XVII-XVIII

Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 70 | 2013

Autour du rire

Offstage Laughter: Restoration Comedies and the Female Audience Aloysia Rousseau

Publisher Société d'études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles Electronic version URL: http://1718.revues.org/525 DOI: 10.4000/1718.525 ISSN: 2117-590X

Printed version Date of publication: 31 décembre 2013 Number of pages: 209-222 ISBN: 978-2-9536021-5-9 ISSN: 0294-3798

Electronic reference Aloysia Rousseau, « Offstage Laughter: Restoration Comedies and the Female Audience », XVII-XVIII [Online], 70 | 2013, Online since 01 August 2016, connection on 30 September 2016. URL : http://1718.revues.org/525 ; DOI : 10.4000/1718.525

The text is a facsimile of the print edition.

XVII-XVIII is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

OFFSTAGE LAUGHTER: RESTORATION COMEDIES AND THE FEMALE AUDIENCE

In England, the end of the 17th century is the age of the comedy of manners and its share of controversies with Jeremy Collier’s famous diatribe against what he considered as immoral debauchery. The Puritan critics deplored the roles assigned to women whose sacrosanct purity was debunked by Restoration playwrights. If the critics’ condemnation of dissolute female characters as well as the supposed loose morals of the actresses playing those parts have been the subjects of many books and articles, it seems that a third posture has been disregarded – that of the female play-goer and her reaction to the plays’ humour. This paper shall therefore concentrate on women’s laughter, more precisely on the masculine depiction of such laughter. The playwrights and critics of the time were indeed for the most part men, often portraying the female audience either as humourless or as wanton since, according to Jeremy Collier, only prostitutes could delight in such obscene comedies. This clear-cut dichotomy between on the one hand the pure and scandalized lady who cannot (or dares not?) laugh and on the other hand the prostitute roaring with laughter will of course be qualified. L’Angleterre de la fin du XVIIe siècle est celle de la comédie de mœurs et son lot de controverses, parmi lesquelles la fameuse diatribe de Jeremy Collier contre ce qu’il considérait être une incitation à la débauche. Les critiques puritains déploraient alors les rôles assignés aux femmes dont la sacro-sainte pureté était discréditée par les dramaturges de la Restauration. Si la condamnation des personnages féminins dissolus ainsi que des actrices supposément perverses a été l’objet de nombreux livres et articles, il semblerait qu’une troisième posture ait été négligée : celle de la spectatrice et de sa réaction à l’humour grivois de ces pièces. Cet article propose ainsi de mettre en lumière le rire féminin de la Restauration, vu, plus précisément, à travers un prisme masculin. Les dramaturges et critiques de l’époque étaient en effet pour la plupart des hommes, décrivant le public féminin comme étant soit dénué d’humour, soit libertin car, selon Jeremy Collier, seules les prostituées pouvaient se délecter de ce spectacle obscène. Cette dichotomie catégorique entre d’une part la femme chaste et respectable qui ne peut pas (ou n’ose pas ?) rire et d’autre part la prostituée qui rit à gorge déployée sera bien sûr nuancée.

Aloysia ROUSSEAU. “Offstage Laughter: Restoration Comedies and the Female Audience.” RSÉAA XVII-XVIII 70 (2013) : 209-222.

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his paper emanates from my noticing the limited number of books and articles dealing with the question not of women’s reception of Restoration plays but more precisely of women’s reception of the comic elements in those plays, that is to say women’s laughter. What we do know is that a great proportion of women from various social backgrounds indeed attended the theatre at that time. 1 The authors who have chosen to analyze female audiences however constantly do so from a moral vantage point so that the comic component is in fact lost. John Harrington Smith’s seminal essay “Shadwell, the Ladies, and the Change in Comedy,” as well as David Roberts’ The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, highlight, and in Roberts’ case qualifies, the part played by play-going women as censors. 2 In other words the question is that of the influence of women on Restoration drama and not of the influence of those bawdy comedies on women play-goers. Their reception of those plays is thus studied in terms of ethics and not of aesthetics as though the comic elements to be found in the plays could only be deemed either shocking or acceptable but not in any case pleasurable. Yet, as we are reminded by John Dryden in his Preface to An Evening’s Love: or, The Mock Astrologer (1671), “the first end of comedy is delight, and instruction only the second” (McMillin 471). My aim here will be to throw light upon the depiction of the female audience’s reception of the bawdy puns of Restoration plays. Their supposed inability to laugh, as is exemplified in Congreve’s assertion in 1695 that “by reason of their natural coldness, Humour cannot exert itself to that extravagant degree which it often does in the male sex” (Congreve 183), will be analyzed as a social constraint and construct rather than a natural reaction. In order to pursue this aim, a first method has been to analyze the way women’s reactions to the plays’ libertinism were described in primary sources, that is to say diaries (mostly Samuel Pepys’), essays and pamphlets such as Jeremy Collier’s famous diatribe against Restoration drama, letters, the Restoration plays themselves and the prefaces, prologues and epilogues in which the playwrights constantly addressed their audience. What we can notice here is that apart from Aphra Behn’s texts, the 1. This is true of Renaissance drama as well, as has been demonstrated by Gurr or by Levin. 2. Roberts indeed undermines Smith’s argument according to which the so-called “ladies” would have actively participated in raising the moral standards of Restoration comedy: “If there is no reason to doubt that comedy has changed its style to suit the modesty of the ladies, there is every reason to be skeptical about the ladies’ part in bringing the change about” (127).

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sources are almost exclusively masculine. Those primary sources are thus men’s discourses on the female audience’s laughter. A second method has been to offer hypothetical conclusions based on the way laughter was defined during the Restoration era on the one hand and on how women were perceived on the other hand which has led me to identify what seems to be profound incompatibility. This paper will therefore suggest that the supposed outrage preventing the female audience from laughing at the double-entendres of Restoration drama is based mostly on men’s expectations of women’s good-breeding. Laughter and modesty A first step will be to compare the theory of laughter during the Restoration era with feminine attributes as subject matter and wonder whether women were in fact perceived as being endowed with the ability to laugh. Could women be both modest and beautiful, two essential qualities that a lady was supposed to possess at the time, and able to take a joke? In The Ladies Calling, Richard Allestree reminds his readers that a modest woman should first and foremost be discreet, something identifiable not only in the content of a woman’s speech but in the very sound of her voice, as is exemplified in this excerpt taken from the first chapter entitled “On Modesty:” “Nor does she only refine the language, but she tunes it too, modulates the tone and accent, admits no unhandsome earnestness or loudness of Discourse. […] A womans tongue should indeed be like the imaginary Music of the spheres, sweet and charming, but not to be heard at distance.” In other words, women were considered modest if they were, if not silent, at least inaudible, a characteristic obviously jarring with the resonant nature of laughter, the sound produced by laughter being in fact one of the prime criteria distinguishing it from a mere smile. Such incompatibility is confirmed by Richard Steele half a century later in the first issue of The Theatre. Steele describes a group of very well-bred young ladies whose conversation he praises: “There is a purity in their manners and a kind chastity in their very dress. Their mirth has no noise, their joy little laughter” (2). What is of interest here is that women are not described as being forbidden to feel emotions such as mirth and joy but they are asked not to express those feelings. Laughter is thus here defined as a mere externalization of an inner feeling, that of joy, an externalization which does not tally with women’s expected modesty. The use of the words “purity” and “chastity” moreover clearly

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pinpoint the value judgment contained in Steele’s description. If the absence of laughter is described as pure, an a contrario argument can easily be inferred from this: the sound of laughter can only be produced by impure women. Yet the dichotomy established in these essays is not only between pure and wanton women but also between uneducated and educated women, more generally between people of breeding and common people. This would explain why servants are entitled to laugh in Restoration plays, contrary to ladies whose laughter is considered intolerable. In other words class distinction supersedes gender distinction, as is made obvious in Lord Chesterfield’s advice to his son in March 1748: I could heartily wish, that you may often be seen to smile, but never heard to laugh, while you live. Frequent and loud laughter is the characteristic of folly and ill manners: it is the manner in which the mob express their silly joy, at silly things; and they call it being merry. In my mind, there is nothing so illiberal, and so ill bred, as audible laughter. (68)

If we have a close look at this quote we can see that laughter is not adamantly denied. Lord Chesterfield opposes a visual expression of mirth (“seen to smile”), which he describes as tolerable, to an intolerable auditory expression (“heard to laugh”). It is in fact once again the sound produced by laughter rather than laughter itself that is dismissed as is exemplified in his use of the adjective “audible.” It is the resonant nature of laughter, its bodily expression which is frowned upon as being ill-bred. Conspicuous laughter is deemed repulsive contrary to discreet laughter which might be considered attractive. This explains the celebration of women’s laughter which is to be found in Renaissance poetry: it is not the laughing faces of women that are seen as enhancing their beauty but merely their smiling faces. Laughter as described by Renaissance poets in their blazons or as praised by Richard Steele in The Theatre is a restrained and silent laugh, the only kind of laugh in fact that women were entitled to let out. Celebration of feminine laughter is thus seen as artificial since its object is not what it pretends to be. Women’s fixed smiles seem to have nothing in common with the violent laughter which sets the body uncontrollably trembling. Laughter thus disrupts the static beauty and the expected modesty of women by introducing movement, surprising the onlooker, as is exemplified in Samuel Pepys’ following entry in his diary on 16 September 1667, describing a female member of the audience at the King’s Playhouse. Pepys was attending The Scornful Lady, a 1616 play by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher which was very popular in the Restoration era: “One of the best parts of our sport was a mighty pretty

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lady that sat behind us, that did laugh so heartily and constantly, that it did me good to hear her.” What is interesting in this quote is not only the fact that Pepys seems to enjoy listening to this lady’s laughter (here we might wonder if such a reaction was shared by his contemporaries) but the fact that he considers such laughter worth noting in his diary. Pepys’ surprise indeed suggests that hearty laughter was not expected from a “mighty pretty lady,” thus leading us to wonder whether these beautiful modest women could indeed attend the playhouses and laugh at the bawdy puns of Restoration comedy without inducing the male audience’s surprise or even, less benevolently, their self-righteous condemnation. The female audience’s outrage Because they were modest, pure and meek, women play-goers were considered as either clueless or necessarily scandalized by the sexual innuendos of Restoration drama. They were for example supposed to have an “innocent, literal understanding,” to quote the aptly named Horner (yet another element that female play-goers were not expected to grasp), of the word “china” in William Wycherley’s The Country Wife’s famous china scene (Lawrence 74-75). The premise was that women theatre-goers did not laugh because their sense of decency prevailed over their sense of humour, hence their not understanding, or feigning not to understand, the obvious innuendo contained in the multiple references to Horner’s “china,” hence as well the numerous comments on women’s outrage on behalf of Restoration playwrights as opposed to the rare testimonies to their laughter. The question was not whether or not women were receptive to the playwrights’ bawdy comedies but if they found them shocking or acceptable. Women theatre-goers were seen as moral guarantors as was the case in fact with actresses when they were introduced for the first time on stage in 1660. Both on and offstage, women seemed to be confined to the realm of ethics. The patents issued to William D’Avenant and Thomas Killigrew in 1660 and reissued in 1662 show that actresses were perceived as a means of raising moral standards in the theatre. In other words, they would rid the Restoration plays of their smuttiness: We do likewise permit and give leave that all the women’s parts to be acted in either of the said two companies from this time to come may be performed by women, so long as these recreations, which by reason of the abuses aforesaid were scandalous and offensive, may by such reformation be esteemed not only harmless delights, but useful and instructive representations of human life. (Fitzgerald 73)

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This was, as we know, not carried out. There was no reformation of the stage, no smooth transition towards harmless delight and instruction brought about by actresses. It was quite the opposite in fact since actresses came to be likened to prostitutes.3 The fact that such a change from an immoral to a moral theatre did not occur throws light upon the discrepancy between fantasy and reality. Actresses were expected to morally improve Restoration drama but they did not meet these expectations. This might be considered as a clue to what happened in the audience: a similar discrepancy might be identified between the perception of women as moral guarantors and their actual stance on Restoration drama. The female audience’s outrage was constantly alluded to in the prefaces and prologues of the plays in which the playwrights called for the audience’s leniency. The so-called “ladies” were constantly taken to task. The tone adopted by the playwrights alternated between sarcasm and sincere reassurance that no lewd remarks were to be found in the plays, as is exemplified in this excerpt from Thomas Otway’s prologue to Friendship in Fashion (1678): 4 I’ th’ next place, ladies, there’s no bawdy in’t, No, not so much as one well-meaning hint. Nay more, ’twas written every word he says On strictest vigils and on fasting days, When he his flesh to penance did enjoin – Nay, took such care to work it chaste and fine, He disciplined himself at every line. (Payne Fisk 250)

Thomas Otway’s prologue shows that female outrage was yet another source of mockery for the playwrights whose supposed discipline was not to be taken in earnest. My aim here is not to deny the ladies’ outrage. Even though it was often mocked and inflated, it should not be disregarded. It was indeed derided by the playwrights but not in any case invented by them. We can even infer from Edward Ravenscroft’s prologue to Dame Dobson (1684) that some play-going women were in fact active, sometimes gathering to protest against the plays’ smut: His London Cuckolds did afford you sport. That pleas’d the Town, and did divert the Court. But ’cause some squeamish Females of renown, Made visits with design to cry it down,

3. This has been thoroughly analyzed by Pullen. 4. This is one example among many since the figure given by David Roberts is that 40 per cent of the plays’ prologues in the Restoration era were addressed to female playgoers.

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He swore in’s Rage he would their humours fit, And write the next without one word of Wit.

Ravenscroft’s use of the determiner “some” highlights the fact that not all women were offended, something that both Restoration playwrights and modern critics seem to have disregarded. Contrary to her fellow playwrights, Aphra Behn did acknowledge that a female audience was not an indissoluble entity but was made of various personalities which constituted as many reactions to the plays. In her preface to The Lucky Chance, Behn describes her male counterparts as feeling threatened by her successful plays, thus trying to convince the ladies of their lewdness: “When they can no other way prevail with the Town, they charge it with the old never failing Scandal – That ’tis not fit for the Ladys” (185). The use of the expression “the old never failing” contributes to toning down the authenticity of the scandal, being identified by Behn as an artificial condemnation of her plays. She moreover reminds her readers at the end of her preface that “Other Ladys who saw it more than once, whose Quality and Vertue can sufficiently justifie any thing they design to favour, were pleas’d to say, they found an Entertainment in it very far from scandalous” (187). Not only does Behn refuse to consider her female audience as homogeneously scandalized but she also underlines, with the use of the word “entertainment,” that her plays should not be judged only in terms of ethics, that is to say as moral or immoral, but also in terms of pleasure and appreciation of the comic elements, something that John Harrington Smith has failed to heed in his 1948 article. 5 Surprisingly, a similar argument is to be found in Jeremy Collier’s “A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage.” Although his aim is to denounce the playwrights’ affront to women’s dignity, he unwittingly admits that the latter are in fact entertained by Restoration drama’s licentious content: Whence then comes it to pass that those liberties which disoblige so much in conversation should entertain upon the stage? Do women leave all the regards to decency and conscience behind them when they come to the playhouse? Or does the place transform their inclinations, and turn their former aversions into pleasure? Or were their pretenses to sobriety elsewhere nothing but hypocrisy and grimace? (Collier 6)

5. John Harrington Smith indeed depicts female play-goers as a uniform entity aiming to rid Restoration drama of its sexual content: “The ladies had for long been anxious to see risqué wit, facetious lovemaking, and perhaps even coquetry replaced on the stage by decency, sincerity, and honest love” (31).

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Collier is thus expressing his own outrage here rather than the ladies’. By admitting that female play-goers are entertained by “those liberties which disoblige so much in conversation,” he is paradoxically invalidating his own argument since he depicts the stage, or at least enables his readers to perceive the stage, as a parallel world, a realm of illusion and transgression. Instead of highlighting women’s natural decency, Collier’s indignation throws light upon entertainment as being a natural reaction and suggests, even though it is mentioned only to be denied, that modesty might be an artifice. Women under the male audience’s gaze The question of the female audience differs from the study of female readership, since contrary to reading which was confined to the privacy of one’s own home, women were constantly under the male audience’s gaze when attending a play, especially at a time when the spectacle was taking place offstage, that is to say in the auditorium, as much as on stage. This is indeed confirmed by Samuel Pepys’ recurring description of what is going on in the audience, commenting on so-and-so’s hairdo or latest fashion statement. 6 Such scrutiny was considered as essential since women’s faces were supposed to be a reflection of their soul, as is underlined by Richard Allestree in his chapter on meekness: [Nature] having allotted to women a more smooth and soft composition of body, infers thereby her intention, that the mind should correspond with it. For tho the adulterations of art, can represent in the same Face beauty in one position, and deformity in another, yet nature is more sincere, and never meant a serene and clear forhead, should be the frontispiece to a cloudy tempestuous heart. 6. Samuel Pepys, Monday 4 February 1667: “Soon as dined, my wife and I out to the Duke’s playhouse, and there saw “Heraclius,” an excellent play, to my extraordinary content; and the more from the house being very full, and great company; among others, Mrs. Steward, very fine, with her locks done up with puffes, as my wife calls them: and several other great ladies had their hair so, though I do not like it; but my wife do mightily— but it is only because she sees it is the fashion. Here I saw my Lord Rochester and his lady, Mrs. Mallet, who hath after all this ado married him; and, as I hear some say in the pit, it is a great act of charity, for he hath no estate. But it was pleasant to see how every body rose up when my Lord John Butler, the Duke of Ormond’s son, come into the pit towards the end of the play, who was a servant—[lover]—to Mrs. Mallet, and now smiled upon her, and she on him. I had sitting next to me a woman, the likest my Lady Castlemayne that ever I saw anybody like another; but she is a whore, I believe, for she is acquainted with every fine fellow, and called them by their name, Jacke, and Tom, and before the end of the play frisked to another place.”

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At a time when exterior beauty was the sign of a pure mind, it was only logical that women should be afraid of the various conclusions that might be drawn from men’s scrutinizing of their faces when a bawdy pun was uttered on stage. Women were thus unable to laugh or if they did, they had to be particularly vigilant, laughing off the beat, that is to say when no double entendre was spoken, and their laugh had to be akin to a smile, displaying their modesty and meekness. Such studied reaction to the plays’ libertinism was derided by Restoration playwrights, as is exemplified in the following excerpt from John Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife (1697) in which Lady Brute confesses that she attends the playhouse only to be seen: I watch with impatience for the next jest in the play, that I may laugh and show my white teeth. If the poet has been dull and the jest be long a-coming, I pretend to whisper one to my friend, and from thence fall into a little short discourse in which I take occasion to show my face in all humours, brisk, please, serious, melancholy, languishing. Not that what we say to one another causes any of these alterations. (Lawrence 443)

The fourth wall has been broken down in this excerpt since it seems that actresses are to be found in the audience as well. Lady Brute’s laughter is not in any case spontaneous but is an attempt at portraying the ideal woman whom poets celebrate, hence the reference to the Renaissance topos of the ladies’ white teeth, although Lady Brute does not go so far as to compare them with pearls... When Lady Brute says that she wants to show her white teeth, she is therefore not truly laughing but merely displaying the smile that is expected from a lady. Moreover, the “jest” that Lady Brute is alluding to is an innocent display of wit and not in any case a saucy remark, hence the distinction established by the young Bellinda: But my glass and I could never yet agree what face I should make when they come blurt out with a nasty thing in a play. For all the men presently look upon the women, that’s certain; so laugh we must not, though our stays burst for it, because that’s telling truth and owning we understand the jest. And to look serious is so dull, when the whole house is a-laughing. (Lawrence 443)

Bellinda’s dilemma is as follows: she cannot laugh at a double entendre if she does not want to compromise her reputation, yet not participating in the audience’s general mirth makes her feel marginalized. Moreover, Lady Brute reminds her that not laughing is in fact as suspicious as laughing, the female audience thus being caught in a double bind:

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LADY B. Besides, that looking serious does really betray our knowledge in the matter as much as laughing with the company would do; for if we did not understand the thing we should naturally do like other people. BEL.

For my part, I always take that occasion to blow my nose.

LADY B.

You must blow your nose half off then at some plays.

BEL.

Why don’t some reformer or other beat the poet for’t?

LADY B. Because he is not so sure of our private approbation as of our public thanks. Well, sure there is not upon earth so impertinent a thing as women’s modesty. (Lawrence 443)

Not only does John Vanbrugh stage the conflict between private enjoyment of a libertine play and public disapprobation but he challenges his female audience’s modesty by creating in the theatre where his play is being performed the exact situation that is described in this excerpt. Ladies could not laugh at Bellinda’s and Lady Brute’s comments at the risk of betraying their connivance with the duplicitous characters. Despite the obviously comic nature of this excerpt, what is at stake here is therefore a rather cruel and disquieting trap that is set for the female audience to fall into. The bawdy pun becomes akin to sexual assault. The victimization of women Sigmund Freud’s theories on laughter, and more precisely on women’s reception of smut, to be found in Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious, can be used to throw light on the double bind that the female audience was confronted with in the Restoration era. According to Freud, a woman to whom a bawdy pun is addressed is necessarily aroused, even when expressing embarrassment which Freud identifies as being only a defense mechanism against her excitement: Smut is directed to a particular person, by whom one is sexually excited and who, on hearing it, is expected to become aware of the speaker’s excitement and as a result to become sexually excited in turn. Instead of this excitement the other person may be led to feel shame or embarrassment, which is only a reaction against the excitement and, on a roundabout way, is an admission of it. (97)

In case the identity of the “particular person” to whom smut is directed is not clear, Freud feels the need to specify that “smut is thus originally directed towards women and may be equated with attempts at seduction” (97). Freud’s use of the word “seduction” is rather paradoxical since this

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seduction is later on described as an assault, Freud using the lexical field of fighting: Smut is like an exposure of the sexually different person to whom it is directed. By the utterance of the obscene words it compels the person who is assailed to imagine the part of the body or the procedure in question and shows her that the assailant is himself imagining it. It cannot be doubted that the desire to see what is sexually exposed is the original motive of smut. (98)

The use of the verb “to compel” and the opposition between “assailed” and “assailant” clearly pinpoint the aggressive nature of smut, women appearing as the targets of this masculine attack. Women’s victimization is moreover confirmed by Freud’s recurring use of the lexical field of vision with the occurrence of the polyptoton “exposure”/“exposed” and of the verb “to see.” The uttering of the double entendre is thus likened to visual disrobing. This accounts for women’s attempt at hiding their faces when attending a Restoration play, hence the use of masks, or vizards, as they were called at the time. Women play-goers were trying to avoid exposure and the satisfaction of the male audience’s libido: “Through the first person’s smutty speech the woman is exposed before the third, who, as listener, has now been bribed by the effortless satisfaction of his own libido” (Freud 100). Women in the audience thus suffer the same fate as female characters: they are the butt of the playwrights’ and of the male spectators’ jokes. However, while female characters are often in absentia victims of men’s lewd remarks, female play-goers are victimized precisely because of their being present in the playhouse. There are for example no ladies present on stage to hear the shoemaker’s double entendre when describing a shoe in Sir George Etherege’s The Man of Mode: “’Sbud, as smooth as your mistress’s skin does upon her; so, strike your foot in home” (Payne Fisk 96). The male play-goer’s gaze would therefore naturally direct itself towards the auditorium so as to witness and gauge female reaction to the licentious joke. This is why it seems to me that the word “surveillance” could be used in order to describe the scrutiny of women’s faces in the audience. The women whose reactions to smut were dissected could indeed be compared to the prisoners described by Michel Foucault in his commentary on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon: “Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap” (Foucault 200). Visibility was indeed a trap for women theatre-goers whose faces were lit up by the daylight that came in through the windows – the plays being performed in the afternoon –

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as well as the lamps and chandeliers that lit up not only the stage but the audience. Indeed auditorium dimming was not introduced until 1876 meaning that a Restoration audience was not sitting in darkness as a modern audience is, thus enabling the male audience at the time to analyze the ladies’ facial expressions. Women had to refrain themselves from laughing in order not to sully their reputation, hence the very few accounts of feminine laughter in the Restoration era: women’s reception of those plays was gauged, as has already been underlined, in terms of ethics. Whether or not a female spectator was entertained was, as we are reminded by David Roberts, not a point of interest: When a double entendre occurred in the theater, it was up to a woman to make it clear that she understood only the innocent part, however obvious everyone else’s enjoyment of the humour. In both cases, a woman was allowed to judge a play only in so far as it reflected her declared moral character, and in so far as it did that the quality of her response could be gauged by the extent of her embarrassment. (38)

My analysis of the discourses on female laughter has turned out to be an analysis of the absence of such discourse since the unanimously praised modesty of women precluded them from being in any way entertained by the playwrights’ libertine comedies, at least from overtly expressing such entertainment. A clear-cut dichotomy therefore emerges from my reading of these primary sources between masculine sense of humour on the one hand and feminine embarrassment on the other hand, as is exemplified in the following lines from Ravenscroft’s prologue to Dame Dobson: “No double sense shall now your thoughts beguile,/ Make Lady Blush, nor Ogling Gallant Smile.” This shows that discourses on laughter were everything but gender-neutral. Double meanings were supposed to arouse antithetical reactions in the audience. Men were expected to laugh, women to blush, 7 hence the female audience’s double-bind that I have underlined: laughing or not laughing was deemed suspicious, meaning

7. Women themselves seemed to perceive their reaction to comedy exclusively in terms of embarrassment, as is exemplified in this excerpt from the Female Tatler: “Our Sex, form’d for Modesty and Innocence, ought to encourage Tragedy” since comedy can only “draw Conscious Blushes from the Cheek” (Pearson, quoted 38). To what extent do these ladies’ guides to proper conduct reflect the general feminine opinion of the time is a question we are however entitled to ask. Those who addressed these pieces of advice to their female counterparts often did not attend the theatre thus undermining their stances on the plays. There are unfortunately very few testimonies of women play-goers apart from mediated accounts such as Samuel Pepys’ reports on his wife Elizabeth’s attendance at the playhouse.

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that a woman was either wanton or pretended not to be. What might have been a solution in order to escape the male audience’s gaze, that is to say the wearing of vizards, in fact only puts emphasis on this doublebind. Vizards, as is underlined by Pepys, 8 had become a great fashion among the ladies yet prostitutes attending the theatre also wore vizards, Collier ironically describing prostitutes as “the Ladys that are too Modest to show their Faces in the Pit” (6), in fact adding that they only could delight in such obscene comedies: “This entertainment can be fairly designed for none but such. Indeed it hits their palate exactly. It regales their lewdness, graces their character, and keeps up their spirits for their vocation” (6). The double bind thus becomes a triple bind: laughing, blushing or trying to hide one’s face was deemed suspicious, betraying one’s lubricity. Women’s denied laughter thus seems to participate in the general misogynist atmosphere of the time during which “at every level of society men seem to have expected a show of resistance from any woman who was not completely abandoned” (Dickie 200). The ladies’ supposed resistance to bawdy puns thus appallingly seemed to fuel the playwrights’ creativity exactly in the same way as “the woman’s inflexibility” is described by Freud as being “the first condition for the development of smut” (98). Let us hope, at least, that the ladies could have a good laugh behind their vizards. Aloysia ROUSSEAU Université Paris IV – Sorbonne

WORKS CITED

ALLESTREE, Richard. The Ladies Calling (1673). 15 December 2013. BEHN, Aphra. Preface to The Lucky Chance (1686). The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3. Ed. Montague Summers. London: Heinemann, 1915.

8. “Here I saw my Lord Falconbridge, and his Lady, my Lady Mary Cromwell, who looks as well as I have known her, and well clad; but when the House began to fill she put on her vizard, and so kept it on all the play; which of late is become a great fashion among the ladies, which hides their whole face. So to the Exchange, to buy things with my wife; among others, a vizard for herself” (Friday 12 June 1663).

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CHESTERFIELD, Philip Dormer. Letters Written by Lord Chesterfield to his Son (1737-68). Ed. Charles Sayle. London: Walter Scott Publishing, 1909. COLLIER, Jeremy. A Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage (1698). London: Samuel Birt, 1738. CONGREVE, William. Letters and Documents. Ed. John C. Hodges. London: MacMillan, 1964. DICKIE, Simon. Cruelty and Laughter. Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth century. Chicago and London: The U of Chicago P, 2011. FITZGERALD, Percy. A New History of the English Stage. London: Tinsley, 1882. FOUCAULT, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. 1975. London: Penguin, 1977. FREUD, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. 1905. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth press, 1960. GURR, Andrew. Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: CUP, 1987. LAWRENCE, Robert G., ed. Restoration Plays. London: Dent, 1992. LEVIN, Richard. “Women in the Renaissance Theatre Audience.” Shakespeare Quarterly 1989 (40): 165-74. MCMILLIN, Scott, ed. Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Comedy. New York: Norton, 1997. PAYNE FISK, Deborah, ed. Four Restoration Libertine Plays. Oxford: OUP, 2005. PEARSON, Jacqueline. The Prostituted Muse. Images of Women & Women Dramatists, 1642-1737. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988. PEPYS, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 15 December 2013. PULLEN, Kirsten. Actresses and Whores. Cambridge: CUP, 2005. RAVENSCROFT, Edward. Prologue to Dame Dobson (1684). 15 December 2013. ROBERTS, David. The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, 1660-1770. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. SMITH, John Harrington. “Shadwell, the Ladies, and the Change in Comedy.” Modern Philology 46 (1948): 22-33. STEELE, Richard. The Theatre (1720). Ed. John Loftis. London: OUP, 1962.

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