The Etheregean Revival — Southerne, Cibber and Vanbrugh

Abstract

I have already described the late seventeenth-century revival of Restoration comedy as ‘artificial’. In doing so I deliberately evoke Charles Lamb’s famous nineteenth century perspective on ‘… the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century’.¹ For Lamb, ‘Artificial’ would seem to mean ‘of the theatre’; a comedy that insists on its ‘theatrical’ provenance and its consequent distance from ‘the real’ as affirmed elsewhere; a comedy to some extent privileged by this distance, protected from moral or political inquisition. Later critics have of course been right to push beyond this formulation. And yet, reductive though it is, it can pinpoint be used to a kind of theatricality which distinguishes the comedy of the end of the century from the earlier forms it imitated. ‘The Playhouse’ according to Tom Brown in 1700 ‘is an enchanted island, where nothing appears in reality what it is nor what it should be’.² The unedifying picture he goes on to paint, of the sordid contrast between theatre and reality, could not perhaps have been apparent twenty or thirty years earlier. An obvious discontinuity of social and theatrical life produces a drama informed by a new awareness of the isolating tendency of theatre to create its own place in its own imagined world; an awareness forced on it by sudden shifts in court taste and social morality.