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Prose and John Bunyan

The best-known prose text of the second half of the seventeenth century was also a return to a medieval rather than renaissance form. The Pilgrim’s progress by John Bunyan, published in 1678 (with a second part in 1684) is an allegory. It is also a dream vision, like many medieval texts. The Pilgrim whose, name is Christian, is described on his journey through this life towards the word “which is to come”. He faces all sorts of difficulties from the Giant Despair and the Slough of Despond (depth of depression) to Vanity Fair (vanity=pride) and all of these scenes question the false values of the world, stressing the values of the Christian faith.

These scenes in The Pilgrim’s Progress are quite different from the exploration and questioning of the renaissance. It is one of the important texts in English Literature because it fixed the values of, society as those of Christianity, faith and stability. These values were to be important to society, for the next two hundred or more years. The Pilgrim’s Progress is possibly the most widely read of all books in English Literature, because it is the one text which is considered to be closed to the bible and almost a religious text itself. Many of its images and phrases have entered the language just as word from the Authorized Version of the Bible or The Book of Common Prayer (final version, 1662) are part of modern English. Some of Bunyan’s words are still sung today in British Churches.

Set against this particularly religious kind of writing is the poetry of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. His life become a kind of symbol of the restoration : He was a rake, a man who gave his life to pleasure, especially sex and alcohol. But just before he died Rochester became a Catholic (at least according to a priest). His poetry is often very witty and rude, celebrating the pleasures of life and satirizing all of society, from king Charles II (a merry [fun-loving] monarch, scandalous and poor) to mankind itself in A satire against Mandkind.

In some ways Rochester is the last of the metaphysical lyric poets, writing complex emotional poems about love and life, but in other ways he is the first of the new Augustan Age.

Satire became an important kind of poetry: it looks wittily at the manners and behavior of society, and very often uses real people and situations to make its humorous point.

The long satirical poem Hudibras by Samuel Butler, published in three parts between 1663 and 1678, was one of the first of such poems. It became very popular. It is a mock romance, one of the first major English texts to be inspired by the Spanish text Don Quixote, and its satirical comments are aimed at every religious, academic and political subject of the age.

John Dryden was a master of satire in poetry after the Restoration. He was a poet, playwright and essayist, and was at the center of most of the important discussions and controversies of his time. One early poem, Heroic Stanza, praised Cromwell on his death in 1658; another, To His Sacred Majesty (sacred = holy), welcomed the return of the king in 1660. Dryden became a catholic in 1685, so when the new Catholic king, James II, was forced to leave in 1688, he was on the wrong side of the religious controversy, and lost his post as Poet Laureate at the court of the king.

Dryden’s satirical poems of the early 1680s, in particular Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (small piece of metal given as reward) (1682) focus on the religious and political issues of the time, and show a different kind of satire from Rochester’s. Rochester comments in general on all mankind but Dryden satirizes particular people and situations.

Here he shows something of the political atmosphere of the age :

Plots, true or false, are necessary things,

To raise up commonwealths and ruin kings.

(Absalom and Achitophel)

Dryden produced many works and was one of the first to make his career as a professional author. His essays on the nature of drama and representation, such as ‘Of Dramatic Poesy’ (1668), were the first of their kind in English, and late in his life, his translations from Latin and Greek greatly improved the Augustan age’s knowledge of the classics which inspired them. He remains the major literary figure of the late seventeenth century, a writer of immense range, of wit and intellect, who was producing major poetry until the very end of his life. His final work, The Secular Masque (1700), provides a famous quotation to end an age.

RESTORATION DRAMA

Comedy

Dryden wrote more than twenty plays, from comedy to tragedy, and was especially successful in the new genre of tragicomedy of which, the best known example is Marriage-a-la-Mode (fashionable marriage) (1672). His most famous tragedy is all for love (1678), which returns to the characters of Anthony and Cleopatra, the subject of tragedy by Shakespeare earlier in the century.

After the restoration, drama and the theater were quite different from what they had been during the renaissance. There were now only two public licensed theater : the theater Royal, Drury Lane, and the Lincolns inn Fields Theater, which moved to Covent Garden in 1732. The audience was at first-upper-class or upper-middle class. The play of the time reflect, the manners and morals of the men and women who had returned with the king from France - so restoration comedy is often called the comedy of manners. Dryden worth several such comedies, but the most famous comedies were written by George Etherege, William Wycherley and William Congreve.

The main subject of these plays was love, but there were new concerns, developed from the earlier city comedy; older men or women looking for younger lovers, upper-class manners contrasting with middle-class values, and country life contrasting with city life. Sex was a mayor subject and the plays become more and more obvious in their comic treatment of sexual themes.

George Etherege’s The Comical Revenge (1684) was one of the first such comedies, and his two later comedies, She would if she could (1668) and The Alan of Mode (mode = fashion) (1676), are among the most typical and successful of the genre. He satirizes, the false fashions and selfish behavior of the time in plots which become very complex and which remain very funny on stage.

William Wycherley’s the country wife (1675) accused of immorality, and helped start a moral reaction against the kind of manners shown on the stage. The main character, Horner, pretends he is not able to have sex in order to attract more women, and the whole plot very obviously explores sexual behavior between men and women.

The main plot concerns Mr. Pinchwife who is in London with his wife for the marriage of his sister. He warns his wife, Margery, many times about the loose morals of London society. She become curious, but thinks she is safe when approached by Horner who then makes love to her. Pinchwife’s sister, Alithea, also takes a new lover.

This is the opposite of the usual romantic view of marriage, and stresses the woman’s independence in a way which we might not expect. But, in fact, women had a strong voice in the Restoration period, and the discussion of male and female roles, was an important part of much writing of the time.

After Congreve stopping writing, at the highest point of his success, the main writers of comedy were George Farquhar and Susannah Centlivre. Farquhar used places outside London and less wealthy characters to illustrate his male characters’ ambitions to win rich, women - The Recruiting Officer (1706) and The Beaux’ Stratagem [the dandies’ plan](1707) are fresh, original and socially conscious developments in drama. Farquhar died in 1707, aged less than 30, and his death brought an early end to a promising career as a dramatist.

Susannah Centlivre was, with Aphra Behn and Mary de la Riviere Manley, one of the main female writers of the time. Behr. Wrote eighteen plays. Such as The Rover (the wanderer)(into part, in 1677 and 1681) in which the main character may have been based on Rochester. One of her main themes was the result of arranged and unsuitable marriages. This kind of social problems and the false values involved is also found in Susannah Centlivre’s plays, the best known of which his A Bold Stroke For A Fife (1718). The plays shows the effect of different religious values on personal relationship when, in order to win permission to Marry Anne the main character, Colonel Fainall, pretends to be a religious man. Her plays were among the most successful of the time, and continued to be played all through the eighteenth century.

TRAGEDY AND SERIOUS DRAMA

Both Dryden and his rival Shadwell wrote new versions of the place of Shakespeare. The new middle-class audiences could not accept much of Shakespeare violence on the tragic endings to some of his plays. So King Lear, for example, was severely rewritten to give it a happy ending, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus was rewritten in the 1960s as a farce. Dryden wrote a successful version of The Tempest(IGG7) and another of Troilus and Cressida (1967).

This taste for quieter, problem-free Shakespearian drama continued for about two centuries, and is an indication of the great changes in taste and in the role of the theater between the beginning and the end of the seventeenth century. The main tragic form of the restoration was heroic tragedy. The best examples are the plays of Thomas Otway, another writer who died young, at the age of 33. Venice Preserv’d (1682) shows, even in its title, the difference between this kind of tragedy and Jacobean tragedy, where death and disaster could destroy the whole of society. Here society is preserved, made safe, by the sacrifice of the hero Jaffeir. With the help of his friend Pierre, a foreign soldier, Jaffeir plots against the republic of Venice and a politician, Priuli, who has disowned his daughter because she has secretly married Jaffeir. Jaffeir is finally too guilty to hide his plot and, after killing Pierre, takes his own life. The moral is that it is wrong to be different and to threaten the stability of society.

At this time there were many theories about realism, how to show reality on stage, and the role of theatre. But pressure was growing to limit what theatre could say: it was not only a danger to public morals, but it also became to controversial politically. John Gay’s play with music, The Beggar’s Opera (1728), was one of the most popular works to satirize politicians and the false values of society. Theatre and drama were not any longer the main forms of literary exploration-the novel was becoming the most important literary genre. Only in the 1770s with the plays of Richard Sheridan, does comedy reach the level of the Restoration again. His plays, such as The Rivals (1775), The Critic (1779), and the most famous, The School for Scandal (1777) were very successful, and are the greatest comedies after the comedies of Congreve.