ARTicles vol. 3 i.1a: Civility, Sex, and the City

THE RULES OF CIVILITY In 1673, Antoine de Courtin published his Nouveau Traité de la Civilité, a handbook of manners designed to instruct young noblemen how to behave in the presence of their superiors. Translated into English in 1678 as The Rules of Civility: or Certain Way of Deportment Observed Amongst all Persons of Quality Upon Several Occasions, de Courtin’s book of etiquette assumes that manners and good breeding are what fundamentally separate humans from beasts. The Rules of Civility is a catalogue of “Do not’s” and “Never’s” that encourages the reader to practice vocal and physical restraint in social situations. A few of de Courtin’s admonishments include: Don’t sneeze too loudly, “so as not to shake the Foundation of the house;” never fall asleep, cough, or yawn in the company of superiors; don’t share your handkerchief; and never speak directly into someone’s face as, “these people do many times make them sick, who have the Civility to hear them: Especially if their breath be strong.” In listing language and actions people should avoid, de Courtin revealed the habits and vices of seventeenth-century aristocracy. Handbooks like de Courtin’s circulated widely in Europe and America in the early 1700s. In the middle of the eighteenth century, George Washington published his own list of 110 “Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.” STENCH Public and private spaces alike stank during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the streets of central London, drains were often blocked by garbage and horse droppings. Rubbish cascaded out of windows onto the heads of unlucky pedestrians below. Domestic fires polluted the air and blackened the sky with a noxious smog. As Patrick Süskind writes at the beginning of his novel, Perfume, “In [the eighteenth century] there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease.” DIVORCE In the decades following the restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, there were almost no legal means of escaping loveless or abusive marriages. Some couples chose to live in separate residencies, but they were never allowed to remarry and the wife was often given little bargaining power in such situations. As Liza Picard writes in Restoration London, in most cases “… a wife was irrevocably tied to a husband who turned out to be a violent, drunken, syphilitic, promiscuous lout who dissipated her dowry, brutally exercised his matrimonial rights, and abused her children.” The ecclesiastical courts could impose an official separation in the case of adultery, but this was rarely invoked after the Restoration, and the process was lengthy, expensive, and humiliating. Neither party could remarry after such a separation, and the husband – even if he wasn’t the adulterer – was required to pay alimony. Sir John considers this option in The Provok’d Wife, but gives up on the plan when Heartfree reminds him of the cost: Sir John: If I could but catch her adulterating, I might be divorced from her by law. Heartfree: And so pay her a yearly pension, to be a distinguished cuckold. The situation improved slightly at the end of the seventeenth century. In 1698, less than a year after the premiere of The Provok’d Wife, the first Parliamentary divorce was granted. The process was still, however, quite complicated, and did almost nothing to improve the situations of women who were trapped with boorish husbands. No woman was granted a divorce until the nineteenth century. PARKS and PLEASURE GARDENS Park scenes abound in Restoration comedies. Once enjoyed exclusively by the royal families, many parks were open to the public by the time of the Restoration. Aristocrats, decked out in the latest fashions, flocked to these open spaces to stroll, socialize, ogle, and flirt. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dust produced by the continual parade of carriages on the Hyde Park ring road was brutal – a problem Bellinda makes reference to in The Provok’d Wife. In 1700, the satirist Tom Brown wrote that in Hyde Park “People Coach it to take the Air, amidst a Cloud of Dust, able to Choak a Foot Soldier.” St. James’s was a more exotic and erotic public park. Once an idyllic, private retreat populated by Henry VIII’s deer, St. James’s became a veritable menagerie during the rule of James I, who stocked the park with leopards, antelopes, sables, hawks, flying squirrels, crocodiles, ducks, and even an elephant which was served a gallon of wine every morning during the winter months. During the Restoration, when leisure became a popular pastime and pursuit, people replaced animals in the park. Charles II opened St. James’s to the public and was himself a frequent visitor, mingling with his subjects, walking his spaniels, and feeding the ducks in the ornamental canal in the center of the park. By day, St. James was one of London’s most popular trysting places. Gallants promenaded down the Green Way, and adulterers carried out their rendezvous in every corner of the park. By night, St. James’s became a den of rampant prostitution and sexual activity. Lord Rochester, a notorious rake and a poet in the court of Charles II, recounted these nocturnal couplings with apparent first-hand knowledge in his poem, “A Ramble in St. James’s Park”: Nightly now beneath [the trees’] shade Are buggeries, rapes and incests made, Unto this all-sin-sheltering Grove Whores of the Bulk and the Alcove Great Ladies, chamber maydes and Drudges, The Ragg Picker, and Heiress Trudges, Carrmen, Divines, Great Lords, and Taylors, Prentices, Poets, Pimps and Gaolers, Footmen, Fine Fopps, do here arrive And here promiscuously they swive. London also boasted pleasure gardens that, like St. James’s, became playgrounds for lovers and open-air markets for the city’s many strumpets. Spring Garden, where Lady Brute and Bellinda meet Heartfree and Constant under the protection of masks, was a pleasure garden in Lambeth laid out with secluded arbors, close walks, and an artificial wilderness. “The ladies that have an inclination to be private take delight in the close walks of Spring Garden,” wrote Tom Brown about Spring Garden around the end of the seventeenth century, “where both sexes meet and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way; and the windings and turnings in the little wildernesses are so intricate that the most experienced mothers have oft lost themselves in looking for their daughters.” Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.