[In this essay, Staves examines the theatrical tradition of foppery and the changes it underwent throughout the eighteenth century, paying particular attention to Cibber and David Garrick. Staves demonstrates a softening attitude toward the fop character, citing Cibber's Love Makes a Man as an important example of this trend.]

Literary critics have often taken a lugubrious tone toward the fop. Fops, we are told, are legitimate objects of ridicule because vain, selfish, narcissistic, and indifferent to the welfare of others. Writing about Sparkish in The Country Wife Virginia Ogden Birdsall comments, “Sparkish eventually reveals himself before Alithea for the unfeeling, mercenary fop that he is.” Toward the end of the closing act he reveals “all the nastiness of injured vanity.”¹ Norman Holland in The First Modern Comedies repeatedly calls attention to fops as characters valuing appearance over reality. Novel and Plausible in The Plain-Dealer, for instance, “concentrate all their attention on externals. … They are, in short, all outside, no inside.”² Such accusations are valid, yet drama is more than a mirror of morality and fops do more than display the evils of superficiality and selfishness. Indeed, foppery is an historical phenomenon, not simply a theatrical convention. The representation of foppery on stage during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is significantly affected by changing English attitudes towards foppery itself and also by deeper shifts in attitudes about what ideal masculine behavior should be.

First, though, who exactly are these fops? As the OED says, a fop is “one who is foolishly attentive to and vain of his appearance, dress or manners; a dandy, an exquisite.” In drama, the type is well illustrated by Sir Fopling Flutter in Etherege's Man of Mode who, to adapt Dryden's words in the epilogue, may be for the moment “Knight o'th' shire” to represent them all. Sir Fopling has affectations of both dress and manner and, having recently returned from France, a Frenchified vocabulary with which to discuss them. He appears adorned with pretty new tassels, a new cut coat to make him look slender and long-waisted, shoes from Piccar, periwig from Chedreux, and especially wonderful, large, well-fringed gloves scented with essence of orange. Garments and accessories alone are not sufficient to create a bel air so Sir Fopling has also studied dancing with St. André and taken up such fashionable behavior as embracing and even offering to kiss his male acquaintances. The playtext does not provide Sir Fopling with a mirror, but in the absence of such a stock fop prop at Dorimant's lodgings he is moved to complain, “why hast not thou a glass hung up here? A room is the dullest thing without one. … In a glass a man may entertain himself. … Correct the errors of his motions and his dress.”³

As important as the fop's obsession with his appearance is what may be described as fop sensibility. Fops are delicate. Not for them the brutality of Restoration scowerers. Sir Fopling complains about the stench of other men's tobacco overcoming his pulvillo and about the smell of a pair of cordovan gloves almost poisoning him at the playhouse. Later he pinches out a tallow candle, exclaiming to Dorimant, “How can you breathe in a room where there's grease frying?” (p. 181).

Finally, though fops are in various ways effeminate, they are rarely presented as homosexual. On the contrary, they are asexuals who like to spend their time with the ladies. As connoisseurs of fashion, they have interests in common with women. Sir Fopling possesses a technical vocabulary that allows him to comment to Emilia, “I never saw anything prettier than this high work on your point d'Espagne” (p. 172). The knight, who claims while in France to have been admitted “in a dozen families where all the women of quality used to visit,” frankly and sincerely tells Dorimant and Harriet, “women are the prettiest things we can fool away our time with” (pp. 180-81). Despite common twentieth-century directorial practice, it is important to recognize that there is no necessary connection between foppery and male homosexuality.⁴ In Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy a few male characters are explicitly homosexual, for example, Coupler in Vanbrugh's Relapse and Maiden in Thomas Baker's Tunbridge-Walks.⁵ Coupler does not seem effeminate or foppish; Maiden definitely does. The majority of effeminate stage fops who, like Sir Fopling, are seen spending their time with ladies could, of course, be imagined to have boys or men offstage in that same space inhabited by Lady Macbeth's children, but the emphasis in most plays seems to me to be on the fop's lack of strong sexual appetite rather than on any suggestion of homosexuality or bisexuality. Such a lack of sexual appetite was itself, in the increasingly polite mind of the eighteenth century, female or effeminate.

Restoration and eighteenth-century drama is crammed full of fops: Shadwell's Woodcock, Brisk, and Trim; Wycherley's Dapperwit and Monsieur de Paris; Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice; Congreve's Brisk and Lord Froth; Cibber's Sir Novelty Fashion; Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington; Garrick's Modern Fine Gentleman; Edward Moore's Faddle; Hannah Cowley's Flutter; and on and on. In the interest of exercising some control over a very large subject, I am going to limit my concern here to what we may call the main-line vestamentary fop, the one obsessed with clothes, accessories, or at least with the appearance he makes in the mirror, ignoring some of the popular subsidiary forms of Witwoud foppery, for instance, the foolish coxcomb obsessed with gossip like Congreve's Tattle in Love for Love or the fool who chiefly pretends to verbal wit, like Anthony Witwoud in The Way of the World. I am also going to ignore female fops. Significantly, though male fops are open to accusations of effeminacy, female fops are not thought to be mannish.

However balefully the moralist may feel compelled to regard the fop, in the Restoration and eighteenth century fops were clearly favorite characters with both audiences and actors. Typical of many spectators' accounts is Thomas Davies's evident enjoyment in describing Henry Woodward, one of the handful of actors who specialized in fop roles:

His person was so regularly formed, and his look so serious and composed, that an indifferent observer would have supposed that his talents were adapted to characters of the serious cast; to the real fine gentleman, to the man of graceful deportment and elegant demeanor, rather than to the affector of gaiety, the brisk fop, and pert coxcomb. But the moment he spoke, a certain ludicrous air laid hold of his features, and every muscle of his face ranged itself on the side of levity. The very tones of his voice inspired comic ideas. … All the variations of brisk impertinence and assumed consequence, of affected gaiety, unblushing effrontery, and lively absurdity, he displayed with a most engaging and lively confidence. In Congreve's … Brisk … he was extremely entertaining, and kept the audience perpetually and merrily attentive.⁶

Three of the most successful actor-managers of the eighteenth century—Colley Cibber, David Garrick, and Samuel Foote—each played famous fop roles and each wrote an eminently successful fop role for himself. Cibber, of course, was the fop par excellence, playing Sir Fopling and Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington for decades and writing himself such roles as Sir Novelty Fashion in Love's Last Shift, Lord Foppington in The Careless Husband, and Clodio in Love Makes the Man; or, The Fop's Fortune. Garrick also played Lord Foppington and Clodio and wrote for himself the part of Fribble in Miss in Her Teens. Even Foote, a great mimic but the least naturally suited to fop parts of the three, played Sir Novelty Fashion, Lord Foppington, and Sir Courtly Nice and wrote for himself Buck in The Englishman Returned from Paris.⁷

Although from a twentieth-century perspective fop roles may seem simply conventional and static, much of the audience's pleasure in observing them on stage seems to have come from elements of realism. In James Moore Smythe's The Rival Modes (1727) the audience was treated to two fops, the Earl of Late Airs (Lord Foppington having acquired still another title), played by Colley Cibber at sixty-six, and Lord Toupet, the Earl's son, played by Theophilus Cibber at twenty-four. The prologue advises:

Our Poet brings a Master-Glass to shew,
What your Sires were, and what your Selves are now.

One of the Earl's equally elderly friends reminisces that they are “of Age to remember, when the Drapery of a fine Gentleman consisted in a huge Perriwig, a preposterous Muff, a flanting Steinkirk, and such a number of other monstrous Trinkums, that it would have made a just Proportion for a full length at Kneller's.” Now, though, to old eyes, wigs are sadly shrunken, and the “Pocket Beaux” of 1727 have got into a fashion of “putting their Wiggs into such huge Bags, their Bodies into Coats like Portmantles, and then fancying themselves drest properly for an Assembly, when they are only equipt for an Academy.”⁸ Sometimes, indeed, actors were criticized for lack of verisimilitude in fop parts. The rather crotchety author of The Theatrical Examiner, for instance, complained that Woodward in playing Lord Foppington overdid the stage business with his fancy snuff-box: “no man of quality ever did, or will make use of his snuff-box, and with a sort of perpetual motion, stray the finger backwards and forwards, from the lid to the sides, and thence to the nose.”⁹ The specific affectations of particular fops represented current fashion and apparently even when plays were in repertory experienced actors took care to keep their fops up to date, thus affording the audience a certain pleasure of self-recognition, even if, for the more intelligent part of the audience, a somewhat rueful self-recognition. Thomas Davies noted that he had often seen Cibber play Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington and that “as the fashions of the times altered, he adjusted his action and behaviour to them, and introduced every species of growing foppery.”¹⁰

At their best, fops are usually characters in comedy of manners, and it is characteristic of the better comedy of manners that the idiocy represented therein is seen fundamentally as the norm of contemporary society, not some bizarre aberration from it. In Pride and Prejudice, for instance, we have to recognize that though Mr. Collins is obviously an idiot to the narrator and to Elizabeth and Mr. Bennet, he is perfectly acceptable in polite society as the novel represents it. In good comedy of manners polite society itself is almost unbearably dull and stupid. What makes Mr. Collins's suit to Elizabeth not only absurd but also depressing is that only a tiny minority can see how absurd it is. Similarly, in the better Restoration comedy of manners, exceptionally intelligent characters can see how absurd the fop is, but contemporary society generally is represented as accepting the fops as men of mode. After Sir Fopling's first exit Emilia observes to Dorimant and Medley, “However you despise him, gentlemen, I'll lay my life he passes for a wit with many”; Dorimant agrees, “That may very well be; Nature has her cheats, stums a brain, and puts sophisticate dulness often on the tasteless multitude for true wit and good humor” (p. 173). In Sir Courtly Nice also the heroine Leonora despises Sir Courtly but, as Viola says, “Not many Lady's do so.” Farewel adds, “Oh! no, Madam, he's the General Guitarre o' the Town, inlay'd with every thing Women fancy; Gaytry, Gallantry, Delicacy, Nicety, Courtesy.” Viola ends this assessment by adding, “And pray, put in Gold too.”¹¹

That the better fops are intended to represent normative behavior even though many of them seem very broadly drawn is also indicated by recurrent rumors that particular stage fops represented particular men. Writing to a friend after having seen an early performance of Miss in Her Teens, Mrs. Delany praised Garrick as “very ridiculous” and “really entertaining” in Fribble, noting, “It is said he mimics eleven men of fashion.”¹² Though to twentieth-century audiences these fops may seem almost entirely fantastical, it must be remembered that their brothers were daily to be encountered in Restoration and eighteenth-century London. Indeed, one contemporary offers a valuable anecdote of life outdoing art. Garrick, he observes, has created Fribble and Flash in Miss in Her Teens “from the conformable oddities of several Individuals, judiciously blended together.” In the play, when Fribble comes calling on Miss bearing a little pot of his special lip salve as a present, he is forced to apologize for being late and for having his hand wrapped in bandages. Taunted by a hackney-coachman, he put out his hand in a threatening gesture, and—to quote his own account, “he makes a cut at me with his whip, and striking me over the nail of my little finger it gave me such exquisite torter that I fainted away. And while I was in this condition, the mob picked my pocket of my purse, my scissors, my Mocoa smellingbottle, and my huswife.”¹³ Utterly fantastical as such behavior might appear, the contemporary critic himself knows “a Person who is a very Falstaff in Size [unlike Fribble], yet speaks and moves for all the world like a Lady”:

This same delicate Object came not long since into a Coffee House, with his Hand muffled in black Silk [according to the reviewers, Garrick wore a black silk bandage as Fribble], and told a deplorable Story of a Hurt received, in Voice almost as fine, and Manner quite as melancholly, as does the Fribble of Garrick; the Weapon of Offence indeed was not the same desperate one, a Whip, but a Fan, with which a cruel Lady had unfortunately struck him over the Thumb.¹⁴

Foppery was a real social phenomenon, not merely a theatrical convenience; periodical essayists and pamphleteers had quite as much to say about it as playwrights.¹⁵ Some of the satire on foppery was provoked by general moral considerations like disapprobation of vanity. Yet attacks on foppery achieve more specific relevance as protest against an effeminization of the masculine role that actually occurred during the eighteenth century. The so-called effeminate qualities of fops satirized in some works are the qualities of the new-fangled heroes in others. Describing Miss in Her Teens one pamphleteer wrote, “the Author attempts to laugh out of Countenance that mollifying Elegance which manifests itself with such a bewitching Grace, in the refined Youths of this cultivated Age.”¹⁶ “Mollifying elegance,” “refinement,” and “cultivation” were certainly not necessarily terms of disapprobation in 1747, the best Restoration plays, foppery is firmly rejected. Fops are contrasted to rake heroes: Sir Fopling with Dorimant, Monsieur de Paris with Gerard, and so on. In these comedies there is some risk of the wits' appearing affected, and as the point of the rakes is that they are natural characters, faithful to natural appetite rather than to unnatural convention, it is useful to be able to contrast them to fops so obviously representative of affection. Part of the intent is to underscore the natural sexual appetite of the rake by contrasting him with one whose appetites seem to have atrophied or never to have appeared at all. (This is one reason why it is important not to allow Sir Fopling or Sparkish to be played as homosexuals.) It is inconceivable in the Restoration plays that Harriet would marry Sir Fopling or Leonora Sir Courtly Nice. Still, even though they have been exposed as idiots and deprived of the girl, the narcissism and complacency of these fops is usually strong enough to prevent their suffering any real disappointment at the end—which is in itself pleasing, since we are then able to enjoy the joke of their complaisancy to the end and since we are in any case grateful to them for the amusement they have provided. In the fifth act of The Plain-Dealer even the severe Wycherley lets Novel and Plausible get back the jewels they have given to Olivia. Sir Fopling's penultimate comment after his rejection by Mrs. Loveit is characteristic: “An intrigue now would be but a temptation to me to throw away that vigor on one which I mean shall shortly make my court to the whole sex in a ballet” (p. 193).

By the reign of William and Mary, though, this fairly consistent view of the fop begins to fall apart. In Crowne's Married Beau (1694), for instance, we see two fops, not the usual pair of idiots like Novel and Plausible, or Shadwell's Selfish and Young Maggot in A True Widow (1678), or even Brisk and Lord Froth in Congreve's Double Dealer, but one idiot, Sir John Shittlecock, and one fop transformed into something like a rounded character and taken seriously, Mr. Lovely. Lovely, according to the dramatis personae, is “a new married beau: He has some wit, but more affectation; Believes himself very handsome, and desires to be thought so by all ladies, and especially by his wife.”¹⁷ This character is thrust into the old plot of Cervantes's Curious Impertinent in which a man tries to test his wife's virtue by persuading his best friend to attempt to seduce her. There is no psychological explanation for why Cervantes's husband determines on this test, but Crowne uses Lovely's foppery as an explanation. Lovely's motives, in fact, are strongly reminiscent of Sparkish's, but, as they are presented in “blank verse,” we are not asked to find them simply contemptible and ridiculous. Lovely tells his friend Polidore:

Oh, sir! to be admir'd by a fine woman
Surpasses infinitely, infinitely
All the delights her body can bestow.
I'd rather a fine woman shou'd admire me,
And to eternity deny her body,
Than grant me her body fifty times a-night.

(p. 245)

Lovely is also affected by the increasing demands that marriage partners choose each other for personal and subjective reasons and wants his wife to resist seduction not out of old-fashioned religious motives but because she likes to look on him better than on anyone else. As in Cervantes, the seduction succeeds. In Cervantes, however, the seduction brings on catastrophe, while in Crowne the wife is allowed to repent and Lovely has the satisfaction of hearing her reprove Polidore and tell him, “Do you not see my husband's a young gentleman? / One of the handsom'st men in the whole world?” (p. 323). The play ends with Lovely rapturous, Polidore getting a girl of his own, and even Sir John Shittlecock marrying the perfectly acceptable Cecilia. There are many causes of this changed ending, but a softening towards the fop is one of them.

No one, though, was quite so notoriously soft on fops as Colley Cibber, who, while born too early to renounce whoring and drunkenness, in many ways played out in life the numerous fop parts in which he was applauded on the stage.¹⁸ Of particular interest is one of Cibber's plays that is now less well known than Love's Last Shift or The Careless Husband, but one that was very popular in the eighteenth century, Love Makes a Man; or, The Fop's Fortune (1700). Cibber played the fop Clodio, a part later taken up by both Garrick and Foote. This play is particularly instructive because Cibber based it on two earlier seventeenth-century plays, The Elder Brother (1637) by Fletcher with the possible assistance of Massinger, and The Custom of the Country (1647) by Fletcher with the probable assistance of Massinger. Fletcher's Eustace in The Elder Brother is a foppish courtier who is brought to see the viciousness of the courtier's way of life. He turns his erstwhile courtier friends off with violent language:

                                        Y' are infectious,
The plague and leprosy of your baseness spreading
On all that do come near you: such as you
Render the throne of majesty, the court,
Suspected and contemptible; you are scarabees,
That batten in her dung …
          …
You stick, like running ulcers, on her face.(19)

As a reward for this reformation, Eustace is taken back into the good graces of all the worthier characters and his uncle promises he shall have a wife and an estate.

Not surprisingly, for Cibber in the reign of William III the issue of decadence at court has evaporated. In fact, righteous indignation at foppery itself is very muted. The character of Clodio, who shares the qualities and exploits of Eustace from The Elder Brother and Rutilio from The Custom of the Country, has lost dignity and gained whimsicality. One scene will show the nature of the shift. In The Custom of the Country Rutilio in Lisbon happens upon an altercation between Duarte, the proud nephew of the governor, and Arnoldo, his enemy. As Duarte wears a sword and Arnoldo carries only a stiletto, Duarte has an unfair advantage. Rutilio's offering a by-stander's opinion of this situation is resented by Duarte, who kicks him. Rutilio replies:

                                        You are too insolent,
And do insult too much on the advantage
Of that which your unequal weapon gave you,
More than your valour.(20)

Rutilio and Duarte then duel and Rutilio apparently kills Duarte. Cibber repeats the outline of this scene and its result, but, as Clodio has begun as the foppish Eustace, his foppery continues here, and is a considerably less dignified foppery than Eustace's. In Cibber's play, Don Duarte's habit is to send servants before him to clear the way and then to challenge anyone who takes the wall of him. Clodio having failed to yield his ground, Don Duarte stalks up to him:

Don Duarte. Do you know me, sir?

Clodio. Hey! ho! [Looks carelessly on him, and gapes.]

Don Duarte. Do you know me, sir?

Clodio. You did not see my snuff-box, sir, did you? [While his brother and their friends are looking for Angelina captured by pirates, Clodio has been looking for the snuff box he lost in contemporaneous sea-adventures.]

Don Duarte. Sir, in Lisbon no man asks me a question cover'd. [Strikes off Clodio's hat]. Now you know me.

Clodio. Perfectly well, sir.—Hi! hi! I like you mightily—you are not a bully, sir?²¹

As in the Fletcher play, they duel and Clodio apparently kills Duarte. Rutilio is not a courtier or a fop, but in The Elder Brother much is made of the cowardice of the fops. In the fifth act scene in which Eustace finally rejects the courtiers, the courtiers acknowledge they have no intention of making use of the ornamental swords they wear. One remarks, “A lath in a velvet scabbard will serve my turn”; another exclaims:

Fighting! what's fighting? it may be in fashion
Among provant swords, and buff-jerkin men;
But wi' us, that swim in choice of silks and tissues,
          …
To lose a dram of blood must needs appear
As coarse as to be honest.

(p. 86)

Cibber, however, is unwilling to allow his fop to appear a coward. In this he deviates not only from Fletcher, but also from Restoration playwrights like Shadwell and Wycherley. Furthermore, Fletcher makes Eustace repent of his foppery before being promised the reward of a desirable marriage at the end; in contrast, Clodio, unrepentant, is awarded the attractive and noble Elvira, along with half his own father's estate. Cibber himself was more personally involved in fop roles than most other playwrights, as Pope delighted to point out in The Dunciad. Nevertheless, The Fop's Fortune was a popular play for decades and similar examples of writers treating fops with more affection and less contempt could be cited from other early eighteenth-century plays.

Satire on foppery and foppery itself were also affected by the changing realities of class. There is, of course, a constant element in foppery: so long as clothes are worn at all, some men will use clothes to try to establish themselves as men of superior attractiveness or taste or dash. Yet the relationship between men and clothes changes significantly between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. In the Renaissance clothes were understood to be integumental expressions of social status. The upper classes were expected to dress with some magnificence and sumptuary laws penalized lower class people who attempted to imitate their betters. During the eighteenth century, however—though fashions were perhaps exceptionally erratic, wigs in particular grew and shrunk and shrunk and grew again—masculine dress became finally less ornate. Large powdered wigs, jeweled sword hilts and satin sword knots, embroidered “clocks” and tassels on long silk stockings, red or pink high heeled shoes all vanished never to be seen again as serious male fashion. Even Fribble's foppery could undoubtedly be supported on a smaller multiple of the average laborer's income than could Sir Fopling's. As the aristocracy lost power and self-confidence, not only did magnificence no longer seem an appropriate virtue, but men who were rich and not aristocratic increasingly were able to purchase the elements of magnificence, thus devaluing them as tokens of exclusivity. Not surprisingly, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth one finds both the serious radicals and those who were still aspiring to create fashion “dressing down.” In Hannah Cowley's Belle's Stratagem (1780) as the fop Flutter enters Sir George challenges the company, “I defy you to tell from his appearance, whether Flutter is a privy Counsellor or a Mercer, a Lawyer or a Grocer's 'Prentice.” Earlier Sir George has complained that modern society is “a mere chaos, in which all distinction of rank is lost in a ridiculous affectation of ease … one universal masquerade, all disguised in the same habits and manners.”²² Anxiety that people were crossing class barriers was frequently expressed and such developments as that of resorts like Bath and Tunbridge no doubt actually made it easier for “impostors” to make their way than it had been in earlier times. Yet the eighteenth century, unlike the Renaissance, was unwilling to try to control such movement with sumptuary laws.²³ As Ellen Moers pointed out in her excellent analysis of the nineteenth-century dandy, Beau Brummel achieved fame not by adding frills to his costume but by eliminating them, by rejecting bright colors, by eliminating silk and satin in favor of wool and linen, and by eschewing perfume absolutely.²⁴ Sir Fopling's definition of a true gentleman appears as the epigraph to Bulwer's Pelham, to be taken up directly by William Maginn in Fraser's confident middle-class attack on foppery and indirectly by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1830), by which time, it seems safe to say, Renaissance ideals of magnificence and dressing well have finally expired. The less vital the connection between dress and human worth, the less superior dress is a kind of sacramental expression of superior worth, the less seriously the culture may be expected to take foppery, which will increasingly seem less a blasphemy and more a whimsical if stupid eccentricity. It is, therefore, not surprising that the really amusing fops in the second half of the eighteenth century desert high comedy for the farces of Garrick and Foote.

Foppery was an unusual vice in that in its purer forms it was the monopoly of the rich. Restoration fops like Sir Fopling or Sir Courtly were both well-born and well-financed. A suit from Barroy or a new calèche did not come cheap. Good Restoration comedy of manners mocks the follies of the town rather than making folly the exclusive possession of hoi polloi. Sparkish complained about contemporary playwrights: “Their Predecessors were contended to make Serving-men only their Stage-Fools, but these Rogues must have Gentlemen, with a Pox to 'em, nay Knights: and indeed you shall hardly see a Fool upon the Stage, but he's a Knight; and to tell you the truth, they have kept me these six years from being a Knight in earnest, for fear of being knighted in a Play, and dubb'd a Fool.”²⁵ Significantly, by the time Garrick found it necessary to rewrite The Country Wife as The Country Girl for the attenuated tastes of 1766, though the part of Sparkish was less altered than most of the rest of the play, this particular speech was cut. From about 1690 on, a number of playwrights are not sure that their fops are well-born after all. In Mrs. Pix's Beau Defeated (1700) a fop who all along is called Sir John Roverhead is suddenly in the fifth act discovered to be not even a gentleman but a servant in that knight's family who has been taught “the Modes and Manners” by the cast mistress of another knight. In The Beau Defeated there are no clear signs that Sir John is not a gentleman until the fifth act, unless we are to understand that foppish idiots cannot also be gentlemen, and that seems precisely what Mrs. Pix wishes us to understand. In Tunbridge-Walks Maiden is exposed as having once been apprenticed to a milliner and the heroine moralizes: “The greatest Beaus we have about Town, now are Milliners, Mercers Lawyers Clerks, and 'tis such upstart Fellows that ruine so many poor Tradesmen; for amongst 'em all, you'll scarce find a Periwig that's paid for” (p. 60). These revelations are in part reflections of the increasing availability of the elements of fashion to the middling and lower orders and, paradoxically, in part symptomatic of the loss of realism in eighteenth-century comedy, not only realism about sex but also as here realism about class. If later fops are satirized, they are apt to be exposed as lower class. Should they be upper class, they are usually sentimentalized like Lord George Hastings in Hugh Kelly's A Word to the Wise (1770).²⁶

Satire on fops during the Restoration and eighteenth century was prompted by a wide variety of motives ranging from concern over the moral evils of vanity through nationalistic worry over being inundated by foreign ideals and foreign goods to specific class tensions peculiar to the period. Some of the changes in foppery are related to changing attitudes towards dress. Yet along with their vestamentary obsessions, the fops of the Restoration and eighteenth century display other sorts of refinements that are characteristic of new sex role ideals for men. We will continue to laugh at these fops in comedy, but when we do so let us now and then recall that even Socrates could be made to seem absurd by a talented reactionary satirist, and that, like Socrates, the fops in their behavior more than in their dress were early champions of new values. The so-called effeminacy of these old fops was an early if imperfect attempt at the refinement, civility, and sensitivity most of us would now say are desirable masculine virtues. Fribble even promises Miss Biddy that after they are married he will “make the tea, comb the dogs, and dress the children” all by himself—an offer obviously ludicrous to Garrick but possibly more tempting to women today.

Notes

1. Virginia Ogden Birdsall, Wild Civility: The English Comic Spirit on the Restoration Stage (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 140-42.

2. Norman Holland, The First Modern Comedies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 102. Similarly, Jocelyn Powell, “George Etherege and the Form of a Comedy,” in Restoration Dramatists, ed. Earl Miner (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 83, writes about Sir Fopling as a “comic embodiment” of the idea that “form has become a substitute for feeling.” A few critics have appreciated particular fops, notably Bonamy Dobrée who in Restoration Comedy, 1660-1700 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 74, writes warmly about Sir Fopling being to Etherege as “a rare orchid is to an enthusiastic gardener.” And even Holland observes that the affectations and hypocrisies of Novel and Plausible “allow hostilities to become smoothed over under pretenses” so that “they get along reasonably well together, even though they detest each other” (p. 102). Dale Underwood in Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners, Yale Studies in English, vol. 135 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1957), pp. 145-57, has written perceptively trying to distinguish early seventeenth-century fops, especially those of Jonson, from Restoration ones. Ben Ross Schneider, Jr., in The Ethos of Restoration Comedy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1971), pp. 114-21, writes about fop preciosity, and Jean B. Kern, Dramatic Satire in the Age of Walpole, 1720-50 (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 78-82, examines the attack on a later group of fops, neither with much sympathy for the fop. Lois Dorias Potter, “The Fop and Related Figures in Drama from Jonson to Cibber” (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Univ., 1965), offers a broader survey with useful facts and observations, though in my opinion her view of Restoration drama unnecessarily trivializes both its rakes and its fops.

3. George Etherege, The Man of Mode, in British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, ed. George H. Nettleton and Arthur E. Case, revised by George Winchester Stone, Jr. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1969), p. 184. Page numbers from this edition are given in parentheses in the text.

4. Men who engage in homosexual acts may or may not be effeminate or foppish; men who are effeminate or foppish may or may not engage in homosexual acts. Sociologists and social historians have recently made useful distinctions between homosexual behavior and homosexual roles, observing that homosexual behavior may exist in societies where there are no specialized homosexual roles and that specialized homosexual roles require historical scrutiny. Whether a specialized homosexual role developed in the Restoration and eighteenth century is a matter of historical interest and debate. See Mary McIntosh, “The Homosexual Role,” Social Problems 16 (1968): 182-92; Randolph Trumbach, “London's Sodomites: Homosexual Behavior and Western Culture in the 18th Century,” Journal of Social History 1 (1977): 1-33; Robert A. Padgug, “Sexual Matters: On Conceptualizing Sexuality in History,” Radical History Review 20 (1979): 3-23.

5. Cf. Arthur R. Huseboe, Sir John Vanbrugh (Boston: Twayne, G. K. Hall, 1976), pp. 86; 159-60, n. 41.

6. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of Garrick, 2 vols. (London, 1780), 1:265-66.

7. See Simon Trefman, Sam. Foote, Comedian, 1720-1777 (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 79, 82, for references to reviews.

8. James Moore Smythe, The Rival Modes (London, 1727), pp. 27, 28.

9. The Theatrical Examiner (London, 1757), p. 41, and cf. pp. 82-83.

10. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies, 3 vols. (London, 1785), 3:453.

11. John Crowne's Sir Courtly Nice, ed. Charlotte Bradford Hughes (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), p. 77.

12. The Letters of David Garrick, ed. David M. Little and George M. Kahrl, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), 1:88.

13. The Plays of David Garrick, ed. Harry William Pedicord and Frederick Louis Bergmann, 4 vols. (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1980-1981), 2:88-89.

14. The Present State of the Stage in Great-Britain and Ireland (London, 1753), p. 39.

15. See, for example, Samuel Butler, “The Modish Man,” in Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve Univ., 1970), pp. 291-92; [Mary Evelyn], The Fop-Dictionary (London, 1690); John Ashton, Social Life in the Reign of Queen Anne: Taken from Original Sources (London: Chatto & Windus, 1897), chs. 7, 13; Satirical Songs and Poems on Costume from the Thirteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries, ed. Frederick W. Fairhold (Percy Society Reprints, 27, 1849), especially pp. 219-20, 232-35, 248-50; The Gentleman's Magazine 1 (1731): 56-57; 2 (1732): 900-901.

16. [Nathaniel Lancaster?], The Pretty Gentleman: or, Softness of Manners Vindicated From the false Ridicule exhibited under the Character of William Fribble, Esq. (London, 1747), p. 6.

17. John Crowne, The Dramatic Works, ed. J. Maidment and W. H. Logan, 4 vols. (Edinburgh: W. Paterson, 1873-1877), 4:[242].

18. Cibber's involvement with the fop role has, in different ways, been usefully discussed by Helene Wickham Koon, “The Kind Imposter: Colley Cibber's Dramatic Technique,” Ph.D. diss., U.C.L.A., 1969, and by Lois Potter in the diss. cited above and in “Colley Cibber: The Fop as Hero,” in Augustan Worlds, ed. J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson (Leicester: Leicester Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 153-64. In the later essay Potter explores “how Cibber's particular situation as an actor contributed to the transformation of a familiar comic type (the fop), and how this in turn enabled him to manipulate his audience's response towards him as a human being” (p. 154).

19. The Elder Brother, ed. W. W. Greg, in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher: Variorum Edition, 4 vols. (London: George Bell and Sons and A. H. Bullen, 1904-1912), 2:87.

20. The Custom of the Country, ed. R. Warwick Bond, in The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, 1:517.

21. The Dramatic Works of Colley Cibber, 5 vols. (London, 1777), 1:244.

22. Hannah Cowley, The Belle's Stratagem (London, 1782), pp. 27, 28.

23. Frances E. Baldwin, Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England (Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies in History and Political Science, Baltimore, 1926). John Sekora in Luxury: The Concept in Western Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), has also recently shown how the upper classes lost their monopoly on the very definition of “luxury,” traditionally a vice of the lower orders, but in the eighteenth century increasingly understood either as a vice of the rich or as a desirable spur to trade.

24. Ellen Moers, The Dandy, Brummel to Beerbohn (New York: The Viking Press, 1960).

25. The Complete Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Gerald Weales (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1967), p. 297.

26. Potter, “The Fop and Related Figures,” p. 224.