George Colman (1732-1794)
[In the following excerpt, Bevis reviews Colman's comedic plays, concluding that while their literary merit is uneven, they are among the few dramas of the period to discuss important social questions.]
George Colman the Elder, youngest of the professional group, produced a body of comic work more substantial than Macklin's or Garrick's and more heterogeneous than Foote's, though he backed into the theater. Until 1764 Colman expected to be a leisured gentleman, but the early death of his uncle and patron, William Pulteney, Earl of Bath, disappointed his hopes of patronage and left him to seek his own livelihood. Since several of his plays had already been successful, he chose a theatrical profession; from 1767 until his death he was usually managing either Covent Garden or the Haymarket. It was when he became a professional that Colman's work began to exhibit its heterogeneity. Up to that juncture he had written three afterpieces and a mainpiece, all either spoofing sentiment or holding firmly to the laughing tradition; afterwards he wrote six mainpiece comedies mixing sentiment with laughter, three farces, and about a dozen illegitimi: burlettas, “preludes,” and the like. Prior to 1764 he resembled Foote or Murphy as a dramatist—a traditional farceur and satirist—but then he began to sound like Garrick: the careful compromiser, willing to purvey what the town wanted. This shift was the easier for him to make because, being less of a public figure than Garrick or Foote, he had not been called upon (nor was he inclined) to proclaim his dramatic aesthetics. Colman did not put himself forward as a critic until late, and the collection of his Prose on Several Occasions (1787) is a quiet commentary on theatrical fashions; it tells us little of his principles, except that he espoused “nature” and “variety.”1 In all likelihood Colman simply realized in 1764 that now he “must please to live.”
In 1760, when his first play was produced, no such exigency constrained him; he was a bright young lawyer, his expectations were reasonably great and the town was his oyster. If true stage comedy was languishing, that dearth might be supplied at the expense of its rivals by a man of talent. Thus Polly Honeycombe, “a dramatic novel in one act,” let off a spirited blast at the sentimental novel and, by implication, at its cousin the sentimental comedy. In the prologue Colman billed himself with a becoming lack of modesty as the new Cervantes, prepared to treat novels as the Spaniard had romances, while mounted on a steed of moral alarm:
And then so sentimental is the Stile,
So chaste, yet so bewitching all the while!
Plot, and elopement, passion, rape, and rapture,
The total sum of ev'ry dear—dear—Chapter.
'Tis not alone the Small-Talk and the Smart,
'Tis Novel most beguiles the Female Heart.
Miss reads—she melts—she sighs—Love steals upon her—
And then—Alas, poor Girl!—good night, poor Honour!
But this moralizing (repeated in the epilogue) is not an accurate description of what happens in the play. Polly does not lose her honor, only her suitor, and she is a more sympathetic and less ridiculous character than her descendant Lydia Languish. We are even forced to take her part against the representatives of the non-novel-reading world who oppress her: Mr. Ledger, her ‘Change-Alley beau, and old Honeycombe the heavy father, with his tag line, “Hark ye, hussy!” Colman seems unable to decide whether his heroine is more benighted or heroic. When she informs Ledger that he is “more tiresome than the multiplication-table,” and her father that “you would dispose of your daughter like a piece of merchandise,” we see her point. Yet we learn at the end that Polly is being hoodwinked by her other suitor, Scribble, who, like Beverly in The Rivals, observes all the romantic forms for the young lady's sake. If we were shown early in the play that Polly's propensity for sentimental fiction has made her an easy mark for the machinations of Scribble and his aunt (Polly's nurse), we would be more inclined to take the purported moral seriously. The novels themselves are played for laughs; their art furnishes the matter with which Polly confronts every crisis of her life. After she has dismissed Ledger, it is “Ha! Ha! Ha!—I have outtopped them all—Miss Howe, Narcissa, Clarinda, Polly Barnes, Sophy Willis, and all of them. None of them ever treated an odious fellow with half so much spirit.—This would make an excellent chapter in a new novel.—But here comes papa—in a violent passion, no doubt.—No matter—it will only furnish materials for the next chapter.” The conclusion, which leaves everyone dangling, is in the manner of Foote; the satire prevents the fulfillment of the comedy, so there are no winners. Unlike Foote, however, Colman leaves us in moral confusion. Are we to approve Honeycombe's diatribe against circulating libraries? True, novel-reading turned Polly's head, almost betrayed her to the clutches of a scoundrel, and broke up the match her parents had arranged. But would marriage to Ledger have been a comic ending? And would Polly have had the spirit to resist it without the examples of Clarissa Harlowe and Sophy Western? Even when all is out Polly finds Scribble the better suitor, as we do. Colman's light satire seems finally to touch everyone, and every position. Moral there is none.
The play was so successful that in 1761 Colman decided to attempt a full-length comedy, and aided by Garrick produced The Jealous Wife, an adaptation of Tom Jones with additions from The Spectator and Terence's The Brothers. Colman retained a good deal of the plot and spirit of Fielding's novel, but embellished it with characters of humors such as Sir Harry Beagle, Captian O'Cutter, and Mrs. Oakly, the titular heroine. Sir Harry combines Squire Western's love of venery with Blifil's role as the unwelcome rival suitor; evidently Colman felt that the character of Blifil was not suited to stage comedy. Captain O'Cutter provides maritime color along the lines of Ben in Love for Love, and is rather awkwardly made the agent of an important development when he delivers the wrong letter. Mrs. Oakly's jealousy is only a patina covering warm love for her husband, which he reciprocates. Excessive love is in fact the Oaklys' only real marital problem; it accounts for her jealousy and his lack of firmness. As Major Oakly tells his brother, “Mrs. Oakly would make you an excellent wife, if you did but know how to manage her.” The misunderstandings, éclaircissement, and reconciliation of the Oaklys make up the original half of the plot.
The rest is recognizably Tom Jones. Mr. Oakly corresponds to Fielding's Squire Allworthy, though he has a wife and a legitimate son, Charles (Tom), in love with Harriot Russet (Sophia). Disappointed in Charles and pressed by her father to marry Sir Harry Beagle, she flees to the dubious protection of her kinswoman Lady Trinket in London, whither she is pursued by her father, Beagle, Charles, and his parents. In the city, Harriot's honor is assaulted by Lord Trinket (Fellamar) and Lady Freelove (Bellaston), who cleverly turns Mrs. Oakly's jealousy against Harriot. Now the girl has no refuge. After Charles saves her from rape by Lord Trinket she runs to her father's lodgings, where she has to reject Beagle's importunities. Discouraged by this setback, Sir Harry now trades his rights over Harriot to Lord Trinket in exchange for a horse. Eventually Charles is allowed to take Harriot under his protection after a rather fulsome reform, the only sentimental scene in the play; Harriot exacts a much fuller measure of confession and contrition from him than Sophia ever did from Tom. When old Russet finally discovers Lord Trinket's designs he wearily awards the girl to Charles, Beagle retires happily to the saddle, and Lady Freelove and Lord Trinket withdraw with polite aristocratic noises. It only remains for Oakly to confront his wife, which he does; a renewal of their vows, and a pledge never to be jealous again, follow in due order.
We do not know how much or what kind of assistance Colman received on The Jealous Wife, but certain of its features are redolent of Garrick. Where Polly Honeycombe had opposed the sentimental novel and employed an original plot and characters, the mainpiece is derivative and admits some sentiment: the reform of Charles, and the generally mellow tone of the individual relationships and characterizations. Some compromise with sentiment was, however, expected in mainpieces, and the pathetic tendencies are kept in perspective by Lady Freelove's barbs: “Where's the difference between truths and untruths, if you do but stick close to the point?” The overall effect is that of an intrigue comedy in the laughing mode, with a genial atmosphere and one sentimental scene. Garrick's influence need not be doubted, yet, given the skill of Polly Honeycombe, Colman was clearly capable of writing most of the comedy himself.
The Musical Lady, a two-act farce of 1762, may afford some idea of how Garrick edited The Jealous Wife if, as Eugene Page claims, the farce consists of material cut from that comedy.2 The plot bears a close resemblance to Polly Honeycombe in that a penurious lover wins the lady by donning a disguise of affected manners to humor her foible. George Mask, a law-student, hopes to wed the pseudo-musical Sophy before his father comes to town. Aided by his friend Freeman's purse and his own amusing imitation of Italian musical fashions, he does achieve his conquest, but then his father arrives and disabuses Sophy concerning George, who readily admits the ruse. All three men join in a concerted attack on Sophy's foreign tastes; they finally laugh her into acceptance of plain British George and life in Merrie England. The strain of patriotic sentiment carries over into the epilogue:
For arts and arms a Briton is the thing!
John Bull was made to roar—but not to sing.
A few such notes aside, the play is a laughing farce of the “festive reform” type, with the musical lady as the humors character who leaves off her foibles. The well-sketched background and competent exposition of the first scene promise something higher than afterwards transpires; characters do not develop and some of the satire is silly.
Colman's best play of these years, a two-act farce called The Deuce Is in Him (1763), returns to the attack on sentiment. Taking the well-worn device of the lover who insists on testing his beloved—which had appeared in Ovid and Chaucer and would reappear in Sheridan—Colman turns it to ridicule. Colonel Tamper is the uneasy spirit who must make certain that Emily loves him for his essential self, so he feigns the loss of an eye and a leg. Colman associates this morbid restlessness with the sentimentalists: Emily describes her story as “quite a little novel,” and Colonel Tamper admits self-consciously, “There is an excess of sensibility in my temper [which] … must be assured that she will … retain her affection for me.” Major Belford remains a welcome voice of reason and the playwright's spokesman. “Most precious refinement, truly!” he exclaims to Tamper, “… picked up in one of your expeditions to the coast of France, I suppose.” (In the Advertisement Colman admits founding the piece on two of Marmontel's Contes moraux.) Belford has no more sympathy for Emily's talk of a “pure and disinterested passion” abstracted from person or fortune, and finally convinces her that passion may be rational. Together they maneuver Tamper into repentance and a request for forgiveness, no sooner asked than conventionally given. Deuce is interesting chiefly in that it shows how comfortably the afterpiece was now discharging the old comic functions.
Colman's only dramatic activity in the next two seasons was a moralized alteration of Philaster. He was chiefly occupied with his translation of Terence's comedies in blank verse, and the upheaval that the death of his patron represented for him.3 The “gentleman-in-training” woke up suddenly to find himself a bourgeois malgré lui. Hitherto he had been semi-dependent on the Earl of Bath; now he was a professional, fully dependent on the public, with all that implied for his work. It was a radical change of outlook: no wonder a concern with the relationship of the aristocracy to the bourgeois runs obsessively through five of his last six mainpiece comedies.
The first of these was The Clandestine Marriage (1766), another collaboration with Garrick, treated here because its class-consciousness is more typical of Colman. The earlier assumption that most of the work was Colman's has been challenged by Frederick L. Bergmann and more recently by Ann T. Straulman as mentioned earlier; she divides the credit about equally, attributing to Colman “the serious romantic aspect of the main plot,” the satirical details about social climbing, and the development of a substantial plot. Garrick is supposed to have created Lord Ogleby, polished the dialogue, and composed the riotous nocturne that concludes the action. A story attributed to Catherine Clive sounds rather like Garrick at work: that the piece was such a thing of the theater that actors' and actresses' names were used for the various characters as it grew.4 Whatever the truth about the respective shares, The Clandestine Marriage was certainly the most important play with which Colman was ever involved; Page calls it “the most representative comedy of its day” (p. 125).
In working up the story Colman may have drawn on James Townley's False Concord (1764, unpublished), a farcical short comedy now extant only in the Larpent Collection (ms 236), which tells how Miss Sedley and Miss Johnson contrive to avert miss Sedley's marriage with Lord Lavender, a senex amans, so that she can wed her cousin Raymond, whom she loves. They have the support of Mr. Sedley, but are opposed by the villainess, Mrs. Sedley, who is mad to have a title in the family and play the aristocrat: “Oh! I shall take a prodigious deal of pains to be easy—Then I will be near-sighted and rude, and know nobody.” Trimmer, the lawyer who stands to gain by the match, is naturally one of her party, but Miss Johnson defeats them both simply by announcing that Miss Sedley has eloped with Raymond. Though the information is false, Lord Lavender betrays his indifference by leaving for London without further ado. Mrs. Sedley, her eyes opened, accepts Raymond as a son-in-law, and a happy Mr. Sedley closes the play with a warning against “intermarriages” between trade and nobility:
'Tis linsey wolsey tack'd to satin,
False Concord!—as we say in Latin.
The Clandestine Marriage is less class-conscious than this, and its tension is not as great because the young lovers are safely married throughout, but otherwise the plots are roughly parallel. Fanny Sterling has been secretly married for four months to Lovewell, her father's clerk, and is pregnant. They have hesitated to reveal the match to her mercenary father, but now that Sir John Melvil and Lord Ogleby are arriving for the marriage of Sir John to Miss Sterling, Fanny's older sister, there is light at the end of the tunnel: Ogleby is a relation of the timid Lovewell, who hopes to secure his approval and protection. Before he can say anything, however, both of the visiting nobleman fall in love with Fanny, confess their feelings to her and open negotiations with her father. Mr. Sterling would do anything for money, and when Sir John offers to reduce the dowry by thirty thousand pounds if he can switch daughters, the consent of the crass tradesman is assured. But Miss Sterling and her rich Aunt Heidelberg veto the change and impugn Fanny's character. The couple's wishy-washiness about revealing their condition, while sometimes comical, prolongs the action painfully. At last Miss Sterling thinks she hears Sir John in Fanny's room one night, preparing to elope, and she rouses the house, but in the ensuing melee the visitor proves to be, of course, Lovewell, and the secret is out. Lord Ogleby surprisingly comes to his kinsman's defence and convinces Sterling to accept the couple, though Sir John quite rightly tells Lovewell that he could have spared himself a great deal of anguish by confessing earlier.
This last remark goes to the heart of the main critical dispute about the comedy. Ernest Bernbaum called it a “surrender to the popular taste,” which he took to be sentimentalism. (p. 218). Eugene Page takes the more moderate view that the play was “a compromise between the old and the new” (p. 112), a delta of the tributary modes (p. 125). I would go further and call it, on balance, a laughing comedy. Bernbaum found The Clandestine Marriage “sentimental in its main plot and chief characters” (p. 218), meaning Lovewell and Fanny, but he seems not to have noticed what the authors were doing with them. The theme is the familiar one of false delicacy: the distresses of the lovers, which arise ostensibly from their precarious financial position, in practice result from their silly conversational fumbling and blundering, and thus become comical, even farcical. Fanny's languishings before Lord Ogleby, intended to dishearten him, come across as coyly encouraging, drawing out her distress and making a difficult task more so. And if we sometimes sympathize with her, we can only laugh at her husband's feebleness; his interview with Lord Ogleby is a tissue of double-entendres, mistaken meanings and untruths. The couple's reticence even allows Sir John to believe he still has a chance. By the end of act 4 Fanny has two suitors, a husband, and four-ninths of a baby. As in False Delicacy and The Guardian, satire upon sentimental reticence is inherent in the plot, but nowhere in eighteenth-century comedy are two sentimental lovers made to look more ridiculous; sentimental becomes here a synonym for ineffectual. Sterling, the bourgeois gentilhomme and archetypal blocking figure; the senile rake, Lord Ogleby; Mrs. Heidelberg's mispronunciations; the legal humor of Flower; and Betty, the amusingly scatterbrained maid, provide further links to traditional comedy.
The modern reputation of The Clandestine Marriage is respectable enough to place it in the occasional anthology as “typical” of the period, but no one has ever accused it of profundity. It is rather a decent piece of social art, dramatizing a wealth of historical information about Georgian bourgeois, especially how they viewed themselves and the classes above them. Sterling is especially interesting as the representative of city money, set deliberately against the titled folk from the other end of town. His soliloquy on social fortunes (iii.i) is an essay in sociological analysis, and it is a fine touch of character that he attributes Sir John's shift of affections to fickleness and indifference to money rather than to love (iii.ii). His daughter Miss Sterling is not ashamed to aspire higher than the title of “cit's wife,” and even Fanny is not oblivious to money. At times the play seems less an outgrowth of False Concord than a parody of The London Merchant, and it is probably here that we see Colman's hand. The aesthetic side of social art is the generally competent standard of dramaturgy. In act 1, for example, the first exclamations of the play smoothly explain the fact of the title, and at the end of the act the remarks of Lovewell and Miss Sterling communicate very neatly the idea that Sir John's passion is for Fanny. Lapses do occur—as when Lovewell begins telling Fanny what she already knows—but they are exceptions to the rule. Not the least of the play's accomplishments is the way it circumvents the eighteenth-century ban on risqué scenes. At the opening of act 5 Lovewell is in Fanny's bedroom at night, and sex is just under the surface. But it is a safe titillation, or at least a lawful one, for they are husband and wife, though they meet as clandestine lovers. This shrewd piece of evasion, now thought to be Garrick's work, has no counterpart in False Concord.
Although Eugene Page describes The English Merchant (1767) as “by far Colman's most sentimental comedy,” he notes that the changes Colman made in Voltaire's L'Écossaise, his source, tended to augment the elements of straight comedy in it (p. 131). These do not amount to much. Only the ridiculous characters of Spatter and Lady Alton, who are ejected, at all lighten the serious atmosphere of troubles and benevolence created by the emphasis on reunion and sententious reform. Amelia is an allegory of Virtue in Distess, Lord Falbridge of Insulting Wealth Reformed. Sir William is tearfully reunited with his daughter in the centerpiece of act 3. And Freeport, the unusual merchant-benevolist—eccentric, forthright, and above social custom—is given a translation of Terence's famous sentiment to mouth: “I am a man myself; and am bound to be a friend to all mankind” (homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto). The English Merchant seems an instance of “cross-Channel feedback”: the sentimental idea, which had crossed to France from England earlier in the century and had struck sympathetic vibrations there, was now returning so amplified that many Englishmen did not recognize it, and, like Colman, ascribed it to Gallic extravagance.
The Oxonian in Town (1767) is a strange afterpiece, laughing but not traditional. One Oxonian in town on a spree (Knowell) finds another (Careless) endangered by a gang scheming to ruin him at cards and marry him off to a whore. He saves Careless by insinuating himself into the confidence of the gamblers and forcing the woman, by threat of arrest, to change sides and turn state's evidence. His reward is Careless' sister. The mildly didactic attitude to gaming and the sympathetic treatment of Lucy the whore are strangely juxtaposed with full-blooded and licentious scenes at the card tables among the ladies of pleasure. The play reads badly, especially the gibbering merriment of Careless and the moral tag by Lucy, but may have staged better; it was Colman's first independent original work since Polly Honeycombe, and he seems unsure what he wants to do with his independence.
Colman's efforts for the next several years were diffuse and mostly insubstantial. In 1768 he altered King Lear less unacceptably than his predecessors, and produced Goldsmith's The Good-Natured Man at Covent Garden, but also began increasing the proportion of operas and pantomimes in his repertoire. His Man and Wife, or, The Shakespeare Jubilee (1769), attempts to capitalize on the Stratford fiasco and its profitable sequel: Garrick's procession of Shakespearean characters at Drury Lane. The plot is a harlequinade of disguises, “business” and deceptions, set against the frenzied background of the Jubilee. Colonel Frankly and Charlotte are the lovers who require uniting; they are opposed by her two rival suitors and two quarrelsome parents, Mr. and Mrs. “Cross,” the title-couple. The four feuders offset each other, negating their own opposition, and the lovers find their way to marriage. In act 3, after a “pageant of Shakespearean Characters,” confusion arises over who is to meet whom in a purple domino—one can imagine Danny Kaye making a good job of this—and the action becomes a smoke-screen of masks, cross-purposes, and counter-intelligence. At the end both suitors and parents, pleased that their rivals have been checked, join in accepting the match, and Mr. Cross points the badly needed moral: a family must maintain its unity. Set against Colman's earlier plays, Man and Wife suggests a deterioration, yet it was another five years before he wrote anything else even as legitimate as this. The interval was given mostly to writing and producing burlettas such as The Portrait and spectacles such as Mother Shipton (both 1770), although Colman did stage She Stoops to Conquer in 1773.
The Man of Business (1774), Colman's first mainpiece in seven years, almost defies generic labels; it is a “comedy” only insofar as it ends happily for the principals. A few passing touches of sentiment come to nothing, and the theme of reform loses itself in a welter of financial dealings during the last act, leaving a residue of fiscal responsibility and bourgeois ethics. Colman evidently wanted to resume the discussions of social class problems he had begun in The Clandestine Marriage and continued in The English Merchant, but more directly this time, without the interference of farce or sentiment or “character.” The plot centers on the misadventures of Beverley. This young middle-class man of affairs has taken to mixing with aristocrats, a development viewed with alarm by his mentor Fable: “What has a man of business to do with men of pleasure? Why is a young banker to live with young noblemen?” It is The London Merchant revisited, with Beverley as George Barnwell, and Fable (“Regularity and punctuality are the life of business”) as Thorowgood. But Fable also suggests Freeport, the English merchant-benevolist: he stages a fictional “ruin” of “the House” to frighten Beverley into mending his ways, and later, when the counterfeit ruin becomes real in act 4, involves himself in dubious business ethics in order to extricate his protégé. The conclusion thus vindicates Fable as much as it does Beverley, who is given the boss's daughter as a reward for returning to the straight and narrow. For all its shortcomings as entertainment, the play radiates a genuine concern with the real-life problems of the bourgeois element in the audience, making it finally more a drama than a comedy.5
The Spleen; or, Islington Spa (1776, produced at Drury Lane) is a light farce that employs familiar devices to satirize the new suburban spa at Islington and its attendant quacks and hypochondriacs. The plot in part suggests The Clandestine Marriage: Merton, a gentleman of slight fortune, has secretly married Eliza Rubrick, and is looking for a propitious moment to announce how matters stand. Unfortunately her parents intend her for old D'Oyley, a retired businessman much addicted to vague diseases and new remedies. A group of bright young people leagued with Merton, chiefly his cousin Laetitia, bring off a scheme to cure D'Oyley of his foible, slander Eliza, and thus induce him to renounce her; he even bribes Merton to take the girl off his hands. The young man then announces the marriage to the pleasure of all except D'Oyley, who vows to leave off his follies. What with young love and old obstacles, manipulation by wit, ridicule, and saturnalia, the play could hardly be more traditional, and it is, significantly, an afterpiece, Colman's last in the comic genre. However experimental his mainpieces became, Colman kept his afterpieces within the laughing tradition. As the prologue to The Oxonian in Town put it: five acts for sentiment, two for us.
Colman's last comedies were all mainpieces. The first was The Spanish Barber; or The Fruitless Precaution (Larpent ms 436, 1777), which, as the name suggests, was adapted from Beaumarchais's Le Barbier de Seville, then popular at Paris. Colman's story, which follows its well-known source too closely to need recitation, belongs to the Spanish intrigue genre; the venerable character-types include young lovers, a senex amans and a witty servant. Through Lazarillo, the rogue-servant-barber-doctor, it is also recognizably related to picaresque fiction, while the disguises, ladders, dropped letters, and secret visits of the lovers' intrigues add the pleasures of pantomime to this hodge-podge (as Macklin had observed of The Suspicious Husband forty years earlier). For good measure it also wears the hat of musical comedy, by virtue of several songs.
Neither The Spanish Barber nor Colman's two subsequent comedies were published; as summer fare at the Haymarket they were not taken too seriously by anyone. Yet The Suicide (Larpent ms 450, 1778) is a serious play, almost a drame. Everything about it is unusual, from its length—four acts—to its particular combination of laughing, sentimental, and problem comedy. Colman touches the reform motif, the “good hearts” aspect, and the fake suicide lightly, while a romantic love match, humor characters, wide-ranging satire and exposure of imposters relate the play to the comic genre. The “suicide” is Tobine, the profligate son of a deceased mercer, and at present partner in the business with Tabby, a cheerless bourgeois. Tobine, however, represents the antithesis of all Tabby's mercantile values, and he is rapidly coming to the end of his rake's progress: money is running out, he has given up his beloved Nancy Lovell because of his unworthiness, and now contemplates suicide. It seems he would rather give up life than pleasure, though his version is that he would rather not hurt anyone else by his prodigality. In a desperate attempt to save him, Nancy has donned men's clothes and become his boon companion “Dick Rattle”; together they drink and duel. Tobine keeps asking for poison, so Nancy obtains a painful but ultimately harmless cordial that she represents as the real item. In the strange scene at the end of act 3 they stage a ritual suicide in a tavern, with Tobine adapting speeches from Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet as he sinks. The unpleasantness of the potion and the opportunity for reflection make Tobine heartily wish for life again, and when he awakes he is amenable to reason and persuasion. Nancy, again a woman, confesses all and puts herself at his disposal. Tobine does not dwell on his previously expressed desire to reform, but we are left to assume that he will do so, and be reclaimed by Nancy and her fortune.
Colman's refusal to sentimentalize this action is notable. He pulls no punches on the reactions of Tobine's friends to his suicide; they worry about the unfavorable publicity, their own futures, the reputation of the inn where he “died.” Tabby is huffy: no decent “cit” commits suicide. That is a vice of west end aristocrats (Dr. Truby has earlier made the point that Tobine's raking is understandable as aristocratic behavior, but pretentious folly in a merchant). In two respects the writing is strongly reminiscent of another tough-minded dramatist, Charles Macklin. The first scene, of a London household beginning to stir as Tobine and company return from a revel at dawn, is as convincingly lifelike as any of Macklin's efforts at verisimilitude. And for an eighteenth-century dramatic precedent to the dark humor of the suicide, which has numerous echoes in modern literature, one would have to go to Macklin's A Will and No Will. It is a bold stroke to allow Nancy, a lost sheep from Elizabethan romance, into this world, but Colman brings it off remarkably well. The Suicide is Colman's most impressive play after The Clandestine Marriage, and on his own.6
Separate Maintenance (Larpent ms 490, 1779), a somewhat brutal four-act comedy of London manners, is another instance of new wine in old bottles, though neither as original nor as successful artistically as The Suicide. But Colman's last original comedy is an interesting application of traditional comic devices to current social foibles, here (principally) the practice of “separate maintenance” for modish wives in London society. In this case the separation is absurd, for Lord and Lady Newberry love each other; they are victims of fashion, pride, and the machinations of Milord's “friend” Leveret, who has designs on Lady Newberry. Lord Newberry is vaguely aware of the scheme, but such trifles are supposed to present no problem between men of this world; as Leveret remarks to him, “No conversation, except criminal conversation, is worthy the attention of people of quality.” A reaction to all this is gathering: neither of the principals is happy with the arrangement, and Milady's parents, the rusticated Oldcastles, are in town, alarmed by rumors of divorce and railing against modern times (most of the worthier characters in the play join them in condemning the excesses of the present debased age, and agree that England is not what it used to be). In the finale Lady Newberry and Miss English, her sister, wrap Leveret in swaddling clothes, lay him on a sofa between them, and tease him for the amusement of the assembled company, which includes Lord Newberry. Seeing his wife's honor, his love and better nature are stirred; he asks a reconciliation and is quickly accepted. The comic spirit is triumphant, and the ridiculous Leveret slinks off after his denouement. The strength of Separate Maintenance is its scenes of routs, balls, and intrigues, which are well drawn and rife with topical satire.
Colman's career leaves in its wake a number of problems and loose ends. Like his early mentor Garrick, he was strongly inclined to collaboration and borrowing; only three or four of his thirteen comedies are genuinely original. In the prologue to The Man of Business an angry dramatist charges Colman with having plagiarized from six authors in his play, and in the dedication Colman freely admits to four. The epilogue to the same play purports to settle the dispute by defining “invention” as “retailing from a wealthy hoard / The Thoughts which observation long has stor'd, / Combining images with lucky hit, / Which sense and education first admit,” but obviously does not address itself to the substance of the question seriously enough to be of value. An adequate answer would contain at least two parts: one admitting that Colman, no less than many other Augustans and Georgians, made a merit of creative and moderate eclecticism in the arts; the other pointing out that on occasion (e.g., Polly Honeycombe, The Suicide) Colman showed himself capable of conceptions as original as any of his contemporaries', though this inventive power, whether from innate weakness or disinterest, was seldom displayed. Three more lines from the epilogue to The Man of Business summarize Colman's defence of his position: “Who, borrowing little from the common store, / Mends what he takes, and from his own adds more, / He is original.” Few would dissent, but then the matter would never have been raised if Colman had always adhered to this principle in practice.
Colman also resembles Garrick in his mixture of styles and genres; in this respect both may be distinguished from Macklin and especially Foote. Colman wrote sentimental comedy (The English Merchant), satire on sentiment (Polly Honeycombe), and plays in which laughter and sentiment are mixed (The Clandestine Marriage). In the 1770s he composed dramas that ended happily without being quite comedies. He wrote and defended legitimate drama, yet half his plays were cast in “illegitimate” molds. Like Sprightly in New Brooms! Colman held “regular Tragedy and Comedy” to be “the main body of the stage entertainments,” but he also shared Crochet's opinion that ordinary plays “will never be able to make a stand against opera and pantomime” unless enlivened by music, dance, and scenery. Pure drama could no longer pay for itself, therefore (Sprightly again) “Opera and Pantomime,” “Show and sing-song” must be admitted “as garnish.” And if a manager were going to produce “garnish,” it would be prudish to refuse to write it as well.
The social theme in Colman is likewise inconsistent, the only apparent pattern being a gradual drift from positive to negative statements. The Clandestine Marriage presents two rather attractive aristocrats while the bourgeois are either weak or servile or grasping, but The English Merchant and The Man of Business portray merchants favorably. The Suicide is negative about the characteristics of both classes, and Separate Maintenance castigates upper-class vices without providing any alternative. Thus Colman seems finally to give up and leave the question nearly where he found it. But though he produced no position paper, his concern with the class question is evident, and it must be acknowledged that he was one of the very few Georgian dramatists to bring onstage problems of real social importance and treat them seriously. That service, on the eve of the Revolution, deserves equal billing with his role as an occasional retainer of the laughing tradition in comedy.
Notes
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See the essay from The Gentleman, no. 6 (Dec. 1775) in Prose, 1:208-10.
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Colman, p. 85.
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Page believes that the translation of Terence caused Colman to change direction towards the sentimental (Colman, pp. 106-7); I think that Pulteney's death was the more important event, and that Colman's later mainpieces moved away from sentiment.
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Percy Fitzgerald, The Life of Mrs. Catherine Clive (London: A. Reader, 1888), p. 68.
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Keenan's “Poetic of High Georgian Comedy” argues that Colman in fact achieved the drame.
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The Suicide has been edited, along with The Separate Maintenance, by Ross Grossman. See “Two Unpublished Comedies by George Colman the Elder,” Ph.D. dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1976.
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