Gentility and the Comic Theatre of Late Stuart London (review)

"Gentility," the subject of Mark Dawson's impressive book, is a vague and threadbare term that evokes a world where a class structure based on status as well as on wealth once underlay the distribution of political power. Moreover, Dawson notes, scholars who attempt to define gentility often reduce it to a tautology (the genteel class possessed gentility) or a nebulous abstraction that can be defined only in opposition to the mores of an always already rising middle class. Dawson, focusing on the era between 1690 and 1725 and on the powerful cultural institution of the London comic theatre, argues that in the wake of the Revolution of 1689, the meaning of gentility became subject to fierce debate. He argues that gentility consisted of "a set of cultural claims about power in early modern society that sought to order this world in terms of itself" and thus proved to be surprisingly fluid. A person's being dubbed genteel, "capped an act of interpretation that here was a dominant, relatively powerful individual" (9), but the interpretive nature of gentility left this social distinction open to contestation by those who profited from the spread of mercantile capitalism, or in some cases by such "impostors" as famous actors and law students with the temerity to crash genteel events.

Few artistic traditions are as finely attuned to the minute gradations of social distinction as the English comedy, and as a place to see and be seen by those with the means to buy a ticket, the playhouse afforded a space in which "multiple claims of gentility, or elite social placement, were simultaneously and routinely produced and consumed" (17). Dawson effectively employs both literary criticism and social history, and he is not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom. Sir Richard Steele's comedy The Conscious Lovers has long been regarded as initiating a new style of bourgeois comedy that unapologetically championed social-climbing merchants, or "cits," against the snobbery of the landowning class. In his first chapter, Dawson boldly upends this commonplace by both highlighting passages of Steele's play that seem decidedly ambivalent regarding the wealth and social prominence of the cit Mister Sealand, and conducting a survey of the entire body of new comedies that opened in London during his focus period. Fully one half of these plays featured plots that cuckolded a cit—hardly the mark of a genre being marketed to an emergent middle class squeamish about public displays of sexuality.

Dawson's second and third chapters also concern themselves with "cit coms" (49) that feature down-at-the-heels, lusty gentlemen and prosperous, cuckolded merchants. The opposed but intertwined natures of these characters establish a dichotomy between wealth and sexual potency. In the second chapter, Dawson argues that this dichotomy both displays social unease with the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the merchant class and entertains the possibility that the power conferred by the cit's wealth establishes a claim to gentility that cannot be summarily dismissed. Building on this consideration of gentility as power in his third chapter, Dawson observes that late-Stuart comedy codes gentility specifically as male, and that a comic character's inability to keep the women in his family from risking their personal capital in the sexual marketplace thus displayed his unworthiness to hold political authority. (The same principle obtains in those few comedies where gentlemen find themselves cuckolded.)

Three more sections follow, each consisting of three chapters and each offering significant contributions to the study of the late-Stuart theatre. In the second section, Dawson guides the reader through the physical and social space of the London playhouse. He argues that the theatres were dominated by a core audience of genteel theatre mavens with the means and the interest—both in plays and in being seen at plays—to attend repeated performances. These chapters make particularly strong use of contemporary documentary evidence, including diary excerpts from...