[In the following essay, Stocker contends that The Rehearsal is both political and literary satire, not one or the other as many critics claim.]

The Duke of Buckingham's Rehearsal¹ (1671) has usually been regarded as a purely theatrical burlesque, of which the central butt is Dryden, in the character of Bayes. Its extensive allusions to heroic drama, in both Bayes' “mock-play” and the “commentary” dialogues surrounding it, evince “shrewd insights into the condition of Restoration drama.”² Although George McFadden has suggested that the play has elements of political satire,³ such suggestions are still greeted with considerable scepticism.⁴ Partly this is because of a resistance to the notion that literature can be “reduced” to topicality. It should be said at once, however, that political concerns do not necessarily reduce a text to sub-literary status. Nor is it necessary to claim that this play is a political satire rather than a theatrical burlesque, although McFadden tended to privilege political over literary satire as the play's central concern. I wish to suggest that in The Rehearsal political and literary satire are analogous, mutually reinforcing, and effectively inseparable. In order to understand this combination, we need to identify more of Buckingham's topical allusions, discover their analytical framework, and understand the literary history which produced this particular play. The Rehearsal offers a logical political analysis of its time, precisely by diagnosing the ideology implicit in its literary target, the heroic drama.

In this paper I am concerned to answer the questions, “who is satirized in the play, and why?” In a companion piece, I shall be embedding the answers in the play's polemical context, in the light of Buckingham's political position in 1671. In the power struggle between himself and Arlington, Secretary of State, Buckingham had lost considerable ground. In 1660 Buckingham, richest man in England and childhood companion of Charles II, seemed perfectly placed for great political influence. Yet this was an illusion, and Buckingham was able to force an entry into government only by effecting the downfall of Chancellor Clarendon in 1667. As the leader of the nonconformists within and outside Parliament, Buckingham's political fortunes were inextricably bound up with theirs. Inevitably there was a fundamental polarity between these interests and the Anglican Cavalier supporters of Clarendonian policy as well as the Papist faction centred on James, Duke of York. After the fall of Clarendon conservative and Yorkist policy was increasingly effected by Arlington in accordance with Charles' labyrinthine intentions. By 1670 these involved pro-Catholic and pro-French policies which required the neutralization of Buckingham even while he remained, in the public view, “chief minister.”⁵ The personal feud between Buckingham and Arlington had continued to simmer despite the co-operation required by their roles in the government, an animosity the more powerful because in 1667 Arlington had framed Buckingham on a charge of treason, forcing his flight and imprisonment before Charles rescued him, perhaps reluctantly.⁶ Although Arlington was effectively Charles' chief minister in all but name, Charles kept him in his place partly by maintaining Buckingham's apparent influence in the so-called “Cabal” of ministers. In fact Buckingham was never appointed to a ministry. Excluded—unlike Arlington—from the secret negotiations of the Treaty of Dover, signed in 1670, he had become aware of his marginalization in the counsels of Charles II. Hoping for a military command over the French forces in Holland which were required by the overt treaty, Buckingham had been foiled by Arlington.⁷ This was the most recent and bitterly resented of his abortive military aspirations. Meanwhile his policy had conspicuously failed to wring from Parliament the finance Charles desperately required, a failure which evoked a blunt rebuke from the king in the Autumn of 1671.⁸ Culminating a series of reverses, this was an explicit sign of Buckingham's political decline which he cannot have underestimated. He was in no mood for optimism. Touched by major scandals in 1670 and 1671, he had also lost his only son, and was up to his ears in debt.⁹ While Parliament remained prorogued, from April 1671, his creditors were able to harass him without the hindrance of parliamentary privilege.¹⁰ That prorogation was both politically and personally disastrous for him. In 1671 Buckingham was beginning to reactivate an opposition critique precisely because his marginal influence at court was becoming clear to him, if not to many contemporary observers. The Rehearsal, produced in December 1671, expresses that critique.

Why should Buckingham choose to express his frustration in a play? First, while Parliament remained prorogued, Buckingham turned to the theatrical expression of political criticism. Such an indirect method facilitated political criticism in a manner which avoided embarrassing the king directly. If targeted on Arlington in particular, the play's satire could articulate opposition ideas in terms which maintained the debate at factional level, without overt criticism of the king himself. Supposedly, Charles was more responsive to a joke than an argument: not true, in fact, but contemporaries commonly ascribed his tolerance of Buckingham to the latter's droll wit, which had often been exercised in wicked mimickry of Arlington. So if the central butt of The Rehearsal's burlesque, the playwright Bayes, is a caricature of Arlington (as McFadden suggests), we should infer that Buckingham was continuing to practise a strategy which he had found as effective at Court as it would be on the stage. Buckingham had used the stage for political purposes before now. A minor instance was the embarrassing of Lady Harvey by personation in 1669.¹¹ More significantly, into Robert Howard's comedy, The Country Gentleman (1669), Buckingham had inserted a scene which unmistakably satirized Sir William Coventry, then treasurer of the navy.¹² The resulting furore caused the play to be banned before performance. Although the play has a strong strand of political satire, Charles II had previously passed it for playing because he had not seen the Coventry scene. It has been suggested that Buckingham effectively ruined Howard's political project by making it too explicit and thus evoking censorship.¹³ Certainly it is clear that Charles II and his ministers might prefer to ignore rather than to underline those cases where political satire was arguable. I think that by 1671 Buckingham had learned the lesson of The Country Gentleman, and that The Rehearsal is careful to maintain a delicate ambiguity which preserved it from censorship and outcry. The literary burlesque is a very distracting cover for political ideas.¹⁴

There was no need for Buckingham to resort to crass signals of political intent. Indeed, overt opposition satire would have been unwise, not only in relation to governmental reprisal but also in relation to the performers. The Coventry scandal had involved threats to maim the players.¹⁵The Rehearsal was performed by the King's Company, who would wish to court neither such reprisal nor the disfavour of their principal patron. Presumably Buckingham did not enlighten them about the play's covert political elements; nor would they have reason to suspect the supposed “chief minister” of subversive intent. His careful coaching of John Lacy in the part of Bayes, which concentrated on the mannerisms of Dryden, not only instituted the notorious identification of Bayes the poetaster with Dryden but also provided a visual cover for the figure's satire of Arlington. That tactic and my methodology here assume a similar principle: the alert pluralism of the seventeenth-century reader, upon which such writers as Dryden depended for the recognition of historiographic parallels with the present, and for the deduction of political principles.¹⁶ Such interpretive alertness was hardly a new phenomenon, as witness the contemporary reader who annotated Spenser's Faerie Queene, recognizing political parallels even when these did not exactly match the allegorical narrative.¹⁷ A thoroughgoing consistency in such political allegories was not only manifestly unnecessary, given such reading habits, but authorially unwise. In turn, when we try to recover such political intent, the most we can ask for is a plausible reading (which the seventeenth-century reader would have arrived at more rapidly) which calls upon historical evidence for a contextual situation. As it happens, The Rehearsal is quite remarkably consistent in the overall pattern of its political satire, as I hope to show.

The political satire in Buckingham's play depends on that analogy between the State and poesy's “kingdom” which is a commonplace of seventeenth-century literature, and invoked by his prologue and epilogue. No reader need exercise any interpretive effort upon the play's literary burlesque: Bayes' “mock-play” is criticized effectively at all points by the “commentary” of Johnson and Smith. In excusing the reader/audience from interpretive effort on this head, Buckingham leaves them free to exercise their perspicacity along political lines. They might reasonably be expected to do so, since Buckingham was not only a prominent political figure but also an incessantly controversial one, who had already been implicated in a major scandal over a comedy with political content.

For Buckingham's project the materials already lay to hand. The ur-Rehearsal of 1665, a projected satire of Davenant and Howard, must have provided a skeleton of the literary burlesque. Yet even in this version there may well have been a political burden. Davenant's Preface to Gondibert (1650) had insistently related poetry and polity, with evident contemporary relevance. He goes almost as far as Shelley in claiming that poets are the legislators of mankind, governors on equal if not better footing than kings and generals. (In 1650 the latter were the current rulers, of course.) Gondibert itself discusses government, and amongst a number of topical allusions may include a personation of Buckingham.¹⁸ Certainly he was known to have joined in the raillery against Davenant that produced, in 1653, a series of burlesque answers to Gondibert which anticipate points made in The Rehearsal.¹⁹ Most of these—poetic lameness, dulness, pretension, the use of foreign words, plagiarism, and so on—were readily transferable from the 1665 version to satire of Dryden in the 1671 version of the play. Amongst the charges against Davenant in the travesties of Gondibert, one in particular harped on the most hubristic claim made in his Preface. Disparaging the ancient writers, Davenant asserted that originality was a prerequisite of poetic achievement, and that he prided himself most upon wit and innovation.²⁰ Here evidently is the original of The Rehearsal's literary bête noire, “new wit.” Yoked in the 1671 version to a topical political analysis (as I shall suggest), that motif may have carried similar connotations in the ur-Rehearsal. There is, then, reason to think that the 1671 version reworked a polity/poetry parallel already present in the ur-Rehearsal's satire on Davenant.

The Rehearsal's political allusions centre on a simultaneous satire of Dryden and Arlington in Bayes, predicated on the analogy between literary and poetic “kingdoms.” In 1670-71 Arlington was the minister in the ascendant, and if he represented and implemented Charles' policy, to Buckingham's Country connexions Arlington embodied their antagonist, “arbitrary government”—absolutism and the Court. In the literary “kingdom” Dryden could be portrayed in similar terms, not merely by analogy but in ideological fact. Not only was it not unusual for the theatre to be used as a political instrument,²¹ but the heroic drama of which Dryden was now the leading exponent exerted its contemporary appeal (especially to Court patrons) partly because of its discussion of political questions.²² Dryden's heroic plays—including The Conquest of Granada (1670), prime target of The Rehearsal's—give exempla of political theory and action.²³ Heroic drama tended to reflect a Stuart conception of kingship and a fundamentally conservative ideology. It was no accident that Charles II encouraged the genre and that Dryden, a conservative apologist, was its foremost theorist and exponent. Suitably, then, Buckingham's burlesque of the genre might not merely mock its dramatic characteristics—“over-inflating the already inflated” heroic conventions²⁴—but also imitate its political reference: thereby criticising both the literary mode and its ideology. For this reason Dryden and Arlington can happily co-habit in the figure of Bayes.

Of this strategy the moral is signalled in the epilogue. Bayes' mock-play lacked coherence and plot:

… tho 'tis a plotting Age,
No place is freer from it than the Stage.
The Ancients plotted, tho, and strove to please
With sence that might be understood with ease;
But this new way of wit does so surprise,
Men lose their wits in wondring where it lyes.
If it be true, that Monstrous births presage
The following mischiefs that afflict the Age,
And sad disasters to the State proclaim;
Plays without head or tail may do the same.
Wherefore, for ours, and for the Kingdomes peace,
May this prodigious way of writing cease.
Let's have …
… some reason, not all Rhyme:
We have these ten years felt its Influence;
Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sense.

The explicit identification of dramatic decadence with current political perturbation, of theatrical with political plots, picks up a topos used by Davenant amongst others, describing the surprising historical “plot” which brought about the Restoration itself.²⁵ This theatrical analogy is given topical pointing by reference to the disturbances of the decade since 1660. The turbulence which produced the Restoration had left in its wake a climate of anxiety marked by plots, rumours of plots, and insurgences. Some plots were (as its opponents complained) invented or fomented by the government itself in order to intimidate parliament, but others were real enough. Selected highlights include White's Plot and Venner's Rising in 1660, the Wildman Plot of 1661, the Tong Plot of 1662, the abortive Northern rebellion and the Dublin Plot of 1663, the republican design in 1665, the alleged conspiracy behind the Fire of 1666, a major Presbyterian rebellion in Scotland in 1666, the Yorkshire skirmish of 1667, the Bawdy House Riots in London and provincial sectarian disturbances in 1668, followed by serious Nonconformist unrest throughout 1670.²⁶ In the interstices of these events came the second Dutch War and seamen's riots, fears of invasion and an actual incursion by the Dutch at Chatham in June 1667, not to mention hearth-tax riots and the like. The Court and government had already acquired an unsavoury reputation.²⁷ Of late years several major scandals at the center of government had in one way or another touched upon Buckingham himself, severely damaging his reputation. Buckingham's own arrest in 1667 and the Coventry scandal were followed in the Winter of 1670 by an attempt to assassinate the Duke of Ormonde and the attack on Sir John Coventry by Monmouth's thugs. In 1671 these were followed by the Blood scandal. All carried significant political implications—the Commons, for instance, abjured other business in its rage at the affront to parliamentary privilege inflicted upon John Coventry²⁸—as well as disturbing signs of underhand factional activity. These implications, which were highly productive of rumor, had in John Coventry's case a topical theatrical connection, for the assault was a reprisal against his remarks in the Commons about the king's actress mistresses.²⁹

Such unrest was a mixture, then, of actual and fictional “plots.” In either case they subvert order and may pose real political threats—whether to the government or to parliament. When governmental in origin, fake conspiracies subserve tyranny, another sense in which plotting is “prodigious,” whether in the state or in the bombastic drama. Menace and confusion link the heroic drama to those things which work against “the Kingdomes peace.” The genre's formal commitment to the heroic couplet, mercilessly burlesqued in The Rehearsal, participates in the polarization of values here. “Prose and Sence,” “reason” and order, are pitted against rhyme, nonsense and disorder. In contrast to the clarity and sanity of classical drama, the “new way” of heroic plays encourages the tyranny of rhyme over sense. The assertion that heroic drama stuns and confuses its audience works together with the evocation of political conspiracies, for both share an intent to obfuscate. The “plot” eludes discovery whenever possible.

The identification of literary with political nonsense was established in the very first scene of The Rehearsal. There Smith (a visitor from the country) and Johnson (an urbanite) discuss the strangely “prodigious” new fashion in drama as well as the “strange new things” in Town. These phenomena are analogous, since politicians (“Men of Business”) indulge merely in a more “solid nonsense … [a] more ingenious pastime” than the playwrights. While Bayes will be characterized as a literary “fop” of baroque dulness, these politicians are “solemn Fops,” equally “incapable of Reason” (1.1.4-31). Like the “Men of Business” in Country Gentleman, Sir Cautious Trouble-All (Coventry) and Sir Gravity Empty (Sir John Duncomb), they are engaged in a pompous and meaningless charade, “always looking grave, and troubling one another, in hopes to be thought Men of Business”—performers on the political stage, as inept as Bayes is in the theatre. In both cases the result is a calculated farrago of nonsense, like the attitudes struck in heroic drama. In politics, however, the motives seem more sinister and must be more dangerous, as the epilogue observes. In that respect, new wits like Bayes are “civil persons” in a double-edged sense. Their theatrical mode—scorning “Nature” in order to “elevate and surprise”—imitates political alarums. The surprises are irrational, manifest “no-meaning” (1.1.32-48). That nihilistic strain indicates wits/politicians' flouting of the literary/natural order, subverting national well-being. When, in Bayes' play, a character brags that “I'll make that God subscribe himself a devil” (4.3.91), Bayes admires his own literary stroke: but we may see in this ludicrous cosmic inversion, the erasure of deity by devilry, a symptom of the consequences of disrupting the natural order.

This is the greater resonance of the play's burlesque upon the heroic drama's dependence on confusion: that inconsistency in plot, situation, genre, characterization and language masks the vacuity and imaginative poverty of such plays. “Elevate and surprise,” their literary manifesto, is “a phrase … to express their no-meaning.” The disguising of vacuity by wilful inconsistency—amply evidenced in Bayes' mock-play—is also analogous to his political counterparts, the artificers of “arbitrary government.” Both turn upon innovation. In the political sense confirmed by the epilogue, “surprise” suggests an insurgence and “Elevate” a consequent raising to power, so it should not surprise us that Bayes' own mock-play turns on a political revolution. Very little changes, though: the “Two kings” of Brentford are simply turned out of their chairs by the usurpers. Bayes is ravished by this novel form of revolution he has invented: “There's now an odd surprize; the whole State's turn'd quite topsie-turvy, without any puther or stir in the whole world” (2.4.70-72). Fake conspiracies such as the government had invented during the 1660s might be similarly described. In that respect they contrast with the Revolution actually effected thirty years earlier, when men had spoken of the world being “turned upside down.”³⁰ Brentford, the mock-play's “kingdom,” had been the site of an important battle during the Civil War, the high-watermark of the king's advance on London.³¹ In a grim sense the town was an example of courtly “non-sense,” since although royalist in sympathy it had been sacked by the king's army. A favorite theme of conservative writers was that the subsequent Restoration had been a bloodless revolution, a miraculous change to reverse change,³² “without any puther or stir.” Since Bayes is portrayed as a plagiarist, it should not surprise us that he owes his “novel” portrait of revolution to events themselves.

England's recent history of political vicissitude also finds a comic counterpart in the sudden reverses of Bayes' plot. The Two Kings, themselves a confusing oddity, are usurped and restored in equally unlikely fashion. The bombastic hero Drawcansir resolves matters simply by massacring both of the opposing armies, one of which is an incompetent secret army hiding out in Knightsbridge. Familiar London terrain mocks heroic excess, but also underwrites Buckingham's travesty of recent history. The secret army in Knightsbridge itself comically reflects widespread apprehension of a standing army. Charles' Life Guards, more considerable than any previous royal bodyguard, appeared to be such a force in all but name—a secret army so to say—and were used to suppress unrest on such occasions as the Bawdy House Riots of 1668. It was thought that the Duke of York was especially anxious to acquire and control a standing army.³³ In 1670 the army established in Scotland was viewed with suspicion as a force poised to interfere in England should Charles require defence against domestic unrest.³⁴ Here too Bayes' plot in the mock-play comically reflects recent policy.

Bayes himself clinches the analogy between plotting and policy, when he reveals that his ludicrous dialogue between the two usurpers has an authentic source: “'tis a Discourse I overheard once betwixt two grand, sober, governing persons” (2.3.56-58). If such intrigue and nonsense are characteristic of actual ministers, then as Buckingham's epilogue suggests, “mischiefs” and confusions in the state are explicable. As Bayes' direct imitation of such policy enforces the literary/political analogy, so an audience might equally reflect that Buckingham himself was no stranger to the discourse of the great.

According to The Rehearsal, then, the government is a conspiracy of incompetence, ripe for burlesque. In the light of this analogical framework, we can comprehend specific personations and allusions in The Rehearsal. Bayes/Dryden polarizes the argument between true (“Ancient”) authority and “new wit,” of stability with vicissitude. He intentionally keeps his plot/“Intrigo” a secret from its audience (2.3.35-54). His aesthetic excuse for this—in “new wit” innovation is all—is the pose of an opportunist hack, just as his counterparts, the political fops, are engaged in a charade which masks political opportunism. His ambition to “out-do all my fellow-Writers” matches their self-seeking intrigues, such as that evinced by the Whispering Scene between the Two Usurpers in his play. The ideology of dramatic innovation is, like their revolution/innovation, merely a matter of self-interest (4.1.50-51). Like them, Bayes wants to advance himself and discompose his audience, “elevate and surprise.” His confession that he achieves this by strategies of mystification parodies the heroic drama's attempts to create tension and suspense by mystification,³⁵ but it also introduces the Whispering Scene's political intrigue. Because the usurpers whisper, the audience has no notion what they are talking about. Bayes justifies this lacuna by saying that “they are suppos'd to be Politicians, and matters of state ought not to be divulg'd” (2.1.67-70). If Bayes suggests that the suppression of information is characteristic of politics, we may well conclude from this and similar hints that there is an actual contemporary situation of conspiracy, suppression, repression, and confusion. In the literary critique, Bayes' apologia suggests a ludicrous confusion between literature and life, but in the political analogy it highlights an inference from the theatrical to the political. The fusion of the two critiques is, in its economy and wit here, typical of Buckingham's method in The Rehearsal.

For the literary burlesque, Bayes certainly represents Dryden, as traditionally believed. McFadden suggests that Bayes is Arlington rather than Dryden, and that the latter himself attests this when he says “I knew that my betters were more concerned than I was in that satire.”³⁶ Although McFadden's account of Arlingtonian allusion is persuasive, I would disagree with his contention that this characterization minimizes reference to Dryden. If, as this paper argues, the play's technique is theatrical burlesque expressing political satire, that is crystallized in Bayes as a conflation of theatrical and political caricature. Representative of the conservative dramatic mode, Dryden as laureate (an honor granted in 1668, and glanced at in Bayes' name) might be regarded as a literary mandarin, analogous in the world of letters to the political ascendancy of Arlington. That analogy is also underpinned by Dryden's appointment in 1670 as Historiographer Royal, semiotically suggesting the political inflections of historical interpretation. The latter was a pastime of considerable significance in the Restoration period,³⁷ for the exigencies of the regime inevitably included “forgetting” the Interregnum, by whatever means was available. Since the heroic drama was itself a propagandist tool, Buckingham's caricature can readily embrace both the Arlingtonian faction at court and Dryden with his tribe, the heroic dramatists. The fop of literary fashion is fellow-traveller of “Solemn Fop” politicians. Indeed, in satirical poems Buckingham and others characterized Arlington as an affected, “arrant fop.”³⁸

Bayes' theatrical/political plotting has an especially sharp relevance if we recall Arlington's fabricated plot to convict Buckingham of treason (which would have cost him his life). Bayes' mystificatory strategies provide a dramaturgical analogue for Arlington's in his capacity as Secretary, which included responsibility for intelligence matters. If Bayes is similarly given to intrigue, he is equally keen on power. He sets out to intimidate his audience by a mixture of ingratiation and blackmail which is not dissimilar to the court's management of parliament by means of bribery and intimidation.³⁹ Both construct claques in the House (1.1.264-71). A small faction (smaller even than Charles' “inner ring,” in the case of the Treaty of Dover) is admitted to the secrets of policy, just as a select few “understand” Bayes' impenetrable dramaturgy. “If I writ, Sir, to please the Country, I should have follow'd the old plain way; but I write for some persons of Quality” (1.1.286-88). This is Bayes' put-down of Smith, the countryman who questions his methods. Like Sir Richard Plainbred in The Country Gentleman, Smith in this play represents old-fashioned patriotic virtue as enshrined in the country party.⁴⁰ His surname characterizes his common sense, his Christian name (Frank) his honesty. His frank criticism lies in political opposition to Bayes'/Dryden's frenchified parlance (a similar contrast to that in Country Gentleman),⁴¹ associating him with country patriotism against the Court's pro-French policy. The contrast is very specific, for an important subversive pamphlet of 1660 had announced itself as Plain English,⁴² truth-telling. A notorious nonconformist printer of such unlicensed pamphlets, still very active in the 1670s, was one Francis Smith.⁴³ “Honest Frank!” the first words of the play, establish its opposition stance. Appropriately, it is Smith who educes from Bayes “the very plain truth” of his plotting (2.3.52). Deepening the court comparison, Bayes is portrayed as a despot of the imagination (2.1.61-64) and a bully in the theatre. Even the actors, harassed finally beyond endurance, do not understand the play. A theatrical equivalent of court policy-makers, Bayes' is the “grand design” (1.1.150-58) and it is not for those who implement his policy to reason why. Actually, Bayes himself cannot explain the “Intrigo” of his last play, and he does not know the meaning of meaning (1.1.63-66; 3.1.17-20). When the players recognize the vacuity of their plot/policy-maker, they revolt and abandon Bayes, in a comic actualisation of his own play's usurpation theme. Bayes is deposed from the King's theatre to the Duke's (“I'll sell this play to the other House” [5.1.399-400]). We should infer that the king's Yorkist advisers have, as Marvell had predicted in 1667,⁴⁴ shown their true colors, the Duke's Papist interest. The political point is obliquely signalled by the way Bayes refers to play-“House” rivalry, “the other House” recalling parliamentary parlance. The factionalism of the court was always further complicated by inter-House disputes within Parliament itself. Aptly, then, the politics of the theatre duopoly reflect the polity.

Equally, Bayes' despotism of the imagination is a form of self-aggrandizement shared with ambitious politicians: “I despise your Johnson and Beaumont, that borrow'd all they writ from Nature. I am for fetching it purely out of my own fancy, I.” (2.1.61-64). In contrast Buckingham's spokesmen, Smith and Johnson, evaluate Bayes' play by the standards of “Nature” and “the old plain way,” exemplified by Ben “Jo(h)nson,” of whom Buckingham's Johnson is an avatar. He carries the larger literary burden, Smith the larger political burden of the critique. Within the general identification of “plain” aesthetics and political sense, Johnson's function as critic is similar to that of Ben Jonson in Andrew Marvell's “Tom May's Death.” There Jonson is invoked as arbiter of poetic and political truth, expelling Tom May from the poets' Elysium because he is “Malignant” in both literary and political terms. He has offended the kingdoms of letters and the state.⁴⁵ Marvell and Buckingham were associated both personally and, in the country party, politically.⁴⁶ By their invocations of Jonson for such a dual purpose, both writers recall the great Ben's own association of true “Poesy” with a healthy society: “the queen of arts … The study of it (if we will trust Aristotle) offers to mankind a certain rule, and pattern … disposing us to all civil offices of society.”⁴⁷ Because of this identification Buckingham's Johnson provides a critique of Bayes which is at once literary and “civil.” If Jonson was a model of decorum, Bayes' play is, as he claims, a “Touch-stone” (2.1.131-37)—a measure of all “mischiefs.” The heroic drama's “changing Rules, of late, as if men writ / In spite of Reason, Nature, Art and Wit,” destabilizes “Rule” whether in aesthetic or political realms.

The evocation of Jonsonian authority points to what I would suggest is the original of The Rehearsal—Jonson's comic-satirical play The Poetaster (1601). There Jonson used the corrective comic method with which Restoration theory still associated his works.⁴⁸ to pillory his opponents in the theatrical wars. Dramatizing the distinction between true poets and mere hacks (Virgil and Horace/Jonson versus Crispinus/Marston and Demetrius/Dekker),⁴⁹ he linked poetic authority to political responsibility. Whereas Virgil and Horace are judicious, unsycophantic advisers of Augustus Caesar, promoting proper government, Crispinus and Demetrius are opportunists involved in a slanderous campaign against Horace, to convict him of treason. Rumour is personified as a malign political force, acted out by the plot against Horace. The poetic war is a political battle, decorum a life-and-death actuality. Even Ovid, because impious and hence subversive, must be punished by exile. The subversive nature of Rumour itself makes spies, conspirators and secrecy significant elements in the play. As a whole, Poetaster's analysis of the proper relations between poetry and polity,⁵⁰ and its carefully stated political advice, provide the major model for Buckingham's project in The Rehearsal. Jonson's poetics justify corrective political satire in association with literary burlesque, such as that of Crispinus. Like Arlington/Bayes, the bad poet here represents a political disease. Equally, the conspiracy against Horace was a suggestive parallel with Arlington's against Buckingham. The role of Rumour, which Jonson uses both to abjure political “interpretation” of the play and to provoke it,⁵¹ is elaborated into The Rehearsal's extensive characterization of conspiracy, faction, mystery and obfuscation. Like Jonson in 1601, Buckingham in 1671 had good personal reason to feel tender about the subject of political rumor.

Within Bayes' mock-play, the Two Kings are, as McFadden suggests (following The Key to the Rehearsal, 1704), Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York.⁵² Conceiving an ambiguous monarchy, Bayes' play comically renders the political cross-currents provoked by James' power as the active heir-presumptive, and the resultant factional interest. The Yorkist party was by 1671 evidently allied with Buckingham's other enemy, Arlington.

BAYES … the chief hinge of this Play, upon which the whole Plot moves and turns … is, that I suppose two Kings to be of the same place … differing sometimes in particular; though, in the main, they agree … the people being embarrast by their equal tyes to both, and the Sovereigns concern'd in a reciprocal regard, as well to their own interest, as the good of the people; may make a certain kind of a—you understand me—upon which, there does arise several disputes, turmoils, heart-burnings, and all that …

(1.1.228-51)

Similarly, the “whole plot” of current political intrigue in England could be regarded as turning upon the duality of Stuart power as represented by Charles and James, especially since by 1671 James' religious proclivities were the subject of common rumor and made him the obvious centre of pro-Catholic initiatives.⁵³ The irrational political situation in Bayes' play is equalled only by the inarticulacy of his explanation, as Smith observes (1.1.254). The implication, that even major policy-makers like Arlington were not fully cognisant of policy's “grand design,” is remarkably accurate to the political methods of Charles II at this time. The mystifying strategies of heroic drama are an apt analogue.

Allusion to the factionalism generated by the succession issue is in fact extended by Bayes' subplot, concerning the fortunes of Prince Pretty-Man. Somehow mislaid as a child, he is brought up by a fisherman whom Pretty-Man takes to be his true father. The fisherman is arrested on a false suspicion of murder, and by some mysterious means this causes the revelation of Pretty-Man's true identity. Since all of this is conducted in a mere 63 lines, both Pretty-Man and the onlookers (Johnson and Smith) are totally confused by this concatenation of dramatic “surprises.” Johnson points to the political allusion in Pretty-Man's lament, “Sometimes a Fishers Son, sometimes a Prince. / It is a secret, great as is the world” (3.4.59-60): “But Mr. Bayes, is not this some disparagement to a Prince, to pass for a Fishermans Son? Have a care of that I pray.” While Johnson's response suggests wariness of both lese-majeste and censorship, Buckingham thereby also disarms them by “correcting” the fault. At the same time the political point is highlighted: that Pretty-Man refers to the other potential successor to Charles, his handsome but illegitimate son Monmouth.

In his “Fisherman” parent is a jokey reference to Charles' fondness for fishing, a hobby which provided a common topic for satirists. In Flatfoot the Gudgeon Taker, for instance:

Methinks I see our mighty monarch stand,
His pliant angle trembling in his hand;
Pleas'd with the sport, good man, nor does he know
His easy scepter bends and trembles so.
Fine representative, indeed, of God,
Whose scepter's dwindl'd to a fishing rod!
… howe'er weak and slender be the string,
Bait it with whore and it will hold a King.(54)

Angling provides both an innuendo characterizing Charles' lechery, and a symbol of his (supposed) political weakness, as conspirators plot to influence him by that route. Buckingham himself had essayed the “planting” of Moll Davis and of Frances Stuart, without much dividend. Recently Arlington had proved more successful in ingratiating himself with Charles' French mistress, Louise de Keroualle, stealing a march on Buckingham in the process. Rumor had it that in October 1671 Charles and Keroualle had actually undergone a form of marriage at Arlington's house, Euston Hall.⁵⁵ While Keroualle and Barbara Castlemaine, Charles' long-standing mistress, jostled for position at court, speculation about the mistresses had a new topic in Keroualle's representation of the “French interest” with the king.⁵⁶

The topics of 1670-71 are also evident in the allusion to Monmouth. Pretty-Man's visit to the tailor before leaving for the wars (3.1) is a hit motivated by Monmouth's appointment to the military command desired by Buckingham himself. Because of the attack on John Coventry (in which Monmouth had led Life Guards “in defence” of the mistresses) and his scandalous murder of a beadle, Monmouth was now closely associated with underhand and unsavory court tactics. The “Fisherman” story at once recalls Monmouth's origins, and implies the dangerous political potential of illegitimate progeny in the light of the Queen's infertility. For some years Buckingham had been pressing the king to divorce her.⁵⁷ That possibility had been reactivated in 1670 when Charles' favorable public interest in the Roos divorce bill had encouraged speculation that he would take the same course. Charles' personal attendance at the Lords' debates seemed intended as a blow to James' standing as putative heir. That Monmouth was Charles' eldest son, and that Charles accorded him some status, were factors which (as Buckingham recognises) gave hostages to fortune—as future events would confirm. The mock-play conflates political satire with theatrical burlesque, heroic drama's nonsense with political disorder. Pretty-Man is equally a dramatic folly and a political error. Once again the theatrical/political conflation was peculiarly apt. While attending the Lords' debates Charles had remarked that they were “better than a play.”⁵⁸

The reference to Charles' lechery is later fleshed out by the dea ex machina in Bayes' mock-play. Pallas Athene enters to compose a quarrel between the Two Usurper-Kings by revealing that the object of their passions, Lardella, is not dead. This episode doubtless reflects the fact that Charles and James were rivals in lechery too. In particular, Pallas herself personates Barbara Villiers. Formerly Lady Castlemaine, she received the title of Duchess of Cleveland in 1670, a victory in the skirmish with Keroualle. In the same year her children were ennobled. Lely's famous series of portraits of Court beauties had represented Barbara as Pallas/Minerva.⁵⁹ Buckingham's allusion recalls that Pallas was a mythic personification of wisdom in government, an ironic reflection upon Barbara's power to bully the king. To those members of the audience who had seen or heard of Lely's portrait, Pallas' warlike accoutrements would be a visual reminder. Together with the King-Usher's reaction—“Resplendent Pallas, we in thee do find / The fiercest Beauty, and a fiercer mind” (4.1.200-1)—these would have appeared fair comment on Barbara's notorious shrewishness as well as her supreme loveliness. Her former title, Castle-main, is redolent of these aggressive qualities. Always the most flamboyant of Charles' mistresses, she has a fittingly metonymic function here for the satire on Charles' weakness. A travesty of “wisdom in government,” she embodies the supposed political influence of the mistresses. (It is no coincidence that the Lely “Beauties” were commissioned by the Yorks.⁶⁰) That she serves “the purest wine of France” (4.1.208) is not merely a reflection of Pallas' symbolic rule of household matters but a glance at the mistresses' expenditure, regarded at the time as a significant factor in Charles' financial embarrassments. More personally, Buckingham is pursuing a private joke about the bribes Barbara received from the French ambassador. She had long been an avowed Catholic, “the prerogative whore,” and by 1669 was evidently allied with the Yorkist faction. A recent instance of Buckingham's discomfiture was the betrothal of her son to Arlington's daughter, despite Buckingham's rival candidate.⁶¹ No doubt it was for Buckingham an instance of the Court's “nonsense” that she and her French rival were ornaments of the same faction.

Personation equally affects Drawcansir, the bombastic hero of Bayes' mock-play. He is a version of the miles gloriosus (like Captain Tucca in Jonson's Poetaster), parodying especially Dryden's hero Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada. In effect Bayes' enthusiasm for his bullying, self-regarding hero also draws a parallel between Drawcansir and Bayes,⁶² his self-regarding and despotic creator. (In Poetaster Tucca also represented the braggadoccio as [con-]artist.)⁶³ As the one is hero of the mock-play, so the other is literary/political anti-hero of Buckingham's play: strengthening the analogy between literature and politics which was established in the commentary. Bayes' literary opportunism, irrationality and irresponsibility are all paralleled by the attitudes of his military hero. Like his creator, he recognises no criteria other than his own wilfulness (“my own Fancy,” as Bayes expressed it). Bayes himself characterizes Drawcansir as “a fierce Hero, that frights his Mistress, snubs up Kings, baffles Armies, and does what he will, without regard to numbers, good manners, or justice” (4.1.102-4). Drawcansir's arbitrary activities in the public realm, flouting civility or society (represented metonymically by “good manners, or justice”) are the mirror-image of Bayes/Dryden's literary indecorum. As we have seen, Bayes too is guilty of lese-majesty, and his treatment of his fictional army is certainly baffling—they are massacred only subsequently to rise up and dance. Such features demonstrate within the mock-play those universal implications of bad literature which are expressed in the commentary and epilogue. The “good manners” and justice of respect for an audience and dramatic propriety are foreign to Bayes, just as the “numbers” of his heroic couplets manifest rhyme's tyranny over “Prose and sence.” This is the ironic “sense” indicated via Bayes' indiscriminate zeugma, “Numbers, good manners, or justice.” While reflecting Bayes' lack of discrimination in both life and literature, the zeugma also has a positive function, implying the more general reference of the principle of decorum.

The unfortunate consequences of flouting literary/political decorum are highlighted both by Drawcansir's arbitrary and disruptive actions in the mock-play (mirroring the bewilderingly rapid political tergiversations of Dryden's Almanzor), and by his specific contemporary reference. His inexplicable actions reproduce within the mock-play Bayes' arbitrary rules of “new wit.” Drawcansir boasts of his military prowess, gives allegiance to no-one—falling upon both armies with indiscriminate gusto—and “snubs up Kings” by disrupting a court-banquet and snatching the Usurper-Kings' drinking vessels. As in the case of Pretty-Man's princely dignity, Smith's protest at this lese-majesty points to the intended political reference (4.2.256-58). This incident, and Drawcansir's character generally, evoke a scandal which had broken only a few months prior to the first performance of The Rehearsal and which had amazed the public. An Irish adventurer, the self-styled Colonel Thomas Blood, had already earned a certain notoriety by his harrying of Ormonde, Lord-Lieutenant in Ireland, which had culminated in his ambush of that notable. Although unsuccessful, the audacity of this assault in St. James, the very heart of London, was itself shocking enough. At this point Buckingham was forced to take a personal interest in the scandal, since within hearing of the king Ormonde's son accused Buckingham of instigating the attack.⁶⁴ There had long been bad blood between Buckingham and Ormonde, not least in the struggle to impeach Clarendon, and Ormonde probably ascribed his own political eclipse to Buckingham's influence.⁶⁵ Although Buckingham was absolved of the assault, he had reason to take a particular interest in the scandal provoked in 1671 by Blood's attempt to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. After Blood's personal interview with Charles II, his treasonous exploit received the royal pardon in August 1671, “to the Wonder of all.”⁶⁶ Thereafter he was received in court, where his very visage inspired fear. In the person of Drawcansir—soldier of fortune, renegade, boaster, bloodthirsty villain, insensible of and untouched by “justice”—we should recognise a portrait of Blood, who was all these things. In Drawcansir's theft of the Kings' “Boles” there is a comic re-enaction of Blood's recent theft of Charles' orb from the Crown Jewels, and both of them get away with it. Drawcansir is a brilliant exploitation of this miles gloriosus of real life.

As Smith wonders at his ability to escape retribution, so the public wondered at Blood's impunity:

How he came to be pardoned, and even received into favour, not only after this, but several other exploits almost as daring both in London and here, I could never come to understand … but it was certainly the boldest attempt, so the only treason of this sort that was ever pardoned.⁶⁷

One rumor claimed that Blood's exploit, like his attempt upon Ormonde, was instigated by Buckingham for anti-court purposes⁶⁸—an absurd notion, calculated to provoke Buckingham's satirical version of the episode. More generally, and accurately, rumor had it that Blood had bought his pardon by informing upon his former associates amongst the insurgents of the previous decade, embarking upon a new career as a double agent for the court. “Some believed he became a spy of several parties … and did his Majesty services that way, which none alive could do so well as he.”⁶⁹ His espionage, and internecine relations with Court and political underground, make Blood a figure representative of conspiracy and intrigue: reflecting, also, the questionable methods of the government and—in his astonishing pardon—the political “nonsense” to which they give rise. Similarly, Drawcansir's indiscriminate political action mimics Blood's ambiguous political agency. The allusion to Blood exemplifies in the action of the mock-play Buckingham's general analysis of political nonsense and chicanery through theatrical burlesque. As dramatic type and political caricature Drawcansir is the fitting hero both of Bayes' “plot” and Arlingtonian “policy.” The secret machinations which the Blood scandal brought to flickering light, and the public bafflement, well illustrate Buckingham's satire upon political intrigue-as-mystification.

Given the remarkable integration of literary and political satire which I have indicated within The Rehearsal, we should recognize how they complement, and complete, each other. As in Ben Jonson's own aesthetics, literary and civil decorum are inseparable. The Rehearsal is not only a very funny play, a salvo in the literary wars of the day, but significantly continues a strand of Renaissance thought about the responsibilities of literary endeavor.

Perhaps literary critics have tended to write off The Rehearsal as an enjoyable trifle because, like some historians, they are all too familiar with Buckingham's frivolous reputation. A dupe of the Treaty of Dover he may have been, a womanizer and a wastrel: but in the latter he was no match for his king, whom we have lately come to respect as more of a politician than his contemporaries imagined. Buckingham's reputation has also rested on the hearsay of antagonistic contemporaries, like Clarendon, Burnet and Pepys—the first ruined by Buckingham's political campaign in 1667, the last a member of the Yorkist faction. For both literary critics and historians, Dryden's retaliatory caricature of Zimri in Absalom and Achitophel has exerted a powerful debunking effect. Buckingham's other witnesses, like his secretary Brian Fairfax,⁷⁰ give a rounder portrait. Perhaps we too should cease to attach so much importance to Buckingham's more rakish activities. If Rochester's poems and Charles' political shrewdness remain uncompromised by such things, why is Buckingham to be derided? By the mid-1660s he was taking his political career seriously: so should we. Public life in the Restoration was a dangerous business, not lightly engaged in.⁷¹ It was not entirely Buckingham's fault—indeed, it was rather because of his loyalty to nonconformity and toleration—that he was always more actually powerful when in opposition than when in Charles' ostensible favor. The Rehearsal is an example of the same phenomenon, for it is the best of his literary works. If literary evidence were to mean as much to history as historical evidence should mean to literary criticism, I would suggest that The Rehearsal shows that Buckingham's political analysis could be shrewd indeed.

Notes

1. Although Buckingham is supposed to have received the aid of such friends as Martin Clifford and Thomas Sprat, it seems clear that Buckingham was responsible for the overall structure as well as the actual writing of the play: A. Mizener, “George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham: His Life and a Canon of His Works” (Ph.d. Diss., Princeton, 1934), 242-43, 248-49; Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, “Attribution Problems in English Drama, 1660-1700,” Harvard Library Bulletin 31 (1983): 5-39: 27-28. I am grateful to Robert D. Hume for allowing me to read the introduction to his forthcoming edition of Buckingham, which was very helpful on this point. References to the play are from the edition of D. E. L. Crane (Durham U. Press, 1976). The editions of Montague Summers (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1914) and Edward Arber (Westminster: Constable, 1902) have also been consulted.

2. Peter Lewis, “The Rehearsal: A Study of its Satirical Methods,” Durham University Journal n.s. 31 (1970): 96-113: 112. See also D. F. Smith, Plays about the Theatre in England (London and New York: Oxford U. Press, 1936), pp. 9-37; V. C. Clinton-Baddeley, The Burlesque Tradition in the English Theatre after 1660 (London: Methuen, 1952); E. L. Avery, “The Stage Popularity of The Rehearsal, 1671-1777,” Washington State College Research Studies 7 (1939): 201-4; S. Baker, “Buckingham's Permanent Rehearsal,” Michigan Quarterly Review 12 (1973): 160-71; R. Elias, “‘Bayes’ in Buckingham's The Rehearsal,” ELN 15 (1977-78): 178-81.

3. George McFadden, “Political Satire in The Rehearsal,” Yearbook of English Studies 4 (1974): 120-28; Susan Staves, Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (U. of Nebraska Press, 1979), pp. 70-72.

4. As, for instance, John O'Neill, George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham (New York: Twayne, 1985), pp. 81-110; evidently he was not convinced by my paper on this topic, at ASECS 1983 in New York, either.

5. For Buckingham's political career see Maurice Lee, The Cabal (U. of Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 161-201; Ronald Hutton, The Restoration 1658-1667 (Oxford U. Press, 1985) and “The Making of the Secret Treaty of Dover, 1668-1670,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 297-318; and the biographies, Winifred Lady Burghclere, George Villiers (1903; repr. New York: Kennikat, 1971); H. W. Chapman, Great Villiers (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), J. F. Wilson, A Rake and His Times (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954). I have exerted some interpretation on these, as well as on my own researches in Archives Etrangeres at the Quai D'Orsay in Paris.

6. Memoirs of Sir John Reresby, ed. Andrew Browning (Glasgow: Jackson, 1936), pp. 64-66; Wilson, Rake, pp. 64-65, 80-81.

7. Wilson, Rake, pp. 157-58, 88; Lee, Cabal, p. 184.

8. D. T. Witcombe, Charles II and the Cavalier House of Commons, 1663-74 (Manchester U. Press, 1966), pp. 124-25.

9. Andrew Marvell, Poems and Letters, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, P. Legouis and E. E. Duncan-Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford U. Press, 1971), 2:325-26; Lee, Cabal, p. 185.

10. Marvell, 2:325.

11. Colin Visser, “Theatrical Scandal in the Letters of Colbert de Croissy, 1669,” Restoration 7 (1983): 54-57.

12. Sir Robert Howard and the Duke of Buckingham, The Country Gentleman, ed. Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume (London: Dent, 1976).

13. Annabel Patterson, “The Country Gentleman: Howard, Marvell, and Dryden in the Theater of Politics,” SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 25 (1985): 491-509. I am grateful to Professor Patterson for allowing me to read this essay before its publication. For her general thesis on censorship, see Censorship and Interpretation (Wisconsin U. Press, 1984).

14. Robert D. Hume, The Rakish Stage (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1983), p. 32; pp. 1-45 discuss the methodology of political readings.

15. See Scouten and Hume, introduction to Country Gentleman; Lee, Cabal, p. 183.

16. J. M. Wallace, “Dryden and History: A problem in allegorical reading,” ELH 36 (1969): 265-90; “‘Examples Are Best Precepts’: Readers and Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Poetry,” Critical Inquiry 1 (1974): 273-90.

17. F. Sandler, “The Faerie Queene: An Elizabethan Apocalypse,” The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and J. Wittreich (Manchester U. Press, 1984), pp. 148-74; 164-66.

18. Sir William Davenant, Gondibert, ed. D. F. Gladish (Oxford U. Press, 1971), pp. xiii-xv.

19. Certain Verses written by severall of the Authors Friends (London, 1653), repr. in Gladish, appendix ii.

20. Certain Verses, pp. 273, 283; Davenant, Preface to “Gondibert” (1650), in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, ed. J. E. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Oxford U. Press, 1908), 2:2, 20-21.

21. A. Nicoll, “Political Plays of the Restoration,” MLR [Modern Language Review] 16 (1921): 224-42; Staves, Players' Scepters, ch. 2.

22. The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 5, by John Loftis, Richard Southern, Marion Jones, A. H. Scouten (London: Methuen, 1976), pp. 3-4.

23. A. T. Barbeau, The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays (Yale U. Press, 1970).

24. Lewis, p. 106.

25. Nicholas Jose, Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660-71 (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 15, cites Davenant's “Poem to the Kings Most Sacred Majesty” to illustrate Restoration predilections for labyrinthine dramatic plots.

26. For accounts see Hutton, Restoration; W. C. Abbott, “English Conspiracy and Dissent,” American Historical Review 14 (1908-9): 501-28, 696-722.

27. Witcombe, p. 13; Marvell, 2:322, 323.

28. Marvell, 2:321-3; Witcombe, pp. 115-16.

29. Cf. “The King's Vows” (1670), Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse 1660-1714 (POAS), vol. 1, ed. G. deF. Lord (Yale U. Press, 1963), p. 161.

30. C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

31. For an account of the battle of 1642 see C. V. Wedgwood, The King's War 1641-1647 (London: Collins Fontana, 1966), pp. 133-34.

32. Jose, p. 23 et passim.

33. L. G. Schwoerer, “No Standing Armies!”: The Anti-army Ideology in Seventeenth-century England (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1974), pp. 53, 72-95; T. Harris, “The Bawdy House Riots of 1668,” Historical Journal 29 (1986): 537-56, 539; Hutton, Restoration, p. 286; Marvell, “Last Instructions to a Painter,” ll. 223-24, 990; “A Ballad called the Haymarket Hectors” (1671), POAS 1:169-70.

34. Marvell, 2:313.

35. Lewis, p. 100, on heroic drama. Jose, p. 38, notes royalist panegyric poetry's dependence on strategies of mystification. Marvell's “Last Instructions” makes clear contemporary recognition of intrigue and confusion at Court (2:609-10). See also Witcombe, p. 22.

36. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. G. Watson, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1962), 2:77-78.

37. R. MacGillivray, Restoration Historians and the English Civil War (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), pp. 48-95; Jose, pp. 26ff.

38. Buckingham, Works (London, 1704), 2:80; “A Dialogue Between Two Horses,” POAS, 1:282.

39. Marvell, 2:324-25; “Further Advice to a Painter,” POAS, 1:165; Lee, Cabal, p. 122.

40. For characterization of the “Country” members see Marvell's “Last Instructions,” ll. 983-90.

41. For Dryden's French affectations see Samuel Johnson, “Life of Dryden,” Lives of the English Poets, ed. J. Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1:463-64.

42. Plain English to His Excellency the Lord General Monk and the Officers of his Army (London, 1660).

43. J. Walker, “The Censorship of the Press During the Reign of Charles II,” History 35 (1950): 219-38, 225 et passim.

44. “Last Instructions,” ll. 932ff..

45. See M. Stocker, Apocalyptic Marvell: The Second Coming in Seventeenth-century Poetry (Ohio U. Press, 1986), pp. 69-71.

46. Ibid, pp. 27-28.

47. Ben Jonson, Timber: or Discoveries, in The Complete Poems, ed. George Parfitt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 445. On Jonson as a model of correctness and decorum, see G. Sorelius, “The Giant Race Before the Flood”: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Uppsala U. Press, 1966), p. 21.

48. Sorelius, p. 110.

49. On Jonson's literary satire see A. Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge U. Press, 1984), pp. 81-86.

50. On the politics of Poetaster see H. H. Erskine-Hill, The Augustan Idea in English Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), pp. 110-21, 169.

51. Ibid, p. 111.

52. McFadden, p. 125. The Key remained adamant about this: see twelfth edn. (London, 1734), pp. 71ff..

53. M. Ashley, James II (London: Dent, 1977), pp. 97-99. Rumor was exacerbated by the Duchess of York's death in April 1671. Marvell, 2:323.

54. POAS, vol. 2, ed. Elias F. Mengel Jr. (Yale U. Press, 1965), pp. 190-91.

55. H. Forneron, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth In the Court of Charles II (London: Sonnenschein, 1887), pp. 69-70, 72; V. Barbour, Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington (Washington D. C.: American Historical Association, 1914), pp. 180-82.

56. Forneron, pp. 54-64; Lee, Cabal, p. 113; Marvell, 2:325.

57. POAS, 1:182; Marvell, 2:315.

58. Marvell, 2:301-2; Witcombe, p. 103.

59. O. Millar, The Queen's Pictures (London: Weidenfeld and the BBC, 1977), p. 70, and Sir Peter Lely 1618-80 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1978), pp. 62-63; Pepys, Diary, 21 Aug. 1668.

60. Anthony Hamilton, Memoirs of the Comte de Gramont, trans. P. Quennell (London: Routledge, 1930), p. 190.

61. E. Hamilton, The Illustrious Lady: A Biography of Barbara Villiers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1980), pp. 61, 121, 133, 144; Barbour, p. 168; POAS, 1:171.

62. R. F. Willson, Jr., Their Form Confounded: Studies in the Burlesque Play from Udall to Sheridan (The Hague: Mouton, 1975) recognizes that Bayes and Drawcansir are similar, p. 103.

63. Barton, Ben Jonson, p. 183, observes that Tucca is an artist/liar.

64. Burghclere, Villiers, pp. 239-42; W. C. Abbott, Thomas Blood, Crown-Stealer (1910; rpt. Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1970); M. Petherick, Restoration Rogues (London: Hollis and Carter, 1951), ch. 11.

65. Lee, Cabal, p. 182; Wilson, Rake, p. 117; Pepys, 4 Nov. 1668.

66. Marvell, 2:326; Petherick, p. 31.

67. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. George W. E. Russell, 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1907), 2:61.

68. Petherick, pp. 32-33.

69. Evelyn, 2:61; Petherick, pp. 33ff.; K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672-74 (Oxford U. Press, 1953), pp. 65ff.

70. Brian Fairfax, “Life of Buckingham,” repr. in Arber (ed.), The Rehearsal, pp. 3-10.

71. See e.g. Staves, p. 43.

    I am grateful to the British Academy for funding some of the research for this paper.