John Vanbrugh's The Relapse
And the influence of John Dryden
John Vanbrugh’s first play to be staged in London was The Relapse, or, Virtue in Danger, which premiered at Drury Lane in 1696. Although it was the first play to be staged, it may not have been the first to have been written (some think that Vanbrugh was working on The Provok’d Wife before The Relapse). Whatever the circumstance, The Relapse was Vanbrugh’s debut, and it is, in my opinion, his best play.
It was inspired by another play, Love’s Last Shift, or The Fool in Fashion, which had appeared at Drury Lane earlier that year and was written by a young actor called Colley Cibber. Vanbrugh’s theatrical career was bookended by collaborations with Cibber (who adapted Vanbrugh’s last play, A Journey to London) and it’s curious how different the two men’s approaches were: while Vanbrugh was witty and cynical, Cibber preferred a softer, more sentimental style of comedy.
Love’s Last Shift is about a virtuous wife, Amanda, who plays a trick on her rakish husband, Loveless, by posing as a high-class prostitute. Having given him a night to remember, she confesses her identity, shaming her faithless spouse to such a degree that he becomes a reformed character. Cibber cast himself as Sir Novelty Fashion: a fop who is more interested in his own appearance than the women he flirts with - his depiction was a hit with audiences.
Evidently something about Cibber’s play fired up Vanbrugh’s imagination because he decided to pen a sequel. In The Relapse, Cibber again played Sir Novelty Fashion (except that the character has been ennobled and is now called Lord Foppington).
The play is constructed from two plots. In the first, Vanbrugh reverses the moral reform achieved in Love’s Last Shift, showing Loveless again straying from his wife, Amanda. This time, he falls for Amanda’s cousin, Berinthia, whom he first sees by chance at the playhouse. But instead of the classic love triangle, we have a quartet: a local gentleman, Worthy, falls for Amanda, and so the two interlopers join forces to split the married couple, each claiming a partner for themselves. It’s a plot of astounding cynicism, which Vanbrugh refused to resolve in a happy ending.
The second plot is a class satire. Lord Foppington will not help his impoverished brother, Young Fashion, despite Foppington’s prospect of increased wealth through an arranged marriage to Hoyden: the daughter of a country squire. With the help of Coupler – a lecherous matchmaker –Young Fashion poses as his brother and marries Hoyden right under the nose of her overbearing father.1 Foppington discovers his brother’s plot, but, not realising that the marriage service has taken place, also ‘marries’ her. In the end, Young Fashion claims his bride, but exits with a bawdy promise, namely, if Hoyden ever finds herself short of lovers, she can always rely on his brother to step in.
The Relapse was a hit, and Cibber again delighted audiences with his performance as the fop. One of the cherished visual gags of Love’s Last Shift was the moment when Sir Novelty’s gigantic wig was carried on-stage in its own sedan chair. In The Relapse, Vanbrugh has him meeting his wig-maker, presumably to allow for an even bigger wig-gag (sadly, the details are lost to history).
John Dryden’s influence on drama in the Restoration period can hardly be overestimated, but if there’s one work that’s helped me to get a grip on Vanbrugh’s attitudes to playwriting, it’s Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668). Like everybody else, Vanbrugh would have read Dryden, but his influence holds more weight when you consider that the two were close friends, and that they shared the same publisher (Jacob Tonson).
Dryden’s Essay takes the form of a fictionalised conversation amongst a group of friends, and ranges across the hot literary topics of the 1660s, including: are the French or English better playwrights? Should deaths be represented on-stage? Should English writers observe the classical unities (of time, place and action)? Why can’t straight translations of French plays ever succeed on the English stage?
And so on. But the thing of special relevance here is Dryden’s comments on the classical unity of action (i.e., the idea that a play should have one plotline). Speaking of the French, one character declares: “The Unity of Action in all [French] Plays is yet more conspicuous, for they do not burden them with Under-plots, as the English do; which is the reason why many Scenes of our Tragi-comedies carry on a design that is nothing of kin to the main Plot; and that we see two distinct Webs in a Play, like those of ill-wrought Stuffs; and two Actions, that is, two Plays carried on together, to the confounding of the Audience …”2
The ‘two distinct Webs’ is something that you find in all of Vanbrugh’s original plays, including A Journey to London (where it does look in danger of confounding the audience). Also, you will notice the mention of ‘tragi-comedies’. Again, this habit of mixing comedy and tragedy is another distinctly English trait, which was practiced by the likes of Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, and is also a quality of Vanbrugh’s work. So he was consciously working in a native tradition.
Finally, Dryden’s remarks on style are so reminiscent of Vanbrugh’s dialogue that you can imagine the younger writer filing them away in his mind:
… Wit is best convey’d to us in the most easie Language; and is most to be admir’d when a Thought comes drest in words so commonly receiv’d, that it is understood by the meanest Apprehensions, as the best Meat is the most easily digested.3
When The Relapse was published, it was accompanied by a preface by the author, plus a prologue and an epilogue. These extra materials - sometimes termed paratexts - are useful clues for understanding the context in which the work was made. To save space, I’ve linked them above, but I wanted to end with some observations about them which I think have some bearing on Vanbrugh’s life. Firstly, have a look at the opening to Vanbrugh’s preface to The Relapse:
To go about to excuse half the Defects this abortive Brat is come into the World with, would be to provoke the Town with a long useless Preface, when it is, I doubt, sufficiently soured already by a tedious Play …
And let’s also have a look at the start of the prologue:
Ladies, this Play in too much haste was writ,
To be o’ercharg’d with either Plot or Wit;
‘Twas got, conceiv’d, and born in six Weeks Space,
And Wit, you know, ‘s as slow in Growth—as Grace.4
According to Cibber, Vanbrugh was a quick writer - and the claim above, that the play was written in six weeks, has always been taken at face value by his biographers. However, I have a hunch that these statements were actually a satire on the playwright Thomas Shadwell.
To understand this, we have to go back to Vanbrugh’s great friend and mentor, John Dryden. Decades before The Relapse appeared, Shadwell and Dryden were engaged in a literary feud. As well as bitter references to each other in the prefaces to their own works, in 1682, Dryden published a satirical poem called Mac Flecknoe, or, a Satire Upon the True-Blue-Protestant Poet T. S. Here he depicted Shadwell as fat, boastful, and the king of dullness.
In fact, one of Shadwell’s proudest boasts was the speed with which he wrote - for example, he says in the preface to his opera, Psyche (1675): “In a thing written in five weeks, as this was, there must needs be many errors”.5 This sort of statement was so frequent that Lord Rochester gave him the epithet “hasty Shadwell”, while Elkanah Settle attacked him by complaining of “some of our impertient tribe” who claim to write plays “in three weeks, or a month’s time”.6
Another thing which Shadwell liked to do was use metaphors of birth and midwifery to represent the artistic process. As Michael W. Alssid has noted: “The artist as midwife or mother and the play as offspring are also conventional metaphors, but they are unusually frequent in Shadwell and in Mac Flecknoe”.7 They also crop up in Vanbrugh’s preface and prologue to The Relapse: so much so, in fact, that I wonder if he was intentionally evoking Shadwell’s memory?
It would have to have been his memory, since Shadwell had died four years earlier. You might think that this was ‘old news’, however, literary scandals were surprisingly enduring in the Restoration period. What’s more, Dryden was still alive - and his reputation rested on works like Mac Flecknoe (which went on to inspire The Dunciad by Alexander Pope). So, while Vanbrugh probably did compose quickly, he is using these paratexts to position himself as a member of Dryden’s inner circle - perhaps even his theatrical successor.
In Coupler, Vanbrugh created an outrageous depiction of a homosexual ‘male bawd’ figure, which was rare for the time.
John Dryden, ‘Essay of Dramatick Poesie’, The Dramatick Works of John Dryden, Esq., vol. 1 (printed for Jacob Tonson at Shakespear’s Head in the Strand, 1725), p. 40.
Ibid., p. 35.
Bonamy Dobrée, ed., The Complete Works of Sir John Vanbrugh (London, 1927-28), vol. 1, pp. 11-13.
The dramatick works of Thomas Shadwell, Esq; in four volumes (London: J. Knapton, 1720), vol. 2, A5.
Quoted in Paulina Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660-1710 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 49. The “hasty Shadwell” reference was made in Rochester’s poem, ‘Allusion to Horace’.
Michael W. Alssid, ‘Shadwell’s MacFlecknoe’, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Summer, 1967, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 390-91.
Thanks for another entertaining read. The development of the theatre in the late 17th and early 18th century is a fascinating topic. It's a shame that The Relapse, and other plays of the time don't get revived very often. Colley Cibber's autobiography is a great source for getting a sense of the literary culture of the time, though, as poet laureate, he came off very badly in his feud with Pope, who crowned him King of Dunces in The Dunciad. Mention of Cibber always reminds me of Kolley Kibber in Graham Greene's Brighton Rock: a bank holiday newspaper promotion, where the public have to recognise the mystery man Kibber to claim a prize. With my pedant's hat on, shouldn't it be over- rather than underestimated?