SOURCE: Hirst, David L. “The Seventeenth Century.” In Comedy of Manners, pp. 6-35. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1979.

[In the following essay, Hirst delineates the themes that distinguish the comedy of manners as a distinct genre and examines some of the works of the leading playwrights of the seventeenth century.]

I will believe, there are now in the world
Good-natured friends, who are not prostitutes,
And handsome women worthy to be friends:
Yet, for my sake, let no one e'er confide
In tears, or oaths, in love, or friend untried.

(William Wycherley: The Plain Dealer, 1676)

The terms Restoration comedy and comedy of manners have become virtually synonymous; but in the twentieth century both require careful reconsideration. The comedy of manners is a dramatic genre which has continued in England to the present day; Restoration comedy has always been a curious misnomer: Charles II came to the throne in 1660, and to describe all the comedies of the next fifty years as ‘Restoration’ is meaningless. The term is perhaps meaningful when considering those plays written during Charles's reign, but to apply it to the dramas produced under James II, William and Mary and Queen Anne, whose political policies and life-style differed greatly, is absurd. Certainly the comedies written in these five decades have much in common which distinguished them from the Jacobean and early Caroline drama on the one hand and the plays of the later eighteenth century on the other. But it is equally instructive to observe that the plays of Farquhar, for example (the last two written in 1706 and 1707), have as much in common with She Stoops to Conquer as The Country Wife and indeed are much closer to Goldsmith's drama than to the plays of Sheridan, who is usually distinguished as the prime exponent of comedy of manners in the late eighteenth century. This chapter will examine the major comedies of the late seventeenth century, drawing attention to the recurrent themes which serve to classify them as a distinct dramatic genre, whilst also emphasizing the differences between the plays of dramatists working under different social and political conditions.

When the theatres reopened in England after the Restoration a distinct break in dramatic tradition and presentation had taken place. These theatres, at first only two—under the management of D'Avenant and Killigrew at Dorset Garden and Drury Lane respectively—were licensed by royal monopoly. They were much smaller than playhouses like the Globe and Swan, more on the model of the indoor Blackfriars, catering for an educated and wealthy aristocratic élite. The intimacy of the smaller indoor theatre with its proscenium and the beginnings of perspective scenery on grooved flats was a far cry from the Elizabethan outdoor public playhouse which had entertained an entire cross-section of the society of London. Shakespeare's theatre with its bare stage reflected the diversity and grandeur of Renaissance life; the Restoration playhouse represented only a few scenes: notably the coffee house, the drawing-room and the park, which defined and circumscribed the range of social behaviour examined by the dramatists. Restoration England was not an heroic age, in its accomplishments offstage or on. In France Corneille's tragicomedies and Racine's tragedies were the perfect reflection of that tension between passion and intellect seen in the thought and action, both social and political, of Louis XIV's court and country.

The court of Charles II was a more cynical and licentious one, and on stage the dramatists, all of them in the truest sense dilettantes, because not fully committed professional men of the theatre, sought to reflect that freedom which was a deliberate counterpart to the Puritan repression of the interregnum. The presence of women for the first time on the English stage served to highlight the emphasis on marriage and sexual intrigue, with their corollaries, adultery and divorce: fresh themes for English comedy. Nor were they Molière's themes. In a stable country, during the Age of Reason, he attacked society's deviants and enemies. In England rebellion was the spirit of the age: Charles I lost his throne and head in 1649, James II his throne in 1688. Before the Puritan interregnum James I's Calvinist upbringing contrasted sharply with Charles I's Catholic sympathies which were inherited by his sons, Charles II and James II. The latter's open profession of Catholicism cost him his crown and he was replaced by William and Mary who handed on the Protestant succession to Queen Anne. Thus England knew no more stability than in the previous century, and saw as much bloody strife and more revolution. No wonder, then, that the immediate post-Restoration period saw drama, and notably comedy, that reflected the turbulence and dissatisfaction of the times. Comedy in the first two decades after the Restoration is notably satiric, savage, cruel, and, in so far as it deals seriously with the important issues of infidelity, marriage, divorce and another significant theme, money, essentially concerned with the incalcitrant realities of everyday life, fully reflecting the manners of a sexually and monetarily acquisitive society.

The plays of Wycherley are the most powerful dramatic expression of this post-Restoration spirit. Produced between 1671 and 1677, they are the most uncompromising comedies of the period, baldly stating several of the major themes which were to dominate the drama up to the beginning of the next century. His third play, The Country Wife (1674/5) has enjoyed most frequent revival—it was adapted by Garrick in the eighteenth century. Its title draws attention immediately to the contrast of rural and metropolitan values, so often a theme of comedy of manners. Margery, the country wife, has by the end of the play accepted the values of the metropolis: she has learnt how to lie, how to deceive her husband. Hoping to escape the consequences of an unhappy marriage to an old rake, now jealous to keep her to himself, she falls easy prey to Horner, the archetype of the Restoration rake or Don Juan figure. Knowing that decorum is all-important, Horner has penetrated the code of the times and exploits the hypocrisy of social manners to the utmost. In Act 1 he tells the Quack: ‘your women of honour, as you call 'em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons; and 'tis scandal they would avoid, not men’ (I, i, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 1, p. 415) and proceeds to match this neat turn of phrase with an equally cool debauchery of all the available women, having circulated the false rumour that the incompetence of a French surgeon in curing venereal disease has made him sterile. The apparent frankness of this confession masks the unscrupulousness of his tactics: even as he disabuses the wives, he can abuse the husbands who flock to proffer their condolences.

As Margery's rustic ingenuousness gives way to determination she soon adapts to the ways of the world and to urban standards of behaviour. Wycherley gives such pointed physical emphasis to his satire that it is impossible to take sides: the playgoer is made forcefully aware of the cunning of the disloyal wives and friends whilst at the same time laughing at the vanity and folly of the dupes. Thus in V,i, when Margery encourages Pinchwife to lead her, masked and hooded, to her lover, we have no sympathy with the deceived husband who is quite prepared to prostitute, as he supposes, his innocent sister to the rake. This refusal to allow the audience a clear point of moral sympathy is basic to the genre and accounts for many critics' distaste of this comic mode. It occurs also in the sharply ironic scene (IV,i) in which Harcourt, disguised as a parson, masquerades as his own brother. The unscrupulousness of Harcourt, who here attempts to steal his own friend's mistress, is matched by the foolish vanity of Sparkish and the total inability of Alithea to cope with the situation, with the result that again the audience's sympathies are with the cleverest intriguer, who indeed wins the girl. Wycherley's plays are much concerned with the duplicity of bosom friends. In The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672) Gerrard, in the act of stealing his friend's mistress, remarks to her: ‘to make him hold the door while I steal his mistress is not unpleasant’; and to her objection: ‘but it goes against my conscience to be accessory to so ill a thing’ answers: ‘Alas! poor miss, 'tis not against your conscience, but against your modesty, you think, to do it frankly’ (IV,i, ed. Ward, pp. 208-9). This constant revelation of the gap between reality and appearance, between selfish motive and smooth professions of cordiality, is fundamental to the comedy of manners with its cynical view of conventional morality and lack of the romantic feeling central to other comic genres.

In its satiric as distinct from romantic emphasis the comedy of manners is in the tradition of Ben Jonson. Horner, at the centre of a complex plot with all the desirable women dancing attendance on him, is rather like Volpone or the alchemists, Subtle and Face. The comedies of the late seventeenth century, like those of Jonson earlier, are concerned with the unscrupulousness of the characters in pursuit of money and sex. But in Jonson money is a far more important concern: gulling and cozening are the activities of his wits, and Volpone is caught precisely because he falls a victim to his passion for Celia. Moreover, in Jonson's plays the cleverest do not always win; conventional morality, albeit subject to Jonson's ironic treatment, prevails, so that Mosca, Volpone, Subtle and Face are finally brought to justice. Enough traces of Jonsonian comedy remain, however, to make his influence clearly recognizable. From characters such as Dapperwit, Gripe and Addleplot in Wycherley's first play Love in a Wood, or St James' Park (1671), through to a play like Congreve's The Old Bachelor (1693), with its comic cuckold, Fondlewife, and its fools, Sir Jasper Wittol and Captain Bluffe, who are both tricked into marriage through the cunning of superior wits, the comedy of manners can be seen to be a development of the comedy of humours. Nor is it always easy to distinguish one dramatic genre precisely from the other. Vanbrugh's The Confederacy (1705), which dramatizes the parallel outwitting of two lustful old misers by their wives and a clever young lover, has affinities with both comedy of manners and Jacobean citizen comedy, though actually based on a French original, Dancourt's Les Bourgeoises à la Mode. Though Dryden in the Essay of Dramatic Poesy expressed unparalleled admiration for Jonson, the latter's influence is nowhere more clearly apparent than in Congreve's letter to John Dennis Concerning Humour in Comedy, where he defines humour as ‘a singular and unavoidable manner of doing or saying anything, peculiar and natural to one man only: by which his speech and action are distinguished from those of other men’ (The Comedies of William Congreve, ed. Marshall, p. 413). In the Letter he refers frequently to Jonson in support of his argument and uses The Silent Woman as an example to illustrate his basic theory—a significant one for the comedy of manners:

Humour is from Nature, Habit from Custom, and Affection from Industry.

Humour shows us as we Are.

Habit shows us as we appear under a forcible Impression.

Affectation shows what we would be, under a voluntary Disguise.

(Ibid, p. 410)

Epicoene, or The Silent Woman is an intriguing choice of play: whilst exploring the craft and subtlety of its intriguers and exposing affectation it is the ultimate comment on Renaissance sexuality and promiscuity. The silent woman turns out to be a boy, and the play, unlike those of the post-Restoration period, explores that complex bisexual world of Shakespeare's late comedies. The advent of the actress put an effective end to this Jacobean convention: after the Restoration comedy took an exclusively heterosexual theme.

Wycherley explores this sexual theme exhaustively. His plays are concerned far more with sex than money. In Love in a Wood nearly all the major characters are in pursuit of more than one person. No one is actually married in this play, so that the savagery of the two mature comedies is lacking, but Ranger, the significantly-named hero, is the characteristic Restoration rake. Though he finally settles down with Lydia, the dénouement of the play is by no means conventionally romantic. Gripe, the ‘covetous, lecherous old userer’, outwits Dapperwit by marrying Lucy, thus avoiding payment of the sum exacted by her parents for an attempted rape, and hoping that he will beget children he excludes his daughter from her inheritance. Maria, the daughter, who has tricked both her father and future husband in contriving to marry when six months pregnant, is a typical Wycherley heroine. The romantic conventions of Shakespearian comedy are a far cry from the intrigues of the comedy of manners. Hippolyta in The Gentleman Dancing-Master is a sexually precocious heroine of fourteen. When caught with her lover she is not outwitted, but tells her father that Gerrard is her new dancing master: ‘So much wit and innocency’, he comments, ‘were never together before.’ By ‘wit’ he here means ingenuity and quick thinking in emergency. Another type of wit emerges in a later scene where the father insists on a continuation of the dancing lesson. Here the comments of Mrs Caution, ‘an impertinent, precise old woman’, though accurate, go unheeded, but they serve to underline the bawdy references:

MRS Caution:
See, see, she squeezes his hand now: Oh, the debauched harlotry!
DON Diego:
So, so, mind her not; she moves forward pretty well; but you must move as well backward as forward, or you'll never do anything to purpose.
MRS Caution:
Do you know what you say, brother, yourself, no? are you at your beastliness before your young daughter?

(The Gentleman Dancing Master, II,i, ed. Ward, p. 186)

The bawdy, rather clumsy and repetitive in this early play, is refined in the celebrated ‘china’ scene of The Country Wife. Here not only is the allusiveness at once more pointed and subtle, but the dramatic circumstances enrich the humour by giving an added sharpness to the irony. Both Mrs Squeamish and Lady Fidget believe each alone shares Horner's secret, but as the scene develops the increasing twists in the bawdy double entendre express a growing anxiety and sexual jealousy on the part of two women, all the more intense because of the strained euphemisms they employ. This is Wycherley at his best, exactly suiting the witty style to his predominantly sexual theme. It contrasts pointedly with the refinement of dialogue in Congreve and the urbanity of style which distinguishes the plays of Farquhar, but all three dramatists in different ways employ wit to define character and present the complex ironies of a dramatic situation:

LADY Fidget:
And I have been toiling and moiling, for the prettiest piece of china, my dear.
HORNER:
Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could.
MRS Squeamish:
Oh Lord, I'll have some china too, good Mr Horner, don't think to give other people china, and me none, come in with me too.
HORNER:
Upon my honour, I have none left now.
MRS Squeamish:
Nay, nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan't put me off so. Come—
HORNER:
This lady had the last there.
LADY Fidget:
Yes indeed, Madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.
MRS Squeamish:
O, but it may be he may have some you could not find.

(The Country Wife, IV,iii, Jeffares Vol. 1, p. 478)

Wycherley sees women as unscrupulous predators; men are ultimately their pawns in the love game. This is true even of Horner; perhaps most of all in his case if we are to take the view expressed in Warren Beatty's film Shampoo, a clever modern version of The Country Wife, in which the central character uses the rumours of alleged homosexuality as a cover for his various amours. Finally he sees the worthlessness of his situation, a position Horner himself does not reach, though the existential quality of the film finds its parallel in the obsessive harping on images of disease—particularly venereal disease—in the play, an effective reminder of the occupational hazard Horner runs, a danger all too familiar to the Restoration rake.

Wycherley's last play The Plain Dealer (1676/7), an adaptation of Molière's Le Misanthrope, is his most uncompromising work. In his reworking of ideas from several of Molière's plays, most notably L'Ecole des Femmes and L'Ecole des Maris (for The Country Wife) Wycherley brought certain aspects of contemporary French comedy—notably its refinement of style and treatment of social manners—to the English stage. But his handling of the material from Molière shows how Wycherley's plays, and indeed the whole genre of comedy of manners in England differed radically from French concepts of drama and satire. Molière's plays cannot be neatly categorized in any one specific dramatic genre: whilst Le Misanthrope could be termed a comedy of manners, such works as Le Malade Imaginaire and L'Avare are closer to farce and draw on the conventions of the commedia dell' arte, whilst mature dramas such as Dom Juan and Tartuffe powerfully and disturbingly mingle different theatrical styles. Wycherley's adaption of Le Misanthrope deepens and extends the satire of Molière's play, introducing new themes vital to the English comedy of manners, as he makes clearer the vices of the age he is so determined to scourge. Alceste, Molière's misanthrope, is an outsider, an excessive critic who will not listen to his friend, the raisonneur and exponent of the virtue of the ‘honnête homme’, Philinte. His mistress, Célimene, is not vicious: she is beautiful, witty and charming, a flirt, but finally, in her refusal to accompany Alceste to the country, a reasonable repudiator of his standards. Society around Alceste is bitchy and opportunist, but there are enough selfless and sensible figures to counteract this. Molière (to quote Jonson) ‘sports with human follies, not with crimes’: in a balanced age of reason he criticizes those who offend a social norm, and Alceste is the worst offender. This is not the picture in Wycherley's play; the society he presents is so unscrupulous in its attitude to love, marriage and money that Manly, the plain dealer of the title, though a sailor and thus a more obvious social outsider than Alceste, is right to despise and mistrust the world.

Manly's bosom and only friend, Vernish, is so only in appearance. He is actually secretly married to Manly's mistress, Olivia, and the pair of them are out to make all the money they can from Manly. They make a very sinister impression on Vernish's first appearance:

OLIVIA:
Manly is returned.
VERNISH:
Manly returned! Fortune forbid! … did you own our marriage to him?
OLIVIA:
I told him I was married, to put an end to his love, and my trouble; but to whom, is yet a secret kept from him, and all the world: and I have used him so scurvily, his great spirit will ne'er return, to reason it farther with me; I have sent him to sea again, I warrant.
VERNISH:
Twas bravely done … Be you sure only to keep a while our great secret, till he be gone: in the meantime, I'll lead the easy honest fool by the nose, as I used to do; and, whilst he stays, rail with him at thee; and, when he's gone, laugh with thee at him. But have you his cabinet of jewels safe? Part not with a seed pearl to him, to keep him from starving.
OLIVIA:
Nor from hanging.

(The Plain Dealer, IV,ii, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 2, p. 189)

The unscrupulousness of the characters is extreme here. We have not yet the refinement of intrigue which distinguishes the subtlest characters in Congreve's plays, but no one went further than Wycherley in satirizing the rapaciousness of the times. Olivia in the above scene is surprised by her husband's return: she is waiting for the arrival of a new lover, Manly's servant, and having ‘thrust out’ her husband she says, ‘So, I have at once brought about those two grateful businesses, which all prudent women do together, secured money and pleasure’ (ibid, IV,ii, p. 190). However, the servant is in fact a woman, Fidelia, in disguise; she has become entangled in this situation through love of Manly. Wycherley's employment of the disguise convention differs from the romantic dramas of Shakespeare or Beaumont and Fletcher in pointing up the viciousness of Olivia and the folly of both Fidelia and Manly, as in the sequel to the scene described above, when Fidelia arrives with Manly ‘treading softly and staying behind at some distance’, where again Wycherley exploits the physical ironies of the situation to full satiric effect.

Olivia is seen at her worst in a scene Wycherley added to the play in a later revision, and which takes its cue from Scene vi of Molière's La Critique de L'Ecole des Femmes. Here Wycherley employs a discussion of The Country Wife to present the hypocrisy and prudery of Olivia and thereby to throw into ironic relief the arguments concerning moral impropriety in his plays, and indeed those of the genre as a whole.

OLIVIA:
Then you would have a woman of honour with passive looks, ears and tongue, undergo all the hideous obscenity she hears at nasty plays?
ELIZA:
Truly, I think a woman betrays her want of modesty, by showing it publicly in a playhouse, as much as a man does his want of courage by a quarrel there: for the truly modest and stout say least, and are least exceptious, especially in public.
OLIVIA:
O hideous! cousin, this cannot be your opinion, but you are one of those that have the confidence to pardon the filthy play.
ELIZA:
Why, what is there of ill in't, say you?
OLIVIA:
O fie, fie, fie, would you put me to the blush anew? Call all the blood into my face again? But, to satisfy you then, first, the clandestine obscenity in the very name of Horner.
ELIZA:
Truly, 'tis so hidden, I cannot find it out, I confess.
OLIVIA:
O horrid! Does it not give you the rank conception, or image of a goat, a town-bull, or a satyr?

(Ibid, II,i, p. 136)

Wycherley's satire here anticipates the Jeremy Collier stage controversy which broke out two decades later and continued well into the eighteenth century. The significance of Collier's pamphlet A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, published in 1698, is evident in the fact that many leading writers, notably Vanbrugh and Congreve, felt the need to reply to his attack on ‘their smuttiness of expression, their swearing, profaneness and lewd application of scripture, their abuse of the clergy, their making their top characters libertines and giving them success in their debauchery’ (A Short View, p. 2). The twentieth-century response to the criticisms of the ‘frenzied divine’ (as Bonamy Dobrée calls him) has generally been one of amused contempt, but it is a mark of the change which had come about in the religious and moral climate of the country by the end of the seventeenth century that he should have been taken so seriously, and that Dr Johnson could say: ‘at last comedy grew more modest and Collier lived to see the reward of his labours’.

Etherege, Wycherley's close contemporary, paints a similar picture of the ruthlessness of society at the beginning of this period, though with less savagery and bitterness. In his final and most celebrated play, The Man of Mode (1676), Mrs Loveit reaches the conclusion: ‘There's nothing but falsehood and impertinence in this world. All men are villains or fools’ (The Man of Mode, V,ii, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 1, p. 618), and she has said earlier: ‘There is no truth in friendship neither. Women, as well as men, are all false, or all are so to me at least’ (ibid, V,i, p. 600). The final phrase is significant: she is speaking as a loser, and Etherege wastes little sympathy on her; but this does not detract from the truth of her remarks. Mrs Loveit tries throughout the play to win back Dorimant who has tired of her; he has designs on her close friend Belinda as well as a newcomer to the city, the wealthy young heiress, Harriet. By the end of the play he has achieved all he wanted: he has made love to Belinda, rid himself of Mrs Loveit, and Harriet is prepared to marry him. Here we have an early glimpse of the higher stakes for which the characters are playing, though Dorimant is a novice beside Fainall and Mirabel. He is essentially interested in sex, and it is some consolation for Mrs Loveit to learn that he needs Harriet as ‘a wife to repair the ruins of my estate that needs it’. Moreover the hollowness of his victory, in contrast to that of Mirabel or Archer, is seen in the way Harriet paints an uninspired picture of what life with her will be like. To her mother's offer: ‘you will be welcome’, she adds:

To a great rambling lone house, that looks as it were not inhabited, the family's so small; there you'll find my mother, an old lame aunt, and myself, Sir, perched upon chairs at a distance in a large parlour; sitting moping like three or four melancholy birds in a spacious volary. Does not this stagger your resolution?

(Ibid, V,ii, p. 619)

Having had a glimpse of life in the metropolis, Harriet is unwilling to go back to the country. That she has more wit and sensitivity than Margery Pinchwife only exacerbates her situation, which was clear enough in her conversation with Young Bellair earlier in the play:

YOUNG Bellair:
What a dreadful thing 'twould be to be hurried back to Hampshire!
HARRIET:
Ah,—name it not!

(Ibid, III,i, p. 559)

When at the end of the play (V,ii) Dorimant makes light of these difficulties and says: ‘The first time I saw you, you left me with the pangs of love upon me, and this day my soul has quite given up her liberty’, she retorts: ‘This is more dismal than the country.’

Whether she is more distressed by his insincerity or the warmth of his changed manner is not clear, but this twist at the end points up the unromantic aspect of the dénouement. The play is much concerned with tone, style and the dangers of sincerity. Mrs Loveit comes nearest to regaining her hold on Dorimant when she pretends to love Sir Fopling Flutter; though Dorimant does not believe her, he is horrified to find that the mere suspicion arouses his jealousy and thus his renewed interest in her. The plays of the period are rich in such acute observations of psychological and sexual truths, often startling in their apparent modernity; thus in The Country Wife (III,ii) Sparkish makes the Pinteresque observation: ‘I love to have rivals in a wife, they make her seem to a man still but as a kept mistress’, and in The Old Bachelor Lucy tells her mistress, Sylvia, that the way to win back Vainlove is to make him believe not that Araminta is in love with someone else, but that she returns his love. In the long scene between Mrs Loveit and Dorimant (V,i) Mrs Loveit is in control so long as she can counter Dorimant's objections to Sir Fopling with the controlled power of her perfectly phrased epigrams. The savagery of his jealousy, finding its expression in sharp, cutting images, is contrasted with the calculated tone of her rejoinders:

MRS Loveit:
The man who loves above his quality, does not suffer more from the insolent impertinence of his mistress, than the woman who loves above her understanding does from the arrogant presumptions of her friend.
DORIMANT:
You mistake the use of fools, they are designed for properties and not for friends, you have an indifferent stock of reputation left yet. Lose it all like a frank gamester on the square, 'twill then be time enough to turn rook, and cheat it up again on a good substantial bubble.
MRS Loveit:
The old man and the ill-favoured are only fit for properties indeed, but young and handsome fools have met with kinder fortunes.

(Ibid, V,i, p. 604)

It is clear who has the upper hand at this point; the style here tells us everything: emotional aggression is translated into the cut and thrust of images and phrases. This is the essence of comedy of manners: what T. S. Eliot describes as the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ has not yet taken place: mind and emotion are fused in the invention and sustaining of witty dialogue. Etherege, however, forces us to watch a break occur disturbingly at the end of the scene. Firmly defeated by Mrs Loveit's control of language and the situation, Dorimant is about to leave, whereupon Mrs Loveit fatally drops the mask of civilized argument. ‘I hate that nauseous fool, you know I do’, she admits, thus by one frank sentence undermining all the power she had established over Dorimant. This confession is a form of extravagance, the trait she elsewhere manifests in her more open pursuit of Dorimant and notably in the scene (II,ii) where she resorts to the impotent rage of uttering the oath ‘Hell and furies’, then tears her fan in pieces and finally bursts into tears. In this respect Sir Fopling is her equal: his extravagance is of dress and affected speech. Dorimant, the true beau, sees the importance of appearance—the play opens with a long scene in his dressing room as he is absorbed in his levée—but this is for him something more: a mask and a means to an end. Sir Fopling, however, is all show; there is nothing beneath the surface. Like Mrs Loveit, he will be outmanoeuvred, though he does pose a threat, not only in his wooing of Mrs Loveit, but also in his way of life, as Emilia is quick to point out: ‘However you despise him gentlemen, I'll lay my life he passes for a wit with many.’ Dorimant draws our attention in his reply to the importance of critical discernment, the corollary of good taste: ‘That may very well be, nature has her cheats, stums a brain, and puts sophisticate dullness often on the tasteless multitude for true wit and good humour’ (ibid, III,ii, pp. 568-9). This, for a civilized courtier and dandy like Etherege, was the final word. It was Congreve at the end of the century who, in his presentation of men like Tattle, Witwoud and Petulant, was to explore the satiric potential of this ‘sophisticate dullness’.

It is revealing to contrast the plays of Wycherley and Etherege, written at the beginning of the post-Restoration period, with those of Farquhar written thirty years later at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In the Prologue to his last play, The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) Farquhar sums up the temper of this very different era:

When strife disturbs or sloth corrupts an age,
Keen satire is the business of the stage.
When the Plain-Dealer writ he lashed those crimes
Which then infested most—the modish times:
But now, when faction sleeps, and sloth is fled,
And all our youth in active fields are bred …
There scarce is room for satire.

(The Beaux' Stratagem, Jeffares, Vol. 4, p. 411)

This was written in 1707 during the reign of Queen Anne, whilst the War of the Spanish Succession was being fought. Civil war had given place to victorious conquest abroad; England had a right to feel secure. This was a new century, a more rational age, benefiting from the writing of men like Locke and the discoveries of scientists like Newton. The task of the critic and dramatic artist was no longer to ‘lash crimes’ but to ridicule ‘follies’, as Farquhar goes on to say:

Simpling our author goes from field to field,
And culls such fools, as may diversion yield.

(Ibid, p. 411)

The satire of this age is milder, more urbane, and yet in several important respects the dramas are more serious. The Restoration rake avoided the traps of matrimony through promiscuity and adultery; to an essentially pro-Catholic age this was the only way out. But under the Protestant monarchs, William and Mary and Queen Anne, another solution was considered: divorce. The fates to which Margery Pinchwife and Mrs Sullen can respectively look forward are a nice indication of the morals of the different periods, though Mrs Sullen's position is more complex than may at first appear. At the end of The Beaux' Stratagem she is free of her husband and can look forward to a happier life with Archer, who says:

Consent, if mutual, saves the lawyer's fee,
Consent is law enough to set you free.

(Ibid, V,iv, p. 496)

That this is manifestly untrue—by law she was as securely trapped as Margery—does not undermine Farquhar's ending; the worlds of the theatre and of real life are different and his more romantic ending is in spirit with the development of the action throughout. It is more reasonable to object that the seriousness with which he advocates the case for divorce is at variance with the play's dénouement which, in its avoidance of the harsh facts of reality, anticipates the sentimentality of later eighteenth-century comedies. This is most pronounced in III,iii where, drawing very directly on Milton's Book II of Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (published 1643), he makes Mrs Sullen argue persuasively for a more humane approach:

MRS Sullen:
Law! What law can search into the remote abyss of nature, what evidence can prove the unaccountable disaffections of wedlock—can a jury sum up the endless aversions that are rooted in our souls, or can a bench give judgement upon antipathies.
DORINDA:
They never pretended sister, they never meddle but in case of uncleanness.
MRS Sullen:
Uncleanness! O sister, casual violation is a transient injury, and may possibly be repaired, but can radical hatreds be ever reconciled—No, no, sister, nature is the first lawgiver, and when she has set tempers opposite, not all the golden links of wedlock, nor iron manacles of law can keep 'um fast.

(Ibid, III,iii, pp. 456-7)

This translates the forcefulness of Milton into a more measured, but no less persuasive prose which leads smoothly into the heroic couplets which close the act as Mrs Sullen advances to address the audience with added force:

Wedlock we own ordained by heaven's decree,
But such as heaven ordained it first to be,
Concurring tempers in the man and wife
As mutual helps to draw the load of life …
Must man, the chiefest work of art divine,
Be doomed in endless discord to repine,
No, we should injure heaven by that surmise
Omnipotence is just, were man but wise.

(Ibid, p. 457)

No passage more clearly illustrates the affinity of Farquhar's style with the urbanity of Pope. The anticipation here of ‘An Essay on Man’ throws into relief the contrast with the earlier dramatists and notably with Wycherley, whose restless energy and savagery of expression are in the satiric vein of Dryden.

Archer's wooing of Mrs Sullen in IV,i further illustrates the warmth and ease which characterizes the witty dialogue in this play. By contrast with the forceful bawdy of the ‘china’ episode in The Country Wife or the sharply polished exchanges of Mirabel and Millament in their ‘contract’ scene, a subtlety of sexual innuendo (mixed with discreet flattery) pervades Archer's seduction of Mrs Sullen. Before she knows what is happening Archer has lured her into the bedroom. Her modesty forces her to run out, though the intervention at this point of Scrub, Sullen's servant, would have guaranteed her honour's safety. Such is the nature of Farquhar's plot that no one is ever in serious danger. Though Mrs Sullen admits to Dorinda a little later: ‘I can't swear I could resist the temptation,—though I can safely promise to avoid it; and that's as much as the best of us can do’ (IV,i)—a very rational approach to the situation and a far cry from the attitudes of Mrs Loveit or Lady Fidget—there is no real threat to her safety. When Archer gains entrance to her bedroom later she is a match for him. Her frequent confessions of weakness to the audience are belied by such comments as ‘Rise, thou prostrate engineer, not all thy undermining skill shall reach my heart’, a repulse worthy of Lady Bracknell (V,ii); and just as he appears to be gaining the upper hand Scrub rushes in again, this time with news of housebreakers.

The fates of the characters are determined not only by their own actions, but by external forces which play havoc with their neat plans. In this respect Farquhar's drama differs radically from that of Wycherley, Etherege and Congreve, in whose plays the characters are entirely responsible for the outcome of their own actions and where it is the cleverest player who wins the game and takes all. Moreover in Farquhar the better natures of the characters are apt to take over just when victory seems in view. Thus Archer relinquishes his seduction of Mrs Sullen to defend her life, and Aimwell confesses to Dorinda the stratagem the two friends have employed to give a false impression of their incomes. Both are rewarded, Aimwell by learning that he has miraculously inherited the title of Lord Viscount through the timely death of his brother, and Archer by profitting from Captain Gibbet's rifling of Sullen's escritoire. Both the initial stratagem of the two beaux and their ruse to gain entrance to Sullen's house are more broadly and overtly comic than any such tricks in earlier comedies of manners, and it is a measure of the more genial tone of this play that Gibbet should be a sentimental highwayman, Boniface a sanguine rogue and Cherry a shrewd country girl. This play is set in Lichfield, and The Recruiting Officer in Shrewsbury: by this date the accepted superiority of metropolitan over provincial manners has given way to a tempering of the ruthlessness of city affairs by a natural warmth and openness. Thus Archer criticizes Aimwell: ‘you can't counterfeit the passion without feeling it’, but he nevertheless respects and remains true to his friend, a very different attitude from that assumed by the characters in Wycherley, Etherege or Congreve.

Farquhar's other mature play, The Recruiting Officer (1706), is less concerned with sex and money. The wit in this play resides in the complex machinations whereby Sylvia obeys the letter of her promise to her father, but disobeys him in essence by obliging him in court to hand her over to Plume. Money in this play, far from being an incentive to the lovers, is a hindrance: both Worthy and Plume consider Mellinda and Sylvia temporarily lost when each woman inherits a fortune. It is characteristic of Farquhar's comedy that fortunes are so easily won: in Congreve the characters have to work for them. The military theme of the play initially gives added depth and toughness to the comedy of manners, but this develops later into a more farcical plot and romantic dénouement. William Gaskill's direction of these two plays at the National Theatre (in 1963 and 1970), however, marked an important stage in the re-establishment of the comedy of manners, since he chose to direct them in an almost Brechtian, realistic style. He laid emphasis on motivation and human relationships, not on external mannerisms or superficiality of style which had characterized the revivals of Congreve and Farquhar by Nigel Playfair and John Gielgud earlier in the century. Of the production of The Recruiting Officer Tynan said: ‘A Restoration masterpiece has been reclaimed, stripped of the veneer of camp that custom prescribes for such plays and saved for the second half of the twentieth century’ (Introduction to his edition of the National Theatre production (London, 1965), p. 16). Moreover Réné Allio's simple, deliberately two-dimensional sets, changed in full view of the audience, found, in the case of both productions, a subtle equivalent for the Restoration stage which, in its contrast of acting area and pictorial scene, mirrored what Clifford Leech has called ‘the tension between the individual figures and the society which imposes conventions, expectations, circumspection’ (Restoration Drama, Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Loftis, p. 134).

Farquhar's plays have many affinities with those of Vanbrugh. Like Lady Brute, the provoked wife of Vanbrugh's play, Mrs Sullen has grounds for infidelity. In the witty seduction scene of The Provoked Wife (1697) Constant remarks: ‘But since you are already disposed of beyond redemption, to one who does not know the value of the jewel you have put into his hands, I hope you would not think him greatly wronged, though it should sometimes be looked on by a friend who knows how to esteem it as he ought’ (The Provoked Wife, III,i, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 3, p. 604). This extends the clever play on language which earlier in the scene centred on monetary transactions whilst forwarding a seduction. Vanbrugh gives an added seriousness by intertwining the two central themes of the genre in a conversation which anticipates Archer's wooing of Mrs Sullen:

CONSTANT:
I hope you'll have so favourable an opinion of my understanding too, to believe the thing called virtue has worth enough with me, to pass for an eternal obligation where'er 'tis sacrificed.
LADY Brute:
It is, I think, so great a one, as nothing can repay.
CONSTANT:
Yes; the making the man you love your everlasting debtor.
LADY Brute:
When debtors once have borrowed all we have to lend, they are very apt to grow very shy of their creditors' company.
CONSTANT:
That, Madam, is only when they are forced to borrow of usurers, and not of a generous friend.

(Ibid, III,i, p. 603)

Through the clever extension of this image the audience is made as aware as the characters of the seriousness of the situation. Lady Brute is contemplating adultery and in this play there is no discussion of divorce. As in Farquhar's play, however, the consummation of the act is foiled, here by the machinations of Lady Fanciful, a more broadly comic and less dangerous intriguer than Marwood in The Way of the World, with whom she has a superficial affinity. The central issue of adultery is indeed never carried to a proper conclusion in this play, because the unmasking of Lady Fanciful and the marriage of Heartfree and Belinda distract attention from the more serious subject of the Brutes.

A similar avoidance of adultery on the part of the wronged wife occurs in The Relapse (1697), a drama which throws light on the mores of the late seventeenth century and notably on the different codes which distinguished the conduct of men from that of women. Amanda, married to Loveless, is tempted to have an affair with Worthy because of her husband's relapse into adultery. Unknown to her, his mistress is in fact her friend, Berinthia, who has encouraged Loveless's advances in order that Worthy, her ex-lover, may enjoy Amanda. The Loveless-Berinthia relationship is concluded with Loveless carrying Berinthia into the bedroom as she says, ‘very softly’, ‘Help, help, I'm ravish'd, ruin'd, undone. O Lord I shall never be able to bear it’ (The Relapse, IV,iii, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 3, p. 512). Manners dictate that she make a token resistance, no more; her complicity is taken for granted. A wife's infidelity is another matter, however, and Vanbrugh causes Amanda to refuse her lover at the last moment, but with such grace that he exclaims:

‘What but now was the wild flame of love,
Or (to dissect that specious term)
The vile, the gross desires of flesh and blood,
Is in a moment turned to adoration’.

(Ibid, V,iv, p. 542)

There is a more pointed contrast between the Loveless-Amanda-Berinthia-Worthy scheme and the completely separate plot which concerns the rivalry between Young Fashion and Lord Foppington for the hand of Hoyden. Here the monetary theme is in evidence—both are pursuing this awkward country girl solely for her inheritance. But Vanbrugh does not treat this subject with the seriousness accorded the sexual conspiracy. Instead we are presented with a farcical comedy of situation resolved by a convenient twist of fortune whereby Young Fashion—a role played by an actress, Mrs Kent, en travestie in the first production—gains the money from Fatgoose living.

The complete separation of the two plots in this play, written in 1696, further highlights the distinctive qualities of comedy of manners as distinct from romantic or sentimental comedy. In the city, which breeds the affected conduct of Lord Foppington and entangles Loveless as soon as he leaves his sheltered pastoral retreat, sophisticated intrigue characterizes the relationships of the lovers, and it is their plotting which determines the course of the action. As in Elizabethan romantic comedy, the story which centres on Hoyden reveals by contrast that mistaken identity and untimely arrivals place the outcome of events beyond the control of the characters and in the hands of a benevolent fate.

It is in the plays of Congreve that we find the ultimate refinement of those themes we have so far observed as characteristic features of the comedy of manners. His first play, The Old Bachelor (1693), reveals a mixture of styles, but it points forward to the uncompromising presentation of human conduct in The Way of the World (1700). This first play, like his most romantic and popular comedy Love for Love (1695), ends with a dance which, as in Shakespearian comedy, celebrates the forthcoming marriages. But the action which has preceded this conventional dénouement observes more Restoration standards of behaviour. Bellmour, who finally marries Belinda, has earlier in the play been disturbed in his seduction of Laetitia by her husband, the banker, Fondlewife. Laetitia was pursued initially by Bellmour's friend, Vainlove, who hands her over once he becomes more interested in Araminta. Bellmour's comment on this situation reveals (with an appropriately neat turn of phrase) the coolness of the amoral debauchee:

BELLMOUR:
Why, what a cormorant in love am I! who, not contented with the slavery of honourable love in one place, and the pleasure of enjoying some half a score mistresses of my own acquiring, must yet take Vainlove's business upon my hands, because it lay too heavy on his: so am not only forced to lie with other men's wives for 'em, but must also undertake the harder task of obliging their mistresses.

(The Old Bachelor, I,i, ed. Marshall, pp. 46-7)

Bellmour's interest in Belinda, however, stems from quite a different motive: money; and his remark to Vainlove later in the scene: ‘There's twelve thousand pounds, Tom—'Tis true she is excessively foppish and affected; but in my conscience I believe the baggage loves me’, reveals the arrogant assurance of the womanizer. He assures Belinda later: ‘courtship to marriage, is but the music in the playhouse till the curtain's drawn; but that once up, then opens the scene of pleasure’; but Belinda's response is more in tune with the play's overall tone and the cynical note of its dénouement: ‘Oh, foh! no; rather courtship to marriage, is as a very witty prologue to a very dull play’ (ibid, V,iv. p. 100).

The Way of the World, like the most complex and richest comedies of manners from Wycherley through to Pinter, is more concerned with the ‘play’ than the ‘prologue’, and The Old Bachelor further anticipates this mature comedy in its emphasis on the importance of relations established prior to the play's action as well as in its presentation of the higher stakes, money and matrimony, for which the characters are playing. The Double Dealer (1694) has further affinities with The Way of the World in its contrast between intriguers cunningly employing wit to outmanoeuvre their rivals and affected wits who waste their ingenuity on mere words. Maskwell is an ancestor of Fainall (the parts were both played by Betterton, just as the heroines Araminta, Cynthia, Angelica and Millamant were created by Mrs Bracegirdle whilst the roles of the more cunning and licentious women, Laetitia, Lady Touchwood, Mrs Frail and Marwood were written for Mrs Barry); the dramatis personae describes him as ‘a villain; pretended friend to Mellefont, gallant to Lady Touchwood, and in love with Cynthia’—which is a fair indication of Congreve's debt to Wycherley in combining and further extending the complexity of roles a character can assume. The final defeat of Maskwell, by an inferior in intelligence, his dupe Mellefont, contrasts with the astringent tone Congreve employs in The Way of the World. Maskwell's perceptive insight into human nature sets him above the other characters: in soliloquy he reflects (of Lady Touchwood):

Pox! I have lost all appetite to her; yet she's a fine woman, and I loved her once. But I don't know, since I have been in great measure kept by her, the case is altered; what was my pleasure is become my duty: and I have as little stomach to her now as if I were her husband … Pox on't! That a man can't drink without quenching his thirst.

(The Double Dealer, III,i, ed. Marshall, p. 157)

The cynicism here has an undeniable ring of truth and it is a mark of sentimentality and dishonesty, therefore, that Maskwell is finally outwitted. Cynthia's love for Mellefont is also unrealistic in her disregard for money, though Congreve reveals that his heroine demands wit as well as passion in her lover, when she says: ‘'tis but reasonable that since I consent to like a man without the vile consideration of money, he should give me a very evident demonstration of his wit; therefore let me see you undermine my Lady Touchwood, as you boasted …’ (ibid, IV,i, p. 170).

Such a challenge has a parallel in Angelica's testing of Valentine in Love for Love, a play which in its presentation of the way Mrs Frail and Tattle are trapped into marriage and in its characterization of Foresight harks back to Jonson again, whilst anticipating the dramas of the eighteenth century in the broader comedy arising both from Valentine's disguise of madness to cheat his surly father and the uncouth behaviour of Ben and Prue. It is in the scene between Prue and Tattle that Congreve plays his most subtly amusing variation on the theme of the town versus the country, where the confrontation of the affected wit and the ingenuous young girl throws metropolitan manners into sharply ironic relief:

PRUE:
Well; and how will you make love to me—Come, I long to have you begin;—Must I make love too? You must tell me how.
TATTLE:
You must let me speak Miss, you must not speak first; I must ask you questions, and you must answer.
PRUE:
What, is it like the catechism?—Come then ask me.
TATTLE:
D'ye think you can love me?
PRUE:
Yes.
TATTLE:
Pooh, pox, you must not say yes already; I shan't care a farthing for you then in a twinkling.
PRUE:
What must I say then?
TATTLE:
Why you must say no, or you believe not, or you can't tell.
PRUE:
Why, must I tell a lie then?
TATTLE:
Yes, if you would be well bred.

(Love for Love, II,i, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 3, p. 271)

The final exchange in the above conversation points up an attitude fundamental to comedy of manners, acting also as a relevant comment on the conduct of the characters in this play's very different sequel, The Way of the World. From the start it is clear that every person in this play is involved in a ruthless battle of wits in which the stakes are very high. Congreve emphasizes this later by furnishing us with specific details, notably in V,vi, where Fainall appears to have the upper hand entirely: he has control of Lady Wishfort's estate, the whole of his wife's fortune and Millamant's £6,000 share. His conduct is, as Lady Wishfort says, ‘most inhumanely savage’, but he is finally outwitted by Mirabell, his true match (as Mellefont is not Maskwell's), who gains wife, compliant mistress and fortune because he has ensured the servants' allegiance—by seeing that Foible marries Waitwell—and has persuaded Arabella to sign a deed of conveyance of her whole estate to him before marrying Fainall. At that time she was Mirabell's mistress: earlier in the play he points out unemotionally why he did not marry her:

MIRABELL:
Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions? To save that idol reputation. If the familiarities of our loves had produced that consequence, of which you were apprehensive, where could you have fixed a father's name with credit, but on a husband? I knew Fainall to be a man lavish of his morals, an interested and professing friend, a false and a designing lover; yet one whose wit and outward fair behaviour have gained a reputation with the Town, enough to make that woman stand excused, who has suffered herself to be won by his addresses. A better man ought not to have been sacrificed to the occasion; a worse had not answered the purpose.

(The Way of the World, II,i, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 4, p. 135)

The development of the plot depends throughout on the complexity of relationships which have a history stretching back long prior to the play's action. Fainall's quarrel with Marwood in Act II illustrates how the delicate balance of roles—husband, lover, friend, mistress, wife—is easily disturbed:

FAINALL:
'Twas for my ease to oversee and wilfully neglect the gross advances made him by my wife; that, by permitting her to be engaged, I might continue unsuspected in my pleasures; and take you oftener to my arms in full security. But could you think because the nodding husband would not wake, that e'er the watchful lover slept.

(Ibid, II,i, p. 132)

He suspects Marwood here because she has informed Lady Wishfort of Mirabell's true motive in pretending love to her:

FAINALL:
Your fame I have preserved. Your fortune has been bestowed as the prodigality of your love would have it, in pleasures which we both have shared. Yet had not you been false, I had e'er this repaid it—Tis true—Had you permitted Mirabell with Millamant to have stolen their marriage, my lady had been incensed beyond all measure of reconcilement: Millamant had forfeited the moeity of her fortune; which would then have descended to my wife,—And wherefore did I marry, but to make lawful prize of a rich widow's wealth, and squander it on love and you.

(Ibid, p. 134)

His logic is inexorable; from the start sexual and monetary motives are seen to be closely interrelated and, moreover, to determine entirely the development of the action.

The resolution of the plot is brought about according to very precise rules defined by documents and contracts. Fittingly, the proposal scene between Mirabell and Millamant has strong legal overtones as the two employ their wit to drive the best bargain. At the end of her list of requirements Millamant states: ‘These articles subscribed, if I continue to endure you a little longer, I may by degrees dwindle into a wife’, whilst Mirabell, after laying down his conditions, concludes: ‘These provisos admitted, in other things I may prove a tractable and complying husband’ (ibid, IV,i, pp. 169 and 171). The coolness of their tone should not deceive us into believing that their relationship is as empty as that of Arabella and Fainall: rather the intensity of the witty conflict is indicative of the depth of their emotional commitment and the fact that they are perfectly matched. This conversation, however, is preceded by a scene between Millamant and her provincial suitor, Sir Wilfull Witwoud, which, like the scene between Tattle and Prue, throws the question of style into a more ironic perspective. By contrast with Sir Wilfull's rough honesty Millamant's wit here seems affected and arrogant. She finds his conversation ‘rustic, ruder than gothic’ and adds ‘I nauseate walking; 'tis a country diversion, I loathe the country and everything that relates to it’. This reveals the complete dismissal of rural values by a skilful exponent of the manners of the town. But Mirabell and Millamant play by the rules these manners dictate, and it is the fine balance they maintain between emotion and reason which ensures their victory over the unfeeling Fainall, the jealous Marwood and the foolish Lady Wishfort whose longing for a ‘pastoral solitude’ is as false and empty as the affected manners of Witwoud and Petulant.

The proviso scene pre-eminently illustrates the interdependence of theatrical dialogue and the language of the civilized society of the day. Congreve dedicated the play to Ralph, Earl of Montague and admitted: ‘If it has happened in any part of this comedy, that I have gained a turn of style, or expression more correct, or at least more corrigible than in those which I have formerly written, I must with equal pride and gratitude ascribe it to the honour of your lordship's admitting me into your conversation, and that of a society where everybody else was so worthy of you, in your retirement last summer from the Town.’ (Jeffares, Vol. 4, p. 109.) His modesty here strongly echoes that of Dryden, who in his celebrated dedication of Marriage à la Mode to Rochester similarly maintained: ‘I am sure, if there by anything in this play, wherein I have raised myself beyond the ordinary lowness of my comedies, I ought wholly to acknowledge it to the favour of being admitted into your Lordship's conversation. And not only I, who pretend not to this way, but the best comic writers of our age, will join with me to acknowledge, that they have copied the gallantries of courts, the delicacy of expression, and the decencies of behaviour, from your Lordship, with more success, than if they had taken their models from the court of France.’ (John Dryden, Mermaid Series, ed. Saintsbury, Vol. 1, p. 229.)

The next two centuries saw very few performances of Congreve's plays. The vogue for sentimental comedy in the eighteenth century and the prudery of the Victorian age were equally hostile to the frank quality of his finest work. But when The Way of the World and The Old Bachelor were revived in the 1920s their refinement of witty dialogue was relished by a more sophisticated society, and they strike a chord again with our more cynical post-war generation. It is interesting to note in conclusion, however, that Congreve himself was so disillusioned by the poor reception of his play in 1700 that he gave up writing for the stage altogether. The times were changing, and both on account of its complex presentation of human relationships and its uncompromising attitudes to money, sex, friendship and marriage the play was disliked. It remains, however, our most complete and subtle comedy of manners, and a reminder that essentially this genre begins where Shakespeare and his contemporaries end: with marriage.

Bibliography

Wherever possible quotations from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century plays are taken from the four-volume Restoration Comedy, edited by A. Norman Jeffares (London and Totowa, New Jersey, 1974).

Plays not included in the above collection are referred to in the following: The Comedies of William Congreve, edited with an introduction by Norman Marshall (London, 1948); John Dryden, edited with an introduction and notes by George Saintsbury in the Mermaid Series, two volumes (London, n.d.); The Plays of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, edited with an introduction by Iolo A. Williams (London, 1926); William Wycherley, edited with an introduction and notes by A. C. Ward, in the Mermaid Series (London, n.d.).

Steele's The Tender Husband is in Bell's British Theatre, Vol. 8 (London, 1778); Bickerstaff's The Plain Dealer in Bell's British Theatre, Vol. 31 (London, 1796); [and] Garrick's The Country Girl is in the edition with remarks by Mrs Inchbald (London, 1806). …