ARTicles vol. 3 i.1a: Rampant and Scandalous

In 1698, the Anglican cleric Jeremy Collier lambasted Sir John Vanbrugh in his anti-theatrical tract, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Published the year after The Provok’d Wife premiered at the Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, Collier’s attack on the Restoration stage denounced Vanbrugh’s play as “particularly rampant and scandalous.” “I am quite tired with these wretched Sentences,” complained Collier after citing passages from The Provok’d Wife and Vanbrugh’s The Relapse. “The sight is indeed horrible, and I am almost unwilling to shew it. However, they shall be Produced like Malefactors, not for Pomp, but Execution. Snakes and Vipers, must sometimes be look’d on, to destroy them…. On what unhappy Times are we fallen! The Oracles of Truth, the Laws of Omnipotence, and the Fate of Eternity are Laught at and despis’d! That the Poets should be suffer’d to play upon the Bible, and Christianity be Hooted off the Stage!” Collier’s ranting may have persuaded Vanbrugh to make a few adjustments to his script, but the rabid cleric couldn’t dissuade audiences from going to see The Provok’d Wife. For the next century, it was one of the most popular Restoration plays on the London stages. Collier’s Short View was anything but brief. His lengthy treatise covered the nearly forty years of Restoration drama that had been written and staged since the return of Charles II to the English throne in 1660. The four decades following the end of the eleven-year Commonwealth were some of the most prolific in the history of British theatre. One of the first decrees Charles issued when he returned from exile in France granted Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant patents to erect theatres in London. For nearly two decades, Parliament had squelched almost all theatrical activity, but Charles’ return sparked an explosion of dramatic creativity and wit. William Wycherley, Aphra Behn, William Congreve, and John Vanbrugh are just a few of the playwrights who came of age during the Restoration. Centuries later, writers such as Oscar Wilde and Joe Orton emulated these Restoration playwrights, imitating their use of epigram and sharp-tongued characters. Both Killigrew and Davenant chose tennis courts as their new theatres. Small and rectangular, these spaces looked little like the open-air public theatres from the ages of Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I. But to Killigrew, Davenant, and Charles II, all of whom had spent time on the Continent during the civil strife of the 1640s and ’50s, this was a familiar shape. Tennis courts were ubiquitous in European cities at the time, and Charles had grown accustomed to seeing theatre in converted courts while he was in exile. The Restoration theatres were not, however, exact replicas of the Continental design. The new English stage protruded well beyond the proscenium arch (a vestige, perhaps, of the thrust from Elizabethan playhouses such as the Globe, the Rose, and the Curtain) and had two or three sets of doors along the side walls that allowed for quick entrances and exits. The thrust created an intimacy between actors and audiences, and allowed playwrights to script asides for their characters to deliver out to the house. The stage was not the only novelty in the Restoration theatre. In January of 1661, the diarist Samuel Pepys noted, “[I went] to the Theatre, where was acted Beggars’ Bush, it being very well done; and here the first time that ever I saw women come upon the stage.” Women had never officially been allowed to appear on London’s stages in public, but the return of Charles, who was an avowed libertine, promised a revolution in the theatres. The presence of women on the stage, hangovers from the tyrannical rule of Cromwell and his anti-theatrical regime during the Commonwealth, and an unabashed rake of a ruler all fueled the comic sensibilities that delighted the largely aristocratic Restoration audiences and enraged Jeremy Collier. Presented with comedies that revolved around sex and scandal, many women in the audience hid behind vizards, or masks, that concealed their laughter and preserved their modesty. Those without vizards had other means of sparing their reputations. In The Provok’d Wife, Bellinda confesses to Lady Brute that every time the characters “blurt out … a nasty thing in a play,” she blows her nose. “You must blow your nose half off then at some plays,” responds a sympathetic Lady Brute. Charles didn’t just condone the tone of Restoration comedy; he encouraged it. Charles flaunted his mistresses in both the theatres and the parks. One of his lovers was the actress Nell Gwyn, who began her life in the theatre as an orange girl, selling citruses and possibly herself in the pit before becoming one of the leading ladies of the early Restoration theatre. By the time of his death in 1685, Charles had acknowledged more than a dozen bastard children, but failed to produce a legitimate heir. When London was dealt the devastating double blow of the plague in 1665 and the fire in 1666, critics at home and abroad saw the atrocities as divine punishment for a hedonistic, debauched court. In 1667, the year after the Dutch had overpowered the English fleet in the Channel, Pepys heard from a friend that “the King and Court were never in the world so bad as they are now for gaming, swearing, whoring, and drinking, and the most abominable vices that ever were in the world … He … do say that the Court is in a way to ruin all for their pleasures; and says that he himself hath once taken the liberty to tell the King the necessity of having, at least, a show of religion in the Government, and sobriety; and that it was that, that did set up and keep up Oliver [Cromwell], though he was the greatest rogue in the world … ” By the time The Provok’d Wife premiered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, the outcry against lewdness and smut on the English stage was strengthening. The comedies presented at Drury Lane and Lincoln’s Inn Fields were, in the minds of many clerics and critics, only accelerating the moral decay of the country. William III, the Protestant King who came to power in 1688 when Charles’ Catholic-leaning brother James II abdicated the throne, had been supporting efforts to clean up the stage for years. In 1692, the Society for the Reformation of Manners began planting its members in the audience to record any non-scripted profanities that slipped out of the actors’ mouths in moments of improvisation. By 1694 these moral watchdogs were petitioning William and Queen Mary to suppress the theatres. Four years after The Provok’d Wife premiered at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, actors in the troupe were indicted for using profane language on the stage. Although Collier’s Short View ironically made The Provok’d Wife an even more popular production than it already was, the tract was a serious blow to leading dramatists of the late Restoration. Collier’s convictions caused the playwright William Congreve to concede he had gone too far in some scenes. Vanbrugh tried to retaliate with his Short Vindication of The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife, from Immorality and Prophaneness, which he published the same year as Collier’s tract. “this honest Doctor…” seethed Vanbrugh, “does not yet understand the Nature of Comedy, tho’ he has made it his Study so long. For the Business of Comedy is to shew People what they shou’d do, by representing them upon the Stage, doing what they shou’d not.” But in this same response, Vanbrugh also admitted that some lines of dialogue were inappropriate and that The Provok’d Wife “was writ many years ago, and when I was very young.” It is possible that Vanbrugh even rewrote entire scenes in response to Collier’s chapter on the abuse of the clergy in the theatre. Collier loathed the episodes in the original 1697 script in which Sir John dresses up as a parson and carouses with his friends Lord Rake and Colonel Bully. Sometime between the publication of Collier’s Short View and the Drury Lane production in January of 1726, Vanbrugh rescripted Sir John’s drunken escapade. In the revised scenes, Sir John stumbled across the stage in his wife’s dress rather than a parson’s gown. Collier probably found the new scenes only slightly less abhorrent than the old, but a cross-dressed Brute must have seemed to him an improvement over a mock clergyman. The popularity of Collier’s tract, which was published four times in the last two years of the seventeenth century, marked a change in the British theatre. Vanbrugh, who died exactly one month before Collier in 1726, never completed another original play after the Short View fiasco. In the eighteenth century, the tone of comedy would become more sentimental and less lewd as the growing middle class audiences looked for moral guidance at the playhouses. Some women must have worried their reputations were at risk when Queen Anne forbade the use of the vizard in 1704, but there were fewer and fewer laughs and blushings to conceal as virtue began to triumph over vice. Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.