Naming and Entitlement in Wycherley, Etherege, and Dryden

Naming and Entitlement in Wycherley, Etherege, and Dryden1 Derek Hughes Sir William Scarborrow]. Kinsman. Brother and Sister. Brother. iTa[therine]. Husband. Child. Father.£car[borrow], Harke how their words like Bullets shoot me thorow. This decisive appeal to a man estranged from his family and social responsibilities (namely from his roles as husband and gentleman), strikingly similar to the appeal which less permanently recalls Dryden's Antony to his roles as husband and Roman, occurs towards the end of George Wilkins' domestic tragedy The Miseries of lnforst Marriage!*- The triumphant reconciliation between the protagonist and the duties implicit in his titles is one of many instances in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury drama in which the recovery of social and moral identity is associated with a recovery of name or title, the recovery demonstrating the natural and inescapable interdependence of linguistic and moral order; perhaps the best example is the unnaming and renaming of Edgar in King Lear.,3 The Miseries of lnforst Marriage deals with the consequences of a broken marriage vow, the hero being forced by his guardian to jilt his betrothed, who kills herself, and to marry the guardian 's niece, and Wilkins' central concern with the vow is reflected in repeated imagery endowing language with a tangible existence and power, both on earth and in heaven. The jilted woman feels that for her to marry another would be adultery, where "God writes sin vpon the Teasters hed" (sig. D), and her suicide is protrayed as an affirmation of love written "in red DEREK HUGHES is Senior Lecturer in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Dryden's Heroic Plays as well as previous articles in various journals, including Comparative Drama. 259 260Comparative Drama Letters" (sig. D2). The hero's long period of dissipated alienation from his family is ended when a doctor of divinity impresses on him the sanctity of the vow in his actual marriage—God "seald the deed" (sig. K2)—and the moral power of language is most clearly rendered in terms of tangible force when Scarborrow experiences the bombardment of titles as a bombardment of bullets. The titles have their power because language is a medium linking earth and heaven, the words of men being recorded in the book of heaven and judged according to their conformity with the precepts ordained in a celestial language of which all human speech is a shadow: when Dr. Baxtor reminds Scarborrow of the sanctity of his vows to the woman he actually married, he describes the vow as having been entered in the record of heaven: "When heauen and men did witness and record/ Twas an eternall oath, no idle word" (sig. K2). Such imagery is, of course, commonplace: we recall that in Richard II Northumberland's treachery was "Mark'd with a blot, damn'd in the book of heaven" (IV.i.236).4 The interest of Wilkins' play for the purposes of the present argument is both that it foreshadows (very closely) Antony's most notorious and striking surrender to language as a vehicle for social values and that it asserts a traditional and widespread view of language that is absent from All for Love, as it is from several leading Carolean tragedies and comedies: the view of language as a divinely ordained expression and instrument of moral order. For this reason, The Miseries of lnforsl Marriage, despite its formidable lack of distinction, forms a useful starting point for considering the scepticism about the function and nature of language which briefly dominated English drama in the Carolean period. I wish to cite one other starting point, also a minor play which portrays what was to be a familiar Restoration pattern, but which again does so in the context of ideas that are at once traditionally authoritative and alien to the intellectual temper of Dryden and his leading contemporaries in the 1660's and 1670's. The play is Shirley's comedy of a rake tamed into marriage, The Example. A number of Shirley's comedies dwell on the reformation of rakish nobles or gentlemen into conformity with the moral demands of their place, associating the period of discrepancy...