SOURCE: Wheatley, Christopher. “‘Power Like New Wine’: The Appetites of Leviathan and Durfey's Massaniello.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 22 (1992): 231-51.

[In the following essay, Wheatley analyzes the political and social themes of Durfey's Massaniello, a play based on an Italian peasant uprising.]

Traditional descriptions of Restoration political drama as “Whig” or “Tory” are sometimes irrelevant to plays that lack an immediate topical application to English political events: Thomas Durfey's two part The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of Massaniello is an example of a play that defies such classification. Although unsuccessful when it premiered in 1700 at Drury Lane,¹ the play is of interest dramatically for its deft juxtaposition of the comic and serious, and for its subject: the 1647 peasant rebellion in Naples led by the fisherman Thomas Aiello.² A playwright identified only by the initials T. B. made the rebellion the subject of a tragedy in 1649, and Giraffi's history of the rebellion was translated into English by James Howell in 1650, with a second edition appearing in 1664. The insurrection attracted wide-spread European interest also; Croce claims that medals were struck in Europe with a likeness of Massaniello on one side and Cromwell on the other, and that Spinoza had a portrait of Massaniello in his bedroom.³ The play's “mixed” genre and complex depiction of an unsuccessful rebellion recall Venice Preserved, and Eric Rothstein and Robert Hume have praised the peculiar power of Durfey's play while arguing that it is a “Tory” play designed to show the dangers of mob rule.⁴ While Durfey's play does show the dangers of mob rule, it is not a Tory play, at least as the term would typically be used in reference to partisan politics in 1700. However devout Durfey's Toryism during the early 1680s, after 1688 he discovered he really had nothing against Whigs at all. Durfey's patrons in the 1690s were Whigs: Charles Montague (also a patron of Addison) and Philip Sidney, third earl of Leicester.⁵ The political content of plays like Love for Money (1690) and The Compaigners (1698) is limited to anti-Jacobitism. How far Durfey moved politically is indicated by the fact that his most virulent play of the exclusion crisis was Sir Barnaby Whig (1681), an attack on Shadwell through the title character, yet in 1692 Durfey wrote the prologue for Shadwell's posthumous The Volunteers. If anything, Durfey's political commitment in the 1690s could be described as “Williamite.” William had Durfey in to sing for him on occasion and rewarded him for his singing (Day, 15).

The only explicit comment on the English political situation in Massaniello is on William's political problems and occurs in a conversation between Massaniello's wife, Blowzabella, and an English servant named Pimpwell who is trying to make his fortune through playing on her attraction to him:

BLOWZABELLA
Ha, ha, ha, ye Rascal, well, and as to your State-affairs, we hear there are great feuds amongst ye as well as here; tho' the King has done great things for 'em, and they say—is a very brave Man.
PIMPWELL
Ay, he is so Madam,—but you must know that we English have some Affinity with the nature of some Dogs we have there, We never receive a good Bone but we snap at our Benefactor's fingers.(6)

Christopher Hill suggests that while William may have had a personal predilection for the Tories, he had to rely on the Whigs since they supported his foreign policy, and Hill quotes Sunderland as summing up William's problem: “it was true that the Tories were better friends to monarchy than the Whigs were, but then His Majesty was to consider that he was not their monarch.”⁷ William described himself to Halifax as a “trimmer.”⁸ William's problem in 1700 was that the “Country” parliament, largely Tory in makeup, was isolationist in its outlook and opposed to the standing army that William regarded as essential to English security. Thus, Durfey's remark on ingratitude is more likely to refer to ungrateful Tories than to Whigs in the immediate political context of the play.

If Massaniello is a “Tory” play, then, it is so only in the larger context of its subversion of the emergent political concept of justifiable revolutions. While the play does attack mobs and irresponsible ministers (a prototypically “Tory” position), Massaniello is like Venice Preserved in that it suggests that there are no solutions to some political crises. Susan Staves has shown that serious drama after 1688 is dominated by what she calls “the democratic romance”: “Cries of ‘Liberty!’ that had so often marked foolish mobs and treacherous plotters in earlier plays now are uttered by sympathetic heroes.”⁹ I argue that the first part of Massaniello has much in common with this type of play. Research by social historians suggests that by 1700 neither Tory nor Whig would assume that a riot over food heralded a return to the horrors of the 1640s. Moreover, that the play was set in Naples was significant. English visitors to Naples had established that peasants in Naples were treated so harshly that if any rebellion was justifiable, theirs was; indeed, Massaniello was even supposed by some to be the instrument of God. Also, Durfey's characterization of Massaniello is very sympathetic, particularly in contrast to the tragedy about Massaniello published in 1649. Finally, both Massaniello and the nobility are shown to be corrupted by power. Thus Durfey's play dramatizes doubt about the possibility of a social contract among creatures driven by their appetites to excess, in a society, like that of Naples, where the only available cultural model for class relations is adversarial.

In political plays of the early 1680s like City Politicks, riotous mobs are exclusively associated with Whigs, but by 1700 no such straightforward identification is possible. After the Triennial Act (1695), election mobs in both London and the provinces might be either Tory or Whig.¹⁰ Moreover, on some issues the lower class and Tories were cultural allies:

The ‘crowd’ knew its rights and was generally conservative but not slavish. In the seventeenth century, Royalism, then Toryism, were linked to the defence of a popular culture that had been under attack from earnest reformers. Eventually that essentially medieval political culture was to succumb, but to industrialization rather than to puritanism.¹¹

As R. H. Tawney pointed out long ago, one of the consequences of the hierarchical, paternalistic social organization that a Tory believed in was a moral obligation to help the poor; with rank came responsibility and poverty was not stigmatized because, after all, God had placed both rich and poor in their respective ranks. Addison's Sir Roger De Coverly, in essays such as Spectator 106, is a good fictional embodiment of such a Tory. Puritanism and incipient capitalism combined to eliminate that obligation, since poverty was the fault of the individual.¹² While Tawney's account has been challenged and refined, in outline it points to the fact that some Tories in Durfey's audience were more likely to have sympathy with starving laborers than were the Whigs.

Most importantly, increased food supplies meant that starving mobs, such as Massaniello's in Naples, ceased to be a serious threat to social stability in England: “… by the end of the seventeenth century developments in agricultural practice, and in transport and market networks, resulted in a high-yielding and varied production of grain, which prevented the occurrence of simultaneous catastrophic increases in the prices of all grain that still affected other parts of Europe.”¹³ In the decade prior to 1700, England was a net exporter of grain with low population growth; consequently, “a great mass of laborers was viewed as an asset rather than a menace.”¹⁴ Agricultural surplus sometimes created a situation analogous to the problem of American farmers of the 1980s, because producers could not pass the cost of taxes on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Low prices and high taxes made it difficult for farmers to make a living: “Indeed, the statesmen of the period were more alarmed than ever they were by food-riots, by the thought of the possible political consequences of years of low corn prices when, as in Shropshire in 1690, ‘the noise of taxes and the deadness of markets filled the country with complaints.’”¹⁵ Low prices for producers, who, unlike the laborers, had some political clout, were a political problem; starving laborers were not, because not many were starving and there was no surplus of labor. There were food riots in England, but such riots were aimed at reforming the system rather than changing it: “At Northampton in October 1693, when the poorer inhabitants of the town seized sacks of wheat from the carts of local corn dealers, they did not keep the grain but sold it in the market at what they judged a fair price—five shillings a bushel. Their aim was to stop unjust profiteering, not to do away with merchants.”¹⁶ Grain rioters claimed to be acting in defense of traditional norms and were apparently believed by magistrates, so that “in practice offenders were often treated with a good deal of leniency by the courts.”¹⁷ In short, the peasant rebellion over gabells on food in Naples in 1647 was unlikely to strike fear into the hearts of an English audience in 1700. There was no shortage of affordable food and occasional protests over prices were not likely to precipitate revolution. Because of the utility of the poor as labor, the upper classes were too busy considering how to turn a profit out of them to be overly concerned with them as a threat. Joyce Appleby sums up this major shift in attitude: “The unwelcome hordes of masterless men at the beginning of the century appeared to the most concerned of their betters seventy years later as a pool of badly managed labor.”¹⁸

And if the propertied classes of England were no longer concerned about a new generation of Levellers, they also knew that the poor of Naples were among the most badly treated in Europe because a generation of travellers had been telling them so. Naples was not a significant British interest in 1700, except as a bargaining chip,¹⁹ but it was an object lesson in oppressive government. Richard Lassels, an English priest, wrote of Naples in his Description of Italy (1654):

The markets here are admirable especially those of fruits. And were but the taxes moderated, Naples would be the cheapest and richest place in the world. But the King of Spaynes officers as they suck in Milan, fleece in Sicily, soe they gnaw here to the very bone; and some years past drove the people into such a dispaire that they tooke up armes under Masaniello's commande, and had like to have shaked off their obedience to Spayne forever.²⁰

James Howell's translation of Giraffi's history of the rebellion assigns the same cause for the rebellion and adds an innate desire for liberty on the part of the peasants:

For it is a clear case that there is engraven in the breasts of men by nature her self a detestation of slavery, and how unwillingly they put their necks into the yoke of another, specially when it becomes intolerable, when exorbitant exactions are imposed upon Subjects, whereby they are reduced to extreme fits of desperateness.²¹

Spain entrusted the rule of Naples primarily to a viceroy whose chief function was to raise money for Spain and himself. As Jean Gailhard wrote in The Present State of the Princes and Republicks of Italy (London, 1671), the people of Naples “are Governed by a Spanish Vice-King, to whom the people is given as prey, that he may make himself amends for the Expenses he hath been at in some chargeable Embassage, or a reward for some service to the crown” (57).

John Ray took time out from his experiments and natural history to enumerate all the taxes on the lower classes in Naples and remarks, “So that one would think it were imposible for poor peasants to pick up so much money as they pay to the King only.”²² Bishop Burnet also expressed sympathy for the poor of Naples in a journal entry dated 8 December 1685: “for the Commons here are so miserably oppressed, that in many places they die of hunger, even amidst the great plenty of their best years, for the corn is exported to Spain.”²³ And Durfey's friend Addison wrote in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy in the Years 1701, 1702, 1703 (London, 1705), that the triumph of Spanish policy is that the plundering of the poor is done by the Neapolitan nobility: “they have so well contriv'd it, that tho' the subjects are miserably harass'd and oppress'd, the greatest of their Oppressors are those of their own Body” (205). The best examples of the mistreatment of the peasants are the gabells:

The Gabels of Naples are very high on Oil, Wine, and Tobacco, and indeed on almost every thing that can be eaten, drank, and worn. There would have been one on Fruit had not Massaniello's Rebellion abolish'd it, as it has probably put a stop to many others.

(209)

Not everyone, of course, came back from Naples criticizing the Neapolitan nobility and sympathizing with the poor.²⁴ But Addison is able to concede that Massaniello's revolt achieved positive results; others went further and suggested he was an instrument of God.

In act two, part one of Durfey's play, Fate and St. Genaro appear to Massaniello while he sleeps before the altar in the cathedral of the Virgin of Carmine. Fate sings that Massaniello is the instrument of the divine will: “He must awake to bloody Wars, / Unbounded Fury, civil Jars / And is by Heav'ns decree, for wondrous deeds design'd” (109). St. Genaro responds that in a “happy hour, / … Naples shall be free from Rebel power” and that Massaniello must suffer for his actions; nonetheless, St. Genaro also says that Massaniello is allowed to rebel by God:

… tho' permission of this ill
Is Sacr'd Mystery and th' Eternal's Will,
Yet he that does the Deed,
For doing it must bleed.

(109)

Massaniello awakes and accepts his fate:

—so teach me now [Kisses his Medal.] the way to act, the Sense to comprehend these Wonders, meant for the relief of Naples; with Sacred Power, Charm my plebeian Soul; let but my Country's Freedom crown the Period, my threaten'd Fall I'll then despise and Laugh at.

(110)

One reason for the scene is undoubtedly that it provides an opportunity for spectacle. But the scene draws on Naples' reputation as a place where miracles occur and on previous commentators' descriptions of Massaniello as the instrument of God.

Naples' recurring miracle involved the blood of St. Genaro, which had dried in a vial but would liquefy when placed near his head, “as hath been annually observed and seen by all, not without great stupour.”²⁵ Bishop Burnet might call it “a scandalous Imposture,”²⁶ but others, such as Lassels and James Drummond, Earl of Perth, clearly believed the miracle and wrote back about it. Drummond also mentions another intervention by St. Genaro in a letter dated 1 February 1696:

In the great eruption of '31 St. Gennaro appear'd visibly in the air, (when the flame seemed already in the city,) and with his pasturall robe bore back the fire, and saved the city; and this is so attested that the wisest here are satisfied it is true.²⁷

Some in the London audience were doubtless willing to suspend their disbelief and accept that supernatural occurrences could still happen in far away places like Naples. But even if the London audience remembered that the age of miracles was supposed to have passed, they knew that Providence used people as its instruments in political events. Indeed, some Protestant ministers regarded William's victory over James as an example of special providence.²⁸ Several commentators describe Massaniello as God's punishment upon a cruel ruling class. In Lassels' posthumously published The Voyage of Italy (London, 1686), he repeats his charges that the peasants were driven to rebellion and draws this moral: “Thus we see, that when Men are ripe for Rebellion, Cromwells and Mazanels are cryed up for great Men; Or rather, when God hath a mind to punish, Flies and Gnats are powerful things, even against Princes” (178).

James Heath also compares Massaniello and Cromwell. Cromwell is the mean between Wallerstein who “aspired to the Imperial Diadem, but perished in the attempt; and Thomas Anello the famous Fisherman of Naples, who dyed in the frantick possession of the power he had so wonderfully attained to.”²⁹ Both Massaniello and Cromwell are criminals, but Heath goes on to describe Cromwell as the scourge of God: “But when the world shall see that those Felicities of his sword and Brain were derived from, and accountable solely to the just Judgement of God, who gave us up a deserved prey to the Spoiler … he being the Scourge of our Iniquity, they will convert their admiration into a reverence of that Supreme overruling power” (A4 verso).³⁰ In Heath's view, while Cromwell's revolt is sinful, its divine function is to punish England for its sins, and presumably the same would hold true for Massaniello; both in England and Naples in the 1640s, there were no good rulers—only punishers and punished.

In Howell's translation of Giraffi's Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples, Massaniello at his height is also the instrument of God, but in a purely positive sense. Massaniello's popularity is not limited to the poor: “With the praises which the common people gave Massaniello, concurr'd also the just Acclamation of divers of the Nobility and Gentry, of many sorts of Officers, of Ecclesiasticks, and all religious orders” (119). He is

freer of his Country, and the assertor of publike Liberty, from the Tyranny and gripes of so many ravening Wolfs both in City, Court and Kingdome … and all this was effected (not by the hand of some invincible Emperor, of some warlike Prince, but) by a young fellow, by a bare-footed Fisherman; This made it far more admirable, and to attribute it the more to God, Qui infirma mundi ligit, ut fortia quaeque confundat, who chooseth the weak things of the world to confound the strong.

(118-19)

While Massaniello deteriorates rapidly in Giraffi's history, his initial actions are justified and greeted with praise by members of all classes as a divinely sanctioned rectification of social injustice.

Durfey does not have the nobility praise Massaniello, but he does rely on the tradition that treats Massaniello as the scourge of God. The Duke of Mataloni (initially unsympathetic as a “farmer” of the gabells but subsequently the play's romantic lead) acknowledges as much when praying for his wife's safety: “Great Providence, whose all-controlling Will, hast for our Crimes, sent down this Plague on Naples, and makist the sparks of bright Nobility, lie hid in the vile Ashes of the Rabble …” (118). When weighing up Massaniello's accomplishments against his station, Mataloni assumes his success must be Heaven's will:

for is it not a Prodigy in Nature, that a base Boy, poor, ragged, and bare-footed—nay, even the lowest of the Wretched Vulgar, should in an Instant, as by Inspiration, be qualified to hold Dispute with Cardinals, negotiate State Affairs of grand Importance; draw out a powerful Army to Rebel, Command 'em, and with a Nod, a beck, an uncontroll'd Motion, subject all Naples; Naples, the Queen of Cities, Mother of Hero's—Metropolis and Rendezvouz of Princes, and in her full six hundred Thousand Souls, as Absolute as any natural Monarch—tis above Wonder—Let me wait Heaven's Pleasure then, for now it is not in my power to crush him, but with the ruin of my self, and Love.

(146)

“Inspiration” here presumably keeps its traditional sense and refers to divine intervention. With God's help, Massaniello is a prodigious figure, and, since Heaven has allowed Massaniello to act, only Heaven can stop him. A conspiracy formed by the bandito Perone and the crooked Jesuit Genovino actually gets two shots at Massaniello at close range; when both miss, Prince Bissignano, intermediary between Massaniello and the nobility, says, “This happy chance, which I Congratulate, shews the Divine Powers hold ye in regard” (140).

That Massaniello's rebellion should have religious implications was inevitable since it began on the festival of the Virgin of Carmine, an important community symbol; historically, this indicates that the revolt was not the work of the lazzaroni (unemployed men who lived primarily by theft and begging), but of the working classes.³¹ Not surprisingly then, just as English food riots were fundamentally conservative, so too Massaniello's revolt “was directed against the power of the aristocracy, and aspired to restore a golden age in which social justice was maintained by the joint action of the king and his people.”³² Durfey reminds his audience of the essentially backward looking nature of the revolt in a scene where the pious Cardinal Fillomerino calls Massaniello “A most notorious Rebel” and “Author of Murders and unnatural Riot”; Massaniello responds,

In part, yet not a rebel—I love the King, and for him and my Country, have undertook this dangerous Enterprise; the People were opprest with loading Gabells, and in th' Oppression, the King's Honour Tainted, which I resolve to abolish, tho I die for it.

(143-44)

When Massaniello makes this speech, he is entirely sympathetic to an English audience not terribly worried about their own poor since there were large amounts of affordable food, aware of the mistreatment of the poor of Naples, possibly willing to believe that Massaniello was an instrument of providential judgment, and reassured by the fact that Massaniello is reaffirming the authority of the king as a check against a nobility that has abdicated its role as protectors of the people.

Even when Massaniello goes mad under the combined pressure of lust for the Duchess of Mataloni, lack of sleep, and doped wine (the second denied and the last supplied him by ambitious followers who seek to prevent him from renouncing his power), the Cardinal's rejection of his own role as conciliator does not invite a topical application to England in 1700, because the motive he attributes to Massaniello is “a Rebellious Itch to quell the Nobles, and set up his base Ignominious self, as Viceroy, and turn us to a hated Commonwealth” (186). Threats to English stability in 1700 were, for Whigs, French power on the continent in the struggle over the Spanish Succession, or, for Tories, the possible tyranny that a standing army in England could allow William, or a Jacobite rebellion which neither Whigs nor Tories were likely to fear as a step towards a commonwealth since it would substitute a Stuart monarchy for William's. Nothing about Durfey's presentation of the Neapolitan rebellion invites a reading of the play that suggests a topical application to the political context of 1700. In its historical context, then, Massaniello's rebellion was more likely than not to be regarded as sympathetic. This is also true in the play's dramatic context. T. B.'s The Rebellion of Naples or the Tragedy of Massenello of 1649 shows Massaniello as dangerous, but the “democratic romances” around the turn of the eighteenth century offer models of justified revolts against tyranny.

T. B., identified on the title page as “a Gentleman who was an eyewitnes where this was really Acted upon that bloudy Stage, the streets of Naples,” disclaims any intention of political commentary on England: “and if there be anything in my booke which points at the present condition of our affairs, I assure you, the times are busie with me, and not I with the times.”³³ Nonetheless, the play shows Massenello (T. B.'s spelling) as corrupted by power almost immediately after the rebellion. The plight of the poor, as in non-dramatic sources, is sympathetic. As Genuino says, “And worse than Catterpillars, who only were devourers of the fruit upon their trees, yet [the aristocracy] have crept into the poor man's basket, and eat a third part of every apple out of the children's hands” (4). Genuino, however, is a corrupt clergyman, and very unlike the historical octagenarian who had been imprisoned for his attempts to help the people (Giraffi, 36). Historically and in Durfey's plays, Massaniello orders the burning of the palaces of the “farmers” of the gabells and threatens execution for any who save goods from the fire. T. B.'s Genuino, a Machiavel, explains to Massanello that the right to rule can be reduced to possession and that the houses of the farmers should therefore be plundered: “What is Nobility, but ancient riches? Get store of old gold, it's no matter whose 'tis, and search for bags that have not seen the Sun this many a day, and then you have ancient riches, and so consequently nobility” (“2-3”/18-19). T. B.'s Massanello is enraptured by this justification of power de facto: “Genuino, thou hast converted me, henceforth I will be covetous, high-minded, glorious and haughty” (“3”/19).

In a very similar scene, Durfey's Genovino tries to convince Massaniello to save the wealth of the “farmers” for the Church. Masaniello responds that the Church is rich in Grace, and the Jesuit Genovino explains that that is not enough. However, Massaniello sees through Genovino; he has previously described him as “my new Church Engine, us'd to encourage Fires not to quench 'em, whose Head and Counsels till I'm fix'd, I yield to; but when the Sword I grasp with Power Supream, I'll trust a Priest no longer with my Politicks” (110). Affecting to misunderstand Genovino, Massaniello agrees to accept wealth for himself: “This is thy Policy I know, my Machiavil, to have me Rich, then consequently Great—and it shall thrive as thou hast forg'd it” (111). In fact, however, Massaniello never allows plunder from the houses of the tax farmers, and when Genovino participates in a conspiracy against him, Massaniello has him executed. The corruption of Genovino emphasizes the essential honesty of Durfey's Massaniello.

In T. B.'s play, the Vice-Roy is a sympathetic character, incomparably superior to Massanello, who regrets the demands made on the peasants: “Poor People! how they shrink under the burthen we are forc'd to lay upon them” (7). As Massanello goes mad, the bakers, butchers, and brewers are happy to ask the Vice-Roy to reassume his role, and he makes clear that the difference between himself and Massanello is the difference between ruler and tyrant: “This is the Idoll which ye first set up, and then ador'd, now ye know the difference, betwixt a golden Scepter, and an iron rod” (69). After Massanello is killed, a crooked Fryer manipulates his body to fake a miracle with the intention of raising a new rebellion; a “prophetic Hermite” explains the imposture and says to the crowd, “O return therefore to your old obedience, & your hearts cannot desire more than your princes will give you, what is past shall be forgotten and forgive” (85). Whatever the abuses of the old system, the hierarchical social organization of Naples is divinely ordained and any disruption of it can only make things worse. Just to make sure this point is clear, T. B.'s Massanello has been aged from the historical fisherman in his mid-twenties, to a man with an adult daughter from a first marriage, and a second wife and second adult daughter. T. B. then creates a subplot where the Vice-Roy attempts to settle the rebellion by marrying the first daughter of Massanello to his own son—the “Prince” is also a non-historical character. Flora is perfectly virtuous and unwilling to go along; she kneels to the Prince and begs to be the servant of his future, appropriately noble, wife. The Prince, previously troubled by the plan, is charmed to love. What makes Flora attractive to the Prince is her recognition of subordinate status: “Humility is the crowne of all other vertues, and thou crownest humility, with such a becomingness, that shee is true humility no where but in thee; and it deserves an exaltation, which it shall soon finde” (61).

Of course T. B. cannot let the marriage actually settle the rebellion; Flora is poisoned by her jealous stepmother, who, in turn, has her neck broken by Massanello with his bare hands. But Flora represents both an acceptance of proper subservience by the lower classes, and the fantasy of meritorious advance through marriage; as such, she is a conventional figure derived from plays like Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday and Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. Flora's humility functions as the chief contrast to Massanello's hubris. He, overcome by his power, wants a monument to himself “fifty cubits higher than the highest of all Egypts Piramides” (57). Massanello becomes completely mad and fancies himself the divine ruler of the world:

and so I'le conquer all the world, and not like foole Alexander, lye down and cry, because there be no more worlds to conquer. I'le goe and be merry with the gods, drinke their wine, sing catches with the angells, hunt the Devill, run races with the horses of the Sun, hob-naile my shoos with a couple of old Moons, and so drinke a pot at every one of the celestial signes.

(62-63)

Unlike Marlow's Faustian figures, T. B.'s Massanello is contemptible even when describing his own transcendence of conventional limits; Tamburlaine does not “hob-naile” his shoes or “drinke a pot.”

Thus, the 1649 play on the rebellion emphasizes the chaos that results from a peasant rebellion, because no peasant is up to the task of rule, and a sympathetic ruler already exists; such a presentation is probably inevitable in a work from 1649 written by a gentleman. But around the turn of the century, several plays feature justified revolutions. Rowe's Tamerlane is “The Scourge of lawless Pride, and dire Ambition / The great avenger of the groaning World.” When he overthrows Bajazet, he does so “But to redress an injur'd People's Wrongs, / To save the weak One from the strong Oppressor.”³⁴ Similarly, the title character in the anonymous Timoleon (1697) also seeks nothing for himself:

          All my ambition was to set you free,
And break the Slavish Yoke of Tyranny:
When that is done, your freedom I'll restore,
That you may never dread a Tyrant more.(35)

Both of these characters are analogues of William, of course, and neither are peasants; Tamerlane has been promoted from Marlowe's Scythian shepherd to a prince of Parthia, and Timoleon from a citizen of Corinth to a prince of the same. But the fact that they seek nothing for themselves but only justice for the “people” makes them similar to Durfey's Massaniello. Most importantly, it is repeatedly emphasized that Massaniello, unlike T. B.'s protagonist, is a remarkable man capable of great actions, and that the nobles of Naples are unfit to govern. Before we ever see Massaniello, Cardinal Fillomerino warns the Duke of Mataloni and his brother Don Peppo that the rebellion needs to be taken seriously and calls Massaniello, “a Bold Fellow, who tho but a Fisherman, has yet strange Courage and uncommon Parts; one who I'm told, has, when his Nets lay Idle, sat often down to read in Politicks, and in His spare time study'd to catch Men” (100-101). Mataloni laughs at the warning and accuses the Cardinal of bias when he pleads for moderation in the treatment of the poor:

CARDINAL
My Lord, my holy Function does oblige me to preach Moderation, and to counsel those I want Power to Govern—And I could wish your Grace would make your self more Lov'd by the People, who, I confess, cry loudly on th'Exactions you late have crush'd 'em with: Nay, they now spare not to say the King's abus'd,—and that your Avarice puts all these Fetters on 'em.
MATALONI
My good Lord Cardinal, you were now for preaching Moderation; but now methinks your Talk seems byass'd Interest, and as the Rabble Dictate.

(101)

Mataloni's contempt for the poor emphasizes his indifference to their well-being; his inability to see Massaniello as a threat indicates ignorance. Whatever the anti-Catholic sentiment of the English audience, they knew that in this case the Cardinal was right: the Neapolitan poor were oppressed, and Massaniello was a threat. Mataloni will subsequently become the romantic hero of the play, but, significantly, only when he has lost his power. The audience is introduced to Mataloni when his noble arrogance and greed materially aid the rebellion.

Mataloni's contrition, however, contrasts with the bloodthirstiness of his brother Don Peppo de Carraffa, who, with the help of Genovino, plans to blow up the marketplace, killing Massaniello, the Duchess of Mataloni, and “a hundred thousand Vulgar” (127). Informed of this by the Cardinal, Mataloni rants,

Oh, this base Carraffa! this bloody Brother! But yet 'tis no more than what the Scheme of his past Life has promis'd, a Nature ever prompt to Cruelty, hardn'd in Ill, he oft would set me on to plague the People, and do things Unnatural, of which the Gabells late imposed, was one,—and which being too severe, has now Undone us.

(128)

Aside from the fact that this is another concession that the poor did have some justification for their rebellion, this emphasizes that cruelty and senseless ambition can be found in any class. Dramatically this is further emblematized by Mataloni's assumption of the disguise of a bandito to help Massaniello in foiling the plot. Noble honor also nearly foils a preliminary settlement of the people's grievances that would bring peace to Naples. Mataloni has difficulty controlling himself in a scene that shows Massaniello's self-control (174-75).³⁶

Mataloni, whatever his qualities when out of power, is not a competent member of the ruling class, nor is his vicious brother Peppo. But the best evidence that there is little to choose between rule by Massaniello and the nobility is the example of the Vice-Queen, Aurelia. Aurelia's wrath has nothing to do with abstract concepts such as justice and equity; very simply, Massaniello's peasant rebellion is an insult to her honor, and that insult must be revenged. Aurelia's lack of moderation is shown through the dramatic parallel of entertainments given by Blowzabella for Aurelia and vice versa. Blowzabella is vulgar, disgustingly fat, lecherous, yet essentially harmless. Except for her attempts to seduce Prince Bissignano (and others), she commits no crimes in the play. Because of her peasant background, when she attempts to entertain the ladies of the court with “a Comical Entertainment,” the result is predictably inappropriate. “Humorous Songs and Dialogues” between “a Town-Sharper and his Hostess” and a “Chimney-Sweeper's Boy” and a “Cook-maid” deserve the comment of Belleraiza, the Duchess of Mataloni: “Had the Times been setled, I could have laugh'd at the Extravagance of it well enough” (180). But however “low” the entertainment, the point of the dialogues is comical conciliation. The Hostess is going to turn in the Sharper for not paying his bills, but he offers his body instead, and she accepts the counter-offer: “Well I'll the Bailiffs stop a while / To try your Fa la, &c.” (178). When the cookmaid tries to drive the chimney sweep away, he tells her that he saw her with the coachman. Again, a compromise is reached:

COOK-MAID
I'll feed thee till I cloy,
My pretty, pretty Boy,
Thou shalt thy Breakfast have each morn
BOY
And you all night shall have your joy.

(180)

In both dialogues, a mutual tolerance for others' weaknesses achieves mutually beneficial results. Fellicia, the Duke of Caivano's innocent daughter, says with unconscious irony, “'tis well enough to see once” (180); in fact, in Blowzabella's entertainment we see the only compromise in the play.

Aurelia's masque for Blowzabella features “three Figures, the one Representing Death, the other a Hangman, the third the Devil” (206). The masque is about the hell reserved for rebels; at its end, Blowzabella is seized, forced to kneel to Aurelia, and then taken off to be hanged. Aurelia then explains the difference between the vulgar and the truly noble:

What can your Mightyneses bow so low, you that could so late dash at the Nobility, and kick your Kennel-dirt up in their Faces; Hah! can you Truckle now ye Groveling Slaves, y'are in your right stations,—low as your Parent-clod. Then throw their hated Carcasses on Dunghills, drag 'em to death; at last the hour is come, tho' long expected, which my indulgent Genius did reserve to gratifie the labour of my Soul for all its Torments during this Rebellion—Mean Souls when wrong'd, mean Satisfaction take. The great can only be with Blood repaid. And Death the least Attonement can be made.

(207-208)

I do not think it is possible for an audience to sympathize with this speech, now or in 1700. Aside from Aurelia's lack of charity, her vilification of the now helpless, her enjoyment of her own cruelty, and, above all, her emphasis that this is not punishment for rebellion but for lese majeste, invite comparison with Blowzabella at her own entertainment. The Neapolitan poor when in power are vulgar; the Neapolitan nobility return to their old habits of arrogant viciousness. As we have seen, the Cardinal begins the plays advising moderation; Aurelia, no more than three minutes from the end of the plays, shows that the nobility have learned nothing. And, as the London audience would have known, historically, within two days of the death of Massaniello, a new rebellion breaks out with Massaniello as its martyred hero.

This is not to say that the rabble are not capable of equal cruelty. Massaniello's brother Pedro rapes Fellicia, which partially accounts for Aurelia's revenge, although she had planned on vengeance from the beginning. But the character in the play with whom Aurelia has most in common is Massaniello. Mataloni calls Massaniello “the Fire-Drake” (172) when talking to Aurelia, and when Belleraiza and Fellicia are captured by the rebels Aurelia says, “Fury unquenchable my Breast does burn, / I change my Nature, and a Dragon turn” (197). In a scene where they confront each other, Massaniello asks Aurelia what she would do to him if she had the opportunity, she tells him in bloody detail, and he releases her to show his lack of fear. But what bothers her most is that he has the temerity to talk to her at all:

AURELIA
But thus to play the Dilatory Fiend, to Teaze me all this while with thy curst Figure … is the curst Quintessence of Cruelty, and I grow Mad with my Despair.
MASSANIELLO
'Tis reasonable; I am Mad too, and so are all my People; the Times are Mad, we should be in the Fashion.

(189-90)

Massaniello clearly has the best of their confrontation, but Durfey is also depicting how similar they are. In Naples, the choice between rebel and Vice-queen is only a choice between the mad.

Contrary then to what other critics have suggested, Durfey's play is not about the horrors of popular rebellion, because the Neapolitan status quo is also horrible—only the victims change. And the last word is the Cardinal's, who ends the play talking about how close to greatness Massaniello came:

Had Massaniello when he sign'd the Articles,
Renounc'd his Sway, and modestly retir'd,
The Action past so Great, so Beneficial,
Would almost have Atton'd for his Rebellion:
He had deserv'd a Golden Statue raised
To keep his Fame to perpetuity.

(209)

“The Moral” is that God uses rebels “First to purge others Crimes, and last their own” (209). Unlike T. B.'s Massenello, Durfey's protagonist accomplishes great things; in part one he is very similar to the Massaniello described by an unnamed writer in yet another recounting of the history of the rebellion in The Ladies Magazine in 1751: “Thus rose and fell Masaniello of Amalfi, the dread of the Spaniards, the Avenger of publick Oppressions, and the Saviour of his desolate Country.”³⁷ Durfey's Massaniello is a transitional figure and represents Durfey's doubt about sustainable, beneficent rebellion granted the nature of fallen man, at least in places like Naples. Power overcomes the best of individuals. The chief distinction between characters like Timoleon and Tamerlane on the one hand, and Massaniello and Aurelia on the other, is their self-control. Timoleon in a moment of doubt suspects himself, but quickly regains his rationality: “But Prince's Minds, like Royal Forts, should / Bravely bid Defiance, then, tho' Passion storms, / Reason at length will get the better” (53). The anonymous author presents a perfectly happy revolution, where Timoleon actually performs what Massaniello promises—having achieved social justice he retires. Liberty is easy enough to achieve and love preferable to power in this optimistic portrayal of the just avenger. In a situation exactly parallel to Massaniello's, Tamerlane is drawn to Arpasia, the wife of the tyrannical Sultan Bajazet. This is not a problem for Rowe's virtuous hero:

Struck with a pleasing Wonder, I beheld her,
Till by a Slave that waited near her Person,
I learnt she was the Captive Sultan's Wife;
Strait I forbid my Eyes the dangerous Joy
Of gazing long, and sent her to her Lord.

(70)

Rational self-control solves all problems because in the democratic romances virtue is a legitimate counterweight to power.

Durfey's Massaniello is a throwback to a less optimistic view of human nature and subverts Locke's whiggish paradigm that man is natively peaceful. At the end of part one, Don Tiberio accurately predicts Massaniello's downfall: “He has sworn to lay down Arms, and yet I doubt him, for Power, like new Wine, in so young a Head, may well intoxicate and turn the Brain” (158). The problem is not merely that Massaniello is a peasant and therefore incapable of self-control when given power; the nobles of Naples are nearly as bad. At the beginning of part one, when Massaniello is told of people flocking to his cause he says, “Rare rare News—Sirs, and merrily strait we'll meet 'em, and then go hunt for this Leviathan here, the Farmer of the Gabells,—Duke of Mataloni” (103). At the beginning of part two when the social hierarchy is reversed, the Vice-roy asks “What Order bring you now? what dreadful Thunder, since his revolt of Sealing th'Articles, and his damn'd Message to send back the Dutchess; must we leave our half-starv'd Bodies? Hah! what says th'Leviathan” (165). The appetites of Leviathan belong to whoever is in power. Aurelia and Mataloni when in the ascendency are no more capable of self-denial than Massaniello.

When Don Peppo plots to kill Massaniello by blowing him up along with the Duchess of Mataloni and one hundred thousand peasants, Mataloni, in disguise, joins with Massaniello and wins his favor. Massaniello offers advancement and Mataloni replies, “Pray, Sir, not too much of your Trust, I may deceive ye; for what I have done, perhaps I had my Reasons, but if you burthen me with Place and Office—I shall do like most of the rest in such Cases; I shall serve my self in the first place” (134). The immediate irony is subordinate to the larger irony that Mataloni has in fact described his own behavior when in power, where, seeking wealth for himself, he did indeed act much like Massaniello's accomplices, and, after power has seduced him, Massaniello himself.

Durfey offers no solutions. The Cardinal suggests that the people should have read Seneca, “whose sacred Morals inflame the Sense, and ease the troubled Minds of those that can discern and taste thy Learning” (141). Stoicism would solve the problems of the poor since they would learn indifference to their own suffering. Unfortunately, as the play shows, even the nobility are incapable of stoicism when their own suffering is involved. As an alternate peaceful vision, Belleraiza wishes that she and the Duke had been born to humbler circumstances:

Or that you and I were Villagers, born in some far remote and peaceful Land, that War's Confusion neer did understand; where we instead of Greatness had been blest, with darling Comforts from our daily Labour.

(164)

This pastoral fantasy mirrors the play's dedication to Lord Leigh, who like “Great Atticus [has] retir'd from Rome, to employ his happy Hours amongst rural Pleasures” (95). But while happiness may exist for shepherds in other countries or wealthy rural barons in England, there is no peace for rich or poor in Naples.

Defoe's less than sunny “The True-Born Englishman,” also published in 1700, sounds a theme similar to Massaniello but with a fundamentally optimistic difference:

The government's ungirt when justice dies,
And constitutions are nonentities.
The nation's all a mob, there's no such thing
As Lords or Commons, Parliament or King.
A great promiscuous crowd the Hyrdra lies,
Til laws revive, and mutual contract ties.(38)

As in Massaniello, where there is no justice, there is no real distinction between the upper and lower classes; everyone takes on the characteristics of the mob. But Defoe assumes that obedience to law revives the social contract, and, reference to King and Parliament aside, the generalized nature of the statement implies that such a reconciliation is universally possible. But Durfey's examination of the troubles of Naples suggests that the happy results of the Glorious Revolution are largely fortuitous, a lucky combination of the right man in the right culture at the right time. In different circumstances, there may be no possible happy outcome because there never was a social contract to resuscitate, as was the case in seventeenth-century Naples. The condemnation of both sides, rulers and rebels, makes Durfey's play similar to Otway's Venice Preserved both formally (as mixed satires) and thematically; the English audience is invited to count their blessings in that Charles II and William are preferable to political “innovation.” We should remember that the optimism of plays like Tamerlane and Timoleon is perfectly justified. As a matter of historical fact, the revolutionary settlement of 1688 has led to more than three hundred years of political stability in England. The power of Durfey's Massaniello comes from its compelling portrayal of a situation like that of Northern Ireland or the Soviet Union today, political conflicts for which there may be no possible solution in the foreseeable future.

Notes

1. The play's summer premiere probably did not help, and it was a bad season in general for both companies; see Judith Milhous, Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln's Inn Fields, 1695-1708 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), 141.

2. For narratives of the events of the rebellion see David Ogg, Europe in the Seventeenth Century, 8th ed. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1960), 385-88, and Roger Bigelow Merriman, Six Contemporaneous Revolutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 18-24.

3. Benedetto Croce, History of the Kingdom of Naples, trans. Frances Frenaye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 39.

4. Eric Rothstein calls Massaniello a “Tory play written while Whiggery was in power”: “While Massaniello remains a coarse but disinterested, just, and brave ruler, his reign is good; when he stoops from monarchy and allows his passions, represented by the ambitious Blowzabella and other relatives (i.e., the rabble) to govern him, Durfey damns him”; Restoration Tragedy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 171. Robert Hume agrees: “Durfey succeeds marvellously in showing the horrifying beastiality of the mob. Massaniello is a fiery Tory play, taking a bitterly contemptuous view of vulgar workers and tradesmen who meddle in politics” (The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century [Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1976], 456). Nancy Grayson Holmes does not call it a Tory play, but does agree that the play was designed to show the horror of mob rule and “the impossibility of sustained enlightened action on the part of a popular ruler endowed with absolute power” (A Critical Edition of Thomas Durfey's The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of Massaniello, Ph.D. diss., University of Tennessee 1980, 76). I do not disagree with Holmes, but, as will become apparent, I think Massaniello is more sympathetic than she does, and Durfey is as hard on the nobility as he is on the mob.

5. Cyrus Lawrence Day, The Songs of Thomas D'Urfey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), 12-16.

6. Holmes, p. 169. All subsequent references to Durfey's Massaniello are to this edition.

7. Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (London: Nelson, 1961), 280.

8. J. R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution (Totowa, N. J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972), 329.

9. Players' Scepters (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 100.

10. The Divided Society: Parties and Politics in England, 1694-1716, ed. Geoffrey Holmes and W. A. Speck (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), 78.

11. Michael Mullet, “Popular Culture and Popular Politics: Some Regional Case Studies,” in Britain in the First Age of Party, 1680-1750, ed. Clyve Jones (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987), 148.

12. Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: John Murray, 1926, rpt. 1948), 253-73.

13. John Walter and Roger Schofield, Introduction, Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society, ed. Walter and Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 17.

14. Daniel A. Baugh, “Poverty, Protestantism, and Political Economy: English Attitudes Toward the Poor, 1660-1800,” in England's Rise to Greatness, ed. Stephen B. Baxter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 82.

15. Max Beloff, Public Order and Popular Disturbances, 1660-1714 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 58.

16. Angus MacInnes, “The Revolution and the People,” in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, ed. Geoffrey Holmes (London: Macmillan, 1969), 85. Riots over food, even when they attacked the gentry and the wealthy, also tended to defer to a popular image of the king as “father and saviour of the people” (Mullet, 146).

17. C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 223.

18. Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 152.

19. The Peace of Utrecht passed Naples to the Emperor in 1697 and the Partition Treaty of 1700 conceded it to France. The latter deal was unpopular with traders to the Levant; see G. C. Gibbs, “The Revolution in Foreign Policy,” in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, 64-70.

20. Reprinted in Edward Chaney, The Grand Tour and the Great Rebellion (Florence: Slatkine Geneve, 1985), 176.

21. An Exact History of the Late Revolutions in Naples (London: 1664), 4.

22. Observations Topographical, Moral, & Physiological (London: John Martyn, 1673), 271.

23. Dr. Burnets Travels (Amsterdam: P. Savouret and W. Fenner, 1687), 10.

24. The anonymous Travels Through France and Italy (1647-1649) advises travellers that “The common people of Naples are extremely fraudulent, therefore by an Argus and Harpocrates, see much, say little, beleeve less” (Introduction and notes Luigi Monda, ed. Luigi Monda and Chris Hassel [Florence: Slatkine Geneve, 1987], 91). Maximilien Misson, a Protestant refugee from France who toured Italy in 1688 as “bear-leader” to Charles Butler, subsequently Earl of Arran, writes “To speak in general, the People of Naples are a very wicked People; the Prisons swarm with Malefactors” (A New Voyage to Italy [4th ed., London: R. Bonwicke, 1714], 2:426). Biographical information on Misson is taken from H. Neville Maugham, The Book of Italian Travel, 1580-1900 (London: Grant Richards, 1903), 31.

25. Edmund Warcup, Italy in its Original Glory, Ruine, and Revival (London: S. Griffin, 1660), 264. Warcup was translating Francis Schotus' Itenario d'Italia, published in Latin in 1600; see John Walton Stowe's English Travellers Abroad, 1604-1667 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1952), 198-99.

26. Three Letters Concerning the Present State of Italy (n.p.: n.p., 1688), 115.

27. Letters from James Drummond, Earl of Perth (London: Camden Society, 1845), 97.

28. Gerald M. Straka, Anglican Reactions to the Revolution of 1688 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1962), 72-73.

29. Flagellum: or the Life and Death, Birth and Burial of Oliver Cromwell (London: L. R., 1663), A4 recto.

30. William Pudey also regards the rebellions in Naples and England as similar examples of the actions of “a Sovereign Power which disposes of Futurity”; A Political Essay: or, Summary Review of the Kings and Governments of England since the Norman Conquest (London: n.p., 1698), 142.

31. Peter Burke, The Historical Anthropology of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 205.

32. J. H. Elliot, “Revolts in the Spanish Monarchy,” in Preconditions of Revolution in Early Modern Europe, ed. Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 126.

33. (London: J. G. & G. B., 1649). All subsequent references are to this edition. This edition is not consecutively paginated. Where the pagination is faulty, I cite by putting the actual page numbers in quotation marks, followed by what the page numbers would be if the pagination were consecutive.

34. Tamerlane, ed. Landon C. Burnes, Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1966), 22-23.

35. Timoleon, or the Revolution (London: W. Onley for John Sturton, 1697), 2.

36. In part two of Massaniello, the spelling of the title character's name changes to “Massainello.” For the sake of consistency, I have maintained the spelling “Massaniello” whenever referring to Durfey's play.

37. The Ladies Magazine (London) 2 (1751): 303. I am indebted to Steven Hicks for drawing my attention to this history of the rebellion.

38. Poems on Affairs of State, ed. George DeF. Lord (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 646.