SOURCE: Backscheider, Paula R. Introduction to The Plays of Samuel Foote, Volume I, edited by Paula R. Backscheider and Douglas Howard, pp. vii-xxii. New York: Garland Publishing, 1983.

[In the following essay, Backscheider explores Foote's works as instruments of satire with which to expose corruption and hypocrisy in British society.]

Samuel Foote's plays prove that the Age of Satire did not die with Alexander Pope in 1744. Foote's early plays mocked the acting styles of the Covent Garden and Drury Lane company members and the idiosyncrasies of the best-known citizens of London. When he began to write full-length comedies, he ridiculed his countrymen's fads and affectations and lashed the cheats and opportunists who used English laws and institutions for their own gain. Were his work more literary, he would be recognized as belonging firmly in the tradition of Pope and Fielding. He, like they, selected a widespread vice, concentrated upon it, introduced memorable (and often living) practitioners of it into the work, dealt out harsh punishments, and drew vitality from caustic humor, topicality, and unity. The subject matter and Foote's animus obviously came from the playwright's engagement with his society, and combined amusement and outrage are as present in his plays as Pope's are in his poetry.

Foote seems to have been destined to write satiric comedy. As a child, he was a superb parodist and mimic and as a youth a wit distinguished by quick insight and a slashing tongue.¹ His elaborate practical jokes when he was a student at Oxford testify to his taste for the ludicrous and his enjoyment of the incongruous. When he arrived in London to be immediately introduced at a private club as “the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung in chains for the murder of his brother”² and to become one of the badgered students of the peevish, opinionated Macklin, he must have needed his acerbic tongue to defend himself.

Besides, Foote began his dramatic career at the Haymarket Theatre in the aftermath of the Licensing Act. The Haymarket still had a reputation for staging unconventional satiric comedies, particularly those that burlesqued the manners and morals of the time. The first great success at the Haymarket had been Samuel Johnson of Cheshire's burlesque Hurlothrumbo (1729), which ran thirty-two nights even though it lacked any of the customary aids to success in the eighteenth century such as a well-known player or an established author. In the following year, Henry Fielding's Tom Thumb and The Author's Farce were hits,³ and, in 1731, his Coffee House Politician put well-known people on stage. These plays shared the topical satire, loose plots, and burlesque of dramatic conventions of Johnson's play.

The Haymarket had traditionally been a proving ground for the rebellious and experimental. Johnson, a former dancing master best known for witty dinner conversation before the production of his play, would never have received a hearing from the patent house managers. Fielding had had modest success with two traditional comedies (Love in Several Masques, Drury Lane, 1728, four performances; The Temple Beau, Goodman's Fields, 1730, thirteen performances), but the patent theatres were uninterested in his work and the Lord Chamberlain closed Goodman's Fields. Certainly without the direct confrontations with booksellers and the Drury Lane management, Fielding could not have produced the devastatingly comic portraits of Bookweight and Marplay. After Fielding moved to the patent house Drury Lane in 1731, Theophilus Cibber led his rebellious company to the Haymarket, where they made The Fall of Mortimer (a satire of court favorites) and Love Runs All Dangers (an attack on Walpole and the Excise Act) hits. Cibber's “mutiny” forced Highmore to sell out of Drury Lane, and Cibber and his troupe returned to the patent theatre early in 1734. Fielding, in the wake of the failure of several traditional comedies at Drury Lane and a brief retirement in East Stour, returned to the Haymarket as manager in 1735, and his Pasquin ran fifty nights. The Haymarket's tradition for explicit political satire mounted by playwrights seeking a proving ground for their talents was soon firmly established. Within two years of Fielding's successful return, the Licensing Act closed the Haymarket (and some thirty other theatres), and playwrights and would-be managers soon discovered that summer theatre, operas, ballets, concerts, and puppet shows alone would be tolerated outside the patent theaters.⁴

In the following years, the managers of the Covent Garden and Drury Lane theatres came to be more repressive than the Lord Chamberlain, rigidly controlling access to the stage and holding actors and playwrights in their power. The managers felt little pressure to pay good wages or perform new plays when they held the reliable treasures (and leftover costumes and scenery) of England's theatrical past. The Haymarket remained closed most of the time until 1744, when Garrick and Macklin petitioned to use the theatre during their strike against Fleetwood. The petition was denied, but Macklin, now angry at what he considered Garrick's betrayal, opened anyway with a company of amateurs, including Foote, performing what he called “concerts.” When Macklin went back to Drury Lane, Theophilus Cibber and his crew moved into the Haymarket, and when he was evicted by an order from the Lord Chamberlain, another rebel, his sister Charlotte Charke, became the first woman manager.

Charke went bankrupt, and Foote became the manager of the playhouse that Fielding described as “a Place called and known by the Name of the Scandal-Shop.”⁵ When Foote advertised a concert, Diversions of the Morning, and a selection from Congreve's Old Bachelour to be performed at the Haymarket at noon on 22 April 1747, his audience would have been prepared for the unconventional nature of the program and its manager.⁶ He continued the tradition of satire while emphasizing his differences with the patent theatres by putting caricatures of the best-known members of both companies on stage. Every time Foote mocked Garrick's death scenes he brought down the house, and when he mimicked the nasal squeak of the stunningly beautiful Peg Woffington and cast her as a playhouse orange woman, he shocked the audience as he exposed the actress's clay feet. At the Haymarket, Foote developed the distinctive acting style that would assure his lifelong popularity. His energy, mugging, obvious delight in being in the spotlight, and attention to the audience transformed mimicry into art. He became a master at improvisation and the insertion of hilarious, biting topical lines.

Foote may have inclined to satire because of his appearance, his experiences as a youth, and his association with the Haymarket, but he also seems to have believed firmly in the type of satiric comedy he wrote. The dramatic prologue to The Minor explains the same satiric principles as Pope's Epistle to Arbuthnot and Fielding's preface to Joseph Andrews. In it, Foote insists that the proper objects of laughter are “whoever affects to be what he is not, or strives to be what he cannot” (p. 7) and offers “those itinerant field orators, who tho' at declar'd enmity with common sense, have the address to poison the principles, and, at the same time, pick the pockets, of half our industrious fellow subjects” (p. 8). The characters Foote and Canker go on to hope that ridicule may be the antidote for their poison and, at least, may prevent others from being infected. In A Letter from Mr. Foote, Foote defends The Minor and his art in more detail. He defines comedy as

an exact Representation of the peculiar Manners of that People, among whom it happens to be performed; a faithful Imitation of singular Absurdities, particular Follies, which are openly produced, as Criminals are publickly punished, for the Correction of Individuals, and as an Example to the whole Community.⁷

Here he puts satire in a broad framework by insisting that it is a picture of his society that goes beyond holding up a mirror to singling out the most dangerous or ludicrous for ridicule in order to warn the society as a group. Moreover, he reminds the reader that ad hominem satire is not new to the stage and that Shakespeare and Molière were among the playwrights who satirized actual people.⁸ He cites Dryden and Pope as models and illustrates the principles in his own plays:

… if Men, with these Infirmities, will attempt Things which those very Infirmities have rendered them incapable of properly executing, it is their own Fault, if the Source that should acquire them Compassion, degenerates into a Fountain of Ridicule. My Lord Lanesborough's Gout would have hardly found a Place in Mr. Pope's Page, if it had not hobbled a Minuet at Court; nor should Mr. Squintum have shown the Whites of his Eyes at the Haymarket, if he had confined his Circumspection to the Tap-Room of the Bell at Gloucester. …

[pp. 14-15]

Although Foote does not mention Fielding, the imagery of bills of fare, ragouts, and desserts is that of Book I, i, of Tom Jones (1749).⁹ Like Fielding, Foote insists that affectation is the true comic object, and his argument that Mrs. Cole is an appropriate satiric object might have been written by the greater man:

The plain Points to be determined are these, Is there such a character in Nature as Mrs. Cole? That granted, is that Character a proper Object for the Stage? Why, if a Detection of the most consummate Hypocrisy, and guarding the most Innocent and unsuspecting Part of the Creation, from the Crafts and Subtleties of the most Artful and Designing, be of Use to Society, no Object so proper. …¹⁰

One of Foote's critics, Charles Dibdin, complained that Foote made the stage a “court of inquiry,” and Foote himself compares the individuals he “corrects” to “Criminals” “publickly punished.” Mrs. Cole, and those satiric objects like her, deserve their public trials and humiliations because they, like thieves, prey upon unsuspecting citizens.

All of Foote's plays, regardless of type, rely upon the most remarkable aspect of his art: his special relationship to the audience. More stand-up comedian than playwright and more outrageous than talented, Foote depended upon mimicry, topical observations, and personal contact with the audience throughout his career. The early “entertainments” used a loose framework to bring notable people and particularly rival players upon the stage, where Foote seized upon whatever distinctive characteristics and mannerisms they had. The Haymarket filled with those eager to see the prominent cut down to size and those who dreaded (or hoped) they might be Foote's next “picture.”¹¹ Disfigurements, infirmities, accents, and habitual mannerisms were not spared. During this strange apprenticeship, Foote learned to present a delightful, memorable character with a few gestures and a line or two of dialogue. He learned the rewards of the sharp observation about fashions, men, and events being discussed on the streets outside the theatre, and he saw his talent for the apt and caustic bon mot rewarded in the Haymarket just as it was at the dinner parties he enlivened. In his endless search for new subjects, he must have been struck by the recurrent nature of certain follies and character types. Although common affectations presented the danger of repetitious “Diversions,” they offered subjects for the traditional comedies he wrote later.

Between 1752 and 1762, Foote wrote plays for both patent theatres. Drury Lane produced Taste (revised from the Haymarket production), The Author, and Tragedy à-la-Mode, and Covent Garden The Englishman in Paris, The Englishman Return'd from Paris, and The Lyar. Tragedy à-la-Mode and Act I of Taste were often performed as the afterpiece for the Drury Lane production of Romeo and Juliet. In the tradition of Fielding's Author's Farce, Tragedy of Tragedies, and Pasquin, Tragedy satirizes the formulaic structure of tragedies as much as it attacks Fielding's targets: language and conventional situations and techniques. Foote gives his author the name of Fielding's hero in Pasquin; Fustian is delighted that Manly, “the ablest critic,” and Townly, “the most fashionable man,” will judge his puppet show, “Love till Death.” Foote has dispensed with all but the essential characters—a hero, a king, a confidant, and a princess—and has compressed the obligatory action to the point that Fustian can say such things as

… the first scene of a tragedy is, from the banging of doors, the rustling of silks, and the mediocrity of the performers, seldom attended to, and contains indeed little more than a map of the country where the poetical magic has conveyed us, with an account of the King and Queen, and the rest of the house. …¹²

The play has stock poetic language (“starry host”), a dark grove, and a moral given in the epilogue by the deceased hero (let daughters marry whom they choose). Foote's play is far shorter and less developed than Fielding's play, but its humor is as good. He does not try to combine literary with political satire and, therefore, gains comic unity even as he loses profundity. The length emphasizes the formulaic nature and barrenness of plot more pointedly than the plays within plays in The Author's Farce and Pasquin. A good part of the fun comes from Fustian's easy relationship with Manly and Townly, the representative audience. Foote cheerfully admits what his audience wants, gives it to them, and shares in their delight when he produces it.

The special relationship Foote developed with his audience in his early career laid the foundation for his success at the Haymarket when he moved there after 1762 and for his triumph over the personal and public disasters of those years. Many of Foote's characteristics are peculiar ones for a successful actor. Thomas Davies, among others, notes that “Foote was a most despicable player in all parts but those which he wrote for himself.”¹³ Players in Dublin, Edinburgh, and London complained that he tried to engross all of the audiences' applause and attention.¹⁴ He was coarse, overweight, and foppish. Nevertheless, Foote had presence, and even in his last performance being on stage inspired him.¹⁵ Genest's description of his 1776 performance of one of his perennial parts, Bayes, catches Foote's inimitable method:

his performance in this part was an odd mixture of his own dialogue and that of the original piece, which he contrived to make coalesce as well as he could—his fancy was so exuberant, his conceptions so ready, and his thoughts so brilliant, that he kept the audience in continual laughter—public transactions, the flying follies of the day, debates in grave assemblies, absurdities of play-writers, politicians and players, all came under his cognizance and all felt the force of his wit. …¹⁶

Foote believed in the fun a theatrical performance could be. The Orators begins with a conversation between two characters in a side box who stop Foote to ask about the evening's program; they tell him they've come “To be jolly, and laugh” at Foote and his “frolicks and fancies.” Foote answers, “If that is all you desire; why, perhaps we shan't disappoint you” (p. 5). Even as he “acted” a part, Foote commented upon London life and his audience and mediated between the stage and the audience.

While at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, Foote began playing the parts of unsympathetic characters in the more conventional comedies he wrote. In these plays, he combined topical satire with the formulaic, sentimental plot structures so common after Steele's Conscious Lovers and Cumberland's West Indian. The Englishman in Paris, for example, ridicules the fashion of sending young men to Paris to complete their educations within a plot that features an orphan, Lucinda, left to be reared by a rapacious and tricky couple; she is rescued by the rake's father, who is struck by her virtue and insists she cannot marry Buck unless he reforms. Foote played the part of Buck and managed to animate the character even as he manipulated the audience's response. Because he had established himself as a satiric parodist, he kept himself before the audience even as he acted his part. He was Buck and a parody of Buck.

When Foote brought The Minor from Dublin to the Haymarket and then on to Drury Lane in 1760, the audience was prepared for him to play Mrs. Cole, the sanctimonious Methodist hypocrite. He had been a hit as a parade of prominent women and as Lady Pentweazle in Taste and was ready to play the rheumatic woman who uttered platitudes such as “a good name is better than a gallipot of ointment” while spouting Methodist clichés: “had not the good gentleman piloted me into the harbour of grace, I must have … been quite swallow'd up in the whirlpool of despair” (p. 44).¹⁷ Again, Foote was himself first even in woman's clothes—he was the delightful satirist who put the vicious and foolish on the scaffold and used the satiric strategy of having the culprit condemn himself out of his own mouth.

The Minor, often praised as Foote's best comedy, was a lasting success¹⁸ and demonstrated that the Haymarket could support Foote's career. After the 1761-62 season, the Haymarket became Foote's theatre. Largely because of the Licensing Act, he returned to his earlier forms of drama; The Orators caricatures the forms of oratory represented by Thomas Sheridan's lectures, by a Scot, a Methodist, lawyers, and a debating society among others, and The Trial of Samuel Foote turns George Faulkner's suit against Foote into a satire of legal arguments and of Faulkner himself.¹⁹

The Minor, however, points to the comedies to come. The combination of the most casual establishment of a typical Georgian comic plot with its predictable character types and topical satire often highly dependent upon a superb humours character is the strategy Foote uses in all of his best Haymarket comedies. It is easy to forget that Lucy is saved at the end of The Minor but hard to forget Mrs. Cole. The formulae of tyrannical guardians, courtship triangles, apparently unsuited lovers, and dreary, acrimonious marriages provide the vehicles for Foote's satires of the peacetime army, loopholes in the bankruptcy laws, antiquaries, and medical quacks and the impetus for the creation of such characters as Solomon Flint, Matthew Mite, the Simonys, and Viper.

These Haymarket plays with their sketchy “sentimental drama” plots and memorable satiric portraits testify to Foote's mastery of technique and understanding of the mood of his audience. Two of these plays, The Commissary and The Nabob, are fully representative. Both have the theme that Foote returned to throughout his life: that of those who obtain wealth by less than honorable means and then attempt to use that wealth to gain power over others. Zachary Fungus, the Commissary, represents the group of army and civil officials who acquired a personal fortune during the time the land-tax paying gentry were supporting the war and becoming impoverished; the nabob, Matthew Mite, has made his fortune in India and intends to use it to buy enough votes to win a seat in Parliament and to force Sir John Oldham to marry his daughter to him. The men are ridiculous in their adoption of fashion and their pretensions based on the conceited assumption that wealth gives them privilege and influence. However, they are dangerous in the damage they do to private families and society at large. Foote pits them against solid, old-fashioned English virtues surviving tenaciously in a society threatening to forget them. Fungus and Mite have the chance to succeed because most of the other characters are either corruptible or morally insensible. Inseparable from Fungus's and Mite's absurd belief that they are entitled to whatever they want is their willingness to use the most obvious and manipulative tactics to win. The laughter Foote directs at them is both cathartic and nervous; they are ridiculous, but serious efforts by strong characters are necessary to defeat them. Here Foote caters to the English resentment at the people who managed to get rich because of England's wars while solid citizens stayed at home; Thomas Oldham, the merchant who defeats Mite, ends The Nabob with this sentiment: “… however praiseworthy the spirit of adventure may be, whoever keeps his post, and does his duty at home, will be found to render his country best service at last!” (p. 71).

Joshua Reynolds believed “by Foote's buffoonery and broad-faced merriment, private friendship, public decency, and everything estimable among men were trod under foot,” and Percy Fitzgerald generalized, “Of his abilities there can be no question; but there can be little doubt that, as a member of society, he was a wretch, a cruel, heartless fellow, and a nuisance.”²⁰ In spite of such opinions, Foote's audiences loved him and showed it in moving ways. In 1750, they rioted when Wilkinson mimicked him on the stage. They came in large numbers for most of his productions despite the inconvenient location of the Haymarket and the heat of summer. When he came back after the amputation of his leg in 1767 with Occasional Prologue and the patent for the Haymarket in hand, the audience called for the piece repeatedly throughout the summer and often interrupted other plays (even Romeo and Juliet) to demand it. In the next season, his Devil Upon Two Sticks ran for fifty performances and earned him unusual royalties of between three thousand and four thousand pounds. The play closes with the Devil taking the young lovers to Foote's theatre to audition, and he encourages them by saying, “you have nothing to fear: The public will treat you with kindness; at least, if they shew but half the indulgence to you, that they have upon all occasions shewn to that Manager” (p. 69). Dibdin complains that “Any other author would have had his Theatre pulled down for the imposition [of Piety in Pattens].”²¹ During his scandalous, libellous trial for sodomy, the audience applauded Foote so enthusiastically that he burst into tears and had to leave the stage.²²

Furthermore, Foote's contemporaries concluded that he was one of the major talents of his generation. Uniformly cited for his excellence in character creation and dialogue, Foote never forgot the lessons he had learned from the Haymarket's self-conscious awareness of traditional plot structures and formula plays. He could use these structures to support his themes and parts, and he could make them the point, the object, of his satire. Foote often complained that the theatre had come to put maudlin sentiment and bad novels on the stage, and he ridiculed the trend throughout his career. As early as The Englishman in Paris, he had simplified and stylized the plots of sentimental drama to the point of absurdity, and he often concluded his plays with antisentimental events; Buck, for example, never reforms, and the appropriate punishment for the runaway ingenue in A Trip to Calais is that she becomes the companion to Lady Kitty Crocodile. One of the characters in The Devil Upon Two Sticks grumbles, “[the Genius of Insipidity] has entered into partnership with the managers of both houses, and they have set up a kind of circulating library, for the vending of dialogue novels” (p. 68). The little afterpiece Piety in Pattens burlesques Pamela as it was transmitted to the stage in Bickerstaffe's very popular The Maid of the Mill; although eighteenth-century audiences resented this attack on two of their favorites, the modern reader finds the satire of the sentiments and unrealistic psychology of the characters almost as amusing as Shamela.

Because Foote relied so heavily on asides, dated observations, and mimicry, it is hard to make a just assessment of his plays today. He constructed them loosely enough to allow his flights of creativity and ridicule and to permit changing sections of the plays to add satiric interpolations or substitutions of more timely exchanges. Evidence suggests that for every recorded line such as “he is as thin as a slice of beef at Marybone-Gardens” (Nabob, p. 21), at least a half a dozen more have been lost. Many players were requested to perform particularly popular prologues and epilogues, but Foote's repertoire included extended scenes that his fans demanded. Gibbon himself said, “When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away the Evening at Foote's Theatre,” and George Colman wrote, “Yet there is no Shakspeare [sic] or Roscius upon record who, like Foote, supported a theatre for a series of ten years by his own acting, in his own writings, and for ten years of the time upon a wooden leg!” Foote was part of an impressive group of playwright-actors that included Garrick, Colman the Elder, Macklin, and Murphy—no inconsequential lot in the history of theatre. He was without question the most successful evader of the Licensing Act and an important part of the tradition of satiric comedy. His contemporaries and heirs borrowed from his plays, and knowledge of his plays allows fuller interpretations of the auction scene in Sheridan's School for Scandal and of his satire of dramatic conventions in The Critic. As a bridge between Fielding and Sheridan and as an innovator, Foote's place in dramatic history is assured.

Notes

1. The biographies of Samuel Foote are highly derivative and repetitious. Unless otherwise cited, biographical information may be found in William Cooke, Memoirs of Samuel Foote, 3 vols. (London: Phillips, 1805); John Foster, “Samuel Foote” in Historical and Biographical Essays, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1858); Mary Belden, The Dramatic Work of Samuel Foote (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929); Simon Trefman, Sam. Foote, Comedian, 1720-1777 (New York: New York University Press, 1971).

2. James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. ed. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), V, 37.

3. Tom Thumb ran nearly forty nights, most often as the afterpiece to The Author's Farce. Stage history is from The London Stage, parts III and IV (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1961-62).

4. London Stage, III, part i, xix-xl and xlviii-lvii; Trefman, vii-xi; John Loftis, Sheridan and the Drama of Georgian England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 38.

5. The Jacobite's Journal, ed. W. B. Coley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 262 (#22 for 30 April 1748).

6. Arthur H. Scouten, “On the Origin of Foote's Matinees,” TN 7 (1952), pp. 28-31. It would be easy to shape Foote's life around the Haymarket Theatre and the Licensing Act; Foote was the most successful evader of it, and his ingenuity influenced English drama for the next fifty years.

7. A Letter from Mr. Foote, To the Reverend Author of the Remarks, Critical and Christian, on the Minor (London: Davies, Becket, & Coote, 1760), p. 3.

8. A Letter, pp. 16-18. Foote was correct to identify himself with a long tradition; see Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Late Eighteenth Century Drama 1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), p. 173; George H. Nettleton, English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 249; Percy Fitzgerald, A New History of the English Stage, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley, 1882), II, 210.

9. Foote and Fielding were old rivals. See Martin Battestin, “Fielding and ‘Master Punch’ in Panton Street,” PQ, 45 (1966), 191-208.

10. Letter, p. 32; compare to Fielding's treatment of Deborah Wilkins in Tom Jones, particularly I, 6.

11. For a description of the favorable regard in which the eighteenth century held mimicry, see Percy Fitzgerald, Samuel Foote (London: Chatto & Windus, 1910), pp. 45-56.

12. Tate Wilkinson, The Wandering Patentee, 4 vols. (York, 1795), I, 293.

13. W. Clark Russell, Representative Actors (London: Ware, n.d.), pp. 137 and 139.

14. Russell, p. 136.

15. Cooke, I, 234-235.

16. John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage, 10 vols. (Bath: Carrington, 1832), V, 529. See also Battestin, p. 202.

17. The Minor is typical of the century's anti-Methodist satire; such metaphorical language and sexual innuendoes were characteristic. Cf. Albert M. Lyles, Methodism Mocked (London: Epworth, 1960), and Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 106, n. 3.

18. Robert D. Hume, “Goldsmith and Sheridan and the Supposed Revolution of ‘Laughing’ Against ‘Sentimental’ Comedy” in Studies in Change and Revolution, ed. Paul Korshin (Menston: Scholar, 1972), p. 250.

19. For details of this suit, see Trefman, pp. 133-136.

20. The Reynolds remark is quoted in Representative Actors, p. 137; Fitzgerald, New History, II, 208, respectively.

21. Charles Dibdin, A Complete History of the Stage, 5 vols. (London, 1800), V, 248.

22. Cooke, I, 122; Trefman, 249-250.

List of Short Titles

Badcock: John Bee (pseud. of John Badcock), ed. The Dramatic Works of Samuel Foote, With Remarks on Each Play and an Essay on the Life, Genius, and Writings of the Author. 3 vols. London, 1830.

Belden: Mary Megie Belden. The Dramatic Work of Samuel Foote. Yale Studies in English, no. 80. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1929.

Blom: The Dramatic Works of Samuel Foote, Esq., to which is prefixed a life of the author. 2 vols. 1809; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, [1968].

Cooke: William Cooke. Memoirs of Samuel Foote, Esq. With a Collection of his Genuine Bon-Mots, Anecdotes, Opinions, & c. Mostly Original. And Three of his Dramatic Pieces, Not Published in his Works. 3 vols. London, 1805.

Genest: John Genest. Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830. 10 vols. Bath, 1830.

Nicoll: Allardyce Nicoll. A History of English Drama 1660-1900. Vol. III: Late Eighteenth Century Drama 1750-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952.

Stone: George Winchester Stone, Jr., ed. The London Stage: 1660-1800, Part 4, 1747-1776. 3 vols. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962.

Trefman: Simon Trefman. Sam. Foote, Comedian, 1720-1777. New York: New York University Press, 1971.

Wilkinson: Tate Wilkinson. The Wandering Patentee; or, a History of the Yorkshire Theatres, from 1770 to the Present Time. 4 vols. York, 1795.

George Taylor (excerpt date 1984)

SOURCE: Taylor, George. Introduction to Plays By Samuel Foote and Arthur Murphy, pp. 1-33. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

[In the essay which follows, Taylor documents the “gradual evolution” of Foote's works in response to popular tastes, and he weighs their comic and dramatic elements.]

It was long a common misconception that comic drama in the eighteenth century, and particularly in the forty years following the 1737 Licensing Act, lapsed into a state of lachrymose gentility known as Sentimentality. This myth originated in the criticism and controversy surrounding the plays of those most successful eighteenth-century comic writers, Goldsmith and Sheridan. It is undeniable that Sentimental Comedy was a theatrically fashionable genre in the 1760s and 70s and was prevalent enough to inspire Goldsmith's essay ‘On the Theatre’, which was published in the Westminster Magazine of January 1773, where he described the style as one ‘in which the virtues of Private Life are exhibited, rather than the vices exposed; and the Distresses, rather than the Faults of Mankind, make our interest in the piece’. However this was written as a puff for She Stoops to Conquer, partly to anticipate some of the critics' objections, but also to exaggerate the author's own originality in order to stimulate public anticipation of the new play. Because of the success of She Stoops to Conquer, shortly to be followed by the plays of Sheridan also in the ‘laughing tradition’, and because of the very plausibility of Goldsmith's critical argument, the myth of sentimental domination passed into the commentaries of the nineteenth-century literary historians. It was only in the scholarly reassessments of the twentieth century that the sentimental vogue was recognised for what it had been, a theatrical fashion that accounted for a smallish number of plays in some essential way ‘different’ from the more numerous conservative comedies, which continued to provide the staple diet of the Georgian theatre.

It is of course true that the brittle cynicism and brilliant wit of the great Restoration comedies failed to survive into the eighteenth century. Farquhar, Cibber and Steele all contributed elements of geniality, respectability and pathos, but the didactic, exemplary moralising and the self-indulgent emotion, which Goldsmith had distinguished as specifically sentimental, was a major feature of only a minority of plays. When Allardyce Nicoll began to catalogue the drama of the period in his History of English Drama (1927), he was surprised that, ‘when we look at the typical dramatic fare of the period, we may be inclined to wonder whether, after all, it was not sentimentalism which was the fashion insecurely planted in the theatre’.¹ Since then, H. W. Pedicord's The Theatrical Public in the Time of Garrick (1954), R. W. Bevis's The Laughing Tradition (1980), and, above all, the statistics of The London Stage (part 4, ed. G. W. Stone Jnr, 1962), have confirmed that (depending on the author's precise definition of Sentimental Comedy) there were something like eight to ten performances of traditional comedies to every one performance of a sentimental full-length piece. The proportion of sentimental afterpieces was considerably less, as it was into the two-act afterpiece that the broader and bawdier traditions of satire and farce were channelled.²

Nevertheless, although these statistics of performances are a conclusive indication of the audiences' general taste in comedy, the authors themselves were turning out a higher proportion of sentimental new plays—Bevis suggests possibly half the mainpieces between 1740 and 1780.³ Many of these were quite unsuited to the stage, and, if performed, survived for only a night or two. The majority were aimed at a reading public rather than a theatre audience. It is clear, even from the traditionally comic pieces published in this collection, that writers tended to clean up and sentimentalise their stage pieces when they came out in published form. The Sentimental Movement had always been more apparent in novels than in the drama. Certainly most of Murphy's revisions for his Collected Works make his comedies seem rather more sententious and pathetic than they appear in their original manuscript form. Both he and Foote were champions of the traditional comedy of humour or of manners, in which laughter is provoked by the ridiculous excesses of folly and affection, or by the misunderstandings and cross-purposes of the comic situation. They, together with Colman the Elder and David Garrick, maintained the ‘laughing tradition’ with considerable ability well before the supposed revival of comical comedy by Goldsmith and Sheridan; and, even if certain elements in the plays of Murphy, Garrick and Colman can be categorised as sentimental, the same can be said of their more famous successors.

If to us many of these mid-eighteenth-century plays seem rather unremarkable in comparison with the novels or poetry of the period, it is probably because the writers of the time considered writing for the theatre as a commercial rather than an artistic venture. Under the Restoration, and indeed back to Tudor times, playwrights were aiming to please the most sophisticated, well-educated section of society, the aristocrats and courtiers. Since the 1688 Revolution, which ushered in the political and social preeminence of the mercantile and gentry classes, the theatre found that it was playing to an audience that was drawn from the City, and even the suburbs, as well as the purlieus of St James. Some writers, like Cibber and Steele, in their different ways, felt they had to write down to these new audiences, and one senses in their work a certain patronising condescension. Others, like Farquhar, Fielding, Lillo and Gay tended to write from a more bourgeois point of view of their own. Their work may have been less polished than that of the Restoration wits, but it demonstrated those middle-class, Georgian virtues of good sense, good humour and that pugnacious quality they called ‘bottom’. The 1720s and 30s had seen the emergence of several new types of drama, the ballad opera, the bourgeois tragedy, the satirical burlesque, not to mention those non-literary entertainments the pantomime and the Italian opera. As places of entertainment, the theatres had gained a commercial independence from the traditional patronage of the court. In political terms this was recognised by the Licensing Act, whereby legal prohibitions replaced influence and self-interest as the regulating factors;⁴ in business terms the adjustment can be traced through the risks and failures catalogued in Cibber's Apology, to the financial stability of the long managerships of Rich and Garrick; and in artistic terms the change was encapsulated in Dr Johnson's famous couplet:

The drama's laws the drama's patrons give,
For we who live to please, must please to live.

The age of Foote and Murphy was one of consolidation rather than of innovation. They exhibited no great originality in form, but by a gradual evolution in response to the tastes of the town, which rowdy audiences were not slow in communicating, their plays gained a workmanlike efficiency that can be compared with the consistently competent standards of television comedy writing in England today. Drury Lane, like the BBC, had a reputation for excellence in presenting the classics; under Garrick the standard of acting was generally high and production was efficient, but new plays, though thoroughly entertaining, tended to be often predictable and seldom thought-provoking. Covent Garden, like the stereotyped image of commercial television, specialised in the more spectacular variety of shows: music, scenery and speciality acts seeming to have more drawing power than the literary quality of the plays. But just as today, when the occasional production by independent television displays an originality above the generally predictable standard, it was at Covent Garden that the original talents of Gay, Cumberland and Goldsmith first made their appearance. Of course this comparison should not be stretched too far, but I think the similarity of a dual monopoly created a pressure to respond to the box office just as the television channels have to maintain respectable ratings, and this tended to cause a similar stereotyping of comic techniques and the repetition of successful formulae. The plays of Foote, Murphy, Garrick and Colman all tend towards situation comedy; the same set of family relations, the same type of social conflicts are worked through time and again. The attitudes, and most of the characters, remain the same, only the intrigues, the tricks and the ‘affecting scenes’ of reconciliation, recognition and reformation are changed or rearranged to give a spurious impression of originality.

To an extent this has always been the case with comic drama, from Plautus to Molière, and the charge of plagiarism can so easily be made against all eighteenth-century comic playwrights that it is hardly worth making. It is only when one gets immersed in the drama of the time, or becomes addicted to various situation-comedy series on television today, that the new slant on a threadbare theme assumes the status of an original stroke of genius. It was Sheridan's good fortune to be the last exponent of a tradition of which Murphy was arguably an equal master; it was Foote's misfortune that he failed to realise that his original satirical slant to the situation-comedy formula was not enough to establish his work as a genre of its own; or to put it another way, in more classical terms, he compromised the Aristophanic qualities, which he had inherited from Fielding, with the tired old plots of New Comedy, which were expected of him by the critics, the audiences and the Lord Chamberlain's Examiner of Plays.

FOOTE

If Foote was not original enough to have earned himself a place on the lower slopes of Parnassus with Fielding and Gay, never mind a lofty seat with Jonson and Molière, he was the maverick of the mid-eighteenth-century theatre, and his achievements both as writer and manager were to have a significant influence on the development of the London stage. Born in 1720 into a landowning family of Cornish gentry, Foote came to London in 1740, after being expelled from Oxford, to enroll at the Inner Temple, where the sons of provincial JPs were normally expected to gather a smattering of law, and a smear of urban sophistication during their time off from study. Foote, like many Templars, took the time off more seriously than any lessons he may have attended or law books he may have read. His tastes were fashionable and inevitably expensive, and, although he probably joined Macklin's acting classes in 1743 for a bit of a jape, appearing as ‘a young gentleman never before on any stage’ as Othello to Macklin's Iago at the Haymarket on 6 February 1744, he was obviously talented enough to repeat the experiment at Drury Lane on 10 March. That autumn he enrolled as an actor with Thomas Sheridan, the manager of the Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin, and so began his theatrical career. However, Foote was too extravagant a personality to settle for repeating other writers' lines; he was a stand-up comic rather than a straight actor, and he soon began to exhibit a talent for comic impersonations and mimicry. In April 1747 he hired the Haymarket Theatre, where he had made his amateur debut, and where, ten years before, the last of Fielding's political burlesques had been banned by the Licensing Act. Under the Act only Drury Lane and Covent Garden were allowed to present regular drama, and Foote decided to circumvent the law by using the ‘Concert Formula’, which had been employed by such varied entertainers as Fielding himself, Colley Cibber's eccentric daughter Charlotte Charke, and Charles Macklin. Since 1740, Henry Giffard had presented plays at Goodman's Fields under the pretence of giving concerts or amateur ‘diversions’, and it had been there that Garrick had first appeared in 1741. Foote advertised his entertainment as follows:

At the Theatre in the Hay-market, this Day will be perform'd a Concert of Musick. With which will be given Gratis a New Entertainment, call'd The Diversions of the Morning. The principal Parts to be perform'd by Mr Foote, Mr Shuter, Mr Cushing, Mr Castallo, Mrs Hallam, Mr Lee, Mr Burton, Mr Hallam, and Miss Moreau.

To which will be added a Farce taken from ‘The Old Batchelor’, call'd ‘The Credulous Husband’. Fondlewife by Mr Foote; Bellmour, Mr Lee, Laetitia by Mrs Hallam.

With an Epilogue to be spoken by the B-d-d Coffee House.

Tickets to be had at Mr Waller's, Bookseller in Fleet-Street. To begin at Seven o'Clock.

Perhaps because he was performing in the evening, or because he was including a cut version of a regular comedy, or because his company were all established professionals, Lacy, the manager of Drury Lane, invoked the Act and on 23 April the performance was banned. But Foote displayed the ingenuity that was to mark his career as an alternative impresario by changing the Concert into an invitation at midday on 25 April ‘to drink a Dish of Chocolate with him, and 'tis hoped there will be a great deal of good Company and some Joyous Spirits; he will endeavour to make the Morning as Diverting as possible’.⁵

The Diversions of the Morning was perhaps Foote's most original contribution to the development of the London theatre. It was not a proper play at all, but a sort of revue, in which sketches were strung together by the most flimsy of plots, and in which Foote himself took a number of parts in order to take off various well-known characters. The Diversions underwent several transformations of both title and content, being known as a Dish of Chocolate, Dish of Tea, Auction of Portraits, The Virtuoso and, eventually, Taste, in which it gained its most regular dramatic form and was published in 1752. Typical of the characters Foote took off were a quack doctor, the Chevalier Taylor; a popular educationalist, Orator Henley; an auctioneer, Christopher Cock; a magistrate, Thomas de Veil; and a follower of fashion the original of which has not been traced, but whom Foote called Lady Pentweazle. Most were of ephemeral interest, as they were indeed charlatans worthy of ridicule, but in his early performances Foote, often with the aid of Harry Woodward, also made a feature of taking off leading actors from the patent houses.

Two acts from The Diversions have survived which were vehicles for the parody of actors. ‘Tragedy à la Mode’, which resembled Fielding's Tom Thumb, was printed in Tate Wilkinson's Wandering Patentee (vol. I, pp. 285-98), and a rehearsal scene, in which Foote took off his old instructor Charles Macklin directing Spranger Barry in a scene from Othello, was printed in the John Bee edition of The Works of Samuel Foote.⁶ The second of these is particularly interesting as it indicates something of the new ‘naturalistic’ style of acting associated with Macklin. He tells his Othello to ‘grind’ rather than declaim his words, while considering

the mode of the mind—that a man's soul is lost, and tost, and crost, and his entrails broiling on a grid iron—bring it from the bottom of your stomach, sir, with a grind, as ‘Tor-r-r-ture me!’ … Now throw me from you, and I'll yield; very well!—keep that attitude—your eye fixed—there's a figure!—there's a contrast! His majestic rage—and my timorous droop.

However the mimicry of fellow actors proved a two-edged policy. Foote could only get authority to present his irregular entertainments at the Haymarket over the summer, and during the winter season he had to take his Diversions to the patent houses or to Dublin, where the burlesque of the regular company was unwelcome to the management, if not to the audiences. It was self-interest and an instinct for professional survival that led Foote to the principle he propounded in the Introduction to The Minor, that he would spare the actors, ‘because, by rendering them ridiculous in their profession, you, at the same time, injure their pocket’. It was because actor-managers like Garrick, Thomas Sheridan and even Macklin had the power to injure Foote's own pocket that he eventually let them alone.

Foote's other early plays, although they still provided characters taken from life for him to mimic, fell more properly into the conventional form of the two-act afterpiece. His impersonated eccentrics tended to be cast in the role of parents or guardians, who, as in Molière, frustrate the love matches of the younger generation. In The Author (1758) he used the two-act form to explore for the first time a specific theme with some social implication: the plight of the penurious hack and the power of the philistine patron. However, despite some pertinent comment on the practices of publishers and booksellers, it was, as usual, the individual portraits of Cadwallader and his wife Becky that captured the audiences' attention. The part was based on a certain Mr Apreece, a foolish Welsh gentleman, who, it was said, had encouraged Foote to impersonate him on stage. When the play actually came out, Apreece regretted the joke, withdrew his permission and got the Lord Chamberlain to ban the play's performance. The next piece that Foote wrote is the first one represented in this volume, The Minor.

So far Foote's work had been merely entertaining, and, although the influence of Fielding's dramatic satire is apparent in the style of his plays, they had none of Fielding's serious content. It is arguable that Foote was never really seriously committed in criticising the aberrations of society, but from 1760 onwards he did tend to write plays around potentially serious topics, and in several cases a genuine concern is discernible behind the surface mockery and theatrical fun. The Minor was to involve him in such controversy that he had to think seriously about his intentions and define his position, but as early as 1747, in his essay The Roman and English Comedy Considered and Compared, he had presented the historical justification for personal satire, and so won for himself the title of the English Aristophanes. In his dedication to Taste (1752) he had repudiated the obligatory plot structure of a love intrigue in favour of ‘confining the eye to the single object of Satire’, and proclaimed that ‘the follies and absurdities of men are the sole objects of comedy’. In fact most of his plays did utilise a love intrigue, but often it is so unimportant to the main drift of the satire and so crudely introduced that its function is patently obvious, which is to provide a neat marriage and a dance to end the play. In The Minor, however, the love interest, though introduced late in the action, does have a significant role in the development of Foote's general theme.

THE MINOR

The Minor is the best known of Foote's plays and kept the stage into the nineteenth century. Its reputation was won partly on its own merits. It is a neat three-act comedy which combines a traditional intrigue, a smattering of social satire, a scene of sentiment, and a handful of caricatures more satisfactorily integrated into the plot than was the case in some of Foote's other farces. However, The Minor's chief claim to fame was that one of the main subjects of its satire was the influence of the Methodists, and in particular the extravagantly emotional appeal of George Whitefield's revivalist preaching, or ‘field oratory’, at his tabernacle on the Tottenham Court Road. The Methodists, under the leadership of John Wesley, had broken from the Church of England in 1739, chiefly because they felt that the established Church had settled into a state of self-satisfied apathy and was doing nothing to minister to the poorer classes of society, whose need for both material and spiritual aid was of the greatest. To an extent the split had been an administrative necessity when Wesley failed to find a bishop prepared to ordain priests of his persuasion, who would work among the submerged classes outside the parish system, but it also had a spiritual content, whereby salvation was equated less with good works than with the desire for regeneration into a state of grace. God's grace is more readily granted to those who blindly believe and seek salvation from the depths of their suffering, than to those who are complacent, comfortably off, and more prepared to indulge in intellectual speculation than in irrational faith. It was precisely this element of ‘enthusiasm’ that Foote, and most sophisticated theatregoers, distrusted: ‘Enthusiasm in divinity is a kind of religious phrensy [sic], that mistakes the dictates of an inflamed imagination, the vapours of a troubled brain, for the operation of a divine possession’.⁷ His was the distrust of fanaticism, and suspicion of the irregular methods used to finance the new movement, which we can see today in the establishment reaction to some of the more eccentric religious sects that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s on the West Coast of America or on the fringes of traditional Buddhism, and which are often accused of exploiting the spiritual starvation of the unhappy and the underprivileged.

To a modern audience, used to a more blatantly didactic theatre, Foote's criticisms may seem rather unsatisfactory, a mere side swipe not fully integrated into the action of the play, and presented as the ‘humour’ of the hypocritical Mrs Cole, and in the rather tasteless epilogue, which relied for its effect not on a genuine exposé of Whitefield's methods, or message, but on Foote's ability to take off his bathetic style of preaching and his unfortunate squint. His answer to criticism of this last point was classic but unconvincing: ‘If men with these infirmities will attempt things, which those very infirmities have rendered them incapable of properly executing, it is their own fault if the source that should acquire them compassion degenerates into a fountain of ridicule’.⁸ It was a principle that should have put pay to his own career once he lost his leg in 1766; an actor with a wooden leg is considerably more incapable than a preacher with a squint.

However, the controversy over The Minor did cause Foote to define and defend his position as the leading theatrical satirist of the day, both in the introductory scene of the play and in his Letter to the Reverend Author of the Remarks Critical and Christian on the Minor. He rejoiced in the sobriquet of the English Aristophanes and proclaimed himself firmly in the tradition of classical comedy: he pointed out that Shakespeare, Jonson and Molière had all caricatured individuals in their plays, and claimed that comedy had always had a utilitarian purpose over and above mere entertainment. He rejected the description of his play as a farce, which he defined as,

a kind of theatrical, not dramatic, entertainment, always exhibited at fairs, and too frequently produced at playhouses; a sort of hodgepodge, dressed by a Gothic cook, where the mangled limbs of probability, common sense, and decency, are served up to gratify the voracious cravings of the most depraved appetites: this I call farce. Comedy, on the other hand, I define to be an exact representation of the peculiar manners of that people among whom it happens to be performed; a faithful imitation of singular absurdities, particular follies, which are openly produced, as criminals are publicly punished, for the correction of individuals, and as an example to the whole community.⁹

More succinctly, in the introductory scene of The Minor, he pointed out that in the case of a religious charlatan, ‘Ridicule is the only antidote against this pernicious poison. This is a madness that argument can never cure, and, should a little wholesome severity be applied, “persecution” would be the immediate cry.’

In fact it was The Minor itself that ran the risk of persecution. Under the Licensing Act, once Foote had a general authority to perform at the Haymarket, he was not required to submit plays to the Examiner for detailed censorship, and it was in recognition of this general authority to perform that Foote dedicated the play to the Lord Chamberlain himself, the duke of Devonshire: ‘Your Grace has thrown open (for those who are denied admittance into the palaces of Parnassus) a cottage on its borders, where the unhappy migrants may be, if not magnificently, at least, hospitably entertained.’ It was only when he wished to present The Minor in one of the palaces of Parnassus, Drury Lane, in the autumn of 1760, that a copy had to be officially submitted to the Lord Chamberlain's office. It was actually the third printed edition, already headed ‘as performed at the New Theatre in the Haymarket’, that the managers, Garrick and Lacy, put in the hands of the Examiner of Plays. The Lord Chamberlain was then approached, not only by Lady Huntingdon,¹⁰ a patron of Whitefield's, but by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who was particularly concerned with the use of religious phrases in a stage play. Devonshire, however, was himself a close friend of David Garrick's, and wrote to him on 25 October 1760, granting permission to present the play:

I had a long conversation with his Grace, who would have authorized me to have used his name to stop The Minor, but I got off from it, and concluded with sending a recommendation by Mr. Pelham to the author, to alter those passages that are liable to objection: His Grace would not point them out, so I think very little alteration may do.¹¹

It was said that Archbishop Secker had refused to be specific because he realised that Foote was capable of publishing the censored version, ‘Corrected and prepared for the press by his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury.’¹² Nevertheless, although the play as a whole was passed, the copy in the Larpent Collection indicates that the Examiner did follow up the criticisms and cut most of the objectionable phrases, although the main satirical idea of the methodistical bawd remained. Details of the Examiner's excisions are listed in the Note on the Texts (p. 41 below), where it will be seen that the main loss was the Epilogue, where Foote, as Squintum, took off Whitefield's style of preaching.

When The Minor is looked at as a performing script, it soon becomes clear that the controversial issue of Methodism is hardly central to the structure of the play, indeed Mrs Cole, based on an actual Covent Garden bawd, Jennie Douglas, is not the only subject of Foote's mimicry. The card-sharp Loader was based on a certain Mr Lookup;¹³ Smirk was the auctioneer Abraham Longford, and in performing the part Foote also took off Longford's predecessor Christopher Cock, whom he had already introduced into The Diversions of the Morning and Fielding had satirised in The Historical Register. Finally, the part of Shift was played as a caricature of either Weston or Tate Wilkinson.¹⁴ The latter had pirated the play when it was first presented in two acts in Dublin, and was to perform it at Covent Garden from 24 November 1760, in direct competition with Foote's own performances at Drury Lane. In 1763 the two actors joined forces in a performance of the play, incongruously splitting the part of Shift between them, Wilkinson playing Shift himself, and Foote Smirk, who is Shift in disguise.

So far this pot-pourri of impersonation was typical of Foote, but the dramatic substance of the play was more fully worked out than usual. The rival systems of education propounded by Sir William and Richard Wealthy, Foote may have developed from Terence's The Brothers; the convention of the benevolent incognito testing the values of the younger generation was one he had already used in The Author, and it was to reappear in Cumberland's West Indian, Goldsmith's Good Natured Man and Sheridan's School for Scandal; while much of the character of Mrs Cole had probably been stolen from Joseph Reed's Register Office. All these varied elements Foote brings together, and, although the result is hardly a seamless garment, it is not quite the rag-bag implied in the criticism of Richard Bevis, who claims that the play is ‘overplotted’, and has

enough story for a five-act comedy. In the melee Foote lost control of the tone. After asking us to laugh at sharpers and follies for two acts, secure in the knowledge that George's straits are artificial, he suddenly gives us a character, Lucy, who is in real trouble and requires immediate sympathy and assistance. The comic law of ‘no consequences’ is rudely violated. Ridicule and outrage are unexpectedly displaced by pathos, and the play becomes emotionally incoherent.¹⁵

Although, to an extent, one must agree with Bevis, and even with those critics who give the Lucy scene the pejorative label of sentimental, it does in fact give the satire that bite which Foote claimed to be missing from mere farce. Lucy's distressed situation was not untypical of the age, its causes are closely tied up with the ‘pernicious poison’ of Mrs Cole's hypocrisy, and George's response to her appeal is more like the traditional good nature of a Tom Jones than the self-conscious squeamishness of a Bevil Junior. The seriousness of Lucy's plight is also an essential ingredient of the main plot. It would have been absurd for Sir William's silly charade to have succeeded in regaining his prodigal son. It needed the shock of real hardship and injustice to make Young George's reformation even probable in terms of his character, or acceptable in terms of theatre. All these considerations give the scene a sobering seriousness and the play as a whole a cutting edge. The Aristophanic qualities of Foote's work are not just restricted to personal abuse, caricature situations and the quick-fire routines of a stand-up comic; he does show in this play, as in several others, including The Nabob, a genuine anger at the social abuses of his age, and, although the Whore's Progress is halted in the nick of time, it is wrong to see Lucy's emotional plight, and George's generous response to it, in the same light as the excessive delicacy and mawkish moralising of the truly Sentimental Drama.

It is true that the central plot of tricking and testing the extravagant Minor is not handled with particular skill or consistency, but, as in many purely popular entertainments, then as now, it was the telling scene and the comical situation, rather than the precise logic of plot or character that appealed to the audience. Argument and analysis would have proved merely boring. Foote's didacticism is that of immediate ridicule—and, in the case of Lucy, immediate sympathy—rather than a carefully argued case or a psychologically consistent character study. Bevis is right when he claims that most critics have unfairly condemned Foote for failing to achieve what he never set out to do, but even he asks for a more classically unified effect than Foote, as a popular entertainer, intended to create. Although The Minor is an important play in assessing Foote's reputation, the reaction it caused at the time was out of proportion to the content of its argument, and critics ever since have been disappointed that it lacks the polish of a Sheridan or the vehemence of a Jonson. What it does have, however, is what Foote set out to provide: enough of a plot to raise a few serious questions, provide a few scenes of comical misunderstanding, and a few opportunities for him to display his talents as a mimic. Maybe the issue of Methodism was being exploited rather than explored, and Foote was cashing in on a controversy, as has ever been the case with successful showmen, but there is enough genuine concern expressed in the Lucy scenes and enough cynicism in his portrayal of Mrs Cole, to have fired the original controversy and to indicate that Foote really did see danger in the irrational enthusiasm of the field orators. In The Nabob too we will see, perhaps even more clearly, that Foote did have a conscience and a sense of concern that his reputation as a rake and a wit tended to hide from his contemporaries.

FOOTE'S ACCIDENT AND THE HAYMARKET PATENT

Possibly as a result of his brush with the Lord Chamberlain over The Minor, Foote found, in the summer of 1761, that the licence under which he had normally performed at the Haymarket had been granted to ‘a man who had a pack of dancing dogs’,¹⁶ and that he had to make alternative arrangements. These were to rent Drury Lane Theatre in partnership with Arthur Murphy, on the understanding that each would provide three new two- or three-act comedies. As we shall see, when discussing The Citizen, Murphy wrote all his three plays, but Foote produced nothing.

From 1762 to 1766 Foote made sure of the Haymarket licence during the summer, and, as his own manager, brought out a number of plays, which, following the example of The Author and The Minor, tended to concentrate on a single theme of satire rather than the indiscriminate sketches of The Diversions. The Liar (1762) was adapted from Corneille and is perhaps his least topical comedy. The Orators, The Mayor of Garrett, The Patron and The Commissary were all topical and each explored a particular aspect of social or political activity, although it is only in The Commissary (1765) that one gets an impression of Foote's being a moral satirist as well as a light entertainer. The Commissary has been published in R. W. Bevis's collection of Eighteenth Century Afterpieces (Oxford, 1970), and in his opinion, ‘It gives in the compass of three acts a selection of the best Foote had to offer … an asset to the laughing tradition which challenges the idea that he never developed or matured.’¹⁷

In 1766, however, Foote's career took an unexpected turn and one that was to be of great importance for the subsequent development of the British stage. He had a serious accident while attempting to ride a mettlesome horse in the company of the Duke of York, George III's brother, at the home of Lord Mexborough. Foote had to have his leg amputated, and, as some sort of compensation, the Duke of York arranged for Foote's occasional summer licence to be changed into a royal patent. Although this was intended to last only for his lifetime, the title of Theatre Royal remained attached to the Little Theatre in the Haymarket after his death, and, from when George Colman took over its management under annual licence in 1777 until the 1843 Theatre Regulating Act, the Little Theatre shared, for the period 15 May to 15 September, the same professional status as the two major houses. Much of the early 1800s was to be spent in trying to extend its summer season into a year-long management, but well into the nineteenth century the Haymarket was the recognised home of light legitimate comedy.

Foote's accident had an effect on all aspects of his career, manager, performer and writer. Now that his control over the Haymarket was secure—he bought the building itself once he knew he had the patent—he enlarged the auditorium, re-equipped the stage and extended the company of actors. Before 1766 he had normally worked with a small company of twelve, many of whom were inexperienced, but now he increased his company to twenty-one actors, ten actresses and four dancers (1769 season), most of whom were drawn from the established professionals of the winter houses. He was also entitled to present legitimate tragedy, and in 1769 he brought his old employer, Thomas Sheridan, from Dublin, to star in a number of Shakespeare plays, coinciding with Garrick's jubilee celebrations at Stratford. As a performer, who had often appeared in several parts in the same play, Foote had obviously lost some of his versatility, but fortunately some of his characters were already suitable for a lame actor; Mrs Cole complains of her ‘rhumatise’, and Peter Paragraph in The Orators was based on the one-legged Dublin printer, George Falkner. However, his wooden leg did cause Foote to reduce his own acting and rely on the support of the other established comedians that he had brought into the Haymarket company, such as Woodward, Palmer, Weston, Bannister, Shuter and his old sparring partner, Tate Wilkinson. Thus began the tradition of excellent comic ensemble acting for which the Haymarket was to remain famous for at least a century. As a writer, Foote showed his customary ingenuity by creating roles that specifically exploited his lameness. In 1768 he produced The Devil upon Two Sticks, in 1770 The Lame Lover, and in 1771 his part in The Maid of Bath was Sir Christopher Cripple. Eventually audiences got used to his disability and Foote reassumed many of his favourite roles and wrote new parts in which no attention needed to be drawn to his leg. The first of these was The Nabob, written in 1772.

THE NABOB

Nevertheless, Sir Matthew Mite, the ‘nabob’, was a moral, even if not necessarily a physical grotesque. As an officer of the East India Company, he has returned home prepared to deal with the English with as much ruthlessness as he had the Indians, from whom he has extorted his fortune. It was one of the better results of the increasingly fashionable humanitarianism of the British upper classes that, although they might indulge themselves in sentimental fiction, they did develop in fact a conscience about the exploitation of their colonial dependants in the Third World—even if not in America or in the newly industrialised cities of their own country. The prosecution of Warren Hastings in the 1780s was the more famous example, but Lord Clive had been indicted for the misgovernment of Bengal early in 1772, and a bill had been introduced into Parliament ‘for the better regulation of the affairs of the East India Company’. Clive was acquitted of specific crimes, but his methods, and those of other East India Company officers, were still considered unacceptable by many who knew little of the actual conditions in India. Also, although he did not make a particularly strong point about it, it is significant that Foote refers to the important Somersett case of 1772, in which the owning of slaves was finally declared illegal on British soil, for the whole anti-slave-trade agitation that developed in the last decades of the century had its roots in the reaction of shame at the exploits of the nabobs.

Mary Belden claims that Foote was not aiming specifically at Lord Clive in his portrait of Sir Matthew Mite, but at either General Richard Smith, whose being the son of a cheesemonger may have inspired the name Mite, or Sir Matthew White, both of whom worked for the East India Company.¹⁸ Both men must have felt that they were possible candidates for the attack, for they invited Foote to dine with them shortly after the play opened. It is a mark of Foote's cool nerve, his wit and his disarming charm that he was able to convince them that neither of them was intended, and that they were to be included in the disclaimer he had put in the mouth of Thomas Oldham:

But there are men from the Indies, and many too, with whom I have the honour to live, who dispense nobly and with hospitality here what they have acquired with honour and credit elsewhere; and, at the same time that they have increased the dominations and wealth, have added virtues, too, to their country.

However, it is clear that Foote's anger as well as contempt had been stirred by the excesses of the nabobs as a class. Much of the satire in the play is aimed at Sir Matthew's parvenu lack of polish, culture and tact, but he is no Monsieur Jourdain, he is a bourgeois red in tooth and claw. Not only are his ‘possessions arising from plunder … treacherously and rapaciously gained’, but his use of money in England is just as irresponsible and vicious as it had been in India. In order to improve his profits from the tea trade he advocates the burning of cargoes; when he wants an estate in Berkshire he tells his agent to ‘give the fellow four times the value, and bid him turn out in a month’; and the ‘treaty’ he offers the Oldham family is as heartless and as irresistible as any of his dealings with the Indian rajahs. Even the venal Mayor of Bribe'em, who has come to offer his borough's parliamentary seats for sale, considers Mite's behaviour to have been that of a Tartar—added to which his largess has caused inflation in ‘the price of provisions for thirty miles round’. However, even in a portrait of almost melodramatic villainy, Foote, the stand-up comedian and impressionist, had to include a lighthearted sketch, which inevitably lessened the satirical bite of his more serious criticism. One subject of satire that has never lost its appeal is that of pedantry, and in act III Foote introduced a completely irrelevant burlesque of a meeting of the Society of Antiquarians, where Sir Matthew gives a lecture inspired by that of Dr Samuel Pegge, who in December 1771 ‘gave us next the History of Whittington, but could make nothing at all of his cat, though she is his constant companion in all statues and pictures: and I firmly believe, if not a rebus for some ship which made his fortune, she was the companion of his arm chair, like Montaigne's’.¹⁹

Another element of parody is better integrated into the fabric of The Nabob, and that is the exaggeratedly sentimental language of the worthy merchant, Thomas Oldham. In terms of the plot he is the hero, he stands up to Sir Matthew, he provided the money that saves his brother's family from disaster, and he continually points the moral, but as a character he is written as a blatant theatrical cliché. There is no real motive for his delay in paying off Sir Matthew's mortgage, and certainly none for distressing the young lovers for reasons which, according to his son, ‘in tenderness he chose to conceal’. Sir Matthew himself has no time for Thomas's ‘refinements’ and in the end, although Mite has not won this time, he remains unrepentant and a dangerous threat to others sharing the traditionally decent standards of the Oldhams. Neither the aristocratic bluster of Lady Oldham nor the moralising of the London Merchant have any effect on him:

MITE:
Is this manoeuvre according to law? … Our practice is different in the Mayor's Court at Calcutta.—I shall now make my bow, and leave this family, whom I wished to make happy in spite of themselves, soon to regret the fatal loss sustained by their obstinate folly.
THOMAS:
Nor can it be long, before the wisdom of their choice will appear, as, by partaking of the spoil, they might have been involved in that vengeance, which, soon or late, cannot fail to fall on the head of the author; and, sir, notwithstanding your seeming security, perhaps the hour of retribution is near!
MITE:
You must, Master Oldham, give me leave to laugh at your prophetic effusion. This is not Sparta, nor are these the chaste times of the Roman republic. Now-a-days, riches possess, at least, one magical power, that, being rightly dispensed, they closely conceal the source from whence they proceeded. That wisdom, I hope never to want.—I am the obsequious servant of this respectable family! Adieu!

Such a contrast of unrepentant villainy and platitudinous morality was to become the stock in trade of Victorian melodrama. In Foote's play the effect is intentionally comic, as can be seen by his further parody of sentimental stage conventions in his next play, Piety in Pattens, a Primitive Puppet Show. At the same time his mockery of the hero increases the seriousness of his warning against the ruthless machinations of the villain. The Nabob has the last word in the argument and we are still left with the feeling that ‘his contrivance and cunning has been an over-match for a plain English gentleman or an innocent Indian’.

Insofar as the two comedies published here are a fair example of Foote at his most serious, it is easy to see him as something of an anachronism in a period when ‘humour’ had lost the viciousness of Jonson for the geniality of Goldsmith. In Squintum, Mrs Cole and Sir Matthew Mite, Foote had characters as potentially grotesque as Tribulation Wholesome, Ursula the Pig Woman and Volpone, but, although he was quite capable of defending the principles of classical satire in theory, the taste of the time had become too genteel and too squeamish for full-blooded Jonsonian comedy, even if Foote had been talented enough to compose it. Despite his repudiation of farce as a ‘sort of hodge-podge’, that was often all that Foote had to offer his Haymarket audiences, although at least he never made a compromise with sentimentality, which is what one finds in Murphy, Goldsmith and Sheridan, all of whom claimed to be champions of laughing rather than weeping comedy. Foote's failing was one of dissipation. Rather than chastise one particular vicious humour, pursuing it to its root cause, or exploring its persuasive influence throughout society, he continually shifted his aim, let off squibs in all directions, and was always ready to settle for the merely amusing, even when he had found a subject fit for scorn, and one that genuinely offended his sense of fair play and social justice.

A performer who could overcome the loss of a leg, and a writer who could maintain almost single-handed a genre of theatre that was often lashed by the critics and occasionally brushed with the law, was clearly not the light-weight that some of his more sober contemporaries wished to consider him. When Boswell speculated that Foote's thoughts on religion were merely superficial and that he ‘seized the first notions which occurred to his mind’, Johnson agreed that ‘he is like a dog, that snatches the piece next him’. But Foote was more genuinely in the tradition of the great satirical dramatists, Jonson, Wycherley, Gay and Fielding, than Johnson's dismissive criticism implies. When Boswell said that ‘Foote had a great deal of humour’, Johnson agreed again, but he rejected Boswell's final suggestion that ‘he has a singular talent of exhibiting character’: ‘Sir, it is not a talent; it is a vice; it is what others abstain from. It is not comedy, which exhibits the character of a species, as that of a miser gathered from many misers; it is farce, which exhibits individuals.’²⁰ Thus spoke a champion of neo-classicism, which always advocated the general rule rather than the particular example, but Foote traced his inspiration back to the genuinely classical model of Aristophanes, who also dealt with the particular and the topical. With the revival of the Aristophanic spirit in Monty Python and Dario Fo we can perhaps now appreciate the special place Foote has in the history of topical satire, and that his talents in this sphere deserve recognition, together with those of Fielding and W. S. Gilbert, both of whom are presently regaining a measure of critical respect as dramatists over and above their reputations as novelist and librettist.

On the other hand, Murphy was held in higher regard by Dr Johnson. His sense of comedy and satire conformed more nearly to the neo-classical norms of unity and consistency. However, it is significant that even his dramatic effectiveness was at its weakest when he followed most closely the formal rules of the five-act comedy. Murphy never claimed that his farces were really comedies, but in fact he gave his two-act afterpieces a respectability and seriousness that actually should have entitled them to the description of ‘petites comédies’.

Notes

1. A. Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660-1900 (6 vols., Cambridge, 1923-59), vol. III, p. 171.

2. In his contribution to The Stage and the Page, ed. G. W. Stone Jnr (Berkeley, 1981), pp. 3-29, Robert D. Hume argues persuasively for abandoning the terms ‘sentimental’ and ‘laughing’ comedy, as they have led critics into exaggerating the generic differences between them. However, it is my opinion that the terms as coined by Goldsmith had a meaning for his readers and should therefore still be used—although with care.

3. R. W. Bevis, The Laughing Tradition (London, 1980), p. 61.

4. For details of the effect of the Licensing Act see Watson Nicholson, The Struggle for a Free Stage in London (New York, 1906), and The London Stage, part 3, introduction ed. A. H. Scouten (Illinois, 1962), pp. xlviii-lx.

5. General Advertiser, 22 and 25 April 1747, quoted in M. M. Belden, The Dramatic Work of Samuel Foote (New Haven, 1929), pp. 7-9.

6. The Works of Samuel Foote, ed. John Bee [John Badcock] (3 vols., London, 1830), vol. I, p. lvii.

7. A letter to the Reverend Author of Remarks Critical and Christian on the Minor, reprinted in The Works, ed. Bee, vol. I, p. ciii.

8. Ibid., vol. I, p. c.

9. Ibid., vol. I, p. xciv.

10. See J.P. Gledstone, George Whitefield, M.A., Field Preacher (London, 1900).

11. The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, ed. J. Boaden (London, 1832), vol. I, p. 120.

12. The Works, ed. Bee, vol. I, p. cxii.

13. Notes and Queries, 10th series, VIII (1907), 141.

14. In The Works, Bee suggests Weston, vol. II, p. 5; Wilkinson considered himself to be Shift, Memoires (London 1790) vol. II, p. 240f. and The Wandering Patentee (York, 1795), vol. III, p. 37.

15. Bevis, The Laughing Tradition, p. 157.

16. A. Murphy, The Life of Garrick (London, 1801), vol. I, p. 360.

17. Bevis, The Laughing Tradition, pp. 160-4.

18. Belden, Dramatic Works, p. 147.

19. J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes (London, 1816), vol. III, p. 578; quoted Belden, Dramatic Works, p. 152.

20. J. Boswell, In Search of a Wife, ed. F. Brady and F. A. Pottle (Yale, 1957), pp. 344-5.