[In the following essay, Wheatley discusses three plays Durfey adapted from dramas by John Fletcher, arguing that the adaptations show an interest in ethical problems seldom attributed to Durfey in particular or to Restoration comedy in general.]

Thomas Durfey, the most prolific playwright of the Restoration, adapted three plays by John Fletcher: Trick for Trick (1678) from Monsieur Thomas (1615), A Commonwealth of Women (1685) from The Sea Voyage (1622), and A Fool's Preferment (1688) from The Noble Gentleman (1626). Durfey's adaptations are interesting because they force qualification of critics' assumption of widespread “influence” of Fletcher's plays in the Restoration, at least in the sense of deference to or imitation of Fletcher's dramatic practice. But the plays are also important because they show a more consistent interest by Durfey in the problems of ethical conduct than previous critics have supposed. Contemporary criticism of Durfey's comedies suggests dual personality disorder in the playwright. There is Thomas Durfey, who, like Shadwell, provides an explicitly didactic drama in plays such as The Virtuous Wife (1679) and The Richmond Heiress (1693) long before the advent of Collier and other reformers of the stage.¹ Then there is Durfey's evil twin (some call him “Tom”), the dramatic equivalent in the Restoration of an outlaw biker, “the once and future king of moral chaos,”² in Rothstein and Kavenik's expressive phrase. Critical opinion diagnoses Durfey's adaptations of John Fletcher as manifestations of the second personality.³ But while it is probably true that Durfey did change his dramatic focus from time to time based on financial and political considerations—particularly after his 1688 conversion to Whiggism—Durfey's adaptations of Fletcher are more consistent with the ethical structure of The Virtuous Wife than they are with Durfey's notorious A Fond Husband (1677), despite Durfey's comic destabilization of Fletcher's happy endings, and an increased emphasis on sex. Durfey's adaptations problematize the relationship between behavior and selfhood that Fletcher's plays take for granted. While Shadwell's plays, for instance, examine the source and nature of ethical obligation, Durfey's plays take ethical judgment for granted; the issue is not how a gentleman or lady should behave, but how difficult it is for a gentleman or lady to act as he or she ought, as a consequence of the habit of vice. In this, Durfey rejects Fletcherian dramatic practice in the construction of character. Fletcher's characters exist in a continuous present which makes radical shifts in behavior plausible. In contrast, Durfey's characters are burdened with consequences of past behavior.

It is necessary to demonstrate first that Durfey could reject Fletcherian drama because there is widespread critical agreement that Fletcher was an important influence on the Restoration stage. Gunnar Sorelius, after discussing at length the large body of commentary on Shakespeare and Jonson, makes the odd assertion, “[Beaumont and Fletcher's] influence on Restoration Comedy was so wide and fundamental as almost to escape comment.”⁴ The difficulty of this argument from absence is apparent if one simply substitutes other names (Brome, Shirley) for Beaumont and Fletcher: many Jacobean and Caroline playwrights escaped comment in the Restoration. Nonetheless, one can see why Sorelius wants to make this claim. The London Stage states that thirty-nine of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays were certainly produced between 1660 and 1700, and three more may have been as well. Twenty-six of Shakespeare's plays were produced in the same period, and only seven of Jonson's.⁵ The Annals of English Drama lists sixteen adaptations of Beaumont and Fletcher between 1660 and 1700 as opposed to twenty-one of Shakespeare and only one adaptation of Jonson—and that adaptation, Nahum Tate's Cuckold's Haven (1685), was of the multiple-authored Eastward Ho.⁶ Rothstein and Kavenik, in support of their use of the term “fletcherian comedy” as a principal mode of Carolean comedy, stress the early dominance of “fletcherian” plays; between the reopening of the theaters and the plague, these plays “account for almost half the total performances for the most popular comedies—96 of 194—and about two-thirds of the total performances for pre-War comedies—96-149” (p. 43). Hume also argues for significant early influence by Fletcher: “The early Carolean dramatists seem to have felt pulled between the genteel Fletcher tradition and the city comedy tradition headed by Ben Jonson” (p. 235). Hume overlooks the oddity of pairing Jonson and Fletcher as “influences”; the former is widely discussed and praised, yet (in comparison to Fletcher and Shakespeare) rarely performed and almost never adapted; the latter is rarely discussed or praised, but frequently performed and adapted. To use an equally vague term, it is clear that both Jonson and Fletcher are “important” in the Restoration, but they are not important in the same way, and an undifferentiated “influence” creates an inaccurate picture of the relationship of late seventeenth-century drama to earlier seventeenth-century drama, particularly in the case of Durfey.

Analyses of Restoration adaptations need to reflect the ambivalent relationship between the Restoration author and his or her sources. An adaptation may privilege previous expressions of social and political hierarchy through adoption of the normative values of the play being adapted. Thus, although Aphra Behn's The Roundheads (1681) adds a romantic plot not present in Tatham's The Rump (1660), she nonetheless accepts entirely his depiction of the mob and the leaders of Parliament. Alternately, Olivia in Wycherley's The Plain Dealer (1676) represents sixty years of social disruption to any member of the audience who recalls Olivia in Twelfth Night. Of course, an adaptation may both affirm and reject. Fidelia mirrors positively Viola's virtue while indicating that that virtue is impotent in a corrupt England. Thus, the adapter has the options of virtually complete identification with the source, rejection of the source, and an enormous range in between.

Not all progenitors are equally seminal, and the extent to which Shakespeare, Jonson, and Fletcher are adapted, performed, and discussed indicates that Fletcher causes the least castration anxiety. Jonson has the status of auctor and is both creator and authority. This is shown not only by the Restoration playwrights' unwillingness to adapt him, but even more by the fact that his plays were performed without tampering with the text until 1725.⁷ In other words, if you staged Jonson, you accepted him as a parental figure whose poetic authority could not be challenged. Shakespeare could be adapted, rewritten, and criticized. Nevertheless, the lengthy discussions of Shakespeare's strengths and weaknesses reveal an ongoing attempt to come to grips with a still vital poetic figure. The very limited critical discussion of Fletcher after 1660 suggests that he rapidly becomes merely (mater)ial, that upon which the Restoration dramatist engenders his new play. Fletcher is an important source for plots and characters, while Jonson's humours comedy enforces form and attitude towards theme.

Robert Markley sums up the reasons for cavalier admiration of Fletcher expressed in the commendatory verses to the 1647 edition; Fletcher possessed “Breeding,” “Courtly Elegance,” “quickness of wit in repartees,” “gentile familiarity of style,” and could well portray “the Conversation of Gentlemen.”⁸ Yet the preface to Rochester's Valentinian (1685), “By one of his Friends,” praises Fletcher's “Fancy,” and then indicates Rochester must be granted superiority precisely because of his greater gifts in those areas for which Fletcher was praised in 1647: “I mean, a nicer knowledge both of Men and Manners, an Air of good Breeding, and a Gentlemanlike easiness in all he writ, to which Fletcher's obscure Education, and the mean Company he kept, had made him wholly a Stranger.”⁹ Imaginative powers may make Fletcher great, but Rochester and his audience are not threatened because of their advantages of birth. Behn's prologue to Rochester's play establishes the appropriate hierarchy: “Wit, sacred Wit, is all the bus'ness here, / Great Fletcher, and the Greater Rochester.” Fletcher's play is a starting point surpassed by Rochester in those very qualities that once made Fletcher great. Far from seeing the early seventeenth-century as an edenic period, Nahum Tate, writing in 1687, sees it as ill-bred: “Those defects in Manners, that were too palpable throughout the Work [The Island Princess], must be imputed to the Age in which they Wrote.”¹⁰ The work still contains “transcending Beauties,” but the combination of faults and advantages allows Tate to say “that I judg'd it safest to Rob their Treasure for a Tribute to your Lordship [Henry, Lord Walgrave].” Tate, although not claiming equality with Fletcher, thinks his version is at least superior in “manners” to the original, which presumably indicates a failure in “breeding” on Fletcher's part—again, something for which Fletcher was praised in 1647.

From early in the Restoration, admiration for Fletcher is tempered by a belief that he can be improved. The prologue to Edmund Waller's The Maid's Tragedy Alter'd, first produced in 1664, indicates that The Maid's Tragedy and Philaster are characteristic of “English Genius,” “Lofty and bold, but negligently drest.”¹¹ The English audience should like Waller's version better, “If we less rudely shall the knot unty, / [and] Soften the rigour of the Tragedy” (p. 4). Although “rudely” refers to the original unhappy ending, it retains its class connotations; Waller's version is not as low as Fletcher's. The prologue to Buckingham's adaptation of The Chances, produced in 1667, reveals no particular regard for Fletcher except as source material:

Our Author thinks he takes the readiest way
To shew all he has laugh'd at here fair play.
For if ill-writing be a folly thought,
Correcting ill is sure a greater fault.(12)

The juxtaposition of Buckingham's indifference to criticism and the claim that he is correcting “ill” writing, suggests a good-natured gentlemanly contempt for both audience and Fletcher. Buckingham's 1686 adaptation of Philaster, entitled The Restauration; or, Right will take Place, reaffirms that he is attempting to purge the original of faults: “But striving still to please you, hopes he may, / Without a Grievance, try to mend a Play.”¹³

While Tate questions Fletcher's portrayal of gentlemanly manners, and Buckingham and Waller show a negligent superiority, the recurring theme of prefaces and prologues to adaptations of Fletcher is that Fletcher is old-fashioned. The epilogue to the anonymous 1669 adaptation of The Island Princess says that it is useless to think an epilogue changes anyone's mind about the play they have just seen, “Though w'ave done our best for your contents to fit / With new pain, this old Monument of Wit.”¹⁴ Interestingly, these two lines are paraphrased from the epilogue to the 1647 Folio edition of The Noble Gentleman (III, 201). If The Noble Gentleman was starting to seem a little old-fashioned in 1647, The Island Princess adds a layer of antiquity. The preface to Thomas Scott's The Unhappy Kindness (1697), from Fletcher's Wife for a Month, also emphasizes the age of its source: “Amongst a number of New Plays that of late have crowded the Stage, I thought an Old Subject, tho for no other account than the Respect we are for the most part apt to pay Antiquity, might meet with some Civility; this was lookt on by some, well vers'd in the Rules and Beauties of Poetry, as a Piece that wou'd not be altogether unacceptable, provided it appeared with a new Air more agreeable to the Humour of the present Age.”¹⁵ By 1697 it is a commonplace that Shakespeare's genius is immortal; Scott presents Fletcher's play as venerable because of its age, yet even so it needs refurbishing. The preface “To the Reader” of Peter Motteux's operatic version of The Island Princess (1699) sounds a similar note: “Tho' Mr. Fletcher's Island Princess was frequently Acted of old, and Revised twelve years ago [Tate's version], with some alterations, the Judicious seem satisfy'd, that it wou'd hardly have been relish'd on the Stage.”¹⁶ Motteux decribes his adaptation as practically an archaeological project. The layers of adaptation to which Fletcher's play is subject show that what is good in the play has to be sifted out from what is dated.

Clearly “influence” exists: Fletcher provides the dramatic material. But the emphasis is on the agency of the adapter, and the work the material needs to make it performable in a different time. Jonson's plays do not require adaptation, and Jonson influences Shadwell to attempt to write new comedies that exhibit Jonsonian practice and values. Shakespeare was adapted, but he also influenced Dryden to write All for Love “in imitation” of Shakespeare. Fletcher's plays required, apparently, the Restoration playwright to rework and reject much of the original material without reverence for the poetic father. The prefatory material to some Restoration adaptations praises Fletcher unreservedly.¹⁷ But that Restoration playwrights regarded Fletcher without the deference that they paid Jonson, and, to a lesser extent, Shakespeare, seems clear, and this is also the case with Durfey.

C. B. Graham has documented the extensive and explicit reference to Jonsonian comedy in Durfey's plays,¹⁸ and when Charles Gildon praises The Marriage Hater Match'd in a letter prefaced to the first edition, he uses Jonsonian terms: “and in spight of all the disadvantages it labour'd under of Action and Audience, pleas'd on, after several times Repitition, and will as long as Wit, Humour, and Plot shall be esteem'd as necessary Materials to compose a good Play.”¹⁹ “Wit” may be associated with Fletcherian comedy (although by 1692 many significantly wittier playwrights had come and gone), but I know of no Restoration critic who disputed Jonson's mastery of humor and plot. Indeed, when Gildon chastises false critics, it is because of their false emphasis on dialogue: “But that which is the most strange is, that some of our Critics … perswade us that a Bundle of Dialogues was all that was ever required to the framing of a good Play; and that Terence had no other Excellence but the neatness of Phrase.” By implication, Durfey is not praiseworthy for language, but that, after all, was what Fletcher was primarily praised for, as Markley has shown (see above).

The prefatory material to Trick for Trick, A Commonwealth of Women, and A Fool's Preferment shows no particular deference to Fletcher. The most positive statement occurs in the prologue to the first of the plays:

He bid me say, the less to show his Guilt,
On the foundation Fletcher laid, he built;
New drest his Modish Spark fit to be shown,
And made him more Debauch'd, t'oblige the Town.(20)

Fletcher's hero needs to be refashioned to fit contemporary taste, but that taste requires that Thomas be less virtuous, and Fletcher remains a foundational figure. Still, Fletcher's play is only a base upon which Durfey builds a new structure. The prologue to A Commonwealth of Women, “spoken by Mr. HAINS with a Western Scyth in his hand[,]” is more ambiguous:

From the West, as Champion in defence of Wit,
I come, to mow you Critticks of the Pit,
Who think we've not improv'd what Fletcher Writ.(21)

The comedian Hains is an unlikely “Champion” of wit, but those who prefer Fletcher's A Sea Voyage are subsequently equated with Whigs who wish to destroy the monarchy; in 1685 Durfey was still a good Tory.

By A Fool's Preferment, Durfey is casually frank in his assumption of superiority. In the epistle dedicatory to Charles, Lord Morpeth, he writes, “As to the Play, I will only say this of it, the first hint was taken from an old Comedy of Fletcher's; and as it was improv'd, and several new Humours added, it was generally lik'd before the acting.”²² Fletcher's play is old, Durfey has added Jonsonian humors, and the result is an improvement.

There is simply too little evidence in the Restoration in general and in Durfey in particular to indicate a widespread admiration for Fletcher. In my view, Durfey's adaptations of Fletcher show a consistent rejection of Fletcherian comedy as unrealistic in its assumptions about the flexibility of character. That is, while Durfey must be interested in some aspect of Fletcher's drama (or he would not have written three adaptations), the plays show an ethical antipathy rather than filial piety, and they indicate Durfey's interest in moral problems rather than admiration for Fletcherian romance.

Critics who doubt Durfey's sincerity in attempts at didactic drama always ignore his angry response to Collier in the preface to The Campaigners (1698): “nay, tho by his Book we may suppose he has read a thousand, yet amongst twenty of my Comedies Acted and Printed, he never heard of the Royalist, the Boarding School, the Marriage Hater Match'd, the Richmond Heiress, the Virtuous Wife, and others, all whose whole Plots and designs I dare affirm, tend to that principal instance, which he proposes, and which we allow, viz. the depression of Vice and encouragement of Virtue.”²³ This is, of course, not an unqualified statement of dramatic purity; Durfey does not claim that all his plays are ethically instructive—not surprisingly, The Fond Husband does not make the list. Nevertheless, the ethos of this preface is righteous indignation. Either Durfey genuinely believes that these plays are morally instructive, or he thinks that the audience will believe that this claim is plausible. The question, then, is what ethical beliefs do Durfey's works “affirm”?

In Durfey's The Moralist, a poem published in 1691, the “Pastor” asks the moralist how he can call himself one, granted his numerous sins. The moralist responds,

That I pretend to't shall appear in this,
Justice and Honour with regard I prize,
And Virtues Laws have still before my Eyes;
And tho Offences cannot be withstood
By the frail Government of Flesh and Blood,
Yet Reason daily glittering in my Sight,
Still makes me take in Folly less delight.(24)

Principle alone is ineffectual in the face of either nature or nurture. The Moralist does not claim he is unfailingly virtuous, only that he knows what virtue is and consequently enjoys folly less. Significantly, “folly” substitutes for vice; vicious behavior is foolish and unsatisfactory because ultimately unpleasing. Reformation, which is difficult in any case, is a consequence of pragmatism, because only self-interest is ultimately effectual in guiding behavior.

Since the eighteenth century, moral philosophers (notably Shaftesbury and Kant) have argued that interest and ethical action are different spheres of behavior; that is, if an action is taken out of interest, rather than out of ethical obligation, no ethical content can accrue to it, except negatively, when interest and ethical obligation are in conflict. Durfey is, I think, an example, of an older teleological ethics that does not make such a clear distinction between the two. In Durfey's 1681 poem, The Progress of Honesty, the son of honesty who must be reclaimed is named “rash error”: “Deaf to reproof he was, and hugg'd his Crimes, / A modish Fop, a creature of the times.”²⁵ The times have made Error the fop he is, but, again, the emphasis is on the consequences for the sinner rather than on larger issues such as social consequences. Indeed, Error's chief offense is his refusal to change: “And most ungrateful lov'd his Father less / Because he did his Crimes express, / And held the Mirror up to show his wickedness” (p. 5). The problem is not theoria, knowledge of ethical principles, but praxis. Durfey's wandering gentlemen, like Error, know the difference between right and wrong for the mirror shows their wickedness; his plays are concerned with how nature inclines and habit lead to error, and the difficult task of leading them back to virtue.

Moreover, virtue is located in action, not in the principles that motivate the action. In “The Prudent Husband: or, Cuckoldom Wittily Prevented,” in Durfey's Stories Moral and Comical (1691), Leonora, wife of Richardo, is “esteem'd for Virtue, Devotion and Beauty, above all that inhabited the place.”²⁶ Unfortunately, Leonora falls in love with a priest, “yet she thought her Virtue had guard enough, believing that a Love so Spirituelle and Seraphick as hers, whatever pleasure it caus'd, could give no Offense to Honour or Conscience” (p. 184). Not surprisingly, Leonora's virtue is no match for her desire, and she eventually invites the priest for an assignation. At no point is it suggested that Leonora does not know that adultery is wrong; she has merely drifted toward it. The post-Kantian reader is inclined to discount Leonora's virtue on the ground that she simply has not been tempted before, and what is called “virtue” is simply lack of opportunity.

But that is not what the plot of the story suggests. Richardo, learning of the assignation, goes disguised as the priest and beats Leonora, which gives her an aversion to the priest and an awareness of the risks of adultery; consequently, she becomes once more the happily faithful wife. Again, many post-eighteenth-century readers would have trouble seeing how this is a moral tale. Leonora has not chosen virtue, she has been frightened into it. Richardo, however, “placing all the former miscarriage upon her Youth and greeness of years, discreetly resolved, for the lasting Confirmation of their future Peace and Amity, never to let her understand that he had any knowledge of the matter, on her side” (p. 215). In short, Richardo regards her as still virtuous because she has not committed adultery. Leonora has made mistakes, but they are a consequence of youthful folly, and since she has erred only in intention rather than in deed, they can live happily ever after. Richardo's brutal behavior is justified because of the positive consequences of averted adultery. Error becomes serious only after action, and apparently reprehensible actions are justified to avoid a greater sin and to return Leonora to her role. Leonora is a virtuous wife as long as she acts like one, and her motives are irrelevant.

Durfey's Thomas in Trick for Trick is a Leonora who acts, and actions create unfortunate consequences, which differentiates Durfey's play from Fletcher's. In Monsieur Thomas, the romantic hero of the serious main plot which Durfey eliminates from his adaptation, Francis, says to Thomas, the romantic hero of the gay couple subplot, “Thou art a mad companion: never staid Tom?” and Thomas replies, “Let rogues be staid that have no habitation, / A gentleman may wander” (IV, 465). The same dialogue occurs virtually word for word in Trick for Trick. But although at the end of Fletcher's play, Thomas is still asserting his right to wander in the face of matrimony, it is just talk; when Mary says “Upon my faith, I love you now extremely,” Thomas almost immediately responds, “Shall we to Church straight?” (IV, 517).²⁷ Francis has had to wander and discover his long lost father Valentine and appropriately virtuous true love, Cellide (previously engaged to Valentine). Mary has always loved Thomas, and has simply waited for him to run through his bag of practical jokes. Rothstein and Kavenik argue that in general “fletcherian characters modify themselves for themselves and others, and the task is made easier by the simplification of ‘self’ with which the plays operate, since if there is no ‘underlying psychological life,’ as we have called it, characters can move themselves freely and alter radically” (Designs, p. 46). The lack of an underlying psychological life in Fletcher's Thomas is contingent on role. Gentlemen with homes can afford to wander since they are their role in society and can move easily in and out of the behavior associated with their role. Francis, who does not know his home because he does not know his parentage, is much more consistent in his behavior by necessity; for instance, when he falls in love with Cellide, the betrothed of his benefactor Valentine, who, it turns out, happens also to be his father, he admirably joins with Cellide in refusing to allow Valentine to act against his own interest. Francis says, “onely this / Is all the help I have, I love faire vertue” (IV, 465). The fact that Francis and Cellide are eventually betrothed is ultimately contingent on the discovery of Francis' parentage; that is, the location of his role.

Durfey's play not only eliminates the serious, romantic plot, it ends very differently. As the play progresses, the tricks of the gay couple—Mary has been renamed Cellide—spin dangerously out of control. Tom is discovered hiding in Cellide's closet by her father, Sir Peregrine, who says, “—to lay the Law t'ee, would perhaps be insignificant, you not understanding it; Reason too is lost upon ye, because you are a Mad-man” (p. 54). Monsieur Thomas has no parallel scene, nor could Fletcher's character resort to Thomas's next stratagem; he claims that they are already lovers and that “She is given to subtlety and wantoness” (p. 55). This is more than just an attack on Cellide. Cellide is staying at the house of Thomas's friend Valentine, and, consequently, she is under Valentine's protection:

SIR Peregreene
My rage has almost suffocated me—but I'll instantly go and cut off the Intail of my Estate, and leave her as despicable as she has left her honour.
FRANCK
Sir, let reason mitigate your passion, this may be all false.
VALENTINE
May be, upon my life it is.

(p. 55)

Thomas has not merely alienated his friends. Cellide, confronted with aggression, responds in kind: “I have one trick more in my head, that if it prospers, is certain to recover all yet; for the Love I had for him is so turn'd in a desire of revenge—that I cannot rest till it be done” (p. 56). The tricks in Fletcher's play are fundamentally harmless. Durfey's Thomas, attempting to save his shattered credit, disrupts both the affection that Cellide previously possessed for him, and the bonds of guest-friendship. In the last act, Cellide and her servants capture Thomas, while her father, observing from above, holds Thomas's father helpless. The possibility of comical reconciliation is quickly destroyed:

THOMAS
Well I shall get loose agen—and then if you persist in this usage, I shall then be implacable—You know, Madam, I have wit.
CELLIDE
What, d'ee threaten me?—I know you have Wit; Where, where is it? For my part, I am blind to it; but I can give ye some, Sir—thus—thus—[Strikes him.

(p. 59)

Thomas escapes, as does his father, and prepares to rape Cellide while passing her gentlewoman friend Sabina to his servant Launce:

SIR Peregreene
Why, thou wilt not lye with her before my face.
THOMAS
Yes but I will tho'—and before my own Father's face too.

.....

SABINA
Savage, Bar'brous Villain—oh Heaven! what sin have I committed, to undergo this punishment?

(p. 61)

The double rapes are stopped when Valentine breaks in, but the scope of the gay-couple plot has widened to include conflict between friends, classes, and generations. Cellide storms out: “Well from this instant I'll shun thee as I would the Plague; and if I do speak of thee, it shall be with Scorn and Derision—to curse thy ill Nature—” (p. 62).

What is fascinating about the ending of the play is that Thomas seems unaware that there is a problem:

THOMAS
A Pox on't, this comes of Interruption, if they had but stay'd a little longer, that I might have had earnest of her, all had been sure; but one weeks humble Address shall make all well agen, will it not, Sir?
SIR Peregreene
No Sir, Nor believe I'll put up this affront so tamely. …

(p. 62)

With Sir Peregreene and Cellide off the stage, Thomas is able to patch up his friendship with Valentine, but Valentine is not indifferent to Thomas' actions: “But had you gone through with your Dance—you and I shou'd have made but a kind of scurvy salutation” (p. 62).

The difference between Durfey and Fletcher is that Durfey's characters are the product of a complex dynamic between inherited character traits, education, and, in a diminished form, will. That is, Fletcher's characters move in and out of roles because the role is subordinate to a central identity that needs no exposition. Durfey's Thomas is presented as the conflicted product of nature and of upbringing. Both Sprague and Arthur Gerwitz have pointed out that expanded role of Thomas's father in Durfey's adaptation, but neither explain why it occurs.²⁸ In both plays, Thomas must convince his father he is still a rake, while convincing Mary/Cellide that he has reformed. In Monsieur Thomas, Hylas, when asked about Sebastian, says he is simply, “As mad a worm as ere he was” (IV, 432). Durfey's Hylas elaborates on the renamed Sir Wilding Frollick: “—why, Sir, the Old Knight is three times more debauch't than he [Thomas], encourages him in it, and provides him Tutors, to teach him the Arts of Playing, Drinking, and Wenching, sent him to Travel, to learn Experience, he had like to have disinherited him t'other day for breaking his assignation with—an Old Whore, that was rotten seven years before, and was then under the Surgeon's hands; ha, ha” (p. 3). Launce, Thomas's servant, says about Sir Wilding, “'tis a strange World this! in a young Man 'tis Natural, but that an Old Fellow shou'd be so debauch'd—mercy on us, how can he hope to be sav'd?” (p. 8). Ultimately, Fletcher's Sebastian is relevant to Thomas's behavior only as a blocking figure that Thomas must fool. Durfey's Sir Wilding has largely made Thomas the man he is, and Wilding's insistence that Thomas remain a rake threatens his ability to move beyond that state, which, while natural to youth, is inappropriate to the old. Both Thomases write a coarse letter to declare love, but Durfey's Cellide says to Thomas's sister, “Well, what think ye now, is not the Gentleman a great Convert?—ha, ha, ha—there is an Old Proverb, What is bred in the Bone, will never—you understand me” (p. 17).

A gentlemanly ability to use language well is characteristic of Fletcherian heroes, and, indeed, marks them as such. Fletcher's Thomas fails with the letter, but is otherwise a witty gentleman, so we do not doubt his reformation. The language of Durfey's Thomas reveals his contempt for polite evasions of social reality, and, thus, of the defining grace of Fletcherian comedy. The servant Launce uses a lofty language:

THOMAS
What, what's that, Sirrah—Inscrutable, Intrinsicable; bless me, what stuff's this ye dog?
LAUNCE
Vat is it—why do you not know—why, 'tis Rhetorick as you bid me speak; Jernie—do you not know tropes and figure, when you hear ‘em.

.....

THOMAS
This Gentlewoman—what Gentlewoman—? this Whore—Rogue, this Whore—Sirrah, let me have no corruption of Notions—But speak every thing in its Nature—.

(p. 7)

Gentlemanly language is comical in Launce's misappropriation of it, but the coarseness of Thomas's language speaks his nature. His attraction to Cellide is expressed frankly and in non-Fletcherian language: “I have such a kind of Mungril Love for this Woman—that I must, and will enjoy her, come what will on't” (p. 40). Durfey transposes Fletcher's wandering gentleman to the naturalist world of Restoration comedy where a character's underlying psychological life has a firm basis in animal desire. After Fletcher's Thomas has enraged his father by pretending to be reformed, he tells his sister Dorothy who has asked that he placate his father, “It shallbe [sic] sister, / For I can doe it when I list: and yet wench / Be mad too when I please: I have the trick on't” (IV, 435). Durfey's Thomas repeats the claim (p. 14), but the play as a whole shows he's mistaken. He can please his father or Cellide but not both. When Dorothy claims Thomas is now “the most sober, civil, well behav'd, courteous Man you ever saw,” Sabina responds with a scepticism the audience knows to be justified: “'Tis a riddle to me he shou'd be so, he was yesterday quite another thing to my knowledge; and to leap in an instant from an excess of Wildness, to the extreme of Temperance, is to me a miracle” (p. 7).

Thomas's closing speech delineates his problem: “For Marriage to a Debauchee, is a second Purgatory; It gives him onely a Prospect of Joy, or Torment, without knowing which he shall arrive to” (p. 63). As a promise of reform, the last two lines of the play, “What ever Nature in a Miss design'd, / Wives only are the blessing of Mankind” (p. 63), are delivered to the wrong audience. Cellide, his prospective wife, hates him and her father has sworn revenge. The play's ending thus develops a dilemma: Thomas's claimed reformation is empty because he has no one to marry, and, if he did, his temper would make it a purgatory.

In short, Durfey's adaptation denies the happy ending in Fletcher precisely because character cannot change easily after a lifetime of debauchery. Thomas, pretending to Sir Wilding that he has repented, anticipates the theme of The Moralist: “Reason, and Religion are two worthy persons, and shou'd Instruct a wandring Mortal” (pp. 36-37). But neither Thomas nor Sir Wilding is of the opinion that they need instruction, while instruction is irrelevant in Fletcher's comedy because his immensely malleable characters are unproblematic. A Commonwealth of Women, while apparently accepting the plasticity of character in A Sea Voyage, subverts the romantic main plot through a sub plot where character is fate, and A Fool's Preferment explores what a workable repentance would look like.

At the end of Fletcher's The Sea Voyage, Rosellia happily renounces her rule over the women of the island because her husband Sebastian has been found. Rosellia has required that the women live without men under the assumption that Sebastian has been murdered. Her virago-like behavior is entirely the consequence of circumstances, and she becomes the properly subservient wife in a heartbeat, leaving the duties of rule to Sebastian as soon as he is restored. Durfey's Roselia behaves in exactly the same fashion, but Durfey's romantic hero Marine practically winks at the audience as he remarks on the sudden transformation: “This Adventure would make a theam for an Excellent History—” (p. 52). Roselia's dissolution of the “Commonwealth” when her natural ruler appears probably seemed like an excellent theme to a Tory like Durfey in 1685, but this comment also suggests disbelief at the rapidity of Roselia's conversion.

Moreover, the subplot repeatedly attacks the notion that men and women can escape nature and habit. Durfey's Amazons show discontent with their freedom from men in the song that introduces the commonwealth of women:

1ST Amazon
Here are no false Men pursuing
Youth or Beauty to its Ruine
…
Liberty's the Soul of Living.
2ND Amazon
Love's a Prey, not destin'd for us.
All our Quivers want their Arrows.
There's no Liberty like Loving.

(p. 23)

While Fletcher's Amazons are equally comfortable as either independent women or subservient wives, Durfey's women want men and dominance simultaneously. A quiver without an arrow is an empty liberty, but when the shipwrecked men begin to arrive on the island, the women, for a while, manage both liberty and sex.

Durfey represents the desire for men as innate: “Well, I see by instinct,” Julietta remarks when the first man crawls ashore, “though a Maid have never seen a Man; there are some certain motions that inform her—” (p. 28). Moreover, on the island this desire is uncomplicated by social conventions, and rendered nugatory only by the absence of men. After discussing potential aphrodisiacs for Roselia that may cause her to revoke the law against men, the women indicate their preference for substance irrespective of language:

HIPPOLITA
I know not what consolation she may have, but if I have any Comfort in this life, but when I sleep, I am a Whore.
JULIETTA
A Whore! Oh Venus! what a sweet charming luscious honey word, has this raw Creature thrown away—A Whore! what the Devil, would you be an Angel?
HIPPOLITA
Would I were a Whore upon a good account.
JULIETTA
Or I either: Oh little Englands a sweet place for this purpose, the Whores have as much respect there as Woman of Quality.
ARIADNE
And more than their Wives, I hear a thousand times.

(p. 25)

If sex is available with the power that comes from “respect,” the women would cheerfully be whores since the substance of what the word represents is superior to the empty quivers of isolation. Julietta, like Thomas, asks that things be spoken in their nature. Amazons are an appropriate theme for romance for Fletcher; happy Amazons living without men are a comic impossibility for Durfey, because it is unnatural for women (or men) to live without sex.

Franvile, a fop, Frugal, a cit, and Hazard parallel the unhappy Amazons in their fruitless hope that the sea voyage can free them from the dominance of women. Their destiny is in their character, however, not in England. When landed, Hazard says aghast, “And have we then, like Flounders, leapt out of the Frying Pan into the Fire: Fled from a Female Fiend or two at home, to be plagu'd here with a whole Nation of Devils?” (p. 37). Quickly dominated by the Amazons, they become as subservient on the island as they were at home. Julietta says happily, as Frugal carries her monkey for her, “I can saddle 'em, ride 'em—do what I will with 'em” (p. 50). Personality in Durfey's subplot is not plastic. The men quickly wish they could return to their old lives:

FRANVILE
Ay, if I had bin rul'd by my poor Spouse at home, I had never come to this; well, dear Peggy, I find the loss of thee now?
HAZARD
Come, come; few know the goodness of Wives, till they want 'em.

(p. 46)

Men dominated by wives will continue to be dominated by other women, and wives, unlike Amazons, have some stake in the well-being of their husbands. One cannot escape from the disappointments of a London marriage merely by sailing to a distant island, since a fully formed character transforms an Amazon into an even stricter wife. Thus, however much the main plot may appear to defer to Fletcherian romance, the subplot of bored Amazons and weak married men denies the possibility of an easily achieved happy ending somewhere far, far away.

By A Fool's Preferment, Durfey feels prepared to reject the Fletcherian comedy A Noble Gentleman by radically changing the ending. Both plays center around a wife married unhappily to an older country gentleman, who is actively cuckolding him while duping him into wasting his substance with promises of court preferment. In Fletcher's play, “Lady” maintains control at the end of the play by telling “Gentleman” that the King has made him a Duke upon the promise that he must not tell anyone. All are perfectly happy:

Now all my labours have a perfect end
As I could wish: let all young sprightly wives
That have dull foolish Coxcombs to their husbands,
Learn by me their duties, what to doe,
Which is to make 'em fooles, and please 'em too.

(III, 201)

Fletcher's play ends with a happy adulteress celebrating her control, although her deluded husband is pleased by his spurious preferment. Durfey's Aurelia repents at the end and asks for forgiveness after the Usher of the Black Rod, representing the King and whom Aurelia has brought as deus ex machina, rescues Cocklebrain from Aurelia's accomplices, Longovile, Clermont, and Beauford.

Gambling becomes the emblem of the effect of habitual vice. Aurelia leaves the room “smiling,” while her lover Clermont plays basset: “She gives me the Ougle to follow her. Oh that damn'd Itch of Play, yet I cannot give over, if I were to be hang'd” (p. 7). As Clermont loses, he offers Aurelia as pawn to Flea-flint: “She is my Mistress, and the dearest Jewel that e're unlucky Gamester pawn'd before: One, that I value equal with my Life; yet such a Witchery there is in Play, that for this Money, I'le contrive it so, that thou shalt be Caress'd instead of me, til I return what's lent” (p. 18). Gambling forces a lover to objectify the beloved; Aurelia is a “Jewel,” and although equally valued with “life,” both have a monetary value in “play.” Gambling is more stigmatized than adultery here, since Durfey invites the audience to assume that any rational person would prefer sex to gambling, but it is also clear that adulterous men are not to be trusted. This is finally made clear to Aurelia when she sees Clermont drawing lots with Beauford and Longovile for the right to seduce Phillida, the country wife of Grub: “Oh! how yon Coxcombs shrugg, and Ogle this new Face already—'Tis well my fine Fops, I shall have an hour for you too!” (p. 67). Aurelia's rescue of her husband is motivated by revenge, but the consequences are positive: Longovile, Beauford, and Clermont are fined twenty thousand pounds and sentenced to imprisonment, and Aurelia vows to become a faithful wife. In short, the motive is irrelevant to the happy moral result.

Like Leonora in “The Prudent Husband,” Aurelia becomes a faithful wife because it is less unpleasant than being an unfaithful wife: “And thus, Sir, on my Knees, I promise ye henceforth to be conforming to your pleasure with all the Care, and Diligence, and Duty of a most Penitent, Obedient Wife, to atone for my past Follies: and no more to heed the senseless Fopperies of the Town, nor the more senseless Fops remaining in it” (p. 85). “Folly” and “Foppery” characterize vice, just as they do in The Progress of Honesty and The Moralist. Even an old and foolish husband like Cocklebrain is preferable to illicit love. Thus, as is typical in Durfey's work and completely atypical of Fletcher, the change in character is due to prudential motives rather than merely the exigencies of plot.

Cocklebrain seeking preferment as a courtier and wit, fights against his nature. His servant Toby exclaims, “Why the Devil will you be a Wit, Sir, you had as good own your self a Bastard: For there has not been Wit in your Family since the Conquest” (p. 5). Albeit comical, Toby's exasperation reinforces the play's attitude that country dullness is superior to the folly of the court, where, according to the admiring Phillida, there are “so many tall, young, handsome, Scotch, French and Irish Wits there, that come for Preferment” (p. 34). The honest English stupidity of Cocklebrain is no match for his adulterous wife and slippery foreigners. Durfey's moralizing tendency is apparent from the rescue of Cocklebrain. When the repentant Aurelia brings the Usher of the Black Rod to reveal the plot, the now chastened Cocklebrain is capable of repairing his fortune: “but I am resolv'd to go into the Country—Eat nothing but Turnips 7 years, to recover the Estate I have spent waiting for preferment, and never so much as look towards old Sodom here agen” (p. 85).

Reformation in A Fool's Preferment is a compromise with fate. To Aurelia's plea for forgiveness Cocklebrain responds, “Well—I am forc'd to believe thee: We that are Married, have but small variety of remedy” (p. 85). The pronoun “We” is carefully chosen, for Cocklebrain speaks for both Aurelia and himself. It is unfortunate that Cocklebrain was born stupid and that the social system has made Aurelia the wife of an older and intellectually inferior man, but in Durfey's dramatic world, no suddenly discovered parentage or instantaneous reformation, as in Monsieur Thomas, no surprising return of the supposedly dead, as in The Sea Voyage, and no benign, undiscoverable deception as in The Noble Gentleman, can change that. The absent “underlying psychological life” which allows for the happy endings in Fletcher is supplied by Durfey in the form of inherited predispositions and behavior patterns constructed over time by parents and social forces. The didactic content of Trick for Trick is that a “debauch'd hypocrite” will not be able to quickly reform and become a good husband. While the romance plot of A Commonwealth of Women ends identically to The Sea Voyage, the sub-plot presents Amazons who cannot escape the imperatives of desire and London husbands who cannot simply sail away to happier relationships. A Fool's Preferment suggests that the acceptance of limitations—Aurelia must remain faithful to Cocklebrain, Cocklebrain must remain a country squire—is the first step toward moral growth. Thus, Durfey's adaptations show a consistent rejection of Fletcherian fantasy and a recurring interest in ethical problems.

It is not possible to generalize from Durfey's adaptations to other adaptations of Fletcher. The changes in other adaptations are frequently minor, and, consequently, show a greater compatibility with Fletcherian romance. What I am arguing for is that Restoration adaptations need to be considered on a case by case basis with a much more careful eye on what it means to say that “x influenced y,” because influence can mean outright rejection of the earlier playwright. Moreover, readers of Durfey need to resist the tendency to see him as a commercial weathervane, responding only to market forces. As a professional playwright he had to get his plays produced, so market forces are certainly a factor. However, the Restoration theater was sufficiently diverse to allow Durfey to explore successfully his interest in ethical problems while experimenting with new dramatic forms. In other words, Durfey may have followed and initiated theatrical trends, but he repeatedly returned to the problems of ethical behavior. And if “miserable Tom” returned frequently to ethical problems in his plays, then, perhaps, it is time for critics to return to examinations of the “morality” of Restoration comedy—only henceforth with a recognition that post-Enlightenment concepts of ethical behavior do not inform either early or late seventeenth-century drama.

Notes

1. See Allardyce Nicoll, A History of Restoration Comedy, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1928), pp. 260-65; Kathleen M. Lynch, “Thomas D'Urfey's Contribution to Sentimental Comedy,” PQ, 9 (1930), 249-59; Jack A. Vaughn, “‘Persevering, Unexhausted Bard’: Tom D'Urfey,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 53 (1967), 342-48; Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), 109-10.

2. Eric Rothstein and Frances M. Kavenik, The Designs of Carolean Comedy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1988), p. 243. Rothstein and Kavenik regard Durfey's “moral” drama as motivated by market forces, but do not account for The Virtuous Wife, which indicates Durfey's interest in reform comedy several years before his adaptations of The Sea Voyage and The Noble Gentleman. Robert Hume also apparently regards Durfey's switch to reform comedy as insincere; see The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 385. All dates for Restoration plays are from Hume.

3. Arthur Colby Sprague says about Durfey's A Fool's Preferment, “As a matter of fact, the consistent and deliberate addition of filth is one of the striking things in his play”; Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage (1926; rpt. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), p. 240. Sprague uniformly disapproves of Durfey's adaptations. Hans Walter Gable dismisses Trick for Trick as a “debased adaptation” of Monsieur Thomas in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), IV, 423. All references to Monsieur Thomas are to this edition by volume and page number. All references to The Noble Gentleman, ed. L. A. Beaurline, are to Vol. III in this series (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1976). Alexander Dyce, in his introduction to The Sea Voyage, calls Durfey's A Commonwealth of Women “a miserable alteration”; The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, VIII (London: 1845), 294. All references to The Sea Voyage are to this edition because the new Cambridge edition of Fletcher's works has not yet released the volume containing this play.

4. The Giant Race before the Flood, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, No. 4 (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells, 1966), p. 112.

5. The London Stage 1660-1800, Vol. I, ed. William Van Lennep, intro. Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965), cxxviii-cxxx.

6. Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, rev. S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964).

7. R. G. Noyes, Ben Jonson on the English Stage (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1935), p. 28.

8. “‘Shakespeare To Thee Was Dull’: The Phenomenon of Fletcher's Influence,” in From Renaissance to Restoration: Metamorphoses of the Drama, ed. Robert Markley and Laurie Finke (Cleveland: Bellflower Press, 1984), p. 92.

9. Valentinian (London, 1685). In this and in other citations, prefatory material is on unnumbered pages (as is common in Restoration texts), unless otherwise indicated.

10. The Folger Library copy of The Island Princess which I used has no title page.

11. The Maid's Tragedy (London, 1690), p. 3.

12. The Chances, “Corrected and Altered by a PERSON OF HONOUR” (London, 1682).

13. The Restauration: or, Right will take Place “From the Original Copy, never before Printed,” in The Works of George Villiers, Late Duke of Buckingham (London, 1715), Vol. 1.

14. The Island Princess “With Alterations and New Additional Scenes” (London, 1669), p. 76.

15. The Unhappy Kindness: or a Fruitless Revenge (London, 1697).

16. The Island Princess … Made into an Opera (London, 1699).

17. The epilogue to The Prophetess: or, the History of Dioclesian, “with alterations and additions after the Manner of an Opera” (London, 1690), attributed to Betterton by Harbage and Schoenbaum, says writing has become the product of “Irish wits”:

    Or hope to see, from such a Mongrel breed,
    Wits that the Godlike Shakespear shall exceed:
    Or what has dropt from Fletcher's fluent pen,
    Our this days Author, or the learned Ben.

    (p. 75)

    Elkanah Settle's prologue to his adaptation of Philaster: or, Love lies a Bleeding (London, 1695) transforms Fletcher into an unconquerable champion: “No Poet shall by this Day's Doom be kill'd: / We safely fight behind great Fletcher's Shield.”

18. “The Jonsonian Tradition in the Comedies of Thomas D'Urfey,” MLQ, 8 (1947), 47-52.

19. The Marriage Hater Match'd (London, 1692).

20. Trick for Trick: or, The Debauch'd Hypocrite (London, 1678). All references are to this edition.

21. A Commonwealth of Women (London, 1686). All reference are to this edition.

22. A Fool's Preferment: or, The Three Dukes of Dunstable (London, 1688). All references are to this edition.

23. Essays on the Stage, intro. Joseph Wood Krutch (Ann Arbor: Augustan Reprint Society, 1948), p. 3.

24. The Moralist: or, a Satyr on Sects (London, 1691), p. 17.

25. The Progress of Honesty (London, 1681), p. 5.

26. Stories Moral and Comical … From Hints out of Italian, Spanish and French Authors (London, 1691), p. 181.

27. J. H. Smith discusses Thomas's rapid conversion in The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), p. 11.

28. Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage, p. 229-30, and Arthur Gerwitz, Restoration Adaptations of Early Seventeenth-Century Comedies (Washington, D. C.: Univ. Press of America, 1982), p. 128.