Dialogue and Duelling in Restoration Comedy

Although not every duel was fatal, the life-or-death consequences of many actual duels that took place in England during the long eighteenth century may be difficult for twenty-first-century readers to imagine. Restoration and early eighteenth-century comedies make this imagining no easier, for their lighthearted treatment of duelling portrays the often deadly activity as just one of the many hazards and amusements that constitute fashionable life.

This lighthearted treatment in comedy veils the seriousness of the cultural debate surrounding the practice of duelling throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Some English saw duelling as a civilizing practice because it provided gentlemen with a remedy for addressing impolite acts, figured as offenses against honor. For others, duelling was a threat to civilized society because it taught gentlemen to assert their own authority rather than encouraging them to turn to established authorities, like the king and the law. In a recent study, Markku Peltonen traces these views through the conduct books of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.¹ As British society became increasingly concerned with politeness, duelling became both more prevalent and an increasingly controversial issue. Peltonen situates duelling at the center of the debate about civility that Anna Bryson traces in her study, From Courtesy to Civility.² The representations of duelling in the plays I examine here, dating from 1664 to 1707, support the assertion that duelling became a central site of England's struggle to accommodate its own shifting attitudes about civil, as opposed to courteous or courtly, conduct.

In addition, references to duelling in comedy reflect the issues raised by changing class, government, authority, identity, and even rhetorical structures in England following the Civil War. Duelling increased in England during the latter half of the seventeenth century, despite proclamations against it issued by Cromwell and by Charles II.³ Comic representations of duelling addressed audience anxiety about this increase. Whether the polite society attending the theater was fearful of being affected by the violence or protective of its right to engage in it, the irreverent portrayals of duelling in comedy presented the limits of both positions.

Richard Kroll argues that the turmoil of 1640-1660 changed the structure of English public discourse: "the Restoration marks a multiple discursive reorientation, responding to a series of pressures that focuses and encourages a new constellation of discursive activities."⁴ Among these activities are acknowledgments of contingency, metonymic and synecdochic figures, arguments based on probability, and an emphasis on the reader's responsibility "to educe general principles from partial but suggestive signs."⁵ Theater audiences, like readers, construct interpretations of plays by responding to a variety of particulate signs, in this case those presented on stage. Although the new plays that we think of as Restoration comedies only constituted a part of the late seventeenth-century theatrical repertoire, they enact the new rhetoric Kroll describes by highlighting the audience's responsibility to interpret the action or, more commonly, the dialogue. When the dialogue in these plays focuses on duelling, it often illustrates ideological conflicts, satirizes the performative nature of living in a civil society, and draws attention to the abstract qualities of language. These features in turn direct the audience's attention to the need for interpretation.

Duels also draw attention to the historical circumstances fuelling their rise during the Restoration. Jonathan Scott identifies "the length and depth of [England's] experience of political instability" as specific to the seventeenth century, and he characterizes the period as one in which "institutions were fragile and ideas powerful."⁶ A duel embodies the powerful idea of honor. When represented or referred to on stage, a duel forces examination of institutions positioned to replace such ideas in the movement from courteous to civil society. Following the regicide and the Civil War, what these institutions might be was an open question structuring many of the conflicts portrayed in Restoration comedy.⁷

Most importantly, perhaps, representations of duelling in comedy provided a mechanism for class identification without the bloodshed. V. G. Kiernan argues that the duel was the result of artistocratic gentlemen's need to identify themselves as...