SEVEN

Social Correctness
and Taste

Continental standards of social correctness greatly influenced Restoration English behavior, taste, and thought. The evidence indicates that English predilections for Continental works of art and ideas, both French and Italian, sometimes reached ridiculous proportions even if we allow for the exaggeration in English Restoration verse and dramatic satire. These predilections for French and Italian art can be explained by two primary reasons: the first is social—the urbane, sophisticated, genteel, rational qualities of French and Italian art, manners, and language were preferred to the relatively countrified boorishness and supposed intellectual inadequacy of the English; the second is aesthetic—it derives from English conceptions of the mind and theories of composition. The first reason led to the encouragement and imitation of correct, genteel, Continental art of the period. The second, despite appearances, led to a struggle between the new French Rationalism and the older English view of the universe, which although derived from the Continent was passé. Predilections for Continental art and ideas caused traditional English music to pass into disfavor, while English drama and critical thought resisted outside influences.

I

Given man’s natural propensities, the kind of art that elicits the most admiration and respect and that is liked by those thought to possess the most refined sensibilities will be admired by those who want to do the right thing yet are unsure of their own judgment—whether they prefer that art and whether that art is worth liking. A rising, ambitious, but insecure middle class will seize and hold fast to art that its members think they are supposed to like, and the Restoration is noted for the rapid expansion of the middle class, its technology, business practices, and tastes becoming more and more important.¹ People aspiring to a higher social level on a national scale, especially if artists and performers are patronized by them, will cause the development of that art they think they should cultivate, while perfectly good, vigorous forms may at the same time be totally or partially destroyed in the name of proper judgment or taste. The simplest and clearest example reflecting the sociological forces in the Restoration that most influenced middle-class taste in the fine arts is Molière’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670).

Urbane, Continental correctness was a civilizing influence. In England, it led to the centralization of culture in London, a change from a rural to an urban culture. There developed a greater gentility in manners and language and a preference for less countrified, more refined works of art. Thomas Sprat says (1667) :

Their [Continental] nobility live commonly close together in their cities, and ours for the most part scattered in their Country Houses. For the same reason, why our streets are not so well built as theirs will hold also for their exceeding us in the Arts of Speech. They prefer the Pleasures of the Town [refined, witty, verbal], we, those of the field [hunting, fishing, nonverbal]; whereas it is from the frequent conversations in cities that the Humour and Wit and Variety and Elegance of language are chiefly to be fetch’d.²

Sprat’s consciousness of a difference between England and the Continent was a common feeling, and the situation was one that most felt needed improvement. Restoration writers keep repeating that they are part of a new era, that they are more cultivated and proper in language, conversation, and behavior, as well as in their taste for the arts; they define themselves as a part of an aristocratic community that includes all of Europe, at the same time excluding many English traditions. We see this identification in references to the introduction of French words, dress, and ideas; in the so-called Continental tours to “round out” the educations of rich young Englishmen; in the translations of Italian treatises on painting; and in a general invasion by Continental literary styles and modes of expression, seen in letter writing, literary salons, theater, rules of art, and reactions to different kinds of art. The Restoration English feel that the main advantages they have over the Elizabethans is the advancement of science, correctness in language, and correctness in art and manners.³

People most under the French influence thought the best, most useful, most correct art improved social behavior by appealing to the highest, reasonable part of the soul overtly, in the form of moral tags and poetic justice. They usually were part of the highest society and looked to the authority of correct French writers and correct French behavior for guidance and help in both social and critical matters.⁴ Thomas Rymer is extreme in rejecting his national art on the ground that it lacks the judgment and order that appeal to the highest soul or faculties, but almost all other English writers are affected to a greater or lesser extent by Continental ideas.⁵ The influence of Continental correctness and rules criticism was furthered by great French art produced inside the bounds of the rules (for example, the dramas of Corneille, Racine, and Molière). These works, as well as social pressure, the acceptance of rather stoical tendencies in the faculty psychology, and English dependence on French criticism for the development of their own, made many Englishmen susceptible to French influences. Ultimately, the English absorbed what they wanted to absorb. (This same sort of phenomenon had occurred earlier in France when the French borrowed and assimilated the vocabulary, ideas, and art of the fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenthcentury Italians.)⁶

In the Restoration, changing tastes based on Continental examples destroyed English music as a serious, elevated form of art. Middle-class Puritanism may have played a part, but the strongest influence on upper middle-class Londoners was social, for traditional English music despite Italian influences did not meet the standards of Continental correctness and sophistication. The same criteria also downgraded English architecture. Christopher Wren, for example, is not mentioned in Jeremy Collier’s Dictionary although Matthew Wren is, and Christopher Wren himself in 1665 notes in a letter the following great artists and architects: Le Brun, Poussin, Bernini, Mansart, and Vaux, all of them from the Continent.⁷ Painting as an important English art did not really exist until the eighteenth century, when it based its principles on Italian modes and rules, as it probably should have done. English painting was not influential: there are no English painters, for example, on Roger Des Piles’s list,⁸ and Oliver Millar reasonably opines, “The English-born artist [was] inevitably rather stifled in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the late Stuart court.”⁹ Dramatic literature of the English Renaissance, however, survived to become a moving force in European thought, culture, and art.

II

As English men and women came to like and to admire more correct, Continental art and manners, eschewing the more roughhewn, bawdy, and boisterous art and behavior of England, their esteem for English music accordingly declined, both as a practice and as a tradition. The aristocratic and would-be aristocratic classes of society, the patrons of the arts, entirely repudiated English music as a serious art form, desiring and encouraging the kind of music that came mainly from Italy and France, although Italy was the primary source of English ideas about the composition and appreciation of music. Italian music, especially, had been influencing English musical forms for some time, as we can see in the Elizabethan lute songs and madrigals of Dowland, Campion, Morley, Byrd, and many others. But in those days, traditional English songs and dances formed the backbone of much of their art music, and despite the invasion of Italian madrigals, English composers were prominent.¹⁰ In the latter part of the century, however, the Italian influence grew stronger. Henry Purcell’s concerti and most of his songs are written in the Italian mode. Dryden’s numerous songs in his plays and operas are with two exceptions cast in the new mode, expressing only delicate attitudes toward love and delineating correctness in characterization.¹¹ In the next century, musicians such as Handel, Buononcini, and Geminiani and the singers Nicholini and Valentini (to name only a few) dominated the English musical scene, and Addison’s attempt, the opera Rosamond (1707; music by Thomas Clayton), to drive the Italians off the stage is a dismal failure. Addison also points out, rather ruefully, that the popular French composer Lully (a Florentine by birth) did not pretend to extirpate French music and plant Italian music in its stead, unlike musicians and composers in England.¹²

The English musical tradition ought to have been entrenched in the culture, but despite the excellence of John Blow and the genius of Henry Purcell there were not enough composers of stature—not of the stature of a Shakespeare or a Milton but composers of general excellence—who by their collective genius might have constructed a strong musical tradition, sturdy enough to resist the flood of Continental works and musicians.¹³ John Dryden, for instance, employed the second-rate French composer Louis Grabu (who had been imported by Charles II) in his first opera, Albion and Albanius (1685), because he thought no one else available. He praises Grabu highly but says, “When any of our countrymen excel him, I shall be glad, for the sake of old England, to be shown my error.”¹⁴ Admiration for Grabu could only come from social considerations.¹⁵ When Dryden discovers Henry Purcell, he is overjoyed. But Purcell also catered to the Continental tastes of his affluent audience.¹⁶ During the seventeenth century, traditional English music lost its artistic stature. It did not disappear altogether but became popular mostly on broadsides, in taverns, and at lower-class rural entertainments.¹⁷ Continental composers and even Continental performers found more lucrative employment than did native artists. John Playford says about English musicians in the Preface to Musick’s Delight on the Cithern (1666): “Nor is any music rendered acceptable, or esteemed by many, but what is presented by foreigners.”¹⁸

Restoration comedy documents factually the Continental influence on English art and manners, from the beribboned fops who ridiculously ape their French counterparts to the fashionable turns of phrase and the proper, genteel behavior and speech of characters who represent the upper classes. The playwright who most fully expresses attitudes toward music is Thomas Shadwell, who wrote social criticism in the realistic tradition of Ben Jonson.¹⁹ Shadwell, a musician, voices the latest musical opinions; his well-bred ladies and gentlemen reflect the tastes of the most sophisticated patrons of the arts, models against whom his audience was supposed to judge itself. Shadwell’s audience was composed of the highest and most cultivated part of society. The court was the center. Many of Charles II’s courtiers had been educated in France, for Charles spent his exile largely in Paris, and it is recorded that the dukes of York and Buckingham even appeared as dancers in the Ballet de la nuit on 23 February 1653.²⁰ Charles II, in imitation of the glorious French ruler Louis XIV, had his twenty-four violins.²¹ It was this courtly society and the middle class who imitated it that was most responsible for the end of a strong cultural tradition of English music and musicians. They fostered the radical split between the old, popular English musical tradition and the kind of music composed and performed by people trained on the Continent. Shadwell’s well-bred characters are intolerant of English songs and dances, while his low-bred characters dote on them. Jeremy Collier supports Shadwell’s ideas, saying that the proper kinds of music are “the entertainment of people of quality”²² The closer we look at Shadwell’s plays, the more consistent we see he is.

Unlike other playwrights who merely exclude English music, except for comic effects, Shadwell has his sophisticated characters frequently discuss the virtues of Italian and the faults of English songs and music, praising Italian music in the most judicious, decorous, and correct manner, in the way persons of judgment are supposed to speak and to conduct themselves. Such persons always have the most refined entertainment. In Bury Fair, the sophisticated Bellamy directs his musicians to perform a two-part Italian song to entertain his guests,²³ and in a scene in which Philadelphia (in disguise) sings two Italian songs, the well-bred Gertrude says only, “ ’Tis admirable! The court has not better” (IV, p. 328). There is no gushing, no expression of extravagant, passionate emotion. In The Woman Captain (IV, p. 31), Sir Humphrey Scattergood, a man of exquisite taste in the pleasures of the senses, affirms that Italian music and musicians are the very best. In The Lancashire Witches (IV, p. 137) Belfort and Doubty, gentlemen of wit and understanding, comment both on well-bred people and on Italian songs to their host, Edward Hartfort, an outspoken patriot who is nonetheless judicious, has excellent taste, and dislikes English music and songs. After Hartfort’s musicians have performed an Italian song, his refined guests give Hartfort and his music the highest possible praise, decorously and rationally:

BELFORT. Finely composed and excellently performed.

DOUBTY. I see, Sir, you are well served in everything.

Shadwell’s characters who like English songs are either illbred or stupid, or both. The witless Prig in A True Widow writes and sings ridiculous English hunting and roaring songs. The uncouth Bernardo in The Amorous Bigotte hates Italian music and “loves” trumpets, cannons, drums, and the groans of wounded and dying men. His lack of breeding is even more evident when he sings a song tastelessly accompanied by a drum (V, p. 52). Oldwit, a country bumpkin in Bury Fair (IV, p. 343), staggers on stage drunk (something a gentleman would never do), roaring the old English song “There Were Three Men Came out of the West.” In The Virtuoso (III, p. 121), after the foolish Sir Samuel Hearty sings an old English song, his well-bred audience says he sings worse than an old woman spinning. Our romanticized image of an old woman spinning and singing a lullaby apparently was regarded in a different light in the seventeenth century. In The Lancashire Witches, Edward Hartfort’s doltish son’s stupidity becomes even more apparent when he sings two old English songs, the second of which is the old favorite “Roger à Coverly.”

The difference between urban sophistication and rural boorishness is made explicit in a scene in Bury Fair (IV, p. 329). In the following quotation, Bellamy and Wildish are sophisticated, knowledgeable men of London; whereas Sir Humphrey Noddy and Oldwit are ignorant country bumpkins. Bellamy and Wildish show us correct attitudes toward music and behavior. They do not like Oldwit and Sir Humphrey, and they do not know, or pretend not to know, the popular “Thetford music.” Notice also the strength with which they scorn their rustic acquaintances and how they cannot bear the way Sir Humphrey turns the conversation to the topics of the traditional English instruments the shawm and the bandore and the well-known English musicians Singleton and Clayton :

BELLAMY. We will Wait upon you soon; but I have promised the ladies an entertainment, with a little concert of music by my own servants [Bellamy’s servants play Italian music], who are ready now: and I desire you will call the ladies, Sir.

OLDWIT. If your Lordship please: but faith, we had better be a topping [drinking].

SIR HUMPHREY. Did you ever hear the Thetford music?

BELLAMY. Not I, Sir.

SIR HUMPHREY. ’Sbud [this country oath is just as illbred as Sir Humphrey’s manners and his taste in music], they are the best music in England; there’s the best shawm and bandore,²⁴ and a fellow that acts Tom of Bet’lem to a miracle! And they sing “Charon, Oh Gentle Charon,” and “Come my Daphne,” better than Singleton and Clayton did.

WILDISH. Here’s the pleasure of your country conversation, Bellamy: had not a man better be condemn’d to the galleys, than endure it?

BELLAMY. I am of your opinion, Ned; and for that reason, never have such company at my house.

Epson Wells, too, is filled with fine old English songs, all sung by the clowns, Bisket, Fribble, and Clodpate. In The Miser, The Woman Captain, The Squire of Alsatia, and The Scowrers , the rogues, bullies, corrupt gentlemen, and fools, the ones who rant, roar, scour, and break windows, all sing and dance to well-known old English tunes.

In Shadwell’s plays, people of good breeding approve of English music only twice. Major General Blunt, in The Volunteers (1692), is an admirable old Cavalier officer and is described as being of “good understanding.” Yet he says, “Pox o’ these entires, give me your jolly country dance, it puts good humour into us, warms the ladies, and makes ’em kind and coming” (V, p. 219). The likable general is sentimentally conceived, of pre-Restoration vintage, reinforcing the idea that the polite society of the times provides a new standard that corrects the rudeness of previous generations. In The Lancashire Witches (IV, pp. 185-86), Sir Edward Hartfort, of “good understanding and honest principles,” tolerates only Italian music but allows his servant Clodpate to express joy in an English dance. After the dance, Sir Edward says of his stout English retainers: “These honest men are the strength and sinews of our country; such men as these are uncorrupted, and while they stand to us we fear no Papists or French invasions; this day we will be merry together” (another dance follows). Here, Shadwell’s transgression of his otherwise consistent principles of who should allow what music to be played was caused by his political and religious biases. The play was first performed in 1681, when feeling against the French and Catholics was very strong. Shadwell was a Whig who was playing up to fear of the “Popish Plot.”

Fops, standard characters in Restoration comedy, always are amusing and ridiculous to cultivated people because they have only pretensions to good taste. In Shadwell’s plays, the fops know what kind of music they are supposed to like, but they know neither how to produce it nor how to react to it. They are inept, act overly enthusiastic, misuse terminology, and in general like and do to excess the right things for the wrong reasons. The songs they sing and like characterize people who try to show understanding and good breeding but who are neither intelligent nor well-bred. In The Humourists, the fop Drybob attempts to write and perform what he foolishly thinks is an Italian song (I, p. 214):

In a scene from The Volunteers (V, p. 191), two fops discuss Italian music:

SIR N.DAINTY. Ah, that’s fine, that’s chromatick. I love chromatick music mightily.

SIR T. KASTRIL. Ah, that fuge! that fuge’s finely taken.

SIR N.DAINTY. And bacely carried on.

SIR T. KASTRIL. All Italian, Sir, all Italian.

Sir Positive-At-All, a fop in The Sullen Lovers, also comically appreciates music merely because it is Italian. In Bury Fair (IV, p. 329), after Gertrude’s well-bred succinct appreciation of an Italian song, a female fop, Lady Fantast (too much fancy, not enough judgment) says overenthusiastically: “You must be putting in with your ill-breeding! If any traveler should affirm that Italy afforded better, I should humbly demand his pardon.”

Sophisticated Londoners consistently poke fun at the countryside for its old-fashioned manners and old-fashioned, boring entertainments, one of which is English music. In The Sullen Lovers (II, p. 29), the witty Caroline teases the sophisticated Lovel: “Why you look more comically than an old-fashioned fellow singing ‘Robin Hood’ or ‘Chevy Chase.’ ”²⁵ In Epsom Wells (II, p. 38), Mistress Jilt says ironically: “Breeding yes; could I not play ‘I am the Duke of Norfolk,’ ‘Greensleeves,’ and ‘The Fourth Psalm’ upon the virginals; and did I not learn, and could play six lessons on the viol de gambo, before I went to that nasty, stinking, wicked town London.” In The Miser (II, pp. 44-45), the sophisticated gentleman Theodore disapproves of Cheatley’s “Country Song,” a popular English song about a young girl gnawing her sheets for want of a man, because it lacks wit—here synonymous with gentility and good taste. In The Scowrers (V, p. 98), Eugenia and Clara speak of country boredom in terms of the music they had to play and hear:

CLARA. And for musick an old hoarse singing man riding ten miles from his cathedral to quaver out the glories of our birth and state, or it may be a Scotch song more hideous and barbarous than an Irish cronan.

EUGENIA. And another musick master from the next town to teach one to twinckle out “Lilli burlero” upon an old pair of virginals, that sound worse than a tinkers kettle that he cries his work upon.

In Bury Fair (IV, p. 329), when the oaf Sir Humphrey Noddy wants the cultivated Bellamy’s musicians to play “Lilli Burlero,” Bellamy scornfully replies: “My servants are no fiddlers.” This song is a country song to be played on old-fashioned fiddles, not on the refined violins that Charles II imported from France. The Whig Shadwell is not expressing any personal dislike for “Lilli Burlero.” The words of this popular song helped drive James II off the throne, as a result of which Shadwell became poet laureate of England.

It may be puzzling that Shadwell includes so much English music in his plays. Judging from the number of songbooks printed at the time, we can conclude only that interest in music of all kinds was very high,²⁶ and Shadwell, probably from personal experience, realized that people liked English songs even though they intellectually disapproved of them.²⁷ A comment by John Dryden indicates the prevailing general attitude:

I confess [Chaucer’s poetry] is not harmonious to us; but it is like the eloquence of one whom Tacitus commends. . . . There is the rude, sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect.²⁸

Dryden is saying that despite their naturalness and pleasing quality Scotch tunes are rude and therefore lack artistic (and rhetorical) sophistication and perfection. Although he thinks Scotch tunes imperfect, he likes them in the same way he likes Chaucer’s poetry.²⁹ Gossip recorded in Samuel Pepys’s diary indicates that the liking for spirited English songs holds true for others. Pepys has heard “how the King and these gentelmen Buckhurst and Sedley did make the fiddlers of Thetford, this last progress, to sing them all the bawdy songs they could think of.”³⁰ In another passage on the court, Pepys says: “The King did put a great affront upon Singleton’s musique, he bidding them stop and bade the French musique play, which, my lord says, do much outdo ours.”³¹ The embarrassment and shame of the English performers must have been deeply felt. The second scene takes place in a self-conciously sophisticated court; the first, in the country. King Charles, Buckhurst, and Sedley, models of courtly sophistication, could enjoy English songs, but they did not consider them an elevated form of art, fit for what they thought of as an elegant setting. The same idea holds true for Sir Philip Sidney’s and Addison’s penchants for the ballad “Chevy Chase.” And Addison’s Sir Roger de Coverly, a character in The Spectator Papers, plays on the reader’s knowledge of that venerable dance tune of a similar name, his charming, hearty, eccentric, and slightly bumpkinish character a good index of attitudes toward the tune itself.³² By the eighteenth century, English tastes were more positive, and apparently the English felt more self-confident socially. In the Restoration, judging from the evidence, such was not the case.

Although good taste is generally thought to consist of a proper response to correct and decorous art, it does not follow that art in the seventeenth century was judged as good or bad by what a person liked or disliked. Critics as a general rule rarely mention their emotional preferences and rarely without intellectual justification. Only the most self-confident, that is, only the most sophisticated and the most naive, openly indicate their emotional preferences for oddities they like rather than for what they were supposed to like. Dryden’s liking of Chaucer and Scottish tunes and Sir Philip Sidney’s penchant for “Chevy Chase” both show us what sophisticated critics dare to say, just as the naive country bumpkins in Restoration comedy who like unsophisticated amusements show us what was regarded as bad taste.³³ Dryden recognizes the force of imagination or passion in Chaucer and folk ballads. He mistakenly thinks Chaucer’s versification (elocution) is deficient, and he likes, although he does not admire, Scottish tunes. Sir Philip Sidney bases his praise of “Chevy Chase” on his own emotional response to the energy of the creative impulse, comparing the ballad to the passionate sound of a trumpet and to the imaginative force of Pindar:

I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder, with no rougher voice than rude style; which being so evil apparelled in the dust and cobwebs of that uncivil age, what would it work, trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar? [Sidney, “Apology for Poetry,” P.94]

The heroic idea arouses a noble passion in Sidney’s heart.

Heightened feeling effected though the force of invention appeals to Sidney s emotions about the glories of war and his English heritage, although the words (the eloquence or rhetoric) are neither correct nor courtly. To Sidney, the poem is like a trumpet. The comparison is apt, for the kind of trumpet Sidney refers to is a crude, loud, martial, coarse instrument.³⁴ Its crudeness and strength are comparable to the poem’s very qualities and are reminiscent of real and literary trumpets from Joshua to Virgil to Sidney’s own time. Even rough words and the performance are considered a part of rhetoric, and therefore Sidney asks, “what would the poem work,” or what passions would it raise, if it were “trimmed in the gorgeous eloquence of Pindar?” He thinks that the delight and movement of the poem would be reinforced or strengthened by more correct rhetoric, and if the poem could be more artfully made, it would be more ravishing to the sensible soul of the hearer or reader. To Sidney, as well as to Dryden, rhetorical devices are conscious, secondary to instruction. If the maker of the ballad were more skillful, the elocution would be more artful and manipulative, more persuasive, and more correct.

III

Despite the pressure of French manners, the Restoration English in some ways were stubbornly chauvinistic and resisted the encroachments of French theory and art in the name of natural English superiority of individual powers of mind, powers that are opposed to the bases of rules criticism. Dryden says, in one of his less subtle statements (1693), “Our [English] authors as far surpass theirs [French] in genius, as our soldiers excel theirs in courage.”³⁵ He also recognizes Thomas Rymer’s role in the dissemination of French ideas, calling him one of those “who manifestly aim at the destruction of our poetical church and state.”³⁶ There is no doubt that English chauvinism was a real, important force in all parts of English life and thought and that resistance to Continental influences was based on a recognition of manifest cultural differences. French and English literary criticism is similar when the subject is a classical writer like Horace or Virgil, but on a contemporary subject or in a more abstract discussion there is less common ground than appears on the surface.

Thomas Rymer himself is mentioned approvingly most often by those who refer to his lines at the end of his Short View (1693), in which he says that English comedy is better than any other,³⁷ and although his theories were respected, Rymer’s plainspoken, French-oriented criticism of Shakespeare was disagreeable to many of his contemporaries. Rymer criticizes Shakespeare from a position entirely outside the boundaries of Shakespeare’s art. He picks on illogical details, wonders where the moral is, worries about poetic justice, and cavils over decorum of character types. He wants to see a particular kind of play Shakespeare does not offer, one that is an abstract of moral truth dressed up in the correctness of improbable probabilities. He is not interested in the truth of life existing in, and expressed by, a world created by the artist, but in another kind of truth existing in a world of previously defined absolutes, previously defined by other people and drawn from a world consisting of previously made works of art. Shakespeare does not fit Rymers French model because Shakespeare was obviously not as much interested in the truth of theoretical probability as he was in absolute truth dramatically presented according to the exigencies of the play. He was not interested in poetic justice as much as in exciting passions through interesting characters and appropriate, exciting acts by those characters. The heroism and degradation of the Moor, Othello, the fragile, unreal delicacy of Desdemona, and the vile, worm-tonguish evil of Iago all are rhetorical in intention, in the sense that they induce in us certain passions, but they come from a tradition different from Rymer’s pseudoscientific classification of decorous types. Rymer thinks in terms of parts of a play, how each incident and each character ought to be, given the rules as standards; whereas Othello, as an inspired work of art, is greater than the sum of its rhetorical parts.

Rymer fails to see that Shakespeare’s plays are forceful and lively, appealing simultaneously to the imagination and the understanding. Rymer is not overcome by the force of Shakespeare’s imaginative vision, his idea, and the passion or movement that are intended to reinforce a view of life and character universal in its comprehension and significance, appealing to both the imagination and the understanding. The reasons why Rymer is unmoved are clear. Shakespeare leaves out the explicit, immediate kind of moral abstraction, or poetic justice (which Rymer thinks ought to be in every play), for poetic justice is not life. Life itself is not full of decorous characters or poetic justice; it is full of good and bad people, neither all good nor all bad, who are neither necessarily rewarded for their good deeds or intentions nor necessarily punished for their bad (although some people then as now liked to think that is what should happen and would happen in the world as it is supposed to exist). To Rymer, characterization should be based on types; actions should correspond to an artificial probability, that is, to how a typical soldier, lawyer, or courtier is supposed to act. Rymer misses the point that generalizations exist to help us understand specifics, whether positively or negatively. Iago, for example, is real and influential to a great extent because he is an anti-type—the opposite of the type of soldier Rymer criticizes Shakespeare for not using and the type of soldier people like Rymer mistakenly classify as honest. Shakespeare emphasizes character or the interplay of characters over plot, each person as uniquely and as fully realized in a dramatic situation as any artist has ever achieved. And we feel as well as understand Shakespeare’s own feeling and understanding of truth and life through understanding his language because we feel we know the worlds of his plays and the characters who inhabit them.

Dryden, unlike Rymer, understands at least partially Shakespeare’s emphasis on the relationships of characters rather than plot, but his ambivalence was shared by many seventeenth-century Englishmen. Although he respects the rules as reasonable, fundamentally he feels the superiority of an irregular, great English art, and although he poses a dilemma for us by conflicting statements about character and plot, we can sort out his ideas, showing that he emphasizes the importance of characterization. First, in “The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy” (1679),³⁸ Dryden says in the mode of French rules criticism that the plot “is the foundation of the play” and with the moral it comes before the creation of the characters (in Watson, I, p. 248). He says also that Shakespeare (and Fletcher) is deficient in his plots (I, p. 246). Yet, Dryden thinks Shakespeare the greatest playwright, and his excellence, as it turns out, is his characterization: “[Shakespeare] had an universal mind which comprehended all characters and passions” (I, p. 260). It is also moving characterizations and passions that make a play lively, as opposed to merely just, and to Dryden liveliness becomes the most important quality of great art.

The extent to which Dryden appreciates Shakespeare depends on how well he comprehended his world view, a view that is Neoplatonic in its comprehension of the universe. The godlike imagination a Renaissance playwright assumed he had was more to English taste than French, and Shakespeare’s lively characters obviously appealed to Dryden more than they did to French critics or to English critics committed to French Rationalism. The fact that Shakespeare was appreciated so much shows that Restoration audiences were at least somewhat oriented toward the older Neoplatonic view of the universe, but the extent to which Neoplatonism was a part of intellectual, as well as everyday, thought in seventeenth-century England is difficult to assess. Its relation to music, mathematics, magic, religion, astrology, poetry, drama, medicine, painting, architecture, and superstition is so manifest everywhere it is incalculable. At the same time, it is so mixed in with other forms of philosophical, religious, and scientific thought that it is impossible to document with exactitude how much modification Neoplatonic thought underwent and to exactly what extent the cultural drift away from it took place, especially in the relationship of Neoplatonic thought to both the new science and rules criticism. That there was a change, we can see in the literal and figurative distance between the kind of art produced by the early Michelangelo, in the Sistine chapel, which embodies universalized, idealized figures, and Rubens’s Life of Marie de’ Medici, which embodies the circumscribed life of the French court. This change is echoed by the distance between Shakespeare’s Cleopatra as a universalized conception of an extremely complex, fascinating woman and Dryden’s more circumscribed Cleopatra as a lady of the English Restoration court.³⁹ All anyone can really do is note that there is a change, explain how it is manifested in individual instances, and expound generally on its extent. There is also disagreement. Arnold Hauser, for example, does not see signs of a new sensualism in France until the end of the century.⁴⁰ But in a more balanced assessment that denotes the gradual change of attitudes and beliefs, Gretchen Finney points out that because of the new science music by the end of the century had lost much of its mystique, becoming “nothing, literally, but a motion of the air.”⁴¹ She also says, quite correctly, that those who were scientifically oriented found it hard to shake off old occult ideas (p. 151). The older Neoplatonism was a powerful, moving force, and the pervasiveness of Neoplatonic beliefs and thought is probably little appreciated by us. Douglas Bush says, for example, “We cannot overestimate the importance of the Platonic strain in English humanism.”⁴²

In the Restoration the influence of the new science was tremendous, but not everyone was influenced in the same way or to the same extent. It is easier for us to study the newer movements of the Baroque age just because they were beginning to be accepted, for that also means they would be articulated, attacked, explained, and defended.⁴³ Ideas have a habit of hanging around for a long time anyway, and many Neoplatonic ideas are still with us today, however diluted, distorted, or modified. The older, established ideas that everyone takes for granted, that no one thinks need explaining, often are hardest to identify and discuss. English attitudes toward newer kinds of music, for example, are easy to document. Although Neoplatonism had been more fashionable in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it was so much a part of human belief that there are still allusions to it almost everywhere at the century’s end. In the Restoration, Neoplatonic ideas were especially prevalent in traditional musical theory. For example, Jeremy Collier, although skeptical of idealism and capable of firm belief in his senses (which even Descartes and Antoine Arnauld find difficult), talks about music in the old way, taking his theory from Boethius, Glarean, and Galtruchius.⁴⁴ And Newton, the great scientist, was fascinated by hermeticism.

The results of the conflict between Neoplatonism and rules criticism are confusing. Sometimes Continental theory seems dominant, and sometimes the English absorbed what the Continent offered, obviously keeping their own national, artistic, and critical identities.⁴⁵ A part of every critic or person who had not espoused the French rules wholeheartedly wanted to see art that was more than an explanation of reality, art that presented a reality perceived and created by artists’ imaginations, stimulating the receptors’ own imaginations to a high degree. Rymer’s criticism, as well as that of the French rules critics themselves, was fundamentally inimicable to the English experience, even though many paid lip service to it, because the English had found models in their own cultural tradition, poets like Shakespeare and Milton, and these artists or makers had taught the English what great art is all about. The English experience helped shape taste, art, and critical thought through an anti-Rationalistic, Neoplatonic mode of thinking about the arts that explained the power of English Renaissance art, as well as that of Homer, Michelangelo, Pindar, and the Bible, works whose excellence lies largely outside the bounds of the rules. Rules criticism and its attendant standards of taste became influential in England at a relatively late date. A. F. B. Clark notes, “No French critic of a generation preceding Boileau had any influence in England.”⁴⁶ English provinciality, or the cultural lag between England and the Continent, proved to be a blessing.