Comedy of Manners

David L. Hirst

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138284005
• eBook ISBN: 9781351629904
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1979, this book traces comedy of manners from the 1660s to the then present — a scope beyond the traditional focus on the Restoration and early twentieth century. It uncovers an underestimated subversive potential and socially critical force in this particularly English dramatic form, emphasising the distinctive subjects and style that distinguish it from more general forms of witty social satire. The author discusses the major comic dramatists of the post-Restoration period; reassesses the significance of Sheridan, Wilde and Coward; and examines the continuation of the tradition in modern writers. This book will be of interest to students of English literature and drama.

1

Introduction

‘You must beware of thinking too much about style’, said my kindly adviser, ‘or you will become like those fastidious people who polish and polish until there is nothing left.’

‘Then there really are such people?’ I asked eagerly. But the well-informed lady could give me no precise information about them. I often hear of them in this tantalising manner, and perhaps one of these days I shall have the luck to come across them.

(Logan Pearsall Smith, Preface to All Trivia, 1933)

When John Osborne called his play The End of me Old Cigar (1975) ‘a modern comedy of modern manners’ he drew attention to the fact that this genre of comedy, which dominated the immediate post-Restoration period, has continued as a vital aspect of English theatre to the present day. One can trace a line of development from the playwrights of the second half of the seventeenth century through Sheridan and Goldsmith in the eighteenth, W.S. Gilbert and Wilde in the nineteenth to the inter–war comedies of Maugham, Coward and Lonsdale. More recently Orton, Pinter and Osborne have achieved a more marked dramatic precision by adopting the features of this comic mode.

The subject of comedy of manners is the way people behave, the manners they employ in a social context; the chief concerns of the characters are sex and money (and thus the interrelated topics of marriage, adultery and divorce); the style is distinguished by the refinement of raw emotional expression and action in the subtlety of wit and intrigue. The comedy of manners is at its most expressive when all three of these aspects interact. But it is possible to have one without the others: Sheridan, for example, is all superficial style; Coward’s Hay Fever is a perfect comedy of manners in its subject, but it has no concern with money and is far less witty than his finest works. Style is all–important in these plays. By style is meant not merely a superficial manner of expression but a definition of behaviour. The winners are always those with the most style: the sharpest wits, the subtlest intriguers. This has led to the repeated charge that the comedy of manners is immoral and unpleasant. It is undoubtedly the most anti–romantic form of comedy, for in plays of this type the conventional moral standards are superseded by the criterion of taste, of what constitutes ‘good form’.

Orton’s Loot ends with the observation: ‘People would talk; we must keep up appearances’, a belief basic not only to his plays but to the genre as a whole. Such a comment is an echo of Pope’s satiric lines in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ where Belinda regrets:

‘Oh hadst thou, cruel, been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!’

(Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, IV, 4. 11. 175–6)

Actions — rape, robbery, murder, adultery — are unimportant; what matters is the way in which they are performed, or more often the style with which they are concealed. Whether it be the careful euphemisms Orton’s characters employ, the wit of Mirabel and Millamant, the clipped tones of Elyot and Amanda, or the epigrams of Wilde’s exquisitely refined ladies and gentlemen, the keynote of these plays is decorum. This has given rise to another criticism: that of a shallowness and lack of sincerity in the characters and their authors. The unscrupulous sexual and monetary acquisitiveness of these figures may initially seem at sharp variance with their refinement of speech, though it is not merely their actions, but, more importantly, the manner in which these characters conduct themselves that secures their victory. They are playing a game, perhaps, but in deadly earnest and for the highest of stakes; and, moreover, they must stick to the rules. These rules are society’s unwritten laws regulating behaviour, the dictates of propriety which, though they may differ in detail from age to age and class to class, are always basic to the conduct of the characters in the comedy of manners.

It is a dramatic genre that is particularly closely related to the social conditions of the time. A careful examination of the periods in which this type of comedy has flourished in England reveals that high style and fashion in every case distinguished the behaviour of society. The Restoration era was the age of the beau and his imitator, the fop; dress and deportment continued to be important, though more restrained in the eighteenth century; but the drabness and heaviness of the Victorian period put an end to the love of and pride in being well–dressed. In reaction, Wilde and others at the end of the century found the need to flaunt their abhorrence of conventional taste in dress and behaviour. With Wilde the dandy was reborn, and this figure was to reappear in the inter–war period and again in the 1960s. Both the ‘roaring’, ‘gay’ 1920s and the age of Hair and Carnaby Street were periods in which fashion, and notably male fashion, asserted themselves, and it is precisely in these times that the comedy of manners, dormant throughout the drab, unstylish 1940s and 1950s as through the Victorian era, again became a significant comic genre. Critics of all these periods — from the late seventeenth century through to the 1960s — have accused this vogue for ostentatious male dress of decadence and effeminacy. The dandies have had their own disarming reply, which from Wilde to Osborne has been the same: that effeminacy always makes a man more attractive to women. Such witticisms also serve to mask another aspect of the comedy of manners; from the time of Wilde it has often been the province of homosexual writers: Wilde, Coward, Maugham and Orton all translated their life–style into their plays, whilst the nature of homosexual relationships features repeatedly in the work of Pinter and Osborne.

Since the beau and the dandy in all these periods sets himself up as the arbiter of good taste, not only in dress but in behaviour, he acts as a powerful critic of conventional values. As Felstiner put it in The Lies of Art, ‘A figure of the counter–culture, the dandy dresses instead of living in earnest and rejects useful behaviour’ (p. 19). Because social satire is basic to all the plays of this type, the comedy of manners is a particularly subversive dramatic form. The men of fashion in the plays of the late seventeenth century defy the taboos of marriage: their life–style is aggressively promiscuous, hedonistic, yet ruthlessly cool. It is not surprising that in the eighteenth century the plays were rewritten (like Garrick’s version of The Country Wife and Bickerstaff’s Plain Dealer), adapted to suit the more urbane mood of the times; whilst in the nineteenth century they were effectively ignored. In the dramas of Gilbert and Wilde conventional Victorian values are inverted and the comedy serves to reveal and attack social hypocrisy. Coward is very unconventional in the sexual morality he appears to advocate in his works: all his major plays in the comedy of manners style explore the impossibility of marriage. Osborne, the original ‘angry young man’, is no less a social critic because his style has matured, whilst Pinter has brought the threats so evident in his earlier drama from the realm of comedy of menace into that of comedy of manners. But it is Orton above all recent playwrights who has proved the most subversive and disturbing writer working in this field.

Two other features of this genre deserve mention. First, whilst ironic and witty social comedy has not been the prerogative of English playwrights — Moliere and Beaumarchais in France and Albee in America have written extensively in this idiom — only in England has there been a continual development of comedy of manners as defined in this chapter and examined in the book as a whole. No doubt the peculiar richness of vocabulary and syntax possessed by the English language in part accounts for this, as well as the persistence of the subtle indestructible indications of our social class system. When, on the one hand, Pinter can exploit to such cunning effect the nuances and ambiguities of language, while, on the other hand, Ayckbourn can satirize the mores of specific clearly differentiated groups within the same (middle) class, we have proof of the abundant comic potential of this native tradition. These plays also require a distinctive style of acting: Edith Evans, John Gielgud, Vivien Merchant and Maggie Smith most notably have revealed a mastery of the comic technique which is basic to the understanding of this type of play in any period. Finally it is a significant fact that, despite the endurance of this branch of comedy, few plays have been written in this idiom by any one author. All the major comic dramatists of the late seventeenth century chose to abandon the theatre after writing a mere handful of plays; those dramatists, such as Coward and Maugham, who have been more prolific have again produced only a few works which may be strictly classified as comedies of manners. The very specific nature of the genre inevitably circumscribes its potential in the hands of any one author; but it is also perhaps significant that Wilde and Orton, who most fully exploited its savage satiric potential, and wrote as they lived — dangerously — should have led such short and tragic lives.

2

The seventeenth century

I will believe, there are now in the world

Good–natured friends, who are not prostitutes,

And handsome women worthy to be friends:

Yet, for my sake, let no one e’er confide
In tears, or oaths, in love, or friend untried.

(William Wycherley: The Plain Dealer, 1676)

The terms Restoration comedy and comedy of manners have become virtually synonymous; but in the twentieth century both require careful reconsideration. The comedy of manners is a dramatic genre which has continued in England to the present day; Restoration comedy has always been a curious misnomer: Charles II came to the throne in 1660, and to describe all the comedies of the next fifty years as ‘Restoration’ is meaningless. The term is perhaps meaningful when considering those plays written during Charles’s reign, but to apply it to the dramas produced under James II, William and Mary and Queen Anne, whose political policies and life–style differed greatly, is absurd. Certainly the comedies written in these five decades have much in common which distinguished them from the Jacobean and early Caroline drama on the one hand and the plays of the later eighteenth century on the other. But it is equally instructive to observe that the plays of Farquhar, for example (the last two written in 1706 and 1707), have as much in common with She Stoops to Conquer as The Country Wife and indeed are much closer to Goldsmith’s drama than to the plays of Sheridan, who is usually distinguished as the prime exponent of comedy of manners in the late eighteenth century. This chapter will examine the major comedies of the late seventeenth century, drawing attention to the recurrent themes which serve to classify them as a distinct dramatic genre, whilst also emphasizing the differences between the plays of dramatists working under different social and political conditions.

When the theatres reopened in England after the Restoration a distinct break in dramatic tradition and presentation had taken place. These theatres, at first only two — under the management of D’Avenant and Killigrew at Dorset Garden and Drury Lane respectively — were licensed by royal monopoly. They were much smaller than playhouses like the Globe and Swan, more on the model of the indoor Blackfriars, catering for an educated and wealthy aristocratic elite. The intimacy of the smaller indoor theatre with its proscenium and the beginnings of perspective scenery on grooved flats was a far cry from the Elizabethan outdoor public playhouse which had entertained an entire cross–section of the society of London. Shakespeare’s theatre with its bare stage reflected the diversity and grandeur of Renaissance life; the Restoration playhouse represented only a few scenes: notably the coffee house, the drawingroom and the park, which defined and circumscribed the range of social behaviour examined by the dramatists. Restoration England was not an heroic age, in its accomplishments offstage or on. In France Corneille’s tragicomedies and Racine’s tragedies were the perfect reflection of that tension between passion and intellect seen in the thought and action, both social and political, of Louis XIV’s court and country.

The court of Charles II was a more cynical and licentious one, and on stage the dramatists, all of them in the truest sense dilettantes, because not fully committed professional men of the theatre, sought to reflect that freedom which was a deliberate counterpart to the Puritan repression of the interregnum. The presence of women for the first time on the English stage served to highlight the emphasis on marriage and sexual intrigue, with their corollaries, adultery and divorce: fresh themes for English comedy. Nor were they Molière’s themes. In a stable country, during the Age of Reason, he attacked society’s deviants and enemies. In England rebellion was the spirit of the age: Charles I lost his throne and head in 1649, James II his throne in 1688. Before the Puritan interregnum James I’s Calvinist upbringing contrasted sharply with Charles I’s Catholic sympathies which were inherited by his sons, Charles II and James II. The latter’s open profession of Catholicism cost him his crown and he was replaced by William and Mary who handed on the Protestant succession to Queen Anne. Thus England knew no more stability than in the previous century, and saw as much bloody strife and more revolution. No wonder, then, that the immediate post–Restoration period saw drama, and notably comedy, that reflected the turbulence and dissatisfaction of the times. Comedy in the first two decades after the Restoration is notably satiric, savage, cruel, and, in so far as it deals seriously with the important issues of infidelity, marriage, divorce and another significant theme, money, essentially concerned with the incalcitrant realities of everyday life, fully reflecting the manners of a sexually and monetarily acquisitive society.

The plays of Wycherley are the most powerful dramatic expression of this post–Restoration spirit. Produced between 1671 and 1677, they are the most uncompromising comedies of the period, baldly stating several of the major themes which were to dominate the drama up to the beginning of the next century. His third play, The Country Wife (1674/5) has enjoyed most frequent revival — it was adapted by Garrick in the eighteenth century. Its title draws attention immediately to the contrast of rural and metropolitan values, so often a theme of comedy of manners. Margery, the country wife, has by the end of the play accepted the values of the metropolis: she has learnt how to lie, how to deceive her husband. Hoping to escape the consequences of an unhappy marriage to an old rake, now jealous to keep her to himself, she falls easy prey to Horner, the archetype of the Restoration rake or Don Juan figure. Knowing that decorum is all–important, Horner has penetrated the code of the times and exploits the hypocrisy of social manners to the utmost. In Act 1 he tells the Quack: ‘your women of honour, as you call ’em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons; and ’tis scandal they would avoid, not men’ (I, i, ed. Jeffares, Vol. 1, p. 415) and proceeds to match this neat turn of phrase with an equally cool debauchery of all the available women, having circulated the false rumour that the incompetence of a French surgeon in curing venereal disease has made him sterile. The apparent frankness of this confession masks the unscrupulousness of his tactics: even as he disabuses the wives, he can abuse the husbands who flock to proffer their condolences.

As Margery’s rustic ingenuousness gives way to determination she soon adapts to the ways of the world and to urban standards of behaviour. Wycherley gives such pointed physical emphasis to his satire that it is impossible to take sides: the playgoer is made forcefully aware of the cunning of the disloyal wives and friends whilst at the same time laughing at the vanity and folly of the dupes. Thus in V, i, when Margery encourages Pinchwife to lead her, masked and hooded, to her lover,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The seventeenth century
• 3 The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
• 4 The twentieth century
• 5 Conclusion
• Bibliography and further reading
• Index