[In the essays below, Holland analyzes the plot, main characters, themes, and structure of each of Etherege's comedies in an effort to trace his artistic maturation.]

THE COMICAL REVENGE; OR, LOVE IN A TUB

By March 1664 the theaters had been open for well over four years following the so-called dramatic interregnum. Yet scarcely a half-dozen new comedies had emerged to interrupt the revivals of Fletcher, Shakespeare, and Jonson that filled the stages, and none of these had caught the fancy of Restoration audiences enough to set a new style. There survived only Dryden's device of witty lovers from The Wild Gallant (February 1663), probably suggested by Nell Gwyn and her then lover, Charles Hart, of the Theatre Royal. The first new comedy to provoke real imitation was Sir George Etherege's The Comical Revenge.

Of Etherege the man, little is known. A gay, handsome individual, who spoiled his looks with drinking, he was a wit of the court circle who turned his hand to playwriting as a gentlemanly thing to do and wrote no more than the gentlemanly number of three plays. James II appointed him envoy to the Diet in Ratisbon, where he misbehaved in a gentlemanly manner, complained of Lady Etherege (apparently a shrew whom he had married for money), and found solace with a young comedienne stranded in the Low Countries. After the Glorious Revolution, he was, of course, replaced. He cast his lot with the Stuarts, went to France, and apparently never returned to England. He died in the early nineties; neither the date nor the place are known. Although to modern eyes his first play looks anything but promising, “The clean and well performance of this Comedy,” wrote the prompter, John Downes, “got the Company more reputation and profit than any preceding Comedy; the Company taking in a month's time at it 1000£.”¹

The Comical Revenge has three plots, high, low, and middle. The high plot, in neat couplets and even neater patterns of love, honor, and confidants, follows the crossed loves of Lord Beaufort and Colonel Bruce for Graciana, and the unrequited love of Graciana's sister, Aurelia, for Bruce. In the middle plot, Sir Frederick Frollick, Beaufort's cousin, lackadaisically pursues the Widow Rich, Graciana and Aurelia's aunt. The low plot shows Wheadle, a rogue acquaintance of Sir Frederick's, and Palmer, a card-sharper, swindling a Cromwellian knight named Sir Nicholas Cully. In the incident—one cannot call it a plot—that gives the play its title, Betty, the widow's maid, lures and locks Sir Frederick's valet, the Frenchman Dufoy, into a tub. (A sweating-tub was the usual seventeenth-century remedy for Dufoy's “French disease.”)

Most commentators on this play dismiss the heroics of the high plot as irrelevant—“obviously out of the picture,” or “out of keeping with the rest of the play.” “We turn from one to the other,” says one critic of a similarly bifurcated play, “as a music-hall audience will welcome the alternation of bawdry and sentiment.”² More important, however, is the fact that the high heroic drama and the low farce interact, each making the other more meaningful. “The clash,” Mr. Empson notes of Dryden's similarly hybrid Marriage à la Mode, “makes both conventions less unreal; … it has a more searching effect, almost like parody, by making us see they are unreal.”³ Certainly the high plot is not the main plot, as many writers seem to think. On the contrary, more than twice as many scenes and two and a half times as many lines are given to the low plots as to the romantic, heroic plot. The play opens and closes with Sir Frederick.⁴

The high plot of The Comical Revenge idealizes and exaggerates in pure heroic style. The story concerns Cavalier bravery and romance. Both Lord Beaufort and Colonel Bruce love Graciana, while Graciana's sister Aurelia loves Colonel Bruce. The colonel returns from imprisonment by the Roundheads to find Graciana in love with Beaufort. He therefore challenges Beaufort; on the field, these gallant enemies unite to drive off some treacherous Cromwellian assassins pursuing Bruce and then return to their fight. Beaufort wins the duel but spares the colonel's life. The colonel, then, despairing of Graciana, falls on his sword and the doctor pronounces him certain to die. Graciana decides she ought to be in love with Colonel Bruce and therefore spurns Beaufort, who despairs. Meanwhile Aurelia reveals her love for Bruce and he reciprocates, at which point “the wound / By abler Chyr'gions is not mortal found,” and confessions match the proper pairs.

It is somewhat puzzling that a man of “easie” George Etherege's urbanity could write this sort of thing. Etherege was a comic writer, and nothing could be farther from the multiple perspectives of comedy than the single-minded admiration of the heroic manner. Possibly, as I suggested in the preceding chapter, Etherege and his friends found the heroic manner funny in and of itself. But whether they did or not, Etherege plays the high plot of The Comical Revenge off against the lower plots to develop Sir Frederick Frollick's role as a realistic but golden mean.

Frollick, being somewhat of a roisterer, beats up the widow's quarters with a drunken serenade by way of showing his affection; she puts him off, however. He acts as second for Beaufort in the high-plot duel, and has himself carried in as though dead to make the widow reveal her love, but she sees through his ruse in time. He then pretends to be arrested for a debt and the widow pays it, thus committing herself. After much verbal play and pretended indifference, Sir Frederick and the widow are finally matched. As a ludicrous parallel to their courtship, Betty, the widow's maid, locks the neck of Sir Frederick's valet into a great tub, which Dufoy must then carry about with him like a snail's shell.

Strange as it may seem, Sir Frederick is the one breath of common sense in the high plot, as, for example, when, after Colonel Bruce has fallen on his sword, he prevents Bruce's second from doing the same so as to complete the stylized heroic pattern. Sir Frederick says simply, “The Frollick's not to go round, as I take it” (55).⁵ “I mistrust your Mistresses Divinity,” he answers to one of Beaufort's exalted love-speeches. “You'l find her Attributes but Mortal: Women, like Juglers Tricks, appear Miracles to the ignorant; but in themselves th'are meer cheats” (7). “What news from the God of Love?” he cries to Beaufort's servant, “he's always at your Master's elbow, h'as jostl'd the Devil out of service; no more! Mrs. Grace! Poor Girl, Mrs. Graciana has flung a squib into his bosome, where the wild-fire will huzzéé for a time, and then crack; it fly's out at's Breeches” (3). The hint that Beaufort knew the wench Grace somewhat better than his high-flown heroics warrant (see also 7) and these various contrasts—physical sex as opposed to spiritual love, the devil as opposed to the god of love, firecrackers as opposed to the flames of love, Grace the wench as opposed to Graciana the heroine—run throughout the play and make up the antiheroic humor.

Sir Frederick is also the one who straightens out the complexities of the low plot. Wheadle, an acquaintance of Frollick's, and Palmer, another crony, disguised as a sheep-farmer, cheat Sir Nicholas Cully at cards. Cully refuses to pay his losses, and Palmer challenges him. In the field, Cully's cowardice forces him to sign a judgment for the amount. Wheadle, at this point, promises to mend his fortunes by introducing him to the Widow Rich (actually Wheadle's mistress Grace in disguise). Cully, however, blunders in on the real Widow Rich, roaring like Sir Frederick. The real Sir Frederick rescues both her and Sir Nicholas by blackmailing the sharpers out of the debt and into marrying: Wheadle to Grace, and Palmer—and Sir Nicholas—to his own ex-mistresses.

Just as Sir Frederick is contrasted by his common sense and earthiness to Beaufort, his counterpart in the high plot, he is, as an urbane, brave, amorous Cavalier, the opposite of the countrified, Cromwellian knight Cully, the fake Frollick of the low plot. Just as Sir Frederick wittily reveals the unreality of the high plot with his skepticism, he brings to the intrigues of the low characters a semblance of honor and mercy. “'Tis fit this Rascal shou'd be cheated; but these Rogues will deal too unmercifully with him: I'le take compassion upon him, and use him more favourably my self” (73), he says, as he decides to marry Cully off to his ex-mistress. The fact that it is Sir Frederick who puts Cully in his place, Professor Underwood points out, establishes a sense of “degree” between “hero and dupe, wit and fool, gentleman and fop.” The applicability of the word “degree” here shows how this typical trick of Restoration comedy relates to traditional medieval and Renaissance values.⁶

Even so, lest Sir Frederick be taken too seriously, there is always his own ludicrous counterpart, Dufoy, who puts a comic perspective on even the golden mean. Not all the antiheroic contrasts are channeled through Sir Frederick, moreover. Palmer ironically pretends to be a virtuous Loyalist like Colonel Bruce (32), and Wheadle compares the dueling-field to a sheep-field (29). Palmer can speak the heroic cant of the high plot as he complains of his lack of business:

I protest I had rather still be vicious
Then Owe my Virtue to Necessity.

(9)

The widow (who “must needs have furious flames,” 16) is a comic compromise between the virginal heroines of the high plot and the wenches of the low—a woman sexually experienced, but not immorally so. High and low scenes are contrasted individually: III. v, the cowardly duel, to III. vi et seqq., the honorable duel; the incident of a letter supplies a bridge between low I. iii and heroic I. iv; the mention of love-wounds brings the audience from Aurelia's unrequited worship in I. iv to Dufoy's syphilis in II. i.

As all this talk of wounds suggests, the whole play is a set of variations on the theme of hostility. Sir Frederick's debauches set the keynote; as described in the opening scene they consist of brawls with watchmen and constables, “beating up” a lady's quarters, breaking windows, and the like. Counterattacks take place in the morning: “De divil také mé,” announces Dufoy in his French dialect, “if daré be not de whole Regiment Army de Hackené Cocheman, de Linke-boy, de Fydler, and de Shamber-maydé, dat havé beseegé de howsé” (3). Love, in particular, is compared over and over to fighting. In the high plot, the metaphor takes the form of a stale Petrarchanism—the victory of the mistress' eyes over the lover (17, 34, 46, 56, 57, 63). “Beauty's but an offensive dart; / It is no Armour for the heart” (76). In the low and middle plots, however, the metaphor becomes an anti-ideal, a reference to the sexual duel: “I have not fenc'd of late,” says Sir Frederick, “unless it were with my Widows Maids; and they are e'en too hard for me at my own weapon” (47). Grace, when she is trapping Sir Nicholas, must “lye at a little opener ward” (78). Sir Frederick mocks the convention when he raids the widow's home in the middle of the night: “Alas, what pains I take thus to unclose / Those pretty eye-lids which lock'd up my Foes!” (31). In the high plot, love is the heart-wound inflicted by the mistress' conquering eyes (63, 64), but Dufoy's wound is far more realistic. He expains it in a dialogue with Beaufort's servant:

DUFOY.
… it be de voundé dat my Metresse did give me long agoe.
CLARK.
What? some pretty little English Lady's crept into your heart?
DUF.
No, but damn'd little English Whore is creepé into my bone begar.

(14)

This colloquy is immediately preceded by a soliloquy in the high plot in which Aurelia mourns the wounds Bruce has inflicted on her heart (13), wounds she later refers to as her “disease” (22).

Hostility exists not just between lovers: love itself and all passions are essentially hostile influences, flaming arrows (63) or flames (46) that burn and torture the heart (63). Passions assault (19); they raise a tempest in the mind (44) that tosses and tumbles the individual until difficulties are resolved and love reaches its expression in marriage:

Thus mariners rejoyce when winds decrease,
And falling waves seem wearied into Peace.

(82)

Nor is dueling the only metaphor in the lower plots for the hostilities associated with love. Sir Frederick describes his courtship of the widow as fishing (8) and the sharpers in the low plot use exactly the same metaphor for their swindle (11), and refer to it also as trapping (9, 78). The ideas of tricking and courtship are linked again when Sir Frederick disguises fiddlers as bailiffs and tricks the widow into bailing him out thereby swindling her: “Nay, I know th'art spiteful,” he laughs, “and wou'dst fain marry me in revenge; but so long as I have these Guardian Angels about me, I defie thee and all thy Charms: Do skilful Faulkners thus reward their Hawks before they fly the Quarry?” (82). (The pun on “angels” as coins is only one of many parodies of the religious imagery in the high plot.) Instead of revenge taking the form of a duel, as in the high plots, in the middle plot the widow retains her estate when Sir Frederick marries her for it; that is one “comical revenge” (Epilogue) and Betty's locking Dufoy into a tub is another.

With marrying for money in mind, Etherege supplies his characters with gambling, as well as swindling, as a metaphor for courtship and marriage. “Do you imagine me so foolish as your self,” the widow asks of Sir Frederick, referring to the money of which he has cheated her, “who often venture all at play, to recover one inconsiderable parcel?” (83) Sir Frederick's debt is a parody of the obligations (“debts,” 64, 65, 77, 85) of love and honor in the high plot. Just as Beaufort can speak of his “claim” or “title” to Graciana (45), so Wheadle can call his illicit relationship with Grace, making “bold, like a young Heir, with his Estate, before it come into his hands” (80). This “conversion downward” of abstractions to matter, of people to things—Sir Frederick's former mistresses to furniture (84) or old gowns (85), the soul to body (42), reputation to a possession (5), and the like—becomes a major component of the antiheroic jokes of Restoration comedy, a metaphorical form of hostility.

Love, in the high plot, is divine, a kind of religious devotion to the loved one (45), directed by the god of love (12, 45, 81), for passion is too much for mere mortals to control (43). By contrast to this febrile neoplatonism, the low plot takes place in the “Devil” inn (10), using the “Devil's bones” (27), i.e., dice. The “hell” of the low plot is dramatized as complete pretense. One disguise follows another and the basest motives are tricked out as love, friendship, or honor. The high plot lacks any pretense. Every emotion is on the surface, to be talked about, analyzed, displayed. It is as though Etherege were trying “to express the motions of the spirits, and the affections or passions whose center is the heart,” trying “in a word, to make the soul visible.” (These phrases come from a treatise on painting that Dryden translated for its insights into poetry.)⁷ In the high plot, there is no body; the fact that “the Parenchyma of the right lobe of the lungs, near some large branch of the Aspera arteria, is perforated” must never intrude upon “Those flames my tortur'd breast did long conceal” (63). As opposed to the low plot, the heroics are only a different kind of incompleteness.

Between this bodiless heaven and soulless hell stands Sir Frederick Frollick, complete because he partakes of both sides. He cuts through the pretenses of both high and low, but is in turn capable of both kinds of conduct, honorable dueling or drunken battles with constables and bailiffs, which are called his “Heroick actions” (6).

Thus, an elaborate set of contrasts and parallels establishes the somewhat doubtful merits of Sir Frederick Frollick as a golden mean and casts a comic perspective on the doings of all the characters, both high and low. There are the parallel duels, one the paragon of honor, the other of dishonor. There are the parallel near-deaths, Bruce's real and Sir Frederick's pretended one, both of which result in declarations of love later recalled. There are the parallel “revenges”: Betty the maid taunts Dufoy the valet for his disease as the widow taunts Sir Frederick for his promiscuity; the maid drugs the valet and locks him in a tub, while the mistress makes her admirer fall in love, and locks him into marriage. All four plot lines are united by the faintest hint of a comic version of death and resurrection. Each one of the men must be laid low before the final matches can take place: Sir Frederick has himself brought in as though dead; Sir Nicholas falls into a drunken stupor and wakes to find himself about to receive Sir Frederick's Lucy in marriage; Dufoy is drugged so Betty can lock him into the tub; and Colonel Bruce is nearly killed before Aurelia declares her love. These absurd deaths-and-rebirths fit into what Professor Underwood sees as the basic comic action of Restoration comedy, which, he says, Etherege developed in this play: the protagonist (Sir Frederick—or Sir Nicholas or Colonel Bruce or Dufoy) aspires to a love or libertinism beyond his “degree,” falls (dies) through this pride, and is regenerated by compromise.⁸ We might say the hero dies and is reborn at a more reasonable level.

Thus, in the much-maligned scene (IV.vii) where Sir Frederick pretends to be dead to trick the widow into declaring her love, the action runs the whole gamut from utter heroic down to utter antiheroic and comes up again to the middle note. The intrigue is admittedly not very sophisticated, but the scene is central to the structure of the play. In the scene immediately preceding it, Betty locked the drugged Dufoy into the tub. A messenger from the field of honor goes before Sir Frederick's corpse to announce in solemn poesy the “bloody consequence” of the duel. The widow drops social restraint and reveals her love. “The World's too poor to recompense this loss,” she cries, but just as Sir Frederick is about to be elevated to the role of Everyman, Dufoy enters, grotesquely locked in his tub, and frightens everyone away with his cries of distress at his master's death. Sir Frederick starts up, and the fact of death against which the widow's pretense of indifference had collapsed shrinks again to comic size: “Farewell, Sir;” laughs the widow, “expect at night to see the old man, with his paper Lanthorn and crack'd Spectacles, singing your woful Tragedy to Kitchin-maids and Coblers Prentices,” and the love-duel resumes. The scene ranges in fifty-six lines from high plot to low.

As this sample shows, the play seems neither overpoweringly funny, nor startlingly new. It uses a number of Restoration devices developed before 1664: the witty lovers, the concentration upon the upper class, and the cynical, competent rake-hero. In many ways, moreover, it stands closer to Tudor-Stuart dramatic techniques than to those of the Restoration, particularly in the religious imagery of the high plot and the extended use of parallelism and analogy. Nevertheless, the play did, for those who first saw it, define a new comedy. Although the dominant humor of this new comedy was to be antiheroic, its techniques grow from the same sense of schism that shows in the rigid patterns of love and honor in heroic drama and the antithetical structure of heroic verse. Its cynicism is that of a disappointed idealist. Things are either perfect or awful: the hero, if he cannot be a heroic Cavalier, becomes a rake.

This antiheroic comedy found three characteristic devices of language and action. First, love is shown with a strong component of hostility or reluctance (a comic and truer version of the artificial love-honor conflicts of heroic drama). The lovers engage in a verbal duel, pretending indifference and comparing themselves to adversaries. Second, abstractions and ideals are converted downward into physical realities: love into sex, reputation into a possession, and so on. Finally, the outer appearance of a thing or person and its inner nature are shown as separate, indeed, inconsistent, and this division is seen as usually true, not an aberration that the action of the play corrects. The cuckold is not given justice as he would be in an Elizabethan play; rather Cully must set out to pass Frollick's ex-mistress off as an honest lady to his country neighbors.

Although The Way of the World, written nearly forty years later, is a far more subtle and complex piece, these three elements of Etherege's first play still pervade it. “The Coldness of a losing Gamester lessens the Pleasure of the Winner,” says the villain in what is almost the opening speech, “I'd no more play with a Man that slighted his ill Fortune than I'd make Love to a Woman who undervalu'd the Loss of her Reputation.” First, there is the sarcastic sense of hostility: love is a winning against the woman-opponent. Second, the speaker converts reputation downward into something monetary that can be priced and wagered. Third, he tacitly assumes that reputation (an appearance) is normally inconsistent with the woman's “natural” desires. Unpromising as it is, The Comical Revenge sounded the authentic triad.

.....

SHE WOU'D IF SHE COU'D

It was nearly four years before Etherege brought out his second play. In his entry for February 6, 1668, Pepys describes the opening run:

I to the Duke of York's playhouse; where a new play of Etherige's, called “She Would if she Could;” and though I was there by two o'clock, there was 1000 people put back that could not have room in the pit: and I at last, because my wife was there made shift to get into the 18 d. box, and there saw; but, Lord! how full was the house, and how silly the play, there being nothing in the world good in it, and few people pleased in it. The King was there; but I sat mightily behind, and could see but little, and hear not at all. The play being done, I into the pit to look [for] my wife, and it being dark and raining, I to look my wife out, but could not find her; and so staid going between the two doors and through the pit an hour and half, I think, after the play was done; the people staying there till the rain was over, and to talk with one another. And, among the rest, here was the Duke of Buckingham to-day openly sat in the pit; and there I found him with my Lord Buckhurst, and Sidly, and Etherige, the poet; the last of whom I did hear mightily find fault with the actors, that they were out of humour, and had not their parts perfect, and that Harris did do nothing, nor could so much as sing a ketch in it; and so was mightily concerned: while all the rest did through the whole pit, blame the play as a silly, dull thing, though there was something very roguish and witty; but the design of the play, and end, mighty insipid.⁹

A rival playwright, though, Thomas Shadwell, wrote in the preface to his own The Humorists (1671), “I think (and I have the Authority of some of the best Judges in England for't), [it] is the best Comedy that has been written since the Restauration of the Stage.”¹⁰ Even though Shadwell was writing before Restoration comedy had reached a very high level, I fear that Pepys, for once in his life, was right in his critical judgment.

Nevertheless, Etherege had come a step closer to what was to become the final Restoration style. That is, She wou'd if she cou'd does not make its point by the contrast between high and low plots as Elizabethan or Jacobean drama—or The Comical Revenge—did. Instead, it concentrates on the one plot of matching two pairs of witty lovers. Further, She wou'd if she cou'd presupposes a fundamental split in human beings between appearance and nature, between social requirements and “natural” desires. The basic theme of the play, its sense of humor, thus becomes the contrast between liberty and restraint. “The Town” in the play stands for a place big enough, offering enough opportunities for anonymity, so that social restrictions do not really interfere with natural desires. Conversely, the country stands for a place where close observation makes social restrictions impinge directly on natural desires. In the town, private self and social self can be quite separated; in the country they cannot. The town thus suggests liberty, and the country, restraint. Similarly, gallantry and flirtation are associated with the town and liberty; marriage becomes associated with confinement and the country. Country restraints are permanent; one only lends oneself to such town requirements as clothing, conversation, or disguise. Thus, plot, symbols, and action all grow from the fundamental assumption that there is a deep division between social and “natural” man.¹¹

As the play opens, two young gallants, Courtall and his friend Freeman, are interrupted in their search for “new game” by Mrs. Sentry, who tells Courtall that her mistress, Lady Cockwood, has come back to town and is eagerly looking forward to seeing him. Courtall has so far managed to avoid satisfying the lady's importunities, and to escape her attentions this time he pleads an engagement to meet her henpecked husband, Sir Oliver Cockwood, and his drinking companion, Sir Joslin Jolly, both of whom are eager to run riot after their release from the country. While Courtall and Freeman are on their way, they meet and are charmed by two witty and handsome girls in masks. When the two gallants are brought to Lady Cockwood's by the two drunken country knights, they find these young ladies are Sir Joslin's nieces Ariana and Gatty, who, also feeling suddenly liberated from the restraints of the country, had been taking the liberty of the town. After a number of meetings during Sir Oliver's alternate drinking bouts and penances and Lady Cockwood's schemes to consummate her relation with Courtall, the two gallants become thoroughly enamoured of the girls. Lady Cockwood sees that they are and angrily realizes why she and Courtall never seem to find an opportunity. She sends forged letters to antagonize the couples, meanwhile assuring Sir Oliver that Courtall has made her dishonorable proposals. Despite the confusion, Courtall adroitly figures out what is going on, and maneuvers Lady Cockwood into a position where she is forced to let the young romances take their course. The girls finally agree to accept their suitors on a month's probation.

As one might surmise from the plot, there is one “natural” desire which is constant for every character—almost the only one: the desire for sexual gratification. And this desire is constant regardless of outward differences between town people or country people, between Lady Cockwood's pretenses to honor or Sir Joslin's frank vulgarity. It is conspicuously true of all the women in the play, to any one of whom the title She wou'd if she cou'd applies. Moreover, each character assumes that sexual desire is the major motive in any action by another. Ariana and Gatty suspect Lady Cockwood's affair with a gallant as she does theirs; Sir Oliver assumes Lady Cockwood is motivated by desire—his only mistake is that he thinks he is to be the instrument of her gratification; Sir Joslin introduces the lovers to each other on strictly physical terms; Lady Cockwood even suspects Sentry of trying to take Courtall away from her. The characters express this indiscriminate sexuality in animal terms. A lover is to his mistress as a spaniel (155) or as horses are to a coach (98).¹² A jealous woman is like a bloodhound (142). “I was married to her when I was young, Ned,” sighs the restless Sir Oliver, “with a design to be baulk'd, as they tye Whelps to the Bell-weather; where I have been so butted, 'twere enough to fright me, were I not pure mettle, from ever running at sheep again” (137).

Birds are the most common symbol for this animality. Thus, Courtall describes himself as an “old Fowler” (151), and Gatty compares him to a kite looking for poultry (154). The belligerent little oldsters, Sir Oliver and Sir Joslin, think of themselves as game-cocks (101, 131) and Sir Joslin even swears: “If I ever break my word with a Lady, … she shall have leave to carve me for a Capon” (100). Like Courtall, Lady Cockwood pursues and is a “kite” (59), and “old Haggard” (122), even an old hen, to whom the girls are chicks (130). The girls themselves are birds in a cage (103), whereas whores are “ravenous Cormorants” (140). Courtall calls the pursuit of Ariana and Gatty going “a birding” (155); “Are you so wild,” asks Freeman, comparing the masked girls in the park to falcons, “that you must be hooded thus?” (107). The play makes this one joke over and over—its theme, insofar as this play has a satirical theme: the absurdity of a two-legged animal's pretending its animal desires are something better. A curious comparison presents itself at this point. As Professor G. Wilson Knight points out in an entertaining appendix called “The Shakespearian Aviary,” Shakespeare also uses birds frequently.¹³ “Such images and impressions,” writes Professor Knight, “occur mainly in direct relation to all essences which may be, metaphorically, considered ethereal and volatile. Bird-life suggests flight and freedom and swiftness: it also often suggests pride.” For Etherege, birds are just another two-legged animal. The difference, in a sense, epitomizes what had happened to English drama.

Etherege portrays love in this play, as in The Comical Revenge, as various antagonisms. Thus, the love-chase is a naval battle (106) or land war (118): the gallants are military strategists (105) and the girls mere soldiers (105) to whom they ultimately surrender (109). Even Sir Oliver and Sir Joslin are “mighty men at Arms” ready to “charge anon to the terrour of the Ladies” (132), for whoring requires courage (138). In this terminology, a billet-doux is a challenge, an assignation a duel (156), and so on. In another form of sex-antagonism, the pursuit of the opposite sex is “hunting” (91, 101, 104, 106, 107) or hawking or horsebreaking (92) or fishing, the girls being “young Trouts” (121). In a set of monetary comparisons, sex is a “trade” (91, 119, 131, 175), “gambling” (98, 128, 168), swindling (104), or lawsuits (150): thus, Courtall speaks of Lady Cockwood's sexual forwardness as trying to arrest him for debt (153). Etherege so proliferates this kind of unfavorable comparison that it almost seems to lose any kind of pattern or direction: love (or sex) is acting a part in a play (121), alchemical projecting (151), an execution (131), a stain (168), or a fever (169); a woman is something to be eaten (153, 178), or even read (155). The same disparagement applies to marriage: it is a duel (176) to which the proposal is the challenge. It is a business enterprise (103, 174), a mortgaging of one's person to acquire an estate; courtship is simply negotiating the contract (174). Nevertheless, these comparisons, even as varied and as proliferated as they are, do show a pattern. In every case, the basis for the comparison is that the individual is about to accept an apparent restraint in order to satisfy his real natural desires. In a sense, he must obey “the rules of the game” to achieve satisfaction: in this respect, love and marriage can be thought of as acting or bargaining or lawsuits, even as alchemy. Etherege is simply saying metaphorically that a fine gallant hates falling in love, for then he must restrain his liberty: “All the happiness a Gentleman can desire, is to live at liberty” (174).

This theme of liberty and restraint—the most basic theme of the play—is organized about various contrasts. One such contrast is that between sexual animality and falling in love. Another such contrast is that between town and country. Indeed, the action of She wou'd if she cou'd is simply that of country people (the Cockwoods, Jolly, and his nieces) adventuring into the wider scope and complexity of London. The difference between town and country shows itself in the form of intrigue. “There is some weighty affair in hand, I warrant thee: my dear Ariana, how glad am I we are in this Town agen,” cries Gatty as she infers an intrigue from Lady Cockwood's behavior (102). “A man had better be a vagabond in this Town, than a Justice of Peace in the Country,” says Sir Oliver, summing up the difference between them. “If a man do but rap out an Oath, the people start as if a Gun went off; and if one chance but to couple himself with his Neighbours Daughter without the help of the Parson of the Parish, … there is presently such an uproar, that a poor man is fain to fly his Country” (93). The difference, in other words, is that the country allows little or no scope for a personal life. There is no privacy: observation is so close that one's nature cannot be given free play, but is bound in tightly by social restrictions. Petty pretenses, like a child's, are the only escape.

In the town, on the other hand, pretenses become large and graceful responses to convention, ends in themselves because the town is large enough and anonymous enough for a person's outward appearance and private life to be quite separated. By being separated, each becomes important in and of itself. Clothing, for example, assumes a new importance in the town. Lady Cockwood can severely restrict Sir Oliver's activities by locking up all but his “Penitential Suit” (127ff.) A face is like a hat (107); an affair to Freeman is like putting on a new suit (97); and a lover, to the girls, runs in one's head like a new gown (168). A woman is known simply as her mask and her petticoat (103, 131). In the town, appearances, because they are separated from the private self, have a separate existence all their own.

The humor of the play lies in the contrast between what the young people do with the liberty of the town and what their elders do with it. Lady Cockwood makes herself ridiculous by pursuing Courtall, and Sir Oliver and Sir Joslin make themselves ridiculous by their sophomoric debauches, while the young people use their liberty to fall in love. Their doing so does not mean they are wiser. On the contrary, they have simply used their freedom to exchange it for confinement; they have ceased being “Tenants at Will” and have bound themselves to a “Lease for life” (174). Accepting confinement means letting oneself in for pretense, because confinement creates a tension between the “natural” self and the outward, social self, and that tension in turn creates a need to deceive others. Thus, Ariana and Gatty disguise themselves to flirt in the Mulberry Garden and resent the social rules that deny them the same liberties as men. Thus, too, Sir Oliver pretends fidelity to escape and resents Lady Cockwood who, by restraining him, creates the need for pretense. In this way, the Cockwood marriage operates not by love but power politics. Sir Oliver tries to establish himself as a monarch (114, 115) or “tyrant” (96) controlling the “politicians,” his wife and Mrs. Sentry. Sentry's name, of course, is significant and Sir Oliver's might be a reminiscence of the Civil War. At any rate, domestic altercations are called “civil war” (137) and infidelities, whether Sir Oliver's or Courtall's, “treason” (139, 144). They are put down, however, and in the finale Lady Cockwood is cast as a restored monarch bestowing an “Act of Oblivion” (176) and marching Sir Oliver off to bed where “we'll sign the Peace” (179). Even the young lovers at this early stage of their relation are subject to power politics. Courtall and Freeman are to Gatty and Ariana as subjects are to rulers, or indeed to “absolute Tyrants” (103).

The play, however, develops one important difference between the old pretenders and the young. Sir Oliver and Lady Cockwood have been pretending so long and so hard that the inconsistency between their inner natures and outer appearances has confused them and corrupted the expression of their real selves. The two overtones in their name suggest this confusion, Cockwood, expressing sexual desire, and “woodcock,” the bird proverbial for stupidity. Lady Cockwood, even in her private interviews with Courtall, cannot put aside her pretenses to honor (as in II.ii, for example.) Even when they are alone, she scolds Sentry for neglecting to chaperone her, and Sentry apologizes for her: “This is a strange infirmity she has, [but] custom has made it so natural, she cannot help it” (113). Sir Oliver's continual pretense of affection and respect to his lady has mixed his inner and outer selves, too, so that he can no longer satisfy his desires for other game. His riots are tainted with the impotency that his relations with Lady Cockwood bring out (“The very sight of that face makes me more impotent than an Eunuch”—114). Thus, his amours in the play are uniformly failures; even his desires are limited: “When we visit a Miss, / We still brag how we kiss, / But 'tis with a Bottle we fegue her” (141). He pretends to his wife (to whom he should not have to pretend at all) that he is more virtuous than he is and to the world that he is more vicious.

This, then, is what is laughable about the older people: that they let their social pretenses creep into private affairs where they do not belong. The difference between them and the young people shows in the two “hiding” scenes. In the first (I.i), Mrs. Sentry, who has come to tell Courtall of the Cockwoods' arrival, is forced to hide when Sir Oliver comes, and overhears him invite the young men to a wild evening. Only confusion results from Lady Cockwood's learning of this, because, since both Cockwoods are pretending to each other, she cannot admit to her knowledge. In the later hiding scene (V.i), when Courtall and Freeman overhear the girls solving the problem of the forged letters, the result is to give both sides the knowledge to break down the barriers Lady Cockwood put between them. The lovers can use their knowledge because they are completely aware of the line where social pretense leaves off and plain dealing begins. The young people use pretense without being dominated by it, and their sense of appropriateness is the screen against which most of the wit sallies are projected. The young people are as aware of their double selves as an actor in a part and, indeed, Gatty uses the metaphor: “I hate to dissemble when I need not; 'twou'd look as affected in us to be reserv'd now w'are alone, as for a Player to maintain the Character she acts in the Tyring-room” (170). “A single intrigue in Love,” says Courtall, “is as dull as a single Plot in a Play, and will tire a Lover worse, than t'other does an Audience.” “We cannot be long without some under-plots in this Town,” replies Freeman, “let this be our main design, and if we are anything fortunate in our contrivance, we shall make it a pleasant Comedy” (121). Two acts of frankness in friendship are what break through the outer barriers of pretense and resolve the intrigue, such as it is. “Let us proceed honestly like Friends, discover the truth of things to one another,” says Freeman, and the two gallants find to their good fortune that they are pursuing different women (152). Similarly, it is Ariana's and Gatty's frank talk (168) that clears up the business of the forged letters. In broader terms, the lovers know that appearance and nature are necessarily different; they know when one's inner nature can be converted into a social, outer fact and when it cannot be, and that is the key to their competence. The difference between old and young, then, is simply that pretense has taken over the old folks' personalities, but not the young lovers'—at least not Courtall's and Gatty's.

The lesser lovers, however, Freeman and Ariana, have begun to show the same confusion of selves that mars the actions of the older people. Freeman's explanation to Courtall of his beginning an intrigue with Lady Cockwood is not convincing (173), and suggests that he is playing his friend false. Similarly, Ariana rejects Gatty's frankness; Gatty demands, “Hast thou not promis'd me a thousand times, to leave off this demureness?” and Ariana answers, “If your tongue be not altogether so nimble, I may be conformable,” suggesting that she, like Lady Cockwood, carries social pretense into a relationship where it ought not to be (102, see also 170).

The denouement resolves these contrasts between town and country, gallantry and marriage, old and young, liberty and restraint, by compromise. Early in the play, when Gatty and Ariana successfully trick Courtall, they speak of turning him into a “Country Clown” (126). At the end of the play, Gatty, speaking of marriage as a kind of confinement, ironically remarks, “These Gentlemen have found it so convenient lying in Lodgings, they'll hardly venture on the trouble of taking a House of their own.” “A pretty Country-seat, Madam,” replies Courtall gallantly, “with a handsom parcel of Land, and other necessaries belonging to't, may tempt us; but for a Town-Tenement that has but one poor conveniency, we are resolv'd we'll never deal” (174). The young men accept their confinement and agree to a month's trial before their final satisfaction: For Courtall, the ways of intrigue seem almost to have passed: “If the heart of man be not very deceitful, 'tis very likely it may be [a match].” For Freeman, however, the lesser lover, “A month is a tedious time, and will be a dangerous tryal of our resolutions; but I hope we shall not repent before Marriage, whate're we do after” (176). The month's trial, of course, continues the pattern of the various unfavorable metaphors for love and marriage: that one must obey “the rules of the game” to achieve satisfaction, submitting to a restraint to win in the end. There is a hint in Freeman's remark that these marital confinements will give rise eventually to the same pretense and hostility that mar the Cockwood marriage. The older people at the end of the play continue their pretenses unchanged. “I am resolv'd,” piously says Lady Cockwood, “to give over the great bus'ness of this Town, and hereafter modestly confine my self to the humble Affairs of my own Family.” “Pray entertain an able Chaplain,” replies Courtall dryly (178). Sir Joslin and the unwitting Sir Oliver are just as restless as at the opening of the play as they prepare to return to country life, a morass of crabbed pretenses forced on them by the binding effect of social restrictions on natural desires.

Etherege's second play is quite different from his first, and the change measures his capacity for growth as a dramatist. Gone are the old devices of parallel plots and character groups. The entire action is built on a series of contrasts, each of which grows from one central idea: the felt conflict between social restraints and “natural” desires. The conception is thoroughly un-Elizabethan, and the form of the play his grown to meet the conception. While there is an occasional heroic note in Lady Cockwood's hypocritical cant about her honor, the highness of the high plot of The Comical Revenge is almost wholly gone, too. The supernatural element, present in a half-serious way in his first play, has now been almost eliminated. The Devil appears: everyone in the play is called a devil at one time or another (126, 129, 150, 151, 157, 158); Lady Cockwood, in particular, is an “Old Devil” (153, 158) or a “long-Wing'd devil” (121). But the epithet is not meant in any traditional religious way and there is hardly any heavenly counterpart in the finale; marriage is taken as a penance for the sins of the gallants (174), Lady Cockwood is urged to entertain an able chaplain, and that is about all. The new play is saturated with realism, real taverns, real parks, real stores, contrasted implicitly to the outlandish atmospheres of heroic drama. The play is antiheroic, but to heroics heard only in the mind's ear. So too, the low plot has been absorbed into the single, unified dramatic situation. Folly, in this play, has risen to the upper class, though it still is, as it was for Sir Nicholas Cully, allowing one's pretenses to take the place of one's real nature.

She wou'd if she cou'd is a study, still somewhat crude, of this kind of folly. The young people of the play face constantly the risk that their necessary and proper social pretenses, whether to honor or to vice, may obstruct their real feelings; they face, too, the warning example of the Cockwoods. Their success in avoiding this pitfall defines an ethic of pretense. Etherege's second play has little of the sheer doings of his first—there are neither duels nor slapstick—and this suggests a growing awareness on the part of the characters and their author that “talk is a very important kind of action.”¹⁴ Conversation is a performance; speech, clothing, manners, and other forms of appearance have importance in themselves because they are separate from the private life of the individual, his “nature.” These appearances constitute the visible, apparent acquiescence to social and other restraints and are thought of as separate from the nature that rebels against restraint. But even the purely private actions of an individual—sexual conversation as opposed to verbal, for example—are felt to have this double nature, a visible, external performance and a personal, internal satisfaction.

The talk Etherege gives his characters bodies forth this sense in linguistic form. “Now shall I sleep as little without you,” cries Courtall, in his curtain speech, as he is parting from his betrothed, “as I shou'd do with you: Madam, expectation makes me almost as restless as Jealousie.” These comparisons, a late-seventeenth-century version of Donne's conceits, let a man be passionate but discuss his passion at the same time, as Donne's do. Impersonally, whimsically, the observer talks about things which he, by an odd coincidence, happens to be doing.¹⁵ In later Restoration comedies, this figure of speech becomes a rhetorical device of extraordinary complexity: the speaker hides his feelings by the comic comparison at the same time that by discussing them at all he makes them more visible and himself transparent in the heroic manner. In She wou'd if she cou'd the device is not yet used with skill. When the events of the play move quickly, metaphor drops out. Where characters are acting or planning action, they speak normally, as when Sir Oliver or Sir Joslin plan their parties or Lady Cockwood an assignation or when the gallants hide in the Cookwood house. Figurative speech is reserved for the obvious occasions when talk is an action itself, such as the time in the park when the two young men meet the girls or when the final matches are made. Metaphor is still felt as a frothy formality opposed to the “weighty affairs” of the play, not yet a part of them. Nevertheless, Etherege has begun to weld action and language into a way of seeing. Town and country symbolize opposite poles of experience, liberty and restraint. Etherege uses this division to split his characters, to show how in response to the pressure to conform some respond by dissimulation and affectation, and some evolve a golden mean of a restraint, the acceptance of which is an expression of self—marriage for love. Both language and action represent human conduct split under the pressure of conformity into a visible, social appearance and a personal, private nature. Folly is the confusion of the two; wisdom is their separation and balance. She wou'd if she cou'd is a quasi-scientific exploration of divided man, and this was to be the Restoration comic mode.

.....

THE MAN OF MODE; OR, SIR FOPLING FLUTTER

There have been few audiences in history as lucky as the one that in 1676 braved the March weather of London and the crowding at Dorset Garden to see Etherege's new play, destined to be his last. The Man of Mode was a tremendous success; its easy, witty dialogue was the finest yet to appear, and its hard, brilliant portrait of the Restoration rake was never to be equaled. Etherege, however, had not taken over the sense of good and evil that Wycherley had begun to develop in The Country Wife. The Man of Mode still treats cleverness as the ultimate virtue.

The play develops its theme and humor from the contrast between two parallel lines of intrigue, one “high” and one “low.” The high intrigue involves Harriet, Young Bellair, and Emilia. The low involves Mrs. Loveit, Dorimant, and Bellinda. In each, a young man is involved with two women, one he wants and one he does not want but who pursues him: Dorimant wants Bellinda, but is pursued by Mrs. Loveit; Young Bellair wants Emilia, but is pursued by Harriet, or, more properly, she is forced on him by their families who wish the match. In each line, the young man uses another young man to decoy the extra woman away: Dorimant uses Sir Fopling for Mrs. Loveit, and Bellair helps Dorimant's relationship with Harriet along. Dorimant thus occupies a pivotal position in both lines of intrigue: he is the decoy for the “high” line and he is the man pursued in the “low.”

In more detail, Dorimant, at the beginning of the play, has begun the exchange of an old mistress, Mrs. Loveit, for a new and younger one, Bellinda. To do the business Bellinda uses Dorimant's attention to a masked lady (actually Bellinda herself) to work Mrs. Loveit into a jealous rage, while Dorimant accuses her of flirting with Sir Fopling Flutter, the “man of mode.” In the second intrigue, young Bellair, one of Dorimant's friends, is in love with Emilia, but his father is forcing him to marry Harriet. Dorimant falls in love with Harriet, but she pretends to be in love with Young Bellair just long enough to let him fool his father and marry Emilia, and, unknown to her, long enough to let Dorimant consummate his affair with Bellinda. Finally, however, Dorimant succumbs to Harriet's charms and agrees to go off to the country (no less!) to court her.

Etherege contrasts the characters as he does the two plot lines. Most critics agree that the play sets off the sleek competence of Dorimant against the strained effects of Sir Fopling. Actually, however, not just these two, but all the principal characters are ranged on a scale. For the men, affectation is the negative value and the worst offender is, of course, Sir Fopling, who absurdly and magnificently incarnates the idea. He has no inner personality, only externals—clothes, attendants, and mannerisms. For example, he criticizes Dorimant for not having a mirror in his drawing room, for “In a glass a man may entertain himself.” “The shadow of himself,” remarks Dorimant. Medley, Dorimant's gossipy friend, ironically adds: “I find, Sir Fopling, in your Solitude, you remember the saying of the wise man, and study your self” (260-261).¹⁶ Sir Fopling's self is totally outside: there is neither inner man nor inner desires.

Medley, Dorimant's confidant, slightly older than the other young men of the play, is almost as bad. He too remains always a spectator of the action, never a participant (255). For his natural self, he has substituted the gossip the ladies enjoy, so much so that Emilia calls him “a living Libel, a breathing Lampoon” (225), and Dorimant, “the very Spirit of Scandal” (226). Medley is also rather effeminate, the only character who indulges in “the filthy trick these men have got of kissing one another,” or who calls Dorimant, “my Life, my Joy, my darling-Sin” (191). Young Bellair is next to Medley in the scale of affectation. “By much the most tolerable of all the young men that do not abound in wit,” “ever well dress'd, always complaisant, and seldom impertinent,” are the judgments of his peers (201-202). Harriet, more subtle, says of him: “The man indeed wears his Cloaths fashionably, and has a pretty negligent way with him, very Courtly, and much affected; he bows, and talks, and smiles so agreeably, as he thinks. Varnish'd over with good breeding, many a blockhead makes a tolerable show” (220). He is to Dorimant what the heroic people of The Comical Revenge were to Sir Frederick Frolick, but Etherege has developed: the contrast is much subtler.

The cynical, witty Dorimant is far more “wild” and “bewitching” (213) than earnest Young Bellair, but even he, as Harriet sets him out, has some affectation. His reputation as a lover is as important to him as clothing is to Sir Fopling. Thus, Dorimant speaks of his long affair with Loveit as old clothes (194) and compares his own person to a bauble or a fashion (229). This play has not just one “man of mode,” but two: Dorimant, as well as Sir Fopling, both occupying similar places in the structure. Etherege is laughing at the hero as well as the fop.

There is, then, a second pattern on which the men are ranked: sexual success, an alternative kind of affectation. Thus, the ladies laugh at Sir Fopling; Medley achieves some popularity, but no particular successes; Young Bellair reaches consummation, but only within the framework of marriage, while Dorimant has two successful illicit affairs and one matrimonial courtship. This scale parallels the other; modishness is a sublimation of sexuality, or replaces it. Sir Fopling thus sees men and women simply as clothes, equipage, or the like (230); he treats his own gown as a person (253). In short, he is one of “the young Men of this Age” who are “only dull admirers of themselves, and make their Court to nothing but their Perriwigs and their Crevats, and would be more concern'd for the disordering of 'em, tho' on a good occasion, than a young Maid would be for the tumbling of her head or Handkercher” (245). Sir Fopling's importance is not so much that he is affected about clothes and “manners,” but that his affectation supplants his sexuality, indeed, his very self.

Etherege sets up this relation between Sir Fopling and Dorimant in his brilliant post-seduction scene (IV.ii); the dialogue contains some appalling insights into the ways of womankind. Critics have complained of the frank stage direction calling for Dorimant's manservant “tying up Linnen.” His inconspicuous, useful presence, however, is a meaningful realistic note, an ironic comment on the fancy speeches of Dorimant and Bellinda downstage. She escapes just as Sir Fopling enters. He, by way of contrast to Dorimant's sexual affectation, immediately starts to dance by himself and to talk of mirrors and clothes. The juxtaposition of the fop's affectations with the hero's, like the juxtaposition of the false courtship of Bellinda and the “real” courtship of Harriet, reveals Dorimant's Don Juanism for what it is, simply another kind of affectation.

Etherege puts the ladies of the play into a pattern based on the opposite of affectation: “Wildness,” which shows itself mostly as sexual promiscuity. Just as Dorimant displays a permissible, or at least curable, kind of affectation, so a woman must be only “as wild as you wou'd wish her,” and should have “a demureness in her looks that makes it so surprising” (193). Mrs. Loveit is far from this ideal. Her affair with Dorimant is the common gossip of London. At the slightest provocation she tears a passion to tatters with a welter of invective (out of Restoration tragedy): “Insupportable! insulting Devil! this from you, the only Author of my Shame!” and so on. Her inner self is always on the surface. She has virtually no concern with appearances, no “affectation,” as that word applies to the men. Bellinda is next in the scale. Although she conceals her affair with Dorimant, she lets her passionate, private self burst the outer restraint of reputation. She cannot control herself, even though she sees how Dorimant used Loveit (274). Emilia does not hide her affectations so adeptly as Bellinda, but she is considerably more chaste. Yet even her virtue is not above suspicion: Dorimant cynically hints that once she is married he might have better luck with her (202). Harriet alone is so completely in control of her passions as to confine her wildness to the dressing table (219). She is outraged that anyone should think her “easy” to marry, let alone to be seduced (279). Yet to Dorimant she can say: “My Eyes are wild and wandring like my passions, / And cannot yet be ty'd to Rules of charming” (248). She is hardly passionless: she simply does not allow her wildness any unfitting expression.

The comedy opens with two brilliantly drawn characters who appear only once: Foggy (i.e., puffy) Nan the orange-woman and Swearing Tom the shoemaker who call on Dorimant at his levée. They introduce, the critics say, a touch of low life and suggest vices among the lower classes like those of the aristocracy. While they certainly do these things, they occupy a good deal of valuable space at the beginning of the play for purely gratuitous bits of local color. One must, I think, find some sort of keynote they represent, or else conclude that Etherege erred seriously in starting with two irrelevancies instead of exposition. Actually, they serve as “sign-post characters.” They establish the two scales along which the other characters are ranged. Nan's business is fruit, something appropriate to one's natural self as opposed to one's social front. (The rest of the ladies in the play face chiefly this problem, expressing their “natural” desires within the limits of society.) Thus, fruit is used later in the play (267) as a double-entendre for Bellinda's misbehavior: “She has eaten too much fruit, I warrant you.” “'Tis that lyes heavy on her Stomach.” “I was a strange devourer of Fruit when I was young, so ravenous—” says Mrs. Loveit's ingenuous maid. Harriet's mother criticizes the appetite of the age for “green Fruit,” instead of ladies like herself, “kindly ripen'd” (246). Swearing Tom, on the other hand, deals in shoes, and the men in the play are ranked by clothing or other factors of appearance. Secondarily, he is concerned with his own inner vices “too gentile for a Shoomaker.” “There's never a man i' the town,” he says, “lives more like a Gentleman, with his Wife, than I do” (198). Just as Medley and Dorimant are called atheists by Bellair, the orange-woman calls Tom an atheist, religious devotion being a continued metaphor in the play for love (278ff.). Tom's chief attribute, swearing, reflects Dorimant's pretended loves and broken vows.

Besides the main characters and these “sign-post” characters, there are three older people. Harriet's mother and Old Bellair (who falls in love with Emilia) make themselves ridiculous by their flirtatious efforts to impose their outmoded selves on the young. Lady Townley, however, Young Bellair's aunt, is urbane and sophisticated, wise enough to accept her role as elder stateswoman, a charming instance of the wisdom “the Town” offers: how to express one's inner nature in outward forms that will withstand time.

To the satirical contrasts between the two plots and the characters associated with them, Etherege adds further contrasts; for example, the differing treatments of love in the two plots. To Loveit, in the low plot, love is subject to disease and death (217), for which jealousy is the best medicine (239). Dorimant, before Harriet brings him from the low plot to the high, calls love a sickness (242), a disease, a “settled Ague” or “irregular fitts” (249), for which intercourse is the cure (260); an appetite, though one can very quickly get one's “belly full” (257). It is a deception: “Love gilds us over,” says Dorimant, “and makes us show fine things to one another for a time, but soon the Gold wears off, and then again the native brass appears” (216). To the people in the low plot, love seems a kind of adversary proceeding, a duel (201), no different for people than for “game-Cocks” (224), for an affair is “a thing no less necessary to confirm the reputation of your Wit, than a Duel will be to satisfie the Town of your Courage” (231). Love affairs are lawsuits (208), carried on with ladies who are “practising Lawyers” (228). Love is a game, in which a woman ought to lose her reputation fairly (269): “The deep play is now in private Houses” (228). Sex, in the low plot, is thoroughly animal: poaching (190), hunting (207, 217), or fishing (242). Only while Dorimant is still in the low plot can he think of Harriet as a business enterprise, requiring “Church security,” or speak of their relation as gambling (235). In the high plot, however, the loves of Harriet, Emilia, and Young Bellair are described in half-serious religious images, “Faith” as opposed to “sence” or “reason” (198-199).

Etherege contrasts the two plots further by their use of acting and dissembling. In the Bellinda-Loveit intrigue, all the affairs are illicit and must be concealed. The whole atmosphere is one of dissimulation. In the Emilia-Harriet plot, acting is a mere jeu d'esprit. The orange-woman sets the tone when she describes Harriet's playful imitation of Dorimant (191), for Harriet does indeed enjoy “the dear pleasure of dissembling” (222), as do Emilia and Lady Townley when they mimic Old Bellair (233). They and Harriet and Young Bellair, however, play-act only to “deceive the grave people” outside the threesome. In the Bellinda-Loveit intrigue, the pretenses are to deceive the people within the threesome: Bellinda and Dorimant conceal their affair; Mrs. Loveit feigns an interest in Sir Fopling. In the low plot, Loveit can say: “There's nothing but falsehood and impertinence in this world! all men are Villains or Fools” (286); “Women, as well as men, are all false, or all are so to me at least” (265). Dorimant sees “an inbred falshood in Women” (269). Acting is not sport but deadly earnest, to hurt, as when Dorimant imitates Sir Fopling (267) or pretends indifference to Loveit (238), or to deceive and manipulate—Bellinda's pretenses (V.i) or Loveit's feigned indifference to Dorimant (242).

Etherege provides still a third contrast. In the low plot, everyone—Loveit, Bellinda, even Medley—is a “Devil” (193, 208, 210, 214, 218, 270), though Dorimant “has something of the Angel yet undefac'd in him” (210), and is charming enough to “tempt the Angels to a second fall” (237), as indeed he does. True love and the high plot, on the other hand, represent Heaven, at least linguistically. Dorimant establishes the metaphor in the opening speech of the play when he compares his being forced to write a billet-doux “after the heat of the business is over,” to a “Fanatick” paying tithes. Medley and Young Bellair also discuss in the first scene the contrast between the “Heaven,” “Faith,” and “Salvation” of true love and the “doubts and scruples” of the rakes (199). But in the end, the most cavalier of Cavaliers gives up his skepticism for “repentance” and “the prospect of … Heav'n” (278).

In this, as in most Restoration comedies, the action involves a cure or therapy for one of the characters, and the important therapy of this play is to tame Dorimant. He must be brought out of the “hell” of the low plot where pretense is the normal order of business, “good nature and good manners” (216); where it is laughable when one's emotions show (as Mrs. Loveit's or Young Bellair's do); and where sex comes not from love, but from hostility. “There has been such a calm in my affairs of late,” says Dorimant, summing up this stormy way of life, “I have not had the pleasure of making a Woman so much as break her Fan, to be sullen, or forswear her self these three days” (195). He must be brought into the “heaven” of the high plot in which the emotional, natural desire can be made a social fact. The critics' sympathies for Loveit and Bellinda in this situation are simply wasted words. By Restoration, or for that matter Victorian, standards these ladies are irretrievably lost, condemned to an endless series of pretenses. The fault in the situation is not that Dorimant gives up his mistresses in favor of a wife, but that the ladies wrongfully succumbed to his blandishments. Neither of them expects Dorimant to marry her; all they ask is that he continue his illicit relationships. Surely Dorimant is more to be praised than censured for preferring the honorable course of matrimony.

It is, of course, Harriet who performs the cure. She very quickly realizes what is wrong with Dorimant: affectation in a much broader sense than the other characters conceive it—for example, Young Bellair in the dialogue quoted above. She knows that Dorimant concerns himself too much with superficial sexual affairs that answer only his vanity: “begging … the Ladies Good liking, with a sly softness in your looks, and a gentle slowness in your bows, as you pass by 'em—as thus, Sir—[Acts him] Is not this like you?” (236). She realizes that Dorimant is used to a group that keeps appearance from revealing the private self, to whom dissembling is the normal condition. She therefore refuses to have anything to do with the oaths that Bellinda and Loveit had regarded as such important tokens, and that Dorimant had broken so lightly (216, 227, 259): “Do not speak it, if you would have me believe it; your Tongue is so fam'd for falsehood 'twill do the truth an injury” (278). Before she will let him come over to the way of life she shares with Young Bellair and Emilia, she puts him through a sort of initiation:

HARRIET.
I was inform'd you used to laugh at Love, and not make it.
DORIMANT.
The time has been, but now I must speak—
HAR.
If it be on that Idle subject, I will put on my serious look, turn my head carelessly from you, drop my lip, let my Eyelids fall and hang half o're my Eyes—Thus—while you buz a speech of an hour long in my ear, and I answer never a word!

This is, of course, exactly the same kind of play-acting she fell into so naturally with Bellair. But while that was to “deceive the grave people,” this is to achieve a catharsis in Dorimant. Dorimant, however, resists.

HAR.
… why do you not begin?
DOR.
That the company may take notice how passionately I make advances of Love! and how disdainfully you receive 'em.
HAR.
When your Love's grown strong enough to make you bear being laugh'd at, I'll give you leave to trouble me with it. Till when pray forbear, Sir.

(249-250)

Submitting to being laughed at is only the beginning.

Dorimant's final submission or “initiation” comes in Act V. It is marked by the transition from Act V, scene i, at Mrs. Loveit's, where all the characters of the low plot are treacherously deceiving each other, to Act V, scene ii, Lady Townley's house, where all the pretenses are broken down and all is camaraderie and good fellowship. (In both scenes, three women work on Dorimant, in each case, two ladies and a maid. Not much is made of the parallel in the text; it is more in the director's realm, to be brought out in the grouping of the players.) Whereas the earlier scene is a study in continued deception, Dorimant having betrayed both the ladies, the initiation scene moves from deception to truth. At first, Harriet quite consciously plays Dorimant's game to make him play hers; she makes herself appear indifferent to force him to commit himself;

HAR.
[Aside turning from Dorimant.] My love springs with my blood into my Face, I dare not look upon him yet.
DOR.
What have we here, the picture of a celebrated Beauty, giving audience in publick to a declar'd Lover?
HAR.
Play the dying Fop, and make the piece compleat, Sir.
DOR.
What think you if the Hint were well improv'd? The whole mystery of making love pleasantly design'd and wrought in a suit of Hangings?
HAR.
'Twere needless to execute fools in Effigie who suffer daily in their own persons.

(277)

Half-serious religious imagery marks Dorimant's progress toward the “heaven” of the high plot:

HAR.
In men who have been long harden'd in Sin, we have reason to mistrust the first signs of repentance.
DOR.
The prospect of such a Heav'n will make me persevere, and give you marks that are infallible.
HAR.
What are those?
DOR.
I will renounce all the joys I have in friendship and in Wine, sacrifice to you all the interest I have in other Women—
HAR.
Hold—Though I wish you devout, I would not have you turn Fanatick—

(278-279)

Because she knows Dorimant is in the habit of hiding or suppressing his emotions, Harriet insists now, in effect, that he train himself into the habit of letting his actions reflect his state of mind. If Dorimant is to love Harriet, she laughingly insists, not only must he submit to being mocked, he must pursue her into the country: “To a great rambling lone house, that looks as it were not inhabited, the family's so small; there you'l find my Mother, an old lame Aunt, and my self, Sir, perch'd up on Chairs at a distance in a large parlour; sitting moping like three or four Melancholy Birds in a spacious vollary—Does this not stagger your Resolution?” (287). As in Etherege's earlier plays, the country was to be understood by his audience as a place highly unpleasant because close observation forces the inner self to conform to visible mores; it is therefore a suitable House of Holiness for Dorimant's penance:

HAR.
What e're you say, I know all beyond High-Park's a desart to you, and that no gallantry can draw you farther.
DOR.
That has been the utmost limit of my Love—but now my passion knows no bounds, and there's no measure to be taken of what I'll do for you from any thing I ever did before.
HAR.
When I hear you talk thus in Hampshire, I shall begin to think there may be some little truth inlarg'd upon.

(279)

Dorimant, Professor Underwood points out, is undergoing the conflict between reason and passion which is traditional for comic heroes, though in this case the “reason” is that of the libertine and Machiavellian school of naturalism.¹⁷ The passion, moreover, is antirational and fideistic.

Harriet has forced Dorimant from the finite loves of the low plot to a love nominally, at least, infinite. Appropriately enough, she can now sneer at Mrs. Loveit, “Mr. Dorimant has been your God Almighty long enough, 'tis time to think of another—” and suggest a nunnery as the fashionable place for her retreat. Harriet has made it quite clear she does not want Dorimant to abandon his naturalistic desires, but to translate them into marriage: “Though I wish you devout, I would not have you turn Fanatick.” In the play's terms, she does not want a permanent residence in the country which would stifle Dorimant's energy and competence. What she does want is to teach him to bring his natural desires to the social framework of marriage. Only “this dear Town,” as Harriet calls it, admits the full expression of self.

This, then, is the action of the comedy and its sense of humor: to bring Dorimant—and through him the audience—from the low plot where the private self fights social restrictions by deception to the high plot where one can realize his private life in viable social forms. Old Bellair, in these last few lines of the play, hails Sir Fopling indignantly, “What does this man of mode do here agen?” as though Etherege wanted to underline his point: that Dorimant has left that status in favor of a richer kind of “modishness.”

In other words, the play is nothing more nor less than the old sentimental story of the rake reformed, indeed redeemed, by the love of a good woman. At least that would be the basic form of the action, were it not so variously undercut by irony. One very basic irony is the fact that Harriet (the good woman) occupies a position in the plot structure that corresponds to Mrs. Loveit's; similarly Dorimant functions as a decoy like Sir Fopling. Harriet's making Dorimant court her in the country, in fact, her whole “holding out” for marriage is nothing but a more elaborate and safer form of the oaths and conditions Bellinda required from Dorimant. The entire first scene of the play makes Dorimant look arrogant and arbitrary by showing him as he berates and badgers his servants in his slovenly, helter-skelter household. In general, the opening scene provides a variety of episodes running the gamut of love from the poor whore's trade to Young Bellair's neoplatonic adoration; all these episodes serve to strip the conventions and formalities from life and lay bare the naturalistic substratum at the core of every social pretense. There is still more ironic crossfire in the final scene: at the very moment when Dorimant is agreeing to go off to the country to court Harriet, he is deftly assuring Loveit (out of one side of his mouth, as it were) that he is only marrying Harriet for her money and (out of the other side) trying to make another assignation with Bellinda.¹⁸ The play bristles with so many ironies, all undercutting one another, that it is difficult to say what, if anything, Etherege wants us to take seriously. Virtually every action of every character becomes a gambit in a great and meaningless social game.

One thing is clear, however. The comedy does not simply laugh at those who do not have “manners.” There are two absurdities. One lies in substituting arbitrary formalism for the inner self, as Sir Fopling does. He lists some French rules of courtship and Medley drily comments, “For all this smattering of the Mathematicks, you may be out in your Judgment at Tennis” (251). The opposite kind of absurdity is Loveit's ranting, an attempt to impose her unformalized inner self on others: “Horrour and distraction seize you, Sorrow and Remorse gnaw your Soul,” and so on (215). “Ill customs,” wrote Etherege from his diplomatic post at Ratisbon, “affront my very senses, and I have been so used to affectation that without the help of the air of the court what is natural cannot touch me. You see what we get by being polished, as we call it.”¹⁹ Precisely this kind of “affectation” is the value the comedy half-seriously puts forward: to express the private self in a social form which is decorous, natural, and even redeeming, or, as Old Bellair somewhat crudely puts it (280): “To Commission a young Couple to go to Bed together a Gods name.”

Notes

1. John Downes, Roscius Anglicanus (London, 1708), p. 25. The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege, ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), pp. 1-28.

2. John Palmer, The Comedy of Manners (London: Bell, 1913), p. 67. Thomas H. Fujimura, The Restoration Comedy of Wit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952), p. 95. Clifford Leech, writing of Marriage à la Mode in “Restoration Tragedy: A Reconsideration,” Durham University Journal, XLII (1950), 109.

3. William Empson, English Pastoral Poetry (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 47.

4. John Wilcox, The Relation of Molière to Restoration Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938), p. 73n.

5. My references are to page numbers in The Dramatic Works of Sir George Etherege, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), I, 1-88. They may be related to other editions by the following table:

   Act I, sc. i: 1-2; sc. ii: 2-8; sc. iii; 9-11; sc. iv: 11-13.

   Act II, sc. i: 13-16; sc. ii: 17-22; sc. iii: 22-29.

   Act III, sc. i: 29-30; sc. ii: 30-33; sc. iii: 33-34: sc. iv: 35-36; sc. v: 36-40; sc. vi: 40-44; sc. vii: 44-46.

   Act IV, sc. i: 46-47; sc. ii: 48-49; sc. iii: 49-51; sc. iv: 52-56; sc. v: 56-57; sc. vi: 58-59; sc. vii: 60-62.

   Act V, sc. i: 62-66; sc. ii: 66-75; sc. iii: 76-78; sc. iv: 78-81; sc. v: 81-86.

6. Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners, Yale Studies in English, vol. 135 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 56.

7. Du Fresnoy, “Observations on the Art of Painting,” trans. John Dryden, Works, ed. Sir Walter Scott and George Saintsbury, 18 vols. (Edinburgh, 1882-1893), XVII, 363.

8. Underwood, Etherege (n. 6), chap. iii.

9. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 8 vols. (London: Bell, 1926), VII, 287.

10. Thomas Shadwell, “Preface to The Humorists, A Comedy” (1671), reprinted in Joel E. Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1908), II, 152.

11. Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners, Yale Studies in English, vol. 135 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), chap. iv, discusses the form and structure of the play at length and with considerable subtlety. This chapter also has a number of insights into the imagery and significance of the play. Though Professor Underwood's approach differs from mine, our conclusions, not unsurprisingly, sometimes agree.

12. My references are to pages in The Dramatic Works of Sir George Etherege, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1927), II, 89-180. They may be applied to other editions by means of the following table:

    Act I, sc. i: 91-98; sc. ii: 99-104.

    Act II, sc. i: 104-110; sc. ii: 110-118.

    Act III, sc. i: 118-126; sc. ii: 126-129; sc. iii: 129-143.

    Act IV, sc. i: 143-149; sc. ii: 149-159.

    Act V, sc. i: 160-179.

13. G. Wilson Knight, The Shakespearian Tempest, 3d ed. (London: Methuen, 1953), p. 293.

14. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman, Understanding Drama (New York: Holt, 1948), p. 442. The quotation refers to The Way of the World but is widely applicable to Restoration comedy.

15. Andrews Wanning, “Some Changes in the Prose Style of the Seventeenth Century,” (Cambridge, Eng., 1938, unpub. diss. on deposit in the Harvard College Library), p. 313. This statement also refers to The Way of the World but applies equally to Etherege's language. Professor Wanning's chapter is entitled “The Language of Split-Man Observation,” a useful term generally for the language of Restoration comedy, and one to which we shall have frequent reference.

16. My references are to pages in The Dramatic Works of Sir George Etherege, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, 2 vols. (Boston and New York, 1927), II, 182-288. They may be related to other editions by means of the following table:

    Act I, sc. i: 189-204.

    Act II, sc. i: 205-210; sc. ii: 210-218.

    Act III, sc. i: 219-224; sc. ii: 225-233; sc. iii: 233-244.

    Act IV, sc. i: 244-257; sc. ii: 258-263; sc. iii: 264.

    Act V, sc. i: 265-274; sc. ii: 274-287.

17. Dale Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners Yale Studies in English, vol. 135 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 79.

18. Professor Underwood (ibid., pp. 90-91) goes so far as to say that Dorimant is following Harriet to the country more for a “ruin” than a romance.

19. Letter to Mr. Poley, January 2/12, 1687/8, The Letterbook of Sir George Etherege, ed. Sybil Rosenfeld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 309.