Over the course of four days in September, 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery turned four-fifths of central London to dust.Footnote 1 Wandering the streets around his home three days after the Great Fire subsided, the diarist John Evelyn describes a city in ruins—its buildings and landmarks “mealted, & reduc'd to cinders by the vehement heats,” its “bielanes & narrower streetes … quite fill'd up with rubbish, nor could one have possibly known where he was, but by the ruines of some church, or hall, that had some remarkable towre or pinacle remaining.”Footnote 2 John Dryden echoes Evelyn's sense of disorientation in Annus Mirabilis, his poem dedicated to the people of London and published in 1667; he describes “the Cracks of Falling houses,” the “Shrieks of Subjects” as the Fire “wades the Streets,” threatens the palace, and lays the city's famed financial centers “to waste.”Footnote 3 And he describes, too, the desperate attempts by those left homeless by the Fire to make spaces for themselves in the ruins:
Previous studies of the post-Fire city—most notably Cynthia Wall's landmark Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London—have focused on its residents’ attempts to render it comprehensible once again by setting it down as image (the map) or, more often, as text: Wall writes of Londoners’ desire to “recover and reassert [the] boundaries” that had once structured their city and “to reinvest traditional imagery with local relevance, to lay foundations for refamiliarization” by producing “common narratives of loss.”Footnote 5 Yet even as Dryden offers his own text as both expression and fulfillment of this desire to reinvest the city with stable meaning, he also suggests the difficulties of achieving such stability in a city changing as rapidly as Restoration London, which in the preceding two and a half decades had weathered not only fire but also two regime changes, ongoing wars, and a plague that decimated its population. In Dryden's poem, the spaces of the city emerge not chiefly as nouns—the buildings and boundaries that the Fire has “mealted & reduc'd to cinders,” in Evelyn's words, the maps and texts that render these buildings and boundaries intact in the archive—but rather as verbs—the repertoire of performances through which Dryden's Londoners move through and reconstitute their city: they “sit,” they “walk,” they trace with “full Eyes” the edges of each “wonted Room.” The skills required to navigate such spaces include adaptability, improvisation, the ability to transform merely through the movements of one's body a heap of ash into a “wonted Room” of one's own.
In this essay, I argue that we can better understand Restoration London if we turn from the maps and texts that attempted to make it comprehensible to the performances through which Londoners learned how to improvise spaces for themselves within the ever-shifting geographies of the post-Fire city. Michel de Certeau, in The Practice of Everyday Life, describes this penchant for improvisation and mobility as the particular purview of the less privileged “walkers” who, denied the bird's-eye views limited to the penthouse dwellers and power brokers, know the city from the ground up. Improvising new paths through and makeshift homes within spaces not designed with them in mind, they impose what de Certeau terms a “migrational” city over “the clear text of the planned and readable city.”Footnote 6 De Certeau uses textual metaphors to describe these improvisations, but as Kim Solga, D. J. Hopkins, and Shelley Orr point out in their 2009 Performance and the City, his emphasis on the mobility, changeability, and ephemerality of these spaces dovetails with the language that theorists have used to describe performance. In the decade since Solga, Hopkins, and Orr declared that “the broadest and deepest implications of the weave between the theatrical and the urban continue to lack sustained exploration,” a growing list of scholars have deployed de Certeau's heuristics to examine how the improvised performances of urban walkers have shaped cities in many periods and across the circum-Atlantic world.Footnote 7 Whereas London has featured prominently in this literature, however, Restoration London garners far less attention than Renaissance or nineteenth-century London—a surprising lacuna considering that many historians date the beginning of the “modern” capital to the end of the Great Fire, which arguably had a more dramatic and rapid impact on the city's geography than any event besides the Blitz.Footnote 8
But Restoration London offers another significant advantage to scholars investigating the performances that produce urban space: a (relative) wealth of documentation about how that space was represented in the public playhouse. The formalized performances of the Restoration stage, I suggest, offer important glimpses of the quotidian, improvised performances of the street, performances whose very mobility and ephemerality make them so difficult to recover in the archive. For as we shall see, plays written and staged after the Great Fire evince an interest in precisely these improvised performances as useful not only to the walkers that devised them but to Londoners from across the social spectrum as they struggled to adapt to a rapidly changing city. Although the Fire certainly had the most devastating impact on the city's vulnerable populations (servants, laborers, and the impoverished), it also invited at least temporary precarity onto those, like the figures in Dryden's poem, who had homes once but no longer. In its wake, Dryden writes, “the rich grow suppliant, and the poor grow proud.”Footnote 9 The Fire stands, then, as the culminating event in Dryden's “year of wonders,” when the Dutch naval attacks and the plague epidemic also contributed to the sudden reversal of fortunes. But the poem is also haunted, like the city it describes, by the memories of the civil wars that redistributed much of the nobility's land between 1642 and 1651—only to restore that land, along with the English monarchy itself, in 1660. In the midst of these upheavals many Londoners shared, to a greater or lesser extent, in precarity; and thus many Londoners had uses for the sorts of improvised, “migrational” performances that allow both de Certeau's walkers and Dryden's “full Eye[d]” property owners to make their homes on shifting ground.
The public theatres that reopened with Charles II's return in 1660 were uniquely equipped for precisely such performances. Only a few years before the Fire struck, William Davenant had successfully drawn audiences away from Thomas Killigrew's rival company by introducing to the public stage the changeable scenery previously used only in court masques and in Continental theatres. By pushing wheeled flats along grooves at the back and along the sides of the stage floor, players could create three-dimensional sets representing recognizable places across the city—and then transform them quickly into other recognizable places. Audiences could watch closely how actors—whose designation as the “King's Servants” or the “Duke's Servants” associated them with classes long accustomed to precarity and whose contemporaries often dismissed them as “rogues and vagabonds”—made space for themselves among the shifting scenes reminiscent of the shifting city just outside the stage doors.Footnote 10 Davenant's scenes were a triumph, and by 1668 he began plans to build the era's most elaborate theatre near the western edge of the Fire's ruins. The Dorset Garden Theatre opened in 1671 with a performance of a London city comedy, Sir Martin Mar-All—written by John Dryden in the very same years that he was composing both Annus Mirabilis and An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, one of the most influential theories of drama to emerge from the Restoration period.Footnote 11
In the pages that follow, I examine these works side by side to explore, first, how Sir Martin Mar-All promotes the value of the improvisatory performances of a servant in helping all Londoners to navigate a changing city; and, second, how both play and Essay present the scenic stage as a place where Londoners look to learn how to treat urban space not as a noun, the plot of a map, but rather as a verb of mobility.
Plotting Sir Martin Mar-All
The first word spoken after the curtains parted on the brand-new Dorset Garden stage on 9 November 1671, was the beginning of a question: “Where?”Footnote 12 The question came from an actor dressed humbly as a servant who would shortly present himself as Warner, valet to the play's eponymous fool.
Warner's question must have resonated with the spectators who gathered that evening around a shifting stage within a new-built playhouse upon a plot of land rendered nearly unrecognizable by the events of the past three decades. The Dorset Garden playhouse was the work of the same people responsible for the city's rebuilding: it was rumored to have been designed by Sir Christopher Wren, whose plan for the post-Fire London was never realized; but it was more likely proposed by Robert Hooke, Wren's assistant in erecting the Monument to the Great Fire between 1671 and 1677.Footnote 13 It stood on ground once occupied by the stables serving the townhome of the Earls of Dorset, who were among the royalists fined for their opposition to Oliver Cromwell during the Civil War. They had managed to cling to their land under Cromwell's rule only to see their house destroyed in the Great Fire. By the time construction began on the Dorset Garden Theatre, makeshift tenements to house the Fire's most destitute victims had appeared on the former grounds of the noble home.Footnote 14 Such tenements had become more common in London as a result not only of the Fire but also of changing economic policy: Dorset Garden opened less than a decade after Parliament passed the 1662 Settlement Act, one of a number of “Poor Laws” that the English government enacted between the late sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries and that Karl Marx identified as symptomatic of the slow transition from feudalism—an agrarian system in which both lords and serfs stuck close to the land—to capitalism—a mercantile system built not on the fixity but rather on the circulation of money, goods, and laborers.Footnote 15 The decline of agrarianism forced many laborers from the land where their families had toiled for generations, and they began to move to and between cities like London in search of work. As their economic potential shifted from the land to their laboring bodies, the skills of mobility and improvisation that de Certeau associates with the working classes became crucial to their survival.
As the poor moved into spaces formerly occupied by the gentry, the gentry appropriated sections of the city once left to the poor. Stately townhomes replaced the small farms and working-class neighborhoods just to the west of the theatre, a now-fashionable enclave known as the Town. Harold Love portrays this “internal migration” as “an act of colonization, by the gentry, of a metropolis that had until that time been the preserve of the manufacturing and mercantile classes.”Footnote 16 Aristocrats who had once eschewed the city except as a place to conduct business before returning to the country now made their homes there, where they found themselves surrounded by members of the “manufacturing and mercantile classes” far more accustomed to navigating the precarity that, in the midst of wars, a fire, and a rapidly changing cityscape, had come to haunt the wealthy as well.
Dorset Garden, like the other London theatres just to its west, was thus well situated to provide even its wealthiest patrons with opportunities to observe and learn from the movements of their poorer neighbors, whom they passed in the varied neighborhoods on the way to the theatre. Such opportunities did not end when they entered the theatre's doors. Earlier characterizations of the Restoration stage as a “court toy managed by courtiers” have been largely disproven by more recent studies, which reveal London audiences as a socioeconomically diverse group that included not only the wealthy but also the middle classes, and even lower-class apprentices and the servants who would catch snatches of the play while saving seats for their employers.Footnote 17 The diarist Samuel Pepys describes the crowd at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1668 as “a mighty company of citizens, prentices, and others; and it makes me observe that when I begin first to be able to bestow a play on myself, I do not remember that I saw so many by half of the ordinary prentices and mean people in the pit, at 2s-6d apiece, as now.”Footnote 18
That Pepys made this observation while attending a production of Sir Martin Mar-All seems more than a coincidence, for the play goes to some length to foreground the city as an environment where those from different social classes meet—and where their separate understandings of urban space brush up against each other. Dryden sets his comedy in Covent Garden, the entertainment district a few blocks to the west of the Dorset Garden Theatre and flanked, like Dorset Garden, with poorer areas. It was famous not only as the birthplace of modern urban planning in London (with a square laid out by set designer Inigo Jones in the 1630s), but also as an area frequented by rich and poor alike. Although Love describes “Dryden's greatest subject” as “the emergence into history of the modern city”Footnote 19 and the mix of wits and fools, high and low, making space for themselves within it, most modern critics have dismissed the play's “minimum of concern for distinctions of rank” as an ill-advised attempt to pander to the pit.Footnote 20 John Loftis denigrates Dryden's three London comedies as “the work of his left hand”Footnote 21 and James Anderson Winn cites Sir Martin Mar-All as evidence that “he knew how to give the public what it wanted, even when his own dramatic theories pointed in another direction.”Footnote 22
In what direction Dryden's “dramatic theories” pointed is an argument I take up later in this essay. There is no doubt, however, that Sir Martin Mar-All gave the public what it wanted when it debuted only a month shy of the first anniversary of the Fire—even if its popularity has been so far unexplained by the dearth of scholarship examining it. It was one of the most frequently performed comedies during Dryden's lifetime; the prompter John Downes estimated that it made the Duke's Company more money than any other play save Love in a Tub.Footnote 23 The same socioeconomic diversity that has put off modern critics, then, seems to have been part of the attraction for Dryden's contemporaries. A few months after describing the presence of “mean people” among the play's original audiences Pepys declared it “undoubtedly the best comedy ever was wrote” and estimated he had seen it some ten times.Footnote 24 Dryden seems to court such attention to the socioeconomic diversity onstage and off not only in the play's setting but from the very moment that the curtains part to reveal a figure dressed in servant's livery.
On the Restoration stage livery was the costume worn by actors playing the servant characters who were becoming more and more central to Restoration plots following the influence of commedia dell'arte (a tradition pronounced in both of Dryden's sources for the play).Footnote 25 But it was also the costume often used to disguise stagehands wishing to blend into the world of the play while moving flats and furniture on and off the stage.Footnote 26 Few clues survive to the blocking of this opening moment or how Dryden's original audiences read its import, but we might imagine this costume as an invitation to these audiences to dismiss the figure, at first, as a mere stagehand or laborer, another part of the set. The casting encourages such an assumption: the part of Warner was originated by the actor Henry Harris, an engraver who had begun his career working behind the scenes but gained celebrity before the curtain later in life.Footnote 27 But in stepping forward from the scenes to begin the play, Harris became an embodied reminder to Dryden's upper-class audience members that the very figures they had learned to disregard—those servants, laborers, and stagehands relegated to traversing the behind-the-scenes spaces of both stage and city—had important knowledge to impart.
It is thus appropriate that Warner's opening soliloquy should take up the contrasts between how the privileged and the chronically precarious move through and claim space in the city—not only in its initial question (“where?”) but in a telling pun on plot:
Enter Warner solus.
Warn. Where the Devil is this Master of mine? he is ever out of the way when he should do himself good. This ’tis to serve a Coxcomb, one that has no more brains than just those I carry for him. Well! of all Fopps commend me to him for the greatest; he's so opinion'd of his own Abilities, that he is ever designing somewhat, and yet he sows his Stratagems so shallow, that every Daw can pick ’em up: from a plotting Fool the Lord deliver me.Footnote 28
Dryden departs from his source material in allowing the servant rather than the master the opening speech—a shift that transfers the audience's sympathies from Sir Martin (however foolish he may be) to his lower-class companion. The difference between the two, Dryden suggests, depends on the definition of the word plot in the final line—a word that signifies the changing definition of space in Dryden's London and that appears twenty-eight times throughout the course of the play.
To plot is, of course, a verb, meaning to plan or scheme. But as Warner's description of Sir Martin as a man who “sows his Stratagems so shallow” suggests, plot is also a noun marking space: the plot of ground one might plant with “Stratagems,” the plot of points on a map. The struggles between Sir Martin and Warner that occupy the next five acts of the play involve their divergent understandings of this word—and the divergent understandings of city space that it engenders. Sir Martin, lately arrived to London from the country, is of uncertain pedigree: J. Douglas Canfield refers to him as “an upstart parvenu,” though from the title he shares with his rival, Sir John Swallow, who declares himself the owner of “a small Estate,” we might assume he owns at least a small plot of ground.Footnote 29 He longs to increase his prospects by marriage to Mrs. Millisent, a wealthy young woman also visiting London from Canterbury and accompanied (alas) by her landowning father, Old Moody, and Sir John, the suitor Old Moody prefers to Sir Martin. Lusting after the daughter of a landowner—and as a likely landowner himself—Sir Martin thus understands plot as a noun and space as fixed, a stable property to be acquired through a suitable marriage.Footnote 30
Yet any attempt by Sir Martin to render London comprehensible—to apply to it his countrified understanding of land as stable and plot as a noun—soon prove foolhardy in the shifting urban spaces he now inhabits. Instead, he must rely on the schemes of his quick-witted and improvising servant to pursue his mistress and carve out a space to court her and marry her away from Sir Moody's and Sir John's prying eyes. Warner lacks the landed estates that his social superiors so value, as Mrs. Millisent's servant Rose underlines when she refers to him as “Mr. Littleplot” in the fourth act of the play.Footnote 31 We later learn that Warner's precariousness stems not from his birth but from “his Father's sufferings in the late times” as a royalist in the Civil War: “I have been a Master,” he announces in act V, “and besides there's an Estate of 800 l. a year, only it is mortgaged for 6000 l.”Footnote 32 In one of the most extensive recent readings of Sir Martin Mar-All, Canfield allows this last-minute revelation (and a trick that allows Warner to marry Mrs. Millisent instead of her servant) to structure his interpretation of the play as upholding an aristocratic ideology: “Thus another banished cavalier is restored to his proper place and estate. The loyalist symbolically remarries the land.”Footnote 33 But while the last few lines of the play might color a scholarly reading in which one can return to the play's opening moments with knowledge of the ending, those who watch it in performance must understand the characters as they are presented. And what Dryden's audiences saw when Harris-as-Warner delivered this opening soliloquy—and throughout the next four and a half acts—was not a once-landed royalist but a man who moves through the world like a servant, a guise that leaves him much better equipped than his landed master to navigate the shifting spaces of a growing city.
Warner, in other words, understands that plot may also be a verb, and many of the schemes that he develops throughout the play to facilitate Sir Martin's hoped-for marriage to Mrs. Millisent depend on the manipulation of city space—and of landowning visitors who assume this space to remain stable. Warner's first plot is to arrange for Mrs. Millisent to lodge in the same boardinghouse where Sir Martin stays, thereby facilitating their assignations. This plot depends on Mrs. Millisent's ability to move around the house unbeknownst to her father and Sir John Swallow, who must remain in one spot—a point Mrs. Millisent reinforces when, entering the lodging, she instructs Sir John “to stay here, that my Father may have intelligence where to find us.”Footnote 34 Unfortunately Sir Martin mars this plot by finding Sir John first and revealing himself as Sir John's rival. In act II, Warner and Mrs. Millisent attempt to send Sir John east to Gray's Inn Walks, where he expects to fight Sir Martin in a duel—while Sir Martin himself is meeting with Mrs. Millisent to the west at St. James Park. Here again the plot depends on Sir John's belief that a body will remain where Warner says it is—and on the superior abilities of a young, unmarried woman (whose gender and status prevent her from owning land) and a landless servant to navigate the spaces of London.
By act IV, Mrs. Millisent is understandably skeptical that Sir Martin has any wit at all; so Warner decides that he must convince her that her tone-deaf pursuer has musical talents. Again, his plan rests on the manipulation of space and proximity, and the assumption that, in the city, both are impossible to measure or to pin down: he will position Sir Martin beneath Mrs. Millisent's window to mouth the words to a song that Warner, hidden a little way off in the bushes, will sing.Footnote 35 Again, Sir Martin fumbles his performance; again, the plot fails; which leads Warner (here instructed by Rose) to a final attempt, in act V, to fool Old Moody and Sir John through the manipulation of space and of place names. Producing two disguises, Rose directs Warner to “dress thy Master, that he may be Anthony, old Moody's Bastard, and thou his Servant, come from the East-Indies.”Footnote 36 But this plot depends on Sir Martin's ability to remember the names of the many places where Anthony has traveled: “Come, Sir, are you perfect in your Lesson?” Warner asks his marplot master. “Anthony Moody born in Cambridge, bred in the Isle of Ely, sent into the Moguls Country at seven years old. …”Footnote 37 Sir Martin is not “perfect in [his] Lesson”; a man tied to his land, he cannot impersonate a traveler, and the place names that Warner recites to him slip immediately from his memory. Succeeding in the city, these many failed schemes suggest, means recognizing space as ever-shifting and being willing to shift with it; it means understanding plot and space as a verb—something produced in the movements of the body and the improvisations of a moment—rather than as a stable, static noun. It is a skill that the precarious of the play—the servant Rose, the unmarried Mrs. Millisent, and the dispossessed aristocrat disguised as the servant Warner—know well, and one that the landowners from Old Moody to Sir John to Sir Martin himself must learn in order to survive in the rapidly transforming city.
Spectators at the first performance of Sir Martin Mar-All at Lincoln's Inn Fields in 1667—or those at its revival in Dorset Garden four years later—would have seen evidence of these rapid transformations in the burnt shells of buildings and in the rapidly rising scaffolding lining their path to the theatre. To the Londoners in the audience, then, Sir Martin Mar-All issued a warning: learn how to navigate the city like a servant, lest you join the fools like Old Moody or Sir John, who fail to adapt to these changing ideas of space. But it also offered a solution: come to the theatre, where a troupe of actors dressed as servants and dancing around changeable scenery will teach you how to make a space for yourself on ever-shifting ground. The play, in other words, positions the theatre as a crucial tool for teaching Londoners how to adapt to their changing surroundings, how to use their bodies to make space for themselves in the city.
Dryden articulates the importance of the theatre in facilitating Londoners’ renegotiations of city space through several metatheatrical references, which he underlines by having Sir Martin contemplate an assignation with Mrs. Millisent in the very playhouse from which Dryden's audience watches.Footnote 38 Each of Warner's plots depend on the tricks of the theatre, and in particular of the changeable scenery featured in the Lincoln's Inn Fields playhouse where Sir Martin Mar-All debuted and perfected in the Dorset Garden Theatre that it opened: Warner prompts Sir Martin when he forgets his lines as Sir Anthony Moody, he and Rose improvise when Sir John discovers Warner hiding behind a door in Mrs. Millisent's lodging, and he proves his performance chops by singing the song beneath Mrs. Millisent's balcony when Sir Martin cannot. Warner's mention of an assignation in St. James Park (a common location in Restoration drama and thus a stock scene in most theatres’ scenery rooms) tempts the audience with the possibility of witnessing one of the scene changes that the Duke's Company had brought to the public stage—only to deny them that pleasure moments later, when Sir Martin derails the plot and the promised trip beyond the boardinghouse. Warner (played by former scene painter Harris) is thus the consummate player, the maker of stage space and of urban space—and one who plays a role throughout the comedy, fooling Sir Martin and others into thinking him a servant when in fact he is a gentleman (a winking reversal of the actor born little better than a servant who assumes the role of king). Sir Martin, meanwhile, is a bad actor, forgetting his lines and dropping his cues, failing to recognize or play along with the scenes his fellow actors have devised.
In each of these metatheatrical plots, the characters without land—the women and servants, with Warner at their lead—are the skilled actors, and the landed characters repeatedly spoil the show. In emphasizing the dichotomy Dryden implies an alliance between precarious city dwellers and “rogue” actors, between those who perform new spaces into being amid the shifting geographies of London and those who perform new spaces into being by shifting the sets of the Restoration stage. This alliance suggests additional meanings of plot as Warner—servant-schemer, improvising performer, liveried stagehand—understands it, and as Sir Martin with his “small Estate” must come to comprehend it. As Henry S. Turner notes, early modern players used plot to refer to the sheet of paper posted backstage that detailed the play's blocking and noted when each actor should enter and exit the stage. Plot, in other words, referred not only to a spot of ground (plot as noun) or to the schemes through which that spot of ground is transformed (plot as verb) but also to the ways that a play's actors moved through the spaces of the stage. Turner argues that the transformation of plot from a word meaning directions for the actors’ movements to one meaning the overarching narratives that structure a play mirrors a similar transformation of the playwright from humble artisan to educated artist—one armed with theories to back up his practices. Yet I think it is possible to see in the metatheatricality of Sir Martin Mar-All not a rejection but rather an echo of this earlier meaning of plot—and an acknowledgment that a play's significance depends as much on how its bodies move across the stage as it does on how well it adheres to the rules of dramatic theory, just as a city's design is as much produced by its walkers as mapped onto its buildings. It is significant, then, that Turner dates the “explicit canonization” of plot as a term for the overarching structures of a play to Dryden's Essay of Dramatick Poesie—a text that, as we shall see, often describes Dryden's theories of “dramatick poesie” in terms of the arrangements and movements of bodies and of scenery across the London stage.Footnote 39
Plotting the Dorset Garden Stage
To associate the Restoration stage with London's walkers and plotters rather than with its landowning voyeurs is to tell a somewhat different story than that favored by many theatre historians, who in their studies of changeable scenery emphasize less its changeability than its use of perspective. David Wiles links the introduction of perspective scenery on the baroque stage to Michel Foucault's discussion of the baroque city as a space that removed the spectator from their immersion in the street life to the higher ground from which they, like de Certeau's voyeur, could enjoy the unencumbered view of the privileged class. “The new baroque architecture, with its immense vistas,” Wiles writes, “turned the city street into a space that bespoke royal power … laid out in accordance with the principles of perspectival art which required that one commanding eye—that of the ruler—should have a view of the totality.”Footnote 40 Allardyce Nicoll, similarly, describes the Restoration stage as “ultramonarchist,” an art form made for a king if witnessed also by his subjects.Footnote 41 Dryden often appears in these accounts as a spokesman for an aristocratic stage that, in Canfield's words, “underwrites the … natural right of the English aristocracy—from peers to the gentry—to rule because they are superior in intelligence (wit) and natural parts.”Footnote 42 Sir Martin Mar-All, a city comedy that does not fit such narratives of Dryden's aristocratic sympathies, if not dismissed as Dryden's attempt to kowtow to popular tastes, is deleted from the narrative altogether.
Yet it is important not to overstate Dryden's aristocratic pedigree: though he relied on aristocratic patronage and spoke up often on behalf of the king's sovereignty and the old aristocratic order, he was not himself an aristocrat and often (as we shall see) made pointed reference to his lower status. Deborah Payne Fisk describes him as “the consummate ‘man of the theatre,’” one who went to great lengths “to represent himself as a working member of a company, someone who collaborates eagerly with actors, managers, musicians, even scene painters.”Footnote 43 It seems odd, moreover, that we should be unable to reconcile the practices of Dryden's best-loved play with the theories he articulated in his Essay—two works written virtually simultaneously, in 1666–7 and 1665–7.
The second half of this article broadens my discussion of representations of space in Sir Martin Mar-All to consider the context of Dryden's theories (as stated in his Essay) and the play's performance amid the changeable scenery of the Dorset Garden stage. In particular, I suggest that previous scholars’ assumption that perspective scenery assumes an inert royal spectator has been skewed by their choice of evidence. Consider theatre historian Richard Southern's description of a scene change in Aphra Behn's Sir Patient Fancy, performed in Dorset Garden Theatre in 1678: “The move made is interesting … the bedroom scene was closed over much as one might shut the door on it, by drawing a scene in front of it.”Footnote 44 The use of the passive voice suggests “the bedroom scene was closed” and the scene drawn as if by magic; it deletes the laboring bodies who drew the scenes, who operated the ropes, pulleys, and sliding flats that made this theatre so spectacular.Footnote 45 It is no surprise that theatre historians have seen the Restoration stage as assuming a royal spectator, in other words; so many of them have relied for their analysis on maps (or architectural plans) and texts (or scripts) that, as de Certeau reminds us, necessarily reproduce the royal spectator's point of view.
Yet Dryden's decision to open the play with a liveried former scene painter stepping out from the scenes to speak serves as a reminder that, for many of Dryden's spectators, the movements of scenes and of the bodies that moved them seem to have been part of the attraction. Tim Keenan has recently argued that actors even in the early Restoration theatres frequently utilized the scenic stage, challenging earlier assumptions that they performed mainly on the forestage to avoid destroying the illusion of the perspective scenery.Footnote 46 Without knowing the precise dimensions of the Dorset Garden Theatre it is difficult to reconstruct the sightlines, but it is likely that spectators seated in the front boxes or in the pit may have been able to see not only these actors but also the stagehands operating the pulleys that moved the scenes into place. At the very least spectators would have seen players moving the furniture that certain scenes called for on and off the apron.Footnote 47 “The changing of the scenes was intended to be visible,” writes Southern, contradicting the idea that maintaining the illusion of perspective scenery was paramount in spectators’ minds; “it was part of the show; it came into existence purely to be watched.”Footnote 48 Blair Hoxby confirms that “the stage was an open and permeable space” during the Restoration and cites several royal proclamations that “enjoined the audience not to interfere with the stage machinery”—clear evidence that several members of the audience were doing just that.Footnote 49 “In numerous plays—including stock comedies,” writes Keenan, “an actor's proxemic relationships with scenery, audience and other actors, the timing and use of scene changes and the sudden revelations provided by discovery scenes must have had a profound effect on an audience's perception of the plays as drama.”Footnote 50 This evidence suggests that for Restoration audiences the stage's meaning lay in shifting boundaries and in movement—of scenes, of bodies around and through those scenes—rather than in the stillness that, according to Wiles, rewarded the perspective of the royal spectator gazing down from his box.
To what extent, though, can we read these movements of actors and stagehands between the scenes as an approximation of the movements of precarious bodies through the city streets? We must be careful, as Bruce Robbins cautions, not to equate the actual experiences of London's poor with their (arguably aestheticized and anaesthetized) representation in literature.Footnote 51 Yet theatrical performance boasts one material advantage that the printed works of Robbins's study lack in the real, material bodies of actors moving through three-dimensional space. In many cases, these actors knew firsthand the precarity that they represented onstage. As Harris's livery reminds us, actors at this time enjoyed at best a tenuous claim to middle-class status: although it is true that Thomas Betterton, the most famous actor of Dryden's era, was buried next to kings in Westminster Abbey when he died in 1710, he had been born the son of an undercook to Charles II—and he and his fellow actors were constantly battling the perception of their status as ephemeral and undeserved.Footnote 52 Twenty years before Sir Martin Mar-All's debut, Cromwell's Puritan government shuttered the theatres between 1642 and 1660, but the threat of precarity loomed in more recent memory as well: in 1665, only two years before the first performance of Sir Martin Mar-All, the plague epidemic had closed all theatres, and actors endured a year of unemployment.
Even those actors who may not have experienced precarity themselves arguably carried its memory in the movements and gestures passed down to them through the theatrical repertoire. Robert Henke has written of the ways in which memories of poverty and hunger experienced by early commedia dell'arte actors came to mark the bodies, jests, and lazzi of its later practitioners: “Whether or not a given troupe or actor directly experienced or even cared about poverty, famine, destitution, or other social issues,” he explains, “by the time of the commedia's ‘golden age’ these themes had by dint of theatrical tradition and performance sedimentation become part of the actors’ repertoire.”Footnote 53 The plot of Sir Martin Mar-All, like those of so many Restoration comedies, derived from commedia; it is not inconceivable that its actors borrowed bits of stage business from the commedia as well. Like the spectacle of a man in servant's livery stepping out of the scenery and demanding to be heard, such lazzi demand that an audience attend to and derive meaning from the words of a servant and the gestures of a company of humble actors in order to find their way through the plot of the play, the shifting scenes through which it wanders, and the shifting city in which it takes place. When they do, they enter a world whose hero is an aristocrat who has learned how to imitate a servant in order to make his way through London, and whose greatest fools are landowners who, persisting in their investment in plot as a noun and space as stable, fail to learn that lesson.
Dryden makes explicit the alliances between the servants’ performances of space making in the city (plot as a verb) and the actor's performances on the stage (the plot of a play) not only in Sir Martin Mar-All's identification of Warner as both servant and actor but also in the Essay of Dramatick Poesie, written in these same years. Today literary historians read the Essay chiefly in the context of the debate it inspired between Dryden and his brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard (who appears in the character of Crites in the Essay) over the appropriateness of rhymed couplets on the stage. The spatial metaphors that pervade the Essay have garnered less attention but are crucial for understanding Dryden's defense of “dramatick poesie” as distinct from the literary texts that Sir Philip Sidney's earlier Defense of Poesy (1580) especially championed.
Dryden's Essay takes the form of a dialogue among four friends—each of them based on a figure in the Restoration theatre—who debate the merits of ancient versus modern and French versus English playwriting while fleeing, by boat, the Dutch navy's attack on London. Reminders of the city's vulnerability and instability thus lie at the edges of Dryden's text, as insistent as the cannon fire that he evokes implicitly in the Essay and explicitly in Annus Mirabilis, which linked the Dutch wars and the plague outbreak with the Great Fire that struck the city only a few months later. The fourth of the four friends, Neander, is a figure for Dryden himself, his pseudonym (new man) emphasizing his relatively recent and still somewhat lower social status in comparison to the aristocrats he accompanies, usually identified as Howard (Crites), Charles, Lord Buckhurst (Eugenius), and Sir Charles Sedley (Lisideius).Footnote 54
Dryden's lower status hardly puts him on the level of a servant or an actor, then, but the pseudonym does ask his readers to contemplate what additional knowledge a nonaristocrat might contribute to the stage. At one point, for instance, Neander defends English drama's habit of staging battle scenes as entertainment, against the more refined taste of Lisideius, who complains the practice “renders our stage too like the theatres where they fight prizes”—in other words, the bearbaiting and athletic contests associated with the lower classes.Footnote 55 At another point, Neander praises the English plays’ competing cast of characters “of a second magnitude … almost equal to the first” (59) as preferable to the French neoclassicists’ centering of a single character, with the others ranged around them merely (as Lisideius puts it) as “so many servants in a well-governed family” (46) with a clear social hierarchy. And, in his elaborated defense of English “variety” (59) a few pages on, Neander describes the plot of an English drama in imagery similar to that which de Certeau would use, many years later, to describe city space: “If then the parts [of the play] are managed so regularly” by the skilled English dramatist, Dryden argues as Neander:
that the beauty of the whole be kept entire, and that the variety become not a perplexed and confused mass of accidents, you will find it infinitely pleasing to be led in a labyrinth of design, where you see some of your way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it. (59–60)
The plot of an English play, Dryden suggests in his explicitly spatial metaphor, must not be a “confused mass of accidents.” But neither must it be so predictable or regular that the spectator might map each twisting and turning before it happens, in the manner of de Certeau's voyeur or Foucault's royal spectator, gazing down upon the space of the city or the perspectival scenes of the stage to see them ordered, mappable, inert. Rather, the best plots of plays are “labyrinth[s]” that allow the spectator to “see some of your way before you, yet discern not the end till you arrive at it,” much as de Certeau's walkers navigate the city at street level. Dryden's ideal spectator is not a distanced royal voyeur but a walker with his wits about him; his ideal plot is not a noun like Sir Martin's static bit of ground but a verb as seemingly swerving and improvised as Warner's ever-shifting schemes.
Dryden explicitly links the plot of the English play to the manipulations of space necessary to survival in a changing London a few pages earlier, when he repeats the pun on plot that also structures Sir Martin Mar-All. After defending tragicomedy against Lisideius's compliant that it destroys the unity of action so prized by French neoclassicism, Neander wonders aloud:
why Lisideius and many others should cry up the barrenness of the French plots, above the variety and copiousness of the English. Their plots are single; they carry on one design, which is pushed forward by all the actors, every scene in the play contributing and moving towards it. Our plays, besides the main design, have under-plots or by-concernments, of less considerable persons and intrigues, which are carried on with the motion of the main plot: as they say the orb of the fixed stars, and those of the planets, though they have motions of their own, are whirled about by the motion of the primum mobile, in which they are contained. (56–7)
Primum mobile here refers to Ptolemy's model of the universe, in which the stars and other planets were seen as part of an “orb” surrounding and rotating around the Earth, which itself rotates in place. But Dryden's description of the French plots as “barren” calls up the sense of plot as a spot of ground—arable or “barren”—that Warner associates with Sir Martin and his landed peers in the opening soliloquy of Sir Martin Mar-All. Like Warner, Neander/Dryden denigrates the inert plots of the French court dramas in favor of the whirling “motion” (a word repeated three times in this short passage) that he associates with the “variety and copiousness” of English performance.
The class implications of these two modes of plot making are clear from Dryden's allusion to the “less considerable persons” and “under-plots” that, through their motion, support the main plot in the English drama. French neoclassicists, by insisting upon a unity of action that favors “one design” and one character “pushed forward by all the actors,” can speak only for the “aristocracy” to which Lisideius compares their stage a few pages earlier—a social structure where “some one will be superiour to the rest, either in parts, fortune, interest, or the consideration of some glorious exploit; which will reduce the greatest part of business into his hands” (46). But Dryden—the aspiring courtier among three well-born interlocutors, the new man among old money—champions an English drama (and an English city) that, while hierarchical, nonetheless pays homage to the “under-plots” and underclasses orbiting in constant motion and around and beneath this “primum mobile” that somehow both “contains” them and whirls them about.
The metaphor aligns Dryden/Neander with Warner, another character whose familiarity with the movements of the lower classes better equips him to navigate the growing city and the varied performances one requires to move through it. At the same time, it suggests that the new city—like the new stage, and the new man who describes it—thrives on motion rather than “barrenness,” plot as a verb and as a performance rather than as a noun, a stable piece of land or a point on a map. But the metaphor is also interesting because the image it presents—of “less considerable persons” dancing in perpetual motion around a seemingly more important entity suspended at stage center—is precisely the image that greets us in the final scene of Sir Martin Mar-All.
Plotting Tactics in “the Frolick of the Altitudes”
Act V, scene ii of Dryden's comedy takes place at a masquerade that Old Moody throws to celebrate Mrs. Millisent's engagement to Sir John Swallow, but it ends with the triumph of characters who, unlike the landed Sir John and Old Moody, understand plot as a verb. Warner and Sir Martin attend the party masked, and propose a game they call “the Frolick of the Altitudes.” The name plays upon some of the same astronomical imagery as the primum mobile that Dryden's Essay also evokes: “altitudes” refers not only to the height of objects on the Earth's surface but also, in astronomy, to the measurement (in degrees) of a celestial object above the horizon. The echoes between play and Essay become clearer as one of the party guests, following Rose's instructions, calls for two very high stools to be placed at the center of the stage and explains the rules of the game: “two men at a time are hoysted up [onto the stools]; when they are above, they name their Ladies, and the rest of the Company dance about them while they drink: this they call the Frolick of the Altitudes.”Footnote 56
The first two guests “hoysted” onto the stools are the masked Sir Martin and Warner; from their high vantage point they choose Mrs. Millisent and Rose (also both masked) as their dancing partners and are helped down from the stools to enjoy their prizes. Next up are Sir John and Old Moody, the two landowners blocking Sir Martin's pursuit of Mrs. Millisent. But here, suddenly, the rules of the game change. “When they are up,” the stage directions tell us, “the Company dances about ’em: then dance off. Tony [the proprietor of Sir Martin's boardinghouse] dances a Jig.”Footnote 57 As the landowners dangle helplessly above the stage, Sir Martin, Warner, Mrs. Millisent, and Rose dance behind the scenery where (as we learn earlier in act V) a priest awaits to marry them. Meanwhile, Sir John and Old Moody realize they've been fooled: “I'le be hang'd if there be not some plot in't,” remarks Sir John to Old Moody, “and this Fool [the jigging Tony] is set here to spin out the time.” Moody agrees: “Like enough: undone! undone! my Daughter's gone, let me down, Sirrah.”Footnote 58
Sir John's use of the word plot here is telling, for it reminds us of the ways that its overlapping meanings have structured the play. Like Sir Martin in the first few acts, Sir John and Old Moody understand plot as a noun: they cling not only to the stability of the land and the attachment of bodies to that land, but also to the class hierarchies here literalized in Dryden's use of stage space. They enjoy the stillness and the height that de Certeau associates with the privileged views of the city—but this stillness and height leads only to their powerlessness at the hands of the “less considerable persons” dancing far below them, between and behind the scenes. Meanwhile these other characters, in interpreting plot as a verb, bodies as mobile, and space as malleable, possess the tools they need to navigate the city not as landowners and mapmakers but as walkers—or as dancers—feeling the way with their bodies, improvising new paths through the “labyrinth of design.” To succeed on the ever-shifting spaces of Restoration London as on the ever-shifting spaces of the Restoration stage, Dryden suggests, one must forgo the “barrenness” of an inert plot of land and the spatial logic of the landed classes and learn how to move like these dancers. It is a lesson that Warner embodies throughout the play, as an aristocrat who succeeds only by acting like a servant. It is a lesson, too, that Dryden offers his patrons, aristocrats looking to a troupe of recently itinerant actors not only for “delight” but also for “instruction.”Footnote 59 And it is a lesson that Sir Martin learns—if imperfectly—over the course of the play.
For it is Sir Martin himself who proposes the Frolick of the Altitudes—though the plot is clever enough that Warner doubts its provenance: “This is so good, it shall not be your Plot, Sir,” he tells his master, “either disown it, or I will proceed no further.” But Sir Martin insists: “I would not lose the credit of my Plot to gain my Mistress: the Plot's a good one, and I'le justifie it upon any ground of England.”Footnote 60 Sir Martin here repeats the comparison of the plot he will enact to a plot of “any ground of England” that Warner's opening soliloquy introduced. But the language of “credit” and of gambling throughout the passage shows how much has changed. Sir Martin suggests his willingness to risk a plot of ground against his “Plot to gain my Mistress,” his willingness to value his actions (plot as manipulation, “plot to gain”) over his land (plot as a noun, plot of “any ground”). Landed or not, he has learned, like Warner, to rely on his movements and his manipulations of space over the land that, in a changing London, seems no longer stable. His efforts are rewarded, appropriately, not with the land he sought at the beginning of the play but rather with an alliance to another character who, like Warner, understands how to plot: when the two couples return to the stage and remove their masks before Old Moody and Sir John, Dryden introduces a final twist in his labyrinth of design, for we discover that Mrs. Millisent has contrived to marry Warner, attracted by his wit, and has left Rose to marry Sir Martin.
Most scholars of the play have concentrated on the coupling of Warner and Mrs. Millisent at the play's conclusion, describing it, with Canfield, as a “retreat[ ] from the radical implications of Warner's rebellion” and a device by which the land is restored to the true aristocrat.Footnote 61 Yet Warner gains this proper estate only after mastering the movements of a servant, in the role he assumes throughout the play as well as in the dance he performs in its final act. In marrying the play's title character to a clever servant, Dryden offers Sir Martin the same opportunity. In place of the land that Sir Martin sought in his marriage to Mrs. Millisent, in other words, Sir Martin ends up in his marriage to Rose with something far more useful: the secrets of navigating a shifting city under the tutelage of a servant (and, by metatheatrical extension, of the actress who embodied her).
Sir Martin Mar-All thus answers the questions that Annus Mirabilis, written at the same time but in text rather than performance, poses but cannot quite elucidate: How might Londoners use the movements of their bodies—their “full Eyes” and haunted “walks”—to mark out the spaces of a modern city changing too rapidly to be captured within the static representations of a map or of a printed book? How might actors and stagehands, dancing across stages adorned with the first changeable scenery in the English public theatres, teach Londoners how to make space for themselves amid post-Fire London's ever-shifting geographies? In his most popular comedy and his most influential dramatic theory, in other words, Dryden emphasizes the significance of the Restoration stage for seventeenth-century Londoners trying to find—or to make—their way. At the same time, he provides new methodologies for scholars curious about the ephemeral movements by which precarious bodies carve out space for themselves amid a surging, shifting city—and how these movements and bodies shaped and reshaped the stage and the city it represented in ways not necessarily perceptible in its static texts, maps, and architectural plans.
Julia Fawcett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley. Her first book, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 (University of Michigan Press, 2016) was a finalist for the George Freedley Memorial Award from the Theatre Library Association. She is currently at work on her second book, Unmapping London: Performance and Urbanization after the Great Fire of 1666.
