[In the essay below, Smith discusses Buckingham's role as a theater critic and his inclusion of the critic characters Smith and Johnson in The Rehearsal.]

THE PLAY-HOUSE TO BE LET

Perhaps the first reference to the critic in the drama of the Restoration, like so many other firsts in the history of English drama, is found in the work of Sir William D'Avenant. His Play-House to be Let was probably acted in 1663. In this comedy the people of the theatre are discussing expedients for keeping the theatre going during the lean days of vacation. If they are to eat during these scanty days when the lawyers and many other regular patrons are away from London, the players and their retainers back-stage must so far as possible maintain a semblance of prosperity and popularity. Accordingly, the discussion drifts to arrangements for a claque to support the coming performance. They decide to admit a friendly fat man who never fails to clap at every play.

HOUS.K[EEPER].
We have some half hearted friends who clap softly
As if they wore furr'd Mittens.
PLAY[ER].
We must provide our Party 'gainst tomorrow;
Watch at the doors before the Play begins,
And make low congies to the cruel Criticks,
As they come in; the Poets should do that;
But they want breeding, which is the chief cause
That all their Plays miscarry.
HOUS.K[EEPER].
There is least malice in the upper Gallery,
For they continually begin the plaudit.(1)

Since during the off-season when the courts are not in session,

Most men of judgment are retir'd
Into the Country, and the remainder that
Are left behind, come here not to consider
But to be merry at such obvious things
As not constrain 'em to the pains of thinking,(2)

noise alone will be sufficient to support their play.

PLAY[ER].
We'll hire a dozen Laundry-Maids and there
Disperse 'em, Wenches that use to clap Linen;
They have tough hands, and will be heard.(3)

The Play-House to be Let is really a drame à tiroir, a nest of plays. The portion of the piece to which the title refers serves as a prelude to three other brief but distinct dramatic pieces. Two of these are perhaps the earliest examples of the French variety of dramatic burlesque to be found in English. Though D'Avenant's play says no more about the critic, nevertheless, as a play about the theatre it is a forerunner of Buckingham's masterpiece, The Rehearsal, the first performance of which was the heyday of Restoration critics. Buckingham, in turn, is to anticipate Thomas Rymer, the trenchant critic of the “School of Rules.” In The Rehearsal, at least, he and his ghost-writers represented the forces of French criticism arrayed against certain native defenders of the English heroic play. Without specifically raising the battle-cry of probability and decorum, or flaunting the colors of French or Italian classicism, his was the first militant attack on the independence of English dramaturgy—inaugurating a trend in criticism which later caused Thomas Rymer to turn against Shakespeare. Perhaps somewhere in the back of his mind the Duke of Buckingham dreamed he was another Richelieu, shaping the literary destinies of his country in the direction of classicism and conformity. The Duke, wishing to see that correctness reached the English theatre, sought to impose on Dryden and his fellows the edicts of French criticism requiring that every play conform to the laws of Nature, Reason, Good Sense. In doing so, Buckingham was to use the then aristocratic weapons of burlesque and ridicule that Sir William D'Avenant had brought over from France and had already made use of in The Play-House to be Let.

II THE REHEARSAL

The Rehearsal, that most prolific of all dramatic pieces, which scattered its progeny throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and then projected its powerful hereditary strain even into our own comedies, farces, and revues, for the first time in English history evidences the complete emergence of the critic in the audience as a prominent figure in the theatre and in the national consciousness of the British people. George Villiers, the Second Duke of Buckingham, its author, who is said to have called in as his collaborators Thomas Sprat, Martin Clifford, Samuel Butler, and probably Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley, was a critic in the fullest sense of the word, and was typical in everything but his own brilliance, prominence, and influence, of all the amateur and self-appointed critics in the audiences of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English theatre. Like his stage counterparts in his own play and in the numerous imitations which followed it, one of his many diversions, in a life dedicated to diversions, was to go to the rehearsals of plays at the two patent houses.⁴ He was, moreover, not only a critic but a dramatic author himself, both in writing The Rehearsal and in later life when he was the adapter of two pieces of an earlier age, one by Fletcher and one the joint work of Fletcher and his collaborator, Beaumont. Finally, it is noteworthy that Buckingham in 1663, years before The Rehearsal, had exercised the last and one of the most feared prerogatives of the amateur critic when he instigated a riot. The occasion was a performance of The United Kingdoms, an heroic play by Colonel Henry Howard. Although the disturbers succeeded in breaking up the performance, the Duke of Bucks, as our author was frequently called, extricated himself with difficulty from the melee and barely escaped injury.⁵

The Rehearsal, then, is a play written by a critic who was the epitome of glamour and prestige, “the greatest wit and wealthiest man in England,” who a little earlier had served as the King's “foremost minister and policy-maker.” If the Duke of Buckingham was a pattern for all who wished to make themselves conspicuous in the theatre by arraigning the author of the evening before the tribunal of wit and good sense, his play was a veritable arsenal of offensive weapons in the form of critical objections that could be vociferated against the average writer when his play went on trial at a Theatre Royal. Buckingham not only told lesser critics what to say, but also taught them how to say it in the simple and prosaic queries and pronouncements of the characters Smith and Johnson, guests at the rehearsal of Bayes's play.

The first performance of The Rehearsal at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane in December, 1671, was a gala day for the critics. The play itself attacked a critic, for Bayes, the satirical butt of the play, represented John Dryden, not only the author of heroic plays but also their chief critical defender. And in the audience of the first performance there were rival factions of critics, the opponents and supporters of the play.⁶ That the Duke was expecting opposition is, as will later be evident, clear from the text of his play. In the Epilogue of The Conquest of Granada (1670), the heroic play which was Buckingham's immediate target, John Dryden had given fair warning to all would-be dramatists, in his oft-quoted comparison of his own age with that of the Elizabethans:

Fame then was cheap, and the first comer sped;
And they have kept it since, by being dead.
But were they now to write, when critics weigh
Each line and every word throughout a play
None of them no, not Johnson in his height, could pass.

The fashionable public of the Restoration was aware of its own brilliance in conversation, and, as Dryden indicates, was rightly proud of exercising its powers:

Wit's now arrived to a more high degree;
Our native language more refined and free;
Our ladies and our men now speak more wit
In conversation than those poets writ.

These lines of the previous year perhaps suggest the type of audience that would then be on hand at any first performance. Many of the spectators were Buckingham's supporters; yet at the commencement of the performance

the friends of the Earl of Orrery, of Sir Robert Howard and his brothers, and other men of rank who had produced heroic plays, were loud and furious in the opposition. But, as usually happens, the party who laughed, got the advantage over that which was angry, and finally drew the audience to their side.⁷

The Duke had won the day.

The Prologue of The Rehearsal, though dramatically attributed to the leading actor in the play, announces the purpose of the author in preparing the burlesque. It expresses scorn for the heroic play and indignation over its popularity. A great lord like George Villiers, once a member of the household of James II and also Master of Arts from Oxford, with a background of Italian and French culture acquired in sojourns on the continent, is fairly nauseated at the delight that a stupid form of entertainment gives to English theatre-goers. Personal grievance, boredom, and the principle of noblesse oblige all prompt him to do battle with a type of public diversion as monstrous as the heroic play, which is itself doing violence to the highest ideals of the age: Nature, Art, Reason, and Wit. His Prologue tells the audience that this “mock-play of ours” is

A posy made of weeds instead of flowers;
Yet such have been presented to your noses,
And there are such, I fear, who thought 'em roses.
Would some of 'em were here, to see, this night,
What stuff it is in which they took delight.

The new dramaturgy is so absurd that gentlemen can endure it no longer:

Our poets make us laugh at tragedy
And with their comedies they make us cry.
Now critics do your worst! …
.....I will both represent the feats they do
And give you all the reasons for them too.

Finally, to translate Buckingham's thought into the words of Sir William D'Avenant in The Play-House to be Let, the author hopes “to introduce such folly as shall make you wise.”⁸ In fact, Buckingham continues, “If what was once so praised you now despise,” The Rehearsal “will reform the stage!”

These brief glances at the author and the Prologue prepare the reader for a look at the play itself. This farce, burlesque, or dramatic satire is a piece of dramatic criticism,⁹ written by a critic, partly about another critic, and was supported and opposed in its initial performance by two critical factions in the audience. It is not surprising, then, that Johnson and Smith, “the two pillars” on which rests the whole attack upon the poet of the heroic plays and upon the plays themselves, are also critics. And Bayes eventually confesses to them that one of the reasons why the play they have been invited to watch is so difficult to understand is that he has made it so to confuse the critics:

'Tis a crust, a lasting crust for your Rogue Critiques. … I would fain see the proudest of 'em all but dare to nibble at this; I gad, if they do, this shall rub their gums for 'em.¹⁰

But Bayes offers critical explanations only to act as a foil and serve as a target. Johnson and Smith, then, are the two most aggressive characters in the outer framework of this play-within-a-play. But they are men of reserve, completely without interest in the welfare of their host, and say just enough to tempt Bayes into foolish explanation and confession.

Critics Johnson and Smith are conservative men of fashion absolutely uncontaminated by the preciosity of the drawing-room where the gallantry of love-making and the coquetry of conversation called for metaphors and similes, or by the aestheticism of the boudoir, where a gentleman or lady might spend long hours reading the society romances of Madeleine de Scudéry and La Calprenède. Smith has just returned from the country, where he has heard rumors of the absurdities now rife on the London stage. He first asks how the business men of the metropolis are faring. Business men and men who profess to be men of business bore Johnson; he regards them as “solemn fops … incapable of reason and insensible of wit and pleasure.” Like most critics in the Restoration and eighteenth century, Johnson is a gentleman, carrying out the code of a gentleman:

Eat and drink as well as I can, have a she-friend to be private with in the afternoon, and sometimes see a play.

“But plays,” he adds, “have become monstrous things … everything but thinking and sense.”¹¹ Even as they are talking, Bayes comes along, and upon being questioned about his last play, invites the two pleasure-seekers to a rehearsal of his new one. They accept the author's invitation and accompany him to the theatre.

Both before and after the trial performance gets under way, these gentlemen ply Bayes with questions, professing incomprehension at various parts of his piece, raising doubts as to its efficacy and correctness, and relieving their own feelings of boredom in ironical praise and sarcastic comment. Bayes, vain, arrogant, and dogmatic by nature, nevertheless, when the occasion demands, shows himself capable of great patience and forbearance. He makes allowance for the incomprehension and lack of appreciation on the part of his guests on the ground that they are not acquainted with the new way of writing. He can, of course, ill afford to be offended by any critics who might otherwise be persuaded to support his play.

When their host is not at hand, Johnson and Smith are even more derisive and become denunciatory. The play is “very fantastical, most abominably dull, and not one word to the purpose.”¹²

SMITH.
What a plague, does this Fop mean by his snip snap, hit for hit, and dash?
JOHNSON.
Mean? why, he never meant any thing in 's life: what dost talk of meaning for?

.....

SMITH.
Well, I can hold no longer; I must gag this rogue; there's no induring of him.(13)

But these fashionable observers enjoy the sport of baiting an author, and continue to draw him out and lead him on until it is time for dinner, when suddenly Bayes finds to his chagrin and rage that they have slipped away before the last act.

Though the rehearsal ends with Bayes in a state of complete futility, his words at the beginning of the play sum up his views on the character of Smith and Johnson and on that of Buckingham himself:

There are, now-a-days, a sort of persons, they call Critiques, that I gad, have no more wit in 'em than so many Hobby-horses. A sort of envious persons, that emulate the glories of a person of parts, and think to build their fame, by calumniating.¹⁴

Buckingham, by including in his piece the very sentiments and feelings of Dryden, his enemy, was, of course, indulging in subtle mockery. He also let Johnson speak out with equal honesty against Mr. Bayes and his faction:

These critics scorn to imitate nature; but are given altogether to elevate and surprise … a phrase they have got among them to express their no-meaning by. I'll tell you, as well as I can, what it is. … 'Tis Fighting, Loving, Sleeping, Rhyming, Dying, Dancing, Singing, Crying, and every thing but Thinking and Sence [sic].¹⁵

In the opinion of Buckingham, this is what Dryden himself stood for as a critic. That the hobby-horse passage is an authentic echo of Dryden's estimate of Buckingham as a critic seems to be corroborated twenty years later by John Dryden himself. In his Essay on Satire (1693), Dryden asserted that Mr. Smith and Mr. Johnson “were two such languishing gentlemen in their conversation, that I could liken them to nothing but to their own relations, those noble characters of men of wit and pleasure about the town.”¹⁶

The Rehearsal with its mixture of sense and nonsense catered perfectly to the intelligence and the frivolity of the hour. Its parodies, like the strains of a popular song, were reminiscent of many a moment of inflated sentiment in the performances that preceded it, and immediately captured the attention of the amusement-seeking public. No other piece of the theatre in Restoration times created more talk on its first appearance or was referred to so frequently in the literature of its own century and the century which followed. Its continued popularity as a stage play, until it was supplanted by The Critic in 1779, was perhaps not entirely without bearing on the coextensive vogue of the critic in the audience. In making fun of D'Avenant, Sir Robert Howard, and Dryden, widely-known figures in the social and literary life of the time, and in burlesquing so popular a form of entertainment as the heroic play, The Rehearsal returned in spirit and technique to the dramatic cartooning of Aristophanes. It also revived devices of the beginning of the century, when in the stage quarrel between Jonson and two younger rivals in playmaking, theatrical lampooning took the form of the caricature of the rival dramatist, wherein one travesties one's enemy and presents him in the role of a fool.¹⁷ Apart from the effect which The Rehearsal had on the heroic play, its chief result was to create an atmosphere of skepticism in pit and boxes and, in the average spectator, a distrust of all forms of dramatic illusion and a consequent avidity for realism. As the reverence of the public for the genius of authorship declined, there was a corresponding increase in the number and insolence of critics. Almost immediately, the sixteen-seventies, when the best work of Dryden, Etherege, and Wycherley appeared, became a new era of freedom of expression for the patrons of the theatre.

Notes

1. The Works of S^r William Davenant K^t (London: Herringman, 1673), ‘Dramas,’ p. 77.

2. Ibid., p. 75.

3. Ibid., p. 77.

4. Brian Fairfax, “Memoirs of the Life of George Villiers,” quoted in English Reprints, edited by Edward Arber, George Villiers, The Rehearsal (Westminster: Constable, 1895), p. 9. Charles II granted patents, or charters, to two favorites, and thus created a theatrical monopoly in London, which, with an ever-increasing number of exceptions, extended from 1660 through the eighteenth century to the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843.

5. See George R. Noyes, Selected Dramas of John Dryden; with The Rehearsal (Chicago: Scott, Foresman & Co., 1910), pp. xxxi-xxxiii. See also ‘The Publisher to the Reader,’ The Rehearsal … with a key (London, 1710), pp. 11, 12.

6. Scott-Saintsbury, ed., The Works of John Dryden (Edinburgh: Paterson, 1882), I, 118.

7. Ibid.

8. D'Avenant, Works (1673), p. 76.

9. For an analysis of the play from the point of view of dramatic criticism and satirical method, see Dane F. Smith, Plays about the Theatre in England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1936), pp. 9-37.

10. The Rehearsal, II, ii, 26-30.

11. I, i, 21-22, 32-35, 36-37, 60.

12. II, i, 107-110.

13. III, i, 30-32, V, i, 129-131.

14. I, i, 336-349.

15. I, i, 48-50, 55-60.

16. Works (1887), XIII, 9.

17. The hostility which the heroic play first aroused in the Duke and his cronies has an English source in their common enthusiasm for Ben Jonson and his classical precepts. See Montague Summers, The Playhouse of Pepys (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935), p. 280.