Country Wife, spreads the (false) story that he is impotent, and no threat to
womankind.His name,Horner, was then pronounced the same as ‘honour’, a word
heard often in the play. Horner uses his safe reputation to dis-honour the women of
the play and give their husbands cuckolds’ ‘horns’. We are not to condemn the play’s
morals but to admire its plot, wit and repartee. Old ideals had been smashed in the
Civil War. Before it, faith had been supported by reason; after it, reason was
distrusted equally by Rochester and by Bunyan.
John Dryden
The Duke of Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672) was a hugely successful prose
burlesque of the theatrical conventions of the ‘heroic’ tragedies of the 1660s, spiced
with partisan and personal attacks known as ‘lampoons’, in the manner of the
modern Pr ivate Eye. One target of its mockery was John Dryden (1631–1700), who
put on five plays in 1667. When Davenant died in 1668, Charles II, a keen patron of
the theatre, made Dryden Poet Laureate.
It was a time of class, party and faction. Rochester, Buckingham and Sedley
scorned Dryden as a social inferior. Others who wrote for a living acknowledged his
superiority by attacking him. He was called ‘Bayes’, after his Laureate crown of bay
leaves. When Royalist politics and religion lost favour in the 1680s, Dryden turned
to satire, and then to translation. He wrote in every kind, but posterity has liked best
the non-dramatic work of his later career: his satire, his prose and his Virgil.
We have very full materials for Dryden’s life. His long literary career is a commen-
tary on his times. At Westminster School, near London, where his Puritan family had
sent him for a classical education, he was, when the King lost his head, a King’s
Scholar. After Cambridge, he returned to London to live by writing for the stage and
the Court. Though a gentleman, he was a slave to the pen, writing twenty-five plays,
some with collaborators. His politics sharpened into satire, and his religion deep-
ened into the Anglican Religio Laici(‘A Layman’s Faith’), and The Hind and the
Panther, in which he reasoned his way into Catholicism. He stuck to this faith in
William III’s reign, a time ofanti-Catholicism, to the material disadvantage of self
and family.
THE RESTORATION 169anti-Catholicism In 1678
the Monument to the Fire of
London was erected. Its
inscription said that the Fire
was started ‘by the treachery
and malice of the popish
faction ... to introduce popery
and slavery’. These words,
removed under James II, were
re-cut under William and
stood until 1831. They
enshrined the Whig myth of a
Popish Plot to kill Charles II in
1678, a ‘plot’ fabricated by
Israel Tonge and Titus Oates,
perjurers who sent twenty
innocents to their deaths. It
was orchestrated by
Shaftesbury, leader of the
Whigs, and culminated in the
execution at Tyburn of Oliver
Plunkett, Archbishop of
Armagh, in 1681.Restor ation plays
With dates of first performances.
Sir George Etherege: Love in a Tub(1664), She Would if She Could(1668), The Man of Mode; or
Sir Fopling Flutter(1676)
John Dryden: The Indian Queen(1664), Marriage à-la-Mode(1672), The Conquest of Granada
(1669), Aureng-Zebe(1675), All for Love(1678)
William Wycherley: Love in a Wood, or, St James’s Park(1671), The Country Wife(1675), The
Plain Dealer(1676)
George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham: The Rehearsal(1672)
Aphra Behn: The Rover(1677)
Thomas Otway: Venice Preserv’d(1682)
Sir John Vanburgh: The Relapse(1696), The Provok’d Wife(1697)
William Congreve: Love for Love(1695), The Way of the World(1700)
George Farquhar: The Recruiting Office(1706), The Beaux’ Stratagem(1707)