Congreve, embittered by this interference in matters literary, published Amendments of Mr Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (1698) in reply to A Short View. His main line of argument was that his words should not be judged out of context: the same justification often used against censors today and an early instance of a writer complaining against deconstruction of his text. Congreve added wit by emphasizing that smut was in the eye of the beholder: ‘[T]he greater part of those examples which he [Collier] produced are only demonstrations of his own impurity; they only savour of his utterance and were sweet enough till tainted by his breath.’25 The charge of prurience was fair—Collier did seem to take great pleasure in spying out immorality—but Congreve's defence was weakened by the need he felt to claim some alternative reforming purpose for his satire.
Vanbrugh was thicker-skinned than Congreve (‘Fortunately, I am not one of those who drop their spirits at every Rebuff—If I had been, I had been underground long ago’26) but his own response to Collier, A Short Vindication of ‘The Relapse’ and ‘The Provok'd Wife’ (1698), got off on an equally wrong foot by accepting Collier's premise that the purpose of theatre was to ‘recommend Virtue and discountenance Vice’.27 King William had expressed approval of A Short View to demonstrate his sympathy with the moral crusaders, even permitting its Jacobite author impunity to come out of hiding. Knowing the King was content to see the theatres gagged, playing to the vocal Christian reformers, must have forced Vanbrugh to pull his punches and choose his words carefully.
Whereas Congreve pretended Collier's insults were too exaggerated to be wounding (‘He would have poisoned me, but he overdosed it, and the Excess of his Malice has been my Security’28), Vanbrugh admitted A Short View's undeniable popularity now made it, as another Kit-Cat admitted, a ‘thing no farther to be laughed at’.29
More self-confident defence came from a non-Kit-Cat writer also targeted by Collier, the neoclassical critic John Dennis. A friend of Congreve's since 1691, Dennis suffered from an absurd prickliness of temper, a quality that probably disqualified him from Kit-Cat membership, if he sought it. Dennis' response to Collier's Short View rightly linked the ‘high flying’30 Jacobite author with those censors at the opposite end of the religious and political spectrum: the Puritans.31 Dennis defended the stage without denying its appeal to ‘passions’ above reason, and did not bother to claim that drama need serve a reforming purpose. One enemy asserted Dennis ‘sat at the head of a Club’ to ‘impeach’ Collier,32 which suggests that the Kit-Cats deferred to an ad hoc grouping of anti-Collierites to handle the matter. In his Defence of the Short View (1699), Collier stated he would only continue the debate with writers like Congreve and Vanbrugh, not with small fry like Dennis.
By 1699, there were nine Societies for the Reformation of Manners working across London, and by 1701 there would be almost twenty. Moral reformers in the Commons and Lords continued to introduce legislation that intruded into the private sphere, with the King's approval. Somers and his Kit-Cat colleagues in the Lords were among those to vote down a 1699 Bill to make adultery a misdemeanour punishable under the common law, for example. Somers had personal reasons for doing so: from as early as 1694, he had been the lover of his Herefordshire ‘housekeeper’, Mrs Elizabeth Fanshawe Blount, whose husband was in prison. One Tory satire accused Somers of having had Mr Blount arrested in order to bed the wife, whereas Somers' friends portrayed him as having rescued her from a negligent, shiftless husband.33
In February 1699, William proclaimed that actors must avoid using profane and indecent language—disregarding the role of his own Cabinet ministers, Somers and Montagu, in encouraging and financing the writing of the allegedly profane and indecent plays in the first place. When Congreve's Double Dealer was revived in March 1699, it was in the expurgated version.
The Kit-Cat Club survived Collier's attacks on its members because it did not attempt to defend the imaginations of Vanbrugh and Congreve as they really deserved to be defended. Instead, the Kit-Cat critics emphasized the points on which they agreed with Collier: that wit without decency is not true wit; that smut should not be used to compensate for a deficit of ‘sprightly Dialogue’,34 and that mobbish audiences needed elevation and education, for the whole nation's sake. While the Kit-Cat patrons supported the Club's authors in defiance of the censors, the more ambitious Whig politicians also recognized that they needed to work on their public image, and that a new, more ‘improving’ literature was required to win the moral highground back from the Tories. Congreve and Vanbrugh were not, however, willing to produce it.
It would be the stars of the following generation of Kit-Cat authors—Addison and Steele, not yet members in 1698—who succeeded in bridging the gap between the Club's libertine, Restoration founders, led by Dorset, and Collier's puritanical strictures. Steele, who was at heart a faithful Christian, later admitted to having privately admired much that Collier preached, ‘as far as I durst, for fear of witty Men, upon whom he had been too severe’.35
In 1698, at the height of the culture wars, Steele was known as ‘Captain Steele’—one of the many demobilized officers whose uniforms reddened the theatre audiences after the peace of Ryswick. Steele was then living either with his aunt and uncle at their Bond Street house, or at the Whitehall home of his boss, Lord Cutts. Steele said Cutts treated him like a son and provided him with ‘an introduction into the world’, so it may have been through this military patron that Steele first entered Dryden's outer orbit at Will's Coffee House. There was already, of course, the connection established with this circle through Addison, though Addison lived in Oxford until 1699.
Steele seems to have charmed Congreve, in particular, with whom he passed ‘many Happy Hours’.36 This was quite an honour, since Congreve confided to Joe Keally that he was ‘not apt to care for many acquaintance, and never intend to make many friendships’.37 Steele, for his part, said that he felt the ‘greatest Affection and Veneration’ for Congreve, admiring, in particular, Congreve's poem ‘Doris’.38 No evidence survives to tell us whether Steele felt a similarly warm regard for Vanbrugh in the late 1690s; as a soldier-turned-playwright, Vanbrugh was the obvious role model for Steele at this juncture.
Steele also appears to have befriended Congreve's housemate, Tonson, by 1698. That year, Tonson moved his firm's offices from Chancery Lane to his family's old premises in Gray's Inn, where they would remain until 1710. A satirical advertisement appeared cruelly referring to Tonson's ‘Sign of the two left Legs, near Gray's Inn BackGate’.39 Steele was often to be found at this shop during 1698. There he could sit for hours and read for free, with a glass of wine by his side, as bookshops then were more like paying libraries where, for a small subscription, one could read the most recent publications on the premises, leaving a bookmark in a volume if not finished at a single sitting.
An additional attraction at Tonson's shop was the publisher's 18-year-old niece Elizabeth, an assistant in the business. In 1699 or 1700, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter by Steele, christened Elizabeth and given the surname of ‘Ousley’, after Dorothea Ousley, a nurse who raised illegitimate infants and orphans in the neighbourhood. How Tonson felt about Steele, an insolvent Irishman, ex-soldier and aspiring playwright, having impregnated his unmarried niece is not recorded, nor is there evidence that Steele's guardian aunt and uncle ever found out about the baby.
Steele felt that an illegitimate child was deeply shameful, not an everyday occurrence. He must have known how Addison disapproved of the ‘Vermin’ who carelessly produced bastards and whose punishment should be, Addison joked, transportation to a colony in need of population.40 The person to whom Steele therefore turned during the crisis was not Addison, nor any of his witty male friends, but Mrs Mary Delariviere Manley, an unconventionally worldly woman who had been a confidante to Charles II's mistress, the Duchess of Cleveland, and who had lived with several men in London, starting with John Tilly, a lawyer and warden of Fleet Prison. Steele met Mrs Manley through Tilly, wh
o in the mid-1690s had joined Steele and another old university friend as gullible investors in some alchemical research.
Manley claimed Steele dealt with two unwanted pregnancies in the late 1690s—one baby died, the other was presumably Elizabeth Ousley. It is unclear whether Elizabeth Tonson was the mother in both instances. Mrs Manley explained that she had stood as guarantor for Steele when he needed credit with a midwife, though whether for an abortion or a birth is unclear. Steele never paid the midwife's bill, so she threatened to sue and make the matter public. A note in Steele's hand confirms this story, referring to blackmail by a Mrs Phip[p]s in Watling Street, near St Paul's, ‘at the sign of the Coffin and Cradle’, through her ‘threatening to expose the occasion of the debt. It is £22.—£5 of it is paid’.41
Steele's refusal to return the favour and lend Mrs Manley some ‘trifling sum’ ended their friendship some years later.42 She complained of his ingratitude, to which Steele responded that he only refused because he did not have the ready cash to lend. He still had, he insisted, ‘the greatest Sense imaginable of the Kind Notice you gave me when I was going on to my Ruin’.43
This guilty sense of his own ‘ruin’ was the source of Steele's sympathy for Collier's coinciding jeremiads about national ruin, though Steele was too much of a Whig to think the Williamite world any more sinful than its Restoration predecessor. Steele's comment about Collier having been ‘too severe’ on witty men was similarly born of his growing friendship with Collier's targets, Congreve and Vanbrugh. Steele recognized that Tory efforts to caricature the Whigs and their wits as unfaithful individuals, both sexually and politically, ignored a certain code of honour upheld by these men, who proved, in fact, as emotionally loyal to their mistresses as they were to their ‘Revolution Principles’.44 Their fidelity to one another as friends, through the Kit-Cat Club, was also an important way in which they sought to counter these Tory accusations and attest their virtue.
During the first five years of the new century, the Collierites and their allies did not slacken in their efforts to force moral reform on the theatres and society as a whole—over thirty pamphlets on the controversy would be published by the end of 1700 alone, including A Second Defence of the Short View by Collier himself. This pushed the Kit-Cat Club to display its defiance of these repressive religious forces more overtly, as on 9 January 1700, when the Club went to the theatre ‘in a body’, to see a performance designed as a rebuff to denunciations of the Whig theatres. The day before, Matt Prior, in London, wrote to Abraham (‘Beau’) Stanyan, one of Congreve's friends from Middle Temple student days and now a fellow Kit-Cat, serving as a diplomat in Paris: ‘Tomorrow night, Betterton acts Falstaff, and to encourage that poor house the Kit Katters have taken one side-box and the Knights of the Toast have taken the other.’45
The two clubs were, it seems, putting on a show of friendly rivalry for a common cause. The ‘poor house’ was Betterton's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, under the patronage of Montagu and the rest of the Kit-Cat Club. Betterton's low rumbling voice and round belly made him perfect for the part of Shakespeare's Falstaff. Prior, meanwhile, had penned ‘a Prologue for Sir John [Falstaff] in favour of eating and drinking’,46 which teased the Knights of the Toast for living on ‘meagre Soup and sour Champagne’ instead of good English fare like Falstaff. It also teased Jacob Tonson as looking like ‘old plump Jack [Falstaff] in Miniature’.47
It is significant that the Kit-Cats so honoured Falstaff, a character moderating tragedy with comic excess and abundance, resilient in his frivolity, regenerative in his adaptability, and a patriotic nobleman who fondly mentors young Hal, the future King of England. Falstaff could be viewed as a hero of English paternalism and materialism, while his love of food and drink was a straightforward connection to Kit-Cat dining. As A Kit Cat C—b Describ'd (1705) put it: ‘None but Sir John Falstaff's of the Party: Fat, Corpulent Lords, Knights and Squires, were to be Admitted into [the Kit-Cat] Society by the Laws of its First Institution.’48 Falstaff's capacious love of life was contrasted to images of rectitude, chastity and neo-Puritanism in the performance. The Club, which counted ‘keeping up good Humour and Mirth’ as an objective equal to ‘the Improvement of Learning’,49 was making the case for a new style of Whiggism—with hedonistic appetites, yet with heart, honour and national pride.
The plan for the 9 January theatre outing was for the Kit-Cats to dine at Dorset's townhouse then proceed to Lincoln's Inn. Prior had had difficulty breathing a few days earlier, so he went to the dinner intending only to ‘sit down to table when the dessert comes, eat nothing but roasted apples, and drink sack and water’.50 The others would have honoured the Falstaffian spirit of the evening with a hearty meal. Their drunken posse, when it turned up at the theatre, must have looked the epitome of privileged debauchery to the servants sent ahead to save their seats. A satirist described Montagu in the theatre ‘sitting on the Kit-Cat side, and Jacob T[onson] standing Door-Keeper for him’.51 The Toasters, on the other side, were led by the Earl of Carbery, acting as ‘general of the enemy's forces’, despite also being a member of the Kit-Cat Club by this date.52
Congreve described the theatre as an open arena full of ‘washy rogues’ to whose semi-illiterate judgement he reluctantly submitted his ‘repartee and raillery’.53 Elsewhere, he despised the ‘swarm of Scribblers’ and City men who arrived before three o'clock to make sure they had enough elbow room, and who ate plum cake while watching the play.54 If the people in the pit did not approve of the performance they blew on little toy whistles called ‘cat-calls’.
The constant, defensive reference to the verdict of the pit by Congreve, Vanbrugh and other Kit-Cats hints at major tension between these writers and their audiences, and reflects their anxiety about the coarsening of the culture. The Kit-Cat Club emerged while popular culture was perceived as expanding at an unprecedented rate, and highbrow authors sought to cling to the opinions of the tasteful, educated few. The Kit-Cat critics were unified, for example, in their distaste for the popular entr'acte entertainments (rope dancers, singers, trained animals, tumblers and acrobats) added to even the most serious plays. They also distrusted mechanical innovations in scenery and special effects that appealed to the pit. Prior's Prologue for Falstaff, in this case, urged the audience to ‘save the sinking stage’ by preferring English comedy to the ‘Apes’ of French farce.55
Watching this performance, which probably consisted of extracts featuring Falstaff rather than an entire history play, the Kit-Cats would have been as much part of the show as the actors: Dorset boasting his ribbon of the Garter; Garth in his distinctive red cloak; Walsh with his heavily powdered wig. The key difference between theatres in this period and those in the Restoration was a larger forestage, so most of the action took place in the middle of the audience. Theatres remained well lit throughout the performances, and after 1690 there was some reintroduction of seating on the stage itself, further blurring the demarcation between the play's intrigues and those in the audience.
The plan to assist Betterton's theatre succeeded beyond expectations. Nearly three weeks later, a Londoner wrote: ‘The Wits of all qualities have lately entertained themselves with a revived humour of Sir John Falstaff…which has drawn all the town more than any new play that has been produced of late.’56
The Kit-Cat Club continued its outings to the theatre over the next few years. In 1700, one satire referred to the Dorset Garden Theatre on the Thames at Whitefriars, ‘Where Kit-Cats sat, and Toasters would be seen.’57 They could attend either the opening night and support the theatre and its company, or the third night to support the playwright. Such excursions were an ideal way for the Club to publicize itself and its patronage, showing London society it was no gang of political conspirators skulking down a back alley like the regicide, republican clubs of the seventeenth century, and that the Kit-Cat's members refused to be cowed by the Collierites' moral condemnation of their dramatic poetry.
Congreve's new comedy of manners, The Way of the
World, began rehearsals at Lincoln's Inn soon after the Falstaff performance closed. Again, the hopes and incomes of Betterton's company were pinned on the new play, with Vanbrugh remarking that ‘if Congreve's Play don't help 'em, they are undone’.58 The play, however, though costing its author some ‘care and pains’ to write,59 was a risky work which Congreve said he doubted London's degenerate audience would appreciate, rather than one designed for popularity. Betterton's actors no doubt felt some ambivalence about the work—so brilliant, yet so difficult—as they rehearsed it. Congreve knew that parts of the play were provocative: two fingers stuck up to those who wanted less cynicism and more moral certainties on the English stage. The Prologue, for example, to be spoken by Betterton and concerning the author's intentions to entertain rather than reform, addressed itself sarcastically to any Collierites in the audience:
Satire, he [Congreve] thinks, you ought not to expect;
For so reformed a town who dares correct?
To please, this time, has been his sole pretence,
He'll not instruct, lest it should give offence.
The Way of the World, like Congreve's earlier plays, reflected the author's view of the urbane society in which he moved: the primacy of male friendships, bonded as much by clubbing and card-playing as business contracts and kinship. Congreve complicates theatrical stereotypes by making the play's hero, Mirabell, one of these suave and socially adept young London gentlemen—qualities traditionally belonging to morally suspect stage villains. Mirabell's final proof of integrity in the play, furthermore, is his kindness to Mrs Fainall, his former mistress. Even today, the question of one's moral duties to one's ex-lovers would be subtle territory for a play; in 1700, facing an audience of Collierites, it was an astonishing question to pose.
Congreve laughs at the affectations of Mirabell's friends, in the characters of Witwoud and Petulant, yet at the same time invokes sympathy for the social insecurities that require such pretences, as when Witwoud laughs at Petulant's attempts to feign popularity by saying he will dress up in costume and ‘call for himself, wait for himself, nay and what's more, not finding himself [at home], sometimes leave a letter for himself’.60 The mutual exposure of faults and fears is simultaneously cruel and affectionate, as male friendships so often are. The author showcases the men's conversation, and hence his own, while implying that they are balancing on their tightropes of wit above great social uncertainty.
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