Abstract: As they reviewed Restoration and legacy, many cultural critics objected to excessive libertinism and gambling that, along with seemed all of a piece. In The Toiler, for example, Richard Steele ridicules a gentleman who spends his days common Diversions of Men of Fashion; that is to say, in Whoring, Drinking, and Gaming (1 : 413). The Epilogue to Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore associates drinking, raking and contends that the reforming stage should fall to shaming / Ill-nature, pride, hypocrisy, and gaming (74). comic dramatists agreed. Sir Charles Sedley'sBellamira concludes with these lines spoken by an aging rake: Wits, Whore-Masters, Gamesters, Drunkards, Bullies / We in our several wayes are all but Cullies (2: 96). A character declares that protagonist of John Corey's A Cure for Jealousie Whores, Games and Drinks, at that abominable rate, he would run out Kings Revenue in less time then 'tis gathered (6). In Susanna Centlivre's The Busybody a father mocks young fellows for assuming that old men get estates for nothing but them to squander away, in dicing, wenching, dressing, and so (309). Such criticism spilled over into debates about literature and drama. For instance, one commentator complained that Some of our Late Comedies have given greatest Countenance to Libertinism that can be, by setting forth extravagant Debauches of Age as True Character of a Gentleman (qtd. in Turner x). While agreeing that age's reigning Vices included love of women, gaming, John Dennis insisted, however, that the Corruption of Manners, is to be attributed to Licentiousness of Drama (1:155, 154).As complementary aspects of late Stuart culture, libertinism and gambling belong to more general category of upper-class excess that Cynthia Lowenthal explores as part of period's crises in Performing Identities on Restoration Stage. As the Restoration theater responded to and provoked an extraordinary number of category crises throughout period, she writes, [t]he 'real-world' objects of multiple gazes . . . were aristocrats whose public displayed a power and an identity inextricably linked to a theatrical kind of presentation and (4, 136). Considering previous studies of the kind of sexual behaviour manifested by Court Wits of Charles II and seducer-heroes of drama, James Grantham Turner argues that libertinism itself was not so much a philosophy as a set of performances and that its defining 'properties' . . are better understood as theatrical props than as precise attributes (x). Finding libertinism lacking in coherence and consistency, Turner stresses self-fashioning aspects, qualities that translate readily into actions on comic stage. I make a similar argument about performative features of gambling, as it became both a social and a stage spectacle in late Stuart period: Gambling, which some conduct books deemed acceptable recreation for gentlemen and ladies, was already theatricalized in Restoration as an unproductive expenditure of an anxious class. Many Restoration comedies . . . incorporated aspects of this spectacle into representations of a [gambler] seen on forestage in somewhat more proximate relation to audiences and their values, even when these characters were ridiculed (Evans 16). While as widespread as sexual libertines, gamblers (mostly gentlemen and ladies, occasionally citizens or their wives, rarely servants) appear in a number of comedies; some include scenes in which characters play cards or dice on stage, and in others games are reported to take place offstage.1There is also a set of characters in Restoration and post-Revolution comedy that combine libertinism and gambling in their on-stage conduct. In this essay I will examine four of them-two protagonists of Carolean comedies, a third from a comedy written shortly before Revolution, and another from a play performed a few years after that pivotal political and cultural event. …
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 2
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