Theater Chronicle
WHAT A PIECE OF WORK IS MAN!
P
ROCEEDING BACKWARD
down the arcade of English comedy, John
Gielgud and his company arrive, in Congreve's
Love for Love
(Royale Theater), at a bay of felicity. From this point, it is possible
to look in one direction toward Jonson and the Elizabethans and in
another toward Sheridan and Wilde. William and Mary were on the
throne when Congreve wrote this comedy; commercial expansion had
begun but the receding rural England was not forgotten, and the mar–
riage of a Stuart princess of romantic heredity to a businesslike Dutch
burgher expressed on the dynastic plane this equivocal moment in English
history which is arrested in
Love for Love,
a play which has no graspable
subject but is like an equation in balance. The whole world of nature is
still present in these London lodgings. Ending in a dance, and inter–
spersed with songs, the play has strong masque suggestions, with the
sea being danced by Brother Ben, red-faced and marine as Poseidon,
the stars by old Foresight, the astrologer, and the earth by the country
girl, Prue, a stumpy little sex fetish rabid with desire of generation.
Here, as with Dogberry and Verges, Shallow a:nd Silence, and the in–
numerable troupe
of
clowns and rustics, rural idiocy is on the one hand
the butt of the playwright and on the other a source of vitality. This
ignorance is bliss, a gift of the Muses, country girls from Pieria them–
selves, to the urbanized author. In much the same way, the stock types
from the earlier comedy are present here, like simples handed down
from one play-doctor to another. The Alchemist survives in Foresight,
Orlando in Valentine, and all those primitive vices and humors in Mr.
Tattle, Mrs. Frail, and Sir Sampson Legend, whose very name proclaims
what he is-an indomitable old myth.
Looking the other way, in what must
be
admitted is a diminishing
perspective, toward Sheridan, Wilde, Coward, one sees at the end of the
vista a drawing-room in which Tattle and Scandal will still be drinking
Valentine's sherry and being wicked and fastidious and selfish and
fatigued. Plato and Epictetus will no longer be found on the table
(Valentine Discover'd Reading would be Valentine discovered dead),
and Jeremy, the manservant, will now
be
called Fetch, but Angelica's
fortune will still be the object, and comfort a necessity to gentlemen
without employment. Those who find Wilde original would do well to
