[In the following essay, Kaufman analyzes Crowne's satire of the Whigs in City Politiques.]

John Crowne's City Politiques (January, 1683) speaks to the Popish Plot-Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678-1682, and like many of the other propaganda comedies of that turbulent period, it utilizes certain of the formulae of the seventeenth-century comedy of amorous intrigue.¹ But unlike most of the rather predictable political comedies of this period, City Politiques embodies within the conventions of sex comedy a trenchant political statement. Crowne was at the time of the play a court man (who nevertheless appears to have disliked the court milieu) writing in the service of the loyalists.² But City Politiques, like Venice Preserved of the preceding year, and Lucius Junius Brutus of 1680, goes beyond historical topicality to portray with considerable imaginative vigor the motivations and nature of self-seeking men engaged in the quest for power.

In his introductory “To the Reader,” Crowne maintains that the play was intended to “suppress the enemies of our religion and government.”³ The play lampoons several actual figures and is somewhat topical,⁴ and the contemporary audience delighted in Crowne's portrayal of prominent Whiggish figures as crazed poltroons. As in Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, the Whigs are seen as self-serving hypocrites, interested in wealth and titles, whose patriotic rhetoric inadequately disguises their lust for power. Although by January, 1683, the date of production, Shaftesbury and the Whigs were all but defeated and pro-Tory feeling was running high,⁵City Politiques gained resonance from the fact that it continued to speak to the anxieties of all responsible English people.

Crowne sets his play in the Naples of 1616-1620, ruled by Spain under a viceroy.⁶ As we see in Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), Dryden and Lee's The Duke of Guise (1682), and Otway's Venice Preserved (1682), the Restoration audience was fond of settings which distance the action while still referring pointedly to contemporary English politics. In City Politiques, the Whiggish Podesta and his gang are men of no principles other than self-interest, and their real desire, despite their cant about “liberty” and such, is for wealth, honors, and land. They seize any opportunity to advance themselves, even at the expense of their allies and indeed, if necessary, of their families. In the first act, the Bricklayer, seized by the authorities, offers to compound: “A word with you, sir [to the Governor], in private. Procure me a pension, I'll come over to your party” (I. ii. 112-13). In the last act, the Podesta, tricked into believing that he is to be made Lord Treasurer, is told that he will be expected to sacrifice his fellow conspirators. The Podesta replies, “Ay, and my father too, if he were alive; he should hang 'em all” (V. iii. 11-12). This loud expression of public zeal and the simultaneous revelation of greed and ambition is seen throughout the play; it is the essence of these “city politiques.” Crowne makes us see the distance between their grasping inner selves and their amusingly transparent public masks; moreover, these politicians will visit their unnatural lack of duty and fellow-feeling on the nation when they come to power. Like the conspirators of Venice Preserved, they continually bicker among themselves, haggling egotistically over trivial points, eager for precedence, “Pretending public good,” as Dryden put it, “to serve their own” (Absalom and Achitophel, 1. 504).

To advance their individual interests, the Whigs of City Politiques are willing to defy in a militant fashion all lawful authority. In the first act, the Podesta defies the Governor, and, snubbed in his presumptuous desire to be knighted, promises civil war. The militancy of the Whigs is a continual comic motif, recalling that of Hudibras; early in the play (I. i. 174-89), Craffy gloats over the rough and tumble election of his father in which the opposition was silenced by force. Later the Bricklayer asserts the Whigs' power to overturn the state: “We have a hundred thousand men, and they are always in the right” (IV. i. 396-97). The Podesta adds, “When a canon's the preacher, who dares shut up the conventicle?” (ll. 399-400). The English audience of 1683 could respond to this representation of what was widely felt to be implicit in the Whig opposition: the anarchy of civil war which had almost become a horrifying reality.

Crowne associates the Whig conspirators with the disordered power of the London mob, whose dangerous energy lies behind the conspirators' strength. The mob was commonly associated with anarchy in the literature of the time; during the Popish Plot-Exclusion Bill crisis, both parties attempted to disassociate themselves from the mob,⁷ and Samuel Butler condenses Restoration anxiety about its dangers in his character of “A Rabble,” where the mob is called “the greatest and most savage Beast in the whole World.”⁸ It is with the crowd behind him that the Podesta can threaten that “I'll be a storm. … A whirlwind that shall rumble and roar over his head [the Viceroy's], tear open doors by day and by night, toss his friends out of their coaches and beds into jails” (I. ii. 133-34, 136-38).

Another aspect of the danger represented by the Whigs is their monomaniacal insistence on the letter, but not the spirit, of the law. The insistence, repeated in the stubborn manner of Shylock, that “what we do is according to law” (I. ii. 78), warns of a mulish legalism which in fact disguises the attempt to subvert the law. The law, in the hands of the Whigs, becomes an instrument of aggression.⁹ Moreover, it becomes a way to justify their own meanness; when asked for alms by poor prisoners in accordance with custom, the Bricklayer can once again repeat, “Is there any law for it?” (IV. i. 32). The legalism of the Whigs recalled for the original audience the power of the City under its charter, the ignoramus juries, and suggests that, despite the Whigs' call for liberty and property, no person or property would be safe under Whiggish law. Bartoline, the double-dealing lawyer, plays both sides, taking money from Whig and Tory alike, but he is continuously associated in his avarice and lack of principle with the Podesta's gang. Indeed, he is willing to appear in court against his own brother for ten pounds. Lucinda is shocked: “Will you hang your brother for ten pound. … Methinks 'tis against the law of nature” (III. 64, 68). At the conclusion of the play, the power of the Whigs is broken and the Governor's answer to the despairing Podesta suggests the mockery directed at the defeated Shylock (without, of course, any suggestion of sympathy): “Ask your law, I must do all things according to law” (V. iii. 187).

Central to Crowne's dramatic definition of the Whigs is his association of them with madness. The Whigs are “a little cracked,” as the Podesta says of his cohort, Dr. Sanchy (read Titus Oates), and what they attempt, to overthrow “a settled throne,” is mad. Crowne begins this motif in his preface, “To the Reader,” where he smilingly acknowledges the madness of “assaulting a whole powerful party,” and indeed, “Perhaps I was so when I first wrote this play. Then half the nation was mad,” and “truly when I saw so many madmen I thought it a shame for a poet not to be as mad as anyone else. … When all men's brains were a-galloping, I could not hold in mine” (pp. 5-6). In the Prologue, Crowne continues to link treason and madness. He begins by opposing madness to wit; as the fear of the plot begins to abate, wit, says Crowne, is coming back into fashion: “Good heaven be thanked, the frenzy of the nation / Begins to cure, and wit to grow in fashion” (ll. 1-2). The would-be rebels are even madder than the famous lunatic, Oliver's porter, “for he in his worst fit, / Was ne'er so mad as to talk treason yet” (ll. 14-15). The posing of treason-madness against loyalty-sanity is continued throughout the play, indeed appears as its guiding metaphor, coming to a climax near the end of the play when the Podesta and his son Craffy both believe the other unhinged: “Now,” says Craffy, “would I give ten pound to know which of us two is mad” (V. iii. 53). The Whigs, if successful in their rebellion, will visit their madness on the nation; they will produce the madness of civil war and anarchy.

Crowne is able to define sharply the nature of the Whig rebellion through another element of the play's comedy. He utilizes the conventional dramatic action of the horning of the cit, but modifies this action to define more clearly its political implications. The old, impotent Podesta and Bartoline feel that they own and have the right to rule their zestful young wives, but because of their impotence (which is gleefully emphasized in the play), the young women turn to those who can, in Florio's words, “pay [their] nightly pension well” (V. iii. 173). Florio mocks Whig principles: “Our principles are: he is not to be regarded who has a right to govern, but he who can best serve the ends of government. I can better serve the ends of your lady than you can, so I lay claim to your lady” (V. iii. 179-82). The Whigs, then, are false claimants, imposters, and the association of the women with their rightful owners is made clear through a startling, almost metaphysical conceit elsewhere. After having got rid of the inconvenient husband, Florio turns to the willing Rosaura with an image that surely evokes the return of Charles in May, 1660:

… we may securely hoist sail for the haven of love. All the mud that barred it up we have conveyed away, and I will come ashore on these white cliffs, and plant my heart there forever.
ROSAURA:
Do so, and I'll promise thee the happiness and wealth I gain by the residence of my prince shall not make me ungratefully factious. Be true to me, and I'll be most loyal to thee.

(V. ii. 199-205)

Florio, the vigorous Tory youth, whose energy recalls that of the Merry Monarch himself, asserts his rightful ownership over a Rosaura who is associated with England herself; the true ownership and authority has been affirmed. And in a similar situation elsewhere, Crowne condenses sexual double entendre into an image suggestive of the order and harmony which the Tories will maintain in England as opposed to the turbulence of the mad opposition:

ROSAURA:
Then, Nero, take thy harp into thy hand,
The tuneful strings will follow thy command.
Now equal Orpheus in thy art divine,
Make all things round thee dance with one sweet touch of thine!

(IV. i. 430-33)

A more pointed handling of the sexual comedy is seen in Craffy's incestuous attempt upon his stepmother, and here again the comic situation takes on definite political implications. The dramatic image of the danger represented by the Whigs is concentrated in this unnatural, indeed mad, rebellion against the laws of society and rightful authority. Craffy revolts against the natural authority of a father (a perennial comic situation) and this parallels the Whiggish revolt against rightful and natural authority in the civil domain.¹⁰ Craffy justifies his unnatural rebellion as he scorns marriage vows and his father's right:

… the locking of a man to a woman in marriage, or in a pew at church, are only a couple of church tricks to get money, one for the priest and t'other for the sexton; that's all.

(I. i. 265-68)

Craffy is indeed quite mad for his stepmother: “so mad for her that I am quite out 'o my wits; nay, I ha'not only lost my wits, but my stomach” (I. i. 220-21). His spurious logic throughout this passage is suggestive of Whiggish rhetorical sophistication and lack of principle. His rhetoric suggests the cynical disbelief in proper authority which is implicit in Achitophel's temptation of Absalom. Craffy's unnatural lust has a violent edge to it: “Od, I could find it in my heart to cut him!” he says of the form he takes to be his sleeping father (III. 398-99). Craffy's rebellion climaxes in an absurd brawl with his father, indicative not only of the ludicrous nature of the Whig rebellion, but of what was seen as its unnatural quality. The element of perversity in Craffy's incestuous attempt finds an analogue in old Antonio of Venice Preserved, whose sexual actions have political implications.

In City Politiques, then, we see two levels of politics: the Whigs misappropriate their energies and, instead of maintaining their rightful functions in society, play at civil politics. The cunning Tories, Florio and Artall, play at sexual politics, with definite and familiar civil overtones. This coalescence of two politics, civil and sexual, is established at once when Florio asks his servant for news:

What news, Pietro? Has the worthy citizen whom I have elected to be my cuckold attained the other dignity of Podesta of Naples yet? … for when he is chief magistrate of Naples, I shall be———of his wife, dispatch his domestic affairs, and receive all the fees of that sweet office.

(I. i. 3-5; 9-11)

This witty combining of two kinds of politics is carried on until the end of the play. City Politiques ends with the Governor/King triumphant. Just law is upheld and asserted as the Whiggish attempts to pervert the laws fail, thus recalling David's concluding speech in Absalom and Achitophel: “Law they [the rebels] require, let Law then shew her face” (l. 1006).

City Politiques is surely a political play, but Crowne generates through the figure of Craffy a complementary theme: the Whigs as men of letters represent a debasement of literature, first in their subservience to false political goals, making of literature mere propaganda (that the Tories too do this, Crowne of course ignores), and finally in the intrinsic dullness of the Whig poets themselves. As Dryden's Mac Flecknoe suggests, the association of bad art and Whiggism was recognized—at least by Tory partisans, who preferred to disregard such artists as Shadwell and the political achievement of John Locke. A glance at Azariah and Hushai and The Medal Reversed reveals that Crowne was correct in making Craffy represent the artist as political hack (what we would today call a party's “media man.”) The Whigs not only represent, then, a clear and present political danger to the state, but, as suggested by Craffy's seditious and execrable poetry, they embody that cultural debasement which Dryden defines perfectly in several works, most clearly, I think, in Mac Flecknoe and “To … Mr. Congreve.” In City Politiques, Crowne opposes sanity-loyalty-true wit to its Whiggish opposite: madness-treason-false wit.

This theme of the corruption of poetry in the service of a debased political offensive is begun in the Prologue to City Politiques:

But some will say, a poet mend the age!
In these high matters how dare they engage?
Why, sirs, a poet's reformation scorn,
Since the reformers now all poets turn?
And by their awkward, jangling rhymes proclaim,
Like bells rung backward, that the town's on flame.
The City Whigs such cursed poets choose,
For that alone they should their charter lose.

(ll. 28-35)

Thus the Whigs represent a threat to the commonwealth of civil responsibility and social order and also to the commonwealth of letters. They threaten the inheritance of wit that Dryden defined indelibly in Mac Flecknoe, representing, as they do, the line of dullness stretching from Heywood and Shirley to the True-Blue Protestant Poet, Shadwell.

Crowne deftly draws a connection between Craffy's bad poetry and Whig madness; the wretched poetry is a symptom of the underlying malaise. “Great wits are sure to madness near allied,” observed Dryden in Absalom and Achitophel, and Crowne humorously echoes this in regard to Craffy: “great wits are humorsome,” notes Rosaura of her benighted stepson (II. i. 177). This Whig poet is seen as continually abstracted, not in Parnassian thought, but in lustful observation and fantasies concerning Rosaura. In IV. i., the Podesta actually despairs of his son's sanity:

Here he is, powdered, a feather in's cap, and catechizing his face in a glass; but it does not make him one wise answer. The boy is spoiled.
CRAFFY:
Ay, this will do, this will do. Nature writ no good hand when she penned me, because she wrote after a damned copy, the fool my father; but this will mend some letters. This will take my mother.
PODESTA:
Craffy!
CRAFFY:
Drunkenness, like a hog in a garden, rooted up my flowers, but now the tulips in my face begin to lift up their heads.

(ll. 148-57)

Craffy often employs a bizarre, idiosyncratic idiom which reveals his private, self-absorbed, and anti-social nature. His odd speech is seen as a form of inappropriate self-assertion, and characteristic of the Whigs more generally. Bernard Schilling has noted the Restoration's fear of inappropriate wit, the obscure and yet dangerous appeal to the emotions.¹¹ Artall, playing the part of a Whiggish convert, makes sure to lard his speech with the odd cant of puritanism, with its self-consciously bizarre use of metaphor:

I have embezzled all the furniture of my soul and body in vice; though heaven gave me an excellent housekeeper to look to it all, a careful, wakeful creature called a conscience, which never slept, never let me sleep in ill, but I abused her, sought to turn her out of doors, nay, murder her, but could not.

(II. i. 493-98)

Such zealots are suspect; they manifest the mindless enthusiasm which leads to public disorder.

Although a Whig and a fool, Craffy often becomes choric: he points out the true nature and motivation of his fellow Whigs, men for whom he has contempt.¹² He is a necessary vehicle for Crowne's satire, since as we read we become aware that despite Crowne's firm royalism, City Politiques is by no means a single-minded or politically simple play. That Craffy is both object and agent of satire suggests an element of conscious ambiguity, although the ambiguity is not in City Politiques as rich or as fascinating as in Venice Preserved. What is striking, and I believe quite overlooked in the play, is the equivocal nature of the two wits, Florio and Artall. It has been universally assumed, I believe, that Crowne, a royalist patronized by the king, was single-mindedly Tory in his drama. In fact, the Englishmen who became known by the derisive name of “Tory” differed in their perceptions of political realities.¹³ Like many Tories, Crowne was loyal to the king but deeply suspicious, indeed vehement, in his hatred of Roman Catholics.¹⁴ His relations with the court were cool; Crowne, Dennis tells us, preferred to keep his distance from Whitehall.¹⁵ Unlike his near contemporaries, Etherege and Wycherley, Crowne did not, it seems, identify with the coterie of wits surrounding the Merry Monarch and indeed his relationship with Rochester, his onetime patron, appears to have been uneasy.¹⁶

Crowne's distrust of the court as embodied in the likes of Rochester is expressed in the figures of Florio and Artall. Although they embody audacious wit and perform the necessary political ritual of “horning the cit,” they are nonetheless ambiguous and finally inadequate characters who represent for Crowne a sense of debasement. There is no class alliance or bond of caste between Florio and Artall, no friendship, but instead mutual distrust, dislike, and double-dealing competition. They bicker upon their first meeting; they are members of a Hobbesean world, at war not only with the city-dotards, but with each other. (See, for example, their initial encounter, I. i. 78-162.) And what they say of themselves is often self-revealing and self-indicting:

ARTALL:
I have not only debauched women but the whole age, poisoned all its morals, murdered thousands o' young consciences, sung others asleep, pumped others with drunkeness; sin I honored and privileged as a peer to the devil, Heaven I affronted, libeled His court, and in my drunken altitudes have endeavored to scour the whole creation of souls and spirits. Now is it fit I should be saved?

(IV. ii. 18-24)

Granted, Artall is masking; the choice of mask, however, and the repetition of similar sentiments by Florio¹⁷ are deliberately suggestive. It is significant that both Florio and Artall pose as sick men. We may be reminded of the metaphorical suggestions of this mask in two plays which offer distinct analogues: Volpone and The Country Wife.¹⁸ And indeed the comic puritan cant both rakes use, with its continual language of death, damnation, and salvation, sets up (without compromising the comic effectiveness of the play) meaningful reverberations.

Florio is especially ambiguous. Although it has been suggested that he represents Shaftesbury or Buckingham, or is a “composite of all the noble Whig leaders,” I would suggest that Crowne is offering, as does Etherege in The Man of Mode, a portrait of that embodiment of one aspect of the age: Rochester.¹⁹ Florio joins, as did Rochester, glamor, disturbingly audacious mischief, and hints of self-destructiveness. He speaks of having parted with his “witty lewd friends” (perhaps a reference to the “merry gang” at court) in order to pose as a Whig, an imposture that could cost him “the reputation of … loyalty” (I. i. 23, 26). Rochester, of course, associated with Whiggish leaders toward the end of his life. Florio is called by the Podesta “a very witty man, and a wicked man too once, but now the most penitent creature in the world” (II. i. 448-49), seemingly a reference to Rochester's belated repentance.²⁰ Crowne seems to disassociate Florio quite deliberately from any hint that he might represent Shaftesbury by having Florio sneer that he would not court “popularity” “were she fairer than the most doting old statesman thinks her” (I. i. 57-58), a clear reference to Shaftesbury. Florio recalls that he was formerly “one of those they call the wits of the kingdom” (II. i. 223), that he “was king of libertines” (III. 353-54), and that he was fond of “a little success in a jest, or a song, or libel” (III. 270-71). This last trait may allude to the Rochester who had satirized Crowne after having served as his patron.²¹

Florio is ironic about his mask of piety: “I am in a world very different from that I used to live in. I talk godly, a strange language to me, Pietro; I pray, hear sermons, live soberly, abstain from wine, women, and wits, a strange life to me” (I. i. 32-36). And yet his amusement, I think, suggests his inadequacy; the passage evokes the corruption, the debasement, of what Florio is. Crowne is surely not contemptuous of the ideals evoked (and by Florio dismissed) in this passage. Anne Righter has noted the similar ambiguity of Rochester: in one aspect, the incarnation of charm, wit, and energy, and yet at last, self-loathing, misanthropic, a man in conflict.²²

But finally, whether or not Florio is intended to represent Rochester, what he is is subtly questioned by Crowne. The playwright has presented the Whigs as a threat to the nation and yet has delicately hinted that the alternative too is absurd, corrupt, and dangerous. This ability to laugh at both Whig and Tory is seen in his next play, Sir Courtly Nice, where the Tory, Hothead, is contrasted to the Presbyterian, Testimony. It is true, as one commentator has suggested, that Crowne's sympathies seem to lie with Hothead,²³ but both are ridiculed. Critics have noted the tendency of the comedy of the later seventeenth century to laugh at deviation from the norm and, at the same time, to suggest the inadequacy of the norm itself.²⁴ In his portrayal of Whig and Tory in City Politiques, Crowne seems to be doing just this. The play's political statement, despite the suggestive ambiguity of Florio and Artall, is clear: the Whigs are dangerous; the King's authority is valid and necessary. Crowne's political loyalty, ultimately, is to public order guaranteed by observance of rightful authority. His comedy is a satire, indeed at times a lampoon. Yet finally it gains force not merely as an exposé, but as an assertion of correct and necessary public attitudes. What the Whigs are is seen clearly. But the play also evokes those qualities of public life that permit social, indeed national, unity. The success of City Politiques (Crowne speaks in “To the Reader” of “flourishing the colors after victory”) suggests that after the defeat of Shaftesbury and “the plot,” the “sober part of Israel” was able to acknowledge the validity of the play's call for stability through public order.

Notes

1. D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681) and The Royalist (1682), Behn's The Round-Heads (1682) and The City Heiress (1682), and Ravenscroft's The London Cuckolds (1681), are but a few.

2. John Dennis, “To Mr. *** In which are some Passages of the Life of Mr. John Crown, Author of Sir Courtly Nice,” in The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1943), II, 405.

3. City Politiques, ed. John Harold Wilson (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 7. All references to City Politiques are from this edition.

4. Dr. Sanchy and “the Catholic Bricklayer” represent Titus Oates and Stephen College. The Podesta may represent Shaftesbury, a constant target of satire in the drama of the period, but, as Arthur F. White points out, “only in a general way” (John Crowne, His Life and Dramatic Works [Cleveland: Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1922], p. 130). Craffy may then suggest Shaftesbury's son, notoriously dense, or perhaps, in his role as propagandist, the Whig poets generally. Wilson (p. xvii) notes that “it is possible that Crowne intended Craffy … to represent Samuel Pordage, who is usually credited with the two poems supposedly written by Craffy in the course of the play: Azariah and Hushai and The Medal Reversed, both published anonymously.” Bartoline has been much discussed and various contemporary figures have been suggested as candidates: Sir John Maynard, Aaron Smith, Sir William Jones, among others. See White, pp. 131-33; Wilson, pp. xiii-xv; and Michael De L. Landon, Theatre Notebook, 31, No. 2 (1977), 38. No doubt Wilson is correct in taking Crowne at his word when Crowne insists that he has “drawn the general corruption of lawyers” (“To the Reader,” p. 4). Florio may, as Wilson argues, represent Shaftesbury or Buckingham or present “a composite of all the noble Whig leaders” (pp. xvi-xvii). I will offer below a different and, I think, a more thematically functional identification. Artall does not represent one contemporary figure, but is, as Wilson suggests, “a typical ‘debauch,’ a young courtier on the prowl for a willing wench” (p. xvii).

5. David Ogg, England in the Reign of Charles II, 2nd ed. (1956; rpt. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 652. Ogg describes the ideological differences between the parties at the time of the Popish Plot-Exclusion Bill crisis, pp. 559-656. The response of the London theaters to the crisis is described by George W. Whiting in two articles: “The Condition of the London Theaters, 1679-83: A Reflection of the Political Situation,” MP, 25 (1927), 195-206, and “Political Satire in London Stage Plays, 1680-83,” MP, 28 (1930), 29-43.

6. Wilson, p. xii.

7. Bernard N. Schilling, Dryden and the Conservative Myth (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), p. 170.

8. Characters, ed. Charles W. Daves (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve Univ. Press, 1970), p. 197.

9. In his portrait of “A Leader of a Faction” (p. 190), Butler sneers: “He is very superstitious of having the Formalities and Punctilios of Law held sacred, that, while they are performing, those, that would destroy the very Being of it, may have Time to do their Business, or escape.” Susan Staves notes “the use of law as a political weapon” in City Politiques; see Players' Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1979), p. 235.

10. Staves points out, p. 135, the analogy in several Restoration comedies, including City Politiques, between “rebellious domestic inferiors and Whigs.”

11. Schilling, pp. 50-65.

12. That Craffy sees the hypocrisy of his father and the Whigs and is used to satirize them is noted by Staves, p. 239, who adds: “we do not entirely despise him.”

13. Ogg, p. 612.

14. Crowne's anti-Catholicism is seen throughout his career, most notably, perhaps, in The English Friar, or, The Town Sparks.

15. Dennis, II, 405.

16. White, p. 36.

17. II. i. 233-41; III. 270-75.

18. White notes the analogy with both plays, pp. 136-37.

19. David M. Vieth offers the suggestive observation that Rochester may be thought to embody qualities seen in the Whig leaders themselves: “In an age when the English aristocracy was still politically, socially, and culturally supreme, Rochester was socially and culturally potent. The erratic brilliance of a Shaftesbury or a Buckingham shone also in him.” The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. xvii.

20. Wilson quotes from Burnet's account of Rochester's repentance to suggest a link between Artall and Rochester. When in the text (IV. ii. 18) Artall whines “I have not only debauched women but the whole age,” Wilson cites Burnet: Lord Rochester “considered he had not only neglected and dishonoured, but had openly defied his Maker, and had drawn many others into the like Impieties.” See Gilbert Burnet, Some Passages of the Life and Death of … John Earl of Rochester (London, 1680), p. 129. The reference to Rochester is certainly present, but of course Artall is here pretending to be Florio. The linkage, I believe, is between Rochester and his fictional representative: Florio.

21. See Rochester's “An Allusion to Horace, the Tenth Satyr of the First Book” and “Timon.” David M. Vieth, however, suggests that Crowne “may have remained clandestinely amicable with the Earl even though he receives unfavorable notice in ‘An Allusion.’” Complete Poems of … Rochester, p. xxx. Unfortunately for Crowne, at least some of his contemporaries saw the link between Florio and the late Rochester and that Florio's canting repentance (echoed by Artall) was the object of Crowne's satire: “Mr Crowne [was cudgled on Wednesday last in St Martin's Lane and] hee that beat him said hee did it at the suite of the Earle of Rochester some time since deceased who was greatly abused in the play for his penetency &c.” The London Stage, 1660-1800, Part I, 1660-1700, ed. William Van Lennep, Emmett L. Avery, and Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), p. 318.

22. “William Wycherley,” in Restoration Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), pp. 86-87.

23. White, p. 58.

24. See, for example, Norman Suckling, “Molière and English Restoration Comedy,” in Brown and Harris above, p. 96.