A Mirror to Nature

Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics 1660–1732

Rose A. Zimbardo

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813155395
• eBook ISBN: 9780813186733
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In this provocative study Rose Zimbardo examines a crucial revolution in aesthetics that took place in the late seventeenth century and that to this day dominates our response to literature. Although artists of that time continued to follow the precept "imitate nature," that nature no longer corresponds to the earlier understanding of the term. What had been in essence an allegorical mode came to be a literal one.

Focusing on the drama of the period as an exemplary form, Zimbardo shows how it moved from depicting a metaphysical reality of idea to portraying an inner reality of individual experience. But drama is constrained in expressing the inner experience since its medium is limited to human action. The novel arose to replace drama as the popular literary form, Zimbardo argues, because it could better and more freely convey man's inner world and thereby imitate the "new" nature.

The study concluded that the changes which took place in drama during this period and which led to the invention of the novel resulted not from any "change of heart" or sensibility but from a fundamental change in the understanding of the nature which art was thought to imitate. Neither the drama of the 1690s nor the early novel, Zimbardo finds, was in the least "sentimental."

A Mirror to Nature brings a new critical perspective to bear on literary developments at the end of the seventeenth century—one that must be considered by critics and historians of the period.

ONE

The Four Stages
of Dramatic Imitation
1660–1732

The transition in dramatic imitation of nature from the imitation of Ideas to the imitation of interior human nature and the emulation theory consequent upon it occurs in four stages. These stages are only roughly datable, since the progression is, of course, a continuum.

Stage 1

In Stage 1 (circa 1660-70), as a derivation from earlier seventeenth-century thinking, drama imitates nature as the Ideal. It is a shape of reality seen whole, the design of a microcosmic order that may be envisioned either as the Neoplatonic scale of Caroline drama set in motion or as the old three-tiered medieval universe secularized and modified by Hobbesian thought.¹ The design may be a mounting progression toward transcendent truth that is effected by dialectical juxtaposition and refinement. These images of reality were the Restoration’s inheritance from its Caroline predecessors, transmitted in large measure by Davenant, whose influence on the restored theater was profound.² Davenant had preserved the old conception of imitation almost intact during the Interregnum. His postscript to the 1673 edition of Gondibert expresses his conception of the process by which an artist imitates “reality.” “I intended in this poem,” he says, “to strip Nature naked and clothe her again in the Perfect Shape of Vertue.”³ In “The First Day’s Entertainment at Rutland House” (1656), he applies the conception to a dramatic piece. The function of his “opera,” he says, is “to advance the Characters of Vertue in the shapes of Valour and Conjugal Love.”⁴ The key words in this sentence are “character” and “shape.” Until about 1680, “character” did not mean personage in a fiction. The word meant, as it had originally, the delineation of an Idea, or essential form. In the 1660s it was still very closely associated with the “shape of reality” that Renaissance thinkers believed to be the proper object of artistic imitation. For example, Theophilus Gale writes in 1669:

If with attentive eye we look

Upon the six days of volume of the Book

Where God and mighty Nature doth appear,

Writ in an Universal Character;

We still shall find in ev’ry part

Space and dominion left for Art.

Or rather, all our Arts are but to know,

How and from whence was made so great a Show.⁵

Even when the shape of reality came to be embedded in phenomenal nature as the design of Providence, the word “character” continued to denote the delineation of an idea. The Theophrastan Character itself was conceived to be the shape of an abstract essence. Characters “differ from Portracts,” Flecknoe tells us, “in that they are onely Pictures of the Mind, abstracting from the Body.”⁶

In his 1663 quarto dedication of The Siege of Rhodes, Davenant declares that his subject is “Ideas of Greatness and Vertue.” He praises Corneille and says that his object, like Corneille’s, is “heightening the Characters of Valour, Temperance, [and] Natural Justice.”⁷ The conception of imitation is Caroline English, though the method of “heightening” by dialectical juxtaposition owes a debt to French formalism and particularly to Corneille.

This foundation is the inheritance of the Restoration playwright; and it is this conception that he fosters and improves upon during the 1660s and early 1670s. “A Play,” Dryden writes, “to be like Nature, is to be set above it, as Statues which are placed on high are made greater than the life, that they may descend to the sight of their just proportion.” The playwright quite consciously tries to avoid portrayal of actual speech and behavior, for, as Dryden goes on to say, “If nothing were rais’d above that level, the foundation of Poetry would be destroy’d. . . . thoughts [must] be exalted and Images and Actions. . . . rais’d above the Life.”⁸

We have no difficulty in accepting the validity of such a conception of dramatic imitation when it is applied to strictly defined “heroic drama,” but when it comes to other dramatic genres, “we expect drama to approximate life. . . . We pronounce characters true to life, or false: hail them as interestingly independent agents or dismiss them as authorial puppets. We want drama to have ideas but we want the characters to experience those ideas, not merely to enunciate them.”⁹ Because he stands on this side of the great seventeenth-century divide, the twentieth-century critic cannot envision a drama that does not imitate experience, that purposefully does not attempt to approximate “real life” in its characterization. In the 1660s all drama—comedy as well as tragedy—imitates abstract, ideal reality. Writing of Bartholomew Fair in the “Defence of the Essay,” Dryden says, “The Author does so raise his matter. . . as to render it delightful, which he never could have performed had he only said or done those things that are daily done or practiced in the fair. . . . the copy is of price, though the original be vile.”¹⁰ In this decade tragedy and comedy may be said to train attention upon different aspects of ideal reality, but comedy is not more “realistic” or more closely approximate to life than tragedy. The difference between the two genres, as Edward Howard argues in his preface to The Women’s Conquest, is not in their level of abstraction but rather in the kinds of Ideas they imitate: “whereas the business of Tragedy is in the highest nature to dispose and elevate the intrigues of passions and affections; I mean such as depend on Ambition, Revenge, Love, Honour and the like and so detect their vices accordingly, as it is the duty of Comedy to do the same in those that come nearest our Moralities.”¹¹ (It is important to note that “intrigue” here is the movement not of persons but of “passions,” a turn of idea.) Sir Samuel Tuke, whose Adventures of Five Hours (1663) was the longest-running comedy of the decade, says in his preface to the 1671 edition that all plays are “Moral pictures” whose “Chiefest Perfections consist in the Force and Congruity of Passions and Humours, which are the Features and Complexions of our Minds.”¹² In the 1660s and early 1670s the dominant aesthetic assumption is that a play of whatever genre is “nearest nature when in certain respects it is farthest from it.”¹³

Stage 2

Given the highly abstract representation that governs the designs of drama in Stage 1, Stage 2 (circa 1670-80) in the evolving conception of dramatic imitation is inevitable. In Stage 2 the drama imitates interplay between the ideal and the actual. The most felicitous expression of such interplay is in dramatic satire, wherein “nature” lies somewhere between the ideal vision that romantic imagination affords and the tawdry actual world that obscures and distorts it. Jean Hagstrum has said: “Caricature, both in its Italian origins and in its later English literary manifestations, was a countertendency to the dominant idealism. High culture was capable of turning itself upside down. . . . The art of distortion is to the art of idealization what bathos is to hypsos: an exact inversion, to which the same techniques apply though the direction is down and not up. The art of distortion reality is the precise reversal of la belle nature. It is nature consummately wrought to a lower pitch.”¹⁴ From his earliest to his latest criticism Dryden was concerned with the inextricable connection between the heroic and the burlesque, which he took to be the essence of satire. As early as the preface to Annus Mirabilis (1666), he locates nature between “images” of “heroic poesy,” which “beget admiration,” and “images of the burlesque, which . . . contrary to this, by the same reason beget laughter: for the one shows nature beautified, as in the picture of a fair woman, which we all admire; the other shows her deformed, as in that of a lazar, or of a fool with distorted face and antic gestures, at which we cannot forbear to laugh because it is a deviation from nature.”¹⁵ And late in his career, in “A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire” (1695), he declares that in “the most Noble kind of Satire. . . the Majesty of the Heroique [is] finely mix’d with the Venom of the other” and insists that “satire is undoubtedly a species [of] heroic poetry.”¹⁶

The sensibility of the seventies brought the upward and downward exaggerations that Hagstrum describes into conjunction. For instance, 1675 brought to the stage at the same time the extravagances of the operatic Tempest and the grotesque caricature, Duffet’s Mock Tempest. The contrasting perspectives were also brought into disjunctive unity within single satiric works, some of which are comic, like The Country Wife (1675); some mock-heroic, like The Man of Mode (1676); and others darkly ironic, like The Plain Dealer (1676), The Libertine (1675), or Friendship in Fashion (1678).¹⁷ The structure of dramatic satire derives from the high-plane heroic and low-plane mock-heroic lines of the earlier three-tiered comic model. In a satire these converge into a single line of subtle interplay. Sometimes the heroic is obviously played against, as in the broad mockery of “love and honor,” “generosity,” and men and ladies “of honor” in a play like The Country Wife. Sometimes it enters by way of quite subtle allusion, as it does in Limberham’s “Tricksy hath murder’d sleep” (V, 323), or in Dorimant’s recitation of lines from Waller (especially interesting, since Waller’s “Instructions to a Painter” [1666] had become a persistent and well-known heroic “antithesis” in verse satires of the period).¹⁸ However, the heroic antithesis in satire often stands as an unspoken “understood” that the playwright expects the audience to recognize—as it does in outright parodies like Duffet’s The Empress of Morocco (1674) or The Mock Tempest (1675), or in forms of verse satire like the Imitation.¹⁹ Both the formulation of the three-tiered structure itself and its relation to dramatic satire has its source in Hobbes. In his “Answer” to Davenant’s “Preface to Gondibert” (1650), Hobbes says that philosophers divide the “Universe” into three, “Regions: Celestiall, Aeriall, and Terrestrial” and that poets, in imitating this three-planed universal design, “have lodg’d themselves in the three Regions of mankinde, Court, City, and Country, correspondent in some proportion to the three Regions of the World.” Medieval heaven, hell, and middle earth have been secularized. This three-level shape of reality gives rise to the poetic genres, which Hobbes always assumes can be rendered with equal facility in narrative or dramatic modes: “From hence [the three planes of the World] have proceeded three sorts of Poesy, Heroique, Scommatique and Pastorali. Every one of these is distinguished again in the manner of Representation, which sometimes is Narrative. . . . and sometimes Dramatique. . . . the Heroique Poem narrative. . . . is called an Epique Poem. The Heroique Poem Dramatique is Tragedy. The Scommatique Narrative—Satyre, Dramatique is Comedy. The Pastorall narrative is called simply Pastorall . . . . the same dramatique, Pastorall Comedy.”²⁰

But it was Dryden who made the clearest connection between English comic structure and satire. The best satire, he says, must have a double design: “As in a play of the English fashion . . . there is to be but one main Design: and tho’ there be an Under-plot, or Second Walk of Comical Characters and Adventures, yet they are subservient to the chief Fable, carry’d along under it and helping to it. . . . Mascardi in his Discourse of the Doppia favola, or Double-tale in Plays, gives an Instance of it, in the famous Pastoral of Guarini, call’d Il Pastor Fido; where Corisca and the Satyre are the under-parts.”²¹ Plays like Aphra Behn’s The Amorous Prince (1671) or Rhodes’s Flora’s Vagaries (1670) clearly anticipate the two-faced satiric design of the mid-seventies.

Plays like The Virtuoso, The Country Wife, and The Feign’d Courtezans are decidedly not the “sex farces” that Hume calls them; quite the contrary, as Earl Miner has so often and so well demonstrated, “Critics and poets during the Restoration held to a concept of literature that was dignified, grand, and perhaps even exorbitant in its claims for . . . satire.”²² We must remember that even The Kind Keeper was recognized as satire in 1678. The charges leveled against it were that it was too topical and that in it Dryden, like Juvenal, gave too close attention to the vice he purports to attack, but nobody thought it was a sex farce or any other kind of farce.

Although imitation of the dynamic interplay between the ideal and the actual finds its best and clearest expression in dramatic satire (which we will explore at length in chapters 3 and 4), it is also the foundation in other dramatic forms of the mid-seventies and early eighties. For example, we find in Aureng-Zebe traces of the “ladder of love” that informs the mounting progression structure of the sixties. Aureng-Zebe figures transcendent, prophetic passion; Arimant, heroic passion; the Emperor, passion in the world. Finally, Nourmahal is Hobbesian passion, or power conflict. The ladder, however, is not used as a structuring device, as it would have been in the previous decade. The play is structured in a single linear pattern that, like a double-backed mirror, reflects upward (the dream of heroic greatness) and downward (limiting, confining actuality) simultaneously. Bruce King has said: “The main theme of Aureng-Zebe is the disquieting effects of imagination. The characters are driven by their restless minds to extremes of hope, passion and fear. The force that drives them is the desire to fulfill impossible dreams.”²³

“Nature” in Aureng-Zebe is the continuous interplay between transcendent idea and material limit. The conceptual change from...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Four Stages of Dramatic Imitation, 1660-1732
• 2. Imitation of Nature as Idea
• 3. Imitation of Nature as “The City Between”
• 4. The Varieties of Dramatic Satire in the 1670s
• 5. Nature as the Experiential Actual, 1680-1700
• 6. Imitation of the Inner Arena: Sentimental, Pornographic, or Novelistic?
• 7. Emulation: The Early Eighteenth Century
• Notes
• Index