reason, recognize the power of Bunyan’s storytelling, and enjoy his homely shrewd-
ness. But compared with the other English allegory of salvation,Piers Plowman,
Bunyan is terribly simple. A milder Puritanism is found in the works ofRichard
Baxter (1615–1691).
The chasm between Bunyan and Rochester was not to be bridged by Church or
State. Puritans attacked the new theatres, where marriage, the marriage-market and
extra-marital intrigue were played for laughs. Playwrights replied that comedy
selects the ridiculous in order to satirize. Actresses became the public mistresses of
public men: Nell Gwynn went from the bed of the actor Charles Hart to that of the
rakish poet-dramatist Sir Charles Sedley, and then to that of Charles II, whom she
called ‘Charles the Third’.
Samuel Pepys
A panorama of London life is found in the diary kept by Samuel Pepys from 1660
to 1669. Pepys (1633–1703) was ‘clerk of the King’s ships’ during the Dutch war. At
his death, his fellow diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) wrote of him as ‘a very worthy,
industrious and curious person, none in England exceeding him in knowledge of the
navy ... universally beloved, hospitable, generous, learned in many things, skilled in
music, a very great cherisher of learned men’. The diary shows Pepys as a faithful
government servant, social, fond of plays and music, conventionally religious, proud
of his country, his profession, his family, his wife and his home. He disarmingly
records everything, including his own infidelities. The diary was deciphered and
part-published in 1825. Its interest lies not just in its accounts of the Plague, the Fire
and the Dutch at the doors in 1665–7, but in its detail. It shows that public life was,
like social life, marke d by public infidelity and venality. In previous reigns, the uned-
ifying life of the Court led to comment, not to public laughter. No one had laughed
at Henry VIII.
The theatres
The London theatres opened to plays by the older dramatist Sir William Davenant
(1608–1668) and to adaptations of pre-Civil War drama, especially that of John
Fletcher, but there were no professional actors, and the new plays were different. Two
public companies licensed by the King acted in purpose-built theatres rather like
modern theatres. Davenant’s at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Dorset Garden, and
Killigrew’s at Drury Lane were covered; they had proscenium arches, curtains,
scenery, lighting and music. They offered lightly classicized entertainments of a
semi-operatic kind to the Court and its friends. Noble arms and noble love strut and
fret their heroic conquests, and debate the problems of honour in symmetrical
couplets. These English tragedies lack the focus of French tragedy. It is hard to see
them staged, but Dryden’s All for Love (1678) reads well. It is a tidy version ofAntony
and Cleopatra, in a dignified blank verse which works better than the heroic couplets
of Dryden’s previous tragedies.
Shakespeare now became the stage’s standby: his plots, language and morals were
trimmed to suit fashions influenced by the plays of Pierre Corneille (1616–1684)
and Jean Racine (1639–1699),seen at Paris. Corneille was played on the English
stage in translation, as in the Pompeyof Katherine Philips (1631–1664), the first play
by a woman to be played on a public stage in England. The authoress signed her
THE RESTORATION 167