Augustan Literature - Drama

Drama

The "Augustan era" is difficult to define chronologically in prose and poetry, but it is very easy to date its end in drama. The Augustan era's drama ended definitively in 1737, with the Licensing Act. Prior to 1737, however, the English stage was changing rapidly from the Restoration comedy and Restoration drama and their noble subjects to the quickly developing melodrama (Munns 97-100).

George Lillo and Richard Steele wrote the trend-setting plays of the early Augustan period. Lillo's plays consciously turned from heroes and kings and toward shopkeepers and apprentices. They emphasized drama on a household scale, rather than a national scale, and the hamartia and agon in his tragedies are the common flaws of yielding to temptation and the commission of Christian sin. The plots are resolved with Christian forgiveness and repentance. Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1722) hinges upon his young hero avoiding fighting a duel. These plays set up a new set of values for the stage. Instead of amusing the audience or inspiring the audience, they sought to instruct the audience and ennoble it. Further, the plays were popular precisely because they seemed to reflect the audience's own lives and concerns (Legouis 782-787, 879-883).

Joseph Addison also wrote a play, entitled Cato, in 1713. Cato concerned the Roman statesman. The year of its première was important, for Queen Anne was in serious illness at the time, and both the Tory ministry of the day and the Whig opposition (already being led by Robert Walpole) were concerned about the succession. Both groups were contacting the Old Pretender about bringing the Young Pretender over. Londoners sensed this anxiety, for Anne had no heirs, and all of the natural successors in the Stuart family were Roman Catholic or unavailable. Therefore, the figure of Cato was a transparent symbol of Roman integrity, and the Whigs saw in him a champion of Whig values, while the Tories saw in him an embodiment of Tory sentiments or, like the Tory Examiner, tried to claim that Cato was above political "faction". Both sides cheered the play, even though Addison was himself clearly Whig (Bloom and Bloom 266, 269). John Home's play Douglas (1756) would have a similar fate to Cato in the next generation, after the Licensing Act.

As during the Restoration, economics drove the stage in the Augustan period. Under Charles II court patronage meant economic success, and therefore the Restoration stage featured plays that would suit the monarch and/or court. The drama that celebrated kings and told the history of Britain's monarchs was fit fare for the crown and courtiers. Charles II was a philanderer, and so Restoration comedy featured a highly sexualized set of plays. However, after the reign of William and Mary, the court and crown stopped taking a great interest in the playhouse. Theaters had to get their money from the audience of city dwellers, therefore, and consequently plays that reflected city anxieties and celebrated the lives of citizens drew and were staged (Munns 96-99).

Thus, there were quite a few plays that were, in fact, not literary that were staged more often than the literary plays. John Rich and Colley Cibber duelled over special theatrical effects. They put on plays that were actually just spectacles, where the text of the play was almost an afterthought. Dragons, whirlwinds, thunder, ocean waves, and even actual elephants were on stage. Battles, explosions, and horses were put on the boards. Rich specialized in pantomime and was famous as the character "Lun" in harlequin presentations. The plays put on in this manner are not generally preserved or studied, but their monopoly on the theaters infuriated established literary authors.

Additionally, opera made its way to England during this period. Inasmuch as opera combined singing with acting, it was a mixed genre, and this violated all the strictures of neo-classicism. Further, high melodies would cover the singers' expressions of grief or joy, thus breaking "decorum." To add insult to injury, the casts and celebrated stars were foreigners, and, as with Farinelli, castrati. The satirists saw in opera the non plus ultra of invidiousness. As Pope put it in Dunciad B:

"Joy to Chaos! let Division reign:

Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,

Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:

One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,

Wake the dull Church, and lull the ranting Stage;

To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,

And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore." (IV 55–60)

John Gay parodied the opera with his satirical Beggar's Opera (1728) and offered up a parody of Robert Walpole's actions during the South Sea Bubble. Superficially, the play is about a man named Macheath who keeps being imprisoned by a thief named Peachum and who escapes prison over and over again because the daughter of the jailor, Lucy Lockitt, is in love with him. This is an obvious parallel with the case of Jonathan Wild (Peachum) and Jack Sheppard (Macheath). However, it was also the tale of Robert Walpole (Peachum) and the South Sea directors (Macheath). The play was a hit, and its songs were printed up and sold. However, when Gay wrote a follow up called Polly, Walpole had the play suppressed before performance (Winn 112-114).

Playwrights were therefore in straits. On the one hand, the playhouses were doing without plays by turning out hack-written pantomimes. On the other hand, when a satirical play appeared, the Whig ministry would suppress it. This antagonism was picked up by Henry Fielding, who was not afraid to fight Walpole. His Tom Thumb (1730) was a satire on all of the tragedies written before him, with quotations from all the worst plays patched together for absurdity, and the plot concerned the eponymous tiny man attempting to run things. It was, in other words, an attack on Robert Walpole and the way that he was referred to as "the Great Man." Here, the Great Man is made obviously deficient by being a midget. Walpole responded, and Fielding's revision of the play was in print only. It was written by "Scribblerus Secundus," its title page announced, and it was the Tragedy of Tragedies, which functioned as a clearly Swiftian parodic satire. Anti-Walpolean sentiment also showed in increasingly political plays, and the theaters began to stage them. A particular play of unknown authorship entitled A Vision of the Golden Rump was cited when Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1737. (The "rump" in question is Parliament, on the one hand, and buttocks on the other.)

The Licensing Act required all plays to go to a censor before staging, and only those plays passed by the censor were allowed to be performed. The first play to be banned by the new Act was Gustavus Vasa, by Henry Brooke. Samuel Johnson wrote a Swiftian parodic satire of the licensers, entitled A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the English Stage. The satire was, of course, not a vindication at all, but rather a reductio ad absurdum of the position for censorship. Had the licensers not exercised their authority in a partisan manner, the Act might not have chilled the stage so dramatically, but the public was well aware of the bannings and censorship, and consequently any play that did pass the licensers was regarded with suspicion by the public. Therefore, the playhouses had little choice but to present old plays and pantomime and plays that had no conceivable political content. In other words, William Shakespeare's reputation grew enormously as his plays saw a quadrupling of performances, and sentimental comedy and melodrama were the only choices.

Very late in the Augustan period, Oliver Goldsmith attempted to resist the tide of sentimental comedy with She Stoops to Conquer (1773), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would mount several satirical plays after Walpole's death, but to a large degree the damage had been done and would last for a century.