|
Links
Schedule
of Assignments
The
Stuarts and the Hanovers
The
Diary of Samuel Pepys
A
Journal of the Plague Year
The
Way of the World
Absalom
and Achitophel
|
|
Jeremy Collier, from A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698):
I shall endeavor to prove . . . the misbehavior of the stage with respect to morality and religion. Their liberties in the following particulars are intolerable, viz., their smuttiness of expression; their swearing, profaneness, and lewd application of Scripture; their abuse of the clergy, their making of their top characters libertines and giving them success in their debauchery. . .
To sum up the evidence. A fine gentleman is a fine whoring, swearing, smutty, atheistical man. These qualifications, it seems, complete the idea of honor. They are the top improvements of fortune and the distiguishing glories of birth and breeding! This is the stage-test for quality. . . .
Thus we see what a fine time lewd people have on the English stage. No censure, no mark of infamy, no mortification must touch them. They keep their honor untarnished and carry off the advantage of their characters. They are set up for the standard of behavior and the masters of ceremony and sense. And at last, that the example may work the better they generally make them rich and happy and reward them with their own desires.
from an anonymous pamphlet, A Vindication of the Stage
(1698):
. . . if the audience will not be pleased with anything but immorality, etc., pray why have not the clergy, whose business it is to instruct the people, taught them better? . . . So that we see it is rather the clergy’s fault than the poet’s crime that our dramas are irregular on this head. And Mr. Collier has laid his argument just wrong, for if the world be good, plays would be good also; but if the world be bad, plays will be bad too.
William Congreve, Amendments of Mr. Collier’s Citations (1698):
Comedy (says Aristotle) is an imitation of the worse sort of people. . . . He does not mean the worse sort of people in respect to their quality, but in respect to their manners. . . . The vices most frequent, and which are the common practice of the looser sort of livers, are the subject matter of comedy. He tells us farther, that they must be exposed after a ridiculous manner. For men are to be laughed out of their vices in comedy; the business of comedy is to delight as well as to instruct; and as vicious people are made ashamed of their follies or faults by seeing them exposed in a ridiculous manner, so are good people at once both warned and diverted at their expense.
William Congreve: from a letter to the Earl of Montague (to whom
The Way of the World was dedicated)
Those characters which are meant to be ridiculous in most of our comedies are of fools so gross that, in my humble opinion, they should rather disturb than divert the well-natured and reflecting part of the audience; they are rather objects of charity than contempt; and instead of moving our mirth, they ought very often to excite our compassion. This reflection moved me to design some characters which should appear ridiculous, not so much through a natural folly (which is incorrigible, and therefore not proper for the stage) as through an affected wit; a wit, which, at the same time that it is affected, is also false. As there is some difficulty in the formation of a character of this nature, so there is some hazard which attends the progress of its success upon the stage; for many come to a play so overcharged with criticism that they very often let fly their censure, when through their rashness they have mistaken their aim.
William Congreve
|
