Attack of the Parliamentary Swamp-Thing

In 1651, an anonymous royalist published an anti-Parliament playlet called The Terrible, Horrible Monster Out of the West. Even better than The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1645), Ariadne Deserted by Theseus and Found and Courted by Bacchus (1654), or A Royal Arbor of Loyal Poesie (1660).

I wonder if Judith Viorst, author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, had a previous life as a Restorationist. Probably not.

In matters of the cloth he is as fickle as can be

On the phone with my thesis adviser this evening:

"Would it be unconscionable if I quoted a 30-page prologue in full at the beginning of my essay?"

"A 30-page--!"

"I mean, I could break it up into smaller pieces, but I don't think my argument would be as clear that way."

"30 pages?"

"Sorry! 30 lines!"

"Oh, that's fine. On the long end of acceptable, but fine. I was thinking, 30 pages--!"

"Oh, God! I'm very tired."

"All right, all right, dear."

This evening is brought to you--well, more properly, to me--by The Kinks' "Dedicated Follower of Fashion," because every thesis needs a theme song. I would also like to congratulate AD on her expert drawings of the back of my head. Tempus fugit. Back to work.

The life of a thesis drone

The best part of writing an honors thesis on Restoration comedy is being allowed to read 30-page articles about fops. Or is that the worst part? The senior who devotes a year to the genre has more or less declared her allegiance to the absurd. It's hard to persuade anyone that characters called Lord Foppington and Sir Fopling Flutter are to be taken seriously. Frankly, if you told Vanbrugh and Etherege that their work had inspired dozens of scholarly studies, they would laugh until they cried.

Over winter break, two friends and I were working, or "working," on our theses in a coffeehouse. One friend was reading about postcolonialism; another was studying theories of consciousness. I was giggling my way through Etherege's She Would if She Could. My friends glanced up from their articles, and I tried to explain the joke: "So there's this knight, Sir Oliver Cockwood--"

I'm afraid I got no further before we dissolved into hysterics.

More by Sedley

To Gaurus
That thou dost shorten thy long Nights with Wine,
We all forgive thee, for so Cato did;
That thou writ'st Poems without one good Line,
Tully's Example may that Weakness hide;
Thou art a Cuckold, so great Caesar was;
Eat'st till thou spew'st, Antonius did the same;
That thou lovst Whores, Jove loves a bucksom Lass;
But that th'art whipt, is thy peculiar Shame.

To Sergius
Thou'lt fight, if any Man call Thebe Whore;
That she is thine, what can proclaim it more.


Sir Charles Sedley (1639-1701) was one of Charles II's infamous "court wits," as renowned for his obscenity as for his epigrams. In 1663, he was arrested for appearing naked on a balcony and throwing bottles of his own urine onto the crowd gathered below, a gimmick that didn't take a Voltaire to contrive (or perform, for that matter). Five years later, Sedley hired thugs to beat up the actor Edward Kynaston for impersonating him in a play. This episode appears in Richard Eyre's hilarious Stage Beauty (2004), though Richard Griffiths, inexplicably, plays Sedley as a dirty old man.

So far as we know, he never became a dirty old man. In fact, he reformed with age. In 1687, he inspired the best description of impotence ever written, in a letter from Etherege to Dryden:

"I am apt to think that you have 'bated something of your mettle since you and I were Rivalls in other matters, tho' I hope you have not yet attain'd the perfection I have heard Sir Charles Sydlie brag of, which is that when a short youth runs quick through every veine and puts him in minde of his ancient prowesse, he thinks it not worth while to bestow motion on his et cetera muscle."

To Scilla

Storm not, brave Friend, that thou hadst never yet
Mistress nor Wife that others did not swive,
But, like a Christian, pardon and forget,
For thy own Pox will thy Revenge contrive.

--Sir Charles Sedley

A friend suggests that this epigram should be inscribed on every free condom at our Health Center.

Put a roasted Orange slasht smoking hot in it

If you want a bottomless fount of obscenity and hilarity, look no further than the Restoration slang lexicon. Restoration readers were obsessed with the lingo of thieves and gypsies, and this craze generated a series of seventeenth-century Urban Dictionaries. I have EEBO to thank for bringing me The New Dictionary of the Canting Crew, a 1699 lexicon plagiarized, appropriately enough, from a similar book published 20 years before. (From the earlier version, Joyce took the slang song in Ulysses: "White thy fambles, red thy gan,/And thy quarrons dainty is.")

It seems almost criminal not to transcribe the whole thing, but I must restrain myself. Some of my favorites, A through C (plus one necessary D):

Abram-men,
the seventeenth Order of the Canting-crew. Beggers antickly trick'd up with Ribbands, Red Tape, Foxtails, Rags, &c. pretending Madness to palliate their Thefts of Poultrey, Linnen, &c.

Academy,
a Bawdyhouse, also an University, or School to learn Genteleman like Exercises.

Alabaster,
mixt by all the knavish Perfumers with the Hair-Powder they sell, to make it weigh heavy, being of it self very cheap, that their Gain may be the greater, found destructive to the Hair and Health.

Arsworm,
a little diminutive Fellow.

Auxiliary-beauty,
Dress, Paint, Patches, setting of Eye-brows, and licking the Lipps with red.

Banter,
a pleasant way of prating, which seems in earnest, but is in jest, a sort of ridicule, What do you banter me? i. e. do you pretend to impose upon me, or to expose me to the Company, and I not know your meaning.

Bear-garden-discourse,
common, filthy, nasty Talk. If it had been a Bear it would have bit you, of him that makes a close search after what just lies under his Nose. As good take a Bear by the Tooth, of a bold desperate Undertaking. Go like the Bear to the Stake, or hang an Arse. As many tricks as a dancing Bear· or more than are good.

Beard splitter,
an enjoyer of Women.

Cabob,
a Loin of Mutton Roasted with an Onyon betwixt each joint; a Turkish and Persian Dish but now used in England.

Click,
to Snatch. I have Clickt the Nab from the Cull, c. I whipt the Hat from the Man's Head. Click the rum Topping, c. Snatch that Woman's fine Commode.

Conger,
a Set or Knot of Popping Book-sellers of London, who agree among themselves, that whoever of them Buys a good Copy, the rest are to take off such a particular number, as (it may be) Fifty, in Quires, on easy Terms. Also they that joyn together to Buy either a Considerable, or Dangerous Copy. And a great over-grown Sea-Eel.

Cracker,
an Arse; also Crust.

Crusty-beau,
one that lies with a Cover over his Face all Night, and uses Washes, Paint, &c.

Damask the Claret,
Put a roasted Orange slasht smoking hot in it.

Every woman is at heart a rake

Because I am an incurable fop, and because no blog is complete without a healthy dose of vanity. Taken last March, in Venice, of course.

(Note for future Grand Tours: Only Americans wear khakis and white button-downs.)

Visited the library today for a collection of essays by L. C. Knights, twentieth-century critic-at-large, who died 12 years ago at the age of 91 (these long-lived Englishmen!). He helped found the take-no-prisoners literary journal Scrutiny, and, according to the DNB, "enjoyed pronouncing the title ‘Scrrrutiny’, with its suitably rasping sound." Back in 1934, in an essay called "Shakespeare and the Shakespeareans," he outlined precisely what I despise about modern literary criticism:

"Mr. [T. S.] Eliot is the only contributor to the book [A Companion to Shakespeare Studies] to ask, or imply, the important question, 'Why should we read what has been written about Shakespeare?' And this, of course, in a world of obvious and urgent duties and distractions, involves some further questions: 'Why should we read Shakespeare? Why should we read poetry at all?' If a centralizing conception of poetry and its function is lacking in this book, this is not because it is by fourteen different writers, but because Shakespeare studies, in common with other intellectual pursuits, have suffered from the decay of a unifying tradition - have, in consequence, lost their life in becoming a specialism, or a collection of specialisms, with their own codes and standards. Whilst the tradition was alive, the answers to our questions were implicit within it. Some of the eighteenth-century critics were unimportant enough, but almost any paragraph of their work implies a social and moral world; and their appeal is to this world, not to 'workers in the same field.'"

This was 75 years ago; one can only imagine what Knights would say about today's academy. How odd that so many scholars agree with him, and not one can figure out how to alter the status quo.

(Knights also dismissed Restoration comedy as "trivial, gross, and dull," but no critic is perfect.)

Ask me not of love, for every man hates every man perfectly and women are still the same bitches.

--John Dryden to George Etherege, 1687

Sic incipio

I am not a Restorationist; I am too young, callow, and frivolous to be an -ist of any sort. I am merely a college senior with a healthy crush on the English Restoration, the span of time between Charles II's coronation in 1660 and his death in 1685. (For the benefit of faulty memories everywhere, Charles was kind enough to live and die in multiples of five.) After a decade of civil war, and another of Puritan rule (Cromwell closed the theaters and banned Christmas), England saw a cultural explosion: plays, poems, periwigs, perversion. Public morality relaxed. Women acted on the stage for the first time. Courtiers danced naked in gardens. Scientists like Robert Boyle and Christopher Wren founded the Royal Society (though they kept their clothes on). And Samuel Pepys wrote it all down.

The 1660s were a bit like the 1960s (hence my nod to The Who), and the Restoration produced the same cultural backlash: by 1700, it was no longer fashionable to smash windows and write poems about impotence. The aging rake, like the aging hippie three centuries later, became a common trope in fiction: feeble and syphilitic, nostalgic for the debauches of his youth. Restoration literature fared even worse at the hands of the Victorians, and suffered from scholastic prudery well into the twentieth century. As late as the 1920s, the editors of Etherege and Wycherley hinted that these dramatists had longed to write about daisies and rainbows, but alas! fashion had compelled them to be lewd.

Tastes have changed since then, but Restoration literature was so underrated for so many decades that almost no one reads it today. The average English major will be lucky to encounter one Restoration comedy in four years. In the unlikely event that she takes the GRE Lit, she'll have to memorize a few dull catchphrases: "war between the sexes," "comedy of manners," "social mobility." This can't go on.

But why should I care? you ask. My job is to give you an answer.

So what can you expect from this blog? I'd class my offerings under the humble label of stuff: poems, epigrams, letters, images, scraps of plays, self-indulgent screeds. It might be fun. We'll see.