SOURCE: Mignon, Elisabeth. Introduction to Crabbed Age and Youth: The Old Men and Women in the Restoration Comedy of Manners, pp. 3-35. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1947.

[In the following essay, Mignon analyzes the comedy of manner's attack on old age and its reverence for youth, illustrating with numerous examples.]

Superannuated belles and timeworn rakes crowded the English stage between 1660 and 1700. The old women with their decayed charms are always pursuers, never pursued. The old men are predestined to wear the horns on their ugly foreheads. The aged of both sexes are loathsome to the gay young blades and precocious heroines who bewilder and victimize them. For it is the young who rule with arrogant ease the beau monde of these plays. It is the old who are intruders. To their highly sophisticated juniors they are merely old harridans and fossils.

The autumnal face of a lady past her rambling days, the palsies of a dotard are subjects for fun and raillery. The laughter of the young characters is most gay when these same old men and women have recourse to camouflage to hide their defects. For the aged dissemblers there is no escape from the supercilious glances of the fashionable gallants and belles.

The conflict between youth and old age furnishes many of the plots in these comedies. Airily superior for four acts, the younger generation always triumph in the fifth. Those miserable pretenders, their elders, are completely frustrated by the end of the play. This conflict, with the inevitable victory of the young and gay, is not peculiar to the Restoration comedy of manners. It is as old as comedy itself. But the battles are more intense, they occur more frequently, their repercussions in language and character are wider in the plays written in the last forty years of the seventeenth century.

By the time Sir Fopling Flutter minced his way across the English stage, the theme had become insistent. It runs with singularly little variation through the works of major and minor dramatists. Young men and women created much earlier than those of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve took joy in thwarting and deceiving their seniors. But after 1660 this delight of heroes and heroines assumes new proportions. The traditional hostility towards crabbed age reaches in these comedies the point of violence. The defiant sons and daughters voice their rebellion with a new frankness. Their brilliant wit strikes with more deadly precision at the infirmities of a passing generation.

Sentiment is completely alien to these young characters, all emotion being carefully masked by the intellect. The end of a play can bring no release of hidden reverence or affection for the aged. The old figure who dares trespass on the superior rights of the young ones shambles or, in some cases, is kicked off the stage in futile protest. The traditional happy ending of comedy carries with it no real mercy for the old men and women who have presumed to look longingly upon or to interfere with the joys forbidden them by their age. The conflict between social equals is resolved—between those who have wit, grace, and youth—but reprieve is impossible for the old characters.

This unflagging abuse of human antiquity in comedy from 1660 to 1700 is a corollary of revolt, a postwar reaction against a constricting morality and a social standard which no longer carried force. The writers of the Restoration period reflect a new generation in the process of flagellating their predecessors, men who were out of tune with the spirit of the new age. The relaxing of the social conscience under Charles II brought with it the denial of an outmoded code and the ridiculing of its champions. It is this denial which hardens and intensifies the rivalry between the generations. Within recent memory a postwar philosophy of sophisticated and disillusioned youth has been expressed in such a play as Private Lives. But Mr. Noel Coward's young cynics, reacting against and damning earlier social conventions, bear only the most distant resemblance to a Mirabel and a Millamant. Elyot and Amanda belong to the comedy of bad manners. Mr. Coward's ultrasophisticated lovers have the intellectual wit of Congreve's pair, but this wit is adulterated in the twentieth-century play with sheer physical farce.

The association of old age with a discarded set of beliefs is suggested throughout the comedies of the Restoration period. But reaction against the musty morals of an earlier day is only one explanation of the untempered hostility which greets the old men and women in these plays. For many of the aged parents, rakes, dotards, and coquettes are untainted by anything like Puritanism. They are, nonetheless, despicable and ridiculous. Reasons may be discovered in the social structure erected in the comedy of manners. This structure is rigid, and it is clearly defined.

In the privileged inner circle move the true wits, gallants, and belles. Trying to gain admission to the select and dominant group are the would-be members, the unpolished rakes, the overpolished fops, the coquettes who lack the wit, the beauty, or the skill to play the game, yet persist in trying to play it. Finally, there are those completely excluded. Here we find such figures as governesses and country bumpkins. The process of selection is ruthless. Youth is prerequisite to those who enter the inner circle. No old man or woman in the plays I have examined is fully accepted there. An old person who in desperation attempts to conceal the fact that he, or she, is beyond the entrance age is only pushed farther outside by the favored ones who are young.

The aged are divided between the second and third groups; they may be either unsuccessful aspirants, or those who never rank as candidates. The old “would-bes” are quickly betrayed by their overeagerness, by the fact that they protest too much concerning their vanishing or nonexistent charms. They are more interesting in a study of characterization than those who are definitely excluded. The latter, the old servants or country fools, are usually stock characters repeated with small variation. For the “would-bes,” too, there are formulas, but the formulas are less rigid.

The shifts to which these characters are reduced in order to force their entrance make for differentiation within the types. Because theirs is a frantic interference with the affairs of hostile youth, the decaying “would-bes” assume no little importance in the action of these comedies. In the work of the greater playwrights they may speak in strongly individualized accents. In them the traditional avarice, tyranny, vanity, jealousy, lechery, or gullibility, the accruing follies of the aged, are employed in ever-varying combinations.

But whatever form the comic flaw assumes, whether the old characters are “would-bes” or those utterly beyond the pale, there is singularly little variation in the treatment accorded them. Senility, wherever it appears, is consistently the target for verbal and physical abuse. The old men and women whom we meet in the comedy of manners are never made comfortable for an instant of dramatic time by the young who reject them. If they try to gain acceptance, they are wretched social climbers; if they do not, they are equally miserable encumbrances.

The social pace in these plays is set by the young participants; it is rapid and telling. The old are always out of step as they stumble along behind their juniors. When they fall, the natural gaiety of the leaders is only heightened.

The line of ignoble and undignified old characters continues unbroken through true comedy of manners. But it lasts only as long as the tradition under which these old figures were created survives in English drama. Even before 1700 comedy was invaded by new elements, in the work of Farquhar. And after 1700 these new elements triumphed in the sentimental mode of Steele. With the breakdown of the manners form itself, old age reassumes the dignity which was entirely lost to it under the dramatic tradition begun by Etherege and Dryden, continued by Wycherley, Shadwell, and Mrs. Behn, and carried to its most brilliant conclusion by Congreve.

These writers themselves were in many cases as precocious as their own heroes and heroines in coming upon the English stage. They were living examples of the early sophistication and refined cynicism which they infused into their dramatic progeny. Congreve in his twenty-third year had produced The Old Batchelor¹ and The Double-Dealer. Lord Falkland, with only a little exaggeration, wrote a prologue for The Old Batchelor in which the youthful playwright is gently satirized:

As for our Youngster, I am apt to doubt him:
With all the Vigour of his Youth about him;
But he, more Sanguine, trusts in one and twenty,
And impudently hopes he shall content you.(2)

At thirty Congreve had given over his brilliant career as a dramatist, and before he was thirty Addison could write to congratulate him on a singular honor: “I was very sorry to hear in your last letter that you were so terribly afflicted with the gout, though for your comfort I believe you are the first English poet that has been complimented with the distemper.”³ If we could accept Wycherley's own story told to Pope, his first two plays were written before he was twenty. We know that his playwriting was completed by the time he was in his mid-thirties. Farquhar's first two plays came on the stage when he was twenty and twenty-one. Etherege, however, was a man in his thirties by the time of his first play, Love in a Tub. A similarly ripe age had been reached by Dryden and Vanbrugh when they began their dramatic careers.

Farquhar in Love and a Bottle satirizes this mode of early composition and the casual pronouncements of gentlemen authors concerning the dates of their writings. In this play, Lyric discusses his poem with Mockmode:

LYRIC.
Now, sir, here's a poem, which (according to the way of us poets) I say, was written at fifteen, but between you and I it was made at five-and-twenty.
MOCKMODE.
Five-and-twenty!—When is a poet at age, pray, sir?
LYRIC.
At the third night of his first play; for he's never a man till then.(4)

Through such fashionable prevarication a writer might distort the facts by a decade, as Lyric does, but he might also be in full career at twenty-five.

These young Restoration playwrights are centuries removed from being the originators of the unpleasant and undignified old age which appears in their plays. It is, indeed, a theme older than English drama itself, going back, as it does, to the comedies of Greece and Rome. Unreverenced old men and women exist with no little frequency in Elizabethan comedy. They appear, however, with notable differences from those who came on the stage in the latter part of the seventeenth century. The most casual reader remembers Jonson's associations of old age and comic vice in Morose of The Silent Woman and Corbaccio of Volpone. As early as 1614 and long before Oliver Cromwell ruled England, Zeal-of-the-Land Busy, that “notable hypocritical vermin” in Bartholomew Fair, embodied Puritanism and old age in comedy. It is perhaps significant that these three Jonsonian plays were popular stage revivals after the return of Charles II.⁵

There are many further examples of unreverenced old age in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies. By 1566 we find Psiteria combining drunkenness, bawdry, and old age in The Supposes. There is the decayed husband, Lorenzo, in May-Day, and Leon the old usurer of The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, both plays by George Chapman. Pecunius Lucre and Walkadine Hoard are old men who fit their names in Middleton's Trick to Catch the Old One. In Marston's Malcontent, Bilioso, another old fossil, who has imprudently married a young wife, figures among the dramatis personae along with Maquerelle, an old bawd and crone. I would not, then, suggest for a moment that the theme of despicable old age is peculiar to the comedies staged during the Restoration period.⁶

It is the concentration upon this theme after 1660 which is remarkable. The playwrights who worked in the tradition of the comedy of manners seized upon senile folly to the exclusion of other aspects of old age. The complexity and variety of the Elizabethan period are reflected in the old men and women of its comedy. There an amiable, even an admirable, aged figure may stand beside one who is a foil and a target for younger characters. We may recall Madge, the hospitable old woman with her gifts as a storyteller in Peele's Old Wives Tale, Margaret's father in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, the hunchbacked old parent whom Clem still respects in The Fair Maid of the West. More clearly we remember such old men as Dekker's Simon Eyre in The Shoemaker's Holiday and Orlando Friscobaldo in The Honest Whore. Simon at fifty-six is a lovable and merry character; old Orlando is a moving figure in his great devotion to his daughter, the honest whore. The dramatists of the Elizabethan period allowed for the existence of sympathetic old characters as well as thoroughly unsympathetic ones. Middleton represents this complexity in the attitude towards the aged within a single play by creating Old Lady Twilight, “a sweet lady every inch of her,” beside Sir Oliver Twilight, “an old man worn to the bone with an itch,” in No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's.

Further, when an old character appears in Elizabethan comedy the emphasis on the fact of his agedness and its associated physical infirmities is seldom as great as it is in the work of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve. Sir Giles Overreach, for example, is an old man, but Massinger allows him no little mental and physical vigor. To descend for a moment into literary “ifs,” it may be said that Wycherley or Vanbrugh would, in such a case, without diminishing the comic flaw, have emphasized physical repulsiveness to a much greater degree. Certainly, they were preoccupied with the infirmities of old age in comparable figures. This preoccupation will be seen in Shadwell's treatment of Molière's Harpagon in transplanting him into Restoration England.

Shakespeare has left the finest examples of this balance in the Elizabethan conception of old age. Among his highly individualized old men and women, there is more than the variation between sympathetic and unsympathetic old characters. Kindly humor plays upon such foolish personages as Verges and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Good and bad are often shaded into one old character. Falstaff is perhaps the most memorable illustration of this complexity of treatment.

Shakespeare laid down no specific boundaries between youth and old age. Masterly in portraying senile folly, he seldom dwells upon it to the exclusion of other complicating elements. By means of the playwright's illuminating retrospective glances we can look back through time to the youth of a foolish old man; we can see that bumpkin Justice Shallow was no less ridiculous as a young man bent on hearing the chimes at midnight than as an old man reminiscing in garrulous fashion about having once heard the sound. In brief, Shallow is not ridiculous simply because he is old, but because he is Shallow.

In Restoration comedy, a justice, whether bumpkin or citified, is automatically a fool if he is getting on in years. And his age is the real determinant of his place in the comic scheme. Age alone is, as it never was in Shakespeare, both the major and the decisive factor. A single or contributing flaw in the characters of Elizabethan comedy becomes the flaw of flaws after 1660. Of the seven ages of man named by Jaques, only two remained in the plays which are the subject of this study. Characters are young or they are old. And when they are old there is no trace of the Elizabethan diversity of treatment. In the earlier comedy the old characters who are unsympathetic opponents of youth are easily found, but here the conflict lacks the ruthlessness which is displayed after the Restoration. Elizabethan playwrights often described the physical infirmities of the aged; by the last decades of the seventeenth century this aspect of old age seems to have become almost an obsession with the writers of comedy. Perhaps nowhere in Elizabethan drama is the joy of heroes and heroines in the humiliation of the old character so great and so prolonged as it is in any typical comedy of manners.

The Elizabethans could delight in the fifth-act bewilderment of tyrannical old fathers or jealous old husbands, in the comic plights of foolish old men and women of all kinds. Yet they could also pay tribute in the drama to the wisdom and nobility of old age, to the elderly grace of the Countess of Rousillon in All's Well That Ends Well or the sturdy worth of the old shepherd in A Winter's Tale, whose rusticity does not preclude dignity.

It was a time when a poet, even one haunted by the transiency of human life and beauty, could still write,

No Spring, nor Summer Beauty hath such grace,
As I have seen in one Autumnall face.(7)

This balance and diversity in the attitude toward old age may be seen in nondramatic as well as in dramatic literature, in the character writers of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. There embittered and satirical portraits of old men and women are numerous. Beside them, however, stand tributes to noble and respected age.

Sir Thomas Overbury's old man is garrulous; he praises his own times vehemently, admires his own customs, and frowns on youth. Obstinacy, a failing memory, tyranny, envy, and physical repulsiveness are embraced in his senescence.

They praise their owne times as vehemently, as if they would sell them. They become wrinckled with frowning and facing youth. … They count it an ornament of speech, to close the period with a cough; and it is venerable, they say, to spend time in wyping their driveled beards. Their discourse is unanswerable, by reason of their obstinacie: and their speech is much, though little to the purpose. … They take a pride in halting and going stiffely, and therefore their staves are carved and tipped; they trust their attire with much of their gravitie; and they dare not go without a gown in summer.⁸

Overbury's Ordinarie Widdow, as distinct from his Vertuous Widdow, is comparable to those ladies frequenting Restoration comedy who have outlived their charms and their first husbands. Overbury depicts her as an inveterate seeker of lovers.

[She] is like the Heralds Hearse-cloath; shee serves to many funerals, with a very little altering the colour. The end of her husband beginnes in teares; and the end of her teares beginnes in a husband. … Her chiefest pride is in the multitude of her Suitors; and by them shee gaines: for one serves to draw on another, and with one at last shee shootes out another. … Thus like a too ripe Apple, she falles of her selfe: but hee that hath her, is Lord but of a filthy purchase, for the title is crackt.⁹

John Earle, the greatest of Overbury's successors, wrote in 1628 a direct answer to the portrait of the “Old Man” in his character of A Good Old Man. Earle's old man is “the best Antiquitie,” “one whom Time hath beene thus long a working, and like winter fruit ripen'd when others are shaken downe.”¹⁰ The good old man considers his youth a danger well past; he has learned the world's vanity and is unafraid before approaching death. He is an influence against vice, and is able to pass on his experiences to young men “without the harshnesse of reproofe.” Earle's aged human being, like Overbury's and those of Restoration comic dramatists, has a stock of old stories; yet he does not inflict them repeatedly on the unwilling ears of another generation.

His old sayings and moralls seeme proper to his beard: and the poetry of Cato do's well out of his mouth. … All men looke on him as a common father, and on old age for his sake, as a reuerent thing. … He goes away at least [last] too soone whensoeuer, with all mens sorrow but his owne, and his memory is fresh, when it is twice as old.¹¹

Acid portrayals of old age—of the old man as “a thing that hath been a man in his daies”—are to be found again and again in the Restoration comedy of manners. They are, moreover, wholly inseparable from the kind of drama in which they appeared. Hence the aged figures of Elizabethan comedy are in general not strictly comparable with those of the Restoration period. This applies even to the old characters created by Middleton, Massinger, and Jonson, all of whom to varying degrees gave realistic portrayals of the manners type. For the portrayal of manners in earlier comedy was usually but one element among others, such as romantic intrigue or the humour. If caught at all, the glittering reflection of fashionable high society was not the center of interest.

Where, however, there is a definite and extensive approach to the kind of comedy written by Etherege, Dryden, and their successors, we find adumbrations of their types of old characters. I refer to those few plays written before 1660 which contain a social structure anticipating the one so clearly defined in comedy after 1660, plays in which the attitude of the young and fashionable libertine is the prevailing one. Only in such plays are there genuine precursors of the old men and women of true comedy of manners.

“Comedy is a form of … dramatic art in which a … flaw in character awakens our laughter by its lack of harmony with the exigencies of society.”¹² There can be no legitimate separation of the comic character from the social attitudes enforced in the world in which he moves. Hence there is only contrast between most of the old figures in Elizabethan drama and their successors in the Restoration comedy of manners. There is comparison in a few cases where the social exigencies within the plays are parallel.

The habits of the Elizabethan courtier and those affected by gallants in the last half of the seventeenth century are placed in sharp relief in the familiar ballad “The Old Courtier and the New.”¹³ Here we find satirical reflection of a world in which old men could still be dominant figures and of a new and changed world which was built upon a denial of the social standards which they once upheld. Queen Elizabeth's old courtier lives in an old hall “with an old study fill'd full of learned old books.” He wears “an old frize coat, to cover his worship's trunk hose.” He has “an old falconer, huntsman, and a kennel of hounds.” But his son, the new courtier of King Charles's time, lives:

Like a flourishing young gallant, newly come to his land,
Who keeps a brace of painted madams at his command,
And takes up a thousand pound upon his father's land,
And gets drunk in a tavern, till he can neither go nor stand:
…
With a new study, stuft full of pamphlets, and plays,
And a new chaplain, that swears faster than he prays.

In some plays where we are beginning to be conscious of the new mode, where this new courtier holds his course triumphantly, there are old figures who may be justifiably compared with those who are the subject of this essay. It is of no little significance that the social attitudes later to be explicit in the manners form are clearly implicit wherever real adumbrations of Restoration comic characters are to be discovered.

The Scornful Lady is such a play. With its clear anticipations of the Restoration mood it was to become a favorite revival after the reopening of the theaters. In Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage, Dr. Sprague says, “Without much doubt ‘the excellent Comœdie of The Scornful Lady,’ to use Aubrey's phrase, enjoyed a more consistent popularity in this half-century than any other work of our authors. And no explanation of this is needed, I think, by anyone who has read the play with Restoration practice in mind.”¹⁴ Abigail, the waiting gentlewoman of the play, is one of those ridiculous old women well past their prime and their first loves who abound in Restoration comedy. Young Loveless's speech about Abigail was to be echoed and re-echoed with slight variations by later young gallants speaking of later old women. In the Beaumont and Fletcher play the old woman says: “As I live, he's a pretty fellow.” …

ELDER Loveless.
Why, she knows not you.
YOUNG Loveless.
No, but she offer'd me once to know her. To this day she loves youth of eighteen. She heard a tale how Cupid struck her in love with a great lord in the Tiltyard, but he never saw her; yet she, in kindness, would needs wear a willow-garland at his wedding. She loved all the players in the last Queen's time once over; she was struck when they acted lovers, and forsook some when they played murtherers.(15)

Again Abigail brings ridicule on herself by her coy advances to Welford, whose response has in it all the scorn of the youthful libertine for doting age: “What a skinful of lust is this! I thought I had come a-wooing, and I am the courted party—This is right court-fashion: men, women, and all, woo; catch that catch may.”¹⁶ Some of Fletcher's plays were not only revived, like The Scornful Lady, but adapted and altered after 1660. And in the alterations by Restoration playwrights an even stronger emphasis on unpleasant old age is made manifest. It will be shown how Vanbrugh vulgarized and coarsened the old father of Fletcher's Pilgrim.

James Shirley is another dramatist whose work anticipates the later comic form. He affords, however, no such striking example as is Fletcher's Abigail of an old character who is evolved rather according to Restoration than Elizabethan practice. His garrulous and blunt old men belong much more clearly to the earlier comedy. In The Lady of Pleasure Shirley's foreshadowings of the Restoration mood are limited to two characters, Lady Bornwell, the social poseuse who affects but cannot achieve true fashion, and Celestina, the young widow of sixteen, who achieves it with grace. Celestina bears a close resemblance to the brilliant young heroines of the later comedy. The resemblance seems to extend to her attitude toward old age, though there is no single aged character who appears in the play as a target for her wit. She challenges Littlewit and Kickshaw in terms which were to be used frequently by later taunting belles:

But neither can, with all the characters
And conjuring circles, charm a woman, though
She'd fourscore years upon her, and but one
Tooth in her head, to love, or think well of you.(17)

Master Alexander Kickshaw in The Lady of Pleasure is called by Shirley “a gallant.” He is far removed in his crudity from being the version of gallant accepted in true manners comedy. Although by the later and more rigid standards he would be only an unpolished roisterer, he yet greets Decoy, the procuress disguised as an old woman, with the intensity of disgust which was to become a typical reaction to ugly old age on the part of more finished young rakes belonging to a later period. Kickshaw voices his repulsion at the physical infirmities of old age:

Embrace! She has had no teeth
This twenty years and the next violent cough
Brings up her tongue; it cannot possibly
Be sound at root. I do not think but one
Strong sneeze upon her, and well meant, would make
Her quarters fall away; one kick would blow
Her up like gunpowder, and loose all her limbs,
She is so cold, an incubus would not heat her;
Her phlegm would quench a furnace, and her breath
Would damp a musket bullet.(18)

The most notable ancestress of the unlovely old coquettes who frequent Restoration comedy appears in The Parsons Wedding, by Thomas Killigrew, a play which was probably written and acted about 1640.¹⁹ Its first performance after the reopening of the theaters was in 1664. Because of the likelihood of the early date of composition, The Parsons Wedding assumes historical importance in a study of Restoration comedy. The manners form in Killigrew's play is adulterated with stock devices from Elizabethan comedy, but here we find the same social game which was played with such frequency and skill in comedies written a generation after The Parsons Wedding. There are in this comedy those who lack wit and the gift of social masking; and they suffer at the hands of those who have the talent to play adroitly.

More important for our purposes, there is the old coquette who is a true and remarkably early prototype of the ladies Cockwood, Flippant, Loveyouth, and Wishfort. Killigrew's Lady Love-all is a superannuated and unskilful gamester; she loses badly in the course of the action. A first edition of the old trots of manners comedy, Lady Love-all is limned out in all her ugliness and affectation through the speeches of younger characters, who despise her. In the play Faithless tells the old woman, “This it is; you will still set your affection upon every young thing.”²⁰ Those knowing young things ill repay the affection of the amorous old lady. Careless summarizes the plot against her: “Yes, faith, they have treated her upsey Whore, lain with her, told, and then pawn'd her.”²¹

The aged pursuer's charms, if they ever existed, have long since withered away. To other characters she is a monumental ruin of human antiquity. Killigrew gives a striking description of her physical decay.

I peep'd once to see what she did before she went to bed; by this light, her Maids were dissecting her; and when they had done; they brought some of her to bed, and the rest they either pin'd or hung up, and so she lay dismembred till Morning; in which time, her Chamber was strew'd all over like an Anatomy school.²²

Another old woman in The Parsons Wedding is also looked upon as a miserable remnant: “Indeed, 'tis time she sat out, and gave others leave to play; for a Reveren'd whore is an unseemly sight. Besides it makes the sin malicious, which is but venial else.”²³ The fact that life in this play and others to follow is a game reserved for young participants is even more clearly indicated in the following words about old Lady Love-all: “She is a right broken Gamester, who, though she lacks wherewithall to play, yet loves to be looking on.”²⁴ This may be taken as a one-sentence description of all the affected and despised coquettes of later comedy. Written by Killigrew, perhaps sixty years before Congreve created Lady Wishfort, it is a formula from which evolves an entire series of unlovely and unwanted old women who refuse to give over the game when they cannot disguise the fact that they are lacking in the youth necessary to play.

The ages of man or woman in Restoration comedy are neither seven nor four, but two. The debut of a precocious heroine in the beau monde is made early in life, and her departure from it is abrupt, else she lingers on after her rambling days to join the antiquated and despised coquettes. And her rambling days are brief. At about twenty the shadows of old age begin to fall. From that time on all the pomatum and Spanish red on Lady Wishfort's dressing table cannot prolong the sport.

The gay young blade is allowed a few years' longer participation, since he may continue at top pace through the age of twenty-five. After this, however, he begins to lose the spirit of the hunt; he may even lean towards constancy in love—an infallible sign of decline. By thirty, old age has laid its hand upon him. For gallant and belle alike, the period of decay is as rapid as their maturity. There seems to be no middle or transition stage. They are young; then suddenly they are old. Young, they rule their world in the comedy of manners with charm and assurance. Old, they must abdicate, or become mere stale remnants to their successors.

To compile statistics from the references to age in these plays would be to assume a seriousness which was alien to the form at its best. What is more, an old huntress or roisterer will dissemble concerning the state of his or her age, to the extent of at least a quarter of a century. Yet it is clear that certain years are dead lines, that the times for pleasure and its giving over are clearly marked. They are not merely hinted at in the plays. They are mentioned again and again by characters acutely conscious of the fact that these years are fatal, fatal not only in physical, but also in social, extinction. Those who pass from youth to age and shut their eyes to the fact, a Lady Wishfort or a Lady Cockwood, are violating the code of the beau monde. They must pay heavy social penalties.

This clearly expressed sense of the passage of time results less in fear of old age than in scorn of it and all its associations. Such a fear is inimical to the spirit of the young sophisticate. But he can be scornful with a vengeance of those who are aged. Such airy and unshakable superiority greets any old person who fails to accept the hour of retirement. Had that hour been less clearly fixed, the social law less rigid, then the attitude towards the old men and women in these plays might waver, the scorn relax occasionally into indifference. The rules are, however, inflexible, and it will be shown that the old men and women meet with consistent abhorrence. Mercy is out of the question if they attempt to disregard certain birthdays, if they fail to recognize the barriers fixed between them and youth.

In Crowne's popular play Sir Courtly Nice, Lord Bellguard denounces “the inversion” whereby the fifties strive to match the pace of the teens. He implies that precocious worldliness was to be found on all social levels of the beau monde.

Things are so inverted, that ladies who were honest all their youth to be like their mothers, turn lewd in their old age to be like their daughters. There never was such an open and general war made on virtue; young ones of thirteen will pickeere at it, and by that skirmish time they are twenty, they are risen to be strumpets-general, and march in public with their baggage, with miss and mass, and nurse and maid, and a whole train of reformade sinners, expecting the next cully that falls.

VIOLANTE.
You talk of paltry hussies.
BELLGUARD.
Very good gentlewomen.(25)

The early sophistication is lamented also in Ravenscroft's London Cuckolds.²⁶

Mrs. Bracegirdle, delivering the prologue to Southerne's Sir Anthony Love, declared:

When once the Child was turn'd into her Teens,
You cou'd not find a Maid behind the Scenes.(27)

And it was very shortly after turning into her teens that the child became a belle. Hippolita in The Gentleman Dancing-Master is not alone in feeling that she can shift for herself “at full fourteen years old.”²⁸ Blunt in The Rover, Part II, thinks it the usual thing for a woman to act “her Part from fourteen to fourscore!”²⁹ Peggy in The London Cuckolds is bustled out of the country to come up to London for marriage at fourteen.³⁰

The young men are not behind their sisters. Melantha in Marriage à la Mode addresses one whose mother, she says, “left you to be your own tutor at fourteen, to be very brisk and entreprenant, to endeavour to be debauched ere you have learned the knack of it, to value yourself upon a clap before you can get it.”³¹ Palamede in the same play suggests that a boy was often “brisk at fourteen, and dull at twenty.”³²

Some then start rambling at fourteen, although more are hindered from budding for another whole year. Lady Wishfort's own daughter was retarded in this way till she was all of fifteen. As that old lady proclaims her highly decorous upbringing of her daughter, Fainall, she indicates that fifteen is not only an acceptable, but a discreet time for young ladies to meet life, life being synonymous with men for Lady Wishfort. “O, she never looked a Man in the Face but her own Father, or the Chaplain, and him we made a shift to put upon her for a Woman, by the help of his long Garments, and his sleek Face, 'till she was going in her Fifteen.”³³ Fainall was really unduly cloistered, since Violetta in The Assignation has already killed her man before she turns fourteen and considers herself ready for another execution.³⁴ She, like Wycherley's Hippolita, proclaims that left to herself, she “could go near to get [her] living.”³⁵ She is no “novice at ripe fifteen.”³⁶ The very definition of a “Bird of Paradise” in these comedies is for the Captain in The Parsons Wedding just such a one as Violetta, “a Girl of Fifteen, smooth as Satten, White as her Sunday Apron, Plump, and of the first down.”³⁷ And the beauties of fifteen are not to be recaptured by all the simulations of forty-five. Old Lady Knowell in Sir Patient Fancy can only wish that she “were but Fifteen.”³⁸ She can only order “her Eyes with some softness, her Mouth endeavouring to sweeten it self into Smiles and Dimples, as if she meant to recal Fifteen again.”³⁹ The lover who would ensnare the wealth of an old lady deceives her by swearing that she has “Beauties that out-charms Fifteen.”⁴⁰ An old bawd who wants to represent the most desirable age is “dress'd like a Girl of Fifteen.”⁴¹ Clorinda in The Dutch Lover has her amorous career well begun by fifteen; her old governess speaks of her as “A Maid in love at fifteen!”⁴² Fifteen is enviable to the old women, for it is to the beauties of that age that the beaux will flock.

FETHERFOOL.
Ned, just such another Gentlewoman as I saw at Church today—and about some fifteen.
BLUNT.
Hum, fifteen—I begin to have a plaguy Itch about me too, towards a handsome Damsel of fifteen; but first let's marry, lest they should be boiled away in these Baths of Reformation.(43)

Lady Lurewell in A Trip to the Jubilee was betrayed when she was at the lovely age of fifteen by an eighteen-year-old gallant.⁴⁴

The next year, sixteen, has in it still the joys of youth, but also the ominousness of being the post-debut year; for some young sprites two years have already been passed in worldly gaiety. The gallants are, however, still interested in sixteen-year-old beauty. It will be seen that Sir Harry in The Constant Couple; or, A Trip to the Jubilee is not revolted at the prospect of a sixteen-year-old mistress.⁴⁵ Young Maggot in A True Widow can still accept a “Billet from the prettiest Creature of Sixteen.”⁴⁶ But Vanbrugh's Corinna, aged sixteen, has the awful knowledge that she is three years past marriageable age.⁴⁷ At sixteen it is time to make shift in earnest! The time is growing short; the heroine cannot afford to fritter it away in the company of old ninny schoolmasters:

Not pity'd? Why is it not a miserable thing, such a young Creature as I am shou'd be kept in perpetual Solitude, with no other Company but a Parcel of old fumbling Masters to teach one Geography, Arithmetick, Philosophy, and a Thousand useless Things. Fine Entertainment, indeed, for a young Maid at Sixteen; methinks one's time might be better employed.⁴⁸

To Raines and Bevil, in Epsom-Wells, “a handsom Wench of seventeen were no ill bargain,”⁴⁹ but a handsome wench of fifteen might well be a better bargain.

There are some late blooms of eighteen in the plays, such as Christina in Love in a Wood, “a young lady scarce eighteen, of extraordinary beauty, her stature next to low.”⁵⁰ Even though she may be getting on in years, a lady's wit may be well preserved at eighteen:

LOVE.
I'll assure you, George, your rhetoric would fail you here; she should worst you at your own weapons.
ROE.
Ay, or any man in England, if she be eighteen, as you say.(51)

Farquhar also allows Angelica to have a “blooming pride of beautiful eighteen.”⁵² This dramatist, however, does not represent the comedy of manners in its purest form. Shadwell, too, gives a glimpse of an eighteen-year-old whose beauties had been appreciated to an unfortunate degree before she reached that age: “There is a pretty Creature, not past Eighteen, whom I have formerly enjoy'd.”⁵³

One of Dryden's characters is patronized “at full twenty” by her fifteen-year-old sister. That fifteen-year-old's condescension—“and that argues you have had a feeling of the cause in your time too, sister”⁵⁴—is less significant than Laura's calm acceptance of it. She thinks of herself as “elder,” using that very word:

Love, in young hearts, is like the must of wine;
'Tis sweetest then; but elder 'tis more fine.(55)

At twenty she can only look back on love in a young heart. Other beautiful ladies are neglected at two years younger than Laura:

Who wou'd have thought such hellish Times to have seen,
When I shou'd be neglected at Eighteen?(56)

In The Gentleman Dancing-Master, Gerald, not over twenty, is, like Laura, getting on past his prime. Florence and Flirt taunt him: “You begin to be something too old for us; we are for the brisk huzzas of seventeen or eighteen.”⁵⁷ Even Justice Clodpate in Epsom-Wells, a bumpkin retarded in his knowledge of the ways of the world, had been to London, and had seemingly shared its pleasures by the time he was eighteen.⁵⁸

The twenty-one-year-old sons in these plays are united by a common longing for the deaths of their fathers, and the references to that age have, accordingly, more material than social connotations.

By the early twenties the true gallant is far from being a novice; rather he is a veteran in wenching and drinking. “O let me kiss that hand; he must be an illustrious man whose hand shakes at 22.”⁵⁹ Freeman in The Plain Dealer manages to have his hand well shaking by twenty-five; he is called “a worn-out whore-master at five-and-twenty.”⁶⁰ In the epilogue to The False Count the following lines are addressed to such twenty-five-year-olds:

The Race of Life you run off-hand too fast,
…
Most of you are threescore at five and twenty.(61)

The pace is rapid and telling, but the gallants still have a few years left. Learchus in Aesop knows that, had his daughter's suitor been “a handsome strong Dog of Five and Twenty, she'd have fallen a Coquetting on't, with every Inch about her.”⁶²

It is otherwise for the ladies; by five-and-twenty they have either given over or are the pursuers instead of the pursued. In The Beaux-Stratagem Cherry's father, Boniface, declares in ringing tones: “Young! why, you jade, as the saying is, can any woman wheedle that is not young? Your mother was useless at five-and-twenty.”⁶³

Useless at five-and-twenty, at thirty a woman must have much coin of the realm to disguise her faded charms. The Countess, “not above thirty,” whom Goldingham tries to palm off on his son, has “Five hundred Pounds more”⁶⁴ than young Isabella. She is never offered without the clause of that five hundred pounds.

At the same age, the man, though still participating, feels unmistakable signs of decay. His scorn of matrimony is weakening; he may even retire to country life, second only to marriage as a form of social execution. Bellamy says, “But for all my bragging, this amour is not yet worn off. I find constancy … come[s] naturally upon a man towards thirty; only we set a face on't, and call ourselves inconstant for our reputation.”⁶⁵ Any man past his roving days belongs among the “wither'd Ruins of stum'd Wine and Poxes.”⁶⁶

The woman is, then, old at thirty; the man is declining towards senile principles. And very shortly after, they are all old together. Those in the forties and fifties are no less harshly treated than the time-wasted relics of fourscore who have dared survive when the grave has been yawning for them for decades. Past youth there is no state of blessed and revered old age; there is only ridicule and defeat.

Haunted by the brevity of their gay years, the youth in these plays proclaim a carpe diem philosophy. Raines and Bevil cry, “Let 'em lye and preach on, while we live more in a week, than those insipid-temperate Fools do in a Year.”⁶⁷ Wildfish in Bury-Fair says, “I have but a short time to live.”⁶⁸ Wildblood in An Evening's Love can waste no time in lengthy courtship: “Young, and slip an opportunity? 'Tis an evening lost out of your life.”⁶⁹ Hoyden and Young Fashion would snatch their pleasures, for delay, according to their code, is madness:

HOYDEN.
A week—why, I shall be an old Woman by that time.
YOUNG Fashion.
And I an old Man. …(70)

Brisk at fourteen, at Sodom by eighteen, the gallant whose hand shakes at twenty-two can still make a graceful exit by thirty. Entreprenante at fourteen or full fifteen, intense in the pursuit of fleeting pleasures, the heroine must give over playing even earlier. The rest is silence for those who, like Florimel in The Maiden Queen, slip “out of the world, with the first wrinkle, and the reputation of five-and-twenty.”⁷¹ Or it is desperate pretense and ineffective camouflage. Those who ignore the cues linger on as wretched encumbrances.

The affected old crones, the despised cuckolds and dotards, who will be shown to bear remarkable family resemblances, belong not only to literary history in the stricter sense, but also to the history of the English stage. It is all too easily forgotten that Lady Wishfort's languishing airs and Major Oldfox's palsies took living shape before Restoration audiences.

What is more, the timeworn coquettes and the decrepit rakes who minced or shambled across the stage were represented by a group of specialists. That such specialists existed is of no little importance, for it reinforces the conclusion that there was singular consistency in the treatment of these figures.⁷²

Among the specialists—like Dogget, Johnson, Bullock, Nokes, Norris, and Underhill—Anthony Leigh and his wife were perhaps of the first rank. It is a temptation to dwell at length on the portrayals of ancient characters done by these players. It must suffice to give a few words to two of them.

There is some evidence to show that Congreve, who greatly admired Dogget, had him specifically in mind as he wrote the part of Fondlewife in The Old Batchelor. If so, we have here a remarkably clear example of the reciprocity of actor and playwright in the origins and interpretation of a character. Cibber says that Congreve “was a great Admirer” of Dogget's, “and found his Account in the Characters he expresly wrote for him. In those of Fondlewife, in his Old Batchelor, and Ben, in Love for Love, no Author and Actor could be more obliged to their mutual masterly Performances.”⁷³ Cibber himself replaced Dogget as Fondlewife. In describing his own attempt to imitate Dogget in the part, he makes it clear that the earlier actor and Fondlewife were so closely associated in the minds of the audience that he found it necessary to reproduce exactly Dogget's mien and appearance.

At my first Appearance one might have imagin'd by the various Murmurs of the Audience, that they were in doubt whether Dogget himself were not return'd, or that they could not conceive what strange Face it could be that so nearly resembled him; for I had laid the Tint of forty Years more than my real Age upon my Features, and, to the most minute placing of an Hair, was dressed exactly like him.⁷⁴

Davies tells us of Cibber's success; he suggests that part of the audience never accepted him completely in the role which had been originally created for Dogget. “Colley Cibber's Fondlewife was much, and justly, admired and applauded, though some greatly preferred Dogget's portrait of old doting impotence to his.”⁷⁵

In Thomas Wilkes's General View of the Stage (1759) there is a contemporary account of Dogget's gifts in the portrayal of senility. Wilkes had “heard this confirmed from one who performed with Dogget … that he could, with the greatest exactness, paint his face so as to represent the age of seventy, eighty, and ninety distinctly; which occasioned Sir Godfrey Kneller to tell him one day, at Buttons' Coffee-house, that he excelled him in Painting; for, that he could only copy nature from the originals before him, but he [Dogget] could vary them at pleasure, and yet keep a close likeness.”⁷⁶

This specific reference to the ages of seventy, eighty, and ninety may possibly indicate how advanced was the physical decay suggested by Dogget's interpretation of characters like Sir Paul Plyant, Learchus, Colonel Hackwell, and Moneytrap. Wilkes also gives a remarkably detailed account of Dogget's costume as old Moneytrap in The Confederacy. Moneytrap is one of those wealthy, avaricious, and senile figures destined for ridicule, deception, and cuckoldry by younger characters. With some reservations, the picture of Dogget as Moneytrap may be a hint at least as to the stage appearance of other old fools like him, of an Alderman Gripe or a Goldingham. Mrs. Behn's old cuckold merchants, Sir Cautious Fullbank and Sir Feeble Fainwou'd in The Lucky Chance, may well have resembled Dogget's Moneytrap when they appeared on the stage. As Moneytrap, the actor

wore an old thread-bare black coat, to which he had put new cuffs, pocket-lids, and buttons, on purpose to make its rustiness more conspicuous. The neck was stuffed so as to make him appear round-shouldered and give his head the greater prominency; his square-toed shoes were large enough to buckle over those he wore in common, which made his legs appear much smaller than usual.⁷⁷

From Aston we learn that nature had made Dogget “a little, lively, spract Man.”⁷⁸ It is Aston, too, who claims that this actor “was the best Face-player and Gesticulator,” that he “was the most faithful, pleasant Actor that ever was—for he never deceiv'd his Audience—because, while they gazed at him, he was working up the Joke, which broke out suddenly in involuntary Acclamations and Laughter.”⁷⁹

The audience which associated Dogget with Fondlewife, which liked to laugh heartily at him when he assumed a dotard's foibles, could not accept him in a serious role. His appearance was the cue for laughter; he was expected to play the ridiculous characters When he tried to shift, he was not taken seriously:

But, on a Time, he suffer'd himself to be expos'd by attempting the serious Character of Phorbas in Oedipus, than which no thing cou'd be more ridiculous—for when he came to these words—(But, oh! I wish Phorbas had perish'd in that very Moment)—the Audience conceived that it was spoke like Hob in his Dying-Speech.—They burst into a loud Laughter; which sunk Tom Dogget's Progress in Tragedy from that Time.⁸⁰

Rigidity of casting, the confinement of an actor to one genre—indeed, to one type of character—is certainly suggested, such rigidity, of course, having exceptions in the case of a truly great actor like Betterton.

To Mrs. Leigh went the part of the greatest of antiquated coquettes, Lady Wishfort. Unfortunately the material on Mrs. Leigh is scant. Colley Cibber emphasizes her gift in acting self-deluded and aged belles, her penetrating humor, a humor which was demanded in any brilliant portrayal of Congreve's old huntress.

Mrs. Leigh … had a very droll way of dressing the pretty Foibles of superannuated Beauties. She had in her self a good deal of Humour, and knew how to infuse it into the affected Mothers, Aunts, and modest stale Maids that had miss'd their Market; of this sort were the Modish Mother in the Chances, affecting to be politely commode for her own Daughter; the Coquette Prude of an Aunt in Sir Courtly Nice, who prides herself in being chaste and cruel at Fifty; and the languishing Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World: In all these, with many others, she was extremely entertaining, and painted in a lively manner the blind Side of Nature.⁸¹

Among other stale maids and matrons Mrs. Leigh represented Lady Fantast in Bury-Fair, Lady Maggot in The Scowrers, Moretta in The Rover, Part I, and Prue's Nurse in Love for Love. Mr. Montague Summers dates Mrs. Leigh's retirement from the stage as June 10, 1707.⁸²

In 1676 Mrs. Leigh delighted Restoration audiences with her portrayal of Lady Woodvil in The Man of Mode. By 1711, four years after the actress's disappearance from stage annals, old Lady Woodvil is no longer a subject for legitimate fun. And Steele writes:

Now for Mrs. Harriot:

She laughs at Obedience to an absent Mother, whose Tenderness Busie describes to be very exquisite, for that she is so pleased with finding Harriot again, that she cannot chide her for being out of the way. This Witty Daughter and fine Lady, has so little Respect for this good Woman, that she Ridicules her Air in taking Leave, and cries, In what Struggle is my poor Mother yonder? See, see, her Head tottering, her Eyes staring, and her under Lip trembling.⁸³

A ridiculous old female by the conventions of the comedy of manners is seen by the writer of sentimental comedy as an exquisitely tender mother. Etherege is dead. Mrs. Leigh and her husband, who represented the superannuated characters in The Man of Mode, are also gone, and Steele can safely deplore the lack of respect which had been shown old Lady Woodvil on the stage. In this one paragraph in The Spectator he exemplifies his own critical cowardice and, more important, a revolution in the history of taste. The cues have changed. Audiences are no longer to laugh heartily with witty youth at the follies of crabbed age.

Notes

1. See John C. Hodges, “On the Date of Congreve's Birth,” Modern Philology, XXIII (1935), 83-85; and Albert S. Borgman, The Life and Death of William Mountfort (Cambridge, 1935), p. 171 n. 2.

2. Comedies by William Congreve, ed. Dobrée (London, 1925), p. 21.

3. Letter dated December, 1699, The Works of Joseph Addison, ed. Hurd (London, 1893), V, 326.

4. Act IV, sc. iii, The Dramatic Works of George Farquhar, ed. Ewald (London, 1892), I, 91.

5. See Robert Gale Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage, 1660-1776 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1935), passim.

6. Three comparatively recent periodical articles evince interest in old age as a dramatic theme in the Elizabethan period: John W. Draper, “The Old Age of King Lear,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXXIX (1940), 527-540; L. Wardlaw Miles, “Shakespeare's Old Men,” E.L.H., VII (1940), 286-299; Ernest H. Cox, “Shakespeare and Some Conventions of Old Age,” Studies in Philology, XXXIX (1942), 36-46.

7. John Donne, Elegie IX, “The Autumnall,” Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Hayward (Bloomsbury, 1929), p. 75.

   Thomas Shadwell, in the Epilogue to The Scowrers (The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Summers, London, 1927, V, 149) borrows Donne's phrase, but to what different ends does he use it!

   Your selves, go Flanting to all publick Places,
   Exposing all you can, your Feeble Graces,
   Darting weak Rays from your Autumnal Faces.

8. The Overburian Characters, ed. Paylor (Oxford, 1936), pp. 14-15.

9. Ibid., p. 71.

10. Micro-Cosmographie (1628), ed. Arber (London, 1868), p. 89.

11. Ibid., p. 90.

12. Willard Smith, The Nature of Comedy (Boston, 1930), p. 149.

13. “The Old Courtier and the New” is included in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy, ed. Edward Walford (London, 1880), pp. 260-261. It was taken “from an ancient black-letter copy in the Pepys Collection, compared with another printed among some miscellaneous ‘poems and songs’ in a book entitled Le Prince d'Amour, 1660.”

14. Cambridge (Massachusetts), 1926, pp. 123-124.

15. The Scornful Lady, ed. Bond, Act I, sc. i, The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Variorum Edition (London, 1904), I, 365.

16. Act I, sc. i, ibid., 1, 373.

17. Act III, sc. ii, Plays, ed. Gosse (London, 1888), p. 317.

18. Act IV, sc. i, ibid., p. 320.

19. See Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York, 1936), p. 74.

20. Act III, sc. v, Restoration Comedies, ed. Summers (London, 1921), p. 83.

21. Act IV, sc. i, ibid., p. 85.

22. Ibid.

23. Act IV, sc. vii, ibid., p. 112.

24. Act IV, sc. i, ibid., p. 86.

25. Act I, The Dramatic Works of John Crowne, ed. Maidment and Logan (Edinburgh, 1874), III, 272.

26. Act I, sc. i, Restoration Comedies, ed. Summers, 149.

27. Thomas Southerne, Sir Anthony Love; or, The Rambling Lady (London, 1691).

28. William Wycherley, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, Act II, sc. ii, Plays, ed. Ward (London, 1888), p. 158.

29. The Rover; or, The Banished Cavaliers, Part II, Act V, sc. iii, Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Summers (London, 1915), I, 199.

30. Edward Ravenscroft, The London Cuckolds, Act I, sc. i, Restoration Comedies, ed. Summers, pp. 147-148.

    “Canon law permitted children above seven years old to marry prior to the age of consent (14 for the man and 12 for the woman),” writes Gilbert Spencer Alleman in Matrimonial Law and the Materials of Restoration Comedy (Wallingford, Pa., 1942), p. 126.

31. John Dryden, Marriage à la Mode, Act IV, sc. iv, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury (Edinburgh, 1882), IV, 335.

32. Act IV, sc. iv, ibid., IV, 331.

33. William Congreve, The Way of the World, Act V, sc. v, Comedies, ed. Dobrée, 427.

34. John Dryden, The Assignation; or, Love in a Nunnery, Act I, sc. i, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, IV, 388.

35. Act I, sc. i, ibid., IV, 390.

36. Act I, sc. i, ibid., IV, 388.

37. Thomas Killigrew, The Parsons Wedding, Act III, sc. ii, Restoration Comedies, ed. Summers, p. 67.

38. Aphra Behn, Sir Patient Fancy, Act III, sc. ii, Works, ed. Summers, IV, 47.

39. Act I, sc. i, ibid., IV, 12.

40. The Younger Brother; or, The Amorous Jilt, Act IV, sc. i, ibid., IV, 370.

41. The Rover, Part II, Act II, sc. i, ibid., I, 145.

42. Act II, sc. iii, ibid., I, 251.

43. The Rover, Part II, Act III, sc. i, ibid., I, 158.

44. George Farquhar, The Constant Couple; or, A Trip to the Jubilee, Act III, sc. v, Works, ed. Ewald, I, 186.

45. Act I, sc. i, ibid., I, 139.

46. Thomas Shadwell, A True Widow, Act II, Works, ed. Summers, III, 312.

47. The Confederacy, Act II, sc. i, The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh, ed. Dobrée (Bloomsbury, 1927), III, 30.

48. Act II, sc. i, ibid., III, 29. See pp. 157-158, below.

49. Thomas Shadwell, Epsom-Wells, Act I, sc. i, Works, ed. Summers, II, 117.

50. William Wycherley, Love in a Wood, Act II, sc. iv, Plays, ed. Ward, 53.

51. George Farquhar, Love and a Bottle, Act II, sc. i, Works, ed. Ewald, I, 30-31.

52. The Constant Couple, Act V, sc. i, ibid., I, 212.

53. A True Widow, Act. II, sc. i, Plays, ed. Summers, III, 311.

54. The Assignation, Act I, sc. i, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, IV, 388.

55. Act I, sc. i, ibid., IV, 390.

56. Aphra Behn, Prologue, The Feign'd Curtezans; or, A Night's Intrigue, Works, ed. Summers, II, 308.

57. William Wycherley, The Gentleman Dancing-Master, Act I, sc. ii, Plays, ed. Ward, p. 148.

58. Thomas Shadwell, Epsom-Wells, Act I, sc. i, Works, ed. Summers, II, 111.

59. Epsom-Wells, Act I, sc. i, ibid., II, 109.

60. William Wycherley, The Plain Dealer, Act II, sc. i, Plays, ed. Ward, p. 424.

61. Aphra Behn, The False Count; or, A New Way to Play an Old Game, Works, ed. Summers, III, 176.

62. John Vanbrugh, Aesop, Act I, sc. i, Works, ed. Dobrée, II, 17. In the play Vanbrugh makes twenty-five the typical age for the typical beau.

63. George Farquhar, The Beaux-Stratagem, Act II, sc. iii, Works, ed. Ewald, II, 266.

64. Thomas Shadwell, The Miser, Act IV, sc. i, Works, ed. Summers, II, 71.

65. John Dryden, An Evening's Love; or, The Mock Astrologer, Act III, sc. i, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, III, 293.

66. Aphra Behn, Epilogue, The False Count, Works, ed. Summers, III, 176.

67. Thomas Shadwell, Epsom-Wells, Act I, sc. i, Works, ed. Summers, II, 108.

68. Thomas Shadwell, Bury-Fair, Act V, sc. i, ibid., IV, 357.

69. John Dryden, An Evening's Love, Act IV, sc. i, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, III, 320.

70. John Vanbrugh, The Relapse, Act IV, sc. i, Works, ed. Dobrée, I, 62.

71. John Dryden, Secret Love; or, The Maiden Queen, Act III, sc. i, Works, ed. Scott and Saintsbury, II, 465.

72. Yet the stage history relating to the old characters in the comedy of manners is not so simple as the preceding statements might imply. To the small and highly important group of specialists there are notable exceptions. For example, we find Betterton, the greatest tragic actor of his time, playing Heartwell in The Old Batchelor and Sir John Brute in The Provok'd Wife.

73. Apology, ed. Lowe (London, 1889), II, 159.

74. Ibid., I, 208.

75. Thomas Davies, Dramatic Miscellanies (London, 1784), III, 367.

76. London, 1759, pp. 146-147.

77. Ibid., p. 447.

78. Anthony Aston, A Brief Supplement to Colley Cibber, Esq.; included in Apology, ed. Lowe, II, 309.

79. Ibid., II, 310.

80. Ibid., II, 309.

81. Ibid., I, 162-163.

82. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, ed. Summers (London, n.d.), p. 203.

83. Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Morley, London, 1891, p. 107 (No. 65, Tuesday, May 15, 1711).