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A "double Portion of his Father's Art": Congreve, Dryden, Jonson and the drama of theatrical succession - William Congreve, John Dryden, Ben Jonson
Criticism, Summer, 1997 by Harold Weber
In this essay I want to suggest the inappropriateness of this narrative to Congreve's career, for the first editions of Congreve's first two plays don't simply anticipate Congreve's later rejection of the theatre, but inscribe it in his very assumption of the dramatist's mantle. The playwright's alienation from the spectator is a foundational trope in Congreve's construction of a theatrical identity. The commencement of Congreve's dramatic career reveals that Congreve does not gradually come to despair of his audience, but rejects them from the very first in order to legitimate himself as the heir of the aging Dryden, who himself organizes his theatrical farewell around the repudiation of an audience that had attended and applauded his plays for thirty years. Dryden's distrust of the theatre expresses itself most famously in his 1685 ode to Anne Killigrew, where he laments a lubric and adult'rate age" by denouncing "the steaming ordures of the stage." But his participation in Congreve's debut allows Dryden to authorize his moral disdain for a corrupt theatrical enterprise by linking it to a pattern of literary and generational succession. In fashioning a distinguished genealogy of poetic genius, Congreve and Dryden reinforce their mutual distance from and contempt for a loathed stage and its unworthy auditors.
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These two first editions enact a drama of poetic succession that occurs alongside of, but separate from, the comedies that ostensibly provide the reason for their being. Congreve enforces this separation through a fascinating act of self-presentation in which the role he assumes on stage is carefully distinguished from and even repudiated by the identity he orchestrates in the dedications and poetic tributes that accompany his two plays. If, as Harry Berger suggests, "the theatre process involves a double mode of representation.... Representation in the presence of an audience is thus at the same time representation of that audience,"4 Congreve plays to and privileges a literate readership above a despised playhouse audience by distinguishing between the fledgling playwright and the heir to Dryden's poetic estate. Such a strategy illuminates what Jocelyn Powell has termed the Janus-faced" nature of Restoration theatre, which looks "one way towards the glamorous patronage of the Court and another towards its own independent development as a commercial institution. The drama of the later seventeenth century is best understood as a playing out of the tensions implicit in such a position."5 Although these tensions manifest themselves in different ways throughout the century, they characterize not only the Restoration theatre but the entire development of English theatre in the seventeenth century. Congreve's determined effort to undermine and scapegoat his theatrical audience, which emerges from such a process as a despicable other whose alienation from the playwright defines one of the conditions of his success, represents one resolution of these tensions; and it marks the last decade of the century as a pivotal moment in the evolution of the theatre in England.(6)
