Thomas Durfey and Restoration Drama

The Work of a Forgotten Writer

John McVeagh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754602538
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351879408
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Though once a favourite of no fewer than four English monarchs, Restoration playwright Thomas Durfey has long been neglected by scholars. In his own day he had a lowly reputation in the world of polite letters - before his death his plays had more or less ceased to be produced; his 'serious' poems had died long before that, and even his songs were soon thought of as common property or 'folk' songs. In this new study, author John McVeagh re-examines Durfey's literary output, finding merit and interest where it has long been presumed that none existed, and restoring Durfey to his proper place in late 17th- and early 18th-century literature. Durfey's creative lifetime spanned the entire Restoration period and continued into and beyond the reign of Queen Anne. McVeagh's book studies his continuing ability to adapt to shifts in taste, fashion and personnel in the world of the theatre. It examines in detail his numerous experiments in new kinds of dramatic writing, both responding to and influencing the conditions of theatrical and artistic production. Among the topics covered are Durfey's attempts to feminize Restoration comedy, his political satires in drama in the late Stuart years, his anticipations of sentimental comedy, his search for a new language for lower class tragedy, and his musical-dramatic experimentations in the 1680s and 1690s, focusing particularly on his collaborative work with Matthew Locke, Samuel Ackroyde, John Eccles, Daniel and Henry Purcell and other composers. In addition, the author discusses Durfey's numerous satiric, narrative and other poems, and relates his writings to their social, political and cultural contexts. The book includes a performance record, listing the plays by performance date. The record includes such information, if known, as: where it was performed; by what company; cast list; to whom it was dedicated; a brief description of the prologue and epilogue; when it was published; what music it contained; and details of any revivals.

Chapter One:
Introduction

The source for the main facts of Thomas Durfey’s life as told in the standard authorities such as the Dictionary of National Biography seems o be Richard Steele’s essay in The Lover of 27 May 1714, so we may as well begin with Steele.¹ He quotes at length from an English translation of the French writer Charles Perrault’s account of the D’Urfey family in France in order to raise Durfey’s reputation – or, as Steele puts it, to show any reader who might feel disposed to ‘Cavil at my Friend’s [i.e. Durfey’s] Writings’ that ‘his Ancestors made a greater Figure in the World, nay in the Learned World, than their own’.² Steele tacks on to the flattering Perrault passage an additional note by John Ozell, Perrault’s English translator, containing details of the Durfeys’ settling in England. He concludes by hoping ‘that the ignorant of Mr. d’Urfey’s Quality may know how to receive him, when on the seventh of next Month he shall appear (as he designs) in Honour of the Ladies, to speak an Oration by way of Prologue to the Richmond Heiress'.

I may be alone in finding something odd, even dubious, about this essay, which all other commentators who have quoted it see as evidence of Steele’s warm-hearted generosity to a down-at-heel old writer. To me it seems that Durfey is being laughed at – helped to a benefit night, yes, but condescendingly, and with a face pulled behind his back. He was alive, after all, when Steele wrote the essay, and Steele knew him, but instead of asking his friend about his own life story he quotes from an English translation of a French biography of his great-uncle Honoré D’Urfé, author of the seventeenth-century cult romance Astrée (1607-27),³ supposedly to impress people with Durfey’s gentility and make them admire him. This drums up custom for Durfey’s benefit night, as Steele had done before,⁴ but in a jocular, even mocking tone. Durfey, he says, in being despised, has met only with ‘the Fate of all great Authors’ and it is to be hoped that ‘the Ladies, for whose Sake only he appears in Publick, will Smile upon him’. These complimentary barbs show that Steele regards Durfey as a bit of a joke. It is typical of the treatment he got from other writers in his lifetime. He was the William McGonagall of Restoration literature.

As Steele says, Thomas Durfey or D’Urfey (he gave himself the apostrophe in his early thirties) was born in 1653 near Exeter in Devon. He was descended from French Protestants on the male side, on the female side from English stock. We hear virtually nothing of his maternal ancestors but his father Severinus, born in France, had been evacuated to England in 1628 from the town of La Rochelle when it was under siege by Catholic forces – one of a family of Huguenot refugees. The D’Urfés settled as Durfeys in the county of Devon and eventually Severinus married Frances Marmion, from a Huntingdonshire family. This marriage produced Thomas Durfey the dramatist and poet and subject of the present book. As Severinus Durfey had lived in England for a quarter of a century by the time Thomas was born, the younger Durfey must have been thoroughly Anglicized.

Beyond these facts information is scarce. Durfey seems to have had no brothers or sisters. He did not marry or have children. His writings contain virtually no family references. John Woodfall Ebsworth says that Durfey shows his love and reverence’ for his mother in his Hymn to Piety and mentions him ‘proudly referring to’ his family relationship to the French author Honoré D’Urfé but without saying where in Durfey’s writings the latter reference occurs.⁵ I have not found it. Frances Marmion, Durfey’s mother, was said to be connected to the dramatist Shackerley Marmion (1603-39) who wrote three comedies in the 1630s and 1640s – Holland's Leaguer (1632), A Fine Companion (1633) and The Antiquary (1641). Though Marmion and Durfey did not overlap Durfey may have read Marmion’s work. There are a couple of similarities. According to Ebsworth Captain Porpuss in Durfey’s Sir Barnaby Whigg is based on Captain Whibble in Marmion’s A Fine Companion. Also Marmion’s Veterano, the idiotic collector of old rubbish in The Antiquary, seems to reappear as Sir Arthur Oldlove in Durfey’s Madam Fickle. But these analogies prove little. Durfey’s plays carry echoes of many writers and are echoed by others in their turn. It was part of the trade.

What about the literary great-uncle? Did he influence the dramatist in any way? As far as can be determined, hardly at all. The two writers cannot have met. His own plays and poems offer no evidence that Durfey wanted to build on his uncle’s achievement, which by the time he began writing must have seemed painfully out of date. Honoré d’Urfé’s serial romance Astrée (I, 1607; II, 1610; III, 1619; IV and V, 1627), part of which appeared in English in 1620, had influenced the précieuse school of writers in France, and, under Henrietta Maria’s patronage, attracted a following in England. But that was earlier in the century. By the 1670s, when Durfey came on the scene, its fantastic idealism must have seemed like high-flown nonsense to the sardonic and sceptical actor-satirist. For instance in Astrée

courtiers disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses spend their time in debating the various implications of their esoteric cult of passionless love. The merits of constancy, the inadmissibility of jealousy, the validity or otherwise of ‘fruition in love’, these and similar themes provide the characters with endless scope for testing the efficacy of their code, and for toying with the précieuse love-imagery of flames, streams, ice, tears, and the like.⁶

Some of Astrée's idealism fed into English heroic drama, so Durfey’s one possible connection with this might be his first play, the ranting tragedy The Siege of Memphis (Drury Lane 1676). But this connection must be very remote given the other influences on Restoration heroic tragedy. These, as Cecil Deane has shown, included French classical drama and a hard-centred Cartesian individualism, and to them we might add an emotional luridity quite out of keeping with the spirituality of the French text. In any case the genre was not to Durfey’s taste. After a single depressing performance The Siege of Memphis was taken off. He did not try that style again.

Of Durfey’s education nothing is known. He did not go to university. According to one source he was trained for the law, which may be a polite way of saying he spent time as a scrivener’s apprentice.⁷ But he soon gave this up for a theatrical career, first as an actor and then as a dramatist. In 1676, at the age of 23, he was entered in the company at Drury Lane theatre.⁸ Before his mid-twenties he had written three plays and had them performed and had co-authored and published a heroic poem in praise of archery. He never looked back. For the next thirty-odd years – from 1676 to 1709 – Durfey lived on the proceeds of his plays and his published songs and poems topped up by some precarious patronage. At the end of that time, by 1709, taste had changed and the appeal of his plays had dried up and it was to help him out in his needy last dozen years that Steele, in 1709 and 1713, gave him the publicity we began by looking at at the start of this chapter.

In one way Durfey’s first appearance on the literary scene in 1676 was impressive. He had three plays produced in three months – The Siege of Memphis, a tragedy, in September, and then in November Madam Fickle and The Fool Turned Critick, both comedies. In the same year he published with the actor Robert Shatterell (b. 1615?) a heroic poem called Archerie Reviv'd: or, The Bow-Man's Excellence. This high rate of production, for which the price paid was slackness in the writing, remained a feature of Durfey’s life. Nearly thirty more plays followed over the next three decades, and even when Durfey retired from active production in 1709 he kept on writing them. Three unperformed plays were published in 1721 – a tragedy and two operas, one of them a burlesque. These thirty-odd plays include experiments in every genre known and some unknown – such as Wonders in the Sun (1706), a one-off operatic extravaganza. They have never been collected. Apart from one or two which made second or third editions or which have appeared in dramatic anthologies, none of them has been reissued since Durfey’s death.⁹ Hence to many scholars as well as to the general reader Durfey as play wright remains an unknown quantity.

As a poet he is, if possible, even less well known. His poetic output, smaller than his plays, nevertheless remains sizeable and varied. It includes heroics and panegyrics, satires, odes, elegies and miscellaneous pieces. In the 1680s Durfey began slowing down as a dramatist and concentrated more heavily on poetry, particularly verse satire on the events of the day. The Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis both fired him up and – at this time a vocal Tory – he threw himself into the political controversies they provoked by following in the footsteps of Samuel Butler, John Dryden, Thomas Shadwell and others and trying to turn politics into poetry. Butler and Dryden succeeded in this aim by gutting issues of their dull aspects and transforming what remained into stinging satire or fabulous praise, but Durfey on the whole did not.

A contributory reason for his change of emphasis was more practical. As explained in Chapter 2, the two theatrical companies of Dorset Garden and Drury Lane merged into one united company in 1682 after a period of squabbles and dwindling profits, which halved the chances for a writer to get a new play staged and therefore halved the point of writing one. Thus Durfey, though he still wrote plays, turned some energy to poetry. The Progress of Honesty (1681) is a satirical description of the court and the city. Butler’s Ghost (1682) is a fourth part added to Butler’s Hudibras. The Maleeontent (1684) is styled a satirical sequel to The Progress of Honesty but is not much of a sequel really. In it Error learns from the malcontent, a hermit, about the world’s vice and decides to be a hermit himself. These were all satires but after 1685 Durfey shifted the balance to other genres, including a good deal of elegy and lots of panegyric as a safe poetic means of adjusting to a series of dangerous dynastic changes. The successions of Charles II by James II (1685) and of James II by William and Mary (1689-90) put trimmers like Durfey on the spot. He wrote an elegy for Charles and a panegyric for James in 1685, a Poem Congratulatory on the birth of the young prince in 1688, a Pindaric Ode to William and Mary in 1691, a Funeral Pindarique Poem to Queen Mary in 1695, and a panegyric on William III called Albion's Blessing in 1698. There were also sundry panegyrics on the Fleet and the Navy which could offend nobody. Satire did not disappear but Durfey turned it social rather than political, as in Collin's Walk Through London and Westminster (1690), a faint precursor of the urban eclogues of Gay and Swift, and, after 1700, thinned it down with tragedy and romance in Tales Tragical and Comical (1704) and Stories, Moral and Comical (1707). Dryden’s Fables (1700), Durfey notes, gave him the idea for these last collections of tales, and generally one could summarize that, as a poet, Durfey followed fashion. He wrote a vogue-ish heroic poem in Archerie Reviv'd, tried his hand at satire when satire was the rage and followed Dryden into verse narrative. Durfey’s poems have not been reissued and are virtually unknown.

Over and above these works are the hundreds of songs which Durfey wrote, some for inclusion in his plays, other...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• General Editor’s Preface:
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theatre Conditions
• 3 A Fierce Hero Bawls
• 4 Bus’ness Comical 1676ߝ1679
• 5 Sham-Plots 1680-1686
• 6 Mirth and Droll 1688-1698
• 7 Sad Times 1698-1709
• 8 Verses ad infinitum
• Appendix: Performance Record
• Bibliography
• Index