Shakespeare's Ear

by Tim Rayborn

  He really couldn’t have asked for much more—and that’s the problem. His extravagant tastes, aided and abetted by the lavish lifestyle that his positions afforded him (feasting, drinking, costly clothing and furnishings, all the usual excesses of too much wealth), meant that he tore through money like a hot knife through butter; even Louis had a difficult time replenishing his losses. Dufresny had a liking for the finer things in life and spent far more than he should have. According to one source, he also “inherited from his great-grandfather a taste for numerous experiments in love.” Take that however you will. Nevertheless he married, but it was unhappy and at his wife’s death in 1688, he moved to Paris, rented a good number of rooms, and indulged in gambling while writing new plays for the Parisian public. He collaborated with fellow playwright Jean-François Regnard (1655–1709) on Italian-style comedies, but the pair ran into a problem: Italian comic actors at the time were prohibited from acting onstage in France (protectionism and such), and so the venture wasn’t nearly as successful as he’d hoped. King Louis still granted him an annual salary, but his extravagance had to take back seat to practicality, which annoyed him greatly.

  A possibly urban legend records that he reached a state where he could no longer afford to pay his washer woman for her services, so he offered to marry her instead and, surprisingly, she accepted. True or not, this scenario was comic gold for the satirists, and Jean-Marie Deschamps (ca. 1750–1826) wrote a play about the incident and Dufresny’s reduced circumstances: Charles Rivière Dufresny, ou le marriage impromptu (“Charles Rivière Dufresny, or the Impromptu Marriage”).

  He lived on in this humbler manner, but his liking for the trappings of wealth remained with him until the end. A friend once tried to comfort him by offering that poverty was not a vice, to which he replied, “It is much worse.”

  Nathaniel Lee (ca. 1645/53–1692)

  Voted into Bedlam

  Lee was a talented young dramatist born after the end of the English Civil War. He eventually excelled in writing bloody tragedies in the grand Jacobean tradition, including The Rival Queens, or the Death of Alexander the Great, Caesar Borgia, an adaptation of Oedipus, and The Massacre of Paris. Filled with violence and blood, his works often questioned divine right and held that tyrants should be overthrown. His early successes earned him much praise, but he soon fell in with the Merry Gang, the notorious social circle of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester (1647–1680). Wilmot, a poet and devoted libertine, took advantage of Charles’s decadent Restoration court to live life to the fullest, especially when it came to excessive drinking and womanizing. Wilmot was involved in the theater and promoted his mistress, Elizabeth Barry (1658–1713) as an actress; he also once punched Thomas Killigrew, earning himself a temporary banishment from the court by the king.

  Lee the debauched playwright seemed eager to join the earl in a squalid life. He was skilled as a dramatist, but his drinking was excessive, and he may have been suffering from mental problems. By 1684, he was declared mad due to his erratic behavior and confined to the infamous Bedlam hospital for the insane, where he was kept for five years before being released. He humorously observed about those who had worked to have him committed: “They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.”

  His time in the asylum had obviously not done much good—such was the state of mental health treatment on those days—and he returned to drinking, dying a few years later after an especially heavy bout, but his collected works were deemed important enough to be published in 1734.

  Jeremy Collier (1650–1726)

  The Profaneness of the Stage

  Collier was one of many late seventeenth-century theologians who fumed at the perceived immorality of the new Restoration stage. He wasn’t the first or last, or even the loudest, but he is probably the best known because of his 1698 pamphlet, the descriptively titled “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.” “Short” is obviously a subjective term, as the text runs to nearly three hundred pages and discusses everything he saw as being wrong with the theater of his day (and there was a lot of it), as well as what to do about it.

  He wasn’t just an agitator against plays. He was part of a cantankerous group of clerics who refused to recognize the new monarchs, William and Mary, who had displaced the previous king, James II, younger brother of King Charles II, in 1688. James had caused quite a bit of controversy by being a Catholic. It was one thing to toss out the Puritans, as Charles II had done, but turning the monarchy over to someone loyal to Rome (for the first time since Mary Tudor in the 1550s) was going too far for many. James was sent into exile, and many rejoiced when the Dutch (and Protestant) William and Mary were offered a coregency in what came to be known as the Glorious Revolution.

  However, many Anglican clerics could not or would not swear an oath of allegiance to these two, feeling that James had been unlawfully displaced, regardless of his religion. This created a schism and quite a bit of controversy in the English and Scottish Churches that was not resolved until nearly the end of the eighteenth century.

  In the meantime, Collier had a lot to say about the stage; quite a lot. His pamphlet railed against all of the immoralities being played out in comedies and against those playwrights that indulged in writing such things. The work is a remarkable bit of crabbed polemic that lets the reader know right away what its intentions are:

  Being convinc’d that nothing has gone farther in Debauching the Age than the Stage Poets, and Play-House, I thought I could not employ my time better than in writing against them.

  One of Collier’s biggest gripes was that comedies in particular let some of their awful and rakish characters get away with all sorts of mischief and never get punished for it. In chapter after chapter, he lays out his claims and attacks everything imaginable, offering up such apoplectic section titles as:

  The Immodesty of the Stage; The Ill Consequences of this Liberty; The Stage faulty in this respect to a very Scandalous degree; Swearing in the Play House an Un-Gentlemanly, as well as an Un-Christian practice; A Second Branch of the Profaness of the Stage, consisting in their Abuse of Religion, and the Holy Scriptures; The Stage Poets make Libertines their Top-Characters, and give them Success in their Debauchery; The Stage guilty of down right Blasphemy.

  These things, he believed, set a terrible example for impressionable viewers, especially young ladies, who, as delicate little flowers, needed to be shielded from the horrid goings-on of a given play:

  Obscenity in any Company is a rustick uncreditable Talent; but among Women ’tis particularly rude. Such Talk would be very affrontive in Conversation, and not endur’d by any Lady of Reputation. Whence then comes it to Pass that those Liberties which disoblige so much in Conversation, should entertain upon the Stage. Do the Women leave all the regards to Decency and Conscience behind them when they come to the Play-House? Or does the Place transform their Inclinations, and turn their former Aversions into Pleasure? Or were Their pretences to Sobriety elsewhere nothing but Hypocrisy and Grimace? … To treat the Ladys with such stuff is no better than taking their Money to abuse them.

  This was all the more true because the scandalous new “actresses,” he and other critics thought, were frequently ladies of a less-than-sterling reputation, and so not to be emulated by the innocent.

  Many of the playwrights whose works were singled out in his attacks responded pretty fiercely, some with pamphlets of their own, thus starting a war of words that went back and forth periodically until at least 1726, the year Collier died. Some playwrights, actors, and theater managers accused Collier of just being upset because their plays tended to portray clergymen as foolish, and that by his actions he was proving them right. John Dryden’s Don Sebastian, for example, states:

  ——Churchmen tho’ they itch to govern all,

  Are silly, woful, awkward Polititians,

  They make lame Mischief tho’ they mean it well.

  Wasn’t Collier trying to govern, a
nd so making himself look silly? Many of his critics thought so.

  So what was the outcome of this war? Some have seen Collier’s not-so-short work as a major nail in the coffin for bawdy Restoration comedy, which disappeared after the turn of the eighteenth century and was replaced by more serious and reverent material. There even appeared societies dedicated to preserving morals and honor on stages. On the other hand, while the pamphlet certainly gave more ammunition to those who already hated these plays, the genre was already winding down and declining in popularity by the 1690s. Tastes were changing, and the coregents seem to have had little interest in racy comedies, being far more straightlaced than the ribald Charles II and his anything-goes mentality. A conservative backlash against those loose-and-free years was already taking hold, and Collier was simply a soldier in an ongoing culture war rather than its instigator.

  Anne Bracegirdle (ca. 1671–1748)

  A rakish plot foiled

  Anne Bracegirdle was one of the most esteemed stage actresses of the generation of restored English theaters. She was likely brought up by actors and made her debut in productions beginning in the later 1680s. She was fond of playing breeches roles (see the earlier discussion of female actors during the Restoration), but quickly added characters such as Desdemona from Othello and Lady Anne from Richard III to her repertoire. These were major dramatic parts, and soon she was winning acclaim and an increasing swarm of admirers. This, unfortunately, was not necessarily a good thing. A fellow actor remarked on her stage appearances: “Her Youth and lively Aspect threw out such a Glow of Health and Chearfulness, that on the Stage few Spectators that were not past it could behold her without Desire.”

  One such admirer was the unsavory Captain Richard Hill, whose infatuation got out of hand; in modern terms, we would call him a stalker. Bracegirdle was polite and cool toward him, but he convinced himself that underneath her virtuous exterior was a passionate woman waiting to be let out, and he was, of course, just the man to do it. There was one problem, though. He decided that she might very well already be in love with another man, the talented young actor and playwright Will Mountfort. She had performed in a few of his plays and they had acted several love scenes together. The captain decided that if this was the case, Mountfort would have to die. He even cursed the actor’s name in front of her, declaring him to be an unworthy rival.

  So Hill approached his friend, Charles Mohun, fourth Baron Mohun (ca. 1675–1712). Mohun was a notorious jerk who loved causing trouble, getting into duels, and gambling to try to support his lavish lifestyle. He was the perfect coconspirator in Hill’s awful plan. On December 9, 1692, their scheme was put into effect. They hired six ruffians to abduct Bracegirdle, but she fought back valiantly and drew a crowd, chasing the would-be abductors off; good for her! Okay then, on to plan B. Hill and Mohun stepped up and offered to escort the actress home. She agreed somewhat reluctantly, but they did as they promised. However, once safely inside her house, she noticed that they were now loitering in the street outside, obviously up to something.

  Recalling that Hill hated Mountfort, she dispatched a messenger to the actor, to warn him that the two men were plotting something. Since he lived nearby, he immediately (and in retrospect, foolishly) rushed to her aid. Coming upon Lord Mohun, Mountfort at first thought he was greeting an ally and embraced him (the two knew each other well enough), whispering words of warning to him about Hill. But as Mohun held him, Hill stabbed Mountfort with a sword, fatally wounding him. Another account says that Mohun stood nearby while Hill stabbed Mountfort in the chest. In either case, the deed was done. Hill realized that the whole thing had gone wrong and fled the country. Mohun was actually arrested and brought to trial in the House of Lords, but lucky him, he played the “get out of jail by virtue of being a nobleman” card and was acquitted; the verdict was widely condemned.

  The loss of Mountfort was indeed tragic. He had much literary promise and was probably not yet thirty years old; it is believed that he coined the phrase “Be still my beating heart” in his play Zelmane. For her part, Bracegridle was deeply saddened by his death and felt guilty for it for the rest of her life. She probably wasn’t even in love with him. In fact, many suspected that she was secretly married to (or least involved with) another playwright, William Congreve (1670–1729), whose comedies were very popular at the time, and in whose plays she acted. He is credited as the true source of two famous quotes (often misattributed to Shakespeare) from his play The Mourning Bride: “Musick has charms to soothe a savage breast” and “Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.”

  In any case, Bracegirdle’s warning had accidentally led to Mountfort’s doom. She continued to act, retiring in 1707 at the height of her career, but lived on until 1748, thankfully not having to put up with any other such ridiculous advances from presumptuous and sexist Baroque jackholes.

  6

  The Eighteenth Century

  In England, the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a backlash against the more outlandish excesses of the Restoration period, when everyone was so thrilled to be out from under the Puritan yoke that things often took on an “anything goes” vibe that thrilled many and shocked more than a few. It wasn’t just that women were onstage, it was that some of them were—gasp—wearing trousers! The plays became increasingly licentious and naughty, as if in a direct flip-off to the Puritans who had tried since the 1570s to curtail them and keep the public from seeing them at all. Still, by 1700, some people were starting to feel like they had had enough.

  Further, this newfound freedom also led to increasing political jabs and pointed opinions that openly criticized and mocked the government, despite all plays still technically being censored to remove overly controversial content. Things got so out of hand—reaching the stage of mocking the king’s large backside—that a new act laid down the law as to what could and couldn’t be said onstage. This basically watered down theater and made it far less fun and interesting, at least for a while; in response, the English novel began to flourish.

  France was in some turmoil as well, as you’ll recall. Louis the Sun King ended his days in 1715—you could say that the sun set on his life and reign—and some years of political intrigue followed. As the century progressed, there was increasing criticism of the very out-of-touch elite, while the masses only saw their conditions getting worse. Eventually, people started losing their heads over the whole thing.

  In a century of changes, Italy seemed to have the perfect response—more Commedia, because when in doubt about the uncertain state of the world, slap someone on the butt with a prop!

  Joseph Addison (1672–1719)

  Inadvertent inspiration for a revolution?

  Addison was an English essayist, politician, and playwright, also known for his contributions to newspapers. In 1707, he contributed the libretto to the opera Rosamond. The music was composed by the violinist Thomas Clayton (1673–1725), no less than a member of the King’s Musick, a private orchestra for royal entertainment. Whatever Clayton’s credentials and Addison’s skill, the opera failed miserably, prompting one observer to say, “Rosamond mounted the stage on purpose to frighten all England with its abominable musick.” Critics have been bringing the snark for centuries, it seems.

  Wisely leaving the opera world behind, Addison instead turned his attention to the play that he is most famous for—Cato, a Tragedy. Set in Roman times, the work discusses the end of the republic and the beginning of Caesar’s dictatorship. Cato, a devotee of the old conservative ways, is a determined foe of Caesar and ultimately commits suicide to hold on to his belief in the republic. The work is a meditation on tyranny that would have implications that Addison could never have imagined.

  While very popular in the British Isles, the play also later found favor in the American colonies. As the government of King George III began to seem ever more tyrannical to some colonists, they began to draw inspiration from the plight of Cato in facing what seemed like increasingly unreasonable demands. Though the work
did not “cause” the American Revolution, many of those revolutionaries drew inspiration from its dialogue.

  For instance, Patrick Henry’s famed words, “Give me Liberty or give me death!” seem to refer to act II, scene 4: “It is not now time to talk of aught / But chains or conquest, liberty or death.”

  Nathan Hale’s alleged declaration “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” could have been in reference to act IV, scene 4: “What a pity it is that we can die but once to serve our country.”

  George Washington wrote to Benedict Arnold (obviously before the latter turned traitor): “It is not in the power of any man to command success; but you have done more—you have deserved it.” This echoes act I, scene 2: “’Tis not in mortals to command success; but we’ll do more, Sempronius, we’ll deserve it.”

  Washington was almost certainly referencing the play deliberately. He was a great fan of the work and made use of it many times. Congress had passed a resolution stating that public officials should not attend plays, owing to a belief that they were too closely associated with “Britishness,” but Washington still ordered Cato to be performed at Valley Forge, possibly as a morale booster to the troops, since Cato’s supporters also rallied at a time of great hardship.

  When some military officers threatened mutiny over Congress repeatedly failing to pay them (money was hard to come by in those early days of a potential new nation), Washington defused the situation in his speech to the officers by again using Cato’s tactics from the play: he rebuked the author of the call to mutiny (who had bravely opted to remain anonymous), appealed to the potential mutineers not to dishonor themselves by turning against the republic, and asked for personal respect based on his own past services. He also quoted from the play to make his points. Clearly it was a very meaningful work for Washington, and if not directly responsible for the revolution, its defense of liberty in the face of tyranny certainly was a model for colonists who wanted a nation of their own.