The Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

  After a while of listening to everything from milkmaids’ songs to harpsichord recitals and anthems, you will no doubt start to wonder who composes the best music? All that baroque sound that we associate with the period – where does that come from? One famous name obviously leaps out but, before we come to him, it is worth listening to his contemporaries. Matthew Locke and Henry Lawes are the most significant composers in England in the 1660s: Locke is the Composer in Ordinary of the King’s Violins, and Lawes the author of three books of airs and a gentleman of the Chapel Royal. In the 1670s a younger generation of composers emerges, represented by Pelham Humfrey, William Turner and John Blow. Humfrey dies young, aged twenty-seven, but not before his education at the French court has influenced all his fellow composers in England. Turner contributes anthems for the royal household, sings in the Chapel Royal and dashes across London to perform his music in the theatres. Blow is the organist of Westminster Abbey: he composes dozens of anthems for the court and one of the first English operas, Venus and Adonis, in 1683. This is the pattern for all the leading composers: producing sacred music for the Chapel Royal, anthems for state occasions and dramatic music for the theatres.

  Then we come to Henry Purcell.

  Born in 1659, Purcell experiences the death of his father when he is five, and so his mother is forced to move with her six children into cheaper accommodation. But Purcell is musically gifted and obtains a place in the Chapel Royal, studying under the direction of Henry Cooke and then Pelham Humfrey. In 1682 he is given the prestigious position of organist in the Chapel Royal, and from that year until his early death at the age of thirty-six, he is incredibly prolific, producing more than sixty anthems, forty-eight hymns and a dozen services for the Chapel Royal, besides more than fifty ‘catches’ (songs by several voices sung in sequence); twenty-four odes; about two hundred popular songs; incidental music for more than forty plays; five dramatic operas (Dioclesian, King Arthur, The Fairy Queen, Timon of Athens and The Indian Queen); a full-scale opera, Dido and Aeneas (1689); and more than a hundred instrumental works, including sonatas, minuets, jigs, preludes, airs, hornpipes, pavanes, suites, voluntaries, sonatas, overtures and marches. Works such as his overture to The Indian Queen and the trumpet tune from the same piece; ‘Dido’s Lament’ from Dido and Aeneas; the rondeau from the incidental music to Abdelazer; the ‘symphony’ from Act Four of The Fairy Queen; and his haunting ‘Music on the Death of Queen Mary’ all escape the confines of their own time and are still cherished in the modern world. Not only does Purcell’s fame not fade down the centuries but his music does not, either.

  The Theatre

  If music was quietened by the Commonwealth, drama was silenced.The playhouses were closed on 2 September 1642 and converted to other purposes. The only performances were in private houses, behind closed doors. Every time the brave proprietors of the Red Lion Theatre in Clerkenwell attempted to put on a public performance, the authorities came knocking. The Globe Theatre was demolished and tenements built on the site. By 1660, despite the growing fame of Shakespeare, the space where he and his fellow actors had held the people of London in thrall was home to washing lines and screaming infants, whining schoolboys and lean old men.

  The one little bit of light that shines out of the darkness of the eighteen years of Puritan suppression is a dramatic opera entitled The Siege of Rhodes.In 1656 Sir William Davenant had a brilliant idea. If he were to have his play about the Ottoman siege of Rhodes in 1522 set to music, he could advertise it as a recital and thus get around the law. Moreover, he could use scenery, which previously had not been seen in the English theatre. He thus commissioned five leading composers to write the music (including Matthew Locke, Henry Lawes and Henry Cooke), and persuaded John Webb to design the sets. In September 1656 the curtain rose on The Siege of Rhodes. It is often said that necessity is the mother of invention: in this case, censorship was the father. Davenant’s idea of a play punctuated by songs, dancing and pieces of instrumental music with lavish scenery introduced dramatic opera to the London stage. Consequently the development of Restoration drama owes much to his vision – especially his use of stage sets and music.

  As with so many other cultural aspects of the Restoration, the royal family plays an important role. On 6 June 1660 the king’s brothers go to see a play, Ben Jonson’s Epicene, at the Red Lion in Clerkenwell.76 A month later the king grants Thomas Killgrew and Sir William Davenant the exclusive right to stage plays in London. Killigrew’s troupe receives the king’s patronage and is thus permitted to call itself the King’s Company, and Davenant’s the duke’s patronage, making his company the Duke’s Company. Thus two main acting companies are formed, which will remain the pattern for theatre in London for the next 150 years.

  The King’s Company under Killigrew first makes its home at Gibbon’s Tennis Court in Vere Street. It enjoys a big advantage over its rival: it has the rights to all the plays that had once belonged to the old company of the King’s Men – and that includes the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Killigrew soon draws up plans for a new Theatre Royal in Bridges Street. This opens in 1663, having cost Killigrew and his partners no less than £2,500, and is admired by many, not least because it allows the most lavish stage sets to be displayed. In 1669 Killigrew pays the artist Isaac Fuller the stupendous sum of £335 for painting the scenery for Dryden’s Tyrannic Love: the play runs for fourteen consecutive days and takes an amazing £100 per day. All goes well until the evening of 25 January 1672, when a fire starts under the stairs at the back of the theatre. By the morning, the building is a smoking ruin and all the stock of scenery and costumes built up over the years is reduced to ashes. Although the theatre is rebuilt, at a cost of £4,000, the King’s Company never fully recovers from the disaster. Audiences dwindle and box-office takings shrink. Retaining an in-house prostitute is indicative of the management’s wayward priorities. On 16 November 1682, the King’s Company ceases to be an independent outfit and merges with the Duke’s Company, under the management of the latter, henceforth calling themselves the United Company.77

  Sir William Davenant is a better businessman than Killigrew. He takes the Duke’s Company first of all to the Salisbury Court Theatre while he waits for Lisle’s Tennis Court in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to be converted for him. His problem is that he has almost no plays: Killigrew has virtually the whole repertoire. Only in December 1660 does Davenant acquire the right to stage eleven classics, including nine plays by Shakespeare. But he gains a great advantage over Killigrew in that he secures the services of Thomas Betterton, the leading actor of the day. In 1661 Davenant’s troupe moves into the new Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and opens with a revival of his own dramatic opera, The Siege of Rhodes. It is a smash hit, running for twelve consecutive days (when most plays only last for three). Two months later he puts on Hamlet, with Betterton in the role of the prince. The leading man and the dramatic scenery do the trick. Thereafter the company goes from strength to strength until Davenant’s sudden death in 1668 – and even then it remains in good hands, as Betterton and Henry Harris take over the running.78 In November 1671 the company moves to new premises, the Dorset Garden Theatre. Richly decorated, with carvings by Grinling Gibbons, it costs a whopping £9,000. There, with even better capacity for employing scenery and music, the company puts on dramatic operas and increasingly elaborate shows. In April 1682, after taking over the King’s Company, the new United Company stages its musical spectaculars at the Dorset Garden Theatre and its ordinary plays at the Theatre Royal. Everything goes smoothly until 1695, when a divisive manager of the United Company, Christopher Rich, upsets Thomas Betterton and his leading ladies, and almost all of the actors walk out on him. They set up independently, back at the old Duke’s Theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields – and London once again has two theatre companies.

  Here are some things to bear in mind if you are planning to see a play. First, the theatres are closed during Lent. They are also shut during the plague of 1665.
Some people still want them to be shut permanently: even in 1680 Ralph Thoresby is still too fearful of the moral judgement of others to step foot inside a theatre.79 Others, however, go to the theatre more than once per day – although doing so might soon empty your purse. The cheapest seats are generally the benches at the front of the pit and the seats in the upper gallery, costing 12d. The best seats in the pit are 2s 6d. The most expensive seats are the boxes in the circle, which, depending on where you are, can cost up to 4s a seat. As a result, where you are seen to sit is all-important: if your work colleagues in a 2s 6d box see you slumming it in the 1s 6d seats, you might not hear the last of it, come Monday morning.80 As a result, there is a whole range of people in the audience. The upper gallery is full of servants; the middle gallery is crowded with citizens’ wives and daughters, serving men, journeymen and apprentices; the pit is where the professional men sit, plus a few ‘beaus, bullies and whores’; and the boxes accommodate the gentlemen and their womenfolk.81

  But what should you go and see?

  You will soon find that theatregoers don’t discriminate that much: the hardcore go to see almost everything that is performed. Whether a play is a success or not depends on how many times they see it, and how many of their friends they persuade to go along too. In 1660 Pepys goes several times to see both The Bondman by Philip Massinger and Epicene by Ben Jonson. He attends the first three performances of Davenant’s Love and Honour in October 1661 and watches Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-all no fewer than seven times in total. In the first eight months of 1668 he goes to the theatre seventy-three times, and over the whole ten-year period of his diary he sees at least 140 different plays.

  Another thing that will perhaps surprise you in this period is how many old plays are performed. It is somewhat peculiar that all of fashionable London is engaged in hearing speeches that are generally more than fifty years old. The reasons are clear enough, and you can hardly blame Killigrew and Davenant. After all, if you had the rights to Shakespeare’s works, would you put on a play by a novice writer in their place? As a result, you can go to the theatre in the 1660s and watch most of the great dramatic works from 1590 to 1620, including Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV, Part One. You can see Ben Jonson’s Epicene and his The Alchemist; Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus; John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil; Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle; and almost everything that John Fletcher ever wrote or co-wrote. Mind you, the opportunity to see all these classics of the stage does not mean that your fellow theatregoers will appreciate them. Pepys declares of Webster’s White Devil that he has ‘never had so little pleasure in a play in my life’. He thinks Twelfth Night a ‘silly play’ and says A Midsummer Night’s Dream is ‘the most insipid, ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life’.82

  What about new plays? Obviously at the start of our period, there aren’t many. Why would you write a play if you knew you could not have it performed publicly? But after 1660, new writers very quickly fill the vacuum. In fact, if it had not been for Shakespeare and Marlowe, we would probably think of the Restoration period as the golden age of the English stage. With this in mind, here are a few of the many playwrights that emerge out of the dramatic void:

  • John Dryden is the most successful writer of the age and also the most senior of the new playwrights listed here. Although not yet thirty at the time of the Restoration, he finds success with his second solo play, The Indian Emperor, performed by the King’s Company at the Theatre Royal in 1665. Even greater acclaim follows in 1667 when he accepts Davenant’s invitation to collaborate on a version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for the Duke’s Company; he writes Sir Martin Mar-all for the same company that same year. In 1670 he writes the first ‘heroic drama’ in his The Conquest of Granada, performed by the King’s Company. In total he writes fifteen plays, three for the Duke’s Company and the rest for the King’s. Several of his works are revived in the early 1690s, when they are given music by Henry Purcell. Dryden has a good claim to be the first prominent writer to live entirely from the earnings of his pen, and it is the stage that delivers him most of that income, even though the publication of his translation of Virgil’s works in 1697 earns him a cool £1,400.

  • George Etherege is a few years younger than Dryden but a completely different character. He is a friend of Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley and the earl of Rochester. Or, to put it more directly, he is a self-indulgent profligate rake and a part-time genius who could achieve full-time success if he were not so lazy. His first play, The Comical Revenge or Love in a Tub, written in 1664, is very well received, but he does not produce another for four years. His third and last play, The Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676), is his greatest hit. It is about a rake, Dorimant, and his intentions to seduce a beautiful heiress who has recently arrived in town. In its frivolous, lascivious wit, you can see why the idea of being seen entering a theatre still fills Ralph Thoresby with dread in 1680.

  • Sir Charles Sedley’s first play, The Mulberry Garden (1668), is nothing special; it displeases Samuel Pepys in both its words and its incidental music. His Antony and Cleopatra (1677) is also unlikely to entice Pepys to see it a second time. However, his third, Bellamira (1687), performed by the United Company in 1687, is a success. The dissolute rake has grown up and yet still he has as sharp a wit and as cold an eye as ever. Where there is beauty, there is now also disease; where there is money, there is avarice; where there is unbridled lust, it leads to rape. Such is the logical end of libertinism, you may feel. Sedley, having lived it, breathed it and been exhausted by it, now writes its epitaph.

  • Aphra Behn starts writing for the theatre in 1670. Over the next seventeen years she produces fifteen plays, in addition to her novels, short stories and poetry. As a result she may be said to be the first woman in Britain to make a living from her pen. Her most successful play is The Rover, which takes as its subject a band of English émigré libertines in Naples and Madrid, with the rake Willmore as a lead character. Willmore might be based on John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, a friend of hers. A woman of striking originality, who treads a delicate line between conformity (so as not to threaten the establishment too much) and revolutionary ideals (for example, in showing compassion for a black slave in her novel Oroonoko), Aphra is a close friend of many other playwrights and becomes an inspiration for the next generation of women writers. Her plays too are revived in the 1690s and performed with Purcell’s incidental music: the rondeau composed by Purcell in 1695 to accompany her Abdelazer, or the Moor’s Revenge (1675) is one of his best-known pieces.

  • William Wycherley is educated in France and is set for a career in law when he is seduced by the stage. In turn his success with his first play, Love in a Wood, leads to him being seduced by the king’s ex-mistress, Lady Castlemaine, in 1671. Known as a great wit, Wycherley becomes famous when the King’s Company perform his third play, The Country Wife, in 1675. The key character is a rake called Mr Horner who comes to town and pretends to be impotent so that men of quality trust him with their wives. He seduces several of them, including a young naïve ‘country wife’ whose husband, Mr Pinchwife, has married her for her inexperience – thinking her so innocent she will not know how to cuckold him. Horner teaches her thoroughly, and soon she discovers she has a vocation. At the end of the play the society ladies all realise they have been sharing Horner’s favours but agree to keep the secret. Mr Pinchwife, who rightly suspects Mr Horner of cuckolding him, is eventually persuaded that it is in his interests to pretend that his wife has not been unfaithful. It causes a scandal: a scene in which two ladies have sex with Horner offstage while claiming to inspect china becomes notorious, being widely seen as offensive to female dignity, but it is successful, and that is what counts. Wycherley’s friends (including the duke of Buckingham, the earl of Rochester and Lord Buckhurst) acclaim its brilliance. Its success allows Wycherley to
go even further in his next play, The Plain Dealer (1676), which stuns audiences with its sharp exposé of contemporary morality. Two years later in a bookshop in Tunbridge Wells he hears a beautiful young lady, who turns out to be the wife of the earl of Drogheda, ask for a copy of The Plain Dealer. When he himself is pointed out to her, and he compliments her on being a woman who can stand ‘plain dealing’, she replies, ‘I love plain dealing, especially when it tells me of my faults.’ A romance follows and, when Lord Drogheda dies, she marries Wycherley.83

  • Thomas Shadwell is Dryden’s rival and successor as poet laureate. He is the author of eighteen plays, of which the most successful are the comedies he writes in his late forties, including The Squire of Alsatia (1688) and Bury Fair (1689). His lasting claim to fame, however, is The Virtuoso, performed at the Duke’s Theatre in 1676. This is the play in which he lampoons Robert Hooke as ‘Sir Nicholas Gimcrack’, a natural philosopher who attempts a number of pointless scientific experiments. Often described as a satire on the Royal Society, it is actually much more sophisticated than that, being a criticism of some intelligent men’s great folly in pursuing pointless and meaningless knowledge rather than that which will actually benefit mankind. When Sir Nicholas claims to be able to swim as well as any fish, his nieces’ suitors, Bruce and Longvil, tease him on the matter: