[In the following essay, Aercke maintains that Bayes, the playwright in The Rehearsal, is a Baroque artist, not a modernist as has been claimed by some critics.]

Buckingham's playwright Bayes summarizes a scene of his own unnamed play in The Rehearsal (1671) as “an orange stuff'd with cloves” (III.i.24-5).¹ A more Baroque image can hardly be found. Oranges are of course associated with the theater of the seventeenth century through the “orange wenches,” but more relevant still is the synaesthetic unity represented by the fruit. A harmonious blend of voluptuous sweetnesses, the reddish-golden globe displays not only the favorite colors of the Baroque, but also the almost shocking boldness of invention associated with this artistic style and period. For who but a Baroque artist would stuff an orange with cloves?

When Bayes asserts proudly that he is “the strangest person in the whole world. For what care I for money? I write for reputation” (III.v.182-3), it becomes clear that the orange conceit is not a fortuitous one; it stands for Bayes's entire play, the rehearsal of which is the subject of Buckingham's Rehearsal. The major point of this essay is that Buckingham's playwright Bayes—and by implication Buckingham himself—ought to be seen as a Baroque artist who is interested in “stuffing an orange with cloves,” in creating a unity out of disunity. Bayes is not merely a parodist who casually connects barbs of satire and parody for their own sake. Faced with the plotlessness of Bayes's untitled play that is being rehearsed, Buckingham's critic Smith cries “Bless me, what a monster's this” (V.i.11). According to a recent study by Jack Gravitt, the play is “absurd” and “modernist” rather than monstrous because of its “involuted structure,” its “lack of plot,” its “devaluated language” and its “black humor.”² Such an attempt to compartmentalize Buckingham by means of twentieth-century categories is in itself quite absurd, unless one has the intellectual honesty to admit that seventeenth-century aesthetics offers critical parameters at least as relevant. Similarities with “modernist” and “avant-garde” techniques that come to the reader's mind then turn out to be nothing more and nothing less than just that: similarities. I will therefore be excused for alluding briefly to eighteenth-century Hegelianism in support of my interpretation of Bayes as a Baroque artist.

The Rehearsal is usually interpreted as a topical parody of heroic tragedy, as the font and origin of English burlesque theater, as a political satire.³ I believe that the play's obvious concern with the dualism of “harmony/unification” vs. “disharmony/fragmentation” has not been touched upon. This concern is thoroughly Baroque, for the dualism mentioned is the very crux of the Baroque aesthetics of paradox.⁴ Smith and Johnson, the plain-speaking critics of Bayes's play embedded in Buckingham's play, lead us right into this matter. Smith rejects Bayes's play. According to this visitor from the country, it confirms “all the strange new things” (I.i.5-6) that he has heard occur in the wicked metropolis. The play is “a mirror of changing tastes in respect of heroics, bombast and blood”⁵ and therefore incomprehensible to Smith. His friend Johnson is a city-dweller, and he remarks that all these “hideous, monstrous things” (I.i.32-3) must not be taken for literal truth, for they are not typical of actual life in the city and belong merely to the realm of art and therefore of imagination and illusion. Smith and Johnson, users of plain-speech both, condemn such artists as the extravagant Bayes who “are given altogether to elevate and surprise” (I.i.42-3). And indeed, Bayes prides himself on doing “nothing here that ever was done before,” thus emphasizing the non pareillo (I.ii.229-30) and the ingegno (genius) of Baroque aesthetics. Whereas Johnson's remarks on Bayes's new form of art are merely inconsistent,⁶ Smith's are more serious for they introduce the classical contempt for the so-called “excrescences” of the Baroque. This critical ambiguity is typical of the Restoration, a transitional period in many ways.⁷

Smith's objections mainly concern Bayes's apparent logorrhea and the irregular form into which the eclectic content is poured.⁸ Smith also fails to understand the four compositional rules that Bayes explains so pedantically. The rules of “transprosing,” “recording,” “encyclopedic invention,” and “surprise” (I.i.97-155; II.iii.17-9) differ considerably from Senecan or Cornelian doctrine, but they are neither absurd nor neoteric for they promote rather than destroy the unification of style and subject. This unification was the intention of the Baroque artist, and distinguished the latter from his Renaissance or Mannerist colleagues⁹ as well as from those who, in the wake of the early scientific revolution, no longer unambiguously accepted the harmony of manner and matter. Bayes is mainly concerned with elocution and composition. His interpretation of composition is modern for his time, because he sees it as the refashioning of pre-existing elements in a process of creative imitation, i.e., a higher mode of poetic invention than the fallacious objective mimesis which conventional critics such as Smith see as normative.

Bayes is certainly not the first (nor the last) philosopher of language to posit that writing is an anagrammatic process that involves breaking down order into disorder and then refashioning the result back into some other form or order. Assuming that this position is valid, then the main criterion of admiration for the resulting work of art is the creative originality of elocution and composition. It is not Smith but rather the intuitive Johnson who understands this. Bayes's inserted play, as well as the entire Rehearsal, is a pastiche of many plays—what one might call a grotesquely inflated anagram. Bayes's four rules for literary composition deny the myth of external divine interference (the Muses) in the poetic act and reveal the artist's power to manipulate his material and his audience. Therefore, to say with Gravitt that the “lack of unity” of Bayes's play means that Bayes has no “aesthetic control of his language, his plot, and his actors,”¹⁰ is dubious.

Bayes's poetics has no room for the Muses, the allegorical figures for the given creation in harmony. An aesthetic usurpation has taken place in the recognition of the disordered creative act. For example, Bayes's “honest” revelation of the frame of his play (the “virgin attire” in “all its nakedness,” I.i.86-8) blandly opposes the organic interpretation of a work of art as natural unity, with the imaginary branches of prologue, epilogue, and imagery sprouting from a no less imaginary trunk of denouement. Bayes's epilogue and imagery are ready-made, interchangeable even (I.ii.125-30). Also, the hiring of a claque, which Bayes advocates, suggests that even the reception and approbation of art must be artificially construed (I.II.174-7). And finally, a critical understanding of the work of art by means of an exegesis of sources and motives (a return to fragmentation) replaces in Bayes's scheme the unanalytical admiration of a Gestalt, hence the need for Bayes's plot summaries (I.ii.171-3) or for the “keys” to The Rehearsal.

Bayes's Baroque “cleverness” is intended to surpass the aesthetics of bewilderment that dominates the last Shakespearean and the earliest Cornelian comedies. In L'Illusion comique (1636), Corneille still harmoniously counterbalanced receptive surprise with an ordered plot. Bayes has given up this median; what Smith condemns as “monstrous” is precisely Bayes's unmitigated dedication to the Baroque phenomenon of meraviglia: marvels and astonished reactions similar in intent to the pursuit of capricious effects in the arts of the period. The overdone interrorem-copia speech that accompanies the entrance of Thunder and Lightning (I.ii.258) would not be out of place in a Baroque opera for its effect of shock. Yet, even in this passage Bayes pursues his ultimate ambition: the representation of harmony through disharmony, of parallellism through paradox. The lines spoken by Thunder and Lightning are neatly balanced and strikingly rhymed. Truly Baroque, Bayes asks: “Why not exaggerate?” The laudatio by Pretty-Man and Volscius in the second scene of the fourth act (11.35-6) is Baroque for the same reason, as well as for its reference to the theme of the sacrificial hero. This laudatio proposes as criterion for aesthetic satisfaction disharmony, which is the diametrical opposite of the Medieval and Renaissance idea that beauty is achieved through a harmonious combination of perfectly balanced elements. I believe that this is David Vieth's meaning when he calls The Rehearsal a striking manifestation of the phenomenon of “reversible meaning” in Restoration literature, namely the sensation that “nothing” is a “something.”¹¹ Which does not mean, however, that The Rehearsal is a play upon nothing. Neither Buckingham's Smith nor the modernist critic Gravitt perceive that Bayes's statements on poetics are also meant to shock. Bayes's ironic condemnation of the clichés of conventional Petrarchan love poetry, for example, is particularly striking (II.i.127-9). Not to take an artist's own statements about his art seriously would be a grave critical mistake. Therefore, let us have a closer look at the second scene of act four, which is announced by a proud Bayes as “the scene of scenes.”

In a bizarre eclogue with Baroque cumulative ending,¹² Pretty-Man and Volscius discuss the “harmony versus disharmony” topos. Pretty-Man is hopelessly smitten with the pastoral beauty Cloris, whereas Volscius loves one Parthenope. Each lover eagerly advertises for his own mistress. Pretty-Man argues that Volscius ought to love Cloris at least as much as he does Parthenope because the essentia of the abstract concept of Love never vary. Hence, the accidentes of Love can hardly be different or disharmonious (IV.ii.17.8). So why would Volscius not feel the same passion for the same girl as Pretty-Man? By means of a simile (which is itself an artificially constructed form of harmony or correspondence between essentially unrelated elements), Volscius retorts that Nature often craftily masks disharmony with a semblance of harmony so that appearance and reality blend imperceptibly (20-1). Can one say then that a change in appearance (or accidentes, here the substitution of one lover for another) signifies a change in the essence of Love? For a Renaissance interpreter, the phenomenological world is indeed a fairly safe guide for knowledge on the assumption that sensory experience is a valid key to intellectual comprehension. Hence the Renaissance preference for simile rather than metaphor, for simile tries to further intellectual understanding by openly referring to sensory phenomena. Bayes, however, introduces in this scene the Baroque questioning of the “reality” of the phenomenological world itself and the systematic doubt of mundane experience. Hence the chameleon-simile. Such reasoning (in artistic form, for couched in verse)¹³ had been Bayes's purpose from the very beginning. Pretty-Man wins the argument of this vivid “scene of scenes” when he states—complacently and irrefutably—that Nature's goal is always harmony and equilibrium (23-4). His admonishing conclusion (66-70) is exemplary Baroque: both lovers will have to remove their girlfriends from the sphere of ordinary human experience by assigning them ambiguous and miraculous powers with which they can transcend the limits traditionally set between the cosmic levels. Such an annihilation of boundaries separating underworld, earth, and heaven can signify either ultimate chaos (in the Greek, mythological sense of the word), or else a supreme harmony of all elements. As compared to the Renaissance anthropocentric immutability of the worlds of God and Man, the Baroque sensibility promotes such cosmic elasticity through art, science, and mystic meditation. After Galileo, motion or change was indeed no longer thought of as an “unsightly imperfection” but rather as a glory and chief attribute of the universe. “Since the scientific revolution has not taken God into account,” Lowry Nelson writes, “Man is allowed to enter the realms previously forbidden to him.”¹⁴

Instead of “devaluating” the language,¹⁵ Bayes does in fact the (Baroque) opposite: he superimposes meaning, by means of language. A clear example is Bayes's substitution of language. A clear example is Bayes's substitution of bawdy talk for the act of seduction itself (I.ii.38-71). (Buckingham may have been influenced by contemporary anti-rhetorical language theory in this matter.) Language that becomes the very act it signifies obviously gains in value as concrete function and rises above the sphere of the sign. Similarly, the usurpation by “Ush” and “Phys” is a deed performed by words, a speech-act, and as such echoes the central theme of Richard III: does the mere word or title “King” confer power and authority per se, or vice versa? Throughout his play, Bayes's language is Baroque, even emblematic; his words represent a higher train of thought. His obscure statement “I mean not for words, for those I do not value, but for state, show, and magnificence” (V.i.3-4) becomes clearer when we take a look at some of his dialogues. The (often anagrammatical) phrases are seemingly meaningless and apparently they promote intellectual chaos,¹⁶ but in reality they are able to resolve conflicts. Contrariwise, the Usher's pseudo-logical dissection of the “whisper-argument” (II.iv.19-23) suggests that supposedly sensible analytical talk can well be totally pointless. For each of the Usher's questions “When?,” “Where?,” “Whether or not?” is shown to ramify into a virtually limitless number of other questions, so that this form of language ultimately destroys itself by hopelessly clogging understanding.¹⁷ The Usher does not even succeed in defining his initial concern, namely the concept of the verb “to whisper.”¹⁸ Any attempt to use language plainly fails—as when the soldiers kill each other in spite of their claim to be “friends”—for, whose friends are they, since when, and why, or why not? (II.v.1-4) Thus is shattered the harmonious classical-Renaissance marriage of matter and manner, propagated by rhetoric from Cato and Cicero to Ben Jonson. It was the latter who stated that “The sense is, as the life and soul of language, without which all words are dead.”¹⁹ The state resulting from the suspension of this harmony might perhaps be labeled “absurd,” but only rightly so if the term is used in a philosophical sense that does not limit itself to the context of twentieth-century modernism. It is namely an absurdity that Baroque poetics is quite familiar with.

Bayes's own poetry contains some of the paradoxical qualities of Baroque and Metaphysical poetry (e.g. IV.ii.41-2). He is proud of his striking word-pictures, his conceits, and believes, with the Italian High-Baroque poet Marino, that the poet should strive to exploit suspense, to express the grotesque, to astound.²⁰ In reality, Bayes's conceits are rather like similes (the technical opposite of conceits) in that the poet (i.e., Bayes) explains the point himself. So for example in the simile of the “burning pine” (II.iii.20-7), which, according to Bayes, “alludes to passion, to consuming, to dying, and all that; which, you know, are the natural effects of an amour” (30-2). Real-life passion does not have such effects at all, but Bayes, tongue-in-cheek, mocks the literary cliché that most undistinguishing readers of Petrarchan-style poetry have come to accept for reality through sheer repetition and familiarity. But this very same simile is also like a conceit, for, as Johnson again appropriately remarks, the first impression it creates is one of cynical ingenuity rather than of conventional poetic aptness. Truly Baroque, Bayes applies classical mythology to incongruous contexts in order to surprize. In the fifth act, for example, Athena's defensive weapons are metamorphosed into celebratory, gustatory stage props. Bayes is also prone to substituting unfamiliar, grotesque comparisons and images for the worn conventions of the Renaissance poetic store-house. As the result of the constant use of metaphor,²¹ disharmonious elements are united and reconciled (discordia concors) through the discovery of correspondences considered impossible by reason or poetic convention. In a dainty love scene, boar and sow replace the conventional “turtles”—the latter may well be canonized as the conventional form for “doves,” but the “literal” image of “mating turtles” is as grotesque as that of Bayes's swine. Sometimes there is an implicit explanation for such a grotesque metaphor; a faint-hearted lover is aptly associated with a fly. “Love hath wings,” after all (IV.ii.46-48).

Bayes's play opens with an ostentatious “flash of Prologue,” and cosmic imagery continues to cloud threateningly over it. After a chiastic introduction (again a form of harmony through disharmony: I.ii.263-4), “Thunder and Lightning” threaten to destroy all the manifestations of earthly harmony: from the government of a city to the make-up of a lady's face. But characteristically and inconsequentially, their incantatory threats themselves rhyme rather too harmoniously. Storms and similar Renaissance imagery of disharmony undergo a surprising devaluation. In the boar and sow-simile mentioned earlier, a storm or cosmic climax prompts the swine to mate—a grotesque parody not only of the “turtles” but also of the canonized Dido-and-Aeneas motif (Aeneid, IV). In agreement with the Baroque view of love as a raging cataclysmic power, Cloris is praised as a “blazing comet” (II.iii.5-6). Also, only cosmic imagery would suffice for the description of the rebellion against or the usurpation of invested power. The standard correlative metaphor for political rebellion or usurpation—the ultimate disruption of harmony—is of course the eclipse, which is taken to represent the breakdown of the harmony of the heavenly spheres (V.i). This metaphor affirms again the constant interaction of the various cosmic levels. Typical of Bayes's sense of irony is his introduction of eclipse and usurpation on stage as a dance. Thus, he represents ultimate disharmony by means of ultimate harmony. A military metaphor²² combines the human theme of the rebellion and the corresponding cosmic unrest: “What midnight darkness does invade the day, / And snatch the victor from his conquered prey?” (V.i.259-61). Similarly, the potential rebel Drawcansir (resembling Almanzor in Dryden's Conquest of Granada, 1672) flashes quickly through the power struggle like an erring comet through the spheres (V.i). Again, Drawcansir's brief appearance reminds one of a meteor, which becomes bright as it is burnt up. This heroic invader “kills 'em all on both sides” and then delivers five grotesquely boastful heroic couplets like a real matamore (V.i.338-47). His flat performance contributes to the theatrum mundi topos that underlies this play and much of Baroque literature, for when ruler and rebel are but actors (as in L'Illusion comique or in La Vida es sueño), the throne is but an illusion and a symbol of vanity in the light of eternity.

The musical motif that connects various scenes of Bayes's play is yet another signifier of harmony in disharmony. Raised in the Renaissance canon, Smith and Johnson are trained to interpret music as the most positive metaphor for harmony, and therefore they fail to comprehend, first, how Bayes's labor of two nights can “merely” amount to a one-note tune, and, second, how he can pretend to have sanctioned artistically the disharmony of usurpation through the harmony of music. Bayes's music is peculiar and paradoxical: he can only create an existential shriek—a sober, one-note composition. Anything other than his tune in “Effaut flat” (II.v.1-3) would dissolve the entire tension of the dualism. The point is that Smith and Johnson do not realize that Bayes has intended this dance to take place after death—for the dancers/soldiers have just absurdly killed each other. Thus they miss the obtuse existentialist meaning of Bayes's cue to the dancers: “Do you hear, dead men?” The Baroque themes of transience, illusion, and death are affirmed by this monotonic harmony in Effaut, which, as burlesque imitation of Apocalyptic trumpets or Royal pomp, is designed to rouse the dead. But though the soldiers are brought back to some kind of life (life as actors, for they respond to a cue), they “cannot get in order” for their “horsemen's dance.” Evidently Bayes has hit upon the wrong note. Bayes himself slips, falls, and breaks his nose, shouting “you'll see this dance, if I am not deceived, take very well upon the stage, when they are perfect in their motions, and all that” (III.v.156-8). After all, it was only a rehearsal. When the real Kings, early in the fifth act, descend from the clouds to chase the Usurpers, the latter interpret the accompanying “soft music” incorrectly as the music of the heavenly spheres (V.i.32-4). Buckingham's satire of politics here coincides with the Baroque motif of heavenly influence: as the “rightful” King states, not much should be expected from Heaven (83-6).²³

Bayes also deploys “characters in couples” in the structure of his play to express the theme of order versus disorder. There are two weak Rightful Kings of Brentford (presumably Charles and James), two Usurpers and two dubious Princes (each one with a girlfriend). Another couple, the general and the lieutenant-general, stage a “flyting” scene, which symbolizes the rebellion of the absurd “secret armies” (V.i.224-47). Buckingham harmoniously couples this complex dual track pattern in Bayes's play with the joint appearance of the two amateur critics in his enveloping structure. The topical-parodical interpretation of The Rehearsal usually refers to Dryden's Conquest of Granada in connection with the heroes-in-couples, but I have found also the Hegelian concept of the development of the self-consciousness in the framework of the Lordship-Bondage theory useful for both the political-satirical reading and the “harmony vs. disharmony” interpretation of the play.

Bayes's play is composed as a series of many apparently unconnected scenes. This structure can be interpreted in various ways: first, according to the Baroque view that ultimate reality or harmony is accessible to the human mind only in moments of intense passionate experience;²⁴ second, as a deliberate imitation of the intermezzi as one of the most comprehensive manifestations of Mannerist-Baroque literary style;²⁵ and third, according to the Hegelian theory of the individual moments of self-consciousness which, “known as not distinct,” must yet “be held strictly apart”—again a form of unity through fragmentation (see Hegel's Phenomenology, paragraph 178).²⁶

Hegel states that the self-consciousness exists only in the act of acknowledgement, namely when it is recognized as consciousness by another self-consciousness. Thus in order to exist, a self-consciousness needs to form a couple-relationship. Becoming self-conscious, however, already implies two notions: “losing” and “superseding” (Phenomenology, paragraph 179).²⁷ The self-consciousness finds itself as other being, but prior to finding or recognizing itself, it must necessarily have “lost” itself, namely its former condition. Only one position or slot can be filled at one given time. “Phys” and “Ush” give up their respective anonymity and their lower condition of “servants in bondage” when each of them recognizes himself and the other as potential candidates for the dual throne. The bond between them is strong, for it is ruled by self-interest. Whereas they have set out as two separate self-consciousnesses (“others” to one another), they have now come to realize one another mutually through an intellectual effort: instead of introducing themselves by name, they each guess at the other's identity and function (II.i.7-16). It is in accordance with the Hegelian scheme (Phenomenology, paragraphs 183-4) that the Physician and the Usher, who have worked at the same place for years but who were unknown to one another, now proceed to an act of mutual recognition. They embrace and appear “hand in hand” (III.ii) and even love till death the same woman (“Lardella”) in a perfectly harmonious understanding (IV.i.196-200). They think, act, and react like one self-consciousness. The same is true for the two Rightful Kings. The actual usurpation of one self-conscious couple by another, then, can be considered a manifestation of the third of the three possible effects which Hegel thinks can result from the human struggle for recognition. The two self-consciousnesses that recognize one another as such engage in a struggle for domination; the third possible effect of this encounter is that one of the two backs down and becomes enslaved. This is the eternal fate of the “Phys-Ush” combination of servants in bondage.

Smith, who attacks Bayes's structure as “loose” and “monstrous,” does not understand the author's concepts and intentions. Whereas the twentieth-century avant-garde author waits for a God to reveal himself or else sends out his six characters in search of an authorial God-Muse to justify their existences and flesh them out on stage, Buckingham's Bayes plays at being a God who is doggedly in search of better actors and critics. It is not the creative power in the universe that fails, but those who perform in the theater of the world, as well as those who pretend to judge it. Bayes's play may appear “messy,” but to condemn it offhand is fallacious, for the artist as craftsman (playwright as well as actor) must at first be given the benefit of the doubt. Hence Bayes's choler is justified when his actors behave unprofessionally (III.iv.10-13). His structure may appear loose, but at least he can justify whatever he does—as he had promised in the Prologue: “I will not only show the feats they do, / But give you all their reasons for 'em too” (20-1). This really summarizes the Baroque aesthetic attempt at forging a unity of manner and matter. The revelation of the artistic framework is not at all such a “modernist” element as Gravitt would have it; especially not if one remembers that twentieth-century modernist theater since Brecht often carefully keeps the real motives of characters hidden in order to achieve a maximum alienation effect, whereas Baroque playwrights (the early Corneille, Rotrou, Calderon, and Bayes) are only too eager to reveal ultimately how the audience has been presented with an illusion. Bayes explains his own work and what lies behind it readily and pretentiously—at least, he seems to do so. We have, namely, no indication whether the promised plot summaries would really contribute to the critical and aesthetic understanding of the very play which the author himself considers a test of intelligence (III.i.140-8) and good taste: an orange stuff'd with cloves.

Notes

1. Villiers, George, “The Rehearsal,” in British Dramatists from Dryden to Sheridan, ed. Nettleton, Case, and Stone (Boston, 1982), 39-67. First produced at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, December 7, 1671.

2. G. Jack Gravitt, “The Modernity of The Rehearsal: Buckingham's Theatre of the Absurd,” College Literature 9 (1982), i., 30-8.

3. George MacFadden analyzes the political aspect in “Political Satire in The Rehearsal,” Yearbook of English Studies, 4 (1979), 120-8.

4. Harold B. Segel, The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Survey (New York, 1974), especially pp. 23-31. Also Frank J. Warnke, Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century (New York and London, 1972), 22.

5. Samuel Macey, “Fielding's Tom Thumb as the Heir to Buckingham's The Rehearsal,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 10 (1968), 405-414, 405.

6. Johnson condemns, for example, as “hideous, monstrous” such things as “fighting, loving, sleeping, rhyming, dying, dancing, singing, crying: and everything but thinking and sense” (I.i.50-2). Here he seems to prefer the wooden, static French comédies of the seventeenth century to the vivid mimesis of real life on stage. But, as Bayes's play gets under way, he is completely involved in the theatrical illusion and can appreciate the popular, conventional scenes (“fighting and dancing”) as well as Bayes's ridiculous answers to Smith's ironic queries (as in III.i).

7. In language theory, for example. For an interesting survey, see James Thompson, Language in Wycherley's Plays (Alabama: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1984), chapters 1 and 2 especially.

8. Warnke, 33, convincingly demonstrates that “For most typical Baroque poets … material makes form,” whereas the Renaissance thought in terms of “pre-existent containers, into which the poetic material may be poured.”

9. Segel, 29.

10. Gravitt, 31.

11. David Vieth, “Divided Consciousness: The Trauma and Triumph of Restoration Culture,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 22 (1977), 46-62, 56.

12. Segel, 112, discusses the Baroque “cumulative ending.”

13. Bayes's remark that his aim is to “reason in verse” is one of the arguments Gravitt uses to describe Bayes as an inconsistent poet who devaluates language (33). Gravitt is probably unaware of many centuries of theological, scientific, propagandistic, and otherwise didactic “reasoning in verse” from Antiquity till the nineteenth century.

14. Lowry Nelson, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven, 1961), 82.

15. Gravitt, 33-5.

16. Cf. the ancient stichomythia technique; each participant in such a “dialogue” is only interested in getting his own point across as quickly and as effectively as possible. Ionesco's parody of unimaginative Assimil language-method dialogues in La Cantatrice chauve “merely” carries this technique to an absurd extreme.

17. This failure to get a reasoning successfully started resembles the intellectual ordeal of Beckett's Watt (1942-44). This would in itself, however, not constitute any reason for labelling The Rehearsal a “proto-absurd” play, since the topos is at least as old as Descartes's “Rules for the Direction of the Mind.” Gravitt fails to mention this particular topos.

18. MacFadden gives an interesting political interpretation of the “whisper-arguement,” 126-7.

19. Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols (Oxford, 1947-61), VII: 621.

20. G. Marino, Murtoleide, sonnet XX, 1-3.

21. Segel, 101-2. Baroque poetics favored metaphor over simile. As compared to the Renaissance emphasis on simile (which implied that the phenomenological world can yield intellectual knowledge through the explicit linking of conceptual categories), the Baroque insistence on metaphor implied that appearance and reality are virtually indistinguishable.

22. Segel, 115, draws attention to the importance of military metaphors in Baroque poetics.

23. MacFadden analyzes this topic, 127-8.

24. Warnke, 52.

25. Segel, 27.

26. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit (1798), tr. A Miller (Oxford, 1977).

27. This idea is also helpful to explain the lyric motif of “loss of self” that one encounters so often in Baroque-Metaphysical poetry (Donne, Marvell) as well as in Romanticism (Keats, Leopardi), and that is occasioned either by an almost mystical meditation (in the case of the former), or by the experience of nature (as with the latter).