[In the essay that follows, Baker contends that The Rehearsal still speaks to modern audiences three centuries after its composition.]

The Rehearsal (1671), the Duke of Buckingham's satire on the heroic play and its chief perpetrator, John Dryden, was a howling success when it appeared at the Theatre Royal in London before an audience that reflected the sophistication of Charles II's court. Everyone knew everything about everyone, and even the slyest hint was not lost. But timely and personal as it was, it nevertheless remained one of London's most popular plays for the next hundred years, a perpetual favorite, until Sheridan's The Critic (1779) supplanted it, and the taste for burlesque and satire began to wane. Directors still revive The Critic from time to time, but they apparently find The Rehearsal too remote to risk. Nevertheless, when we open its pages today, we find a life undimmed by time, a hilarious vitality that makes The Critic (may my renowned ancestor forgive his namesake) trivial by contrast,¹ setting us laughing even before we discover, through the footnotes, all the fringe benefits.

The Rehearsal is not only a prototype for a kind of farcical burlesque that none of its many imitations has ever quite matched or sustained, but also a work that reaches the necessary orbit of any great literature, where temporary historical particulars become permanent depictions of something permanently true about human nature, so that we can see in a wildly comic play three centuries old some home truths about ourselves and our seemingly very different scene. Though criticism has virtually ignored it, The Rehearsal is indeed permanent in this way.

How does this wicked caricature of John Dryden, whom we continue to admire for the virtues the cartoon omits, achieve a meaningful permanence? Boswell's comment to Johnson suggests an answer. The answer resides, as it necessarily must in any mimetic work, in human character, usually, as here, in a character: in Mr. Bayes, the Poet Laureate and writer of grandiose plays (named for the bay-leaf crown, the laurels, of laureateship), who is the caricature of John Dryden, the Poet Laureate and writer of grandiose plays. “Bayes, in The Rehearsal, is a mighty silly character,” says Samuel Johnson, doubting that it was actually aimed at Dryden. “If it was intended for a particular man, it could only be diverting while that man was remembered. …” “I maintained [continues Boswell] that it had merit as a general satire on the self-importance of dramatick authors. But even in this light he held it very cheap” (31 March 1772).² Boswell is right. Bayes is an energetic display of the universal comedy of human vanity, particularly in that mode of vanity in which literature takes its being. The Rehearsal, in its wild abandon, thus deals with a central and dangerous truth about literature itself. Authorship is indeed a mode of vanity, which the good author must refine out of existence as he transfers its energy to the work itself. The Rehearsal, a play about producing plays, a mock rehearsal behind the scenes of those literary illusions we take for reality, gets both to the heart of authorship and the heart of literature itself.

The Rehearsal, moreover, goes one step farther, through its irresistible comicality: it takes the permanent dilemma of authorship—to make something ever new from the ever old forms and the ever old stuff of life—as a symbol for the fallacy of modernism, the delusion that the present moment is the only moment, that everything of the past age, or year, or day, is different, dead, and irrelevant, that one's own experience is unique, and that only I, Bayes, the author supreme, can create the ever “new Way of Writing,” which somehow the dull age does not yet know how to appreciate.

The play begins as a satire on “the new Things going on,” as Smith and Johnson, two young blades, discuss these relatively new heroic plays, by “Fellows who scorn to imitate Nature; but are altogether given to Elevate and Surprise.” Then Bayes strolls past, and we almost immediately see the particular satire on heroics transform into a general satire on authorship and modernism. Johnson asks him to explain his latest play:

BAYES.
Faith, Sir, the Intrigo's now quite out of my head; but I have a new one, in my Pocket, that I may say is a Virgin; 't has never yet been blown upon. … 'Tis all new Wit. … In fine, it shall Read, and Write, and Act, and Plot, and Show, ay, and Pit, Box and Gallery, I Gad, with any Play in Europe.

Indeed, the very idea of a rehearsal emphasizes newness: we, with Smith and Johnson, are getting an advanced peek at this newest of the new. In short, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, gallant soldier, wit, and wastrel, achieved in The Rehearsal (with a few collaborators) the very portrait of the Mad Modern that Swift was to create some thirty years later, with a kindred wild brilliance and equally telling permanence, in The Tale of a Tub (1704).

Of course, the personal and “temporary” satire at Dryden's expense is devilishly engaging. We respond to it with all our instincts for malice. But the universal satire on vanity and mad modernism saves us from shame as we escape in doubled laughter. Buckingham rehearsed John Lacy, the first Bayes, in Dryden's mannerisms and dressed him in Dryden's customary browns and wig. “Dryden was notoriously a bad reader, and had a hesitating and tedious delivery, which, skillfully imitated in lines of surpassing fury and extravagance, must have produced an irresistible effect upon the audience.”³ Bayes's characteristic and all that and egad (“I Gad”) are evidently characteristic of Dryden too.⁴

But all of these amusing personal Drydenisms immediately become characteristics of mad authorial egotism itself—Mr. Bayes:

Now! Are the Players gone to Dinner? 'Tis impossible: The Players gone to Dinner! I Gad, if they are, I'll make 'em know what it is to injure a person that does 'em the honour to write for 'em, and all that. A Company of Proud, Conceited, Humorous, Crossgrain'd persons, and all that, I Gad. I'll make them the most Contemptible, Despicable, Inconsiderable persons, and all that, in the whole world for this trick. I Gad I'll be reveng'd on 'em; I'll sell this Play to the other House.

(V.i, 5th ed., 1687).

The same is true of other facts about Dryden, including, I fear, his mistress. Perhaps nothing is intrinsically comic about taking snuff, or liking stewed prunes. We can even see as an admirable, if misguided, dedication to his craft Dryden's custom, before sitting down to a major piece of work, “to purge his body and clear his head by a dose of physic.”⁵ But, thrown together for emphasis, each serves as a sign of Bayes's monstrous authorial egotism. Bayes, of course, has his snuff box, once spilling snuff on himself, and any good comedian would make much of it throughout the play. One of the rehearsed play's kings turns it into a ridiculous authorial aid, in an analogy no one could miss, since Bayes is standing, box in hand, looking on: “when a knotty point comes, I lay my head close to it, with a Snuff-Box in my hand, and then I fegue it away i'faith” (III.iv). Sir Walter Scott, a century later, indeed remembers this as coming from Bayes himself, illustrating how comically the snuff box registers as an aid to thought. Scott writes in his journal, “I fegue it away, as Mr. Bayes says.”⁶ Similarly with Dryden's other habits:

If I am to write familiar things, as Sonnets to Armida, and the like, I make use of Stew'd Prunes only; but, when I have a grand Design in hand, I ever take Physick, and let blood: for when you would have pure swiftness of Thought, and Fiery flights of Fancy, you must have a care of the pensive part. In fine, you must purge the Belly.

(II.i)

Even reference to Dryden's presumed mistress, Anne Reeves, and her actual presence in the play, acting the part of Bayes's mistress, only underlines Bayes's mad conceit, again throwing the light more on Bayes, the mad author, than on Dryden, the errant male, who seems to have almost managed to keep his affair quiet, if indeed it was a fact.⁷ Bayes is talking to Mr. Johnson:

BAYES.
… Why, I make 'em call her Armaryllis, because of her Armor: Ha, ha, ha.
JOHNS.
That will be very well, indeed.
BAYES.
Ay, it's a pretty little Rogue; I knew her Face would set off Armor extreamly: And, to tell you true, I writ that part only for her. You must know she is my Mistress.
JOHNS.
Then I know another thing, little Bayes, that thou hast had her, I Gad.
BAYES.
No, I Gad, not yet; but I'm sure I shall: for I have talk'd Baudy to her already.

(I.i)

And on Bayes goes, describing his invincible cleverness.

Bayes fluctuates hilariously from a kind of insane laughter at his own irrational new things, to a happy pride, and on to anger and even melancholy at not being taken at his own high rating. Immediately after his pleasure in Armaryllis, he falls into the dumps, then immediately turns to boasting “at this time, I am kept by another Woman, in the City.” Johnson wonders how he can “make shift to hold out, at this rate.”

BAYES.
O Devil, I can toil like a Horse; only sometimes, it makes me Melancholy: and then I vow to Gad, for a whole day together, I am not able to say one good thing, if it were to save my life. …
… And that's the only thing, I Gad, that mads me, in my Amours; for I'll tell you, as a Friend, Mr. Johnson, my acquaintances, I hear, begin to give it out that I am dull: now I am the farthest from it in the whole World, I Gad; but only forsooth, they think I am so, because I say nothing.

(I.i.)

Here, again, Dryden's actual taciturnity has been transmuted into Bayes's mad egotism. His admiration of himself and his defenses on every hand are boundless. No one can properly appreciate his genius; no actor can really do him justice.

This comedy of blind conceit everywhere transcends the personal satire in which it originates, as Buckingham incorporates thrusts at authors other than Dryden (actually remnants from earlier versions), particularly William D'Avenant, whose nose was snubbed and almost nonexistent, presumably from syphilis, and who evidently sometimes wore a false nose to repair the lack.

Soldiers have come in and killed each other, and music begins to play:

BAYES.
Hold, hold! [To the Musick. It ceaseth.] Now here's an odd surprize: All these dead men you shall see rise up presently, at a certain Note that I have made, in Effaut Flat. Play on. [To the Musick.
Now, now, now, [The Musick play his Note, and the dead
O Lord, O Lord! Men rise; but cannot get in order.]
Out, out, out! Did ever Men spoil a good thing so! No Figure, No Ear, no Time, no Thing? Udzookers, you dance worse than the Angels in Harry the Eight, or the fat Spirits in The Tempest, I Gad.
1 SOL.
Why, Sir, 'tis impossible to do any thing in time, to this Tune.
BAYES.
O Lord, O Lord! Impossible? Why Gentlemen, if there be any Faith in any person that's a Christian, I sate up two whole nights composing this Air, and apting it for the business: For, if you observe, there are two several Designs in this Tune; it begins swift and ends slow. You talk of time, and time; you shal see me do't. Look you now. Here I am dead [Lies down flat upon his Face.]
Now mark my Note Effaut flat. Strike up Musick. Now. [As he rises up hastily, he falls down again.] Ah, Gadsookers, I have broke my Nose.
JOHNS.
By my troth, Mr. Bayes, this is a very unfortunate Note of yours, in Effaut.
BAYES.
A plague of this damn'd Stage, with your Nails, and your Tenterhooks, that a Gentleman cannot come to teach you to Act, but he must break his Nose, and his Face, and the Devil and all. Pray, Sir, can you help me to a wet piece of brown Paper?

Act II closes; and Act III opens with “Bayes with a Paper on his Nose,” as bumptious as ever, explaining his ingenuity to his two guests. He evidently wears the paper obliviously throughout the rest of the play, turning D'Avenant's false nose into a symbol of Bayes's ridiculous inability, which he cannot see before his very face.

Here we see him, at the end of Act IV, papered nose undoubtedly still in ridiculous evidence:

BAYES.
Now the Rant's coming.
PRET.
Durst any of the Gods be so uncivil, I'll make that God subscribe himself a Devil.
BAYES.
Ah, Godsookers, that's well writ! [Scratching his head, his Perruke falls off.]

Another patch of ranting follows, and Bayes exclaims:

There's a bold flight for you now! 'Sdeath, I have lost my Perruke. Well Gentlemen, this is that I never yet saw any one could write, but my self. Here's true Spirit and Flame all through, I Gad.

Act IV ends as Bayes walks off for a pot of ale, saying, “I'll make that God subscribe himself a Devil. That single Line, I Gad, is worth all that my Brother Poets ever writ.”

Bayes's delight in his powers continues to rebound hilariously from his linguistic and physical ineptitudes, and we delight in him as the comic symbol, a kind of Wigless Victory, of all human pride in one of its most sensitive aspects: that of the writer who presumes to handle language and reality in that most godlike of human activities, authorship, that exposition of reality itself—or so we believe in our enchanted beliefs.

In addition to this essential comedy of blind pride, The Rehearsal makes comedy, at our own delighted expense, of literary illusion itself: a play making fun of plays, literature making fun of the most essential literary fact, our joy in these grand illusions of reality. We laugh heartily at Bayes, and through him at our own pretensions. But we are also enchanted into contemplating, comically, this illusion of reality that pulls us in, part way, as we give ourselves knowingly to its power. We enjoy the theater in its very theatricallity, and The Rehearsal gives us a kind of comically privileged view into the theatrical mysteries.

In the lines and pageantry of The Rehearsal, we also recognize the pleasures of the serious heroic play, in its language and sonorous hauteur, its music and dances, its ingenious mechanisms, as kings descend in clouds, singing. The same companies would play this farce to the “heroic” audiences of the day before and the day after. The heroic play continued to prosper, alongside The Rehearsal. Dryden wrote his last heroic play, Aureng-Zebe, in 1675, four years after The Rehearsal launched out to harry him; and these grand heroic spectacles of his continued to hold the stage for some years to come and to influence the elevated tragedies that were to follow.

Doubtless, The Rehearsal's jovial acid eventually began to bite. Dane F. Smith believes that it undermined the heroic play and created “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.”⁸ He has in mind the unmannerly audiences, who could damn almost anything and everything as they ate their oranges and ogled the ladies, and probably the realistic of manners in comedies. But the serious plays that follow The Rehearsal hardly show either a passion for realism or a distrust of illusion, however theatrical. The Rehearsal in fact so capitalizes on the essential literary and theatrical delight in illusion that it would seem almost to feed the appetite it teases.

Today, we put The Rehearsal down after reading it, in the only theater in which we are likely to see it, that of our minds, with a kind of pleased wonder at the essential fact of literature: that we take these illusions for reality, but with some partial admiration for the illusion itself—the author's style, his evocative powers, and, in the theater, the actor's genius at seeming the role he is only playing. This is the essential literary paradox. We wish to take these unrealities as real, but do not wish them to be real, as Samuel Johnson pointed out long ago: they move us because they are lifelike, not life itself but reminders of the possibilities and realities in our own real lives.

The Rehearsal makes constant comedy of this paradox, as we observe the author and two guests observe the absurd illusions he constantly breaks into from his supposed reality. The actor begins to act his mock illusion. Bayes breaks it off, as he corrects the actor, and then sets him to evoking illusion again. The mere breaking off of the pseudo-illusion comes as a comic surprise, as when a film breaks, snapping us back to our own reality. Even the absurd pseudo-illusion has some of the essential literary and theatrical spell-binding effect. We are constantly laughing at our essential propensity for being taken in, for submitting to the grand illusions of the stage. We have a sense that the audience itself must have had: they had recently submitted and would submit again to language and stagecraft almost identical with these. The laughter, as ultimately in all good comedy, turns reflectively on ourselves.

We know that we could respond to one of Dryden's world-shaking heroes, gladly entering the illusion, as he sends even gods to the devil. When Bayes explains that one of his characters is “the Sister of Drawcansir. A Lady that was drown'd at Sea, and had a Wave for her Winding-sheet,” we know that we would respond—in fact, we do respond with a touch of pathos glowing through the fun—to the poetry and the idea in its serious context. Dryden's verse-plays actually reach something of the idealized and impassioned resonance that Corneille had achieved, and Racine was achieving, in France.⁹ Dryden's Almanzor, in The Conquest of Granada, hears the ghost of his mother speak in an elegant passage beginning:

I am the Ghost of her who gave thee birth:
The airy shadow of her mouldering earth.
Love of thy father me through seas did guide;
On seas I bore thee, and on seas I died.
I died; and for my winding-sheet a wave
I had, and all the ocean for my grave.

Buckingham's burlesquing of this passage, with Bayes's little comic sadness at his own created illusion, reminds us, as we laugh, of the language and power of illusion itself, a language and power to which we know we ourselves respond. In all the short passages of parodied poetry—and part of Buckingham's brilliance is in keeping them brief, never letting them grow dull before Bayes breaks them off—we sense the power both of poetry and of the mimetic illusion, even as we laugh at the parodic absurdities.

This comic contrasting of illusory levels is especially evident in the music and dancing. When Bayes leaves to mend his broken nose, he tells his soldiers to remember to “dance like Horsemen.” They respond in bewilderment, then try their muddled dance, then give it up. One of the soldiers asks the music to play a dance that Bayes had once found fault with, and we very evidently have a solo dance, by one of the cast's several skillful dancers, to the best music the theater could produce. Then Smith and Johnson cross the stage with a comment on “this Fool” and his nose, and Act II ends, pulled a step back toward the farce from the thorough theatrical illusion of the dance and the music.

The play ends similarly, after Bayes's magnificent comic anger at everybody's having gone off for lunch, his threat to sell his play to the other theater and turn satirist, “And so farewell to this Stage, I Gad, for ever.” After comic Bayes, we move back toward the very level of theatrical illusion at which we have been laughing. A few actors still linger on stage. One says, “But before we go, lets see Haynes and Shirley practice the last dance,” which they can use on some other occasion.

Joseph Haynes, as Samuel Pepys tells us, was “an incomparable dancer,” and Shirley (first name unknown) was evidently not far behind.¹⁰ We end, then, with serious music and dance, the best of the day, straight from the heroic realm itself. We enter the illusion at which we laughed. But not quite. We are enjoying the very fact of illusion, with a certain amusement at ourselves as fallibly human and therefore comic creatures, a minor set of Bayeses. For we are seeing not the complete illusion, as in a heroic play, but only its rehearsal, by two real men, whose names we know, who themselves are only practicing the illusion they will eventually enter completely, under their assumed roles and pretended names. This double pleasure of having and eating our illusory cake, laughing at ourselves as belonging to the comic kind, comically blinded by our illusions, is certainly the ground-bass of The Rehearsal, on which Bayes acts out his hilarious arpeggios and descants.

We are indeed engaged, comically, in an essential dramatic pleasure: that which we enjoy after any final curtain, when the actors and actresses, still in costume, come smiling forth as the real persons we applaud and cheer, and give bouquets, for their illusory powers. The Prologue to The Rehearsal sets and illustrates its unique comic version of this basic theatrical fact. John Lacy, Charles II's favorite comic actor, one of the best comedians of the times, comes on stage dressed as John Dryden for his role as Bayes. But he speaks straightforwardly (though breezily):

We might well call this short Mock-play of ours
A Poesie 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.

And, then, after hoping that audiences will eventually grow wise, and despise the popular heroic play, he concludes:

Then I'll cry out, swell'd with Poetic rage,
Tis I, John Lacy, have reform'd your Stage.

Here is real Lacy (whom we know) dressed to look like Dryden (whom we know), ready to step into that full comic personality, Mr. Bayes, yet thinking at the end of swelling with typical heroic rhetoric to declare, with a marvelously pretended Bayesian pomposity that he, John Lacy, the mere actor, has reformed the stage, whereas, in actuality, the reformer will have been Buckingham, the parodist and satirist who has created the role for him to act. This mixing of actuality and theatrical illusion becomes even more intriguing when we contemplate the curious fact I have already mentioned: that Anne Reeves, Dryden's presumed mistress, is playing her own comical counterpart as Bayes's mistress, burlesquing the parts she had played in Dryden's plays. However one can separate these comic layers of theatrics, they highlight the fascinating fact that theatrical illusion works comically upon us throughout The Rehearsal—which, of course, is not a real rehearsal at all, but a comic mime of that double layer of actuality and illusion that goes on before the play and behind the scenes.

Lionel Trilling, speaking of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, has observed that the “essence of the theatre, as everyone is quick to understand, is illusion,” and that audiences, beginning with those of Aristophanes, have, again and again, delighted in a playwright's seeming to destroy the illusion.¹¹ Those modern devastators, Beckett and Ionesco, come to mind as outstanding examples, as we laugh nervously at their shifts of illusion, wondering what we're doing there, and here. But The Rehearsal, in its merriment, may be better than the modern illusion-shifters, and more sustained than Aristophanes, in this eternal flirtation between our love of illusion and our need for reality. Certainly, in The Rehearsal, more than in any of its lesser descendants, we enjoy a sustained comedy of illusion at our own expense, costing not too much psychic humiliation to join us happily to the general comedy of being fallible and human.

The Rehearsal thus does reach the permanently comic in two supportive ways. Primarily, in the superbly comic Bayes. The quintessential fact of comedy is human ineptitude mistaking itself for omnipotence. Authorship, by nature, assumes an omnipotence it must disguise. And Bayes is authorship laid comically bare, and never more thoroughly and comically so. His Mad Modernity extracts further comedy from the phenomenon of authorship, which must render ever new the unchanging essentials of human existence. The mimicking of John Dryden, which we continue to enjoy as a maliciously augmented seventh in the total comic harmony, is only a means to the basic human comedy that Bayes represents, in his wild prides and pretensions.

Bayes indeed ranks among the best comic characters we have, if we would but blow the dust from the book, and get him back on the stage, which he held for well over a century, lingering in memory for a good bit longer too. The Rehearsal reinforces this comedy of Bayes, at a second level of permanence, through its shifts of illusion, which implicate, as Bayes himself does and as all great comedy must, ourselves, the laughers, in the general human comedy, from which we, looking down from the boxes, had thought ourselves immune.

Notes

1. Montague Summers concurs: “Amusing as Sheridan is and full of smartness, even his wit and humor pale before the brilliance of the Restoration Duke”; “The water of The Critic is a mean thing to place beside the strong wine of The Rehearsal” (The Rehearsal [Stratford-Upon-Avon: The Shakespeare Head Press, 1914], pp. xvii, xxv. Dane F. Smith finds The Critic “not so great in a literary sense” as The Rehearsal (The Critics in the Audience of the London Theatres from Buckingham to Sheridan [Albuquerque: The University of New Mexico Press, 1953], p. 141.

2. Twelve years later, Johnson holds it cheaper still: “‘It has not wit enough to keep it sweet’ [he said]. This was easy;—he therefore caught himself, and pronounced a more rounded sentence; ‘It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrefaction’” (June 1784). Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1934), II.168, IV.320.

3. Robert Bell, “Life of Dryden,” Poetical Works (1854), I.40-42, qtd. Edward Arber, The Rehearsal (London: A. Murray & Sons, 1868), p. 17.

4. Pope's Rape of the Lock (1714) illustrates both The Rehearsal's enduring popularity, over forty years later, and the way personal peculiarity can become a popular comic touchstone. Pope reinforces his satire on superficiality with this reminder of the prototypically foolish Bayes:

   Snuff, or the Fan, supply each Pause of Chat,
   With singing, laughing, ogling, and all that.

5. Charles la Motte, Essay on Painting and Poetry (1730), qtd. Summers, p. 95.

6. Summers, p. 100. “Fegue” means to beat or drive.

7. Among other roles in Dryden's plays, Anne Reeves had played Esperanza in his The Conquest of Granada, of the preceding year (1670), one of the principal plays parodied, and, as Amaryllis in The Rehearsal, she was actually playing herself. See Hester W. Chapman, Great Villiers (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949), p. 173. Evidence for and against Dryden's presumed affair remains inconclusive: see Charles E. Ward, The Life of John Dryden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), p. 183.

8. The Critics in the Audience, p. 25.

9. Dryden emulated Corneille, not only in tight structure but also in versification, as the Prologue to his The Maiden Queen suggests:

   He who writ this, not without pains and thought
   From French and English Theatres has brought
   The exactest rules. …

                                                                                             … and a mingled chime
   Of Jonson's humour, with Corneille's rhyme.

   Summers, who quotes this, points out that Dryden is pronouncing Corneille with the final French uh (pp. 79-80), the characteristic mannerism of elevated French dramatic verse.

10. Summers, pp. 152, 102.

11. The Experience of Literature (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. 359-360.