Literary Criticism (1400-1800)

Villiers, George Second Duke of Buckingham | Peter Lewis (essay date 1970)

Peter Lewis (essay date 1970)

SOURCE: Lewis, Peter. “‘The Rehearsal’: A Study of Its Satirical Methods.” In Die Englische Satire, edited by Wolfgang Weiss, pp. 284-314. Darmstadt, Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1970, Lewis explores the methods used by Buckingham in satirizing Dryden, D'Avenant, and others in The Rehearsal.]

The Rehearsal is the archetype of most later Restoration and Augustan dramatic burlesques. A few pre-Commonwealth plays such as The Knight of the Burning Pestle might be regarded as burlesques, and, to judge from Jonson's satirical portraits of his contemporaries in Every Man out of his Humour and Poetaster and Dekker's equally incisive reply in Satiromastix, scurrilous caricature on the stage did not begin with the presentation of Dryden as Bayes in The Rehearsal; but in its total organization, the...

[The entire page is 11692 words long]

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

Lookup any word on eNotes with our dictionary. Highlight the word and press SHIFT + D for a definition, or SHIFT + T for a synonym.