English comedy was certainly greatly reformed, in some senses of the word reform, during the period which followed the publication of “The Rehearsal,” and, in the hands of writers like Wycherley, Shadwell, Congreve, and D’Urfey, the dulness of the Howards was exchanged for an extreme degree of vivacity. The plot was as little considered as ever—it was a mere peg on which to hang scenes brilliant with wit and repartee. The small intrigue is often but a frame for a great picture of society in its forms then most open to caricature, with all the petty intrigues inseparable from it. “Epsom Wells,” one of Shadwell’s earlier comedies, and perhaps his best, will bear comparison with Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair.” The personages represented in it are exactly those which then shone in such society—three “men of wit and pleasure,” one of the class of country squires whom the wits of London loved to laugh at, and who is described as “a country justice, a public spirited, politick, discontented fop, an immoderate hater of London, and a lover of the country above measure, a hearty true English coxcomb.” Then we have “two cheating, sharking, cowardly bullies.” The citizens of London are represented by Bisket, “a comfit-maker, a quiet, humble, civil cuckold, governed by his wife, whom he very much fears and loves at the same time, and is very proud of,” and Fribble, “a haberdasher, a surly cuckold, very conceited, and proud of his wife, but pretends to govern and keep her under,” and their wives, the first “an impertinent, imperious strumpet,” and the other, “an humble, submitting wife, who jilts her husband that way, a very ——.” One or two other characters of the same stamp, with “two young ladies of wit, beauty, and fortune,” who behave themselves not much better than the others, and a full allowance of “parsons, hectors, constables, watchmen, and fiddlers,” complete the dramatis personæ of “Epsom Wells.” With such materials anybody will understand the character of the piece, which was brought out on the stage in 1672. “The Squire of Alsatia,” by the same author, brought upon the stage in the eventful year 1688, is a vivid picture of one of the wildest phases of London life in those still rather primitive times. Alsatia, as every reader of Walter Scott knows, was a cant name for the White Friars, in London, a locality which, at that time, was beyond the reach of the law and its officers, a refuge for thieves and rogues, and especially for debtors, where they could either resist with no great fear of being overcome, or, when resistance was no longer possible, escape with ease. With such a scene, and such people for characters, we are not surprised that the printed edition of this play is prefaced by a vocabulary of the cant words employed in it. The principal characters in the play are of the same class with those which form the staple of all these old comedies. First there is a country father or uncle, who is rich and severe upon the vices of youth, or arbitrary, or avaricious. He is here represented by sir William Belfond, “a gentleman of about £3000 per annum, who in his youth had been a spark of the town; but married and retired into the country, where he turned to the other extreme—rigid, morose, most sordidly covetous, clownish, obstinate, positive, and forward.” He must have a London brother, or near relative, endowed with exactly contrary qualities, here represented by sir Edward Belfond, sir William’s brother, “a merchant, who by lucky hits had gotten a great estate, lives single with ease and pleasure, reasonably and virtuously, a man of great humanity and gentleness and compassion towards mankind, well read in good books, possessed with all gentlemanlike qualities.” Sir William Belfond has two sons. Belfond senior, the eldest, is “bred after his father’s rustic, swinish manner, with great rigour and severity, upon whom his father’s estate is entailed, the confidence of which makes him break out into open rebellion to his father, and become lewd, abominably vicious, stubborn, and obstinate.” The younger Belfond, Sir William’s second son, had been “adopted by Sir Edward, and bred from his childhood by him, with all the tenderness and familiarity, and bounty, and liberty that can be;” he was “instructed in all the liberal sciences, and in all gentleman-like education; somewhat given to women, and now and then to good fellowship; but an ingenious, well-accomplished gentleman; a man of honour, and of excellent disposition and temper.” Then we have some of the leading heroes of Alsatia, and first Cheatly, who is described as “a rascal, who by reason of debts, dares not stir out of Whitefryers, but there inveigles young heirs in tail; and helps ’em to goods and money upon great disadvantages; is bound for them, and shares with them, till he undoes them; a lewd, impudent, debauched fellow, very expert in the cant about the town.” Shamwell is “cousin to the Belfonds, an heir, who, being ruined by Cheatly, is made a decoy-duck for others; not daring to stay out of Alsatia, where he lives; is bound with Cheatly for heirs, and lives upon them, a dissolute, debauch’d life.” Another of these characters is captain Hackum, “a block-headed bully of Alsatia; a cowardly, impudent, blustering fellow; formerly a sergeant in Flanders, run from his colours, retreating into Whitefryers for a very small debt; where by the Alsatians he is dubb’d a captain; marries one that lets lodgings, sells cherry-brandy, and is a bawd.” Nor is Alsatia without a representative of the Puritanical part of society, in Scrapeall, “a hypocritical, repeating, praying, psalm-singing, precise fellow, pretending to great piety; a godly knave, who joins with Cheatly, and supplies young heirs with goods and money.” A rather large number of inferior characters fill up the canvas; and the females, with two exceptions, belong to the same class. The plot of this play is very simple. The elder son of sir William Belfond has taken to Alsatia, but sir William, on his return from abroad, hearing talk of the fame of a squire Belfond among the Alsatians, imagines that it is his younger son, and out of this mistake a considerable amount of misunderstanding arises. At last sir William discovers his error, and finds his eldest son in Whitefryers, but the youth sets him at defiance. The father, in great anger, brings tipstaff constables, to take away his son by force; but the Alsatians rise in force, the officers of the law are beaten, and sir William himself taken prisoner. He is rescued by the younger Belfond, and in the conclusion the elder brother becomes penitent, and is reconciled with his father. There is an underplot, far from moral in its character, which ends in the marriage of Belfond junior. It is a busy, noisy play, and was a great favourite on the stage; but it is now chiefly interesting as a vivid picture of London life in the latter half of the seventeenth century. “Bury Fair,” by Shadwell, is another comedy of the same description; with little interest in the plot, but full of life and movement. If “The Squire of Alsatia” was noisy, “The Scowrers,” another comedy by the same author, first brought on the stage in 1691, was still more so. The wild and riotous gallants who, in former times of inefficient police regulation, infested the streets at night, and committed all sorts of outrages, were known at different periods by a variety of names. In the reign of James I. and Charles I. they were the “roaring boys;” in the time of Shadwell, they were called the “scowrers,” because they scowered the streets at night, and rather roughly cleared them of all passengers; a few years later they took the name of Mohocks, or Mohawks. During the night London lay at the mercy of these riotous classes, and the streets witnessed scenes of brutal violence, which, at the present day, we can hardly imagine. This state of things is pictured in Shadwell’s comedy. Sir William Rant, Wildfire, and Tope, are noted scowrers, well known in the town, whose fame has excited emulation in men of less distinction in their way, Whachum, “a city wit and scowrer, imitator of sir William,” and “two scoundrells,” his companions, Bluster and Dingboy. Great enmity arises between the two parties of rival scowrers. The more serious characters in the play are Mr. Rant, sir William Rant’s father, and sir Richard Maggot, “a foolish Jacobite alderman” (it must be remembered that we are now in the reign of king William). Sir Richard’s wife, lady Maggot, like the citizen’s wives of the comedy of the Restoration generally, is a lady rather wanting in virtue, ambitious of mixing with the gay and fashionable world, and somewhat of a tyrant over her husband. She has two handsome daughters, whom she seeks to keep confined from the world, lest they should become her rivals. There are low characters of both sexes, who need not be enumerated. Much of the play is taken up with street rows, capital satirical pictures of London life. The play ends with marriages, and with the reconciliation of sir William Rant with his father, the serious old gentleman of the play. Shadwell excelled in these busy comedies. One of the nearest approaches to him is Mountfort’s comedy of “Greenwich Park,” which is another striking satire on the looseness of London life at that time. As in the others, the plot is simply nothing. The play consists of a number of intrigues, such as may be imagined, at a time when morality was little respected, in places of fashionable resort like Greenwich Park and Deptford Wells.
An element of satire was now introduced into English comedy which does not appear to have belonged to it before—this was mimicry. Although the principal characters in the play bore conventional names, they appear often to have been intended to represent individuals then well known in society, and these individuals were caricatured in their dress, and mimicked in their language and manners. We are told that this mimicry contributed greatly to the success of “The Rehearsal,” the duke of Buckingham having taken incredible pains to make Lacy, who acted the part of Bayes, perfect in imitating the voice and manner of Dryden, whose dress and gait were minutely copied. This personal satire was not always performed with impunity. On the 1st of February, 1669, Pepys went to the Theatre Royal to see the performance of “The Heiress,” in which it appears that sir Charles Sedley was personally caricatured, and the secretary of king Charles’s admiralty has left in his diary the following entry:—“To the king’s house, thinking to have seen the Heyresse, first acted on Saturday, but when we come thither we find no play there; Kynaston, that did act a part therein in abuse to sir Charles Sedley, being last night exceedingly beaten with sticks by two or three that saluted him, so as he is mightily bruised, and forced to keep his bed.” It is said that Dryden’s comedy of “Limberham,” brought on the stage in 1678, was prohibited after the first night, because the character of Limberham was considered to be too open a satire on the duke of Lauderdale.
Another peculiarity in the comedies of the age of the Restoration was their extraordinary indelicacy. The writers seemed to emulate each other in presenting upon the stage scenes and language which no modest ear or pure mind could support. In the earlier period coarseness in conversation was characteristic of an unpolished age—the language put in the mouths of the actors, as remarked before, smelt of the tavern; but under Charles II. the tone of fashionable society, as represented on the stage, is modelled upon that of the brothel. Even the veiled allusion is no longer resorted to, broad and direct language is substituted in its place. This open profligacy of the stage reached its greatest height between the years 1670 and 1680. The staple material of this comedy may be considered to be the commission of adultery, which is presented as one of the principal ornaments in the character of the well-bred gentleman, varied with the seducing of other men’s mistresses, for the keeping of mistresses appears as the rule of social life. The “Country Wife,” one of Wycherley’s comedies, which is supposed to have been brought on the stage perhaps as early as 1672, is a mass of gross indecency from beginning to end. It involves two principal plots, that of a voluptuary who feigns himself incapable of love and insensible to the other sex, in order to pursue his intrigues with greater liberty; and that of a citizen who takes to his wife a silly and innocent country girl, whose ignorance he believes will be a protection to her virtue, but the very means he takes to prevent her, lead to her fall. The “Parson’s Wedding,” by Thomas Killigrew, first acted in 1673, is equally licentious. The same at least may be said of Dryden’s “Limberham, or the Kind Keeper,” first performed in 1678, which, according to the author’s own statement, was prohibited on account of its freeness, but more probably because the character of Limberham was believed to be intended for a personal satire on the unpopular earl of Lauderdale. Its plot is simple enough; it is the story of a debauched old gentleman, named Aldo, whose son, after a rather long absence on the Continent, returns to England, and assumes the name of Woodall, in order to enjoy freely the pleasures of London life before he makes himself known to his friends. He takes a lodging in a house occupied by some loose women, and there meets with his father, but, as the latter does not recognise his son, they become friends, and live together licentiously so long, that when the son at length discovers himself, the old man is obliged to overlook his vices. Otway’s comedy of “Friendship in Fashion,” performed the same year, was not a whit more moral. But all these are far outdone by Ravenscroft’s comedy of “The London Cuckolds,” first brought out in 1682, which, nevertheless, continued to be acted until late in the last century. It is a clever comedy, full of action, and consisting of a great number of different incidents, selected from the less moral tales of the old story-tellers as they appear in the “Decameron” of Boccaccio, among which that of the ignorant and uneducated young wife, similar to the plot of Wycherley’s “Country Wife,” is again introduced.
The corruption of morals had become so great, that when women took up the pen, they exceeded in licentiousness even the other sex, as was the case with Mrs. Behn. Aphra Behn is understood to have been born at Canterbury, but to have passed some part of her youth in the colony of Surinam, of which her father was governor. She evidently possessed a disposition for intrigue, and she was employed by the English government, a few years after the Restoration, as a political spy at Antwerp. She subsequently settled in London, and gained a living by her pen, which was very prolific in novels, poems, and plays. It would be difficult to point out in any other works such scenes of open profligacy as those presented in Mrs. Behn’s two comedies of “Sir Patient Fancy” and “The City Heiress, or Sir Timothy Treat-all,” which appeared in 1678 and 1681. Concealment of the slightest kind is avoided, and even that which cannot be exposed to view, is tolerably broadly described.
It appears that the performance of the “London Cuckolds” had been the cause of some scandal, and there were, even among play-goers, some who took offence at such outrages on the ordinary feelings of modesty. The excess of the evil had begun to produce a reaction. Ravenscroft, the author of that comedy, produced on the stage, in 1684, a comedy, entitled “Dame Dobson, or the Cunning Woman,” which was intended to be a modest play, but it was unceremoniously “damned” by the audience. The prologue to this new comedy intimates that the “London Cuckolds” had pleased the town and diverted the court, but that some “squeamish females” had taken offence at it, and that he had now written a “dull, civill” play to make amends. They are addressed, therefore, in such terms as these:—
In you, chaste ladies, then we hope to-day,
This is the poet’s recantation play.
Come often to ’t, that he at length may see
’Tis more than a pretended modesty.
Stick by him now, for if he finds you falter,