THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

chastely honest and abstract Fidelia. Although love does not exactly conquer all, reconciliation does, perhaps because
Wycherley cannot really conceive of any viable or acceptable alternative.
With the death of Charles II in 1685 and the flight to France of James II in 1688, direct royal patronage of the
stage diminished (though James’s daughter and successor, Mary II, maintained a discriminating interest in the
theatre). A generation of playwrights passed with the political regimes which fostered their wit, but both comedy and
tragedy were set, even stuck, in smooth grooves. In the Preface to his tragi-comedy Don Sebastian of 1689/91 Dryden
mourned that ‘the Humours of Comedy were almost spent, that Love and Honor (the mistaken Topicks of Tragedy)
were quite worn out, that the Theatres could not support their Charges, and that the Audience forsook them’. Because
of these discouragements he felt condemned as a dramatist ‘to dig in those exhausted Mines’. This same Dryden
could, however, recognize that by 1694 one major new talent had emerged, one hailed in his poem ‘To Mr Congreve’
as the true heir to Etherege’s ‘Courtship’ and to Wycherley’s ‘Satire, Wit, and Strength’. William Congreve (1670-
1729) achieved a startling popular success with The Old Batchelour in 1691 and followed it in 1693 with The Double-
Dealer and in 1695 with Love for Love. Congreve acquired his mastery through a combination of instinct and
experience. Each of his early plays advances his technique and assimilates the lessons of his predecessors. If his
Spanish tragedy The Mourning Bride of 1697 might seem aberrant to latter-day readers, its initial popularity is
testified to by the familiarity of its opening line (‘Music has charms to sooth a savage breast’) and of its famous
observation that ‘Heav’n has no rage, like love to hatred turn’d, | Nor Hell a fury, like a woman scorn’d’. His last and
most brilliant comedy, The Way of the World (1700), was by comparison a failure with its public. Little of the play,
Congreve remarked in its Dedication, had been ‘prepared for that general taste which now seems predominant in the
pallats of our audience’. To some later commentators, however, it is the last and greatest play of the ‘Restoration’
period, the climax of the dramatic experiments of forty years and the comedy that uniquely allows for both true wit
and genuine feeling, for social satire and for the establishment of marital alliances based on tenderness rather than
convenience. The impact of the play depends both on the complex social and family interrelationships of the
characters and on the discrepancies between what is publicly declared and what is privately acknowledged. The
importance of definition is especially evident in the relationship between Mirabell and Millamant. In the famous
‘proviso’ scene in Act IV each lays down conditions to the other; though she has admitted to loving ‘violently’, she
seeks a relationship which looks cold to the outside world (‘let us be as strange as if we had been married a great
while; and be as well bred as if we were not married at all’); he insists that she abhor the trivia that divert less
[p. 271]
intelligent women. Both determine to stand aside from the marital way of the world, and the way of much
contemporary comedy, which the play’s concluding couplets see as a ‘mutual falsehood’ and as ‘marriage frauds’ that
are ‘too oft paid in kind’.
The work of two of Congreve’s far less subtle contemporaries serves to throw the quality of The Way of the World
into further relief. Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726) is now far better known as a flamboyantly inventive architect than
as a dramatist. His buildings are brilliant, balanced, whimsical, and weighty; his plays are merely brilliant and
whimsical. Vanbrugh had a hand in some eleven plays, most of them collaborations or adaptations from the Spanish
and the French. Only two, The Relapse; or Virtue in Danger (1696) and The Provok’d Wife (1697), are completely
his. A third, A Journey to London, was finished by Colley Cibber and produced posthumously in 1728 under the title
The Provok’d Husband. The Relapse is a somewhat conventional response to, and a continuation of, Cibber’s far
drabber comedy Love’s Last Shift. In the original production at Drury Lane Cibber himself played Lord Foppington,
the character to whom Vanbrugh allots his most effervescently witty and harsh lines. The discordant picture of
marriage in The Provok’d Wife is relieved only by the suppleness of the colloquial comic dialogue in which the play
abounds. The work of the Irish-born actor/playwright, George Farquhar (?1677-1707), is marked by a shift away from
the London-oriented comedies of his predecessors into the fresh fields of the English provinces. The Constant Couple,
or a Trip to the Jubilee, produced in 1699, was one of the theatrical hits of its day but like its sequel, Sir Harry
Wildair (1701) it seems a slight, if sexually candid, piece of work compared to the long-popular The Recruiting
Officer (1706) and The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707). With the British victory at Blenheim of 1704 vividly impressed on
the public mind, and with the military campaign against Louis XIV of France still being pursued, The Recruiting
Officer had a particular contemporary currency. Despite its thin plot and the lightness of its intrigues, the play is
tartly observant of the nastiness of a soldierly career and, in the resourceful Sergeant Kite, offers one of the finest
comic roles in the English theatre tradition. The Beaux’ Stratagem reveals an equally relaxed interplay of cynicism,
realism, and romance. Its central male characters, Aimwell and Archer, both ‘gentlemen of broken fortunes’, are
fortune-hunters rather than rakes and success in their chosen provincial careers is ultimately determined by the
emergence of their natural virtue. At a crucial point in the action Aimwell is obliged to admit that he is ‘unequal to
the Task of Villain’ having been won over to the uprightness of love by Dorinda’s ‘Mind and Person’. It is an
admission that might have seemed merely a cynical device in a play of the 1670s. By 1707 it may well have been