[In the following excerpt, Wheatley discusses English sex comedies from the 1670s and 1680s, of which Durfey's A Fond Husband and The Virtuous Wife were among the most popular and influential.]

In Thomas Shadwell's A True Widow (1678) the poetaster Young Maggot describes a new play that he admires to the male leads Bellamour and Carlos: “I saw it Scene by Scene, and helped him in the writing, it breaks well, the Protasis good, the Catastasis excellent, there's no Episode, but the Catastrophe is admirable, I lent him that and the love parts, and the Songs. There are a great many sublimes that are very poetical.”¹ In act 4, all the main characters actually watch a play about a cuckolding that Young Maggot praises because “'tis admirably worded” (336). The passage below is a representative sample of the dialogue of the play-within-the-play:

LOVER
But since Fortune (by so many frequent Signalizations) has demonstrated how much she is a friend to us, in assisting us with so many Subterfuges, when most we have needed them, it will be a hainous tergiversation from her, to abandon that trust we formerly have reposed in her, and she may justly take a Picque at our infidelity, and, in that Caprice, may contrive a revenge sutable to our delinquency.
WIFE
Rather Fortune may be apt to believe us too audacious, in tempting her with so much importunity, that it must needs be more vexatious than agreeable; and while we make such vigorous addresses to another Deity, for ought we know, Love may wax jealous of our Applications to it: For though he's blind, he can descry, and will greatly resent our Dereliction; and, when he is incensed, his Nature is highly vindicative.

(335)

This polysyllabic perversity draws from one of the female leads, Theodosia, the comment, “This is very lewd Stuff: Is this the new way of Writing?” (335). Carlos's response emphasizes the contrast between the language and the action: “A Man would think these Lovers in Plays did not care a farthing for one another, when they find nothing to do but to be florid, and talk impertinently when they are alone” (335-36). The language is “impertinent” because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the subject of adulterous sex, around which, after all, the action of the play-within-the-play revolves. The elevated style in which the characters speak is inappropriate to the subject in the view of the normative characters in Shadwell's play.

But Shadwell's play shows his recognition—and contempt—for the “comic sublime” in the sex comedies of the late 1670s and early 1680s. Young Maggot's sublime play is, in fact, a parody of Thomas Durfey's smash hit A Fond Husband (1677), where the elevated style of transport and raptures has been pressed into the service of a cuckolding. Nor is Durfey's play unique; Aphra Behn's Sir Patient Fancy (1678) uses the sublime style in a similar fashion. While undoubtedly the sublime in these plays sometimes indicates a comical intercourse between mismatched elements, a feast of fools where the low become high, I would also like to argue that on another level the sublime is to be taken seriously in these plays as a celebration of a nobly irregular attitude toward marriage, a “marvelous” indifference to the conventional.² The Latin adjective “altus” associated with the rhetorical sublime means both height and depth, and the deviation from the mean in these plays locates the sublime in the conflict between desire and repellent social practice. This paper will first examine the comic sublime in Longinus and show how the sublime operates in A Fond Husband and Sir Patient Fancy, in contrast to Dryden's mock-heroic deflation of the comic sublime in Mr. Limberham. Subsequently, I will examine the ways in which Otway, Leanerd, Ravenscroft, and, most importantly, Durfey himself reject adulterous love as an expression of the sublime.

Monk's distinction between the Longinian or rhetorical sublime, which Monk sees as primarily a style characterized by loftiness, and the aesthetic sublime that Monk sees as finding its perfect expression in Kant, is more useful as a heuristic device than as a representation of what people in the seventeenth century actually thought.³ Theodore E. B. Wood has shown that the word “sublime” was frequently used in a much more general sense in the seventeenth century than Monk allows,⁴ and Boileau is quite clear that there is more to the sublime than mere eloquence: “It must be observed then that by the sublime he [Longinus] does not mean what the orators call the sublime style, but something extraordinary and marvelous that strikes us in a discourse and makes it elevate, ravish, and transport us.”⁵ This is not to say that eloquence is not important to the sublime; the third, fourth, and fifth elements of the sublime are “figures diversly fashioned,” “Stateliness of expression,” and the “ordering and well placing of sentences according to their magnificence and dignity.”⁶

But words like “elevate” and “ravish” suggest subliminal sexual energy. We can see this also in Longinus's description of how the sublime operates:

For that which is truly Sublime, has this inseparable quality, that it affects the Soul of him who hears it, and makes her conceive a better Opinion of her self, filling her with an unusual Joy, and a kind of a (I know not what) pride, as if she her self had been the Author of what she does but barely hear.

(21)

The sublime acts upon our innately feminine (because passive) souls, filling us with conceptions that we did not previously have. When the sublime is “conceive[d],” the result is “joy” and a participation in creation or “authorship.”

And while we, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics, typically associate the sublime with the Bible, epics, and tragedies,⁷ comedy, like the language of sexuality, impinges on the sublime. For instance, Longinus describes as sublime an exchange between Alexander and Parmenio, which shows

the exalted and lofty fancies of High-Spirited men. See for example, the Answer which Alexander made, when Darius proffered him half Asia in marriage with his Daughter. Were I Alexander (said Parmenio) I would accept the offer, and so would I (reply'd the Prince) If I were Parmenio. Could any one but an Alexander have made such a reply.

(29)

This is sublime because it illustrates the greatness of Alexander's conception of himself; only Alexander could make such a reply, partially because only Alexander was ever in the position to decline such an offer, but also because the great-souled man will not accept less than his due. But that doesn't alter the fact that it is also a fairly decent drop-dead line, and as such is similar to a line in the recent movie Heathers; when one of the Heathers is asked “Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch,” Heather's answer, “Because I can,” shows the same truly sublime contempt for a person of lesser power presuming to apply his or her petit-bourgeois standards of morality to the truly great.⁸ The comic is less likely to be sublime than epics or tragedies—Longinus regards the Iliad as more sublime than the Odyssey, because sections in the latter about Penelope and her suitors have comic elements (40)—but the comic can achieve sublime stature.

Sappho's love poetry is also an example of the sublime. Longinus quotes with approval a fairly salacious bit and asks us to “Observe how strangely she is toss'd to and fro; now she freezes, then she burns; now is out of her wits, then again grows sober; now at the very point of death: In a word, her Soul does not so much seem the seat of one single Passion, as the general Rendez-vouze of all; and so is it with all those who love” (43-44). Sexual passion, then, can inspire wonder if it is turbulent enough. Significantly, Longinus sees the sublime in Sappho's lesbian love poetry (although he does not identify the lyric as such), which, like adultery, is strange and marvelous if only in that it isn't ordinary marital sex.

Sappho's love poetry also illustrates the danger from loss of control inherent in the sublime. Peter De Bolla describes this danger in terms of the relationship between performer and audience:

The sublime comes to reign over the hearer, which is a conventional description of the power of eloquence, but the suggestion is also present that “sublimity flashing forth” may not only overpower the audience but also the orator—it scatters everything before it.⁹

Sappho desires to prevail over her beloved with her love poetry, but the result is that passion prevails over Sappho as well. In drama, the action of the sublime is even more complex. The gallant or mistress prevails over his or her beloved, while at the same time the lover is also overcome by his or her own passion. Simultaneously, the cuckold is overcome in a much more literal sense. The sublime's final effect is to overcome the audience of the play, as they are required to suspend their conventional judgments on adultery.

The politics of sexuality enter the sublime under the second of Longinus's elements, (the first is “regular elevation of thought”); essential to the sublime is “being pathetical; by which is meant that Enthusiasm and Natural vehemency which touches and affects us” (24). It is a gift of nature and a kind of “divine rapture” (27). “Rapture,” of course, is one of the most common epithets used by gallants to define their feelings to prospective or current mistresses. This rapture in Longinus refers to a quality of the soul in the artist—and by extension the lover as artist—who creates the sublime and which is reflected in the audience. That quality is connected to liberty: “For the mind (continued he) being kept under, and subject to controll, dares not attempt any thing that is bold or noble” (161). By liberty, Longinus means political liberty; yet marriage is also a method of control, particularly of women. Indeed, the sublime is inevitably “the polar opposite” of the “economic arrangement or disposition (epoikonomia) of facts or of passions.”¹⁰ The adulterous wives of Restoration comedy, merely by refusing to accept the social and economic control of marriage, move towards the sublime on a political level.

Longinus is not just interested in describing the sublime; he is interested in trying to teach it, and freedom from social convention is the lesson learned by Restoration wives and rakes. John Hall, who published an English translation on Longinus in 1652, describes eloquence as “A way of speech prevailing over those whom we designe it prevail.”¹¹ Sublime style in 1670s gallants and wives helps them prevail over their mistresses and lovers; the truly sublime element, however, is the marvelous victories over the base husbands and over the audience, as they submit to a dramatic challenge to the ordering principles of society.

II

Durfey's A Fond Husband does not merely use the language of the sublime, but it comically suggests that adultery provides an opportunity for a sublime contempt towards social convention; in other words, Durfey's lovers live up to their language. The play begins with Rashley singing to his mistress Emilia, the wife of Peregrine Bubble, who is described in the cast list as “A credulous fond Cuckold”:

But Vigorous and Young I'll flee to thy Arms,
Infusing my Soul in Elizium of Charms.
A Monarch I'll be when I lie by thy side,
And thy pretty Hand my Scepter shall guide.(12)

The euphemisms allow the song to be in the play, but the particular choice of substitutes elevates illicit love. The “soul” is transported to paradise, and the lover ennobled to a monarch wielding a symbol of power and authority. More exalted than Rashley, however, is Emilia, and the symbol of her power is her ability to use language. Bubble praises Emilia as “one of the pearls of Eloquence.—And Pop,—by the way let me tell you, there's ne'er an Orator in Christendom has more Tropes and Figures, take her when her hands in” (5).

Opposed to Emilia and Rashley are Maria, Bubble's sister and in love with Rashley, and Ranger, in love with Emilia. Maria's desire for revenge on Emilia renders her capable of sublime wrath:

Fool'd by a Brothers wife! A Creature that the Law makes kin to me! No, 'twas tamely thought, and I as tamely now should suffer wrongs had I a Dastard Spirit. But in me Nature has shown her Master-piece, and to a Masculine person Providence has bestowed an Active Soul so sensible of wrongs, that to forgive would argue me as base as is their treachery.

(12)

Maria's soul has been stirred to action not merely from jealousy, but from a fear of being “base”; her revenge is not a mean satisfaction, but indeed proof that she has not “a Dastard Spirit.” The conflict between Emilia and Maria would not be out of place in Lee's tragedy The Rival Queens, which preceded Durfey's play by two months, but the weapon is wit rather than poison. In a confrontation scene, the motif of height and depth recurs:

MARIA
Thy Wit! they Wit compare with mine, insipid Fool?
EMILIA
Yes; and my prosp'rous Fate shall mount me far above thy shallow Stratagems.

(21)

Emilia's ascendancy is partially the product of her ability to outwit Maria's schemes, and partially the fact that all the men in the play are attracted to her rather than Maria; but her linguistic supremacy identifies her as the victor even more than Maria's ultimate failure to punish Emilia for attracting Rashley. Even Maria, however, participates in the sublime in that unlike Mrs. Loveit in The Man of Mode, Maria is never humiliated, only defeated.

Even the hapless Ranger is inspired to poetic utterance as he is worsted by Emilia, breaking into blank verse to describe her as the model for a “Commonwealth” of fiends (24), and when Bubble refuses to believe that Emilia has cuckolded him, Ranger muses, “So Paris stole the Wife of Menelaus, and Troy grew bright with fire” (25). Emilia, like Falstaff, is not merely witty in herself, but the cause of wit in others. The folly of Bubble and the impotence of Maria and Ranger magnify her victories, however temporary, to epic stature.

Jonathan Lamb has argued that Tristram Shandy can be best understood as the expression of a genre of the comic sublime that begins with Don Quixote. The heroes of such works in the eighteenth century, characters like Adams, Toby, and Lismahago, are eccentrics: their “singularity argues some sort of opposition to society and an integrity which is irregular in terms of the social forms it ignores but which is consistent and coherent in terms of private values.”¹³ The private values in Lamb's examples are rarely far from garden-variety Christianity, while the society they oppose is normally foolish or vicious on some level. But in plays like A Fond Husband, while the society remains corrupt, the opposing consistent and private values are sexual gratification and personal freedom. This does not render these values contemptible. In a subplot, the attractive Cordelia is threatened with marriage by the repulsive old Fumble. When he asks her if he is old, she says, “So old, that your presence is more terrible than a Deaths-Head at Supper: for my part I tremble all over. There's a kind of horrour in all your antick gestures; ‘specially those that you think become you,—that fright worse than the Devil; than the Devil, Sir” (49). Cordelia escapes marriage with Fumble, but dramatically she indicates the presence of the fear and pain that are attendant on the sublime. Emilia did not escape and hence exists caught between the pain of marital relations with Bubble and the pleasure of her affair with Rashley. When the only choice is between a horrific marriage and a rapturous affair, the affair ceases to be stigmatized. Neither Fumble nor Bubble is sublime; rather, the marriage of convenience provides an occasion for the sublime as Emilia transcends the hardships connected to such a marriage.

When Emilia hesitates at one point, Rashley contrasts the caution of social convention with the passion and liberty of sublime lovers:

Dam Consideration; 'Tis a worse Enemy to Mankind than Malice: Let impotent Age consider, that is fit for nothing but dull tame thoughts of what he has been formerly: Let the Lawyer and Physitian consider, what Quibbles, and what Potions are most necessary: And let the slie Phanatick think his time out, and consider how to be securely factious: But let the Lover love on, still transported, whilst all his thoughts and sences are employ'd in the dear Joys of rapture, endless passion, without a grain of dull Consideration.

(52)

Against the base line of cautious old people, lawyers who patch the fabric of society, doctors who patch the decaying body, and religious zealots who seek personal advantage, the lovers are transported to a higher plane of passion. Consideration is the mean, while rapture is the extreme that the lovers achieve.

Close to the beginning of the play, Rashley establishes the superiority of the lovers: “Fear nothing, Madam: Fear is the worst of passions, and incident to base, not noble Hearts” (3). The nobility of the lovers is demonstrated when eventually, despite Emilia's “inventions,” Rashley and she are cornered, whereupon Rashley begins a motif subsequently borrowed by Otway and Leanerd to different effect. Rashley remarks coolly, “Well, Sir, if I have injur'd you, I wear a Sword, Sir,—and so—Farewel” (61). The helplessness of Bubble to take any effective revenge on Rashley leaves the lovers triumphant, as Rashley exits having demonstrated his superiority with every weapon of a gentleman.

The sublimity that the language of A Fond Husband aspires to is ultimately justified by the dramatic action. The sublime can, of course, be used as a deflationary device, as mock-heroic providing an ironic commentary on the gap between subject and style. Dryden's Mr. Limberham, or the Kind Keeper (1678) is an example of this usage. When the title character accuses his mistress of infidelity, she tells him he must be drunk and should sleep it off. Mr. Limberham laments, “Thou hast robbed me of my repose for ever: I am like Macbeth, after the death of good King Duncan; methinks a voice says to me,—Sleep no more; Tricksy has murdered sleep.”¹⁴ In this play, departures into the sublime are the province of the cuckolds. Brainsick, too, speaks in an elevated style; when his wife tells him that she has left the company to relieve herself, he says, “Your sex is but one universal ordure, a nuisance, and an encumbrance of that majestic creature, man: yet I myself am mortal too. Nature's necessities have called me up; produce your utensil of urine” (85). The coupling of elimination with loftiness emblematizes Brainsick's refusal to see his own insignificance; his eloquence is an empty superstructure concealing only from himself a base of animal functions and human folly. Woodall, who cuckolds both Limberham and Brainsick and passes up a third opportunity with his landlady only because of exhaustion, ordinarily speaks in simple, colloquial prose. Dryden's play, written to capitalize on the trend started by A Fond Husband, satirizes the notion that fornication and adultery are fit subjects for an elevated treatment precisely through the use of the lofty style.¹⁵ Woodall is tamed by marriage, and Mr. Limberham and Brainsick continue to enjoy Tricksy and Mrs. Brainsick, Brainsick completely free of any suspicion that he has been cuckolded. But Bubble in A Fond Husband is unable to doubt that Emilia has cuckolded him, and he remains unable to do anything about it because of his “base” heart. Durfey's ending insists on the sublimity of the lovers because he, unlike Dryden, provides no conventional surrender to decorum. …

… Although Durfey's comic sublime is appropriated and fractured by other playwrights, Durfey himself rejects it in A Virtuous Wife (1679). The soul, sublime in its awareness of its liberty, achieves this state through drunkenness. When Beverly's mistress Jenny/Mathilda (she appears in the dialogue headings under both names) remonstrates with him on his inebriation, he defends drinking as the great liberator of man from social convention: “why I tell thee 'tis as natural to us as to thee, Lying, Drunnkeness is the Souls Carnaval, where the noble Essence has liberty to range and divert it self, uncontroul'd by the severe Rules of Wisdom, Nature, Religion, or Honesty; why would I drink agen, there's a question indeed.”¹⁶ The freedom of the carnival is opposed in this speech, not to contemptible social practices, as in A Fond Husband, but to systems of order, natural and social.

Disguise is the visual embodiment of Beverly's search for a passion that transcends the boundaries of marriage. When he leaves Olivia, the virtuous wife of the title, he does so in a mask: “So, now to my Mistriss; in this disguise I think I need not fear being Dogg'd by my plaguy-Wife, or any of her Setters; for she's as Revengeful and Jealous as an Italian that has trapan'd his Wife in Masquerade” (34). Beverly's simile inverts “natural” hierarchy; Olivia becomes by analogy the male figure and Beverly the trapped wife. This inversion shows that the mask of the carnival is not empowering but demeaning. Indeed, Olivia punishes Beverly by disguising herself as a man and pretending to seduce Jenny. Aghast, Beverly says, “How now? What a Devil have we here? a young Masquerade, that hopes to ingratiate himself by taking her part—” (47). While pretending contempt for the disguised Olivia, Beverly must resume a disguise to seek his revenge on the young gallant she is playing:

Revenge, as it is the solace of wrong'd spirits, so 'tis a benefit design'd by Heaven, to shew the difference between the brave and coward: 'tis the Cordial drop that sweetens the injuries we have receiv'd, and gives us courage to repay 'em.

(54)

This speech shows Beverly's characteristic weakness. On the one hand, revenge is a chance to show courage and separates the brave from the base. On the other, the desire for revenge is what makes courage possible; that is, Beverly is brave only when seeking revenge, and he can seek revenge only when in disguise. Beverly's attempts at the sublime show only his weakness; Rashley, in A Fond Husband, is at his best when confronting the man he has cuckolded after all has been discovered. Beverly's desire for a role that transcends convention is dramatized as the drunken celebration of a masked reveller; while such a portrayal may not be inherently negative, Beverly's own rejection of that role by the end of the play indicates that in this play the role is meant to be seen as unattractive.

The closest thing to sublime passion in the play is Olivia's refusal to be the obsequious wife when she surprises Beverly with Jenny and he asks her to overlook the incident:

OLIVIA
What be your Bawd my self! oh Confusion! have I been bred with such Integrity, taught Virtue from my Cradle, practis'd it, supply'd the office of a Wife with credit, and ne'r did action that could taint my Innocence—have I been this, to be at last a Pandress—What, catch my Husband with a whore, and wink at it?
…
BEVERLY
Excellent! Is there a greater fury than a virtuous Wife? no, not in Hell, I am confirm'd in't.

(24-25)

Beverly's comparison of his wife with a devil shows his implicit recognition that Olivia is the character who most transcends ordinary social standards, both in her virtue and in her pride. Olivia's refusal to undervalue herself distinguishes her from the forgiving wives of later Restoration comedy. She, too, dons a disguise to seek revenge: “Well Sir, and I am resolv'd to be reveng'd on thee; and tho my Virtue will not let me do it the right way, yet I'll make thee as jealous as if I did” (25-26). The difference between Beverly and Olivia is that she is successful and discards her mask when Beverly casts off Jenny. For Olivia, the mask is a convenience and a tool, while for the unreformed Beverly, it is his defense against his own inadequacy.

Beverly's reformation speech abjures his previous desires: “—for from this moment, all base drossy thoughts, that soil'd the life and lustre of my Judgement, shall vanish; and instead of those, thy Beauty, Love, Constancy, and Wit, shall crown my heart” (64). The acceptable social deviations of drunkenness and adultery are newly categorized as base, and an offense against good “Judgement.” It is important to recognize that Beverly's repentance is not predicated on a revived or newly discovered passion for his wife,¹⁷ nor on any précieuse vision of woman charming savage man to virtue.¹⁸ Instead Durfey shows Beverly rejecting the supra-rational passions of A Fond Husband for a rational evaluation of the benefits of marriage to Olivia. The comic sublime is reduced in this new formulation to an adolescent urge for destructive freedom that must be overcome.

Notes

1. The Works of Thomas Shadwell, ed. Montague Summers (London: 1927), 3:294. All subsequent references are to this edition. Dates for all plays are drawn from Robert Hume's The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).

2. This conception of A Fond Husband is in disagreement with Robert Hume, who argues that “There is no instance in late seventeenth-century comedy in which ‘libertinism’ is presented both seriously and favorably”; The Rakish Stage (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), 166. Hume dismisses A Fond Husband as a “bedroom romp” (159). As in The London Cuckolds, the adultery is simply a “donnée in a sexual romp” (166). Maximillian E. Novak also regards A Fond Husband as “a completely amoral sexual farce”; “Margery Pinchwife's ‘London Disease’: Restoration Comedy and the Libertine Offensive of the 1670s,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 10 (1977): 21. Hume's own study shows how unlikely the audience would be to accept rapturous adultery as a given in a farce; he demonstrates that very few plays even attempt to portray an adulterous affair without providing a punishment for the affair or repentance by the hero. As Susan Staves argues, “It is one thing to know fashionable men keep mistresses or even to have a mistress oneself and quite another to be prepared to have such a practice exhibited on the public stage”; Players' Scepters (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 167. Moreover, the difficulty with simply categorizing these plays as farces, and therefore denying them any intellectual content, is that farce does not eliminate meaning, but rather “brackets” it; that is, through some distancing device, the action ceases to be threatening. In my view, A Fond Husband and Sir Patient Fancy achieve aesthetic distance through the invocation of the sublime, and subsequent plays through a reaction against it. J. H. Smith classifies the plays I discuss as “cynical” responses to the gay couple in The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 92-104, thus finding continuity between Etherege and Wycherley in the earlier 1670s, and Behn and Durfey in the later 1670s. I would agree on the essential continuity of sex comedies, but see the continuity not in their cynicism, but in what Michael Neill calls “The Man of Mode's balancing of heroic head and humble tail”; “Heroic Heads and Humble Tails: Sex, Politics, and the Restoration Comic Rake,” ECTI 24 (1983): 138. In Durfey and Behn, the comic sublime provides this balance so that the relationship between loftiness and sex is dialectical rather than mock-heroic.

3. The Sublime: A Study of Critical Theories in XVIII-Century England (New York: MLA, 1935), 5-9.

4. The Word ‘Sublime’ and Its Context, 1650-1760 (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), 50-52.

5. “Preface to His Translation of Longinus” (1674) in The Continental Model, ed. Scott Elledge and Donald Schier (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), 272.

6. John Pulteney, A Treatise of the Loftiness or Elegancy of Speech (London, 1680), 24-25. Pulteney's book is a translation of Boileau's translation, and I use it because interest in the sublime largely arises in England as a consequence of Boileau's translation. All subsequent references are to this edition.

7. See W. P. Albrecht, The Sublime Pleasures of Tragedy (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1975), 8-11.

8. Michael Lehman, dir., Heathers, New World Entertainment Ltd., 1988.

9. The Discourse of the Sublime (Oxford: Basil Blackford, 1989), 37.

10. Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 103.

11. Peri'upsous or Dionysius Longinus of the Height of Eloquence (London, 1652).

12. A Fond Husband (London, 1677), 1. All subsequent references are to this edition.

13. “The Comic Sublime and Sterne's Fiction,” ELH 48 (1981): 113.

14. The Dramatic Works of John Dryden, ed. Scott and Saintsbury (Edinburgh, 1882), 6:90. All subsequent references are to this edition. The California Dryden has not yet published the volume that will include Mr. Limberham.

15. For Dryden's wry acknowledgment of the popularity of A Fond Husband, particularly with the king, see The Letters of John Dryden, ed. C. E. Ward (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 11-12. Rose A Zimbardo says about Mr. Limberham, “The play is problematic not because it makes sin delightful but because its mock-heroic antithesis is too slight to carry the weight of its thesis”; A Mirror to Nature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986), 126. But since Zimbardo does not examine the play in the context of A Fond Husband's success, she underestimates the pointedness of Dryden's satire on Durfey's linking of eloquence and adultery.

16. (London, 1680), 22. All subsequent references are to this edition.

17. Laura Brown regards the ending as unconvincing. Since in the first act “Olivia and Beverly appear as frank and unsentimentalized marital enemies” the resolution “makes a random assertion of morality” but “does not place the morality in a coherent action”; English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 109. In my view the action is coherent because Beverly's reformation is a consequence of his learning to prefer judgment and social order to the uncontrollable passion and liberty of the sublime, not a sudden preference for Olivia to Jenny. Love and passion are largely irrelevant to Beverly's new desire for marital stability.

18. See David S. Berkeley's “The Penitent Rake in Restoration Comedy,” MP 49 (1951): 227.