...considered among finest of that halcyon decade: Epsom-Wells (1672), The Virtuoso (1676), A True Widow (1678), and The Woman-Captain (1679). (1) Perhaps his most famous comedy, however, remains The Squire of Alsatia, which debuted just months before the Glorious Revolution (May 1688). Because of its exemplary hero and his exemplary foster father, who shows him the error of his one flaw, and because of their moral sentiments, critics have seen in it the origin of a major change in comedy toward the exemplary, the sentimental. (2)

In the conclusion to Tricksters and Estates I myself wrote:

The comedies of Shadwell--starting in 1681 with The Lancashire Witches and moving through The Squire of Alsatia and Bury-Fair ([April] 1689) to The Amorous Bigotte and The Scowrers (both of 1690 [Spring and December, respectively]) and finally to The Volunteers ([November] 1692])--most clearly mark this paradigm shift [from aristocratic Restoration to bourgeois Revolution comedy], peopled as they are with heroes and heroines and patriarchs and prodigal sons so essentially good-natured and benevolent as to create that new form of comedy called sentimental, in which the aristocratic yields to the bourgeois family romance, articulated most famously in Sir Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1772). (3)

In "Shifting Tropes of Ideology in English Serious Drama, Late Stuart to Early Georgian," I had already analyzed in detail Lancashire Witches under the rubric of tragicomic romance, arguing that the moralizing comedy it represents anticipates the transformation of that old aristocratic genre into bourgeois sentimental comedy. (4)

The phrase bourgeois sentimental is here a pleonasm. However vexed a term, what critics have generally meant by sentimental as applied since Bernbamn to post-Revolution comedies is a new ethos which emphasizes the essential good nature of humans, their capacity to reform, their perfectibility. As opposed to recklessness and wildness and wit and ridicule, sentimental comedy stresses sobriety, neostoic restraint paradoxically coupled with sensibility, reclamation. Generosity no longer is something born into but bred into, inculcated into one. This ethos is part of a triumphant Whig ideology that portrays the old aristocracy as generally decadent and the new order as a meritocracy, where the City merchant need yield neither rectitude nor status to the Country gentry. And it is this positive portrayal of at least the great merchants, who have come to demand a place at the table of power, that justifies the term bourgeois.

But it is more: I am not utilizing the old mimetic model of criticism that sees literature as merely passively reflecting its real historical background. Instead, I am insisting on the constitutive power of literature in general and of drama in particular. That is, whatever construct is fashioned by social and political historians for the period--including the fashionable revisionists, who concede no significant structural change in English history between Elizabeth and Victoria (5)--I am arguing that the drama began to present a new picture of English society, a new set of values, after the Revolution of 1688. Not all dramatists, not all plays. But Shadwell was the vanguard of a dramatic shift toward a set of values for which we generally use the term bourgeois because they are associated with the rise of the cities and their increasing power and wealth: an emphasis on merit rather than birth as a measurement of worth (e.g. Mary Pix's Beau Defeated, whose subtitle, The Lucky Younger Brother, speaks volumes); a neostoical ethics of restraint, prudence (William Congreve's Mirabel's virtue won't let him debauch Lady Wishfort, even as he prudentially provides for his former mistress, Mrs. Fainall); a more positive portrayal of Cits and a more negative portrayal of aristocratic rakes as they degenerate into beaux (e.g. Pix's Mr. Rich and the title character of The Beau Defeated), as their more negative, predatory aspects are peeled off into fully negative characters (e.g. Congreve's Maskwell, Fainall), and as their more positive aspects are tempered into a more benevolent, well-meaning figure (e.g. Congreve's Mellefont and Mirabel). (6) The plays are still populated with members of the aristocracy, the gentry, the middling sort, the servant, and occasionally the labor classes. What is different is a compromise, as it were, a symbiosis between the landed gentry and the emergent middle--yes--class.

Shadwell's later comedies in the main move comedy toward the sentimental, toward a bourgeois ethos. From 1688 on, they pick up many of the tropes of Lancashire Witches: benevolent fratriarch who is a sober patriot preaching neostoicism; self-reliant heroines who are free Englishwomen with agency; young men marked by sensibility who, early or late, become true lovers; clods, bumpkins, parvenus, and superannuated lovers who are disciplined; Catholics who are roundly satirized. (7) The resolutions of their conflicts, however, represent an ideological triumph that in reality masks the falseness of several of their dichotomies.

THE SQUIRE OF ALSATIA

Thanks to Ronald Berman, Christopher Wheatley, and John C. Ross, we have begun to read late Shadwell not in terms of morality, but ideology. (8) Berman demonstrates how The Squire of Alsatia embodies Lockean principles. Wheatley demonstrates how it embodies a class code. Concerning The Squire of Alsatia and Bury-Fair Ross writes, "For the first year or so [of the Williamite era], as the one established Whig professional writer there was, [Shadwell] bore a serious responsibility to provide cultural validation for the Revolution Settlement" (229). This he does, as both Ross and Berman have shown, by presenting in Squire the triumph of a patriarchy based on constitutional law in language reflective of the current political theoretical debate. Wheatley sees the ending of the play as affirming the "social role" of the representatives of the ruling class (49-50). Let us ask what further cultural work the play performs to make it a bourgeois comedy.

If Wheatley is correct in recasting the question of the protagonist's sexual peccadilloes in terms of the play's affirmation of a class code, we can begin to better see why so much of the play is devoted to its sexual politics. Because it does not jettison patrilineal patriarchy as the system for the succession of power, the emergent haute bourgeoisie merges its ethos with that of the aristocracy to create an amalgam. (9) The signs of the power of the ruling class continue to include the estate in the traditional sense, a patrimony passed down through the body of a woman. Hence, Belfond Junior, who is at the end to be endowed with his heirless uncle's estate, "cannot help" marrying a woman who is unadulterated and who therefore is a proper conduit for his power and property. (10) As Raymond Williams says perspicaciously about Restoration comedy, "[T]he moral ratification of this drama is not marriage against an intrigue or an affair ... , nor is it wit against folly, or virtue against vice. It is the steering of the estate into the right hands." (11) Like Etherege's Dorimant, the Restoration rake par excellence, Belfond Junior has his mistresses, whom he will inevitably cast off in favor of his virgin conduit, Isabella. But unlike Dorimant, with help from his uncle, Belfond Junior will end up preserving the reputation of Lucia, daughter of a city attorney, whom he has seduced but who, according to the cold logic of the patriarchal patrilineal system, is damaged goods and thus an unfit, contaminated conduit. Like Dorimant, he has a higher-class mistress who is a more formidable opponent and who responds even more viciously than Mrs. Loveit when he attempts to justify the temporary nature of their liaison: "Why you were not marry'd to me: I took no Lease of your frail Tenement: I was but Tenant at my own will.... if a man lies once with a Woman, is he bound to do it forever?" (227-28). Mrs. Termagant, whose name would seem to have become a household word for a shrewish vixen because of this play, (12) being more sinister than Mrs. Loveit, represents a bourgeois appropriation of the motif of cast mistress for use as a grave warning to prodigal sons. Termagant's threats to the patriarchal economy are real: if she can prove a prior contract, Belfond Junior will be bound to her--or her brother may kill him in a duel as an affair of honor. She goes so far as to threaten him with seeing "thy Child sent thee in pieces, Bak'd in a Pye" (240). She tries to trick his profligate brother into a marriage that will ruin him, and she finally tries to kill Belfond Junior when her plots are discovered. Her fate is to be sent somewhere to be "tamed" (278). Belfond Junior articulates a lesson Dorimant would never utter: "Well, say what they will, the life of a Whore-master is a foolish, restless, anxious, life; and there's an end on't" (269). In other words, Restoration comedy often, indeed usually, socializes the sexual energy of its heroes into bed with the right woman to perpetuate the estate and its political economy. Shadwell has made this reformation didactic not only as learning the lesson of the value of the right woman, but as appreciating an escape from danger. He has made it melodramatic, that staple of bourgeois culture. And he even redeems Termagant, who is finally "subdued" by the generosity of Sir Edmund toward her and her child (279).

Meanwhile, also ostensibly in the fashion of many Restoration comedies, the two desirable women, daughter and niece to the Puritan Cit Scrapeall, agree to choose their lovers as their guardians and thus escape his tyrannical control. They are naturally attracted to the superior qualities of the Town Wits, Belfond Junior, and his friend Truman. And they must place their trust in the rhetoric of their reformed libertine lovers. The entire denouement with regard to the main male protagonist, however, is enabled by the wealth of his merchant uncle, Sir Edward, who financially covers both his mistakes and his aspirations. Thus, England's ruling class is bolstered by its new money and its nouveaux riches. Belfond Junior and his Isabella will settle obviously, like Bingley and Jane Bennett after them, on that status symbol, an estate in the country, and they will be an integral part of their class and of the Nation, whose land-based wealth becomes increasingly augmented by the revenue of the colonial trade. (13)

This observation brings us to the class conflicts in the play. The most obvious is between the two brothers, Sir William and Sir Edmund Belfond--the former a Country squire, the latter a City merchant, the former conservative, the latter liberal, particularly in their modes of education of their charges. (14) While Sir William's mode is overly practical and overly strict, Sir Edmund's is theoretical and indulgent. He is another of Shadwell's benevolent fratriarchs,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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