Fangs Of Malice: Hypocrisy Sincerity And Acting

Act One. They Dress Up

.Act One t hey dress up Theophilus Lucas, in his Memoirs of 1714, recounts the story of how Major Clancy, an Irish “sharper” or confidence man, came to discover his true occupation. Clancy began as a valet, a “sort of page to Monsieur Mancy in Paris”: One day Major Clancy being at his Exercise of Brushing, he locks the Chamber-door, lays apart each Suit of Cloaths, with all that belong ’d to it, and putting on the finest of them, struts up and down like Crow in a Gutter, then goes to the Looking-glass, where he was so startled at first that he stept back, hardly knowing who it was in such a Habit; but finding at last, after part of his Wonder was over, that it was himself, he begins to propose to himself how happy and how fortunate should he be if he could order Matters so as to keep this Finery by which he was so alter’d, that he might appear to all others, as to himself in the Glass.1 Putting on his employer’s fine clothes transforms Clancy the valet into Major Clancy, who can then pursue his notorious career. Dressing above his class, performing before the mirror, Clancy is an actor who takes costume and imposture off the stage and into real life. Sumptuary laws during the early modern period sought to limit the possibility of such misleading misuse of costume, but actors, who often purchased the clothes of aristocrats from valets who inherited or stole them, acquired whole wardrobes that they were not entitled to wear. Rousseau, like many other antitheatrical writers, cautioned that theater tends to break down sumptuary laws. If clothing reflects social station, and if it is deemed necessary that all citizens should wear clothes that indicate their particular stations, then certainly the wearing of costumes by actors immediately transgresses such codes. Marjorie Garber rightly notes that while much recent scholarly attention has been dedicated to the ways in which sumptuary laws attempted to regulate gender, such “legislation was overwhelmingly concerned with wealth or rank, and with gender largely as it was a subset of these categories .” Sumptuary laws mainly prohibited the wearing of certain fabrics by certain members of the population— cloth of gold, for example, being limited to “earls and above that rank and Knights of the Garter in their purple mantles.” Simple fabrics, limited to the lower classes, were also identified with honesty: Berowne, in Love’s Labor’s Lost, rejects “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise” by equating them with “maggot ostentation,” promising instead to adopt a language of “russet yeas and honest kersey noes” (5.2.407, 410, 414).2 While this donning of coarse domestic fabric is metaphorical, more extremely, King Gustav III introduced legislation in Sweden at the end of the eighteenth century mandating the wearing of national costume, designed by the king, in order to prevent the aristocracy from imitating the fashions of France. In this act I address costume as a moral problem on the early modern stage. First I consider the professional status of the “boy-actress” on the English stage in the pre-Restoration period by concentrating on Viola’s anxious meditations on her own problematic attire in Twelfth Night and then move to the metamorphosis that occurs as Viola comes to be played by actresses after the Restoration. Next Jeremy Collier’s strictures in A Short View of the Immorality and Prophaneness of the English Stage against English comic authors, who “must ridicule the Habit as well as the Function, of the Clergy,” focus attention upon stage clerics and friars.3 The problem of true and false piety, as stirred up by the controversy in the 1660s about Molière’s Tartuffe, has far-reaching implications: championing the cause of high moral seriousness in Restoration comedy, decrying those who see the plays as frivolous, recent scholars like Aubrey Williams and J. Douglas Canfield continue the debate in much the same terms as those in which Bishop Louis Bourdaloue excoriated Molière. Finally, I turn to fashion’s most slavish adherents, the late-seventeenth-century fops, emblems of theatricality, despised for their monstrous similarity to actors. By the very beginning of the eighteenth century, however, dramatists have come to treat fops as human beings, inviting audiences to analyze their feelings and even 2 ] act one to sympathize with their predicaments. Cross-dressing, putting on clerical garb, and foppery all come together as indices...