The Restoration Rake-Hero. Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England by Harold M. Webber (review)

394Comparative Drama that it is. But on the aggregate, these are minor objections to a generally solid work. Prophet of the New Drama is not a bridge over a "cultural chasm." It is a well researched and well written biography of an important critic. Its strength lies less in its effort to stand a century of Archer scholarship on its head than in its sensitive, human, yet scholarly treatment of Archer, Robins, and the birth of a new drama in England. If it fails to repair a body of inaccurate and faulty theater history, it succeeds on the far more important level of illuminating the people and events that caused all the trouble in the first place. THOMAS A. GREENFIELD Bellarmine College Harold M. Webber. The Restoration Rake-Hero. Transformations in Sexual Understanding in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Pp. ? + 253. $26.50. The full title of this book indicates its scope and also its methodological problems. It is an ambitious but dubious undertaking to seek to demonstrate large-scale national transformations on the basis of a narrow selection of character types from one literary genre. With the exception of a brief discussion of Moll Flanders and Fanny Hill in the final chapter, occasional quotations from Rochester's poetry, and brief discussions of Otway's Venice Preserv'd and Lillo's The London Merchant, Professor Webber's survey is not only limited to drama but to comic drama. Many of the plays discussed—The Country Wife (1675), The Man of Mode (1676), Friendship in Fashion (1678), TAe Princess of Cleve (1682)— were written and performed within a few years of each other. The high literary quality and interest of these works is not in dispute; but as indices of national cultural transformations, sexual or otherwise, they may well be less significant than religious meditations, books on midwifery, letters, diaries, and commonplace books. These plays were performed in small London theaters and are as likely to represent a particular and short-lived fashion for sexual comedy amongst a sophisticated urban elite as data for the construction of a new sexual mentalitié. Certainly, if we are to see the character types discussed in Professor Webber's book as more than a passing theatrical fad and, furthermore, as showing that "the rake's career on the Restoration stage initiates the modern 'discourse' on sexuality" and "represents the initial attempts of English culture to transfer control of sexuality from the divine to the secular world" (p. 10), then we need more theoretical and methodological underpinning than this book offers. In fact, the theoretical and sociological dimensions do not extend much beyond a quotation from Freud, two references to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality (Vol. I), three references each to the by now statutory works on the family by Lawrence Stone and Peter Laslett, and a handful of quotations from Paul-Gabriel Boucé's collection of essays Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century Britain. These sources help to suggest that, from the mid-seventeenth century to the early eighteenth century, attitudes towards family and sex Reviews395 were undergoing changes. But they cannot constitute a thoroughgoing discussion of the complexities of these changes or of the role of literature, let alone a particular character-type in a particular genre, in relation to these changes. In a somewhat simplistic fashion, historical events, such as the execution of Charles I, or historical judgments, such as Stone's, are cited to indicate the breakdown of traditional values. Dramatic characters and dramatic incidents are then ushered in to illustrate either that which has been defined as traditional, the divine, or that which has been defined as the new, the secular. At times there is a distinct sense of strain as Jacobean city comedies are strenuously fitted into the divine mold while references to God, the world, the flesh, and the devil are argued to be incidental to the secular ethos of Restoration drama. The rake-heroes are divided into three categories: Hobbesian libertinerakes , philosophic libertines, and female libertines. At no stage are the terms 'Hobbesian' or 'libertine' adequately defined. The distinction between the Hobbesians and the philosophers seems to come down to the idea that Hobbesian...