User:Bishonen/Short "Playwright" section
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] Playwright
|
 |
|
Vanbrugh arrived in London at a time of scandal and internal drama at London's only theatre company, as a conflict played out between pinchpenny management and disgruntled actors. He immediately threw himself into the fray by writing a comedy.
[edit] The Relapse
Main article: The Relapse
Vanbrugh noted that a new comedy staged in the eye of the theatrical storm, Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, or, Virtue Rewarded (January, 1696), had an outrageously sentimental final scene of reform and reconciliation between a Restoration rake and his long-suffering wife. Six weeks after the première of Love's Last Shift, Vanbrugh offered the company a witty and unsentimental sequel about the problems likely to beset this marriage afterwards. The Relapse sends new sexual temptations in the way of not only the reformed husband but also the patient wife, and allows them to react in more credible and less predictable ways than in their original context. A fop part written by the flamboyant actor Cibber for himself to play in Love's Last Shift was taken brilliantly over the top in The Relapse where Cibber acted it again, and again brought down the house. Critics of Restoration comedy are unanimous in declaring Vanbrugh's Lord Foppington "the greatest of all Restoration fops" (Dobrée), by virtue of being not merely laughably affected, but also "brutal, evil, and smart" (Hume).
[edit] The Provoked Wife
Main article: The Provoked Wife
Vanbrugh's second original comedy, The Provoked Wife (1697), was performed by a new actors' cooperative, formed by established professional actors who had walked out of the mismanaged theatre monopoly that had staged The Relapse. The actors' cooperative boasted the star performers of the age, and Vanbrugh tailored The Provoked Wife to their specialties. While The Relapse had been robustly phrased to be suitable for the minor acting talents and amateurs remaining at the parent company, he could count on versatile professionals like Thomas Betterton, Elizabeth Barry, and the rising young star Anne Bracegirdle to do justice to characters of depth and nuance. Vanbrugh deepens audience sympathy for the unhappily married Lady Brute, even as she fires off her witty ripostes. In the intimate conversational dialogue between Lady Brute (Barry) and her niece Bellinda (Bracegirdle), and especially in the star part of Sir John Brute the brutish husband (Betterton), which was hailed as one of the peaks of Thomas Betterton's remarkable career, The Provoked Wife is something approaching a Restoration problem play about the subordination of women in marriage.
[edit] Changing audience taste
In 1698, Vanbrugh's argumentative and sexually frank plays were singled out for special attention by Jeremy Collier in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, particularly for their failure to impose exemplary morality by appropriate rewards and punishments in the fifth act. Vanbrugh laughed at these charges and published a joking reply where he accused the clergyman Collier of being more sensitive to unflattering portrayals of the clergy than to real irreligion. However, rising public opinion was already on Collier's side (see Restoration comedy). The intellectual and sexually explicit Restoration comedy style was becoming less and less acceptable to audiences and was soon to be replaced by a drama of sententious morality. Colley Cibber's Love's Last Shift, with its reformed rake and its tear-jerker reconciliation scene, can be seen as an early forerunner of this drama.
Although Vanbrugh continued to work for the stage in many ways, he produced no more original plays. With the change in audience taste away from Restoration comedy, Vanbrugh turned his creative energies from original composition to dramatic adaptation/translation, theatre management, and architecture.
