A "double Portion of his Father's Art": Congreve, Dryden, Jonson and the drama of theatrical succession - William Congreve, John Dryden, Ben Jonson

they who were not qualified to judge in King Charles his

Reign, were influenced by the authority of those who were;

and that is of the Court, which always in a peculiar manner

influences the pleasures of the Gentry.... But the Court of

England at present has other things to mind than to take care

of Comedy.

Whereas of late, the Play-houses are so extreamly pestered

with Vizard-masks and their Trade, (occasioning continual

quarrels and Abuses) that many of the more Civilized Part of

the Town are uneasy in the Company, and shun the Theater

as they would a House of Scandal.... the present Plays with

all that shew, can hardly draw an Audience, unless there be

the additional Invitation of a Signior Fideli, a Monsieur L'Abbe,

or some such Foreign Regale expresst in the bottom of the

Bill.(19)

Wright's contemptuous final reference to the development of the "Whole Show" that was to dominate the eighteenth-century theatre reveals the same prejudices that Dryden and Congreve express for the changing composition of the audience in the 1690s and the new demands it placed on a playwright contemplating a professional career.

Not all playwrights, of course, set themselves against the triumph of a more popular as opposed to elite theatre. Southerne's dedications, for instance, demonstrate a very different attitude towards the reception of his plays and even suggest an identification with his audience. His dedication to Sir Anthony Love insists that he is "gratefully sensible of the general good Nature of the Town, to me, which you must give me leave to value my self upon." And even when his plays were not successful, as with The Wives' Excuse (1691 or 92), Southerne could maintain that he refused to be "mortifi'd into a despair of pleasing the more reasonable part of Mankind."(20) Another of Congreve's contemporaries, George Farquhar, provides an even more powerful contrast to Congreve, for while the latter prides himself in his dedication to The Double-Dealer on his decision to "preserve the Three Unities of the Drama," Farquhar dismisses such "Rules" in his attempt to satisfy a diverse and demanding audience: "How must this secret of pleasing so many different Tastes be discovered? Not by tumbling over Volumes of the Ancients, but by studying the Humour of the Modems: The Rules of English Comedy don't lie in the Compass of Aristotle, or his Followers, but in the Pit, Box, and Galleries."(21)

I began this essay by evoking Ben Jonson and wish to conclude by returning to jonson, not only because he represented one of "the Gyant Race, before the Flood" who so oppressed Dryden's theatrical imagination, but because aspects of Jonson's vocation served as a model for some of the ways in which Dryden and Congreve understood their own relation to the theatre. In his book Jonson and the Psychology of Public Theater, John Gordon Sweeney surveys Jonson's theatrical output as "a fascinating record of an artist's struggle to define himself through, and against, his audience": "The idea that meaning, like value, is something negotiated between the parties of the stage and gallery lies at the heart of Jonson's sense of theater."(22) The striking difference between Jonson and Congreve lies not simply in the loss of any balance between "through, and against" in Congreve's brief career, but in the absence of any apparent struggle to arrive at such a position. Jonson committed himself to the conception of theater as negotiation in spite of his powerfully ambivalent attitude toward his audience; Congreve I argue rejected this model from the very start. Jonson's long and varied career bears witness to the productive tension between playwright and spectator that animates his engagement with the public theater. As he in turn berates, cajoles, dismisses, and dupes his audience, Jonson reveals the excitement and novelty of working within commercial and artistic structures that were hardly a quarter-century old when he first began to write for the stage.