Whether one agrees with it or not it is well to keep in mind Lamb’s defense in his essay On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century:
“We have been spoiled with ... the ... drama of common life; where the moral point is everything; where, instead of the fictitious half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy) we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies,—the same as in life.... “I do not know how it is with others, but I feel the better always for the perusal of one of Congreve’s—nay, why should I not add even of Wycherley’s—comedies. I am the gayer at least for it; and I could never connect those sports of a witty fancy in any shape with any result to be drawn from them to imitation in real life. They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland.... But in its own world do we feel the creature is so very bad?—The Fainalls and the Mirabels, the Dorimants and the Lady Touchwoods, in their own sphere, do not offend my moral sense; in fact they do not appeal to it at all. They seem engaged in their proper element. They break through no laws, or conscientious restraints. They know of none. They have got out of Christendom into the land—what shall I call it?—of cuckoldry—the Utopia of gallantry, where pleasure is duty, and the manners perfect freedom. It is altogether a speculative scene of things, which has no reference whatever to the world that is.... He [Congreve] has spread a privation of moral light ... over his creations; and his shadows flit before you without distinction or preference. Had he introduced a good character, a single gush of moral feeling, a revulsion of the judgment to actual life and actual duties, the impertinent Goshen would have only lighted to the discovery of deformities, which now are none, because we think them none.... “... When we are among them [the characters of Congreve and Wycherley], we are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings,—for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated,—for no family ties exist among them. No purity of the marriage bed is stained,—for none is supposed to have a being.... There is neither right nor wrong,—gratitude or its opposite,—claim or duty,—paternity or sonship....
“The whole is a passing pageant.... But, like Don Quixote, we take part against the puppets, and quite as impertinently.... We would indict our very dreams.”
6. Beginnings of the Change in the Drama.
Such had been the conditions surrounding the drama and in the drama itself before the reformation began. When one comes to look at the stage and the audiences, one finds very little indication of change at first. In 1682 there seems to have been objection to London Cuckolds on the ground of indecency, and Ravenscroft in the prologue to Dame Dobson (1682) claims to have complied with the objections which had been raised by making his own play dull and civil. In 1684 appeared Southerne’s first comedy, The Disappointment, which he calls a “play,” and in this we have the serious treatment of the marriage relations and the preservation of a wife’s chastity. Throughout, Southerne’s tendency was towards morality.
In 1696 there begins a real and easily discernible movement towards the moral treatment of dramatic themes. The She Gallants (1696) was so offensive to the ladies that it had to be withdrawn; in She Ventures and He Wins (1696) the man who would carry on an amour with a married woman is exposed and tricked and made the butt; and in Mrs. Manley’s The Lost Lover (1696) there is the noticeable introduction of a virtuous wife.
In 1697, the epilogue to Boadicea, a tragedy, tells us that
“Once only smutty jests could please the town,
But now (Heav’n help our trade) they’ll not go down.”
Waterhouse[71] finds traces of sentimentality in Vanbrugh’s Aesop, which appeared the same year. Then in 1698 matters were brought to a head by Collier, and we find Congreve’s Double Dealer advertised to be acted “with several expressions omitted,” while in The Way of the World (1700) his muse is somewhat more chaste. The Provoked Wife was altered, probably in 1706, so that the clergy might not seem to be attacked.
From this time on the changed attitude was increasingly manifest in the new plays, though the old were still acted with little or no change.