Protectorate Drama

With the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642, Parliament officially closed the theatres. Though the Red Bull attempted to put on some plays, the Globe was torn down, and drama was effectively banned.

That doesn't mean no one tried to stage dramas during this period, though. Strolling players might still attempt to perform skits at fairs and both private halls and public taverns might host actors for brief plays.

Those plays had to be kept brief, as authorities might intervene at any moment. Once Oliver Cromwell was declared Lord Protector of the Realm, the authorities had a firmer hand than ever. Rather than performing full plays, actors mined longer dramas for brief sketches they called drolls.

In 1662, after the monarchy had been restored, many of these drolls got collected together in a book called The Wits, or, Sport upon Sport. The entertainment presented by Bottom and his friends was excerpted from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and other scenes were ripped from John Marston's The Dutch Courtesan, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, and Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle.

A famous illustration for the book portrays Sir John Falstaff, who appeared in The Bouncing Knight, a droll based upon the Gad's Hill episode in The First Part of King Henry IV. With him is the Hostess, who appears in the same playlet. Other stock characters include a Simpleton and a French Dancing Master. These sketched-in characters, often reduced to a simple bumpkin, a testy lord, or a dull college professor, had a tremendous influence on Restoration drama once the theatres were reopened in 1660.

One droll, The Humour of Bumpkin, shows not just the forbidden art of theatre, but repressed dancing as well, and even makes references to Maypoles, a tradition the Puritans must have abhorred. In it, Bumpkin makes up his mind to fall in love, and is fortunately obliged by three country wenches who pull upon him, each wanting to be his sweetheart.

The drolls that persisted during the Protectorate were hardly great art, but they prove that theatre can never be completely repressed.

Best Productions of 2021

New York City theatre isn't completely back yet, especially with omicron scares cancelling shows right and left, but at least things are better than last year, when I had to write a list of the top 10 shows I did NOT get to see.

So now I'm back to my annual tradition of coming up with a list of the top shows I saw that opened this year in New York City. Obviously, my own adaptation of A Christmas Carol doesn't count, since it was in Trenton, and neither do virtual performances, though some of them were quite fun.

Here are my picks, in reverse order:

10. The Alcestiad - Magis Theatre Company lived up to its name with this magical outdoor production on Roosevelt Island this summer. Thornton Wilder's take on a Greek myth involving death and plague came alive with the ruins of a smallpox hospital providing the backdrop. It was a joy to behold.

9. King Lear - New York Classical Theatre decided to do William Shakespeare's most depressing tragedy this year, but with the happy ending rewritten by Nahum Tate. Once again, the outdoor setting added to the experience, though it also meant that my first two attempts to see the show were cancelled due to rain. The third time was a charm, and this show was nothing if not charming.

8. The Book of Moron - Robert Dubac's one-man show was closer to a stand-up comedy routine than your typical Off-Broadway fare, but it rose beyond simple jokes to become an engaging and thought-provoking piece of theatre. This was in part due to flawless direction by comedy legend Garry Shandling and a surprisingly innovative set designed by Melissa Burkhardt Moore. I'm glad I saw it.

7. Trouble in Mind - Alice Childress at last made it (posthumously) to Broadway with Roundabout's production of her most famous play, a backstage drama about actors rehearsing a dreadful script by a conveniently absent playwright. During intermission, I overheard one audience member say, "Chuck Cooper makes everything he's in even better." How true! Cooper's performance in the play is not to be missed, so if you haven't seen it yet, get your tickets. It's still playing, but only through January 9th!

6. Merry Wives - Jocelyn Bioh's adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor was the Public Theater's sole offering at the Delacorte this summer, but it was worth seeing, if for no reason other than Jacob Ming-Trent, who played the larger-than-life character of Falstaff. Bioh appropriately adjusted the text to make Shakespeare's comedy of rural life in England work when reset among African immigrants in contemporary Harlem. The sight of Ming-Trent as an overgrown man-child playing video games was not only a witty sight gag--it was amazingly appropriate for the character of Sir John Falstaff.

5. Flying Over Sunset - When James Lapine has a new play, it's usually worth seeing, and when it's got music by Tom Kitt and lyrics by Michael Korie, you definitely want to be there. This imagined meeting of Aldous Huxley, Clare Boothe Luce, and Carey Grant at a rented Malibu beach house where they go on LSD trips together delivers both soaring melodies and beautiful stage pictures. It also features innovative choreography by tap master Michelle Dorrance. Harry Hadden-Paton, Carmen Cusack, and Tony Yazbeck all provide stellar performances that go beyond mere impressions of celebrities. This show is still playing at Lincoln Center, so get your tickets while you can!

4. Mrs. Warren's Profession - Gingold Theatrical Group scored again with their production of Bernard Shaw's devastating comedy about capitalism and prostitution, which turn out to be pretty much the same thing in this play. Karen Ziemba was able to shine in the title role, even when sharing the stage with other acting stalwarts like Raphael Nash Thompson and Robert Cuccioli. The more challenging roles in the play, however, go to the younger performers playing Vivie and Frank. Nicole King made her Off-Broadway debut as Vivie Warren, a "New Woman" whose enigmatic intelligence Shaw explored but thankfully never tried to solve. She was complimented by David Lee Huynh as Vivie's caddish love interest, Frank. Director David Staller made certain this production was just as charming as GTG's 2019 offering, Caesar and Cleopatra.

3. The Disciple - Thirdwing is a relative newcomer to NYC theatre. Their productions--which are sometimes live, sometimes virtual, and sometimes both--can be hit or miss. The Female Genius, a series of filmed shorts by Rachel Carey, provided the basis for this full-length play about author and philosopher Ayn Rand and her devoted much younger lover, Nathaniel Branden. Unlike some other plays about sexual exploitation by the famous and powerful, The Disciple finds nuance, in part by flipping traditional gender politics on their head, and showing a woman who is willing to be just as selfish and brutal as any man. Maja Wampuszyc is perfect as Rand, and Cameron Darwin Bossert plays Branden with both humanity and humor. Alas, the in-person show came and went without much fanfare, but fortunately, you can still see a filmed scene from it streamed through Thirdwing's website.

2. The Alchemist - The funniest new play of 2021 was Ben Jonson's old Jacobean comedy The Alchemist, made new again in a brilliant adaptation by contemporary dramatist Jeffrey Hatcher. Red Bull Theater Company, which has been remarkably active online during the pandemic, thankfully returned to the live stage with this side-splitting production directed by Jesse Berger. The cast featured Jacob Ming-Trent--who was so hilarious as Falstaff in this summer's Merry Wives--as well as Manoel Feliciano, Reg Rogers, Teresa Avia Lim, Nathan Christopher, Carson Elrod, Allen Tedder, Louis Mustillo, and Jennifer Sanchez (who literally shimmered in a costume designed by Tilly Grimes). Jonson's play is hysterical, but its cast of 12 (plus assorted extras) makes it difficult to produce for a professional company. Hatcher did a great job getting to the core of the humor while also reducing the cast size and making the play feel topical for those of us living through the plague of the 21st century.

1. The Streets of New York - Of all the New York companies that took their work to the virtual world to keep theatre alive during the pandemic, none were more prolific and innovative than Irish Repertory Theatre, which experimented boldly with the online format, and frequently with great success. I intensely looked forward to their return to the live stage, though, and was greatly pleased when they announced that they would be performing Dion Boucicault's The Streets of New York, especially after they had done such a magnificent revival of the same author's comedy London Assurance. What I was not expecting was for the show to be a musical! Director Charlotte Moore provided a number of delightful songs to transform Boucicault's classic melodrama into a holiday treat. She couldn't have done it, however, without a delightful cast that includes Ben Jacoby, David Hess, Justin Keyes, Jordan Tyson, Ryan Vona, Delaney Westfall, and (most winningly) Amanda Jane Cooper. It's still playing until January 30th, so be sure to grab tickets.

That's my list! Honorable mentions go to Blackbird, Radium Girls, and The Overcoat. Let's hope the virus recedes soon, and we can have a more robust season in 2022!

The Alchemist

The prologue to Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist begins: "Fortune, that favours fools, these two short hours / We wish away..." It is a reminder that Jacobean plays rarely ran much over two hours.

If you have the good Fortune to see Red Bull Theater Company's production of The Alchemist, currently running at New World Stages in an adaptation by Jeffrey Hatcher, those hours will seem short indeed.

The cast is entirely game, and they bring off Jonson's witty comedy with remarkable aplomb. The setting, a London house abandoned by its owner during an outbreak of the plague, seems remarkably apt for New Yorkers in 2021, especially those of us who stuck it out during the height of COVID-19 deaths, having no country houses to retreat to when the going got rough.

Staying in the house are a trio of con artists: a servant named Face (Manoel Feliciano, who played the villainous De Flores in Red Bull's production of The Changeling), a fraudulent alchemist named Subtle (the oily Reg Rogers), and a cunning vixen named Dol Common (a stunning Jennifer Sanchez). It is Dol who takes the lead in this production, though, using her wit, beauty, and sexual prowess to get what she wants.

And what is it she wants? The same thing everyone wants in the world of The Alchemist: GOLD! Few people lust after the yellow metal as much as Sir Epicure Mammon, though, who is perhaps Jonson's most memorable character in the play. Mammon is a larger-than-life figure whose appetites rival those of nearly any other character from the period. In order to find his equal, one would have to look to such behemoths as William Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff.

Fortunately, Mammon is played in this production by Jacob Ming-Trent, who starred as Falstaff this summer in the Public Theater's production of Merry Wives. He fills the stage with laughter whenever he appears, aided by over-the-top costumes designed by Tilly Grimes (who also designed Red Bull's hysterical production of The Government Inspector, likewise adapted by Hatcher).

Other brilliant cast members include Stephen DeRosa as the anabaptist Ananais, Nathan Christopher as the tobacconist Abel Drugger, and Carson Elrod as the gambler Dapper. The plot picks up steam when Face and Subtle both get designs on a rich, sexy widow named Dame Pliant, played by Teresa Avia Lim (Cleopatra in GTG's Caesar and Cleopatra). But to get to her, they'll have to deal with her choleric brother Kastril (Allen Tedder) and the appropriately named Surly (Louis Mustillo).

Director Jesse Berger ably conducts this magnificent cast, and the set designed by Alexis Distler looks nice enough to live in--even if you have to weather a plague in order to stay there. Tickets are available now, so get them soon. The show is currently only running through December 19th.

The Masque of Queens

Ben Jonson's The Masque of Queens was first performed for James I and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, on February 2, 1609. The piece is particularly flattering to Anne, who performed in it, as well.

Anne was not alone. She was accompanied by the Countess of Montgomery, the Countess of Arundel, the Viscountess of Cranbourne, the Countess of Derby, Lady Elizabeth Guilford, the Countess of Huntingdon, Lady Anne Winter, Lady Windsore, the Countess of Essex, and Lady Anne Clifford. Because royalty and nobles were participating in the performance, Jonson wrote that it was his intention "to see that the nobility of the Invention should be answerable to the dignity of their Persons."

To better show off the beauty of the ladies, Jonson began with "an Anti-masque of Boys" who were dressed "in the habit of Hags, or Witches, sustaining the Persons of Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, &c. the Opposites to good Fame." This prelude provided "a Spectacle of strangeness," according to Jonson. The set designer Inigo Jones also built an image of Hell for the witches to make their entrance from, accompanied by "a kind of hollow and infernal Musick." The witches then called for their leader with this charm:

      Dame, Dame, the Watch is set:

      Quickly come, we all are met.

      From the Lakes, and from the Fens,

      From the Rocks, and from the Dens,

      From the Woods, and from the Caves,

      From the Church-yards, from the Graves,              

      From the Dungeon, from the Tree

      That they die on, here are we.

            Comes she not yet?

            Strike another heat.

Sound a bit like a certain Scottish play by one of Jonson's contemporaries? The witches' second charm does, too, perhaps even more so:

      The Weather is fair, the Wind is good,

      Up Dame, o' your Horse of Wood:

      Or else, tuck up your gray Frock,

      And saddle your Goat, or your green Cock,

      And make his Bridle a bottom of Thrid,

      To rowl up how many Miles you have rid.

      Quickly come away;

      For we, all, stay.

            Nor yet? Nay, then,

            We'll try her agen.

The Dame who leads the witches finally does arrive, and leads them all in "a magical Dance, full of preposterous change, and gesticulation." This was supposed to be an inversion of the customary rules of dance, with the witches "dancing back to back, and hip to hip, their hands joined, and making their circles backward, to the left hand, with strange phantastick motions of their heads, and bodies." Jonson credits the choreographer Hierome Herne with coming up with this spectacular stage business.

In the middle of the dance, "on the sudden, was heard a sound of loud Musick" and then "not only the Haggs themselves, but the Hell, into which they ran, quite vanished." In place of Hell "appeared a glorious, and magnificent Building, figuring the House of Fame. The twelve ladies, including the Queen herself, were arrayed on this arch. Jonson knew better than to give these noblewomen a bunch of lines to recite, so instead they just had to present themselves in costumes designed by Jones, representing famous Queens from history.

An actor dressed as Perseus representing "masculine Vertue" descended to the stage and said:

      So should, at Fame's loud sound, and Virtue's sight,

      All dark, and envious Witchcraft flie the light.

      I did not borrow Hermes Wings, nor ask

      His crooked Sword, nor put on Pluto's Cask,

      Nor on mine arm, advanc'd wise Pallas shield,

      (By which, my Face avers'd, in open field

      I slew the Gorgon) for an empty Name:

      When Virtue cut off Terror, he gat Fame.

He then introduced the women who adorned the House of Fame. Eleven of them were queens of the past: Penthesilea the Amazon, Camilla of Volscia, Thomyris of Scythia, Artemisia of Caria, Beronice of Egypt, Hypsicratea of Pontus, Candace of Ethiopia, Voadicea (Boudica) of Britain, Zenobia of Palmyra, Amalasunta the Goth, and Valasca of Bohemia. On top of this pyramid of fame sat Queen Anne herself, in the person of "Bel-anna."

Fame personified then appeared, "attir'd in white, with white wings, having a collar of gold about her neck, and a heart hanging at it." She said to Virtue:

      Vertue, my Father, and my Honour; thou

      That mad'st me good, as great; and dar'st avow

      No Fame, for thine, but what is perfect: Aid,

      To night, the triumphs of thy white-wing'd Maid.

      Do those renowned Queens all utmost Rites

      Their states can ask. This is a night of nights.

The queens then mounted chariots and bound up the witches. The masque ended with this song:

      Who, Vertue, can thy power forget,

      That sees these live, and triumph yet?

      Th' Assyrian Pomp, the Persian Pride,

      Greeks Glory, and the Romans di'de:

            And who yet imitate

      Their Noises, tarry the same Fate.

            Force greatness all the glorious ways

            You can, it soon decays;

            But so good Fame shall never:

      Her Triumphs, as their Causes, are for ever.

Jonson's masque didn't last forever, and the Stuart monarchy itself collapsed within a generation. We do have some of Jones's sketches of the costumes, though. Here's his design for Artemisia, as played by Lady Elizabeth Guilford:

You can also watch video of a 2016 production of the masque at New College Chapel in Oxford. They clearly didn't have the budget of James I's court, but hey, they gave it a try!

Plutarch's Caesar

Ben Jonson quipped that his friend William Shakespeare had "small Latin, and less Greek." It's true that Shakespeare must have been familiar with Ovid's Metamorphoses in the original Latin, but other than that, Johnson seems to have been right.

Fortunately, by the end of the 16th century, people in England didn't have to be able to read Latin and Greek in order to have access to the classics. Many of Shakespeare's plays are based on the ancient historian Plutarch. In order to read Plutarch, the playwright simply read an English version by Thomas North, which North had translated from a French version of the original Greek.

How do we know Shakespeare read North's translation? He borrowed heavily from the language he used. In Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, Shakespeare takes North's description of Cleopatra's barge, and just tweaking a word here and there, turns it into iambic pentameter and makes it fit the verse form he wants. Passages in Julius Caesar might not be quite as close, but they still betray a direct debt to Plutarch, and in particular to North's rendering of Plutarch into English.

Consider this famous passage from Act I of Julius Caesar:

                    Let me have men about me that are fat,
                    Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep a-nights.
                    Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.
                    He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.

Compare that to this prose passage in North's translation of Plutarch:

Caesar also had Cassius in great jealousy, and suspected him much: whereupon he said on a time to his friends, "what will Cassius do, think ye? I like not his pale looks.... As for those fat men and smooth-combed heads," quoth he, "I never reckon of them; but these pale-visaged and carrionlean people, I fear them most," meaning Brutus and Cassius.

Shakespeare's version is better, but it borrows key words, including look(s), fat, men, (carrion)lean, and head(ed).  The syntax is changed, but the meaning is essentially the same. Shakespeare knew when to borrow good material, but he also understood how to reshape it to turn what was good into something better.

In Act II, Shakespeare borrowed from North's Plutarch in penning possibly even more famous lines for Caesar:

                    Cowards die many times before their deaths;
                    The valiant never taste of death but once.
                    Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
                    It seems to me most strange that men should fear,
                    Seeing that death, a necessary end,
                    Will come when it will come.

Here's what it says in North's translation of Plutarch:

And when some of his friends did counsel him to have a guard for the safety of his person, and some also did offer themselves to serve him, he would never consent to it, but said: "It was better to die once, than always to be afraid of death."

Shakespeare elaborates on the quote in the original, expanding it into a meditation on the subject of death and bravery. A simple aphorism becomes a moment of philosophical reflection. Shakespeare didn't always expand upon his material, though. One of the most chilling moments in Plutarch's story of the assassination of Caesar is this:

Furthermore there was a certain soothsayer that had given Caesar warning long time afore, to take heed of the day of the Ides of March, (which is the fifteenth of the month), for on that day he should be in great danger. That day being come, Caesar going unto the Senate-house, and speaking merrily unto the soothsayer, told him, "the Ides of March be come:" "so they be," softly answered the soothsayer, "but yet are they not past."

The play relates this exchange with remarkable brevity:

                    CAESAR: The ides of March are come.
                    SOOTHSAYER: Ay, Caesar, but not gone.

It seems that everything has been done already in one way or another. Playwrights always use source material. Shakespeare just seems to have been able to use his better than most. When he found gold, he polished it. When there was a nugget of precious material, he mined it further until he found what he wanted. And when he came across a gem, he chipped back at it until he uncovered a heart that sparkled all the more brilliantly.

The Jacobean Stage

Because Queen Elizabeth I never married and bore no children, when she died in 1603, she left no clear heir. Fearing civil war, Elizabeth's chief advisor, Robert Cecil, proclaimed King James VI of Scotland as the new king. James was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots (a cousin of Elizabeth whom the English queen had executed for treason). Now King James I of England as well as King of Scotland, James took up residence in London and set up court. His reign, known as the Jacobean era, saw an even greater flowering of drama than England under Elizabeth.

The king had a literary bent, and while still in Scotland had written several books, including a work on witchcraft called Daemonologie. He personally took on the patronage of Shakespeare's company, which became known as The King's Men. No doubt in part to please his new patron, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, a dark tragedy featuring one of the king's ancestors (Banquo) portrayed in a particularly good light. Also not surprisingly, the play featured witches, another great interest of the king. James had a notoriously short attention span, however, and The King's Men probably had to abridge plays performed at court even more drastically than they had to under Elizabeth.

During the early years of James's reign, Shakespeare produced some of his greatest plays, not only Othello and King Lear, but also the dark comedy Measure for Measure, and the Roman tragedies Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. In 1608, Shakespeare became part owner of an indoor theatre known as Blackfriars. Though located within the city limits, the theatre was on land formerly belonging to a Dominican monastery and so was legally outside the control of local politicians who disapproved of plays. The King's Men now had a second permanent theatre, and it was one where plays could be performed year-round. Though the audience and performers were protected from the elements, the theatre had to use candles to light the stage, which was an expensive proposition.

The Blackfriars Theatre was a smaller, more intimate space than the Globe, and it charged a considerably higher admission, guaranteeing an exclusive clientele. Shakespeare's later plays, including Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest, while also no doubt performed at the Globe, display a level of sophistication and subtlety that might have been influenced by the new theatre. Also, while plays at the Globe were performed without intermission, the Blackfriars Theatre required multiple act breaks in which expiring candles could be replaced. This led to the break-up of plays into five acts (following the model of the Roman playwright Seneca) with musical interludes played between acts. Nobles who paid extra could sit on the stage at Blackfriars, likely to the consternation of actors.

One Elizabethan dramatist who successfully made the transition to the new style of the Jacobean period was Thomas Heywood, whose play A Woman Killed with Kindness was performed in the first year of James's reign in England. Like the city comedies of the era, Heywood's play focuses on middle-class characters, but in the genre of tragedy, instead. Jacobean revenge tragedies, which took inspiration from plays like The Spanish Tragedy and Hamlet, were particularly popular. Notable among them is the anonymous play The Revenger's Tragedy, sometimes attributed to Cyril Tourneur (author of The Atheist's Tragedy) and sometimes to Thomas Middleton (author of another revenge drama, Women Beware Women). Middleton later collaborated with William Rowley (author of The Birth of Merlin) on The Changeling, a play that explores forbidden love and madness.

However, John Webster is generally considered the master of Jacobean revenge drama. His play The White Devil seems to have been a failure when it was first performed in 1612 at the open-air Red Bull Theatre. His later plays proved more popular, perhaps because they were presented in the more intimate Blackfriars. Not long after the debacle of The White Devil, The King's Men performed Webster's masterpiece The Duchess of Malfi, based loosely on the events surrounding an infamous Italian duchess a century earlier. The play not only proved a hit, but it received numerous revivals for years to come.

Theatrical entertainments at court frequently involved the courtiers themselves on stage, and sometimes even members of royalty. These elaborate spectacles came to be known as masques. They involved music and dancing as well as poetry, and writers of masques were often accomplished poets. Though English courts had performed masques even before the reign of Henry VIII, these entertainments particularly thrived under James I. During his reign, Ben Jonson became the predominant writer of masques at court.

In 1604, Jonson co-wrote a court entertainment called The Coronation Triumph together with Thomas Dekker. The following year, the court performed Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, in which James's wife Queen Anne took a leading role. Other masques followed, with Jonson writing about one entertainment a year for the court. In 1611, he introduced the king's heir, Prince Henry, to the court, with the masque Oberon, the Faery Prince. Not all of these performances met with approval, however, and the audience dealt harshly with Jonson's 1618 masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. The failure might not have been all Jonson's fault, though. Prince Henry had died six years earlier, and Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue marked the debut of James's younger, physically frail son, Prince Charles, who was the new heir.

Jonson's collaborator in these masques was Inigo Jones, an architect and stage designer. Jones had traveled to Italy and brought back Italian scenic techniques, especially those of Andrea Palladio. As time went on, the costumes and scenic designs for masques took on greater importance, and Jonson's words receded into the background. The great writer commented in verse on the meteoric rise of the scene designer, writing:

                    Oh, to make boards to speak! There is a task!
                    Painting and carpentry are the soul of masque.
                    Pack with your peddling poetry to the stage:
                    This is the money-get, mechanic age!
                    To plant the music where no ear can reach,
                    Attire the persons as no thought can teach
                    Sense what they are: which, by a specious, fine
                    Term of the architects, is called design!

After 1634, Jonson stopped writing masques, but Jones continued designing the popular entertainments. His greatest design was probably for Salmacida Spolia, a masque written by William Davenant for celebrations at the beginning of 1640. By that time, Prince Charles had become the decidedly unpopular King Charles I. The king cast his political enemies in the masque, hoping to win them over to his side. His attempt at reconciliation failed, though, and two years later civil war would break out in England.

The Sullen Lovers

The word "romantic" or "romantick" predates the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The scholar Tim Blanning traces the first use of the word to 1650, when the Catholic royalist Thomas Bayly wrote a book entitled:

Herba parietis: or, The wall-flower as it grew out of the stone chamber belonging to the metropolitan prison of London, called Newgate: being a history which is partly true, partly romantick, morally divine. 

Here the author contrasts the fact that his book is "partly true" with the idea that it is "partly romantick," indicating that the imaginative "romantick" does not correspond directly with an objective account of what is "true." For many seventeenth-century writers, the idea of something being "romantick" was by no means positive. In fact, the term could be downright pejorative.

Thomas Shadwell seemed to feel that way when he wrote his 1668 comedy The Sullen Lovers. Shadwell believed that Ben Jonson, not Shakespeare, should be the model for dramatic poetry. In the preface to his play, he disdained authors who "have wilde Romantick Tales wherein they strein Love and Honour to that Ridiculous height, that it becomes Burlesque..."

According to Shadwell, only Shakespeare's Falstaff came near to Jonson's characters. The Sullen Lovers, he claimed, would be different from the "Romantick" writers who elevated poetry beyond the good-natured humor of Jonson. Shadwell's prologue claims the audience would find:

          No kinde Romantick Lovers in his Play,
          To sigh and whine out passion, such as may
          Charm Waitingwomen with Heroick Chime,
          And still resolve to live and die in Rime... 

Shadwell admitted to writing the play after hearing an account of Moliere's Les Facheux (which roughly translated means "The Annoying Ones"). However, he claimed to have written much of The Sullen Lovers before reading Moliere's play, and the two works, while similar, have a number of major differences.

The Sullen Lovers concerns Stanford, who is described in the cast list as "A Morose Melancholy Man." Stanford longs to retreat from the world to "some remote and unfrequented Place" where he has "none but Bears and Wolves for his Companions" and he "never see's the folly of Mankind!"

The misanthropic Stanford finds his soul-mate in Emilia. Her hero is Charles V, who:

          Seeing the Vanity of Mankind, did quit
          The pleasures that attend a Monarchs state;
          Nay more, that most bewitching thing call'd power,
          And left the World, to live an humble life,
          Free from the Importunity of Fools...

The two, indeed, are set upon by fools, and the fools quote Shakespeare, no less! A conceited poet named Ninny, for instance, references Hotspur from Henry IV, Part I when he cries: "I'le pluck bright honour from the pale fac'd Moon (as my friend Hot-spur sayes)..."

Ultimately, the lovers are left to be melancholy together, discovering that there is no one they find less intolerable than one another. In the final lines of the play, Stanford declaims:

          Now to some distant desart let's repair:
          And there put off all our unhappy Care,
          There certainly that freedom we must find,
          Which is deny'd to us among Mankind.

What I find interesting is that Stanford and Emilia are the cause of fun in this comedy. Stanford's friend Lovel and Emilia's sister Carolina (who also get together at the end of the play) are much more moderate and present the audience with a sensible ideal. Were this a Romantic play with a capital "R" Shadwell might have taken the sullenness of his lovers a bit more seriously.

Top Comedies After 1737

I previously wrote about the effects of the Licensing Act of 1737, which brought broad censorship to the British stage in the 18th century, and continued to hold back playwrights well into the 20th century.

Comedies like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera and the rollicking satires of Henry Fielding had drawn the ire of Robert Walpole, Britain's first prime minister. He was determined to make sure he would not be made fun of onstage. The Licensing Act silenced the laughter, and comic writing migrated from the stage to the novel.

In the wake of this massive new censorship law, what comedies were produced? Now that political theatre was effectively banned, what could the playhouses of the Georgian era actually stage? What were the comic plays they put on, over and over again, which proved to be the most popular? The answer is: virtually nothing new.

From 1737 to the end of the eighteenth century, all of the top ten most performed comedies in London were (with one important exception) revivals from earlier eras. I recently came across a list of these comedies, and I found some of the names on it quite unexpected. Here they are in reverse order:

10. The Alchemist by Ben Jonson. Jonson's reputation once exceeded that of Shakespeare, though his works are seldom performed today. Personally, The Alchemist is my favorite of his, and in the 18th century it out-ranked all of his other comedies, as well as all but two comedies by Shakespeare.

9. As You Like It by William Shakespeare. One of the Bard's two comedies to top Jonson was this perennial favorite. Now that women could perform on stage, Rosalind was a wonderful opportunity for actresses to show off their legs in perhaps the greatest cross-dressing role of all time.

8. School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. That's right - Sheridan's classic play was the only new comedy to break into the top ten, and it didn't premiere until 1777. For 40 years, the comic well ran pretty dry for the British stage, and even Sheridan barely made it onto the list.

7. The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar. This 1706 comedy tones down some of the bawdiness of the Restoration, but still has plenty of laughs. I saw New York Classical Theatre do the show a few years back, and I can attest that it still works.

6. The Busy Body by Susanna Centlivre. For those who think there were no female playwrights before Wendy Wasserstein, this 1709 play should be a wake-up call. Though Centlivre is not performed much today, she once outranked Sheridan!

5. The Tempest by William Shakespeare. This late Shakespearean comedy has always been a favorite. Some recent productions in New York have occasionally missed the mark, though I rather enjoyed this summer's production by The Classical Theatre of Harlem.

4. The Provoked Husband by Colley Cibber and John Vanbrugh. You haven't heard of this 1728 play? I can't say that I'm surprised. I've never read it myself, but it once outranked all of Shakespeare's comedies!

3. The Beaux' Stratagem by George Farquhar. This 1707 play is probably Farquhar's best known, so it should come as no surprise it ranked so high. It received 419 performances in London from 1737 to 1800. As You Like It by comparison received only 264 over that same time period.

2. The Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele. This sentimental comedy edged out The Beaux' Stratagem with 434 performances in London from 1737 to 1800. It was no match for the era's top play, however.

1. The Beggar's Opera by John Gay. In spite of the Licensing Act, a ballad opera savagely attacking Robert Walpole and his policies remained (by far) the top comedy in the wake of the new censorship law. The Beggar's Opera had 875 London performances from 1737 to 1800, far more than any other comedy. Though the play was one of the chief causes of the Licensing Act, Walpole couldn't stop performances. It was already an audience favorite.