 'Dramatick Poetry, like a Glass, ought neither to
fla:tter, nor to abuse in the Image which it reflects, but to
give them their true colour and proportion, and is only valuable
for being exact.' He considerably modifies this view when he
suggests that comedy deals with the 'under wood of Vice,
FoUy and Affectation' and that 'a true comic poet is like a
good Droll Painter; he ought to make his whole piece
ridiculous'. This description whilst being perfectly applicable
to the satirical comedy of Ben Jonson fails to do justice to
the comedy of manners. The writer of a satirical comedy, in
order 'to make his whole piece ridiculous', has to accept
crude realism as a part of his comic material. The writer of
the comedy of manners need not reject this view altogether
and yet he has often, of necessity, to present the affectations
I
li,
and pleasantries of sophisticated men and women. Such a
necessity largely modifies the older approach to realism.
That the age was not willing to accept the Jonsonian kind
of realism is best illustrated in the case of Thomas Durfey. His
Don Quixote Part III was found by his patrons too coarse
to be acceptable. Durfey tells us in his Preface to the play
that the 'Ladies were prejudic'd', 'about some Actions and
Sayings in Mary the Buxom's and Sancho's Parts'. But he de-
.fended himself by stating tha,t there was 'no other way in
Nature to do the Characters right, but to make a Romp
speak like a .Romp, and a Clownish Boor blunder out things
proper for such a Fellow'. It was however precisely this sort
of realism that the comedy of manners outlawed. Durfey's real
defence was that he was not attempting a comedy of manners
at all, but was merely carrying on the Jonsonian tradition.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 247
That explains his significant statement that 'In exposing
Humour' 'some Course Sayings will naturally happen.' What
he failed to realise was that the demands of the comedy of
manners were basically different as also its elements and
temper.
VI
Humour, as Durfey rightly felt, was wedded to coarse
realism. It was a natural corollary of this that, as Dennis
pointed out some years later, 'Humour [was] more to be found
in low Characters, than among Persons of a higher Rank.n
But Dryden had declared that 'for humour itself, the poets of
this age will be more wary than to imitate the meanness of
his [Jonson's] persons'. 2 'Gentlemen will now be entertained
with the follies of each other'. Wycherley also seems to
corroborate Dryden's view. The tone of his Sparkish in The
Country Wife (III, i) may not be altogether serious but he
does take note of one of the chief characteristics of con-
temporary comedy. 'Their Predecessors', he says about the
authors of the comedy of manners, 'were contented to make
serving-men only their Stage-Fools, but these Rogues must
have Gentlemen, with a Pox to 'em, nay Knights; and indeed
you shall hardly see a fool upon the Stage but he's a Knight',
These new 'gentlemen-fools' were basically incompatible with
the Jonsonian 'humours' which could flourish best only
amongst the lower sections of population. Dennis rightly
pointed out that among 'People of condition', 'the Charm-
ing Diversities' of nature on which 'humour' depends tend
to disappear. In fact, according to Dennis,. 'the more educa-
tion [or •good Breeding'] a Man Iias, tlie more he is capable
of subduing, or at least of hiding, his Passions and his
Humours'.3
It has been suggested by a recent critic that though Jonson
defined 'humour' as 'some one particular quality' natural to
a man, in actual practice his comedy dealt more with social
affectations than with •natural humours' and, hence, it bas
1 Hooker, I. p, 28 l.
a Ker, I. p. 177.
3 Hooker, I, p. 283.
 248 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
been contended, 'Jonson's conception of the comic humour
(was) carried over with little change into the Restoration'.1
Such a view completely ignores the fact that the Restoration
age regar'<Jed Jonson as primarily a moral poet, who (to
quote Shadwell's' words from his Epilogue to The Humorists)
'div'd into the Minds of Men' to cure them of their mental
and moral diseases. Whatever it may have been for Jonson,
for the Restoration age the Jonsonian 'humour' was not a
social affectation at all : it was a natural obsession which (to
use the words of Jonson himself),
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confl.uctions, all to run one way.
Shadwell, in the true Jonsonian spirit, described in his Epilogue
to The Humorists this Jonsonian 'humour' thus :
A Humor is the Byas of the Mind,
By which with violence 'its one way inclin' d :
It makes our Actions lean on one side still,
And in all Changes that way bends the Will.
That this is the typ1cal ·' Restoration interpretation of the
Jonsonian humour is proved by what some other playwrights
have to say on the question: For Southerne, too, humour is a
'Byas of th.e Mind' colouring all our actions. In his The Maid's
Last Prayer [III, ii], he describes a 'humorous' character in the
following words : 'He has a. Thousand good Qualities, but
they have all a tang of his testy Humour, that s~ows itself
in all he says, and does; like a drop of Oyl left in a Flask of
Wine, in every Glass you taste it'. For Congreve, too, 'humour'
was 'of a 'Natural Growth' to be distinguished both from
'Habit' and 'Affectation.' In Concerning Humour in Comedy, he
defined 'humour' as 'A singular and unavoidable manner ofdoing.
or sayinganything,PeculiarandNaturalto one Man only'. Con-
greve, it may be noted, has modified Jonson's view behind whose
conception of 'humour' lay the Aristotelian ethical system-
1 Henry L. Snuggs, The Comic Humours : A New Interpretation'. PML.d
(1947), Vol. LXII, p. 119.
'fHE! COMEDY OF MANNE!RS 249
the idea of the 'mean' and the deviations from it-and for
whom a 'humorous' character was typical rather than singular.
But otherwise, Congreve too, like Shadwell and Southerne,
treats 'humour' as something natural.
Since these 'natural' humours were hardly compatible with
Restoration ideas of culture and breeding, it is difficult to
see how they could be 'carried over with little change' into
the later period. They are obviously too coarse for the comedy
of manners, and though they may be employed now and then
for the sake of variety, they surely cannot contribute the chief
characters of this comedy. A typical instance is that of Dryden's
Moody in Sir Martin Mar-all. We are told that he 'loves none
of the fine town-tricks of breeding, but stands up for the old
Elizabethan way in all things' (I, i). He is 'stout, and plain
in speech, and in behaviour' and hates 'those empty fellows of
mere outside' who have 'nothing of the true old English
manliness• (I, i). He is, in fact, a country bumpkin, a 'Witless',
who can provide to the audience what may be described
1
(in Dryden's words) as •malicious pleasure'. The real 'fool'
,,,.--- of the new comedy had to be much more delicate and much
more refined. His 'humour' had to be 'affected' rather than
'natural': he had to be a •town-fop' and not a 'country-clown'.
He was the Sir Fopling, the Sir Courtly Nice and the Witwoud
of the new comedy. As described by a contemporary wit he
was
Not quite so low as Fool, nor quite a Top,
But hangs between 'em, and is a Fop. 2
That only such •fools' were compatible with the delicate
atmosphere of the new comedy is proved in a most instructive
way by Shadwell. In the Preface to his very first comedy,
The Sullen Lovers (1668), he declared that he would follow
'the practice of Ben Johnson', 'he being the onely person that
appears to me to have made perfect Representations of Humane
Life'. Shadwell hoped that in this play he too had perhaps
created some 'natural humours' like Ben Jonson's. Two such
'humours' were the hero and the heroine in The Sullen Lovers.
1 Ker, I, p. 85.
ll George Villiers, Works (1715), II, p. 225.
 250 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
They had 'sullenness' as their humour (or 'Byas of the Mind'),
and all that they said or did was coloured by this 'sullenness'.
The other 'humours' in the play, however, were less natural.
Shadwell himself calls them 'three or four forward prating
Fopps' who already anticipate the later 'fops' of the new
comedy whose 'humour' is affected rather than natural.
The real change in Shadwell from the Jonsonian 'natural'
humours to the Restoration social affectations, however, took
place in his second comedy, The Humorists (1671). In the
Epilogue to that play, he again claimed to follow Jonson-
The Mighty Prince of Poets, learned Ben,
Who alone div'd into the Minds of Men.
In this Epilogue he aJso gave his own definition of humour
which is more or less based on Jonson's description of humour
in his Induction to Every Man out of his Humour. Shadwell
had, however, become conscious that si.nce Jonson's times
great changes had taken place in the English way of life and
'true Humours' like Jonson's were no longer easy to handle:
He [Jonson] only knew and represented right, ,
Thus none but mighty Johnson e'r could write.
Expect not then, since that most flourishing Age,
Of Ben, to see true Humor on the Stage.
Jonson's successors too, it is true, had attempted 'humours' in
their comedies but Shadwell spoke for all of them when he
said :
All that have since been writ, if they be scan'd,
Are but faint Copies from that Master's Hand.
About his own achievement in this field, Shadwell is gracefully
modest:
Our Poet now, amongst those petty things,
Alas, his too weak trifling humors brings.
Whether owing to the difficulties of presenting a natural
humour or to the Jack ofresponse to such humours from the
THE COMEDY OP MANNERS 251
age, Shadwell radically changed his position when he said in
his Preface to The Humorists(167l) that 'the proper subject of a
Satyr' was not 'the natural imperfections of men' but 'the
affected vanities, and the artificial fopperies of men, which,
(sometimes even contrary to their natures) they take pains to
acquire'. It is interesting that in his Dedication to The Virtuoso
(1676) Shadwell again repeated these views. There too he
began with natural humours but ended up with 'artificial fop-
peries'. 'Four of the Humours are entirely new', he said in the
usual manner and added that he 'never produced a Comedy
that had not some natural Humour in it not represented
before'. He further emphasised the 'natural' or theJonsonian
aspect of these 'humours' by distinguishing them from eccentri-
cities like 'using one or two by-words ; or ... having a faNtas-
tick, extravagant Dress ... [or] the affectation of some French
words'. But as in the Preface to The Humorists (1671), here too
Shadwe11 radically modified his theo.ry of 'natural' humours
when he declared that the 'proper object of Comedy' is 'the
Artificial FoHy of those, who are not Coxcombs by Nature,
but with great Art and Industry make themselves so'. In
6ther words Shadwell admitted that the 'proper object of
Comedy' was not the representation of a 'natural• humour
colouring a man's whole attitude to life ; it was the represen-
tation of affected Fops through whose behaviour the sophisti-
cation of fashionable society could be delicately caricatured.
After making such statements it should have become clear
to Shadwell that he had more or less thrown away the cause
of the comedy of humours in favour of the new comedy. It
is distressing· to see, however, that his Dedication to The
Virtuoso contains almost contradictory statements. Even after
declaring that his theme was 'Artificial Folly' he still harped
on the old 'natural' humours. 'Comical Humour', he said,
ought to be 'such an affectation, as misguides Men in Know-
ledge, Art, or Science, or that causes defection in Manners
and Morality, or perverts their Minds in the mainActions of
their Lives',-a 'kind of Humour', indeed which he had 'not
Improperly described in the Epilogue to the Humorists'. This
confusion is the outcome of Shadwell's divided loyalties. Ben
Jonson was his great master and yet, as Dryden perceived,
only a new comedy could 'please an age more gallant than

252 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORAUON PERIOD
the last'. 1 When gentlemen demanded the follies of gentlemen
for their entertainment, the typical comic characters had to
be vastly different from Cobb and Tib. Shadwell realised
it, however dimly, and it is significant that when in his
Prologue to The Virtuoso he defined the kind of fool he was
presenting in the play, he delineated not the usual fool of
tµe comedy of humours but the brisk Witwoud of the comedy
of manners:
He's sure in Wit he can't excell the rest,
He'd but be thought to write a Fool the best :
Such Fools as haunt and trouble Men of Wit,
And sp ight of them, will for their Pictures sit.
Dryden also recognised the inadequacy of the old 'hu-
mours' in a world dominated by the values of the new comedy.
In his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, he defined humour as 'some
extravagant habit, passion, or affection, particular ..• to some
one person, by the oddness of which, he is immediately distin-
guished from the rest of men'. 2 A character embodying such
odd traits would not, however, be natural, because, as Shad·
well said in his Preface to The Humorists, if the humour did not
represent some general human characteristic and 'belong [ ed]
to one, or two persons' only-'if there be such a humour
in the world' - 'it would not be understood by the Audience,
but would be thought (for the singularity of it) wliolly un-
natural, and would be no jest to them'. Although at one
stage in the Essay, Dryden insisted on 'singularity' in the
character 'which indeed causes it to be ridiculous' / 1 elsewhere
in the same Essay, he called it 'the imitation of what is natural' .4
In his Preface to An Evening"s Love, he further emphasised the
natural basis of humour. He significantly referred to 'humour
in comedy' as 'the theft of poets from mankind' 5 -the two
requisites of a writer of the comedy of humours being 'ob-
servation' and 'judgement' as against 'fancy', which Dryden
attributed more especially to a writer of the comedy of wit.
1 Ker. I, p. 161.
I Ibid., p, 85.
a Ibid., p. 84.
4' Ibid., p. 86.
IS Ibid., p. 147.
\',
tHE COMEDY OF MANNER$
Thus, although at first Dryden conceived of humoL ______ _
something extravagant and singular about a character,- mis
interpretation leading him inevitably to treat 'humorous'
characters as more or less farcical-he soon came to treat it
as a natural trait colouring a man's entire outlook on life.
This second interpretation· of humour Dryden believed to be
the correct Jonsonian one. All the same Dryden had no
respect for this Jonsonian 'humour' in comedy. He regarded
'humorous' characters a$ contemptible and the comedy
representing such characters as inferior in quality and purpose.
He described 'humorous' characters as 'low characters of
vice and folly' and added that 'Poetry being imitation', the
imitation 'of folly is a lower exercise of fancy'-'a kind of
looking downward in the poet, and representing that part of
mankind which is below him'. 1 Consequently the re-
presentation of humour on the stage did not provide the
refined pleasure of the comedy of manners but instead what
Dryden described in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy a!l 'malicious
pleasure'. Dryden may have been influ~nced in his views by
I Hobbes but it is interesting to find that according to him the
laughter of the comedy of humours contained much of 'scorn'
and 'ill-nature'. 2
The 'humours' of the old comedy, then, had to be transform-
ed before they could be accommodated in the polite world of
the comedy of manners. It is a tribute to Dryden as a critic
that he was the first to realise the nature of this transforma-
tion. Comedy could not do without 'fools' and yet, as we learn
from Dryden's Epilogue to Etherege's Man of Mode, the
transfigured fool of the comedy of manners had to be an
altogether different species :
1
Sir Fopling is a Fool so nicely writ,
The Ladies wou'd mistake him for a Wit.
And, when he sings, talks lowd, and cocks; wou'dcry,
I vow methinks he's pretty Company,
So brisk, so gay, so travail'd, so refin'd !
Sir Fopling was indeed 'pretty Company• and 'scorn' an
Ibid., p. 172.
~
1
2 lbid., pp. 136, 143.
 254 THEORY 6F DRAMA IN THE RESTORA'tION PERtof>
ill-nature' could hardly be the chief ingredients of the plea-
ure providl!d by him. It would be quite siJly on the part of
A an audience to feel a sense of 'sudden glory' at the sight of
Sir Fopling. Hobbes' theory of the comic in fact is clearly
madequate in explaining Sir Fopling. Here was 'extravagance'
in behaviour--the distinguishingfeatureoftheold 'humorous'
character, according to Dryden-and yet this imitation of
folJy could hardly be described as 'a lower exercise of fancy'
or as 'looking downward in the poet'. Dryden personally
was incapable of creating a Sir Fopling. As he confessed in
his Defence1 ofan Essay ofDramatic Poesy, he lacked the 'gaiety
of humor' of Etherege. Moreover, as he tells us in his Dedi.ca-
tion to Marriage A-la-Mode, he had no patience with those
'middling sort of courtiers' who made 'it their business to
chase wit' -the sort of men out of whom the fops of
contemporary comedy were to be moulded. It was natural
that in spite of his great achievements in the field of COilledy,
he should fail to create a true Witwoud. His Melantha is a
delicate creature-a superb portrait of a feminine fop-- but
Melantha is a minor Millamant and cannot be dismissed as
a mere 'Witwoud'. This inability to create the brisk, witty
fool of contemporary comedy is perhaps the chief reason
why Dryden does not belong to the manners school proper.
It is in Congreve, .bowever, that tne conception of humour
underwent its most complete transformation. His conception
of humour in Concerning Humour in Comedy ( 1695) is more or
less Jonsonian. 'Different Humours', he says, 'naturally arise,
from the different Constitutions, Complexions and Disposi-
tions of Men.' He does indeed admit 'that very entertaining
and usefol Characters, and proper for Comedy, may be drawn
from the Affectations', but these are not to be confused with
natural, Jonsonian 'humours'. Affectations, he warns his
readers, are not to be 'imposed on the World, for Humour,
nor esteem'd of Equal Value with it'. Congreve does realise,
however, that a pure comedy of humours is a difficult under-
taking. 'It were perhaps', he suggests, 'the Work of a Jong
1 Ibid., p. 116. It is perhaps the earliest mention of •gaiety' in connection
with 'humour' in the age. (cf. p, 256ff.] Here Dryden does seem to liberate the
word 'humour' from the old Jonsonian shackles. The examples suggested by·
George Watson (Of Dramatic Poesy and other Critical Essays, Everyman's
Library, 1962, Vol. II, p. 299) are much less convincing.
fim COMEDY OF MANNERS 255
Life to make one Comedy true in all its Parts, and to give
every Character in it a True and Distinct Humour.' There
was also the problem of reconciling 'humour' with the sophis-
tication of contemporary fashionable society. Congreve's
Captain Bluffe in The Old Batchelor might be a considerable
improvement on Jonson's Bobadil as far as refinement goes,
but such characters do not provide the kind of entertainment
demanded by the contemporary audience. In his commenda-
tory verses prefixed to Congreve's The Old Batchelor, Bevil
Higgons defined what this audience sought in a good comedy:
Each Character be just, and Nature seem ;
Without th' Ingredient, Wit, 'its all but Phlegm.
For that's the Soul which all the Mass must move.
In Concerning Humour in Comedy, Congreve rightly stated that
instead of presentin~ 'gross' fools like the old 'humorous'
characters, contemporary comic playwrights should present
'Characters, which shou'd appear ridiculous not so much
,Abro' a natural Folly (which is incorrigible~ and therefore
not proper for the Stage) as thro' an affected Wit ; a Wit,
which at the same time that it is affected, is also false'. This
was clearly to admit that only a Witwoud was compatible
with the sophisticated atmosphere of the comedy of manners.
In Congreve wit was overdominant and Dr,yden's remark
in A Para/Jel ofPoetry and Painting, that he 'could draw nothing
but wits in a comedy' was highly pertinent. Even his fools
were •infected with the disease of their author'. It was no
wonder, as he complained in his Dedication, that his audience
could not 'distinguish. betwixt the Character of a Witwoud and
a True Wit' in The Way of the Wo,ld. Congreve claimed,
rather arrogantly perhaps, that his comedy was not 'prepar'd
for general Taste' and that he could only be appreciated
by a 'Few ... qualify'd' by education and culture. By 1700,
however, the domination of the English theatre by the 'Few
qualify'd' was coming to an end, and, whatever its value as
art, at this point in English history the sentimental comedy
(which was out to supersede the comedy of manners) was
more representative of the national character.
256 THEORY OF bkAMA IN TllE! RllSTORA'rION PERIOD
It was perhaps owing to the rise of the new social forces
that 'humour' in Congreve appreciated in meaning. The
polite audience of the early years of the Restoration period
regarded humorous characters as low and contemptible. The
audience· in the nineties, however, had come to develop a
more sympathetic attitude to such characters. Some contem-
porary thinkers in fact began to see 'humour' as a special
feature of the English character. What Temple for instance
has to say on the question is fairly symptomatic : 'We have
more humour, because every man follows his own, and takes
a pleasure, perhaps a pride, to show it.' 1 In such circumstances
it was only natural that Congreve should not scoff at humour,
as Dryden had done, nor should his laughter contain any
'scorn' or 'ill-will'. He did a great service to the concept of
'humour' when, in his Prologue to Love for Love, he separated
it from satire with which it had been indissolubly linked in
the Jonsonian conception. He had provided both satire and
humour, he said, but satire was meant 'to gratifie ill Nature'
whereas 'Humour ... for cheerful Friends we got'. Humour
as something cheerful, containing that pure mirth which is
provided not only by a character such as Witwoud but also
by a character such as Millamant-a mirth indifferent to
all notions of superiority or incongruity~was an innovation
for the period. 2 It was indeed the modern conception itself.
It must be mentioned that there are some obscure references
to this conception before Congreve too. Banks- in Virtue
Betrayed (1682) mentioned 'looser Hours of Mirth or Humour'
(Act V) and thus clearly associated humour with mirth. A
character in Lacy's Sir Hercules Buffoon (1684) significantly
said: 'I was told you were in a gay humour last night, good
company, and very witty.' 3 But it is in Congreve that for
the first time this conception comes to acquire a real
conscious meaning. In view of this it need not surprise us
that Congreve regarded humour as one of the special features
of his masterpiece, The Way of the World :
Some Humour too, no Farce ; but that's a Fault (Prologue)
1 Cited by Louis Cazamian, The Development of English Humour (1952),
p. 329. ' 1 B. V. Crawford, High Comedy in Terms of Restoration Practice, Phi/olo-
2 Cf. E. N. Hooker. Humour in the Age of Pope, The Huntington Library
Quarterly (1948), Vol. XI, No. 4, p. 366ff.
s Cf. Louis Cazamian, op. cit., pp, 395-6.
THE COMBOY OF MANNERS 257
But he paid another pleasing compliment to the word-and
consequently to the idea behind it-when he made one of
his characters describe Millamant as 'a Humorist' (I, ix).
Whatever the meaning of 'humour', 'the Byas of the Mind',
an obstinate whim or affectation, the moment it is applied
t'o Millamant, it ceases to be contemptible or ridiculous.
That in her case it was supremely charming is attested by
Mirabel who surely speaks for his creator here : 'Her Follies
are so natural, or so artful, that they become her; and those
Affectations which in another Woman wou'd be odious,
serve but to make her more agreeable' (I, iii). ·
VII
Thus the comedy of manners, whatever its actual achieve-
ment, clearly had a profound effect on the whole conception
of comedy in the Restoration. period. In response to the purity
of tone proper to high comedy, old ideas concerning the
place of satire, realism and humour in comedy. underwent a
significant change. This comedy postulated 'an ideal life
of wit, gallantry and pleasure'. As far as possible, it allowed
nothing to intrude in this 'ideal' world, nothing crudely
realistic, moral or sentimental, nothing, in fact, which might
cast a doubt over its artificiality. Here 'reality' was almost
'anaesthetised'. The action often seemed to have no time or
place and the characters and their acts no subsequent or
consequent life or value. Here indeed was complete holiday
from life and all that it standsfor: no passion ('Passion' being
'the most unbecoming thing in the world', as Lord Foppington
declared), no feeling or sentiment, 'altogether a speculative
scene of things' (in Charles Lamb's words), 'which has no
reference whatever to the world that is'. Such at least was the
theory of this comedy, the 'purest' of all English comedies.
Limited as its world and attitudes and responses may be,
this comedy has justly been praised by an American critic
for its 'singleness of effect' and 'unity of tone' which 'cannot
be duplicated elsewhere in English drama'. 1
gico/ Quarterly (l.929), Vol. 8, p. 343.
17
258 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
However attractive it might appear, it was a theory difficult
to accept. Life cannot be 'anaesthetised', at least not for long.
The fashionable :men and women of this comedy might trifle
with each other and pretend (as a character in Wycherley's
Country Wife, II, ii, does) that 'as [they] have no affection, so
[they] have no malice', but beneath their exquisite demeanour,
there are throbbing hearts which know both affection and
malice. Even in scenes where this.comedy achieves its highest
perfection and seems temporarily to shut out reality, life, often
unrecognised perhaps, seems to be knocking at the door.
'Well-I think-I'll endure you', says Millamant to Mirabel
in The Way of the World in the pose of a perfect coquette and
yet only a minute later, she is a real woman who has a heart
which may also be broken : 'If Mirabel should not make a
good Husband, I am a lost thing.' And yet if the 'tension of
preserving its ideal artificiality' is so great even in Congreve's
comedy, what can be said of the. others ?
Dryden perhaps realised that 'repartie'-'the greatest grace
of Comedy'-was not enough to sus,tain a whole comedy
and that the pure comedy of wit was capable of realisation
only in a few sparkling scenes like those of his own Secret Love
and Marriage A-la-Mode. There was also the problem of the
audience which was changing with baffling speed both in
character and composition. Playwrights had peforce to
recognise that variety in comic material and methods was
not only desirable but necessary. In his Prologue to The
Humour of the Age (1701), Thomas Baker describes the almost
contradictory demands that the new mixed audience made on
the comic playwright at the end of the Restoration period :
Therefore this Poet to secure his own,
Seeing the various Humours of the Town,
Has got some Fancy to please every one.
To gain the Court, he calls the City, Fools,
To please the Citts, the Court he ridicules ;
To win the Beaux, that nice i' th' Box appear,
He laughs at Gall'ry Things that Ape an air,
The Men of sense, there due Respect he shows,
And to divert their Spleen, presents the Beaus;
In short, there's not one Fool in all this Town,
But is by Character, or Satyr, shown.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 259
Farquhar's summing up of the situation in his Discourse upon
Comedy (1702) is perhaps more relevant for critical purposes :
'The Scholar calJs upon us for Decorums and Oeconomy: the
Courtier crys out for Wit and Purity of Stile; the Citizen for
Humour and Ridicule; the Divines threaten us for Immodesty ;
and the Ladies will have an Intreague'. In the early Restora-
tion period the picture was not so complicated. The real
conflict then lay between the old comedy of humours and
the new comedy of wit, and Shadwell had already launched
the attack. Dryden could not have perhaps guessed the later
complex demands which were to be made on comedy in the
time of Farquhar but he must have surely realised that what-
ever its merits the comedy of wit was rather inadequate to
meet many of the legitimate demands on comedy. Further-
more, in actual practice his contemporaries were often creating
a rather mixed kind of comedy which spurned at nothing.
farce, humour, sentiment. or romance. Neither was distinc-
tion between humour and wtt to be made too rigidly.
Congreve himself had admitted in his Concerning Humour in
Comedy that whatever the difference between Wit and Humour,
'Humorous Characters [did not] exclude Wit' and vice versa.
In the case of Dryden this realisation had come much earlier
and although he rightly regarded the comedy of wit as the
chief contribution of his age to English drama, his attitude
was highly flexible. His memorable words on the question
in his Preface to An Evening's love (I 671) are not perhaps
comprehensive enough but they do indicate a critical temper
which is of the highest importance for all students of
contemporary critical theory : 'I will not deny but that I
app;rove most the mixed way of Comedy ; that which is
neither all wit, nor all humour, but the result of both. Neither
so little of humour as Fletcher shows, nor so little of love and
wit as Johnson; neither all cheat, with which the best plays of
the one are filled, nor all adventure, which is the common
practice of the other.' The immediate purpose of this state-
ment was, of course, to silence the enemies of the comedy of wit,
but the theory of the Restoration comedy was expanded by
Dryden in these words, unwittingly perhaps, although on
very fruitful lines. In actual practice the 'mixed way' was
the way of contemporary comedy. By accepting this 'way'

260 1'HEORY OF DRAMA IN THE REStORA'rION PERIOD
in theory too, the age merely recognised the continuing
conflict between the various types of comedy which then
flourished.
It is interesting to record that one of the :first persons to
accept the 'mixed way of Comedy' was Thomas Shadwell,
the chief opponent of the comedy of wit. Even before Dryden
enunciated his idea of the 'mixed way', Shadwell had stated
in his Preface to The Humorists (1671) that he regarded
Etherege's She woul'd if She cou'd as 'the best Comedy that
has been written since the Restauration of the Stage'-a
significant admission in its own way. But he soon made a
categorical statement in his Dedication to The Virtuoso (1676).
'l have endeavoured in this Play, at Humour, Wit, and Satyr'
he said, pertinently adding that these 'three things' 'are the
life of a Comedy'. He expressed a similar view in his Dedication
to A True Widow when he complimented Sedley's The Mulberry
Garden (1668) for its 'true Wit, Humour and Satyr'.
Durfey was another believer in Jonsonian comedy who
accepted Dryden's compromise. Although he frequently
condemned the'new comedy, in his Trick for Trick (1678)
(as he tells us in the Epilogue) he 'New drest' one of Fletcher's
characters to make of him a 'Modish Spark fit to be shown'
to a contemporary audience. This attempt to come nearer
to the new style was not, however, very successful :-
He should have been all Air, and the Mode pursue,
That is, keep Miss, kick Wife, and Run Men through.
Some years later, in his Dedication to Sir Barnaby Whigg
(1681), he complimented his patron on his 'vivacity of Wit'
and 'refin'd Elegance in Language' and rather grudgingly
conceded that in •a good Comedy' along with 'Plot, Invention,
and a quick and ingenious fancy' 'Wit' too had to be there.
In his commendatory letter, Gildon also recognised that
Durfey's The Marriage-Hater Match'd{l692) was an admirable
combination of 'Wit, Humour,;and Plot'. In his Dedication
to The Intrigues at Versailles (1697), Durfey proudly claimed
that he had 'alwayes Studied Variety to procure Diversion'.
He explained how in A Fond Husband he had provided
a 'Regular Comedy with a Good Plot; in the Boarding-
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS
261
School Satyrical Humour and Character •.• ; in the Marriage
Hater, a Mixture of all digested with Comical Turnes to the
last Scene ; Also in the Don Quixotes Farcical Scenes of Mirth',
but the 'Model' of The Intrigues at Versailles (1697) 'being
Courtly', he had kept out 'the Farcical Scenes, with which
the Inconsiderable part of the Audience were formerly Enter-
tain'd'.
Ravenscroft was another playwright who also 'Studied
Variety to procure Diversion'. But he knew, much better
than Durfey, that the first demand of the contemporary
audience was for 'wit'. However exasperated in tone, the
following lines from his Prologue to The Italian Husband (1698)
contain a vital truth :
Y' expect to find ev'ry new Play that's writ,
In spight of Nature, shou'd be stulfd with Wit.
But in 1698, the playwrights had to entertain a mixed audience
and 'wit' alone could hardly suffice. Ravenscroft therefore
enunciated in the same Prologue the surest formula of success
on the stage : ·
He that wou' d furnish out a modish treat,
Shou'd strive to please with various sort of meat,
To feed the Beaus with Farce is very good,
Those Babes in Wit can't bear substantial food.
For men of sense some Satyr shou'd be got.
For "Politicians to be sure, a Plot.
With Swanish Puns you may regale the Cit,
Their swinish taste delights in husks of Wit.
But he that wou'd secure a good third day,
Must show your Vices to you, to save his Plc;1y.
That Congreve, the master of the new comedy, did not
altogether reject certain elements of this m!xed comic recipe
was clear enough to Dryden. In his commendatory verses
prefixed to The Double Dealer (1694), he complimented
Congreve on the latter's attaining perfection in the 'mixed
way of Comedy'. Congreve had not merely combined in
himself Fletcher's 'easie Dialogue' and Jonson's •Strength of
 262 THEORY OF DRAMA IN THE RESTORATION PERIOD
Judgement', but also all the important qualities of contem-
porary comedy :
In Him all the Beauties of this Age we see ;
Etherege his Courtship, Southern's Purity,
The Satire, Wit, and Strength of manly Wicherley.
These qualities had attained such a perfection in Congreve
that Dryde.n could think only of one such miracle before in
the history of English draina :
Heav'n, that but once was Prodigal before,
To Shakespear gave as much ; she coul'd not give him more.
THE COMEDY OF MANNERS 263
peare and Ben Jonson. In a chastened mood, in his Dedication
to Examen Poeticum (1693), Dryden declared not only his
own allegiance, but that of his entire age to those old masters:
'Peace be to the venerable shades of Shakespeare and Ben
Johnson ! none of the living will presume to have any competi-
tion with them ; as they were our predecessors, so they were
our masters. We trail our plays under them; but as at the
funerals of a Turkish emperor, our ensigns are furled or
dragged upon the ground, in honour to the dead; so we may
lawfully advance our own afterwads, to show that we succeed:
if Jess in dignity, yet on the same foot and title.... n

Congreve ihimself was aware of the ··mixed' :nature of his

comedy. In his Epilogue to The Double Dealer, he explained
that diverse tastes among his audience looked for different
qualities in his play-some for 'Repartee and Raillery',
others for 'Characters ... nicely bred'. and yet others for
'soft things ... penn'd and spoke with Grace'. In the Prologue
to his next play, Love/or Love (1695), he described the 'Variety',
of diversion that he had provided:

There's Humour, which for chearful Friends we got,

And for the thinking Party there's a Plot.
We've something too, to gratifie ill Nature,
(If there be any here) and that is Satire. ~

The same 'variety' was offered in The Way of the World ( 1700)
as we learn from Congreve's Prologue to the play:

Some Plot we think he has, and some new Thought ;

Some Humour too, no Farce; but that's a Fault.

Thus, in spite of its crusade against the old comedy, and its
desire to refine and purify it, the Restoration age did at last
realise that whatever its own special contribution, it could
not completely break away from the old dramatic tradition
a·nd that even its greatest playwright was indebted, in however
subtle a way, to that 'GianfRace, before the Flood' of Shakes-
1 Ker, II, p. 5.