A Gambling Man: Charles II's Restoration Game (29 page)

Charles himself prompted the first heroic play when he asked Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, if he thought it possible to produce an English form of French tragedy. Orrery later told Ormond that when he kissed the king’s hand, he Commanded me, to write a Play for Him…: And therefore, som months [later] I presumed to lay at his majtys Feete, a Trage-Comedi, All in Ten feet verse, & Rhyme. I had writt it, in that manner upon two accounts; First because I thought it was not fit a Command soe extraordinary, shou’d have bin obeyd in a way that was Common; Secondly, because I found his majty Relish’d rather, the French Fashion of Playes, than the English.
¹³

The hero of Orrery’s
The General
, in 1661, was a soldier (like Monck) who revolts against a usurper to restore the true king, amid a welter of arguments on love and honour. (It roused Sedley to spluttering sarcasm in the pit when he saw it in 1664.) Orrery’s second play,
The History of Henry the Fifth
, was an even more vehement exposition of the same themes, focusing on the ‘restoration’ of English power in France, with lavish sets and costumes, including the coronation robes lent by Charles and James. In heroic drama everything was larger than life – armies fought to the sound of drums and trumpets, heroes displayed staggering bravery and heartbreaking nobility, ghosts warned of sudden turns of fate. A favourite subject, perhaps inevitably, was the triumph of the rightful king or queen over wicked usurpers, but the plays also allowed dramatists to explore serious themes like the clash between cultures, the meaning of sovereignty and hierarchy, and – a warning to Charles – the disastrous effect of passion over reason.

The grand plots, often acted out in sweeping verse, were usually balanced by comic sub-plots, bringing the plays nearer to the everyday world. Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher were the great influences here, prompting a lasting argument between devotees of Jonson’s ‘humour’ and of Fletcher’s ‘wit’. Beaumont and Fletcher were favourites because they caught the idiom of the court, while their combative lovers, descended from Shakespeare’s Benedict and Beatrice, gave birth to the witty sparring couples of the later Restoration stage. Compared to Shakespeare, Dryden decided, ‘they understood and imitated the Conversation of Gentlemen much better, whose wild debaucheries and quickness of wit in Repartees no poet can ever paint as they have done’.
¹⁴

Dryden himself was the leader in a new group, the professional writers. His first success, in 1663, was the
The Wild Gallant
at the Theatre Royal. Although it had a baffling plot (Pepys could never work out who the ‘wild gallant’ actually was), it had a witty script, and was staged at court a fortnight later. Dryden’s friend Robert Howard (soon a powerful figure in opposition politics) also wrote for the stage. His farcical satire
The Committee
, which appeared to riotous applause in 1662, in the middle of the tension surrounding the Act of Uniformity, featured upstart, hypocritical puritans of Cromwell’s London trying to stop two Cavalier couples retrieving their estates. The noble Cavaliers won, of course, with the help of their loyal but dim Irish servant Teague.

Charles influenced comedy personally, as he had tragi-comedy. This time he looked for inspiration not to France but to Spain. At his suggestion, in 1663, Sir Samuel Tuke adapted two comedies of Calderón to create the immensely successful
The Adventures of Five Hours
, which recast the grand issues of love and honour on a domestic scale, especially through the anti-heroic servants. The play started a trend, and for several years the stage swirled with Spanish ‘cape and sword plays’ (including three adaptations by the pro-Spanish George Digby, Lord Bristol). But although the Spanish dramas pleased the pit and the gallery with their exotic settings, action-packed plots and high moral sentiments, what audiences really wanted was more debauchery, frivolity and quick wit. And soon a new young dramatist appeared, George Etherege, who was eager to supply them in abundance.

Etherege was twenty-seven when his play
The Comical Revenge, or, Love in a Tub
was acted at the Duke’s Theatre in March 1664. It was dedicated to Buckhurst: Etherege had written it, he said, as a calculated way to get to know him. The ploy worked. In 1663–4 Etherege and Buckhurst exchanged exaggerated verse poems celebrating prostitutes, wine, and pleasure in a rakishly self-conscious manner.
¹⁵
The Comical Revenge
reflected all their wild living, with a romantic plot in rhymed verse and comic plots in prose. Its forthright portrait of a rich, lusty widow jousting with the spendthrift hero who needs a rich wife made it an instant hit, running for nearly a month. It was exuberant and vital, mixing realism and heroism, fantasy and ridicule. More significantly, it evoked the stifling social forms of Cromwell’s England specifically to celebrate, by contrast, ‘the freedoms of the present’. In its festive way it was a libertine manifesto.

A climactic scene from Etherege’s
The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub,
Act IV, scene vi

The Comical Revenge
swept the actors along in constant motion. But while its energy was extreme, it was not unusual. In almost every production, the cast were stretched to their limit. They worked hard and were poorly paid, if touched by glamour and enriched by occasional gifts. The King’s Company inherited stars from the generation before, like the comic Yorkshireman John Lacy, who made the crowd roar as the nonconformist Scruple in John Wilson’s
The Cheats
in 1662, yet another bold performance in the middle of the debates about religious settlement. ‘The new play called
The Cheats
’, wrote Abraham Hill gleefully to his friend John Brooke, ‘has been attempted on the stage, but it is so scandalous that it is forbidden.’
¹⁶
Charles loved Lacy and commissioned John Michael Wright to paint a triple portrait of him playing three different roles. But he was also impressed by the handsome Charles Hart, who excelled both as a man of honour and as a fine, witty gallant, and was said (without evidence) to be Shakespeare’s great-nephew.

Davenant’s company also had promising young leads, like Thomas Betterton, still only in his twenties, and Edward Kynaston, now playing male roles. But however fine the actors, the women were the real draw. New names appeared in court gossip, like Elizabeth Weaver, with whom Charles had a brief fling, Anne and Becky Marshall, Charlotte Butler and Elizabeth Davenport. Actresses and singers were sucked into the whirlpool of court sex, self-interest, and practical jokes. It was thought extremely funny when Aubrey de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who was a Privy Councillor, Gentleman of the Bedchamber, knight of the Garter and colonel of the Horse Guards – tricked the hapless Hester Davenport into a mock marriage that she believed was real. When she threw herself at Charles’s feet demanding justice, laughter was all she got. When two maids of honour decided to play orange girls, they encountered the life of theatre women at first hand, being accosted at the play-house – a normal fate for orange sellers – and then ambushed in their coach by the roué Henry Brouncker who had a house in the country ‘always well stocked with girls’.
¹⁷

The playwrights deliberately created opposing pairs of women to show them off: virtuous heroines and stormy villainesses in the tragedies, and smart-talking court ladies and innocent country girls in comedies. They also made sure that bodies were on show at every turn. The tragedies were full of rapes and rescues, and the comedies with breeches parts to show off the girls’ legs. (Dryden’s
The Rival Ladies
of 1664 gave double value, with
two
women disguised as pages pursuing the same man.) And when an actress spoke the prologue or epilogue she stepped out of her role, cracking sexual jokes and flashing innuendoes at the delighted audience. These moments, when the actors ‘remove from Fiction into Life’, greatly upset the critic Jeremy Collier: ‘Here they converse with the Boxes and Pit, and address directly to the Audience…But here we have Lewdness without Shame or Example; Here the Poet exceeds himself…And to make it the more agreeable, Women are Commonly pick’d out for this Service.’
¹⁸
After the show, select playgoers went round the back to the dressing rooms, the ‘tiring rooms’, above the green room where the actors waited for their cues. To protect (and control) his actresses, Davenant lodged them in a house attached to the theatre, while Killigrew hired rooms in Drury Lane. Many were smart, clever girls from the streets, others – or this was their story – came from better-off families who had fallen on hard times.

The plays themselves were seductive, at once an escape and a mirror. In the theatre a man who had just come from practising new French dances could laugh at Paris fopperies, or a presbyterian could sneer at puritans without shame. Many topics were close to the audience’s hidden concerns: the clash between generations, the forced, loveless marriages, the hypocrisy of piety, the greed of merchants. The lines of class were drawn constantly, allowing each part of the audience to laugh at the other. As the actors mimicked the court drawl and gestures, fashionable obsessions were mocked as affectation while also appearing an accomplishment. Indeed some plays were almost a handbook to polite manners, increasingly so in the comedies of the next decade, as when Bellair instructs Harriet in flirtation in Etherege’s
The Man of Mode
:

YOUNG BELLAIR
: At one motion play your fan, roll your eyes, and then settle a kind look upon me.

HARRIET
: So.

BELLAIR
: Now spread your fan, look down upon it, and tell the sticks with a finger.

HARRIET
: Very modish.

BELLAIR
: Clap your hand up to your bosom, hold down your gown. Shrug a little, draw up your breasts and let ’em fall again, gently, with a sigh or two,
etc
.
¹⁹

And so it goes on, as Bellair says, ‘Admirably well acted!’

The tone of voice and repartee were wickedly close to court speech.
²⁰
Exactly the opposite was true of tragedy, where the actor followed strict rules of gesture and voice, pointing to his head to indicate reason, slapping his heart when evoking passion, raising his hands in suppliance to the Gods, shooting his arms forward with open palms to show horror. And there was magic in the theatre, as well as gossip and grand acting. When the King’s Theatre closed for alterations, Pepys went backstage, ‘to see the inside of the stage and all the tiring rooms and machines’:

and indeed it was a sight worth seeing. But to see their clothes, and the various sorts, and what a mixture of things there was; here a wooden leg, there a ruff, here a hobby horse, there a crown, would make a man split himself to see with laughing, and particularly Lacy’s wardrobe and Shotrell’s. But then again, to think how fine they show on the Stage, by candlelight, and how poor things they are to look now too near hand, is not pleasant at all.
²¹

Like Charles, looking at his court in a sober mood, he was almost bewildered to find that the glittering performance was an illusion.

The plays and poems and letters of the court show wit meaning many things, running up a sliding scale. At the bottom comes bawdy, the crude armoury of sexual, scatological and bodily jokes, graduating to buffoonery, slapstick and burlesque. The exaggerated imitation of burlesque – like Buckingham’s mockery of Clarendon – was also a form of criticism and truth-finding, hunting the essence of a character. Ridicule of this kind was forensic, and much to be dreaded. At its finest, the wit of the court, and of the stage, was penetrating and questioning. To Dryden, fast repartee – ‘a chace of wit kept on both sides, and swiftly managed’ – was the chief grace of comedy and ‘the greatest pleasure of the audience’, one area where British writers utterly outdid the French. It flowered in a play of metaphor and phrase-making. It worked through opposition, antithesis and balance, slowly reaching agreement, or leaving an opponent silenced by a brilliantly closed barb, as in Charles’s own punishing one-liners. Halifax found Charles’s enjoyment of low comedy and broad humour demeaning, and his wit too fast, too prone to spy a weakness in people and turn it to jest: ‘His wit consisted chiefly in the Quickness of his Apprehension. His Apprehension made him find Faults, and that led him to short sayings upon them, not always equal, but often very good.’
²²
Charles’s tartness was softened by his generosity, and his fellow-feeling, yet these, said Halifax (wittily), could also be a weakness, displaying a humanity and a delight in applause unsuitable to a king:

The Thing called Wit, a Prince may taste, but it is dangerous for him to take too much of it; it hath Allurements which by refining his Thoughts, take off from their dignity in applying them less to the governing part. There is a Charm in Wit, which a Prince must resist: and that to him was no easy matter; it was contesting with Nature upon Terms of Disadvantage.