Before Collier

William Congreve

In 1698, a clergyman named Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) published a pamphlet entitled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. It was one of those little works that, while almost completely unread now, had an outsize effect in its day, in this case on English theatre. In it, Collier denounced the English stage for its perceived propagation of every kind of vice: profanity, blasphemy, sexual license, irreligion, you name it. Theatre had become a threat to public morals.

It would be easy to write Collier off as yet another Puritan killjoy. However, he is worth taking seriously for a few reasons. For one thing, he was not a Puritan or dissenting “fanatic”; he was a High Church Tory. In other words, he was a representative of The Establishment, and therefore could not be written off so easily by the beau monde. Second, his work touched a nerve, even with the playwrights whose works he attacked. Collier marks a turning point.
For the English stage, and for English comedy in particular, the period up to 1698 “BC” (“Before Collier”), is broadly spoken of as the period of “Restoration Comedy”. It is marked by all the excesses one associates with the stereotyped culture of the Restoration, its debauchery, sexual license, and general indifference towards received moral and religious norms. The language of Restoration Comedy was bawdy and demotic. Its stock characters were the prostitute, the pimp or procurer, the young rake, the rich and horny widow, the young and horny wife (and her cuckolded husband). What is now rightly considered “sexual assault” was a very frequent plot device in the comedies (!) of the age. Bill Cosby could have plied women with drugs in one of these plays to great comic effect if he were living in London in the 1670s. All of which is to say that, rather than being just another dour crank, Collier had a point.“AC” or after Collier, the language of comedy becomes more subdued. The plots are less “rapey”. Attempted seduction or adultery is less often successful, and unhappily married couples are reconciled at the end. There are happy endings for the virtuous – or for the repentant – and vice comes to a bad end. In short, playwrights started writing plays differently, or like William Congreve (1670-1729), left off writing plays altogether.

Congreve is actually my reason for writing this. I had read The Way of the World (1700) many years ago and remembered little of it. In my mind, Congreve represented the polite, neoclassical – “after Collier” – generation of writers I associate with the likes of Addison and Pope. There is no real reason for this other than my general ignorance of his works, and the mental image I have of that Kit-Kat Club portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller. I was disabused of this assumption after recently reading all his comedies and finding them to be firmly in the Restoration tradition.

Besides having all the louche elements of Restoration Comedy abovementioned, I was also very alert to a number of Rochesterian references in these plays. By “Rochesterian” I mean references to the writings of the naughty Earl of Rochester (1647-1680), a poet almost synonymous with the moral and spiritual bankruptcy of Restoration libertinism. And although Rochester died when Congreve was about 10 years old, there would have been a direct link between the two men through the person of Elizabeth Barry (1658-1713).

Barry was an actress who had roles in all four of Congreve’s comedies, though by this late stage of her career she was relegated to playing older parts. For our purposes, what matters is that Elizabeth had been the mistress of Rochester, to whom she bore a daughter. Tradition has it that Elizabeth’s inaugural appearance on the stage was a complete disaster, but that Rochester took her under his wing and coached her. She went on to become one of the most celebrated actresses of the age. She also dumped Rochester.

The first Rochesterian reference I came across in Congreve’s plays was actually not penned by Congreve himself. Rather, it was written by Thomas Southerne in some commendatory verses prefixed to Congreve’s The Old Batchelour (1693):

     She yields, she yields, surrenders all her Charms,
     Do you but force her gently to your arms
     (“To Mr. Congreve”, ll. 14-15)

Aside from its rapiness, it is also reminiscent of Rochester’s lines:

     Shee yields, she yields, Pale Envy said Amen
     The first of woemen to the Last of men.
     (“Sab: Lost”, ll. 1-2)

In the same play, Belinda admonishes Araminta (Act II, scene ii):

"Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in Commendation of that filthy, awkard, two leg’d Creature, Man."

In sentiment and phrasing it brings to mind the opening lines to Rochester’s “A Satire against Mankind”:
 
     Were I (who to my cost already am
     One of those strange prodigious Creatures Man)
     A Spirit free, to choose for my own Share,
     What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas’d to weare,
     I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear,
     Or any thing but that vain Animal,
     Who is so proud of being rational.

In Love for Love (1695), the free-speaking Scandal gives his opinion of women’s virtue (Act III, scene i):

"Yes, Faith. I believe some Women are Virtuous too; but ‘tis as I believe some Men are Valiant, thro’ fear."

The line illustrates a very prominent notion in Restoration libertinism, namely that it is our very vices that underpin and motivate our supposed “virtues”. It is the received depth psychology of Restoration moral cynicism, made popular and borrowed wholesale from Rochefoucauld. The idea that valor is at bottom sublimated cowardice appears several times in Rochefoucauld’s work, as in the following instance:

"Perfect Valour and perfect Cowardice are Extremes Men seldom arrive at…. Some are not at all Times equally exempt from Fear: Others give occasionally into general Panics: Others advance to the Charge because they dare not stay in their Posts."

However, when Congreve has Scandal say that some men are valiant through fear, he more likely has Rochester in mind, who in the same “Satire against Mankind” (ll. 158-159) famously wrote:

     For all Men, wou’d be Cowards if they durst:
     And honesty’s against all common Sense.

It was a well-known line, and also appears in Lord Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Vol. I, p. 119:

"And all Men (says a witty Poet) wou’d be Cowards if they durst."

Congreve’s last and most well-known comedy, The Way of the World (1700), is the only one to appear after Jeremy Collier’s attack. Indeed there are a couple of half-hearted jabs at Collier and his ilk, to little effect. After this play, Congreve gave up writing plays. Although not strictly true, it is tempting to consider The Way of the World as the last Restoration comedy. In any case, at one point (Act IV, scene i), Millimant is walking around, distractedly reciting lines to herself from the Cavalier poet, Sir John Suckling. The scattered lines she repeats here and there, taken out of context, can clearly be given a sexual meaning:

     prithee spare me gentle Boy,
     Press me no more for that slight Toy.

and

     I swear it will not do its part,
     Though thou do’st thine, employ’st the Power and Art.

After these last two lines, Millimant interrupts herself:

     Natural, easy Suckling!

It is a paraphrase of a line from Rochester’s “Timon, A Satyr” (ll. 108-108):

     Falkland, she prais’d, and Sucklings, easie Pen
     And seem’d to taste their former parts again.

Here the sexual meaning is less subtle: “suckling” of “pens” and “tasting” of “parts”. It is typical of Rochester, whose mind dwelled in a universe almost metaphysically constituted by sex, where even the trees in St. James’ Park “fuck’d the very Skies”.

The metaphysics of the post-Collier theatrical universe would be structured more politely.


Bibliography

CONGREVE, William. The Comedies of William Congreve. Anthony G. Henderson (ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

ROCHEFOUCAULD, François, Duc de La. Moral Maxims by the Duke de la Roche Foucault. Translated from the French. With Notes. London: A. Millar, 1749.

ROCHESTER, John Wilmot, Earl of. The Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Keith Walker (ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

SHAFTESBURY, Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 3rd Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (3 vols.). Douglas Den Uyl (ed.). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001.