The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy by Peter Holland (review)

382 Comparative Drama playwright who successfully documents the human spirit invariably measures the progress of national power in terms of the agony of suffer­ ing and the delusions of political grandeur. LARRY S. CHAMPION North Carolina State University Peter Holland. The Ornament of Action: Text and Performance in Restoration Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pp. xiii -I- 284. $29.50. This is a stimulating, learned, sometimes irritating book. Even the well-disposed reader will encounter some frustration in trying to determine just what is being argued here. Holland says at the outset that he has “chosen to investigate the relationship of performance to play and of performance to published text, in terms of the physical conditions of the English theatre between 1660 and about 1705 and the force of those conditions on comedy” (page x). This is a bit misleading. Not much gets done with physical theatre except in general descriptive terms, and the crucial thrust of Holland’s argument has to do with casting and the expectations generated by casting. On this relatively limited subject the book makes an important and most welcome contribution. The first four chapters— 137 pages—are devoted to general back­ ground, dealing with audience, theatres, actors, and published texts re­ spectively. They contain little that is particularly new or original, though they make a tidy digest of scattered materials which will be of use to students. Their relation to the chapters which follow is tenuous. The rest of the book is a technical monograph which could have been addressed to specialists on the assumption that they would be broadly familiar with the relevant background. Chapters 5 through 7 (pages 138-243) present us, respectively, with a cast-oriented consideration of the nine new come­ dies staged during the seasons of 1691-92 and 1692-93, a close analysis of Wycherley’s The Plain-Dealer (1676), and readings of the four come­ dies of Congreve (1693-1700). The logic of this sequence escapes me. The heart of this book, all matters of background survey aside, is really a short and useful account of Congreve based upon close attention to his casts. Chapter 5 makes a reasonable prelude, surveying as it does United Company productions of new comedies in the two seasons lead­ ing up to the première of The Old Batchelour in the spring of 1693. Holland might usefully have focussed outright on the transitional period 1690-1705 and gone on to survey context up to the opening of the Haymarket or the proto-union of 1706. The treatment of such neglected plays as The Marriage-Hater Match’d, The Volunteers, The Maid’s Last Prayer, and The Richmond Heiress is highly competent and welcome. Why not extend it to later seasons? The gist of Holland’s argument, reduced to bare essentials, is that in a repertory theatre actors are used in particular “lines,” which profes­ sional writers exploit for them. A first-rate writer may utilize an actor Reviews 383 against audience expectation, thereby creating a more complex, prob­ lematical, and provocative play—as in The Wives Excuse or the plays of Congreve. An interpreter coming to a play can certainly make good use of the cast list in trying to decide what sort of response is anticipated from the audience. We cannot, of course, always be certain that the actor or actress who took a role was originally intended for the part, even by professional writers attached to a single company. Pregnancy, illness, and company politics must sometimes have dictated changes. Nonetheless, Holland is absolutely right to urge on us the importance of casting as a line on interpretation. I have three broad reservations about the book as Holland has given it to us. The first is his failure to focus closely on what seems to be the crucial point. The chapter structure suggests a general introduction tacked in front of what sets out to be a study of Congreve in context, into which a chapter on Wycherley has somehow intruded. Second, the lack of any sort of “Conclusion” is disconcerting. Especially with the aims left very broad at the outset, some sense of what the author feels we should con...