[In the following essay, Vaughn views Durfey's plays as valuable for the insights they provide into Restoration dramatic tastes.]

Thomas D'Urfey (1653-1723), known to his contemporaries as Tom, was one of the more popular and prolific of Restoration playwrights, yet his name is all but unknown today. It is unfortunate that a dramatist who produced thirty-three plays for the English theatre and who shared the limelight with Congreve and Vanbrugh in Jeremy Collier's indictment of the London stage should today be unrepresented by a single modern edition of any of his dramatic works. This is not to say that D'Urfey's dramaturgy was on a par with that of the major Restoration playwrights, but his works can not be ignored by the serious student of English drama, for they reveal the tastes of Restoration and early eighteenth-century audiences, and his comedies in particular display a vital theatricality in both dialogue and situation. Certainly the D'Urfey canon deserves critical and bibliographical treatment, if only for the preservation of a valuable testimonial of the character and quality of the mainstream of English drama of the period.

Tom D'Urfey's career as a popular playwright ran from 1676 to 1721, during which time he gave to the London stage twenty-three comedies, five tragedies, four operas, and one tragicomedy. All but three were produced, some with many performances, as late as 1785. One comedy, A Wife for Any Man, was presumably performed but is lost.¹ In spite of this prodigious output, not one of D'Urfey's plays is available to the student of Restoration drama unless the reader turns either to the original quartos and early eighteenth-century reprints or to microfilm. This is unfortunate for theatre historians as well as for students of the drama, since a modern edition of D'Urfey's plays would constitute a useful document not only on dramatic literature but also on the conventions of Restoration staging. As a group, the texts of the plays present a veritable catalog of seventeenth-century stage directions and scenic effects.²

D'Urfey's life was as diverse and colorful as his plays. He was a court favorite during the reigns of five monarchs from Charles II to George I. No less a commentator than Joseph Addison recalls “king Charles the Second leaning on Tom D'Urfey's shoulder more than once, and humming over a song with him,”³ and D'Urfey himself informs us that “When I have perform'd some of my own things before their Majesties King CHARLES the IId, King JAMES, King WILLIAM, Queen MARY, and Prince GEORGE, I never went off without happy and commendable Approbation.”⁴ His “things” were the hundreds of songs and ditties, eventually collected and published in 1719-20,⁵ with which he earned his way into the affections of his royal patrons, and over which even the sober and conservative William of Orange was said to be moved to hearty laughter.

Though D'Urfey managed to maintain the affections of the Court, often by abruptly altering his political sympathies to endear himself to the party in power, he was not uniformly liked by his contemporaries or by his critics. He did not hesitate to lash out in his epistles dedicatory against his detractors, his competitors, or his audiences. Consequently, he came in for much criticism, frequently concerning his plagiaristic bent. Gerard Langbaine, in his essay on the English dramatic poets, singled out D'Urfey as one who, “like the Cuckow, makes it his business to suck other Birds Eggs.”⁶

Another popular objection to D'Urfey concerned his liberal use of profanity and obscenity in his comedies. For this offense, the playwright became one of the chief objects of Jeremy Collier's denunciation in A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, earning nine pages of reproof from the indignant clergyman.⁷ Collier's criticism, based almost solely on D'Urfey's trilogy of Don Quixote plays, renounced the dramatist on three counts:

I. His Profaneness with respect to Religion and the holy Scriptures.

II. His Abuse of the Clergy.

III. His want of Modesty and Regard to the Audiences.

(p. 128)

Collier elaborated on each count and, as a parting blow, wrote derisively of the poet's penchant for boastfulness and false modesty in his epistles dedicatory, calling his dedications “to the full as diverting as his Comedies” (p. 134).

D'Urfey's retaliation was immediate. The title page to his next printed play, The Campaigners (1698), announced “A FAMILIAR PREFACE UPON A Late Reformer of the STAGE,” in which he attacked Collier, calling him “an angry malcontent … in the garb of an humble Churchman” and describing him as “raging and even foaming at the mouth.”⁸ This was typical of D'Urfey's exuberance when engaged in controversy.

The attention given to D'Urfey by Collier at least elevated the poet to the company of such men of letters as Congreve and Vanbrugh, both of whom also shared Collier's disdain. As a result of A Short View D'Urfey, along with Congreve, was indicted by the justices of Middlesex on May 12, 1698, on the grounds of having written obscene material.⁹ No record exists of either man having been brought to trial.¹⁰

Tom D'Urfey's eighteenth-century critics included Addison and Steele, Alexander Pope, and Jonathan Swift, all of whom seemed to share a general respect for the man as a friend but a veiled contempt for his poetics. Addison made a public plea for support of D'Urfey's benefit of A Fond Husband (1677), to be given on June 15, 1713. In it he referred to the poet as a “diverting companion” and a “cheerful, honest, and good natured man,” and urged attendance at the performance: “I … heartily recommend to all the young ladies, my disciples, the case of my old friend, who has often made their grandmothers merry. … I hope they will make him easy.”¹¹ Steele, in noting the appearance of a new D'Urfey play, The Modern Prophet (1709), called the playwright “my honoured friend,” though he wrote with heavy irony of D'Urfey's lyrics, many of which are mere doggerel: “Besides his great abilities in the dramatic, [he] has a peculiar talent in the lyric way of writing, and that with a manner wholly new and unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans, wherein he is but faintly imitated in the translations of the modern Italian Operas.”¹² In a later article, Steele wrote with similar irony of D'Urfey's polemical dramaturgy: “Mr. Durfey generally writes state-plays, and is wonderfully useful to the world in such representations. This method is the same that was used by the old Athenians, to laugh out of countenance, or promote, opinions among the people.”¹³

Alexander Pope wrote to Richard Cromwell in 1710 that he had recently “learned without book a Song of Mr. Tho: Durfey's, who is your only Poet of tolerable Reputation in this country,” though again there is veiled sarcasm in his testimonial to D'Urfey's catches: “In the same Manner as was said of Homer, to his Detractors; What? dares any man speak against Him who has given so many Men to Eat? … So may't be said of Mr. Durfey, to his Detractors; Dares any one despise Him, who has made so many men Drink?”¹⁴ Pope also wrote somewhat contemptuously of D'Urfey's benefit in 1713. The “Prologue Designed for Mr. D'Urfey's Last Play” begins:

Grown old in rhyme, 't were barb'rous to discard
Your persevering, unexhausted Bard:
Damnation follows death in other men,
But your damn'd poet lives and writes again.(15)

Swift's comments on D'Urfey are confined to the dedication of Tale of a Tub and do not evidence the personal affection of the others. Swift refers with heavy sarcasm to “Tom Durfey, a Poet of a vast Comprehension, and universal Genius, and most profound Learning,” and then proceeds to refer to his plays quite explicitly as “excrement.”¹⁶ The reference to the poet's “profound Learning” points to D'Urfey's lack of a formal education, a lack which the playwright evidently resented, since Cambridge scholars are pictured as figures of ridicule in some of his comedies.

Many of D'Urfey's plays were performed on the London stage throughout most of the eighteenth century, but with the rise of romanticism his popularity declined and he sank into the oblivion which still engulfs him. Nineteenth-century critics rarely mentioned the playwright, and when they did it was in the perspective of Victorian morality. Needless to say, D'Urfey came off badly. Edmond Gosse, Congreve's biographer, dismisses poor Tom as a “scurrilous and witless buffoon, on whose shoulder the king might lean to hum over a song, but whom it was needless to discuss in any grave examination of British dramatic literature.”¹⁷ A. W. Ward's history of English drama describes D'Urfey as “the literary nadir of Restoration comedy—and indeed of the Restoration drama in general,” allowing him a single paragraph, and that devoted to decrying his plagiaristic bent.¹⁸ G. H. Nettleton cites D'Urfey as a sufficient example of “the prolix mediocrity of writers who lacked even the distinction of title.”¹⁹

At least one late Victorian, however, has identified that quality of D'Urfey's comedies which renders them deserving of study. Sir Walter Besant, while admitting that the plays “have all the faults of the period, with few of its merits and beauties,” also recognizes “an inextinguishable gaiety, which probably carried the play along while the actors were able to keep the spirit of the thing alive.”²⁰ Other critics, too, have identified this vitality in D'Urfey's comedies. David Erskine Baker, in the Biographia Dramatica, says of them: “They are very far from being totally devoid of merit. The plots are in general busy, intricate, and entertaining; the characters not ill drawn, … and the language, if not perfectly correct, yet easy and well adapted for the dialogue of comedy.”²¹ The Reverend John Genest, in his monumental history of the English stage, states: “He has sometimes been spoken of with a contempt which his writings did not deserve—his two Tragedies are bad—his alterations from Shakespeare and Fletcher do him no great credit—but his Love for Money—Marriage-Hater Matched—Richmond Heiress—Don Quixote and Campaigners are certainly good plays—and even the worst of his Comedies are not without a tolerable degree of merit.”²²

What is implied in such statements is that D'Urfey's plays are stageworthy, that they “play.” This theatrical viability is the most significant feature of D'Urfey's comedies. It accounts for their popularity in their own time, and it could be meaningful for a director today. Unfortunately, D'Urfey's five tragedies lack this theatrical value. They suffer from excess of incident, sensationalism, and inferior verse. The Siege of Memphis (1676) was his first play and is an obvious copy of Dryden and Howard's Indian Queen (1663/4), complete with rhyming couplets and sententious epithets. His next tragedy, Bussy D'Ambois (1691), is an adaptation of Chapman's tragedy which closely follows the original, though D'Urfey, in claiming to have eliminated Chapman's “obsolete Phrases and intolerable Fustian,” replaced the poetic grandeur of the original with doggerel.²³ The two parts of The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of Massaniello (1699) are D'Urfey's most bombastic tragedies. In sensational and bloody scenic effects they out-Seneca Seneca. His final tragedy, The Grecian Heroine, was never acted but was printed in 1721 together with The Two Queens of Brentford and Ariadne in a single volume.²⁴The Grecian Heroine bears all the defects of The Siege of Memphis, less the heroic couplets.

The four operas are similarly lacking in merit. Cinthia and Endimion is a masque-like potpourri of classical myths and deities, originally intended for Court presentation in 1694 but withheld on the death of Queen Mary and subsequently given at the Drury Lane in 1697. It is slow-moving and poorly constructed. Wonders in the Sun (1706) is a satiric opera, loosely related to the Birds of Aristophanes, which emphasizes quantity at the expense of quality. It is exceptionally lengthy, involves dozens of characters, and requires elaborate staging and spectacular costuming. The other two operas, The Two Queens of Brentford and Ariadne, were never performed. The former is a dull and awkward sequel to Villiers' Rehearsal (1671), and the latter is yet another unsuccessful attempt at classic mythology set to music.

It is as a comic writer only that D'Urfey made a contribution to the theatre which we can appreciate today. His comedies should properly be called farces. They rely heavily upon frankly contrived situations and plots into which the characters, little more than standard types of the period (the rake, the fop, the jilt, etc.), are fitted for comic effect. The situations often depend on visual effects: beatings, physical defects, and grotesque or humorous costuming. All the plays are complexly plotted, some having as many as three different story lines, not always well integrated. Such devices of the intrigue comedy as disguise (often transvestism), mistaken identity, eavesdropping, and elaborate trickery are often used. Nevertheless, the incidents are often highly entertaining, and D'Urfey's dialogue is at times genuinely bright and witty.

Most of the comedies involve sexual intrigue to some extent. Particularly dependent upon this theme are Madam Fickle (1676), A Fond Husband (1677), Trick for Trick (1678), Squire Oldsapp (1678), The Banditti (1686), The Intrigues at Versailles (1697), The Campaigners (1698), The Bath (1701), and The Old Mode and the New (1703). Of these, the first two are particularly sprightly and amusing. Madam Fickle is a lady of fashion who keeps several suitors on the string simultaneously. In the second scene of Act II she entertains her suitors and disposes of each one by instructing her maid to interrupt at the crucial moment with the announcement that her “kinsman” has arrived. The anguish of each suitor at this point is highly amusing since the audience is fully aware that the “kinsman” is the next lover, who waits patiently outside for his interview. In A Fond Husband, the credulous old cuckold, Peregrine Bubble, is duped by his young wife and her lover through five acts of evasive trickery until, in the final scene, he quite accidentally discovers them together in a compromising situation. Though the plotting is highly artificial, the characters and situations are delightful. Especially amusing is the deaf lecher of the subplot, Old Fumble, whose mishearings of innocent remarks account for much of the humor of the piece.

Trick for Trick, an adaptation of Fletcher's Monsieur Thomas (1615), while not so entertaining as either of the above, is interesting for its virtuous heroine, Cellide, who will not submit to the advances of her lover before they are married. With this character D'Urfey introduces a tone of sentiment which he was to develop further in The Virtuous Wife (1679), A Commonwealth of Women (1685), Love for Money (1691), and The Richmond Heiress (1693), all written before Cibber's notedly sentimental Love's Last Shift (1695/6). Of these, Love for Money is D'Urfey's most outstanding venture into sentimental comedy. Its hero, Will Merriton, is a “witty, modest well-bred Gentleman,” in love with Mirtilla the orphan, “witty, modest, and virtuous.” She is, unknowingly, an heiress, deprived of her inheritance by Sir Rowland Rakehell. Her kindly guardian, Old Merriton, is the only person who knows her true identity, but he keeps the secret in order to insure her humility. Though Mirtilla loves Will, she can not confess her feelings for lack of a proper dowry. Will, of course, being a gentleman of honor, is loath to importune. In the final act, Old Merriton reveals the truth, Mirtilla accepts both the fortune and Will, the villains are punished, and all ends happily in the best tradition of sentiment.

Many of D'Urfey's comedies aim at social or political satire. Especially strong in political commentary are Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681) and The Royalist (1682). Neither play is skillfully written, the political sentiment standing squarely in the way of the plot.

Sir Barnaby, as a Whig, is a figure of ridicule. The first-act statement of his political inconsistency is ironic, since it might well have applied to D'Urfey himself: “In all turns of State, [he will] change his Opinion as easily as his Coat, and is over zealous in Voting for that party that is most Powerful.” This comedy is also notable for its character of Porpuss, an old sea captain, who emerges as one of D'Urfey's most consistent “humours” characters. His dialogue is filled with sailor's jargon, and the scene in which he describes his fox-hunting adventures entirely in terms of a sea battle is especially amusing. D'Urfey's other major venture into the comedy of humours was Squire Oldsapp, in which Jonsonian gulling is imitated with minimal success.

The Royalist, one of D'Urfey's few “period” plays, is set in the Commonwealth years. The titular figure is Sir Charles Kinglove, a staunch royalist whose plain-dealing ways are in direct imitation of Wycherley's Manly. D'Urfey's play is even equipped with Phillipa, a young admirer of Kinglove, who, like Fidelia in Wycherley's comedy, follows her master about with dog-like devotion.

Those plays particularly strong in social commentary are The Fool Turned Critick (1676), A Fool's Preferment (1688), The Marriage-Hater Matched (1692), and The Modern Prophets (1709). By far the best, and possibly D'Urfey's finest play, is A Fool's Preferment, an adaptation of Fletcher's Noble Gentleman (1626). This comedy is, in spite of an irrelevant and absurd subplot, one of D'Urfey's most tightly constructed plays. The plot, dealing with social climbing in the middle class and a current gambling rage, is clear and uncomplicated, as well as amusing and entertaining. The roles of Cocklebrain the social climber, Toby the comic servant, and Phillida the buxom country wife are among D'Urfey's most consistent and amusing type characters. The several songs in the piece were set to music, the title page informs us, by Henry Purcell. Undoubtedly, the excellence of the comedy's structure is due to D'Urfey's reliance on his model and is a virtue not uncommon in his outright adaptations.

All of D'Urfey's plays owe their plots, to varying degrees, to some previous models, but eight of them are admitted adaptations. Bussy D'Ambois, Trick for Trick, and A Fool's Preferment have been mentioned. The others are A Commonwealth of Women (1685), from Fletcher's Sea Voyage (1622), The Injured Princess (1682), an alteration of Cymbeline and D'Urfey's only Shakespeare adaptation, and the three parts of The Comical History of Don Quixote (1694-95), which Montague Summers calls the best of some fourteen plays in English based upon Cervantes' novel.²⁵

The Injured Princess, like the other adaptations, is structurally superior to the usual D'Urfey play, since it follows the original rather closely, but its verse and dialogue are mediocre. The action is colorful and highly romantic, and its speeches are filled with chauvinistic sentiments concerning the nobility of the race of Britons. Evidently D'Urfey had no great opinion of his treatment of Cymbeline, admitting in his Prologue: “And every Artist knows that Copies fall, / For th' most part, short of their Original.” At least one critic would have concurred heartily with this admission, the anonymous author of Wit for Money; Or, Poet Stutter, a vicious satire on D'Urfey which reads in part: “Witness his laying violent hands on Shakespeare and Fletcher, whose plays he hath altered so much for the worse, like the Persecutors of Old, killing their living Beauties by joining them to his dead lameless [sic] Deformities.”²⁶

The first two parts of Don Quixote, produced in 1694, proved to be D'Urfey's most successful and famous plays, as he notes in the Preface to Part II. There is evidence of these two comedies having been performed (possibly on a single bill) at least fifty-five times, as late as 1785.²⁷ The success may be attributed to the playwright's fidelity to his source, which was popular with the English at the time. The fame is partly due, at least from a modern viewpoint, to the Collier controversy, which kept the plays in the public attention. Part III of the series, produced in 1695, was a failure as D'Urfey admits in its Preface, attributing it, typically, to bad staging. Actually, all three plays are episodic and loosely constructed. Though their incidents and characters were popular with their original audiences, they do not represent D'Urfey's best work as a dramatist.

Tom D'Urfey's dramatic output was great, not only in quantity but in scope. His works range from heroic tragedy, through sentimental romance and opera, to the comedy of manners: a diversity which is uncommon in most dramatists. Diversity is evident, too, in the quality of his writing, which fluctuates from excellence to wretchedness, sometimes within a single work. Though almost no playwright is less effective than D'Urfey at his worst, the best of D'Urfey—infrequent as it is—is fine.

No single D'Urfey play stands today as a great piece of dramatic literature, but the plays as a group are important for their revelation of the tastes of the Restoration audience. Weak in structure and characterization, they nevertheless display a frenetic theatricality and vitality, evident in their dialogue and situations, which rendered them viable as stage vehicles in their day, and which could well serve to animate them in the theatre today. Certainly they deserve, at least, to be made available to the modern reader.

Notes

1. See Cyrus L. Day, “A Lost Play by D'Urfey,” Modern Language Notes, XLIX (May, 1934), 332-334.

2. Thus far three D'Urfey plays have been edited as unpublished dissertations: Raymond A. Biswanger, “The Richmond Heiress: an edition” (Univ. of Penn., 1951); Donald W. Sanville, “Love for Money: an edition” (Univ. of Penn., 1950); and this writer's “A Fond Husband: an edition” (Univ. of Denver, 1964). A Fool's Preferment was reprinted by Robert Stanley Forsythe in Western Reserve Studies, I, no. 3 (1917).

3. The Guardian, No. 67 (May 28, 1713).

4. Wit and Mirth; Or, Pills to Purge Melancholy (London, 1719-20), Dedication.

5. Ibid.

6. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets (Oxford, 1691), pp. 179-185.

7. Reprinted, London, 1738, pp. 128-137.

8. The Campaigners; Or, The Pleasant Adventures at Brussels (London, 1698), Preface.

9. DNB s.v. “D'Urfey, Thomas.”

10. D'Urfey's role in the Collier controversy has been most fully treated in Sr. Rose Anthony, The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy: 1698-1726 (New York, 1966), pp. 106-107.

11. The Guardian, loc. cit.

12. The Tatler, No. 1 (April 12, 1709).

13. The Tatler, No. 11 (May 5, 1709).

14. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford, 1956), I, 81.

15. The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope, ed. A. W. Ward (London, 1924), pp. 469-470.

16. Ed. Guthkelch and Smith (Oxford, 1958), p. 36.

17. Life of William Congreve (New York, 1924), p. 98.

18. A History of English Dramatic Literature (London, 1899), III, 454.

19. English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century (New York, 1914), p. 116.

20. “Tom D'Urfey,” Belgravia, XVIII (1872), 431.

21. London, 1782, I, 142-144.

22. Some Account of the English Stage (Bath, 1832), II, 517. In mentioning only two tragedies, Genest probably dismisses Bussy D'Ambois as an adaptation, classifies The Grecian Heroine as an opera, and considers the two parts of Massaniello as one. He refers then to The Siege of Memphis and Massaniello.

23. Bussy D'Ambois; Or, The Husband's Revenge (London, 1691), epistle dedicatory.

24. New Opera's, with Comical Stories, and Poems, on Several Occasions (London, 1721).

25. “Tom D'Urfey,” Bookman, LXIII (1923), 273.

26. London, 1691, p. 10.

27. Cyrus L. Day, “Dates and Performances of Thomas D'Urfey's Plays” (Charlottesville, Va.: Bibliographical Society of the Univ. of Va., 1950). Mimeographed.