The Spanish Setting in Restoration Comedy

Diplomarbeit , 2003 , 133 Seiten , Note: good

Anglistik - Literatur

English Restoration Comedy has long been equated with Comedy of Manners as written by Etherege, Congreve or Wycherley with a setting in London in upper class society. There are exceptions, however. Some comedies are set in the country, as for instance Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, or in foreign countries such as Italy (Dryden's Secret Love and Behn's The Rover I); some include characters from the lower classes of society, even criminals (Thomas Shadwell's The Squire of Alsatia) or fantastic creatures like witches (Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches).

For this paper the period labelled Restoration Drama has been delimited somewhat arbitrarily by the Restoration itself at the beginning, and the death of Dryden at the end of it.1 The 1660's, after the re-establishment of the theatrical companies, showed a varied mix of plays, which included performances of the traditional English comedies and tragedies by for instance Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson with his humours' comedies, and also their adaptations. A new type of drama was introduced by the Cavaliers returning from their continental exile, containing French or Spanish influences such as from Moliére, or from Spanish intrigue comedy with its highly complicated plot, among the dramatis personae often two young, high-spirited ladies, a gallant and his friend, male adverse authority in the figure of father or brother, roguish attendants, 'honour touched and honour righted ... the comedy of cloak and sword.' (Ward, Cambridge, VIII/5/§15). Van Lennep in his The London Stage (I/cxxii) described it as 'the Spanish romance, based upon a Spanish source, … its emphasis upon a rigid code of conduct, … a plot filled with intrigue, and … one or more high-spirited women in the dramatis personae.'

In this category fall Sir Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours. (January 1663, the Spanish source of it then attributed to Calderón, now generally to Antonio Coello; written at the request of Charles II, Tuke's play opened on 8 January 1663 before a full house and achieved an excellent run of thirteen consecutive performances.),2 or Lord Digby's Elvira (November 1664),3 Thomas Porter's The Carnival (ca 1664). 'The reliance upon an intrigue plot became the chief characteristic in the hands of later writers in this mode, such as Mrs Aphra Behn.'

CONTENTS

Abbreviations

1. Introduction
1.1. Historical Background
1.2. The Stereotype of the Spaniard
1.3. The Playwrights

2. John Dryden
2.1. The Rival Ladies
2.1.1. The Play Itself
2.1.2. The Spanish Setting
2.2. An Evening's Love
2.2.1. The Play Itself
2.2.2. The Spanish Setting
2.2.3. The English versus the Spanish
2.3. The Spanish Friar
2.3.1. The Play Itself
2.3.2. The Spanish Setting
2.3.3. The Issue of Religion
2.3.3.1. The Moor and the Jew
2.3.3.2. The Catholic

3. Aphra Behn
3.1. The Dutch Lover
3.1.1. The Play Itself
3.1.2. The Spanish Setting in Place and Time
3.1.2. The Spanish in Comparison
3.2. The Rover II
3.2.1. The Play Itself
3.2.2. The Spanish Setting
3.2.3. Different Nationalities and Beliefs
3.3. The False Count
3.3.1. The Play Itself
3.3.2. The Spanish Setting
3.3.3. Languages
3.3.4. Religion

4. Mary Pix and The Spanish Wives
4.1. The Play itself
4.2. Place Names Referring to the Spanish Peninsula
4.3. The Characters - Names and Physical Appearance
4.5. The Catholic Element

5. Conclusion

Appendix 1 (Aphra Behn)

Appendix 2 (Mary Pix)

Appendix 3 (Historical Overview)

Bibliography

Index

Abbreviations

The Plays

RL The Rival Ladies all from the edition by Saintsbury vol. 6/125-222

EL An Evening's Love vol. 3/255-368

SF The Spanish Friar vol. 6/393-523

R-1 The Rover I all from the edition by Todd vol. 5/445-521

R-2 The Rover II vol. 6/223-298

DL The Dutch Lover vol. 5/157-238

FC The False Count vol. 6/299-356

SW The Spanish Wives from the edition by Rogers

Works of Reference

DNB Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen et al.

VOX Diccionario Actual de la Lengua Española, ed. José Blanco Rodriguez

et al.

Col.Rob. Collins – Robert French Concise Dictionary, ed. Beryl T. Atkins et al.

LS Langenscheidt Spanisch-Deutsch, ed. Th. Schoen

1. Introduction

English Restoration Comedy has long been equated with Comedy of Manners as written by Etherege, Congreve or Wycherley with a setting in London in upper class society. There are exceptions, however. Some comedies are set in the country, as for instance Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, or in foreign countries such as Italy (Dryden's Secret Love and Behn's The Rover I); some include characters from the lower classes of society, even criminals (Thomas Shadwell's The Squire of Alsatia) or fantastic creatures like witches (Shadwell's The Lancashire Witches).

For this paper the period labelled Restoration Drama has been delimited somewhat arbitrarily by the Restoration itself at the beginning, and the death of Dryden at the end of it.^[1] The 1660's, after the re-establishment of the theatrical companies, showed a varied mix of plays, which included performances of the traditional English comedies and tragedies by for instance Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson with his humours' comedies, and also their adaptations. A new type of drama was introduced by the Cavaliers returning from their continental exile, containing French or Spanish influences such as from Moliére, or from Spanish intrigue comedy with its highly complicated plot, among the dramatis personae often two young, high-spirited ladies, a gallant and his friend, male adverse authority in the figure of father or brother, roguish attendants, 'honour touched and honour righted ... the comedy of cloak and sword.' (Ward, Cambridge, VIII/5/§15). Van Lennep in his The London Stage (I/cxxii) described it as 'the Spanish romance, based upon a Spanish source, … its emphasis upon a rigid code of conduct, … a plot filled with intrigue, and … one or more high-spirited women in the dramatis personae.'

In this category fall Sir Samuel Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours. (January 1663, the Spanish source of it then attributed to Calderón, now generally to Antonio Coello; written at the request of Charles II, Tuke's play opened on 8 January 1663 before a full house and achieved an excellent run of thirteen consecutive performances.) ,^[2] or Lord Digby's Elvira (November 1664),^[3] Thomas Porter's The Carnival (ca 1664). 'The reliance upon an intrigue plot became the chief characteristic in the hands of later writers in this mode, such as Mrs Aphra Behn.' (van Lennep, cxxii) Spanish elements can of course be found in a number of other plays, for instance openly ridiculed as in The Gentleman Dancing Master by William Wycherley, as intrigue elements or the 'Spanish voice' (Altaba-Artal, Feminism, 15) in intrigue comedies by Aphra Behn, not to forget the exotic and heroic tragedies of the Restoration.

Prose fiction written in Romance languages, especially French, also had a profound influence in both theory and practice, often serving as a source for plots and whole scenes. 'Romantic elements are lessened, the old clowns and buffoons are discarded, certain elements of stage intrigue are standardised.' (Thorndike, 274)

Dryden himself discussed the subject of borrowing from French and Spanish drama in the preface to An Evening’s Love (EL, pref., 250), ‘... wherever I have liked any story ... I have made no difficulty ... to make it proper for the English stage ... to heighten it for our theatre.’ He considered English drama to be far above the others, so ’incomparable more curious in all the ornaments of dramatic poesy than the French or Spanish.’

In this paper I will be looking at seven comedies actually set on the Spanish Peninsula - three plays by John Dryden (The Rival Ladies of 1664, An Evening's Love of 1668 and The Spanish Friar of 1680/81), three by Aphra Ben, (The Dutch Lover of 1673, The Rover II of January 1681 and The False Count of November 1681), and The Spanish Wives by Mary Pix of 1696. I decided not to include straightforward adaptations or translations such as The Adventures of Five Hours by Sir Samuel Tuke set in Seville or Lord Digby's Elvira from Valencia.

In analysing these seven comedies in respect to their setting on the Spanish mainland I decided to concentrate on the following issues to see whether they were relevant for the author's decision to choose this particular setting and to investigate whether their common setting also caused common features in the plays.

Since the relationship between England and the Catholic absolute monarchy of Spain had always been ambiguous, ranging from outright hatred during times of military conflict to calculated friendship during the exile of Charles II in Spain, the historical time and events of the writing and/or productions of the play, and the related time and place of the comedies and their correlation to historical veracity seemed interesting starting points.

Closely related to the issue of place in the comedies is the problem of how the Spanish setting is presented in language, for instance how places are described, whether and how frequently and how correctly the author employs non-English expressions, or whether their use is limited to Spanish characters. Most of the comedies dealt with in this paper present not only Spanish personas on the stage, but also deal with English and other nationalities, sometimes contrasting them with each other. In some of the plays religion is an issue, especially the hated Catholic belief, maybe a reason for the author to set his play in a Catholic country.

Proceeding more or less chronologically, I shall first be looking at the plays by Dryden, then at the three comedies by Aphra Behn and last at the short three act farce by Pix, and explore them according to the issues mentioned above. This will be preceded by a short discussion of some selected items of the relationship between England and Spain, of the situation of Catholicism in England in the seventeenth century, and of a short overview of the lives of the three authors. Some selected items from the historic relationship between England and Spain, from the relationship to the Catholic religion in England and from the lives of the three poets will complement the introduction.

1.1. Historical Background

One of the reasons for the long-standing hatred between England on the one hand and the great Catholic and absolutist powers of Europe could have been the fact that whenever military conquest was threatened to English territory, this threat came from Spain or France. England had won the upper hand for some time with the victory over the Armada in 1588, but the danger began to raise its head once more when Charles I intended to marry a Catholic princess, bringing the Popish threat right into the centre of the country. The relationship with the Catholic powers of Europe was an ambiguous one: on the one hand there was this hatred and distrust, on the other hand it was at the English court where '[i]n Charles I's reign the English ruling class still aped Italian, Spanish, and French fashions and ideas.' (Hill, Consequences, 81)

The Catholic queen Henrietta, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici, may have been influential in inducing Charles I to indulge in a war with Spain which, however, ended in disaster - the French pulled out, faced with the Huguenot problem in their own country, and an expedition against Cadiz^[4] 'ended in disaster.' (Bowle,315) During the time when the court was established at Oxford after 1642, she caused unrest among the Cavalier faction by turning the Protestants among them against her and her entourage. Since the last persecution by a Stuart king proscribing legal penalties and fines on Catholics had occurred more than 25 years ago, the rich English Catholic community was also willing to support Charles I. The Earl of Worcester, for instance, reputedly one of the wealthiest men in England, gave his annual rental of £24,000 to the King.^[5]

Cromwell decided in 1654 to use the great fleet, which had brought Holland to its knees, to attack the Spanish Indies, this costing only a little more than laying them off and promising great profit. They were driven away from Hispaniola, but managed to conquer Jamaica, then only thinly populated by Spaniards. Spain, enraged, declared war on England, and Cromwell had to resort to an alliance with France, the arch-enemy of Spain, in spite of its Catholic and absolute monarch. In addition to that a British fleet was successfully established in the Mediterranean to 'terrify the Catholic powers on the French, Spanish, and Italian coasts.' (Trevelyan, 309) Barcelona, under French rule since the Catalan uprising of 1640, was recaptured by the Spanish in 1652.

The Spanish War that followed was powered by a hatred of all things Catholic, as for instance the sinking of galleons named after saints. The Spanish fleet was destroyed in Santa Cruz on Tenerife in the Atlantic in 1657. The success of this war was, though, not so much to be measured in religious terms, but in establishing the basis of a commercial, professional navy.

During the Protectorate many of the younger members of the cavaliers spent their youth among the nobility of France and Spain, as for instance William Wycherley, and of course Charles Stuart himself, 'half a Frenchman by birth, sympathy, and training.' (Trevelyan, 352)^[6] He was helped on his flight from England by Roman Catholic subjects. Like most of aristocratic Europe he saw an absolute Catholic and despotic monarchy as the ideal state form, the model being France, Spain, Austria, and Italy.

Under Cromwell the Catholics were not persecuted, unless they had joined the Cavalier side, although they were not allowed to publicly exercise their religion. After the Restoration the religious situation in England was not resolved by far. In the Declaration of Breda Charles II had promised as part of the conditions of his return, among other things, that 'no man was to be disquieted or called in question for differences of opinion in matter of religion, and the king would be ready to consent to such act of parliament as should be offered to him for the full granting of that indulgence.' (Clark, Later Stuarts, 3) Although during the following years, Catholics were removed from all positions of power by various acts of parliament, the suspicions concerning Charles II were no yet allayed - 'in so far as he had any religion, a crypto-Catholic.' (Bowle, 341-42)^[7]

The number of Catholic priests in England during the period of 1660 to 1700 is 'hard to fix.' (Clark, Later Stuarts, 27) A number of about a hundred, without Cornwall, is known for 1692. According to the records of the Jesuits themselves about 150 Jesuits lived in England in 1660, a number that fell below 100 for some years during the Popish Plot. But a number of English houses, colleges and nunneries on the continent stayed in contact with England during that period, providing education and helping to keep the religion alive. So was the English convent in Bruges 'associated with Charles II in his years of exile,' (Todd, Secret Life, 90) when he visited there.

The French king played a great part in the marriage negotiations between Charles II and Catherine of Braganza, the daughter of the queen-regent of Portugal, at war with Spain since 1640, in the hope that the English allies would then assist him against Spain. Charles's Catholic Portuguese queen, straight from a nunnery, could hardly speak English, was isolated among her Portuguese attendants at the English court, and was held up to ridicule by her husband, who forced her, for instance, to employ his mistresses as her ladies-in-waiting. Her extreme devotion to the Catholic faith caused her to be accused by Whig extremists to poison her husband.^[8] Louis XIV, himself the son of a Spanish princess, thereby a grandson of Philip III, in his turn married a daughter of Philip IV of Spain, Marie Thérèse, with the prospect of a union of the two realms in the future.

A new outbreak of the Plague in 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666 unsettled the public mind. They were regarded as an act of vengeance of God, but also as the work of Papists, the 'power secreted behind the English throne.' (Trevelyan, 346) Public opinion seemed to sense something there. It only became known after his death that CharlesII did indeed carry through negotiations both with the Pope and the Catholic absolute monarch Louis XIV between 1662 and 1672. These negotiations culminated in the secret Treaty of Dover in 1670 with the division of Holland between France and England and Charles's offer to convert to Catholicism in exchange for money and soldiers to enable him to declare his conversion in England.

Charles's secret dealings may have been aided by his sister Henrietta, a devout Catholic, Duchess of Orleans and the wife of Louis' XIV only brother. The secret Treaty of Dover, signed also by the Catholic ministers of the inner circle of Charles's government, was covered up in 1671 by an 'official' Treaty of Dover, which more or less contained the same conditions, but without any mention of Catholicism, and which was opposed by the Catholic ministers in order to induce the non-Catholic ones to sign it.

In the Third Dutch War of 1672, when France and England jointly attacked Protestant Holland, the strong Catholic alliance of the Austria and Spain came to the assistance of William of Orange and induced peace between England and its Dutch enemy.

The Catholics in England in the meantime were the target of much jealousy, especially after Charles fulfilled his promise given before the Restoration, in the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672, and allowed Roman Catholics to exercise their worship in private houses. The dislike of Catholics by the people culminated in the Test Act of 1673, which virtually excluded them from holding civil or military office and thus removed the Catholic ministers from the government and the Duke of York, Charles's Catholic brother, from his post at the head of the fleet. The Test Act was forced on Charles II in exchange for much needed funds for the impending wars. From about this time for many years to come it was one of the constant factors in English history that a

solid body of Englishmen, who disagreed about many other things, were agreed in fearing three things which they believed to be closely allied - popery, France, and arbitrary power ... They saw clearly an advance of popery in high places in England. The Duchess of York, Clarendon's own daughter, had lately died a convert ... Of the ministers ... Arlington had joined [the papists] (Clark, Later Stuarts, 79-80)

On April 24th 1678, the Jesuits held their regular Congregation in rooms in the royal St.James's Palace, and in the autumn of the same year Titus Oates^[9] came out into the open with the so-called Popish Plot. He alleged that during his residence at Jesuit Colleges in Valladolid in Spain (1677) and St. Omers in the Low Countries (1678) - in 1677 he, originally an Anglican clergyman, had converted to the Catholic faith - he had learned that this Jesuit Congregation of 1678 had met in order to plan burning down the city, raising French and Irish soldiers, and murdering the King.

So unreal his allegations may seem to us now, in the times of Charles II, however, they did not seem absurd to a generation that still had in memory the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, the Irish massacre of 1641, and the beheading of a King in 1649 - a generation whose city had been destroyed by a fire attributed to Catholic conspirators and whose own King had plotted to convert the nation to Catholicism by the aid of French arms, although this fact was not known by then. The same century would yet have to witness the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which deprived France of more than a quarter of a million of its Protestant citizens.

The unrest escalated when the magistrate with whom Oates had first lodged his declaration was found dead, maybe murdered. The ensuing panic was prolonged by Whig supporters who felt they had the upper hand in times of terror. More by chance secret correspondence from 1675 was discovered between the secretary of the Duchess of York, the Papal nuncio and the French King's confessor, strangely confirming Oates' allegations of a plot, but a plot of a different sort which would 'enable Charles to govern without Parliament, and hand over to James the chief influence in the State.' (Trevelyan, 372). The secretary confessed that the Duke of York knew of this plan. As a result of this detection, the powerful Whigs wanted to exclude James from the succession, leading to the Exclusion Crisis, but could not quite settle on a successor to Charles. They did not want James's daughter Mary by his Protestant first wife and her Dutch husband William of Orange to rule England, not quite sure of their favours. Charles signed the death warrants of the alleged conspirators in the Popish Plot, but refused to exclude his brother from the succession.

Pope-burning pageants were led through the streets of London, not only including effigies of the Pope, but also of Jesuits and of the Queen's physician with a bottle of poison in his hand.^[10] Such was the aversion against Catholics and especially against Jesuits that their evidence was disregarded in court. It was believed that they upheld the 'casuistic doctrine that it was pardonable to lie in the interest of the Church.' (Trevelyan, 382) Clark says of the later Caroline divines of the time of Charles II in his The Later Stuarts (32) that

[t]heir interminable arguments against the papal supremacy are now unreadable, though they seemed very important then, with popery spreading on the Continent, and they made the papacy as dreadful to educated opinions as The Pilgrim's Progress and Fox's Book of Martyrs made it to the unintellectual reader.'

The Whigs were strong enough to be able to form the first Whig parliament in 1679, but it was dissolved by Charles a few months later, before the Exclusion Bill could be passed. The King compelled James to go into exile, in order not to further incite the people, and played for time by making concessions to the Whig Lords, such as the Habeas Corpus Act of May 1679. The Catholic mistress of Charles II, Louise de Keroualle (or Querouaille), Duchess of Portsmouth, full of fear for her life joined the Whig side. '[I]n return for a sum of money and the abandonment of all proceedings against her, she would win over Charles to accept Exclusion and any successor' (Trevelyan, 396) that the Whigs would name.

After Charles had again been promised money by Louis XIV, he dissolved the unsuspecting Third Whig Parliament at Oxford in 1681. Without a parliament, the 'ministers had complete executive freedom' (Trevelyan, 402) and used this to put Royalist Anglicans into the magistracy and militia of every shire. They enforced the pro-Anglican Clarendon Code 'with the utmost cruelty and rigour.' (Trevelyan, 403)

In 1683 a series of plots was discovered, culminating in The Rye House Plot planning the assassination of the King, which only failed because an accident prevented the King's journey. This led to a further strengthening of the Tories, especially after the Whig leader Shaftesbury had died in exile in Holland and more Whigs were executed.

From then until his death in 1685, Charles II ruled as a despotic king without a parliament. He was afraid that the Whigs would gain power if elections were called, and he relied on the money he had received from France. He had his brother James restored to the court in defiance of the Test Act. Charles II died in February 1685, a Catholic after receiving the last rites.

The powers James II was endowed with when he succeeded to the throne were probably due to misunderstandings between him on the one side and parliament on the other: as Duke of York he had never worshipped in public, and it was not yet known that Jesuit congregations had taken place under his roof, so it was assumed he would also in future 'treat his creed as a private matter.' (Trevelyan, 411) James, on the other hand, must have seen the High Churchmen as 'half Catholics' (Trevelyan, 411), who would let themselves be assimilated to Rome as planned in the Treaty of Dover. Therefore, his accession led to yet more cruel punishments of Protestant Nonconformists. He called in Parliament in May 1685 in the hope to 'relieve the Catholics from the Penal Laws,' (Trevelyan, 413) but his hopes were thwarted by the rising of the peasants of Somerset and their proclamation of the Duke of Monmouth, a supposed bastard son of Charles II, to King. This uprising was cruelly punished in The Bloody Assize of September 1685 under Judge Jeffreys. Monmouth was executed in July of that year.

His success led James to believe that he could romanize England since it had allowed him to call up an army. A host of between 13,000^[11] and 16,000 men^[12] was gathered near London, at Hounslow Heath, and James sent Catholic priests in among them to try to convert them. The hatred of all things Papist, however, was stronger in them than their willingness to fight against the religion of England, Anglicanism. The removal of Monmouth also led to the acknowledgement of Mary, James's daughter by his first Protestant wife Anne Hyde, the daughter of the Earl of Clarendon^[13], and her husband William of Orange by all Protestants of England, since the Whig factions no longer had their first choice, Monmouth, Charles's son.

James dissolved Parliament when it did not fulfil his wishes to legalise the Catholic officers commanding his large standing army. A Jesuit school was established within the precincts of the Savoy Hospital; friaries of the Franciscans, Dominicans, and Benedictines in London, and a papal nuncio was officially received at court. The Tory ministers were replaced by Catholics, among them Father Petre, a Jesuit priest, and Anglican bishops by Catholic ones appointed by the King. It is a strange co-incidence that it was now a Catholic King that used the powers originally established by the Tudors in order to remove Papal supremacy.

Since he could not repeal the Test Act, James used his Royal prerogative to declare its provisions invalid and to fill posts with Catholics. A great many of the Catholic gentry, however, were not willing to be used for this 'folly of the Jesuits' (Trevelyan, 418), and a Catholic middle class did not exit. Therefore, James also tried to enlist Nonconformists for his cause, just as did the Anglican Church, both offering them toleration of their belief.

When James converted two Oxford colleges, one of them Magdalen, property of the Church, into Popish seminaries, the landed gentry and the priests both turned against this attack on freehold property. The First Declaration of Indulgence of April 1687 gave freedom of worship to Dissenters and Catholics and 'suspended all laws which debarred them from civil and military office.' (Trevelyan, 420) With it began a period of religious toleration in England, which has lasted until the present times. The Second Declaration of Indulgence of April 1688 had an entirely different effect, boasting as it did of the 'appointment of Catholics to civil and military command.' (Trevelyan, 420)

The birth of a son to James by his second wife, Catholic Mary d'Este, the sister of the Duke of Modena, accelerated the resistance of the English to his Romanization process. The Huguenots, who managed to escape the cruel retributions by the Catholic Church in France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and reached England, furthermore enforced the negative picture of the Popish threat in the mind of the English. In the last weeks of James's reign, the Jesuit Father Petre acted as the main advisor in the government.

William and Mary were assisted, although Protestants, by the Catholic powers of Spain and Austria, because these powers were in conflict with France. Even the Pope Innocent XI

'urged all faithful Catholics to aid the heretics and the Holy See against their common enemies, the French Jesuits and the Gallican Church. For the temporal, and to some extent the spiritual, authority of the Bishop of Rome has always depended on the balance of power in Europe and in Italy. (Trevelyan, 424).^[14]

In 1687 William declared publicly that he was in favour of freedom of worship, but would also uphold the Test Act. After William's landing at Torbay on November 5th, 1688, James refused to call in a free Parliament and alienated his last friends. The Catholic Irish troops, the only army he could still rely on, were too few to affect anything. James fled to France, thereby renewing the threat of a Catholic invasion trying to restore him to the throne.

The danger of civil war, caused by distrust against anybody, by mobs ransacking Catholic chapels and properties, by the disbanded army, by the Irish Catholics and the rumours of terror spreading around them, led the Tories and the Whigs to work together for once and call in a Convention that would offer the crown to William and Mary. The Toleration Act of 1689 allowed Nonconformists to practice their religion, but excluded Catholics from public worship, although they were saved from persecution.

In the War of the League of Augsburg (1688 - 1697) England fought on the side of Holland, Spain, Austria, Savoy, and Germany against France, mainly in defence of the Spanish Netherlands. During these years James, with the assistance of France, twice tried to invade England and also plotted to assassinate the King. In addition to the army on land, William revived the fleet in the Mediterranean, a policy that Charles II had neglected, most likely for want of money and under the influence of France fearing for its own safety.

After the peace treaty of Ryswick in September 1697, which Louis conceded quickly in view of the impending death of Charles II of Spain, where he wanted to assert the claim of the House of Bourbon on some lands of the Spanish territories, William and Louis met twice to form a secret agreement for the partition of the Spanish power. The great Spanish Empire, however, which had been 'the terror, and almost the ruin, of those who now fought over its division' (Trevelyan, 445) finally went to the grandson of Louis XIV, who once more proved right the dislike of the English people when he broke the secret treaties with William. After the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) England, however, recognized the Bourbon King of Spain under the condition that France and Spain must never be united under one monarch.

1.2. The Stereotype of the Spaniard

The historical background delineated in the previous chapter could be seen as the trigger for the quite frequent appearance of the negative Spanish characters in English drama of the seventeenth century. This, however, would render the explanation for this phenomenon rather too simplistic.

Stanzel^[15] defines national stereotype as a widely imagined fictional construction devoid of reality, which may be exploited by literary interpretation as well as ethnological, psychological, and politic-historical interpretation.^[16] The details for this fictional construction can be attributed to a gigantic literature 'props room'^[17]. From these 'props', the appropriate ones were then taken and built up in a political conflict situation to an image of the enemy, rather than the other way round.

It is argued for instance that certain national stereotypes were being mapped onto the traditional catalogue of the seven deadly sins at the end of the Middle Ages, this interpretation gaining momentum in the sixteenth century. The catalogue of the seven deadly sins or vices (both terms have been used indifferently) can be encountered in Western European literature from the thirteenth century onwards, combining Christian concepts with Roman and Greek moralist ideas (Plato's four virtues and the three Christian virtues of faith, hope and charity, set in opposition to the seven sins).^[18] Pride is considered the main vice, the sin of Lucifer, of Satan himself, as for instance in Spenser's Fairie Queen, where the queen Lucifera reigns with the help of six ministers, representing the remaining six deadly sins. In Daniel Defoe's The True-Born Englishman (82) of 1703 this "superbia" is clearly associated with Spain.

Pride, the first Peer, and President of Hell,

to his share Spain, the largest Province fell ...

As late as 1905 a literary critic tries to describe Spain's downfall based on

the pride of special selection and distinction by fidelity to an exalted mystic ideal, religious or amorous. (Hume M., 115) ... the exalted spiritual pride, that had been for a century the nation's strength, and was ... to be the nation's ruin. (ibid., 150)

This association of pride with Spain is however, not limited to England. Stanzel (Europäer, 20) quotes from a seventeenth century French source:^[19]

Die Spanier anmaßend, Fremden gegenüber unfreundlich, kluge Politiker, Strapazen ertragend und Hitze und Kälte gegenüber unempfindlich, sie sind ehrgeizig, herablassend, übertrieben ernsthaft und voll blinder Leidenschaft für den Ruhm ihrer Nation, sie machen sich leicht lächerlich in Liebesdingen, Haß kann sie rasend machen.

This image of the arrogant and proud Spanish nobleman is also found on a so-called Völkertafel with a description of the European nations and their character traits.^[20]

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Völkertafel, anon. oil painting, Styria 1720 - 30,

Österr. Museum für Volkskunde, Wien (from Habersack, 1)

The idea that the character of a nation could be described and assessed in the same manner as the character of a single person was a trend, running concurrently with the concept of climate theory. In this theory it was argued that people in warmer climates were less productive, amassed lesser riches, worked less, were more sensual and passionate ("luxuria - sensuality" was in this context usually associated with southern nations) than people in temperate and colder climates. For the European tradition this was based on ancient Greek thinking, such as Hippokrates, and later discussed again during the Enlightenment, for instance by Montesquieu and Herder.^[21]

This basis in Western European imagery aids the author in building up a common basis of communication with his readers or the audience by employing national stereotypes. Especially for quick-witted comedy, this may be considered an advantage - there is no time to construct a new atmosphere, a new view of the situation. The author may instead resort to stereotypes, as for instance the proud Spaniard with his religious ideals, and the audience will instantly grasp the situation, since it will be familiar with the idea, the posture, and the attire of the character on stage.^[22] Stereotypes may also be applied in situations where it is not possible or not wished for to acquire additional information or to question the established ideas - then the above mentioned 'props room' is turned to.^[23]

Another function of this employment of national stereotype may be the establishment of a contrast to the audience's own nation, using the image of the foreigner as a transparency. This comparison helps to establish and delineate one's own nationality and its qualities when overlaid with the foil of the stereotype.^[24]

So far, the functions of national stereotype in literature can be regarded as mostly positive, or at least not harmful to a great extent. If they are, however, employed in propaganda with the aim of leading the audience into a feeling of superiority over the depicted foreigner, it can lead to very successful manipulation of public opinion. The Puritans in the first half of the seventeenth century took advantage of the negative image of the Spaniard, denouncing his blood lust, cruelty, and treachery.^[25] These traditional burdens must be recognised and called by name in order to let go off them and surmount them, since they are not based on fact, but rooted in images. They are pure fiction, transfers of old patterns.^[26]

1.3. The Playwrights

''Tis well an old age is out:/And time to begin a new' (Dryden, Works, VIII, 498) may well be considered a fitting epilogue to John Dryden's life - the last lines of his The Secular Masque, performed as part of Vanbrugh's The Pilgrim some days after his death. Dryden's death on May 1st 1700 marks the end of a century and, in the minds of many literary critics, also the end of the period of Restoration literature.

John Dryden's excellent education^[27] at Westminster School and later Trinity College, Cambridge, was marked by a thorough knowledge of the classics, probably also of French and maybe Italian.^[28] His marriage to Elizabeth Howard connected him to some of the best families in England, as for instance to the Earls of Orrery^[29] and of Surrey and Suffolk. He was elected one of the Original Fellows of the Royal Society, which prided itself on accepting members of all denominations, among the Catholics two cousins of Dryden's wife and Samuel Tuke, the author of The Adventures of Five Hours.

Shortly after the death of Charles II, Dryden converted to Catholicism, a move often interpreted as a sign of opportunism. But his scepticism concerning the church of his youth, the Anglican church, can already be felt in Religio Laici of 1683, bemoaning a lack of authority to help the troubled believer on his way when scripture failed to be of assistance or when it had been interpreted or translated wrongly. At that time he had also been a close friend of William Wycherley, who converted back to Catholicism in 1687.^[30]

The example of the father seems to have influenced Dryden's sons - all three became Roman Catholics, one even attending the English College at Rome. It may also have been due to the encouragement of their mother, although it is not known for sure whether she was a Catholic.^[31] Her relative, however, Cardinal Philip Howard, a member of the Dominican order, later looked after her youngest son in Rome, where he was studying. Their two older sons later also went to Rome, where John died in 1701 (Ward, Life, 248) or 1703 (ibid., 319). Dryden's older brother-in-law, Viscount Andover and later Earl of Berkshire, was a devoted Catholic, who 'made no effort to conceal his religion,' (Winn, 122) who had at some time exchanged letters with Father Coleman, the confessor of the Duchess of York (convicted and executed during the Popish Plot), and who had to flee to the Continent in 1678.

Information concerning Dryden's connections to Spain and Spanish language and Romance culture is scarce, but can be found nevertheless. His own puritanical family does not show any such links. The aristocratic family of Dryden's wife, however, the Howards, could not escape continental influences. When Charles I went to Spain to court the daughter of the Spanish King in 1632, Thomas Howard, the Earl of Berkshire, Elizabeth's father, was among the courtiers.^[32] Sir Samuel Tuke composed his The Adventures of Five Hours from a Spanish source, the text of which was given to him by the King 'on a visit to Henry Howard of Norfolk, cousin to ... Lady Elizabeth.' (Winn, 566, n.56) Sir Robert Howard, her brother, had an anti-Spanish play, The Great Favourite; or The Duke of Lerma, performed in 1668. Another member of the Howard Family, the Earl of Sandwich, was sent to Spain as ambassador in 1666, returning in 1668 with a treaty between the English and the Spanish.^[33]

In critical literature about the Restoration period several references can be found that courtiers, among them the Earl of Orrery, were translating French plays, for example Corneille's Pompey.^[34] Winn (141) also argues that Dryden 'knew Spanish', but does not give details where exactly he took his claim from. In the dedication to his The Rival Ladies Dryden himself says, defending his writing in verse, ' All the Spanish and Italian tragedies, I have yet seen, are writ in rhyme.' (RL, 135) It can, however, not be inferred from this remark whether he read them in the original or in English or French translations. Allen (Sources, 6, n.22) mentions a letter by Dryden in which the poet complained 'that his cousin talked to him all day long in French and Italian to show his breeding,' a fact that in Allen's view indicates the possibility that Dryden understood Italian, but that 'it seems quite possible that he was unable to translate Spanish well enough to use Spanish sources.'

In Langbaine (Poets, 154-166), a great number of Spanish and French romances is listed as sources for Dryden's plays, which indicates a familiarity with that type of literature among the readership Langbaine expects for his book, and also among the writers and the audience of the Restoration stage. As early as 1691, Langbaine (Account, 131) says about Dryden's plays that '... for Comedy, he is for the most part beholding to French Romances and Plays, not only for his Plots, but even a great part of his Language.'^[35]

Dryden's life has been thoroughly documented and researched, as Poet Laureate, pre-eminent poet, playwright and essayist of his times. One of the reasons for us not having much certainty about the origins and the private life of Aphra Behn, as she is called on her epitaph in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey,^[36] can be found in the fact that women were 'excluded from most institutions that keep records.' (Todd, Secret Life, 1) Her not being of aristocratic origin reduced the chances we now have of finding biographical evidence even further. Not even her date of birth or her parentage is documented for sure. There are, however, three contemporary references, setting her date of birth around 1640 and giving a Mr Johnson, a barber from Canterbury, as her father. We only know for certain that at some point after 1664 she became known in England as Mrs Behn. She was sent on a spying mission to the Netherlands and returned to London, deeply in debt, in 1666, and is only heard of again when she appeared as the author of The Forc'd Marriage, a tragicomedy, in 1670.

Behn was reasonably educated, as can be deduced from her works and references in them, she especially must have been accomplished in foreign languages, probably already from an early age. The question arises whether this could have been possible for a barber's daughter from Kent. Barbers' shops at that time were not only places where men went to have a shave, they were places for social gatherings and renowned for their music. Canterbury itself, a busy Cathedral town on the direct road between London and the Continent, was busy with Huguenot refugees, and there was a large Dutch colony at nearby Sandwich,^[37] giving her the opportunity to hear French, Dutch, and Spanish spoken.

A great number of works from French literature appeared in England after the end of the Commonwealth, for instance the large historical romances by La Calprenède^[38] were published in the 1660s. Behn probably listened to all rushing at her with great interest, 'for many of her later allusions to the great heroes of romance are spelt phonetically, as if from something heard, not read, long ago as a girl.' (Todd, Secret Life, 21) She might have spent some time in her youth copying poems, pamphlets and newsletters, which were much in demand then, since her handwriting is fluent and clear.^[39]

Before Bartholomew Johnson, one of the historical persons often held to have been her father, moved to Canterbury, she grew up as 'foster sister' to the orphaned Sir Thomas Culpeper, a gentleman, where she might well have already shown some promise of her talent and intelligence. Todd (Secret Life, 25-27) assumes her to have had contact with the families of the Sidneys and the Howards. In this situation she may have acquired her learning and a knowledge of foreign languages, especially French. She spoke this language sufficiently well to produce 'English versions of the popular scientific works of Fontenelle and the maxims of La Rochefoucauld' (Todd, Works, I/xx) in the 1680s, including a preface on 'the theory and practice of translation ...not notably inferior to Dryden.' (Day, 63) Her early contacts to well-born people, some of them Catholics,^[40] could also have served her later when she was travelling on the continent or when she was trying to interest the fashionable London society in her literary works, especially her plays.

It seems likely for two reasons that she had already travelled on the Continent and maybe moved in Royalist and secret circles before the Restoration. She was entrusted with a 'dangerous mission in the Low Countries at the height of war with Holland,' (Todd, Secret Life, 31) which would not have been the case had she been an untried newcomer to the spying game. There is further evidence in her plays: in The Dutch Lover, for instance, she refers to a change of governor in Flanders in 1659,^[41] a fact probably not widely known in a time without newspapers and mass media.

During her childhood, her time in Middle America (if she was really there), and during her stays in the Netherlands she must have picked up Spanish, of which there is plenty of evidence in her plays, most of it correct. It must be noted, however, that, as in her French (see above), she sometimes spelt words as she must have heard them: ' Anglese' (R-1, 455), ' Sivil' (FC, 306) compared to Dryden's 'Seville' (RL, 143), 'Dossety' (FC, 318), 'Jesemine' (FC, 338), her "seignior/seigniour/signior"^[42] compared to Dryden's 'senor' (EL, 304),^[43] ' Counte D'Oliveris ' (DL, 171) vs. ' Conte De Olivaris. ' (ibid., 231)^[44]

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Behn's writings were often seen as smutty and unwomanly. Instead of raising the base instincts of man to the high ideals of woman's nature, she was accused of dropping down to his coarseness. By the feminists of the twentieth century the fact that Aphra Behn wrote and published her writings and was successful with it, weighed more than her artistic achievements, since she did not conform to the notion of 'a suffering soul working against patriarchal oppression.' (Todd, Secret Life, 3)

The Dictionary of National Biography states under the entry of Mary Pix, the third of the authors of this papers, that her style 'confirms the statement of her contemporaries that though she had an 'inclination to poetry' ... she was without learning of any sort.' Looking at The Spanish Wives, there is a lack of references to classical learning and, compared to the comedies by Behn, a surprising lack of expressions in Spanish or in other languages. Clark (Women) in her chapter about Mary Pix shows that she must have known some French and some history, have read the Decameron, Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher - for the time she was a relatively learned woman.

Mary Griffith Pix^[45] was born in 1666 as the daughter of a vicar in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire. At the age of eighteen she married George Pix, a London merchant tailor, only six years older than she, and was soon pregnant with the only child we know of, who died young in 1690. There may have been surviving children, since a 'benefit performance for the bereaved family' (Kendall, 31) took place when she died in 1709. We only have indirect information of her death, which at the same time may be interpreted as an indication of her by then diminishing fame.

Pix is positioned at the turn of the century with its change in attitudes on the stage, her comedies showing 'the changing temper of the times in that there is less emphasis upon cuckoldry and more on virtuous love.' (Pearse,22) The Dictionary of National Biography seems to agree, stating that 'her comedies, though coarse, are far more decent than those of Mrs. Behn, and her comic bustle is sometimes entertaining.' (DNB, s.v. Pix, Mary)

By some critics she is seen as writing plays that contain 'significant feminist views' (Fowler, 49) and 'carefully controlled feminist agendas ... having her characters settle for a little oppression over total oppression, herself accepting a certain amount of constraint in order to meet accepted dramatic conventions, thereby assuring the success of her play' (ibid., 58), seeing herself and her female colleagues as 'politically aware of themselves as women with an alternative vision to offer theatregoers' (Kendall, 9), a view that cannot be wholeheartedly agreed with by merely looking at The Spanish Wives.

There the women seem to be happily living the status quo of their society, the fanciful governor's wife for instance accepting her lot as a married woman and settling for a little flirting instead of an affair, or Elenora patiently waiting to be rescued without taking initiative, quite in contrast to the traditional heroines of cloak and dagger comedy. Pearson (169) confirms that her 'plays rarely complain about women's lot and tend to repeat and endorse stereotypes of female behaviour.' Pix includes ideas rejected by the more aggressive Trotter and Manley in her plays, 'the man's eye view, the sexual double standard, the misogynist tags, the dubiousness about women's friendships, the notion that women should be passive and men active.' (ibid., 180)

2. John Dryden

2.1. The Rival Ladies

2.1.1. The Play Itself

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Two groups of noble, high class characters are the main protagonists in this tragicomedy - Don Rodorigo, his sister Angelina, and their brother Don Gonsalvo (cast into the port of Alicante by a storm), on the one hand, and Don Manuel and his two sisters Julia and Honoria on the other hand. Don Manuel and Don Rodorigo had promised to marry each other's sister to end a long quarrel. Julia actually is in love with Rodorigo, Angelina, however, has fallen in love with Gonsalvo, whom she had met when secretly escaping her brother's intrigue, dressed as a boy.

Another noble girl dressed as a boy, Honoria, with whom Gonsalvo had a short affair in Barcelona without knowing her real name and who followed him to Alicante, has joined Angelina as page in the service of Gonsalvo. Gonsalvo himself, however, is deeply infatuated with Julia, whom he saved from robbers in the woods outside of Alicante. Rodorigo and Gonsalvo do not recognise each other, since some years ago Rodorigo had left Seville, their hometown, and changed his name.

Among numerous intrigues, sword fights between the men and between the girls dressed as men, and various misunderstandings they all find themselves on board of Gonsalvo's ship, which has in the meantime been taken over by robbers. Rodorigo is believed dead, Gonsalvo has saved the lives of both Manuel and his sister Julia and been promised the hand of Julia. In their fear of being killed by the pirates, Julia asserts her love for Rodorigo and both Angelina and Honoria reveal themselves and their love for Gonsalvo. Rodorigo is found to be still alive and recognises Gonsalvo as his brother. Angelina reluctantly embraces Gonsalvo as brother instead of lover and finally accepts Manuel as husband. Gonsalvo nobly forswears Julia's love, gives her free for Rodorigo, and yields to Honoria's declarations of love. Rodorigo finally offers Manuel his friendship.

The Rival Ladies was 'entered in the Stationers' Register on 27 June 1664' (Van Lennep, 78) and first performed during that summer in the Drury Lane Theatre by the King's Company. Langbaine (Poets, 167) calls it 'a Tragi-Comedy [which was] acted at the Theatre-Royal [and] printed in quarto... 1679.' In his edition of 1808, which Saintsbury used as a basis for his text together with Congreve's edition of 1735, Sir Walter Scott talks of a first performance date during 1663, which was amended by Saintsbury to within six months before August 1664, and a first printing date of 1664.^[46]

Published about forty years later, AComparison Between the Two Stages (Wells, Comparison, 36) calls this play 'a confusion of Intrigue and Incidents, so generally obscure' and mentions as its source a story in a novel, 'from whence he took it,' without giving the name of this novel. Langbaine (Poets, 169) finds some similarity in

... the last Act; where the Dispute between Amideo, and Hippolito; with Gonsalvo 's fighting with the Pirates, is borrow'd from Petronius Arbiter. ... To say nothing of the Resemblance of the Catastrophe with that of Scarron's Rival Brothers, Novel the Fifth.^[47]

Dryden himself in the prologue to The Rival Ladies refers to a certain 'mode in plays' (RL, 141) with 'deep intrigues', the Spanish mode of writing drama, which came into vogue then. Dryden had failed with his first play, The Wild Gallant, a play 'in the older English tradition' (Allen, Sources, 55) and tried to react to the tastes of the times with a play in the Spanish manner, probably imitating Tuke's successful comedy.^[48] The inclusion of the masque with its fancy stage machinery and fire, although having the function of allowing Rodorigo to abduct Julia in disguise, may also have its footing in a wish to appeal to the audience and of demonstrating the possibilities of the new Restoration stage.

Allen, Sources (56-73) mentions a number of details which lead him to believe that Dryden admits to this imitation in the prologue,^[49] when he for instance refers to blowing out candles 'to light the plot,' (RL, 141) an incidence from act V of The Adventures of Five Hours. The setting in Spain and the characters also seem to be an imitation from Tuke's comedy (both plays show two gentlemen who are friends and who each have a sister they have to find husbands for), as are some other allusions to the Spanish atmosphere, for instance when Angelina steals out through the garden door or when mention is made of Julia going into a convent. Hughes (Naming, 270) calls Dryden's play a 'response' to Tuke's comedy, but adding 'to its source a heavy thematic stress on the need for reason to control passion.'

Dryden kept some of the general turns of the plot, but added a third couple and endowed the new girl with some of the twists and intrigues of Tuke's plot.^[50] In Tuke's play for instance the hero and the woman he rescued from the bandits are married in the end - they are not the brother and sister Dryden made them into. Taking into account Dryden's classical education and his wide interests, it would have been easy for him to draw on topoi like the shipwreck of a rival brother on a strange coast or a sister in man's attire to be safe from attack, without the need to search for a specific source.

In Dryden's early heroic plays rhyme was often employed throughout,^[51] but in The Rival Ladies Dryden followed Tuke's model of using rhyme only in the heroic passages as a means of emphasising and heightening them.

Gons. - Once more;

If I swear often, I shall be forswore.

Others against their wills may haste their fate;

I only toil to be unfortunate: ... [talking to Julia, declaration of love]

[versus]

... Quickly go find Don Rodorick out:

Tell him, the lady Julia will be walking

On the broad rock, that lies beside the port,

And there expects to see him instantly. [giving orders] (RL, 191)

Allen (Sources, 64) argues that 'it is this use of scattered passages of rhyme that is really new, and in using them Dryden is indebted to Tuke and not to the others he mentions.'^[52] This 'scattered' use of rhyme, however, is of course not completely new and can be found in English dramatic literature of both the sixteenth and the seventeenth century. A Midsummer Night's Dream may serve as just one example, where Shakespeare switches between rhyme (the Athenians, for instance in love dialogues, magic verses, some speeches by the fairies), blank verse (also the Athenians and the fairies) and unstructured prose (the low-comedy characters).

Titania Come, now, a roundel and a fairy song;

Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;

Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds;

Some war with rere-mice with their leathern wings,

To make my small elves coats; ...

[versus]

Lysander O take the sense, sweet, of my innocence;

Love takes the meaning in love's conference.

I mean, that my heart unto yours is knit;

So that but one heart we can make of it; (both quotes II/3)

Dryden himself called this play a tragicomedy, a term he later applied only to dual plot plays. In his criticism he reverted to the classical idea of unity of action, defending himself, however, from the critics for writing two-plot plays, as for instance in the preface of The Spanish Friar, where he says that he broke 'the rule for the pleasure of variety.' (SF, preface, 409) Dryden with his theoretical deliberations was influential in transforming the definition of this term, from a play with tragic and/or heroic characters who do not all find a fatal end^[53] as here in The Rival Ladies, to a play which combined the two traditional types, high characters and low comedy, in one play as he did in The Spanish Friar.^[54]

2.1.2. The Spanish Setting

The scene is set in Alicante in southeast Spain, defined in the dramatis personae for the readers of the play.^[55] The audience is informed by the traditional exposition of the play, a dialogue between Gonsalvo and his servant, mentioning two Spanish cities, Seville and Barcelona, in line two and three of scene one, and some lines later the typical plate fleet with precious metal from the New World. Just in case the rowdy audiences of the time missed the beginning or did not understand the hints, Gonsalvo asks his servant about twenty lines into the play, '... upon what part of Spain/Are we now cast?' which the servant answers with one of two mentionings of 'Alicant' in the play. (RL, 144) The West Indies are mentioned again, together with Flanders, another part of the world then associated with Spain. In the same scene other images of a southern country are evoked: a noble gentleman, in his leisure, walking among trees, a fresh evening breeze from the hills and the scent of sweet orange blossoms 'from the gardens near the city.' (RL, 144) Seville and Barcelona are mentioned again in act II, when Gonsalvo reminds the audience once more of the setting and of the relationship between himself and the other characters. (RL, 72)

In this comedy, Dryden was not very concerned with researching the geographical juxtaposition of the cities on the Spanish peninsula he mentions. The ship was originally destined for Seville and, according to Gonsalvo, was taken by a storm 'almost in the port of Seville,' (RL, 143) then driven to Barcelona, where another wind caused them to be cast on the shore near Alicante. A wind, taking a sailing ship in the estuary of the Guadalquivir and driving it out to sea would have to be blowing from the northeast. It would then, on the Atlantic, have to change to the north-west, in order to drive the same ship to the Straits of Gibraltar, to the west to cause it to sail through the Straits and further along the Costa del Sol, then to the south-west, and among many more changes of direction the ship might eventually reach the harbour of Barcelona. It would go too far to try and follow the loops and turns it would need to take to enter and leave the fortified harbour of Barcelona and reach Alicante, south of Valencia - all very improbable.

illustration not visible in this excerpt

(from Bury, see bibliography)

By choosing these cities Dryden seems to follow similar ideas and create similar images as can be detected in some of the other plays dealt with in this paper: Seville is of course the first port of call for the plate fleet carrying Gonsalvo's riches from the Indies, a thoroughly Spanish, proud city inland, where the two noble families come from. However, before he can reassume his proper place in society, he is carried to Barcelona: once more the free and open harbour city, where Gonsalvo has a short love affair with a noble girl. Finally he arrives at Alicante, the Spanish city on the Mediterranean Sea with its sweet-smelling hills and orange groves.

As can be seen from the plot and the dramatis personae, all the main characters are Spanish and belong to the same class. Even the captain of the robbers turns out to have at least nobility of mind, if not of body. The Spanish atmosphere is mainly created by the characters addressing each other by their Spanish names and their talk of honour and nobleness. A small number of Spanish expressions and references are employed by Dryden here, small compared to for instance his An Evening's Love or Behn's plays.

When Manuel is freed by Gonsalvo, he first takes him to be the captain of the 'picaroons' (RL, 147).^[56] The English were familiar with Spanish picaresque tales since approximately 1570 or 1580, when the first translations of Lazarillo de Tormes, the first real Spanish picaresque novel, were published in London, and therefore most likely also familiar with the Spanish term.^[57]

In a fighting scene in act I Gonsalvo shows himself as the noble hero. Dryden combines elements of old and new drama here: one of the characters getting killed on stage is typical of Renaissance tragicomedy and would hardly have occurred in the later plays. The girl from good family in man’s attire and played by a female actress, on the other hand, would not have been found on the stage before the Restoration. There are no major low-comedy characters, the funny element in this comedy is almost exclusively (apart from some short servants' scenes reminiscent of Shakespeare, the who-will-lodge-with-whom discussion in act I and of course dramatic irony) contributed by the parody of the honour's talk supplied by the two girls dressed as men. To the audience their strutting and mimicking of swaggering male ways and behaviourisms ought to have appeared very funny, especially taking into account the fact that this must have been one of the first original comedies on the English stage with women playing the female roles.

[...]

---

^[1] For a discussion of the boundaries of the Restoration period cf. for instance Hume, Development, chapters 6-10.

^[2] Cf. Ward, Cambridge, VIII/V/§15, or Altaba-Artal, Feminism, 26, who holds it to be anonymous.

^[3] Cf. the paragraphs on the location in the chapter about The Dutch Lover.

^[4] Clark in Later Stuarts (194) talks of 'English traders at Cadiz' at that time.

^[5] For this paragraph cf. Trevelyan, 229-233.

^[6] Cf. also Chancellor, I/84: 'It would seem that shortly after this Charles went to Spain to procure monetary assistance, because when General Monk sent him a verbal message through Sir John Granville, who had gone over to England on the King's behalf, he advised him to leave Spanish territory, 'lest he shall be detained as a pledge for the recovery of Dunkirc and Jamaica.' '

^[7] Cf. on the other hand Clark, Later Stuarts, 18: ' [Charles II] was without serious personal religion, and his theological opinions, so far as he had any, were those of the deism which was by this time common among unprejudiced men of position.'

^[8] Cf. Bowle, 340.

^[9] Titus Oates is also said to be one of the first to name the two parliamentary factions rising at that time, when he used to call out 'Tory' to anybody who dared to doubt his allegations, a name originally applied to Catholic bandits in Ireland. In return the other party was named 'Whigs' after a Scottish group who was known for murdering bishops. (cf. Trevelyan, 395)

^[10] Cf. the contemporary drawing of a pageant in the chapter on the Catholic about the The Spanish Friar. They were also mentioned in some contemporary dramas, for instance in Otway's The Soldiers' Fortune, March 1680; cf. also Ward, Life, 153: 'the carefully managed and contrived Pope burnings of 1679, 1680, and 1681.'

^[11] Cf. Trevelyan, 415.

^[12] Cf. Clark, Later Stuarts, 122.

^[13] It seems like a tragic twist of fate that the daughter of the instigator of the Clarendon Code had married the Catholic Pretender to the English throne.

^[14] cf. also Clark, Later Stuarts, 130: Innocent XI, 1676-1689, the saintly and politically generally disinterested pope, who had refused the cardinal's hat James had requested for Petre.

^[15] Cf. Stanzel, 9-21 and Metzeltin, 34-40.

^[16] '... ein weithin vorgestelltes, imaginiertes, von der Realität abgehobenes Gebilde, eine Fiktion also, die sich der literarischen Interpretation ebenso anbietet wie der ethnologisch-psychologischen und politisch-historischen.' (Stanzel, 9)

^[17] Cf. Stanzel, 18: '... aus einer Art literarischen Requisitenkammer, einem schriftlich fixierten Fundus der geläufigen Vorstellungen von fremden Völkern.' Metzeltin (85) calls this working with 'tradierten Versatzstücken.'

^[18] ca 1280 - Somme des Vices et des Vertues (translated into English), ca 1300 - Dante's Divine Comedy, ca 1360 - Piers the Ploughman (for all these cf. Ward, Cambridge, under the respective headings).

^[19] He quotes from Jules Pilet de la Mésnadière, La Poetique de la Mésnadière (Paris 1640; translation from Stanzel); cf. also Deforneaux, 32, quoting from the travelogue of a Provencale poet from the sixteenth century, Annibal de Lortigue.

^[20] The key for the Spaniard reads: 'Sitte - hochmüttig' ('manners - proud').

^[21] Cf. also Ward, Cambridge, vol. XIV/II/§47 - Buckle's History of Civilization, Lewes G.H., 100-105.

^[22] For this passage cf. O'Sullivan, 61-69.

^[23] Cf. Metzeltin, 85.

^[24] For the finding of one's identity cf. also Metzeltin, 44-46.

^[25] Cf. Breslow, 71-73.

^[26] 'Doch diese "Altlasten der Europäer", wie Stanzel die nur zu tief sitzenden Vorurteile in der Typisierung der Anderen nennt, müssen aufgegriffen, erkannt und benannt werden, um sie loslassen und überwinden zu können. Denn sie beruhen nicht auf Tatsachen, sondern sie entspringen Bildern, sind Imagines, Fiktionen, Übertragungen alter Raster.' (Habersack, 1; emphasis in the original)

^[27] For details to the life of Dryden cf. DNB, s.v. Dryden; Ward, Life; Winn.

^[28] Cf. Winn, 137: 'We may imagine the undergraduate Dryden continuing to read drama in English and French.'

^[29] The Earl was married to Sir Robert Howard's, Elizabeth's brother's, first cousin.

^[30] Cf. Connely, 207.

^[31] Cardinal Howard called her, in a letter of recommendation for Dryden's sons, 'a Cathc. Sister to ye. Lord Berkshire,' in contrast to Dryden, 'a Convert,' as if it was clear to him that she had always been a Catholic and not converted to Catholicism like Dryden. (Winn, 123)

^[32] Cf. Winn, 121.

^[33] Cf. Winn, 199 and 575, n.3.

^[34] Cf. for example Winn, 146.

^[35] Langbaine does not say, however, how Dryden was 'beholding' to the French as far as the language of his comedies is concerned, but from some other references in his An Account of the Dramatick Poets it may be deduced that he probably means that he took whole scenes line by line from the source.

^[36] Cf. appendix 1 of this paper for some ideas about her different first names and about her origin.

^[37] Cf. Jones, Behn, 315.

^[38] Cf. Todd, Secret Life, 20: Gauthier de La Calprenède, Cassandra and Cleopatra.

^[39] Cf. Todd, Secret Life, 21) with a facsimile copy of her handwriting.

^[40] Cf. above: Dryden's connections with the Catholic Howards.

^[41] Cf. DL, 192.

^[42] Cf. the chapter on languages in The False Count.

^[43] Cf. in modern English/Italian/Spanish "Inglese – Seville – docity – jasmine – señor "

^[44] Especially in a case like this it is hard, without editor's notes, to decide how much of the spelling is based on the decision of the printer ("oun" instead of "on" or "om", in modern Spanish "conde", in modern French "comte", cf. VOX and Col.Rob., under the respective entries). Here, however, the omission of the weak "e" in "de" in front of a vowel would be typical of spoken language.

^[45] For the life of Mary Pix cf. Pearse, 12; Pearson, 171; Kendall, 31; DNB, s.v. Pix, Mary; Clark, Women, 183-287..

^[46] Cf. RL, 126-128.

^[47] The idea of the hero as a victim of forces outside of himself, shipwrecked on a strange sea shore and meeting long-lost relatives after some confusion is a well-known topos in literature and has been used in English drama before, for instance by Shakespeare in The Comedy of Errors or of course in The Tempest. For Scarron cf. also Allen, Sources, 68: '"Les deux frères rivaux" in an incidental nouvel in Scarron's Le Roman comique.'

^[48] Cf. also Hogan (Comedia, 130) who argues that there is 'no evidence of a Spanish source for The Rival Ladies... Dryden was writing in the manner of Tuke's The Adventures of Five Hours instead of the Spanish.'

^[49] For him this is also the reason that Langbaine, only interested 'in uncovering Dryden's surreptitious borrowings,' (Allen, Sources, 62) had not mentioned The Adventures as a possible source for The Rival Ladies.

^[50] For the plot of Tuke's play cf. for instance Hume M., 292-293.

^[51] For a treatment of Dryden's changing attitude towards his own heroic plays and the reaction of others cf. Pendlebury (111-125).

^[52] Cf. also Ward, Cambridge, VIII/1/§8, who agrees with Allen.

^[53] Cf. the definition of tragicomedy from Thorndike, 280: 'heroic character involving dangers and affairs of state'.

^[54] Cf. Dedication of The Rival Ladies.

^[55] During the Restoration period the theatre audience was probably not informed in advance of the characters' names, unless they were familiar with the play or had been in touch with a printed copy. It was, however, only '[m]idway through the eighteenth century [that] the desire of theatre audiences to be apprised in advance of the names ... of the characters ..., preferably in order of appearance, began to be gratified in the form of bills posted outside the theatre.' (Barton, 175) So the audience had to be introduced to a character's name directly in the text.

^[56] Cf. VOX, s.v. picarón, derived from pícaro, a low person with little honour and valour.

^[57] Cf. for instance Hume M., 138.

• Hochschule: Universität Wien
• Note: good
• Autor: Elisabeth Enzler (Autor:in)
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2003
• Seiten: 133
• Katalognummer: V31989
• ISBN (eBook): 9783638328401
• Sprache: Englisch
• Schlagworte: Spanish, Setting, Restoration, Comedy