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Theatrum Belli: Late-Restoration Comedy and the Rise of the Standing Army
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2009
Extract
“Plays are but the Mirrours of our Lives,” wrote Colley Cibber in 1707, recognizing the special relevance of a timeless metaphor to the theatre of his own day. A man generally given to hyperbole, Cibber here underestimates the theatre's affective power for influencing and transforming society. Of all the many reflections and transformations one may see in the mirror of late-Restoration theatre, however, the most important, I believe, are the images of warfare. In the early eighteenth century, the theatrum mundi was indeed a theatrum belli, for the theatre of war was not confined to Vigo, Blenheim, and Malplaquet, to the fields of Sanders or Spain, but was enacted on the proscenium stages of Drury Lane, Lincoln's Inn fields, and the Haymarket. Nearly every new play written and produced on the London stages in the first decade of the eighteenth century has a Redcoat or a Tar in its dramatis personae or has topical references to the War of the Spanish Succession, to disbandment, to conscription, or to the debate over the issue of a standing army. Concurrent with the theatre's reflection of the nation's concern over the rise of the standing army is a transformation in the representation of army officers in stage comedies. After 1700, portrayals of military men shift so dramatically that they seem to attain an ideological significance; the historical causes and the aesthetic effects of this shift—which are the focal points of the ensuing essay—suggest a widespread ideological effort by writers to enlist public sympathy not only for the soldier but also for the notion of a standing army.
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References
ENDNOTES
1 The Lady's Last Stake (prologue), in Colley Cibber: Three Sentimental Comedies, ed. Sullivan, Maureen (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1973), 181Google Scholar. Subsequent references to Cibber's plays are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text.
2 The Works of George Farquhar, ed. Kenny, Shirley Strum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), vol. 2, p. 35Google Scholar. Subsequent references to Farquhar's plays are from this edition and will be cited by volume and page number parenthetically within the text. The Wrekin was a famous hill near Shrewsbury.
3 Trevelyan, George Macaulay, England Under Queen Anne (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), vol. 1, p. 217.Google Scholar
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9 That is, the instability England had experienced between 1641 and 1660 and again in 1685 and 1688 was internal rather than external; England had not suffered an invasion in more than six hundred years, and naturally had had no boundary disputes since Wales was conquered.
10 England's major conflicts with Spain in the sixteenth century and Holland in the seventeenth were conducted largely by the navy.
11 Childs, John, The British Army of William III, 1689–1702 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), 189Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically within the text.
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13 Fortescue, J. W., A History of the British Army (London: Macmillan, 1910), vol. 1, p. 384Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be cited by volume and page number parenthetically within the text.
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16 Brodsky, G. W. Stephen, Gentlemen of the Blade: A Social and Literary History of the British Army Since 1660 (New York, 1988), 31Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically within the text.
11 The Poems of John Dryden, ed. Kinsley, James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), vol. 4, p. 1751.Google Scholar
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19 All references to Burnaby's plays are from The Dramatic Works of William Burnaby, ed. Budd, F. E. (London: E. Partridge, The Scholartis Press, 1931)Google Scholar, and will be cited parenthetically within the text.
20 Baker, Thomas, An Act at Oxford (London, 1704), 17Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically within the text. An Act at Oxford was banned and never produced; cf. Hume, Robert D., The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 463Google Scholar. Baker reworked the play in 1705 as Hampstead Heath, deleting the satire on Oxford scholars. Although the plays are practically the same, I quote from the earlier text, rather than that which was actually produced on the stage, since it reflects the pre-Blenheim days when the army had yet to prove its worth.
21 Baker, Thomas, The Fine Lady's Airs (London, 1709Google Scholar; rpt. ARS, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California Press, 1950), 6. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically within the text.
22 Baker, Thomas, Tunbridge-Walks: or, the Yeoman of Kent (London, 1703), 5Google Scholar. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically within the text.
23 Cf. Childs, , op. cit., ch. 8.Google Scholar
24 Cf. Schwoerer, , op. cit., 155–197.Google Scholar
25 Clearly a pre-Blenheim sentiment. Baker carelessly revised this passage in Hampstead Heath: “If they were as hot in storming a Town, ‘twou'd be much happier for the Nation” (London, 1705, 50)Google Scholar. The revision hardly reflects the national optimism and fervor the army after Marlborough's victory at Blenheim. That Baker maintains the pre-Blenheim doubts in his revision suggests one reason for the failure of Hampstead Heath in the theatre.
26 William Ill's one major victory was the recapture of Namur in 1695.
27 Vanbrugh alone among the three includes no soldiers in any of his comedies with a contemporary London setting. Only his unperformed fragment, A Journey to London (adapted by Gibber in 1728 as The Provok'd Husband) contains representations of soldiers.
28 This predominance holds true only in comedies; heroic and tragic plays, with their setting in past civilizations, were often constructed around a virtuous and noble warrior.
29 Shadwell, 's The Volunteers (1692)Google Scholar is a notable exception.
30 The Plays of Richard Steele, ed. Kenny, Shirley Strum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 38Google Scholar. Subsequent references to Steele's plays are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text.
31 Dennis, John, Gibraltar (London, 1705), 24Google Scholar. Wilmot and Vincent are presented as lewd debauchers and whoremasters who treat lightly issues of great seriousness to the general, patriotic public. For example, one of them says, “Valour consists in a Medium: That is, I suppose, in plain English, a Mediocrity” (43). Moreover, they both mock English naval captains. Dennis's representation of the English officers must have been offensive to its audience, still basking in the glow of Blenheim and subsequent victories; surely, his characterization must have been at the root of the play's failure. Dennis's contemporary, Arthur Bedford, attacked Gibraltar in his indictment of the immorality of the stage, The Evil and Danger of Stage-Plays, accusing Dennis of “representing all the English Soldiers as addicted to Whoredom.” Bedford is thankful that “our Soldiers behaved themselves in another Manner [than Dennis's colonels did]; but no thanks is due to the Poet or Stage, who made a Jest of that, for which all others sorry in earnest” (149). Bedford, of course, exaggerates Dennis's intention, which was never to satirize the military.
32 Cf. Bakers prologue and epilogue to Tunbridge-Walks: “You soft Sirs, who at home Indulge your Ease, /And hate French Bullets worse than French Disease”; “Who think it Safer, here at home to fall / By Ladies Eyes, than by a Cannon Ball.”