LIMBERHAM.
The extreme indelicacy of this play would, in the present times furnish ample and most just grounds for the unfavourable reception it met with from the public. But in the reign of Charles II. many plays were applauded, in which the painting is, at least, as coarse as that of Dryden. "Bellamira, or the Mistress," a gross translation by Sir Charles Sedley of Terence's "Eunuchus," had been often represented with the highest approbation. But the satire of Dryden was rather accounted too personal, than too loose. The character of Limberham has been supposed to represent Lauderdale, whose age and uncouth figure rendered ridiculous his ungainly affectation of fashionable vices. Mr Malone intimates a suspicion, that Shaftesbury was the person levelled at, whose lameness and infirmities made the satire equally poignant. In either supposition, a powerful and leading nobleman was offended, to whose party all seem to have drawn, whose loose conduct, in that loose age, exposed them to be duped like the hero of the play. It is a singular mark of the dissolute manners of those times, that an audience, to whom matrimonial infidelity was nightly held out, not only as the most venial of trespasses, but as a matter of triumphant applause, were unable to brook any ridicule, upon the mere transitory connection formed betwixt the keeper and his mistress. Dryden had spared neither kind of union; and accordingly his opponents exclaimed, "That he lampooned the court, to oblige his friends in the city, and ridiculed the city, to secure a promising lord at court; exposed the kind keepers of Covent Garden, to please the cuckolds of Cheapside; and drolled on the city Do-littles, to tickle the Covent-Garden Limberhams[1]." Even Langbaine, relentless as he is in criticism, seems to have considered the condemnation of Limberham as the vengeance of the faction ridiculed.
"In this play, (which I take to be the best comedy of his) he so much exposed the keeping part of the town, that the play was stopt when it had but thrice appeared on the stage; but the 004 author took a becoming care, that the things that offended on the stage, were either altered or omitted in the press. One of our modern writers, in a short satire against keeping, concludes thus:
"Dryden, good man, thought keepers to reclaim,
Writ a kind satire, call'd it Limberham.
This all the herd of letchers straight 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."
Mr Malone mentions his having seen a MS. copy of this play, found by Lord Bolingbroke among the sweepings of Pope's study, in which there occur several indecent passages, not to be found in the printed copy. These, doubtless, constituted the castrations, which, in obedience to the public voice, our author expunged from his play, after its condemnation. It is difficult to guess what could be the nature of the indecencies struck out, when we consider those which the poet deemed himself at liberty to retain.
The reader will probably easily excuse any remarks upon this comedy. It is not absolutely without humour, but is so disgustingly coarse, as entirely to destroy that merit. Langbaine, with his usual anxiety of research, traces back a few of the incidents to the novels of Cinthio Giraldi, and to those of some forgotten French authors.
Plays, even of this nature, being worth preservation, as containing genuine traces of the manners of the age in which they appear, I cannot but remark the promiscuous intercourse, which, in this comedy and others, is represented as taking place betwixt women of character, and those who made no pretensions to it. Bellamira in Sir Charles Sedley's play, and Mrs Tricksy in the following pages, are admitted into company with the modest female characters, without the least hint of exception or impropriety. Such were actually the manners of Charles the II.d's time, where we find the mistresses of the king, and his brothers, familiar in the highest circles. It appears, from the evidence in the case of the duchess of Norfolk for adultery, that Nell Gwyn was living with her Grace in familiar habits; her society, doubtless, paving the way for the intrigue, by which the unfortunate lady lost her rank and reputation[2]. It is always symptomatic of a total decay of morals, where female reputation neither confers dignity, 005 nor excites pride, in its possessor; but is consistent with her mingling in the society of the libertine and the profligate.
Some of Dryden's libellers draw an invidious comparison betwixt his own private life and this satire; and exhort him to
Be to vices, which he practised, kind.
But of the injustice of this charge on Dryden's character, we have spoken fully elsewhere. Undoubtedly he had the licence of this, and his other dramatic writings, in his mind, when he wrote the following verses; where the impurity of the stage is traced to its radical source, the debauchery of the court:
Then courts of kings were held in high renown,
Ere made the common brothels of the town.
There virgins honourable vows received,
But chaste, as maids in monasteries, lived.
The king himself, to nuptial rites a slave,
No bad example to his poets gave;
And they, not bad, but in a vicious age,
Had not, to please the prince, debauched the stage.
Wife of Bath's Tale.
"Limberham" was acted at the Duke's Theatre in Dorset-Garden; for, being a satire upon a court vice, it was deemed peculiarly calculated for that play-house. The concourse of the citizens thither is alluded to in the prologue to "Marriage-a-la-Mode." Ravenscroft also, in his epilogue to the "Citizen turned Gentleman," acted at the same theatre, disowns the patronage of the courtiers who kept mistresses, probably because they Constituted the minor part of his audience:
From the court party we hope no success;
Our author is not one of the noblesse,
That bravely does maintain his miss in town,
Whilst my great lady is with speed sent down,
And forced in country mansion-house to fix.
That miss may rattle here in coach-and-six.
The stage for introducing "Limberham" was therefore judiciously chosen, although the piece was ill received, and withdrawn after being only thrice represented. It was printed in 1678.
Footnotes:
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE JOHN, LORD VAUGHAN, &c[1].
My Lord,
I cannot easily excuse the printing of a play at so unseasonable a time[2], when the great plot of the nation, like one of Pharaoh's lean kine, has devoured 007 its younger brethren of the stage. But however weak my defence might be for this, I am sure I should not need any to the world for my dedication to your lordship; and if you can pardon my presumption in it, that a bad poet should address himself to so great a judge of wit, I may hope at least to escape with the excuse of Catullus, when he writ to Cicero:
Gratias tibi maximas Catullus
Agit, pessimus omnium, poeta;
Tanto pessimus omnium poeta,
Quanto tu optimns omnium patronus.
I have seen an epistle of Flecknoe's to a nobleman, who was by some extraordinary chance a scholar; (and you may please to take notice by the way, how natural the connection of thought is betwixt a bad poet and Flecknoe) where he begins thus: Quatuordecim jam elapsi sunt anni, &c.; his Latin, it seems, not holding out to the end of the sentence: but he endeavoured to tell his patron, betwixt two languages which he understood alike, that it was fourteen years since he had the happiness to know him. It is just so long, (and as happy be the omen of dulness to me, as it is to some clergymen and statesmen!) since your lordship has known, that there is a worse poet remaining in the world, than he of scandalous memory, who left it last[3]. I might enlarge 008 upon the subject with my author, and assure you, that I have served as long for you, as one of the patriarchs did for his Old-Testament mistress; but I leave those flourishes, when occasion shall serve, for a greater orator to use, and dare only tell you, that I never passed any part of my life with greater satisfaction or improvement to myself, than those years which I have lived in the honour of your lordship's acquaintance; if I may have only the time abated when the public service called you to another part of the world, which, in imitation of our florid speakers, I might (if I durst presume upon the expression) call the parenthesis of my life.
That I have always honoured you, I suppose I need not tell you at this time of day; for you know I staid not to date my respects to you from that title which now you have, and to which you bring a greater addition by your merit, than you receive from it by the name; but I am proud to let others know, how long it is that I have been made happy by my knowledge of you; because I am sure it will give me a reputation with the present age, and with posterity. And now, my lord, I know you are afraid, lest I should take this occasion, which lies 009 so fair for me, to acquaint the world with some of those excellencies which I have admired in you; but I have reasonably considered, that to acquaint the world, is a phrase of a malicious meaning; for it would imply, that the world were not already acquainted with them. You are so generally known to be above the meanness of my praises, that you have spared my evidence, and spoiled my compliment: Should I take for my common places, your knowledge both of the old and the new philosophy; should I add to these your skill in mathematics and history; and yet farther, your being conversant with all the ancient authors of the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as with the modern—I should tell nothing new to mankind; for when I have once but named you, the world will anticipate all my commendations, and go faster before me than I can follow. Be therefore secure, my lord, that your own fame has freed itself from the danger of a panegyric; and only give me leave to tell you, that I value the candour of your nature, and that one character of friendliness, and, if I may have leave to call it, kindness in you, before all those other which make you considerable in the nation[4].
Some few of our nobility are learned, and therefore I will not conclude an absolute contradiction in the terms of nobleman and scholar; but as the 010 world goes now, 'tis very hard to predicate one upon the other; and 'tis yet more difficult to prove, that a nobleman can be a friend to poetry. Were it not for two or three instances in Whitehall, and in the town, the poets of this age would find so little encouragement for their labours, and so few understanders, that they might have leisure to turn pamphleteers, and augment the number of those abominable scribblers, who, in this time of licence, abuse the press, almost every day, with nonsense, and railing against the government.
It remains, my lord, that I should give you some account of this comedy, which you have never seen; because it was written and acted in your absence, at your government of Jamaica. It was intended for an honest satire against our crying sin of keeping; how it would have succeeded, I can but guess, for it was permitted to be acted only thrice. The crime, for which it suffered, was that which is objected against the satires of Juvenal, and the epigrams of Catullus, that it expressed too much of the vice which it decried. Your lordship knows what answer was returned by the elder of those poets, whom I last mentioned, to his accusers:
—castum esse decet pium poetam
Ipsum. Versiculos nihil necesse est:
Qui tum denique habent salem ac leporem
Si sint molliculi et parum pudici.
But I dare not make that apology for myself; and therefore have taken a becoming care, that those things which offended on the stage, might be either altered, or omitted in the press; for their authority is, and shall be, ever sacred to me, as much absent as present, and in all alterations of their fortune, who for those reasons have stopped its farther appearance on the theatre. And whatsoever hindrance it has been to me in point of profit, many of my 011 friends can bear me witness, that I have not once murmured against that decree. The same fortune once happened to Moliere, on the occasion of his "Tartuffe;" which, notwithstanding, afterwards has seen the light, in a country more bigot than ours, and is accounted amongst the best pieces of that poet. I will be bold enough to say, that this comedy is of the first rank of those which I have written, and that posterity will be of my opinion. It has nothing of particular satire in it; for whatsoever may have been pretended by some critics in the town, I may safely and solemnly affirm, that no one character has been drawn from any single man; and that I have known so many of the same humour, in every folly which is here exposed, as may serve to warrant it from a particular reflection. It was printed in my absence from the town, this summer, much against my expectation; otherwise I had over-looked the press, and been yet more careful, that neither my friends should have had the least occasion of unkindness against me, nor my enemies of upbraiding me; but if it live to a second impression, I will faithfully perform what has been wanting in this. In the mean time, my lord, I recommend it to your protection, and beg I may keep still that place in your favour which I have hitherto enjoyed; and which I shall reckon as one of the greatest blessings which can befall,
My Lord,
Your Lordship's most obedient,
Faithful servant,
John Dryden.
Footnotes:
- John, Lord Vaughan, was the eldest surviving son of Richard, Earl of Carbery, to which title he afterwards succeeded. He was a man of literature, and president of the Royal Society from 1686 to 1689. Dryden was distinguished by his patronage as far back as 1664, being fourteen years before the acting of this play. Lord Vaughan had thus the honour of discovering and admiring the poet's genius, before the public applause had fixed his fame; and, probably better deserved the panegyric here bestowed, than was Usual among Dryden's patrons. He wrote a recommendatory copy of verses, which are prefixed to "The Conquest of Granada." Mr Malone informs us, that this accomplished nobleman died at Chelsea, on 16th January, 1712-13.
- The great popish plot, that scene of mystery and blood, broke out in August 1678.
- Flecknoe was a Roman Catholic priest, very much addicted to
scribbling verses. His name has been chiefly preserved by our
author's satire of "Mack-Flecknoe;" in which he has depicted
Shadwell, as the literary son and heir of this wretched poetaster. A
few farther particulars concerning him may be found prefixed to
that poem. Flecknoe, from this dedication, appears to have been
just deceased. The particular passage referred to has not been
discovered; even Langbaine had never seen it: but Mr Malone points
out a letter of Flecknoe to the Cardinal Barberini, whereof the
first sentence is in Latin, and the next in English. Our author, in
an uncommon strain of self-depreciation, or rather to give a neat
turn to his sentence, has avouched himself to be a worse poet than
Flecknoe. But expressions of modesty in a dedication, like those
of panegyric, are not to be understood literally. As in the latter,
Dryden often strains a note beyond Ela, so, on the present occasion,
he has certainly sounded the very base string of humility. Poor
Flecknoe, indeed, seems to have become proverbial, as the worst
of poets. The Earl of Dorset thus begins a satire on Edward
Howard:
- Those damned antipodes to common sense,
- Those toils to Flecknoe, pr'ythee, tell me whence
- Does all this mighty mass of dulness spring,
- Which in such loads thou to the stage dost bring?
- There is a very flat and prosaic imitation of this sentiment in
the Duke of Buckingham's lines to Pope:
- And yet so wondrous, so sublime a thing
- As the great Iliad, scarce could make me sing;
- Except I justly could at once commend
- A good companion, and as firm a friend;
- One moral, or a mere well-natured deed,
- Does all desert in sciences exceed.
- Thus prose may be humbled, as well as exalted; into poetry.