Hey there!
I’m Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and Yorick brought tissues today,
because we are taking on sentimental tragedy, which is going to make you cry.
And sentimental comedy, which ... will also make you cry.
We’re back in England, too, and I’m sorry to tell you that after all that Restoration
smuttiness the 18th-century theater had a moral crisis: good characters should
be rewarded, they said, and bad characters should be punished, they claimed.
Adultery and venereal disease?
Not cool, they griped.
Also, Parliament was like, "Maybe what we need
is a lot more censorship.
And fewer theaters!"
Have they learned NOTHING?
Well, it was lewd while it lasted, friends.
Lights up!
[INTRO MUSIC]
Before we get to the REALLY sad stuff, we’re
going to look at sentimental comedy, the only-kind-of-sad genre that replaced Restoration comedy.
Today “sentimental” means corny, or sappy—overly emotional in a bad way.
Eighteenth-century writers used it to mean all that same stuff but in a good way.
By exciting emotions like pity or sorrow, playwrights thought they could encourage an
audience to make better moral choices.
So yeah, pretty different from Restoration comedy, which was witty, rascally, and deeply
cynical about human nature and society.
And I mean, when you’ve just come through an intensely horrible and bloody civil war,
you might be feeling a wee bit disillusioned.
But, sentimental comedy is all about re-illusionment.
Which illusions you might ask?
Well I’m glad you did.
Sentimental comedy promotes the Enlightenment idea that people are mostly good, unless they
encounter bad influences.
In plays by Richard Steele and his contemporaries, good people triumph over adversity, and bad
people get their comeuppance.
Funny stuff is reserved for servants.
Marriage is, once again, the happy ending.
The best known sentimental comedy is Richard Steele’s 1722 play “The Conscious Lovers,”
which is based on a comedy of Terence, I’m sure you’re shocked to learn.
In this comedy, the poor but virtuous Indiana isn’t able to marry the man she loves, because
she’s a dowry-less orphan.
There are a lot of couples and a lot of complications and a lot of interfering relatives.
And then, at the end, Indiana drops a bracelet, and it turns out she’s rich after all.
Then it’s conscious coupling for everyone.
So - ok - it’s a comedy but … is it funny?
Not really.
Steele wrote in a preface that he wanted to create “a pleasure too exquisite for laughter.”
How English!
Also, for the record, Steele’s own idea of “pleasure” included drinking and dueling,
so maybe not the best dude to be writing for yuks.
Oliver Goldsmith would later criticize sentimental comedy for not being fun enough, but still,
these plays allowed audiences to have a good cry and do some serious virtue-signaling.
If you were moved, it meant that you had a good and tender heart.
People with good and tender hearts don’t giggle.
Sentimental plays aren’t hilarious, though some of the funny is restored when sentimental
comedy evolves into the laughing comedies or the comedies of manners that Oliver Goldsmith
and Richard Brinsley Sheridan wrote.
You want to know what was even less funny than a pleasure too exquisite for laughter?
Bourgeois tragedy, the sad-ending version of sentimental comedy.
Greek tragedy and Shakespearean tragedy weren’t all that invested in teaching moral lessons—unless
those lessons are that the universe is cruel, and players gonna play, so just get on with
it, Hamlet!
Bourgeois tragedy is all about using recognizable characters and situations to school the audience
in appropriate behavior, mostly by showing them that inappropriate behavior gets you
hanged.
Bourgeois tragedy did this by encouraging the audience to identify with the tragic hero.
As Adam Smith writes in the 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments: “My thesis is that
our fellow-feeling for the misery of others comes from our imaginatively changing places
with the sufferer, thereby coming to conceive what he feels or even to feel what he feels.”
The audience was urged to imaginatively change places with the sufferer and feel all of his
difficult feelings.
This move would prompt the audience to make better moral choices, avoiding miserable feelings
in real life.
To help with the place-changing, writers of sentimental tragedies often looked to newspapers
and ballads instead of myths and legends.
They wanted their tragedies to relate directly to the middle-class people watching them.
So they wrote about contemporary merchants and tradesmen instead of ancient nobles and
gods.
The playwright George Lillo defended this choice, which was controversial at the time,
saying “it is more truly great to be the instrument of good to many who stand in need
of our assistance than to a very small part of that number.”
Let’s look at Lillo’s most famous tragedy, the 1731 play “The London Merchant.”
Lillo based his play on a real seventeenth-century murder, which had become the subject of a
popular ballad.
On opening night, the crowd was like, “Writing a tragedy based on a ballad about an apprentice?
So lame.”
They came to laugh at his play, but by the end: were in tears.
Get your tissues ready.
Here’s the Thought Bubble: George Barnwell, is an apprentice to Thorowgood,
a London merchant.
He falls under the sway of Millwood, an evil prostitute.
She invites him to… dinner, and then tells him that because of their…
dinner, she’s being evicted.
So George steals a bunch of money from his master to pay her rent.
Because George is a good guy when he’s not being led astray by evil prostitutes,
he confesses and runs away.
This makes Millwood grouchy.
But then she remembers that George has a rich uncle, whom she convinces George to rob and
murder.
That must have been some… dinner.
George arrives in disguise and murders his uncle.
But with his dying words, the uncle asks forgiveness for both his nephew and his murderer.
George is like, “They’re both me,” and with more dying words the uncle is all, “It’s
okay.”
So George is too sad to rob him.
When George shows up at Millwood’s without the money, she has him arrested.
But then her servants have her arrested, and they’re both sentenced to death.
Millwood doesn’t repent, because… evil.
But George does, and he goes to his death peacefully.
Then his friends come out to remind everyone to learn from George’s mistakes.
The play upholds basic sentimental beliefs: people are mostly good, but can be led astray
by evil influences.
We should learn from the moral errors of others.
Don’t rob or kill people.
Especially rich people.
Which probably explains why, for almost a century, London apprentices were sent by their
bosses to see this play every year.
You know, just, like, as a friendly reminder.
Thanks, ThoughtBubble.
Sentimental comedies and bourgeois tragedies weren’t the only kinds of theater on offer
in early modern England.
Remember how every so often governments decide that theater is dangerous and needs a lot
of regulating?
Well, this is one of those times!
In the 1730s, regulation of the theaters was divided up haphazardly among the Lord Chamberlain,
the Treasury and the occasional judge.
Which means it wasn’t being regulated much at all.
There were a bunch of political satires mocking Parliament and the king,
most of them written by Henry Fielding.
In response, some ministers were like,
"Hey, remember when the Master of Revels could just censor stuff?
Let’s bring that back!"
Robert Walpole convinced them to pass the Licensing Act of 1737 by taking one of the
most offensive plays, “The Golden Rump,” and reading it aloud in Parliament.
Worth noting, though, that no manuscripts of The Golden Rump exist, and it doesn’t
appear to have ever been performed in public.
How suspicious!
One theory is that Walpole commissioned it HIMSELF... for political purposes.
SO TRICKY.
So Effective.
The Licensing Act said that only two London theaters, Drury Lane and Covent Garden, could
present spoken drama, though Parliament later gave a license for the summer months to Samuel
Foote at the Haymarket, as repayment for a prank the Duke of York pulled, betting that
Foote couldn’t ride an unrideable horse.
Turns out: He couldn’t!
And then they had to amputate his leg.
The licensing act also said that no plays could be performed “for gain, hire, or reward”
without the prior approval of the government.
Of course, a lot of theaters got around this.
They’d charge for a concert, or a beer or an auction and accidentally stage a play.
WHOOPS!
But sometimes theaters were caught, and many of them closed.
The closure of the New Wells Theater led its proprietor, William Hallam, to send a troupe
of players to America, and—as we’ll see—that helped get American theater going.
Another work-around was to avoid presenting spoken dramas by dancing them, miming them
or using puppets.
A rule known as the burletta rule said that a drama wasn’t “spoken” as long as there
were five pieces of incidental music in it, so suddenly there was a lot of musical theater.
A version of commedia dell’arte also appeared in this period, now called pantomime.
Acting also underwent some changes in the eighteenth century.
The main style of the period was declamatory.
Actors faced front and loudly orated,
even when the characters were supposed to be
talking to each other.
But just as bourgeois tragedy was taking baby steps toward realism,
acting likewise inched toward the lifelike.
The trend started with the Scottish actor Charles Macklin, but its biggest proponent
was David Garrick, the most famous and versatile actor of his day.
Like other actors, Garrick delivered his speeches facing front, but he departed from the sing-song
style of verse-speaking and tried to make his lines sound natural and conversational.
One of his techniques was to make his characters stammer in moments of great emotion.
Natural, right?
At the time, actors would only rehearse a new play three hours per day for two weeks,
but Garrick extended that rehearsal period and asked the other actors to actually act
during rehearsals instead of just marking cues and blocking.
Man, what an actual acting taskmaster!
Theaters had become very big, swelling to accommodate more than three thousand spectators—because
if you’re one of two licensed theaters in the city, you’re gonna pack them in.
By the later half of the eighteenth century, they had big, elaborate scenery to match.
The whole situation became even more ~theatrical~ when Garrick kicked the audience off the stage.
Scenic innovations were becoming more realistic as well.
While sets used to be generic—every theater would have a go-to temple or palace or garden—some
theater managers started to insist on specific settings for each production and hired scene
painters to realize them.
Costume designers also pushed their craft toward realism.
And candles were gradually removed from the stage, replaced with lamps and reflectors
for more precise lighting.
Sometimes that lighting was even colored!
Today, sentimental comedy and bourgeois tragedy don’t seem especially realistic, and eighteenth-century
acting would strike us as ridiculous.
But these were some of the first actors trying to close the gap between drama and real life,
so to speak, and some of the first serious plays to focus on middle-class characters,
insisting that real conflicts and emotions don’t belong to the nobility alone.
And that was a big deal.
As the eighteenth century became the nineteenth, theatrical changes abound.
Next time, Sturm clouds on the horizon, Sturmy weather, and a Sturm front a-coming.
We’ll head to Germany for the first time since we discussed the morality plays, and
we’ll check in on Sturm, Drang, and romanticism.
Things aren’t looking so moral this time.
But until then… curtain!
Crash Course Theater is produced in association with PBS Digital Studios.
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and It's Okay To Be Smart.
Crash Course Theater is filmed in the Chad and Stacy Emigholz Studio in Indianapolis,
Indiana,
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