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be expelled from the Bar and his Inn, to be deprived of his Oxford degree, to stand in the pillory, to lose both his ears, to pay a fine of £5,000 to the king and to be perpetually imprisoned.” 28 More and more, however, with the approach of civil war the Puritan cause gained force until on September 2, 1642, there went forth the edict for the total suppression of stage-plays. This was not wholly effective at first and had to be followed up by other and more stringent acts; nor, as has been suggested, was the spirit of the drama really killed. For eighteen years, however, the theatre as an institution was officially closed, and the love of Viola and the humor of Falstaff became a tradition and a name.

** Ward, III, 243-44.

CHAPTER VII

DRYDEN AND HIS AGE

50. The Era of the Restoration. Heroic Drama.— 1460 When at the accession of Charles II the English theatre was formally opened again it witnessed a new age and experienced new impulses. Unfortunately, and in spite of much noble effort, its dominant tone and tendencies were such as to incur as never before the censure of the moralist. The characteristics of the period and its differences from that of Elizabeth and James I, have been thus ably summed up by one of the ablest students of the epoch: "In the mechanism of stage presentation the Restoration theatre is distinct from its Elizabethan predecessor.

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It is enough to recognize that the general adoption of movable scenery and the regular employment of women as actors are noteworthy departures from the habitual usages of the Elizabethan stage. . . Elizabethan drama is spontaneous and original, Restoration drama artificial and imitative. Elizabethan comedy at its height is creative; Restoration comedy at its best is imitative of the fashions and foibles of the beau monde. The one notably interprets character, the other chiefly produces characteristics. Again, the Elizabethans were impatient of artificial restraints. Shakespeare violated the dramatic unities; Dryden advocated them even if his practice did not always 1 Nettleton: English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 3-9.

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square with his precept. . . No less marked is the contrast between Elizabethan and Restoration drama in breadth of scope. The former is national, the latter local. Shakespeare sounds the whole gamut of life; but the comic dramatists of the Restoration repeat the notes of fashion, frivolity, and vice. Comedy in Dryden's age represents primarily only the life of the court. Hero and heroine know the world, but the world is London. Shakespeare portrays all the passions; Restoration comedy constantly reverts to the single passion of unlawful love." Naturally in Dryden's day Shakespeare was rewritten to suit an age which found Elizabethan genius rude and unrefined. "Beyond the Restoration horizon lay the forest of Arden and the seacoast of Bohemia. But perhaps the most significant contrast between Elizabethan and Restoration drama is in moral tone. Restoration comedy differs fundamentally from Elizabethan in deliberately enlisting the sympathy of the audience in favor of the wrong-doer. The earlier drama, with all its sins, inclines to award dramatic justice, however belated, to the virtuous. Restoration comedy, disdaining fifth-act compromise, often lets vice rampant in the earlier acts remain vice triumphant. It laughs not merely indulgently at vice, but harshly at the semblance of virtue. Cavalier contempt went so far as to regard the show of virtue as proof of hypocrisy. Cynicism replaced religion. Piety was considered bourgeois." It is easy to exaggerate such elements and characteristics as affecting the general population of London; but as affecting the theatre there can be no doubt. "As the number of playhouses was, for a time, limited to two, the people who attended the theatre could not have comprised any large part of the comfortably situated London popula

tion. The King and his court generally formed a considerable portion of one audience. Then, there would be a number of that parasitic host that always follows in the wake of royalty. These elements account, in large measure, for the dissolute and indescribably low moral tone of Restoration drama as a whole." 2

For a long time it was customary to attribute not only such characteristics as have been remarked but also the whole basis of Restoration drama to French influence. More recent scholarship, however, has shown that this influence has been considerably exaggerated, and that the drama of the period followed the main stream of English tradition-from Shakespeare and Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher. Of special importance was the realism of Jonson. Nevertheless it is true that the French did a great deal to affect the nature of English drama and dramatic theory. With prime emphasis on the classical, Corneille influenced tragedy, and Molière, frequently greatly coarsened, influenced comedy, while the prose fiction of France is also to be considered. The French code of rules, with its adherence to the three unities, tended more and more to cultivate the mechanical, and the new comedy of manners especially owed much to the Continent. While it is true then that in any case the Restoration would have produced a comedy not very different from that which appeared, the development was assisted by the comedy of manners of Molière; and the reason why this foreign type, not in its technical features, but in its animating spirit, was ultimately more influential than Jonson's comedy of humors or Fletcher's court comedy, is that it was more congenial to a society that was less interested in satirical 'Wright: The Political Play of the Restoration, 174.

portraiture or romantic exaggeration than it was in its own mundane existence." 3

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Different forces affecting the stage worked together to produce a new kind of play, the Heroic Drama. As sentiment became more and more detached and impersonal, it also became chivalric and artificial; and it was affected by the romances of La Calprenède and Madeleine de Scudery. It is to be noted, however, that there was heroic romance on the stage even before the Restoration, and the ultimate origins seem to be found in the sometimes exaggerated romanticism of Fletcher. "Love is the main theme of all heroic plays, and the sole theme of many. All major and most minor characters are lovers. The hero is always a warrior, but the martial element is made so unimportant that nought but the lover remains." Along with love went honor, and as friendship is a form of honor, the heroic play was sometimes concerned with the conflict between love and friendship. "A second form concerns four people,—a male and a female villain, and a hero and his mistress. The male villain loves the mistress and the female villain the hero; so their alliance is founded on selfish interest. In the end both villains are killed by opportune interference from the outside. . . . A third manifestation of the same idea is where the female villain becomes infatuated with the hero, who is of course already a lover. She offers him the choice of reciprocating her passion or death. She meets her fate, likewise, through external influence that also saves him from the embarrassment of a decision; or she may be so successful as to bring about the death of his love, and possibly that of him

Miles: The Influence of Molière on Restoration Comedy, 220-21. • Chase: The English Heroic Play, 65.

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