[In the following essay, Morgan-Russell discusses public and private spaces in The Souldiers Fortune, concluding that the plot, which concerns adultery, is meant to offer political lessons.]

The subject of adultery in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England has seen a good deal of scholarly interest in recent criticism, particularly as the relationships between the participants in the adulterous transaction have been theorized. But few investigations have considered that the adulterous liaison requires a space for its performance: Samuel Pepys, who has become an emblematic figure in the late seventeenth century for sexual “carrying-on,” records in his diary that his frequent fits of adultery took place in a variety of locations—the houses of his mistresses while their husbands were away, carriages, boats, private rooms in Lambeth alehouses, his own dining-room, even, if we extend our focus to include his extra-marital fantasy and subsequent spontaneous ejaculation, church. Lawrence Stone reminds us that Pepys's sexuality might not be entirely normative for its period (“Most men at most periods do not record their sexual experiences, and the few that do are likely to be exceptional in some way or other”), but the variety of spaces in which his adulterous liaisons occurs prompts discussion about the architectonics of adultery in the Restoration.¹ How is adultery shaped or determined by the physicality of its locus? How does the adulterous act configure space? How do the spatial structures of adultery interact with the discourses of public and private space in the domestic environment? In this present essay I intend to consider how these questions find expression in Thomas Otway's The Souldiers Fortune (1680), a Restoration comedy that is unusually explicit in its representation of the dynamics of household space.

The premise upon which The Souldiers Fortune functions is typical enough for its genre. After Charles II's army has been disbanded, Captain Beaugard and his comrade-in-arms Courtine return penniless to London, where Beaugard discovers that in his absence Clarinda, his former mistress, has married Sir Davy Dunce, an aged wealthy man. With the help of the voyeuristic “Reverend pimp,” Sir Jolly Jumble, Beaugard plots—successfully—to cuckold Sir Davy.² But the play is as much a representation of political discord as it is of marital difficulty and adultery. Robert D. Hume suggests that the cuckolding in this play can be differentiated from that of other Restoration plays because “Beaugard is not the usual airy younger son, scrambling to make his fortune; rather, he is a grown man facing a bleak future in a desperately inhospitable world.” For Hume, the play's “harsh realism” and the situations through which “poverty is … made real” are results of Otway's military service in the 1670s and his own first-hand experience of financial distress.³ Michael Cordner casts The Souldiers Fortune as a conflict between Tory and Whig: in Beaugard's and Courtine's world, the inversion of social hierarchy has placed these descendants of the “old Cavaliers” (1.15-16) at the bottom of the heap: “Their England is one in which the Whigs' ascendancy is so total that they have, in effect, already achieved victory. … And in that England Beaugard and Courtine are irretrievably outsiders.”⁴ Sir Davy is the ascendant Whig who “rail[s] against the King and the Government, and is mightily fond of being thought of a party” (1.463-64), and who is in possession of what Beaugard, the Tory, is missing: his mistress Clarinda (now Lady Dunce) and property—an upscale Covent Garden residence that contrasts sharply with Beaugard's homelessness and starving vagabondage at the beginning of the play. As Cordner remarks, “the story has been set up in a manner which ratifies Tory stigmatizing of the Whig as a kind of enemy within.”⁵ For both Hume and Cordner, Beaugard's apparent success at the play's conclusion is seriously qualified. Hume maintains that “for Beaugard and Lady Dunce there can be no satisfactory conclusion. (Unless, of course, Otway were to … provide a legally impossible divorce),” and Cordner concurs.⁶ Quoting from Lawrence Stone's Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 that “England in the early modern period was neither a separating nor a divorcing society,” he proposes that

Beaugard, Sir Davy, and Lady Dunce are therefore fated to a perpetual ménage à trois. Sir Davy's legal title to her remains unbreakable, and the original wrong—the supplanting of the Tory soldier by the Whig interloper—can therefore never be rectified. In its place comes a permanent act of theft.⁷

For Hume and Cordner the conclusion of The Souldiers Fortune solves nothing: if Beaugard wins a little ground in the play, the “unfestive” ending suggests Otway's belief that “within the larger society Tory soldiers remain the victims of [Whig] power-brokers.”⁸

To insist on this significant qualification of Beaugard's success as “realism” in the face of Otway's own strong Tory bias and the evident royal approval for his later play Venice Preserv'd is itself a rather Whiggish interpretation of the play that denies the possibility of Tory fantasy at work on the stage. Cordner's characterization of the relationship of Beaugard, Sir Davy and Lady Dunce as a “perpetual ménage à trois” is not entirely accurate because it does not take into account the imbalance of power in their relationships at the play's conclusion. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential work on cuckoldry and homosociality in Wycherley's The Country Wife is particularly useful here because of its formulation of cuckoldry as a power relationship between men, and because it provides an indirect commentary on Otway's play. Sedgwick defines cuckoldry as “a sexual act, performed on a man, by another man” that “differs additionally from more direct sexual male homosocial bonds in that it requires a woman.”⁹ Perhaps most definitive of these bonds is the inequity of knowledge and power in the relationship of the cuckold and the cuckolder; according to Sedgwick, the bond of cuckoldry necessarily implies a hierarchy because the cuckold is ostensibly oblivious to the relationship. The bond of cuckoldry depends, suggests Sedgwick, on “an asymmetrical relation of cognitive transcendence” or “cognitive mastery” of the cuckolder over the cuckold.¹⁰ Although this formulation describes usefully the structures of homosociality and cuckoldry in Wycherley's play, Otway allows Sir Davy to discover he has been made a cuckold and provides Beaugard with means to continue his relationship with Lady Dunce after the play's conclusion. Sir Davy has plotted to murder Beaugard, who uses the knowledge of the plot to assert a mastery over Sir Davy that extends beyond the merely cognitive:

Nay, Sir, I have a hanck upon you, there are Laws for Cut-throats, Sir, and as you tender your future credit, take this wrong'd Lady home, and use her handsomly, use her like my Mistress, Sir.

(5.693-96)

Sir Davy has little choice but to submit to Beaugard's command, which he does to the accompaniment of his own uncomfortable laughter: “I am thy Lady-ships most humble Servant and Cuckold, Sir Davy Dunce Kt., Living in Covent-Garden, ha, ha, ha, well this is mighty pretty, ha, ha, ha” (5.702-5). The image that Sedgwick finds for cuckoldry in The Country Wife—that of a man cheating another at cards—hardly applies to The Souldiers Fortune; Sir Davy is left at the play's conclusion with the responsibility of maintaining his wife as another man's mistress, with the full knowledge of his subordinate status. Knowingly cheated, publicly exposed, Sir Davy laughs gamely at his own folly.

Another departure from the model of cuckoldry Sedgwick proposes is the function of women in Otway's play. In The Country Wife, women are circulable commodities in a male homosocial economy; Sparkish's willingness to see his mistress only in terms of her value in circulation among men and Pinchwife's concern with the removal of his wife from circulation for his own private use are set against Horner's normative relationship to the symbolic economy—as Sedgwick remarks, “he values women just enough but not too much; he moves back and forth acrobatically and effortlessly between a privatizing and a circulative relationship to the female commodity.”¹¹ The women in Otway's play certainly do not escape this economy, but they are commodified in significantly specific terms; not just commodities or immediately circulable currency, Lady Dunce and Sylvia are characterized and transacted as physical property or “realty”—architectural structures that can be seized, owned, and occupied. When Sylvia interrogates the bound Courtine about the terms of a potential marriage, she offers herself as an estate, requiring “constant residence,” a “promise to keep the Estate well fenc't, and enclos'd, least sometime or other your Neighbours Cattle break in and spoil the crop on the Ground,” and a “strict Covenant, not to take any other Farm upon your hands” (5.137-51). Sylvia may be the landlady of her own body, but Courtine, as its tenant, is responsible for its upkeep and enclosure, because, as she points out, unsecured and neglected property is subject to trespass and possession by others; if Courtine becomes interested in other property, Sylvia proposes, “then it shall be lawful for me to get another Tenant” (5.150). Even though Sylvia is in a position of immediate power over Courtine—at the beginning of act five she has him tied to a couch until he agrees to the terms of her “lease”—she emphasizes the passivity of her body as property, a structure that can be possessed, occupied, repossessed, and trespassed upon unless subjected to adequate husbandry. This representation of the woman as property becomes the dominant image in The Souldiers Fortune. When Sir Davy Dunce, for example, is made aware of Beaugard's first attempt to cuckold him he expresses his grief in terms of property relations: “I'l have him hang'd for Burglary, he has broken my House” (3.559-64). This recognition of woman's characterization as property is not new—as Peter Stallybrass has remarked, the production of woman as a category of property has a deep history.¹² Stallybrass discusses the representation of the normative woman as a “closed” body, “like Bakhtin's classical body … rigidly ‘finished’: her signs are the enclosed body, the closed mouth, the locked house.” But, as Stallybrass points out, women are seen as “fragile states,” needing to be policed to prevent transgressive border crossings.¹³ In this regard, The Souldiers Fortune draws on a familiar longstanding topos in representing women as property or physical space, but the recognition of its usage in the play allows, I think, an understanding of the function of the adulterous liaison in spatial terms, or as a structure within the architectonics of the domestic environment.

THEORIZING PLACE AND SPACE

Although the dynamic of the adulterous liaison has been considered by a number of critics and theorists, the choice of location for the liaison—the space of adultery—is often occluded. In The Souldiers Fortune, however, in which property and household architecture play so significant a part, attention to location is important for understanding the function of adultery. Beaugard and Lady Dunce's adulterous assignation is conducted in Sir Davy Dunce's house and is effectively orchestrated by Sir Jolly—he offers Beaugard and Courtine lodgings in his own house because, coincidentally, “[Lady Dunce] lives the very next door man, there's but a Wall to part her chamber and thine, and then for a peep-hole, odds fish I have a peep hole for thee” (1.283-85). Although we witness an attempted liaison in Lady Dunce's chamber in act three (with Sir Jolly in attendance, “peeping”), we do not discover the precise location of Sir Davy's and Sir Jolly's properties until the beginning of act four when the “SCENE changes to Covent-Garden Piazza” (4.493) and Sir Davy enters his house (4.559), most likely through one of the stage's side doors. Covent Garden and its “Piazza Houses” were familiar enough to a Restoration theater audience, which saw The Souldiers Fortune premiere in a theater a short “block” away. The houses in the square were designed by Inigo Jones for the Earl of Bedford during the 1630s, Jones only completing two sides of his proposed Italian piazza before the Earl ran short of money—two perpendicular rows of houses constructed above an arcade or portico, which became known popularly as the “Piazzas.” The houses were Palladian in design (rooms proportioned as cubes or double cubes) and each had a mezzanine floor that functioned as living or dining quarters with bedchambers above and sometimes a parlor or a study on the ground floor.¹⁴ Initially, the fashionable and expensive Piazzas were occupied by members of the nobility—Sir Edmund Verney rented two adjoining houses there in 1634 at a rent of £160—but by the Restoration the houses were inhabited by a mixture of gentry and wealthy tradesmen.¹⁵ The reputation of the district began to change as early as the period of the Interregnum, when many of the houses in the Piazzas left empty by exiled Royalists became the target for criminal activity; later, as the area become more commercial (especially after the immigration of City merchants westward after the Great Fire in 1666), Covent Garden further declined, the streets surrounding it becoming an area populated with prostitutes, brothels, and bagnios. The reputation of Covent Garden would not have been lost on the audience to Otway's play, which opened in the same year as the Hummums, London's first “Turkish” bagnio, began its business in the Little Piazza.

The extent to which a Restoration theater audience—or Otway—would have been familiar with the layout of the Piazza housing can be relied upon with less confidence, however; indeed, it might be fair to suggest that accurate depiction of the interior of the Piazza housing is less relevant to the playwright than the iniquitous associations provoked by the exterior, which makes Otway's careful and quite explicit mapping of the private space of Sir Davy's house a noteworthy factor in the play. Sir Davy's closet adjoins Lady Dunce's chamber—he enters from it to discover Lady Dunce and Beaugard in act three. In act four, when the “Scene opens [to show] the middle of [Sir Davy's] House” (4.560), Sir Jolly and Lady Dunce are discovered laying Beaugard (who is pretending to have been murdered by Bloody Bones at Sir Davy's instigation) on Sir Davy's “Hall Table”; in his desperation to dispose of the body, Sir Davy offers to have Beaugard buried in the “Arbour at the upper end of the Garden” (4.609-10), but, at Sir Jolly's suggestion, Beaugard is taken to Lady Dunce's chamber (the “next room”) to be revived by “putting him into a warm bed” (4.618), while Sir Davy retreats through another door to his “Closet in the Garret” (4.634-35). In act five, the “Scene draws and discovers” Lady Dunce's chamber with “Sir Jolly at the door peeping,” but Sir Davy's untimely interruption requires that Beaugard descend through a trapdoor “into a bathing-Room” (5.417-18); later in the scene Sir Jolly reveals that he has “discover'd a door place in the Wall betwixt my Ladies Chamber and one that belongs to me” (5.465-66). Although Otway's sub-plot—the courtship of Courtine and Sylvia—is pursued under Sir Davy's roof, the chambers in which their actions take place do not interact spatially with the chambers in which Sir Davy's cuckolding occurs. In fact, the areas in which Lady Dunce's adultery is transacted interact more directly with spaces outside the boundaries of Sir Davy's property: Lady Dunce's chamber has points of ingress from Sir Davy's closet, the hall, the “bathing-Room,” and Sir Jolly's chambers (both a concealed door and a peep-hole).

Although Sir Davy Dunce's household is a fictionalized space behind the façade of a familiar public location, the systems of analyses developed by architectural historians to consider the spatial organization of real households offer some insights into its construction and function. Frank E. Brown's “Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth-Century London” studies how spatial organization of seventeenth-century urban housing is inscribed by patterns of living. Principally a morphological analysis of house plans (Christ's Hospital Evidence Book, [c. 1612] and City Lands and Bridge House Properties, 1680-1720), Brown's study takes the principle of “access” as the basis for a house typology—the ways in which individual rooms (with individuated functions) are connected by doors or other points of ingress, an analysis that not only

provides an economical way to characterize spatial organisation of the house, but that … more than any other property, is tied directly to functional requirements. Indeed, access relations cannot properly be separated from functional relations, for they evolve precisely to facilitate, and to inhibit, movement as required for practical and social purposes.¹⁶

Brown's thesis—that because of “the intimate association of access with function, the internal structure of the home does not remain static over time, but changes to accommodate … new sorts of social relations”—finds its conclusion in his essay in the consequent changes in the location and function of the parlor, which emerges as a locus for managing unequal or asymmetrical social relations in the emergent middle-class. To arrive at this conclusion, Brown constructs “‘justified’ access graphs” for the houses in the plan books, which measure the depth of an architectural space within a building in terms of access—some rooms are directly accessible from the exterior of the building, and others are accessible only by passing through other rooms, creating a “depth” of penetration of the house's interior. He also considers the permeability of each functional space—the numbers of entrances and exits—that facilitate this access. Brown hypothesizes that the movement of the parlour from its deep location in the privacy of the household to its “shallow position in the complex … located at the front of the house” indicates a shift in its function from a private withdrawing room to a place where family members interact with outsiders.¹⁷ Brown also considers the position of the chamber and discovers that “examples of ground-floor chambers are relatively few,” but when it does occur “the chamber is generally a deep space.” It also appears to Brown that “chambers were mostly unipermeable [possessed of a single entrance or exit].”¹⁸ If the internal structure of Sir Davy Dunce's house does not necessarily concur with what we can surmise about the actual architectural structure of the Covent Garden Piazzas, then, neither does it represent a normative organization of seventeenth-century domestic space, a representational difference that is perhaps more significant to a seventeenth-century theater audience. Lady Dunce's chamber is not located at the deepest level of location within the spatial arrangement of Sir Davy's household, and, more significantly, is multipermeable: if one includes Sir Jolly's “peep-hole” and the concealed communicating door to his chamber as separate points of access, the room has five points of ingress, two of which allow direct access from a space external to the household (Sir Jolly's house). In this respect, Lady Dunce's chamber is a shallow, very accessible, and very public space.¹⁹

Up to this point in my essay, I have used the terms “place” and “space” to represent a location, an area, or a room apparently without specific distinction, but theorists have distinguished between these two concepts in ways that are useful to my project. Louis Marin considers the question “What is a place? How is a place different from space?” in his meditations on Versailles by reflecting on the complex notion of the term in seventeenth-century France.²⁰ Marin charts Furetière's dictionary definitions of lieu (place), from the Aristotelian “primary and immobile surface of a body which surrounds another” to more specifically architectural meanings: lieu is defined as “Spot intended for setting something either by nature, or by art. God put all beings in a suitable place” and as a “private house in the city or in the country”; a place is defined by the use for which it was designed—“the church is a sacred place”—or as a “position in the ranks of honor which are established in the republic or the opinion of men.”²¹ Marin suggests that these definitions may be generalized as “that which is a place, or falls within the domain of place is order in every sense of the term” and he also quotes de Certeau's statement that “place obeys the law of the proper and of property.” “Thus,” Marin writes, “any and all places necessarily imply an indication of stability and thereby any place produces a law.” Space, however, is defined in other ways:

there is space when one takes into consideration direction vectors, speed quantities, temporal variables, movements. Space, one could say, is animated by the movements within it, or, more precisely, spaces are effects of these movements … it can be said that place is determined by “beings-there,” by presences … as opposed to space which would be determined by the operations which specify it, that is by the actions of subjects.²²

Marin's formulation of the dialectic relationship between place and space provides us with a formulation for the analysis of the spatial operations of The Souldiers Fortune. In Otway's play, the “place” of Sir Davy Dunce's wife's chamber is defined by its position in Sir Davy's household: it occupies its “proper place” in the domestic terrain by functioning as part of Sir Davy's order—a room in his property that is designated to contain his wife, a place that “obeys the law of the proper and of property.” Within Sir Davy's order, the chamber is not properly a space, however; although it may be defined by “beings-there” it is not actuated by operation or event. When Sylvia complains, in the first act of the play, of the prospect of an old husband (like Sir Davy)—“A Horse-load of diseases; a beastly, unsavory, old, groaning, grunting, wheazing Wretch, that smells of the Grave he's going to already” (1.386-89)—Lady Dunce replies that she misinterprets the use of a husband: “They are not meant for Bedfellows; heretofore indeed 'twas a fulsome fashion, to ly o'nights with a Husband; but the worlds improv'd and Customs altered” (1.392-94). Despite its position in the proper domestic order of Sir Davy's household, Lady Dunce's chamber is action-less, a “place” of no event. However, if we consider the adulterous liaison between Lady Dunce and Beaugard to constitute the “event” of the play, the chamber becomes an adulterous space—an area defined, now, by the operations of subjects, “animated by the movements within it.” Furthermore, this space disrupts the notion of place in Sir Davy's household by defying the proper order of Sir Davy's marital structure and by usurping the “law” of property: a “place” in Sir Davy's household becomes part of Beaugard's “space.” As Sir Davy laments in act three when he first discovers Beaugard in his wife's chamber, “he has broken my house” (3.563-64)—in the sense that Beaugard has “broken into” the house, but also that he has broken, disrupted, or fractured the order of Sir Davy's domestic environment.

One conclusion that this essay produces is the modification of Hume's and Cordner's claims that The Souldiers Fortune's “unusual, effective, and disturbing realism” yields an ultimately unsatisfactory ending to Beaugard's ménage.²³ The “realistic”—whether economic or architectural—is less important to the play than the symbolic, as I believe Otway's delineation of place and space reveals. Otway appropriates the topos of woman's body as permeable property, the “fragile state” that needs constant male vigilance to keep its enclosure secure against the threat of trespass and commonality. By reading the contemporary collapse of Lady Dunce's body into the space of her chamber, we see her construction as a space created or “set up” for penetration, and Sir Davy's inability to control the traffic through his property is seen as disruptive of the structure of his domestic environment. In this play adultery becomes a spatial transgression, an act of trespass, a violation of property, transforming the fixed place within an ordered domestic hierarchy into a labile, permeable, uncontrollable space.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE ACTS

My mapping out of the space of Sir Davy's property in the previous section of this essay may seem to be a particularly “literary” rather than “theatrical” or “dramatic” endeavor, but Otway's careful use of the physical space of the Restoration stage dramatizes the architectural relationships of the adulterous space. Inigo Jones's Palladian façade for the frontage of the Covent Garden Piazzas offers a useful metaphor for Otway's management of the architectural space within the Piazza houses in The Souldiers Fortune: at 4.492 the “SCENE changes to Covent-Garden Piazza” and we witness Courtine's scaling of the balcony as he ascends to Sylvia's window, the entrance on the stage of Fourbin and Bloody Bones “as from Sir Davids House” and then finally, as Sir Davy enters his house at 4.559, “Scene opens the middle of the House and discovers Sir Jolly and the Lady putting Beaugard in order as if he were dead.” The machinery of the Restoration stage enacts the movement from the property's exterior to the interior chambers of Sir Davy's house, a penetration of public façade that reveals the dynamics of private space to the audience of the play. I have mapped the physical permeability of Lady Dunce's chamber and body and the symbolic permeability that is effected by the act of adultery, but to introduce the penetration of theatrical space by spectatorship calls attention to the audience's voyeurism, a dynamic that has commonly found representation in architectural terms: the “removal of the fourth wall” of the staged space to enable the audience's ocular access. In The Souldiers Fortune the audience's voyeuristic relationship to the activity on stage is emphasized by the operations of Sir Jolly Jumble, the gentleman pimp consumed with the desire to “peep” at sexual liaisons. When Beaugard's “business” is planned at the beginning of the second act, Sir Jolly fantasizes that

if thou hadst her in thy arms now between a pair of sheets, and I under the Bed to see fair play, Boy, gemini! what would become of me? What would become of me? there would be doings, oh Lawd, I under the bed!

(2.30-34)

Later, as he hovers by the open door to Beaugard and Lady Dunce's assignation, he sighs rapturously, “Ah, h, h, h! Ah, h, h, h!” (3.532), underscoring for the audience the voyeurism implicit in the act of spectatorship, and, in mediating between stage activity and the audience reception, emphasizing the exposure of the private space of adultery to public view.

The development of public and private space (and private life) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has seen much critical evaluation recently across the disciplines, in considerations of the domestic environment, architectural design, notions of identity and subjectivity, and discourses of secrecy and intimacy.²⁴ Although Stone locates an increased emphasis on personal privacy among the upper classes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (manifested in changes in domestic architecture), Lena Cowen Orlin, who locates the “private in property, both real and movable,” believes that the “medieval property fetish achieved its full and comprehensive measure in England in the sixteenth century.”²⁵ One of the images Orlin takes as emblematic for her study is a plaster frieze in the great hall of Montacute House, built in the 1590s: a scene of domestic abuse (in this case a wife beating her husband) takes place within a house that is represented only as a couple of posts and a roof, its transparent “fourth wall” allowing public view of the private lives of its inhabitants. A man stands outside the house “directing our attention to the inversion of patriarchal authority,” which is punished in the skimmington ride of the frieze's next panel: for Orlin, the watchful neighbor represents the practice of the community's social surveillance of the early modern household, a public vigilance that “militated against privacy … [and which] engendered a suspicion of the private.”²⁶ If, as Orlin suggests, the late sixteenth-century plaster frieze articulates a suspicion or distrust of the acts allowed by private space, then this cultural anxiety seems not to have found much resolution a century later; in The Souldiers Fortune, the concept of the private and of privacy is frequently mentioned, but rarely in positive terms. Lady Dunce suggests to Sylvia that her husband's sexual interests reside elsewhere than within their marital relationship, a thread that Cordner traces through the play to propose the possibility of Sir Davy as a sodomite: his extra-marital activities, which make him “so loathesome no Woman but must hate him” (1.415-16), are referred to by Sylvia as his “private divertisements.”²⁷ When Beaugard relates the near-discovery of his liaison with Lady Dunce by her husband to Courtine, the latter remarks that Sir Davy is “saucy intruding Clown, to dare to disturb a Gentleman's privacies!” (4.90-91). Sir Davy's subsequent plot to have Beaugard murdered is conducted at a tavern in “private” (4.215); the act of assassination is called by Bloody Bones a “private murder” (4.259), and Sir Davy's attempts to dispose of Beaugard's body are circumscribed by private activities: “Is there no way to have him privately Buried and conceal this Murder?” (5.283-84) and by his hope that “if the Body were remov'd, and dispos'd of privately that no more might be heard of the matter” (5.472-73). In Otway's play, the private act describes sodomy, adultery, murder. It suggests secrecy for nefarious purpose and unlawful concealment of incriminating evidence.

Although the audience to The Souldiers Fortune sees the private act of Beaugard and Lady Dunce's adultery exposed to public, theatrical view, Sir Jolly Jumble functions rather like the watchful neighbor in the frieze at Montacute House, directing the audience's attention to the acts taking place on stage and suggesting that privacy is a symbolic space subjected to social surveillance. It is significant, however, to consider the scope of Sir Jolly's powers of observation: he is not at the center of a panopticon, because his vision is, by choice, partial. When he fantasizes about his “doings” under the bed Beaugard suggests an alternative site for spectatorship:

BEAU.:
Or behind the hangings, Sir Jolly, would not that do as well?
SIR Jol.:
Ah no, under the bed against the world, and then it would be very dark, hah!
BEAU.:
Dark to chuse.
SIR Jol.:
No, but a little light would do well, a small glimmering Lamp, just enough for me to steel a peep by.

(2.35-41)

Sir Jolly is not interested in obtaining a clear vision of the private acts of which he is voyeur, but chooses a “peep” in half-light, an observation that suggests more than it reveals, which provides a glimpse of iniquity and sees only a part of a larger operation. Earlier in the play Courtine suspects Sylvia's motives in her suggestion of an assignation, suspecting she may “contrive some way to make a publick Coxcomb of me, and expose me to the scorn of the World” (3.68-70), but complete exposure to public view is denied within the dramatic action of the play in order to maintain the continuation of Beaugard's ménage. Sir Jolly insists, in fact, on what he chooses not to see. After what we may presume to be the consummation of Beaugard and Lady Dunce's liaison in act five, Sir Jolly “at the door peeping” asks “So, so, who says I see anything now? I see nothing I, I don't see, I don't see, I don't look, not so much as look not I” (5.368-70)—the “peep” at the adulterous relationship Sir Jolly's voyeurism has allowed is now concealed from view. Sir Jolly glimpses but chooses willfully to deny the sight of the “Gentleman's privacies,” so that if his voyeurism polices the space of the private act then it does so not by laying bare the transgression to public censure or shame—like the skimmington ride of the frieze at Montacute House—but by allowing a partial vision of private acts that, while it may engender suspicion of the private space, subordinates censure of Beaugard's private transgression to the public and political victory over the presumptuous Whig.²⁸

I began this essay by proposing an examination of the “structure” of adultery. Although Otway's play reveals that the adulterous liaison depends, on a very pragmatic level, on easy access to the site of the affair, the fictionalized dynamics of Sir Davy's house suggest that, as for Pepys, adultery can be consummated in any place because it makes its own space within the order or, as de Certeau says, the “law of the proper and of property” that defines place. For Marin, “all places imply an indication of stability,” and spaces, by contrast, are defined by movement and instability, which disrupts, as I have shown, the law and order of the domestic household.²⁹ The world of the play discovers, from a Tory perspective, an inverted hierarchy, where Whigs own property and position and Tories live in anonymous poverty; this “order of things,” which finds its sustained representation in the play in the collapse of women's bodies into physical property or realty, is, moreover, a particularly fragile state that, for Otway at least, deserves the disruption. Rather than the unsatisfying or limited conclusion proposed by Hume and Cordner, I believe that Beaugard's repossession of Lady Dunce—the “estate” of which he was dispossessed during his absence—is a Tory victory that is expressed in the most positive terms. The making of Beaugard's space of adultery within Sir Davy's domain of place can be seen, I think, as a political rather than merely personal victory. I began my discussion of The Souldiers Fortune with the claim that it is as much a play about politics as it as about adultery, and I hope that this essay reveals that in Otway's play adultery is a political act, in which all the characters—even, unwittingly, Sir Davy—and the audience conspire. But if domestic disruption is licensed in this particular example, the “Gentleman's privacies” that Beaugard enjoys and that the play's characters work to bring about belong to a series of operations that, within the discourses of the public and the private, are subject to cultural anxiety and suspicion. The play makes clear that adultery, like sodomy, murder, and deception, is a private operation that can be made public to stage a political victory, but, as Courtine seems to understand, this publicity potentially invites censure of both the private and political acts. This vulnerability is managed in The Souldiers Fortune by Sir Jolly Jumble, who actively supports and orchestrates Sir Davy's cuckolding, but who ultimately chooses not to see the play's transgressive act. Beaugard's success in Otway's play depends precisely on “peeping”—on the audience's selective vision of the distinction between public and private, so that although Beaugard and Lady Dunce's adulterous liaison is a personal and private transaction, Otway encourages his audience by Sir Jolly's example not to see the transgression in these terms, but rather to observe the political and public structures of the adulterous act.

Notes

1. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, abridged edn. (New York: Harper Row, 1977), 340.

2. The Works of Thomas Otway: Plays, Poems, and Love-Letters, ed. J. C. Ghosh, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 2:1.87. All references to Otway's play are to Ghosh's edition unless otherwise stated; the play is hereafter cited parenthetically by act and line.

3. Robert D. Hume, “Otway and the Comic Muse,” The Rakish Stage: Studies in English Drama, 1660-1800 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1983), 93-94.

4. Michael Cordner, Introduction, Four Restoration Marriage Comedies, ed. Michael Cordner (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1995), xvi. Cordner admits that the terms “Tory” and “Whig” did not become current until 1681, but that “the party formations they came to identify, however, were for Otway already securely in existence by 1680” (xiv).

5. Cordner, xvii.

6. Hume, 95.

7. Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987 (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), 2; Cordner, xx.

8. Hume, 97; Cordner, xx.

9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 49-50.

10. Sedgwick, 50, 56.

11. Sedgwick, 55.

12. Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, & Nancy J. Vickers (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 127.

13. Stallybrass, 129.

14. Mary Cathcart Borer, The Story of Covent Garden (London: Robert Hale, 1984), 16; I have also drawn on the following texts in my reconstruction of the architecture of the Covent Garden Piazza houses: Norman G. Brett-James, The Growth of Stuart London (London: Allen & Unwin, [1935]); E. J. Burford, Wits, Wenchers, and Wantons—London's Low Life: Covent Garden in the Eighteenth Century (London: Robert Hale, 1986); E. Beresford Chancellor, The Annals of the Strand: Topographical and Historical (London: Chapman and Hall, 1912); Walter H. Godfrey, A History of Architecture in London (London: Batsford, 1911); Ronald Webber, Covent Garden: Mud-Salad Market (London: J. M. Dent, 1969).

15. I have been unable to determine whether the houses had any sort of interior communicating door, like the one Sir Jolly discovers between his chamber and Lady Dunce's. The mention of Verney's occupancy (in Frances Parthenope Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family During the Civil War [London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892], 105-6) includes references to the security of the houses, which had “shuttynge windows” and doors with “stock locks.”

16. Frank E. Brown, “Continuity and Change in the Urban House: Developments in Domestic Space Organisation in Seventeenth-Century London,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 28 (1986), 567. I have also found Matthew Johnson, Housing Culture: Traditional Architecture in an English Landscape (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993) useful for thinking about the dynamics of architectural form in this period.

17. Brown, 588.

18. Brown, 586. Lawrence Stone suggests that the movement of the bedchamber upstairs was a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century phenomenon, reflective of the increasing emphasis on personal privacy among the upper classes (Family, 169); this suggestion is not supported by Brown's analysis.

19. As Brown remarks, the term “chamber” does not exclusively represent “bedchamber” in this period, but it seems, in The Souldiers Fortune, that Lady Dunce's “Chamber” serves this function. In other Restoration plays, adultery is often connoted by the removal at the end of a scene from the chamber to the more private, personal lady's “closet”—it is significant, I think, that in Otway's play Lady Dunce has no such private facility. The only closet letting into her chamber belongs to her husband (act three).

20. Louis Marin, “Classical, Baroque: Versailles, or the Architecture of the Prince,” Baroque Topographies: Literature/History/Philosophy, Yale French Studies 80 (1991), 169. Marin maintains the distinction between place and space that he makes in Utopiques: Jeux d'espace (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984) and is later developed by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Randall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984). I have not quoted the French text of Furietière's dictionary used by Marin, relying on the translation offered in Marin's essay.

21. Marin, 169-70.

22. Marin, 170-71.

23. Hume, 97.

24. A more exhaustive list of texts is beyond the scope of an endnote, but some recent work includes Fran Dolan's Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994); Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994); Frances Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1995). A discussion of private life cannot neglect to mention A History of Private Life, ed. Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1987), particularly, for this essay, volume three, Passions of the Renaissance.

25. Orlin, 1.

26. Orlin, 5-7.

27. Cordner, 344. At other points in the play Sir Davy is called “Sir Sodom” and perhaps more tellingly, he offers, when drunk, to use Courtine as an “errant Bitch-Whore” (4.451).

28. For an interesting essay on voyeurism of the sodomitical spectacle, see Lee Edelman's “Seeing Things: Representation, the Scene of Surveillance, and the Spectacle of Gay Male Sex,” Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 173-91.

29. Marin, 170.