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City Comedies: Courtiers and Gentlemen

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SOURCE: Butler, Martin. “City Comedies: Courtiers and Gentlemen.” In Theatre and Crisis, 1632-1642, pp. 141-80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

[In the following excerpt, Butler examines the relationship between class and politics in Shirley's comedies, particularly as illustrated through the world of manners, drawing a close connection between the courtship behavior of Shirley's lovers and tensions in the Caroline court.]

TOWN AND COUNTRY

In his intelligent and complex play [The Weeding of Covent Garden], Brome finds in Covent Garden, the symbol of the new permanent gentry presence (and crossness) in London, an occasion for defending the gentry's developing political character and for making a general critique of the personal rule. In turning to Shirley's town plays we find a society more confident in its own autonomy, and one of Shirley's main aims, consequently, is simply the elucidation of the new codes of manners as they act as internal standards to regulate and censure behaviour. But for Shirley as for Brome, these manners are resonant with political meanings; the problem is that these have been obscured by an obliquity of interpretation, a treatment of Caroline city comedy as largely either post-Jacobean or pre-Restoration. In fact, Shirley's preoccupations and anxieties rest on notions about the shape of society and the whereabouts of its points of tension different from those obtaining in both periods; we will not understand the significance of his comedies until we treat them as characteristically Caroline, and not merely adjunct to but fully distinct from both their predecessors and successors.

To conduct the kind of inquiry he wished for in The Weeding of Covent Garden, Brome adopted a deliberately old-fashioned style, playing the severe moralist in the Jonsonian mould, more concerned with humours than manners; his model is obviously Bartholomew Fair. Broadly speaking, Jacobean city comedy is moral rather than social, and takes greed and folly for its principal preoccupations; it also evinces little direct interest in the court. The main social antagonism with which it deals is between citizen and gentleman, Money and Land; London means the city, a place of legalism and sharp practice. This polarization did not greatly obsess the dramatists of our period. London in the 1630s implies the Strand, not Cheapside, and the motives to action are less commercial than amorous, so although London comedy is still a serious form, the vices it castigates are promiscuity and pride rather than greed, and its yardstick is civilized behaviour rather than human kindness. Moreover, as we have seen, many playgoers were making connections with the rich merchant classes, and the plays they saw rarely suggested that the city was out to destroy the gentry. I have argued elsewhere1 that the great apparent exception, Massinger's The City Madam (1632) actually proves the rule; Massinger attacks civic avarice and social-climbing but from the standpoint of Sir John Frugal, a dignified citizen of aldermanic rank who associates with and counsels the nobleman, Lord Lacy, yet who is also a thrifty and highly successful businessman. Frugal cures the ladies of his family of pride above their station; nevertheless he still marries one daughter to a gentleman, the other to Lord Lacy's son.

Fletcher's city comedies begin to deal more obviously with London's leisured classes and develop an interest in ‘wit’ as a social value (‘accomplishment’ or ‘breeding’) as opposed to the ‘wit’ of Middleton's heroes which represents their capacity to swindle. However, his gallants are still footloose and their ‘wit’ is a nervous reaction, ‘a flourish of indifference towards money’2 and the obligations it brings with it; ‘wit’ rationalizes their rootlessness in terms of London's competitiveness, providing a weapon against insecurity. In Wit Without Money (c. 1614) Valentine, even though an elder brother, decides to live in London by his wits and attractively but outrageously parades his contempt of responsibility. His ‘wit’ converts his sense of displacement into aggression; Fletcher's plays are still largely without much sense of a communal social round such as becomes commonplace for the 1630s. Valentine walks the streets or visits taverns; in Wit at Several Weapons (c. 1609?) the clown kills time by wandering around ‘the new River by Islington, there they shall have me looking upon the Pipes, and whistling’.3 In Caroline plays people never simply lack anything to do but participate in an established and socially sanctioned Town. So although Shirley depicts ‘wits’, their otium is never, like Valentine's, radically at variance with their negotium. Caroline London plays continually demand that ‘wit’ be reconciled with more traditional notions of ‘worth’, and that it should cease to be the badge only of the déclassé.

It is more essential to distinguish Caroline comedy from its counterpart in the 1660s and 1670s because here critics have found the similarities most compelling (even though Shirley was felt to be out of date by 1667).4 Restoration comedy spoke principally to a metropolitan audience accustoming itself to absenteeism and establishing permanent roots in London, itself rapidly becoming the only centre of political power. The centre of the stage has been taken over by the Town, and the criteria of behaviour have become urbanity and a cultivated and detached civility. ‘Wit’ has developed into an electric, sophisticated and sardonic mode of discourse entirely unlike anything in the 1630s (the nearest equivalent is the compliment, always regarded suspiciously by Caroline dramatists),5 and marriage and romantic love are treated realistically and sceptically, perhaps fully for the first time. Clearly much has changed—including the attitudes to society and politics.

The precedence of the town in the 1660s and 1670s is established by a continual comparison with country dullness. This issue is examined most searchingly in Wycherley's The Country Wife (1675) in which, although the value of Margery Pinchwife's rural ‘naturalness’ is plain, her husband's error is to take it for something which is antithetical to the habits of the town. Her innocence exerts no positive pressure at all; it is simply lack of experience, and she quickly discovers it is as ‘natural’ for herself to prefer the town to the country as it is for any more sophisticated person (‘how shou'd I help it, Sister’).6 ‘Nature’ is everywhere outraged in The Country Wife, but as a prescriptive system of value it hardly exists. Rather, in Wycherley's Hobbesian human zoo men are ‘naturally’ predatory and pleasure-seeking, just as it is ‘natural’ for jealous husbands, like Pinchwife, to be cuckolded. Ironically, it is the town which best fulfils these conditions, and is witty man's ‘state of nature’. In Etherege's plays, the country is similarly a place of dullness or sterility, the ‘Wildness’ of the heroine of The Man of Mode (1676)7 is exactly that quality which allies her with the town against the country. Any suggestion that the town fulfils man's ‘nature’ or represents the sum of experience in this way is wholly alien to the 1630s.

Alongside this devaluation of the country is a shift in the political position of the town. The Cavalier-puritan polarity absent from the 1630s is much in evidence in the 1660s and 1670s. A main butt of Etherege's seminal comedy The Comical Revenge (1664) is ‘Sir Nich'las Culley, one whom Oliver, for the transcendent knavery and disloyalty of his Father, has dishonour'd with Knight-hood’ and who therefore is allowed no serious qualities; the hero, Bruce, is a loyal Cavalier who has to vindicate himself from puritan slanders (‘Look on your Friend; your drooping Country view; / And think how much they both expect from you’).8 The tendency of these comedies, even within a single play, to over- and under-seriousness reflects the self-images towards which the exiled courtiers were forced in the Interregnum, either heroic Prince Ruperts or debauched devil-may-cares. In Dryden's Marriage-à-la-Mode (1672), and many like it, the play world simply splits into two contrasting halves, one prose, one verse, which coexist yet barely interact except as versions of these extreme, alternating mentalities. The place of the town in this is quite evident. Sedley's The Mulberry Garden (1668) opens with an apparently objective debate on the freedom of town pleasures, recalling similar discussions in Caroline comedies, but its seriousness is suddenly undermined when the critic of the town is revealed as a puritan and hence a killjoy who in the overplot prevents his daughter from wedding a heroic Cavalier loyal to the exiled king. Throughout the play the puritan is satirized and humiliated, and the success of true love is signalled by the return of Charles II and the vindication of loyalty and the gaiety of the town. A comparable re-alignment is observable in more serious drama too.9

Evidently the experiences of 1642-60 have undermined the Town's independence and forced it into a close association with the court and into opposition to city, country and puritanism of any brand. Dryden formulated his criticisms of the drama of the previous age precisely in terms of its lack of courtliness. Accusing Jonson of ‘meanness of thought’, he complained that the wit of his contemporaries

was not that of gentlemen; there was ever somewhat that was ill-bred and clownish in it, and which confessed the conversation of the authors … In the age wherein these poets lived, there was less of gallantry than in ours; neither did they keep the best company of theirs … I cannot find that any of them were conversant in courts, except Ben Jonson: and his genius lay not so much that way as to make an improvement by it …

The present (1672) refinement he ascribed to the influence of ‘the Court: and, in it, particularly to the King, whose example gives a law to it’; later (1679) he attacked Fletcher for allowing kings who were not usurpers to appear bad, and for failing to provide ‘those royal marks which ought to appear in a lawful successor of the throne’.10 There is a unity of artistic and political outlook here in which a dislike of ‘lowness’ in art reinforces a rejection of ungentlemanly behaviour in politics, and specifically of ‘country’ distrust of and opposition to the king. The dramatic equivalents of Dryden's precepts are Lady Woodvill in The Man of Mode (she being an absurd ‘admirer of the Forms and Civility of the last Age’) and Old Bellair whose ridiculous rustic obstinacy (‘go, bid her dance no more, it don't become her, it don't become her, tell her I say so; a Dod I love her’) is a deft parody of the deliberate stubbornness associated with the political idea of the ‘country’;11 sixty years later, Chesterfield was quite certain about what the involvement of the Restoration dramatists with the court had meant for the political attitudes they had expressed.12 It is this narrow courtliness in politics which it is tempting, but most misleading, to read back into the Town plays of the 1630s. These are the attitudes of a society purposefully retreating from serious political engagement, not of one moving towards it.

In several Caroline plays, the country is indeed ridiculed in a figure who has come to London and failed to reproduce society's good manners. However, the social pretender is always satirized not for his rusticity but for his lowness and his attempt to clamber into a higher rank than he deserves. In Shirley's The Changes (1632; pub. London, 1632) a country knight, Simple, finally returns to the provinces to sell his servant his ‘Knighthood for halfe the mony it cost me, and turne Yeoman in the country agen’ (p. 69). In The Constant Maid (c. 1637; pub. London, 1640), Startup, claiming gentility, admits ‘my father was / A Yeoman … my Grandfather was a Nobleman['s] Foot-man, and indeed he [ran] his countrey; my father did outrun the Constable’ (sig.C2v); he is contrasted with the dignified figure of a countryman whose daughter he has wronged. Other figures abused for their lack of gentility rather than urbanity are Brome's Tim Hoyden (in The Sparagus Garden, 1635) and Cavendish's Simpleton (in The Variety, c. 1641-42), the latter's attempted rape of the play's heroine making him a most undesirable character. The attitudes are social and moral, not anti-rural; rather, this feeling that rank ought to be answerable to a standard of worth seems to me to be a characteristically ‘country’ conviction.

I have been suggesting that the roots of Caroline high society were still firmly linked to the provinces, and the instinctive sympathy of Caroline city comedies (and Shirley's in particular) for the outlook and attitudes of the country is a feature which significantly distinguishes them from their Restoration successors. This sympathy is made explicit in Shirley's The Witty Fair One (London, 1633), written shortly before our main period (1628). The heroine's social placing is very carefully detailed:

Her Father is a man who though he write
Himselfe but Knight, keepes a warme house i'the Countrey
'Mongst his Tenants, takes no Lordly pride
To trauell with a Footman and a Page
To London, humbly rides th old fashion
With halfe a douzen wholesome Liueries,
To whom he gives Christian wages and not countenance
Alone to liue on, can spend by th'yeare
Eight hundred pounds, and put vp fine sleepes quietly
Without dreaming on Morgages or Statutes
Or such like curses on his Land, can number
May be ten thousand pound in ready coyne
Of's own, yet neuer bought an office for't
Ha's plate no question, and Iewels too
In's old Ladies cabinet, beside
Other things worth an Inuentory, and all this
His daughter is an heyre to …

(sig.B3r)

Sir George Richley, described here, typifies the traditional country values—conservative, hospitable, plain yet wealthy, knowing his place yet independent of the court (‘never bought an office’), and he is contrasted with the foolish Sir Nicholas Treedle who lacks love for his servants, pursues foreign fashions and is ‘a Knight & no Gentleman’ (sig.K1v). Although Richley opposes his daughter's match, the play exhibits considerable respect for the attitudes represented in this speech. The best characters are shown acting in a magnanimous, dignified manner, and their generous language matches their deeds. Typical are the scenes in which Richley's daughter's suitor is counselled by her uncle, or in which the subsidiary heroine is aided by two anonymous gentlemen to reform her rakish suitor:

2 GENTLEMAN.
                                                                                                    Gentle Lady
And if it prove fortunate, the designe
Will be your honour, and the deed it selfe
Reward us in his benefit, he was ever wilde
1 GENTLEMAN.
Assured your ends are noble, we are happy in'[t].

(sigs.I2r-v)

The play is permeated with the values and speech of a gentry class moving to London yet conscious of its traditional duties of courtesy and responsibility, and this feeling for ‘country’ values continually recurs in London plays of the 1630s. For example, Shirley's Constant Maid opens with the hero bidding a sad farewell to the family retainers he can no longer support, one of whom refuses to leave him; and in Thomas May's The Old Couple (1636), the Jacobean city comedy motifs of usury and avarice have been imposed, with little sense of incongruity, on a story set amongst country gentry and emphasizing values of charity and neighbourliness.

Another feature distinguishing Caroline from Restoration comedy is that in the former the Town is not the only centre of attention, but the other localities of the realm are invoked besides and the behaviour of the metropolis is measured against them. The completest example is, again, Shirley's Constant Maid whose hero, we have seen, has a country background and who, at the nadir of his fortunes, leaves the town for the fields. The city is present in a usurer, Hornet, who opposes his daughter's marriage, and the court is represented in burlesque by a group of servants who dress up as courtiers to help fool Hornet out of his daughter. So although the town gallants triumph, the town is placed against a broad context of all the estates of the realm in a manner quite unlike Restoration comedy. In the ease with which the tyrannous Hornet is deceived by the fake courtiers' talk of monopolies and projects (and in his readiness to threaten the gallants with a prosecution in Star Chamber), Shirley seems to be associating city and court together as both unattractive and avaricious, whereas the gallants, with their dignity and resistance to parental attempts to force their affections, adopt a ‘country’ outspokenness and respect for free judgment and action. For example, one of the girls resists her mother's oppression indignantly:

Though in imagination [i.e. in thought] I allow you
The greatest woman in the earth, whose frowne
Could kill … I durst tell you
Though all your terrours were prepared to punish
My bold defence; you were a tyrant …
My soul's above your tyranny, and would
From torturing flame, receive new fire of love.

(sigs.G1r-v)

Although in comedy parents traditionally oppose lovers' freedoms, the violence of this retort and its language of ‘tyranny’ (and the girl's insistence on her essential obedience and willingness to submit despite her speaking her mind) seem to me wholly characteristic of the tone of this drama with its instinctive feeling for the gentry's inviolable dignity and for the freedom due to their ‘place’. This ‘country’ sense of place derives from the gentry's identity as the principal propertied class; it both defines their social position, and protects their independence from the encroachments of other ranks.

Country gentry in town, such as Sir Humphrey Mildmay and Sir Edward Dering, would have felt much sympathy with these characters on the Caroline stage, and much continuity exists between the respect for gentility, responsibility and worth in these plays and the sentiments which are commonplace in the memoirs, letters and notebooks preserved by such people as Sir George Sondes, Sir John Oglander, the Verneys of Buckinghamshire and Oxindens of Kent, men deeply conscious of the traditions and responsibilities the ownership of land confers. Although this serious aspect of Caroline comedy has been dismissed by critics as an anticipation of Augustan sentimentality, or as ‘dubious grace’,13 it is something that runs very deep in this period. It also carries a considerable political charge. There is, for instance, much common ground between the distaste for parental tyranny in The Constant Maid and the reflections on ‘political nobilitie’ made by the Kent gentleman Henry Oxinden. Oxinden felt that the aristocracy should be esteemed according to their behaviour, not their titles:14

The knowledge and consideration whereof hath caused mee not to value anie man by having anie inward respect or conceite of him beefore another, beecause he excells in degrees of honour, but according to the concomitant ornaments, as vertue, riches, wisdom, power etc. etc.


If I see a man of what low degree or quality soever that is vertuous, rich, wise or powerful, him will I preferre beefore the greatest Lord in the kingdome that comes short of him in these …

The implications for the political attitudes of the Caroline gentry of this respect for traditional dignities and valuation of virtue above title are worked out most fully in Shirley's two major comedies.

TOWN AND COURT

Shirley's The Lady of Pleasure (1635; pub. London, 1637) opens with an attack by Sir Thomas Bornwell (and his steward) on the extravagance of his wife, Aretina, which is destroying their wealth in the country, and the play is often read as if it were a moralistic rejection of the behaviour of the town from the point of view of a rural society outraged and threatened by it. Shirley's opening, though, must be balanced against the scene in the second act in which Bornwell visits the other ‘lady of pleasure’, Celestina, apparently also to ‘test’ her behaviour in town. After acting towards her in the bawdy manner of the gallants with whom his own wife consorts, he finds that her manners are not a blind for lascivious or over-liberal behaviour but a reflection of her true, virtuous nature, and he apologizes to her and praises her innocence. The scene acts as a norm of social behaviour which Shirley admires, and thereafter Bornwell associates with the ‘good’ lady of pleasure rather than with Aretina, in order to cure the latter's misbehaviour. Bornwell and Celestina are two prongs in one argument—country attack of the town's excess, and an example of what it should be. The play parallels the careers of Celestina and Aretina, demonstrating in the former that the achievement of a social code enshrines positive values and enables free social intercourse by defining its limits, and attacking in the latter those who misuse the social codes for ambition and lasciviousness.15

The main force of the Aretina plot is moral. Shirley attacks fashionable ladies for whom manners contradict morality (‘Praying's forgot. / 'Tis out of fashion’ (sig.C1v)), and the plot culminates with Aretina's reawakening to virtue as she realizes the degeneracy of her lover and her nephew (whose attempted rape of her is the fruit of the fashionable dissipation to which she has encouraged him). But this moral failure is related in the first scene to a political failure. Aretina's extravagance is an attempt to make her household like the court, and she encourages her husband to use his wealth to procure offices:

A narrow minded husband is a theefe
To his owne fame, and his preferment too,
He shuts his parts and fortunes from the world
While from the popular vote and knowledge men
Rise to imployment in the state.
BORNWELL.
I have
No great ambition to buy preferment
At so deare rate.

(sig.B3r)

‘Deare’ here implies expense to the pocket and to honour. Aretina is (quite literally) prostituting herself to the court, and Bornwell responds to this as to a subversion of his ‘gentry’ integrity. Her court-centred attitudes are realized in her language, for she justifies her actions, as Charles his prerogative rule, on the grounds of ‘privilege’:

I finde you would intrench and wound the liberty
I was borne with, were my desires unpriviledged
By example …
You ought not to oppose.

(sig.B3r)

With this ‘privilege’ she subordinates Bornwell's freedom, keeping him in awe of her ‘kinsmen great and powerfull, / It'h State’, and he admits that if she does not have her will ‘the house [will] be shooke with names / Of all her kindred, tis a servitude, / I may in time shake off’ (sigs.B2r, B3v). Her extravagance is related to court tyranny; Bornwell complains she makes gaming ‘Not a Pastime but a tyrannie, and vexe / Your selfe and my estate by't’ (sig.B2v). This distinction between court and town has been obscured by critics who have persistently referred to Sir Thomas Bornwell as ‘Lord Bornwell’. There is, though, a clear correlation between Aretina's behaviour and her desertion to the court; she offends against the values of the town gentry morally, economically and politically.

Whereas Aretina's steward criticizes her expenditure, Celestina's questions her morals:

                                                                      tis not for
My profit, that I manage your estate,
And save expence, but for your honour Madam.
CELESTINA.
How sir, my honour?
STEWARD.
Though you heare it not
Mens toungues are liberall in your character,
Since you began to live thus high, I know
Your fame is precious to you.

(sigs.C2r-v)

The steward's suspicions reflect on his baseness, not Celestina's, and she strikes him for them. Such criticisms the play's action shows to be false, for Celestina is a town lady whose expense is the true image of her ‘generosity’—both her financial openness and her dignified gentility (the word derives from generosus, meaning ‘of high birth’). It does not compromise her modesty but marks the freedom proper to her ‘place’; she and her women are resolved to possess

Our pleasure with security of our honour,
And that preservd, I welcome all the joyes
My fancy can let in.

(sig.D3r)

So although Celestina resists Bornwell's temptations, she rebukes one of her women for not freely returning a courteous kiss that she is given. Liberality is thus the outward sign of inner gentility, and suited to her social position. She is not, then, overbearing like Aretina, but her freedom is precisely that natural behaviour proper to a gentlewoman. She reverses Aretina's position, establishing herself in opposition to, not emulation of, the court; she will

Be hospitable then, and spare no cost
That may engage all generous report
To trumpet forth my bounty and my braverie,
Till the Court envie, and remove …

(sig.C2v, my italics)

Whereas the ridiculousness of the courtiers with whom Aretina consorts exposes them, Celestina herself satirizes the worthlessness of those who visit her. One she slyly guesses is a courtier ‘by your confidence’ (sig.C2v); another she characterizes as

                                                  a wanton emissarie
Or scout for Venus wild [fowl], which made tame
He thinkes no shame to stand court centinell,
In hope of the reversion.

(sigs.D3r-v)

This implicit friction between court and town becomes explicit in the fourth act in which Celestina undergoes a test of courtesy with an unnamed lord.

The great court lord who is thrown Celestina's way is a platonic in love after the manner fashionable at Henrietta Maria's Whitehall in mid decade. When he first appears, he is professing an elaborate and rather pompous fidelity to a dead mistress, Bella Maria: he boasts of having ‘a heart, 'bove all licentious flame’ and of having loved Bella Maria for her beauty rather than her person, so that he claims now not merely to be mourning her loss but still to be in love with her ‘Idea’ as his ‘Saint’ (sigs.E4r-v, I4r). Celestina ‘tests’ the lord rather as Bornwell tested her and is pleased to find at first that his professions are matched by a real purity, and are not a merely fashionable courtly pose:

Nor will I thinke these noble thoughts grew first
From melancholy, for some femall losse,
As the phantasticke world beleeves, but from
Truth, and your love of Innocence …

(sig.H4r)

However, in the final act he reverses his position and succumbs to Celestina's charms. As base as her steward, he now supposes that her personal openness indicates she has lascivious intentions like Aretina's:

These widowes are so full of circumstance,
Ile undertake in this time I ha courted
Your Ladiship for the toy, to ha broken ten,
Nay twenty colts, Virgins I meane, and taught em
The amble, or what pace I most affected.

(sig.K1r)

He now disowns his earlier constancy as ‘A noble folly’ and offers her instead a platonic love that really is, like Aretina's manners, only the superficies of respectability, a mask for looser practices (‘Your sexe doth hold it no dishonour / To become Mistris to a noble servant / In the now court, Platonicke way’ (sig.I4v)). He goes on to woo her with an elaborate flowery speech, perhaps intended to recall the language of Davenant's platonic plays. Celestina only regains him for virtue by narrating an exemplary fable about a social upstart who tried to purchase honour equivalent to his, implying his honour is worth no more than bought honour if not matched with personal integrity. Thus the town corrects the court, its virtue being shown to have a more solid foundation than the artificialities of courtly platonism, and Celestina's moral point is underlined (in a manner typical of Shirley) in the action immediately following in which a minor courtier defends his gentility honourably and exposes the lack of gentility of another, merely fashionable, courtier (sigs.K1v-2r).

The lord's tactics are also tyrannous, like Aretina's. He appeals to his status, expecting that his position at court can validate his behaviour:

                                                                                          consider
Who tis that pleades to you, my birth, and present
Value can be no stain to your embrace …

(sig.I4v)

Celestina admits that ‘gay men have a priviledge’, but warns the lord that by presuming on this privilege ‘you doe forget / Your selfe and me’ (sigs.K1r-v). That is to say, in respecting the lord's privilege, she expects an answering respect for her privilege: the system of ‘privilege’ defines the freedom of behaviour appropriate to every rank within that system but its operation demands that the ‘privilege’ of each rank is as inviolable as that of the next. By assuming that because his privilege is courtly it is in some way superior to Celestina's, the lord invades and destroys her privilege—in the language of opposition to Charles, it is an encroachment on her rights. This too is the burden of the fable Celestina instructs the lord in, that the attempt of the parvenu to purchase honour like the lord's renders the system within which it operates meaningless and destroys the very basis of that honour. Privilege and honour are forces which determine social boundaries, but cannot be used to override them for that would turn them against themselves; the sanction of society's values, they are not strategies to exceed them. By disrespecting Celestina's privilege and resorting to tyranny the lord has destroyed the guarantee of his own freedom, the privilege which protects his rights as well as hers.

Clearly, this incident, and the fable with which Celestina corrects the lord, have far-reaching social and political implications. It is not merely that the lord is using the authority of his ‘honour’ dishonourably, but Celestina's rebuke reaches out impressively to imply a wide social system of checks and balances in which each man respects the freedom and integrity of those around him and in which the respect he can command is a guarantee of his own freedom. It is a mature, comprehensive picture of the workings of society, depending for its dynamic on the gentry sense of one's ‘place’, a position in which one can act and speak freely without encroaching on the freedoms of others. This has obvious continuities with the attitudes of Charles's critics in parliament whose anxiety for their liberty of life and person was bound up with a concern for their property rights, the security of the possession of their goods from court encroachment. Denzil Holles complained in 1641 that Charles's judges ‘have removed our land marks, have taken away the bound stones of the Propriety of the subject, have left no meum and tuum; but he that had most might had most right and the law was sure to be of his side’.16 Celestina, arguing that the privilege which gives the lord his freedom does not sanction his attempt to override her freedom, is anticipating Holles's argument.

Celestina's free speaking here is also a form of resistance to the court's centralizing tendencies. Her answer of course attacks the lord's notion that his status enables him to arbitrate all moral value according to his uncontrolled will. But on a different level, she is replying to the extremely flowery platonizing speech with which he tries to tempt her. It is a long, over-poetic description of the delights she can expect in his paradise of love, and she parodies it as ‘linsey woolsie, to no purpose’ (sig.K1r). But it does have a purpose—to overwhelm her resistance with a catalogue of sensual delights, subjugating her with a stream of all varieties of pleasure. Just as the court laid claim to a monopoly of authority, this speech shows the lord claiming a monopoly of experience, destroying value (and Celestina's freedom to act morally) by invoking all value. This is a common topos with Shirley. In The Example (1634; pub. London, 1637), Lord Fitzavarice (whose name suggests the economic encroachments which parallel his moral encroachments) tries to overwhelm the wife of an absent gentleman with extravagant poetry:

                                                            consent, deere Ladie, to
Be mine, and thou shat tast more happinesse,
Then womans fierce ambition can persue;
Shift more delights, then the warme-spring can boast
Varietie of leaves, or wealthie harvest
Graine from the teeming earth. Joy shall dry all
Thy teares, and take his throne up, in thy eies,
Where it shall sit, and blesse what e're they shine on.
The night shall Sowe her pleasures in thy bosome,
And morning shall rise only to salute thee.

(sig.D1r)

Fitzavarice's expressions suggest he can control all experience and hence all value, a monopoly of authority which destroys discrimination (his creature, Confident—Shirley's typical name for a courtier—claims that to inquire ‘The meaning of a Jewell, sent by a Lord, / … 'tis a thing / At Court, is not in fashion’ (sig.A4v). The tempted gentlewoman heroically resists this sensual assault:

                                                            not your estate,
Though multiplied to Kingdomes, and those wasted
With your invention, to serue my pleasures,
Have power to bribe my life away from him,
To whose use I am bid to weare it …
Ile rather choose to die
Poore wife to Peregrine, then live a Kings
Inglorious strumpet

(sigs.D1r v)

Shirley presents us again with another gentlewoman preserving her moral independence against a courtier who claims to control all value.17 The blasphemous echoes in his speech (‘Joy shall dry all / Thy teares …’) recall the assertions that were being made about Charles's divinity in court masques, and in Love's Cruelty (1631) an explicit link is made by the courtier Hippolito who, instructed by the duke to seduce a gentlewoman for him, once more embarks on such another speech of the rapturous delights of the court which culminates in a description of the scenic wonders of Jonson's masque Neptune's Triumph (1624). Here Shirley penetrates to the heart of the court's ethos. The masque, a symbol of the king's power, shows all nature subjected to him and obedient to his magical will as the scenes range over all times and places. The masque is thus the highest expression of the court's imperialism,18 making the king the lord of all possible experience and value, and it is this imperialism with which Shirley's courtiers try to tyrannize Celestina and her counterparts.

This pattern, in which the town criticizes and restrains the court's monopolizing tendencies, underlies all Shirley's major city plays with the exception of The Gamester (1633) which, significantly, he wrote specifically for court performance. It can be found in Hyde Park, The Example, the collaborative play The Country Captain (c. 1641) and, in modified form, The Constant Maid.19The Ball (1632) seems to follow the pattern, but it is ambiguous because of the alterations Shirley was forced, by court interference, to make in the play. One would dearly like to know more about those people ‘personated so naturally, both of lords and others of the court’ that Sir Henry Herbert insisted Shirley cut out.20 Evidently the pattern represents for Shirley something very basic and challenging about the town's position in the social structure; nevertheless, he does not offer to present the town as replacing the court but balancing it, and modifying its excesses. The pattern shows the court being restrained from usurping the centre of value but equally prevents the town from doing the same (and in this Shirley's plays are typical of the broad perspective characteristic of Caroline city comedy in general). While Celestina's cautionary fable criticizes the court's misuse of its status, she has no quarrel with the system that grants it its privilege. She is not so much attacking the court as defending the status quo (the system of honour) which is unbalanced by the lord's exceeding of his place. The lord's failure to match his ‘worth’ to his ‘status’ (the two ideas suggested by ‘honour’) disrupts and nullifies the system; Celestina's riposte suggests that the system is prescriptive and that, to deserve his status, the lord must recognize the responsibilities, as well as the privileges, that it confers (this is the same argument that seemed so ineffective when advanced in Shirley's The Duke's Mistress (chapter 3 above). An admonition to the court to fulfil its proper social/political role carries a different pressure depending on the context in which it is made; the court's and town's conceptions of this role would not have been identical.)

It was exactly such a notion of a balanced system, the members of which sustain and restrain each other, to which the parliamentary leaders frequently appealed in defence of the rights which Charles's government seemed increasingly to be eroding. Pym argued in 1628 that the constitution was one of finely balanced ‘mutual relation and intercourse’; the ‘form of government is that which doth actuate and dispose every part and member of the state to the common good; and as those parts give strength and ornament to the whole, so they receive from it again strength and protection in their several stations and degrees’. If these degrees are exceeded, ‘there should remain no more industry, no more justice, no more courage; for who will contend, who will endanger himself for that which is not his own?’ Clarendon similarly urged in 1641 that if either king or parliament tried to increase its dominance, it hurt the very basis of its power: ‘if the least branch of the prerogative was torn off, or parted with, the subject suffered by it, and … his right was impaired: and he [Clarendon] was as much troubled when the crown exceeded its just limits, and thought its prerogative hurt by it’. In 1647 his solution was that ‘the frame and constitution of the Kingdom [should] be observed, and the known laws and bounds between the King's power and the Subjects' right’.21 These are the constitutionalist sentiments of a gentry class concerned for the survival of their interests and wishing for reform but reluctant to provoke social revolution in the process. Similarly, Shirley reforms his stage-courtiers, but then puts his trust in their future good faith. In The Example, Fitzavarice is rebuked in the third act, and thereafter acts in a wholly noble way, even being allowed to defend his honour in a duel. He ends taking to wife the heroine's sister (though ‘not for any titles’ but ‘for [his] noble nature’ (sig.I2v)). Once he acknowledges the responsibilities lying on him, he resumes his place in a properly reformed world, in which the checks and balances inherent in the system will ensure its just operation. Both court and gentry have their place in this order; but the gentry maintain their freedom and dignity by reminding the courtiers that they will only receive their dignity—their place—by respecting the dignity—the place—of others. ‘Respect’ and ‘restraint’ are the forces that bind together, and simultaneously distinguish, the various components of this society.

Shirley's completest account of this harmoniously balanced society is drawn in that beautifully achieved play Hyde Park (1632; pub. London, 1637).22 The action follows three parallel courtships of three ladies, the spirited Carol, her suitor Fairfield's sister Julietta, and Mrs Bonavent, a merchant's wife and, supposedly, his widow. The Julietta plot presents another gentry-courtier contrast. Julietta is tested by her gallant, the aptly named Trier, who exposes her to the dubious attentions of Lord Bonvile, having secretly assured Bonvile she is a courtesan. Her innocent openness to Bonvile is based on her understanding that her integrity will be protected by the social forms, giving Bonvile all respect since

It is my duty, where the king has seal'd
His favours, I should shew humility
My best obedience to his act.

(sig.H4v)

The credit she allows Bonvile is that which answers his social position (‘There's nothing in the verge of my command / That should not serve your Lordship’ (sig.E2r)), and she refuses to probe the sincerity of his behaviour for he is ‘one it becomes not me to censure’ (sig.E3r). Such respectful, dignified language matches her ideal of civil, generous behaviour and clearly she expects Bonvile will treat her respectfully in return. But he is full of ambiguous compliments. Where her language has been that of ‘plaine humilitie’, his is dark, leading her to protest ‘Ile not beleeve my Lord you meane so wantonly / As you professe’ (sigs.E2r v). In fact, he wishes simply to violate the proper boundaries of social place which her careful language acknowledges. Quite literally, he would approach her too closely:

LORD.
Come, that [word] humble was
But complement in you too.
JULIETTA.
I wood not
Be guilty of dissembling with your Lordship,
I know [no] words have more proportion
With my distance to your birth and fortune,
Then humble servant.
LORD.
I doe not love these distances.

(sig.C2r[=D2r])

Julietta's faith in the protecting system of decorum is thus rendered useless by the lord who does not recognize the constraints of that system. He is another tyrannizing courtier, expecting absolute deference from all ranks beneath him (when Julietta offers her ‘best obedience’, he says, ‘So should / All hansome women that will be good subjects’ (sig.H4v)). In a short episode after this initial seduction scene, Bonvile's page tries to rape Julietta's woman, spurred on by his master's example, Shirley implying that Bonvile's contempt for decorum causes similar disruption at all levels, and threatens the whole basis of society's order.

The plot culminates with another rebuking scene. Julietta tells Bonvile his disrespect for her dignity destroys his own dignity, and that true status is dependent on the hierarchy of virtue to which he, as much as any man, must submit:

                                        this addition
Of vertue is above all shine of State,
And will draw more admirers …
Were every petty Mannor you possesse
A Kingdome, and the bloud of many Princes
Vnited in your veynes, with these had you
A person that had more attraction
Then Poesie can furnish, love withall,
Yet I, I in such infinite distance am
As much above you in my innocence.

(sig.I1r)

Julietta's defiant assertion echoes Henry Oxinden's regard for virtue above degree (p. 166 above). In her, the town criticizes the court from a standpoint of independent, disinterested judgment, while still reserving its essential duty (‘Tis the first libertie / I ever tooke to speake my selfe’ (sig.I1r)), and desiring to see the order reformed, rather than overturned (Julietta admonishes Bonvile, ‘Live my Lord to be / Your Countries honour and support’ (sig.I1r)). On the last page, Bonvile has his place and Julietta's respect, but it is based on his answering respect for her virtue, and, one feels, for the town's.

By contrast, Trier has been rejected as a suitable husband for her. His behaviour has travestied gentility. He has degraded her before Bonvile, and by thinking her virtue needed testing, he has shown his own baseness and lost her respect (Lord Bonvile rebukes him, ‘Oh fie Franke, practice jealousie so soone, / Distrust the truth of her thou lov'st[?] suspect / Thy owne heart sooner’ (sig.I3v)). He assents to the moral and social view of the unreformed Bonvile, allowing that ‘his honour / May priviledge more sinnes’ (sig.B2v). Having degraded Julietta he degrades himself before Bonvile, using the very basest compliments:

TRIER.
If [you] knew Lady, what
Perfection of honour dwels in him,
You would be studious with all ceremony
To entertaine him! beside, to me
His Lordship's goodnes hath so flow'd, you cannot
Study, what will oblige more then in his welcome!
LORD.
Come, you Complement!

(sig.C1v)

Of course he compliments! Not only is he being insincere and putting place above worth, he is compromising the integrity of the town as Aretina had done, making it a place of courtship rather than of true judgment.

This association of insincerity with ungentility is related to the play's main antithesis between nature and chance. Trier belongs with the other characters who are only game-players, uncommitted to anything but fortune, and seeing courtship only as an amusement to be dabbled in. In the first scene, Carol's suitors approach courtship as a game in which one will defeat the others; the widow's suitor sees her as a business venture, a ‘voyage’ he makes, or a ‘bond’ to be cashed (sig.B1r). The supreme gamester, Carol, uses games to avoid commitment. Her freeness allies her with court rather than town, for it involves a tyranny of personal will:

Keepe him [a lover] still to be your servant,
Imitate me … I
Dispose my frownes, and favours like a Princesse
Deject, advance, undo, create againe
It keepes the subjects in obedience,
And teaches em to looke at me with distance.

(sig.C3v)

The play shows her learning to put aside wilfulness, relinquishing games for a serious personal relationship. The mere gamesters and complimenters are rejected and ‘nature’ is allowed to triumph. Carol describes flattery of a mistress or a lord as offensive to man's ‘natural’ dignity:

                                        You neglect
Your selves, the Nobleness of your birth and nature
By servile flattery of this jigging,
And that coy Mistresse[.] Keepe your priviledge
Your Masculine property.
FAIRFIELD.
Is there
So great a happinesse in nature!

(sig.C2r)

This speech recommends an idea of natural ‘privilege’, man's freedom to be his dignified self, and the term ‘property’ here is close to Denzil Holles's notion of ‘propriety’ (p. 171 above), meaning that which is proper to each man, his by right of possession (with all its attendant political suggestions). Similarly, in the horse-racing and betting scenes of Act IV, Bonvile attributes his success to his belief in nature, not chance (‘Won, won, I knew by instinct, / The mare would put some trick upon him’ (sig.G4v)). In the third plot, the return of the widow's husband comes as the restoration of a deeper, natural order:

Welcome to life agen, I see a providence
In this, and I obey it.

(sig.K1r)

This sense of nature taking over is clearest in the bird calls of the central scenes. Nature greets the winners with the nightingale, the losers with the cuckoo, endorsing those who have chosen a respectful, responsible mode of loving, and in whom outward status is matched by nobility of mind.

It is thus in the park itself that man's natural condition—‘the Nobleness … of birth and nature’ to which Carol refers—can be most fully realized. Hyde Park, a green world in urban London, is both country and town, nature and art. It is a cultivated nature, expressing the dual character (of town and country) of the gentry who frequent it and who are ‘cultivating’ themselves. The agents of this cultivation are ‘good manners’, also simultaneously artificial yet natural to those for whom courteous deportment reflects inner respectfulness. The park is both the natural environment of this gentry and a symbol of their values, for enshrined in the manners of this high society are the ideals of decorum and balance, social and moral distance, which Julietta brings to bear against Bonvile. In Hyde Park and high society, England's political character is harmonized, for here the court and the country are brought into a mutually respectful, mutually beneficial relationship.23

So in exploring the manners of London's developing fashionable world, Shirley's city comedies are also concerned with the moral attitudes they protect and the political adjustments they make possible; the three are inextricably mixed, and the purely social ideal of respect acts as a key to the relationships which Shirley, and the genteel audience he addresses, would see obtaining between the political entities of court and country, nobleman and gentleman. Although this reinforces the structure of the system as Shirley finds it, it leaves the gentry in the key position in that structure, for it is precisely they, with their ‘country’ sense of responsibility and place, who are most aware when ‘place’ is being exceeded and may best act as the arbiters of this hierarchy of deference. Court and country do not exist in isolation, for each term implies the other; but it is the gentry, and their developing town midway between the two, who see themselves as reconciling and balancing the various constituents of the political nation.

There is a suggestively proto-Whiggish admixture in these plays of fashionable London life which makes them ideal vehicles for expressing the outlook of a landed but discontented class. The gentry (broadly speaking) may increasingly have felt politically excluded, yet nevertheless they were well and firmly entrenched socially and in so far as they can be said to have desired revolution, it was only revolution in their favour—change taking place within careful limits, and governed by a respect for traditional and constitutional forms and principles. I have tried to show that the admiration which distinctively marks these plays for balance and ‘propriety’ in manners and politics arises from a feeling for the sacredness of ‘property’—a concern for secure enjoyment of one's liberties, protected by customary restraints from the depradations of arbitrary and irresponsible powers.24 But not only the landed interest was spoken for from the Caroline stage. The popular stages were still active and, apparently, successful, and on the more fashionable theatres they exerted an important and much underestimated influence. Alongside the comedies of manners another and more plebeian, varied and eclectic tradition of drama coexisted. Inevitably, the political sentiments to which it gave voice were far more disturbing and subversive of established values and hierarchies than the comedies of elegant society could possibly be.

Notes

  1. In my ‘Massinger's The City Madam and the Caroline audience’ [Renaissance Drama, N.S. 13 (1982), 157-87].

  2. I quote from the typescript of a forthcoming essay by L. G. Salingar, ‘“Wit” in Jacobean comedy’.

  3. Fletcher, Works (ed. A Glover and A. R. Waller, 10 vols, Cambridge, 1905-12), IX, p. 119. Although probably by Middleton, this play was published as Fletcher's in 1639 and found its way into the folio of 1647.

  4. See the prologue published with the third (1667) edition of his The School of Compliments.

  5. E.g. The Lady of Pleasure, III.ii; The Sparagus Garden, IV.x.

  6. Wycherley, The Complete Plays (ed. G. Weales, New York, 1967), p. 273.

  7. Etherege, The Dramatic Works (ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith, 2 vols, Oxford, 1927), III.i.4.

  8. Ibid, I.ii.160, IV.iv.111. Another good instance is Aphra Behn's The Rover (1677) which is set among exiled royalists on the continent (ed. F. M. Link (London, 1967), I.ii.66-7, II.ii.22, V.i.510-11). The fool is a country squire and supporter of parliament (I.ii.50-8, 293).

  9. For example, Edward Howard's The Change of Crowns (1667) often brings Habington's Queen of Aragon to mind, but operates within much narrower limits. Here political difficulties dissolve easily away before the force of true love, and the ‘change of crowns’ is much less radical than the title might suggest—the exchange takes place within a restricted and firmly royal circle, and raises none of the questions about hierarchy and authority which Habington pursued (significantly, the disguised hero's real name is Carolo). Yet this play was deemed scandalously subversive in 1667, and was prevented from reaching print.

  10. J. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Essays (ed. G. Watson, 2 vols, London, 1962), I, pp. 180-1, 252.

  11. In Dramatic Works, I.i.123, IV.i.6. Compare Brome's Crosswill, deliberately stubborn yet, in 1633, still sympathetic.

  12. See his speech of 1737 on the Licensing Bill: ‘in King Charles IId's Time … when we were out of Humour with Holland, Dryden the Laureat wrote his Play of the Cruelty of the Dutch at Amboyna. When the Affair of the Exclusion Bill was depending, he wrote his Duke of Guise. When the Court took offence at the Citizens … the Stage was employ'd to expose them as Fools, Cheats, Usurers, and to compleat their Characters, Cuckolds. The Cavaliers at that Time, who were to be flattered, tho' the worst of Characters, were always very worthy honest Gentlemen; and the Dissenters, who were to be abused, were always Scoundrels and quaint mischievous Fellows’ (The Gentleman's Magazine, 7 (1737), 410).

  13. D. Underwood, Etherege and the Seventeenth-Century Comedy of Manners (London, 1957), pp. 138-42.

  14. Gardiner, Oxinden Letters (London, 1933), p. 279.

  15. My argument here has been anticipated by G. Bas, ‘Titre, thèmes et structure dans The Lady of Pleasure de James Shirley’, Annales de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice, 34 (1978), 97-107. There is a revealing contrast with Fletcher's The Noble Gentleman (1625) which initiates a parallel debate between the thrift of the country and the wastefulness of the court which Fletcher simply does not (or cannot) resolve. In The Lady of Pleasure the Town provides Shirley with a third term midway between Court and Country in which the conflicting claims of each are harmonized into an acceptable mean.

  16. [W.J.) Jones, Politics and the Bench [London, 1971], p. 214. See also Sir John Eliot's speech on grievances, 24 March 1628 (Forster, Eliot, II, p. 125).

  17. A similar overwhelming speech in Massinger's Believe as You List (1631) actually is spoken by a courtesan (IV.ii.184-204).

  18. L. Barkan, ‘The Imperialist arts of Inigo Jones’, Renaissance Drama, N.S. 7 (1976), 257-85, passim.

  19. As well as in Massinger's The Picture (1629) and The City Madam (1632), and Brome's The Sparagus Garden (1635).

  20. Bentley, [The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (Oxford, 1941-68)], V, p. 1077.

  21. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution 1603-1688 (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 16-18; [B.H.G.] Wormald, Clarendon [: Politics, History and Religion (Cambridge, 1951], pp. 11-12, 148.

  22. There are recent discussions of Hyde Park by R. Levin, ‘The triple plot of Hyde Park’, Modern Language Review, 62 (1967), 17-27; and A. Wertheim, ‘Games and courtship in James Shirley's Hyde Park’, Anglia, 90 (1972), 71-91.

  23. The country is also brought to the city in Brome's The Sparagus Garden and Nabbes's Tottenham Court. In each there is a similar association of a (cultivated) natural setting with ‘country’ criticism of courtiers.

  24. The collocation of propriety in manners and politics (and aesthetics) is suggestively elaborated by Clarendon: ‘Whatsoever is of Civility and good Manners, all that is of Art and Beauty, or of real and solid Wealth in the World, is the … child of beloved Propriety; and they who would strangle this Issue, desire to demolish all Buildings, eradicate all Plantations, to make the Earth barren, and man-kind to live again in Tents, and nourish his Cattle where the grass grows’ (quoted in C. Hill, Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958), p. 211).

Abbreviations

Bentley, JCS: G. E. Bentley, The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (7 vols, Oxford, 1941-68)

CSPD: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series

CSPV: Calendar of State Papers, Venetian Series

DNB: Dictionary of National Biography

ELH: ELH; formerly Journal of English Literary History

HMC: Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report

TLS: Times Literary Supplement

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Deception and Social Dislocation: An Aspect of James Shirley's Drama

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