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Mémoire et oubli dans le monde anglophone des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

Purging the Past and Gauging the Future: Stage Puritans as Manifestations of Religious Trauma in Restoration Comedies Adapted from European Sources (1660-1689)

Alice Marion-Ferrand

Résumés

Cet article s’intéresse à cinq comédies de la Restauration créées entre le retour de Charles II en Angleterre et la Glorieuse Révolution, qui mettent toutes en scène la question religieuse et sont adaptées de sources françaises, espagnoles et anglaises (élisabéthaines et jacobéennes) : The Law Against Lovers (1663) de William Davenant, Tartuffe or the French Puritan (1670) de Matthew Medbourne, Sir Patient Fancy (1678) d’Aphra Behn, The Spanish Fryar, or the Double-Discovery (1681) de John Dryden, et Sir Courtly Nice, or It Cannot Be (1685) de John Crowne. En étudiant ce corpus par le prisme des personnages religieux, et notamment celui du dévot puritain, cet article a pour but de montrer comment les comédies de la Restauration tentent de purger le traumatisme de l’Interrègne puritain tout en usant de sa mémoire pour interroger les crises actuelles et à venir. Il s’agit ici d’étudier la fonction cathartique comique de ces pièces, l’actualisation de la figure du Puritain à la Restauration, ainsi que l’idée d’un continuum entre Puritains et Catholiques sur scène qui serait à la source d’un réseau de sens sous-jacent pour les spectateurs de l’époque.

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  • 1 See entries for 11 September 1661, 6 January 1663, and 20 January 1669.
  • 2 Emerging from eighteen years of banned theatrical activity and faced with the sudden reopening of t (...)

1When the theatres officially reopened in 1660 after eighteen years of Puritan ban, one of the first plays performed was an adaptation by William Davenant of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night that was then regularly revived on the Restoration stage, notably in 1661, 1663 and 1669 as mentioned in Pepys’ diary.1 The end of the Restoration period also saw another adaptation of Shakespeare’s play, William Burnaby’s Love Betray’d, or, The Agreeable Disappointment which premiered in 1703. Adaptations of Twelfth Night and its outstanding Puritan character Malvolio framed the period, highlighting two important features of Restoration comedy, the processes of adaptation that crucially participated in the creation of the Restoration dramatic corpus,2 and the haunting presence of Puritan figures on that stage.

  • 3 It is worth mentioning that the notion of trauma and traumatic memory as they are used in this arti (...)

2Although the restored regime was to face many moments of crisis culminating in the 1689 Glorious Revolution and the deposition of James II of England and VII of Scotland, Charles II’s accession to the English throne symbolised, for a time, a return to order and stability. The Interregnum had been marked by traumatising3 social, cultural and political instability: the civil wars killed four percent of the English population, a higher percentage than in both World Wars (Peck 2‑3), wounding many more; the Regicide represented a cultural shock; and the change in regime realised the fear of a breakdown of social order that, according to David Underdown, “[was] at no time […] more widespread, or more intense, than in early modern England” (116). The Interregnum cemented three connected fears that had already existed in the early Stuart period, as explained by Jonathan Scott: fear of religious dissent; fear of arbitrary government; and fear for the survival of the English monarchy (Scott 166). Paulina Kewes argues that the realisation of these fears during the Interregnum led to the anxiety that the same would happen again:

The fear that history would repeat itself, and that the country would be torn apart by another civil war, haunted post-1660 England until (and beyond) the relatively bloodless revolution of 1688-9. Parallels between the recent past and the present were being obsessively drawn: during the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis the Whigs were accused of aping the seditious politics of the Puritan rebels; Charles II and in due course James II were denounced by their opponents as popish tyrants in the mould of Charles I. (103)

3As such, it seems relevant to analyse references to the Interregnum in terms of traumatic memory and as haunting manifestations of an unresolved past that shaped English people’s relationship to contemporary troubles, in particular regarding the perceived threat of Catholicism.

  • 4 Although theatre and performance have historically been absent from trauma studies – which can in p (...)

4In The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson defines the theatre as both haunted by the past – past texts, past performances, past memories of the audience – and as “a site of the continuing reinforcement of memory by surrogation” (2). At the same time, studies focusing on the interrelation between trauma and performance4 have highlighted the usefulness of performance in enabling people to confront their traumas and, in doing so, interrogate and perhaps even remediate them (Duggan 335). The dialectic between the perpetuation of memory through performance and the cathartic function of theatre – not of tragedy, here, but of comedy – is the focus of this study. My contention is that observing the figure of the stage Puritan and its echoes from 1660 to 1689 reveals how Restoration comedy attempted to purge this traumatic memory through laughter-inducing ridicule while also contributing to its resurgence. I will focus on five comedies adapted from Elizabethan/Jacobean, French or Spanish sources featuring stage Puritans, Catholics and nonconformists: William Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers (1663), adapted from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Much Ado About Nothing; Matthew Medbourne’s Tartuffe, or the French Puritan (1670), adapted from Molière’s Le Tartuffe, ou l’Imposteur (1669); Aphra Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy (1678), adapted from Molière’s Le Malade imaginaire (1673), with scenes and characters from L’Amour médecin (1665), Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1669) and Les Femmes savantes (1672); John Dryden’s The Spanish Friar, or, the Double Discovery (1680), adapted from Quinault’s tragedy Astrate, Roi de Tyr (1665) and Brémond’s novella Le Pèlerin (1676-78); and John Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice, or It Cannot Be (1685), adapted from Moreto’s No puede ser (1654). Examining adaptation processes and cultural exchanges helps situate the plays in a common European literary and dramatic heritage while discovering the singularities of English adaptations and the English context. I shall examine how Restoration comedies struggled to overcome the trauma of the Interregnum, and how the figure of the Puritan in this context was updated to deal with current issues, postulating the possibility of a continuum between stage Puritans and stage Catholics.

Coping with the trauma of the Interregnum

  • 5 The Marprelate controversy started when a Puritan writer (or writers) published pamphlets under the (...)
  • 6 The Elizabethan and Jacobean clown is a protean entity. The term could designate both a type of com (...)

5The stereotype of the stage Puritan appeared during the Martin Marprelate controversy of 1588-89.5 The stage took up the anti-Martinist pamphlets’ representation of Puritans mocking them as hypocritical fools, and added to it. Puritans came to be associated with the carnivalesque figure of the rebellious clown6 attempting to level hierarchy (Hornback 40). The stage Puritan cemented the use of the name, for the “godly”, as they sometimes preferred to call themselves, had up to this point been referred to as reformers, disciplinarians or simply as “them” (Collinson 168). Stage Puritans were defined by an established set of idiosyncrasies associated with the recurring (meta)dramatic theme of hypocrisy: “outward piety (indicated by the white of the upturned eye), inner corruption consisting of avarice, lust and sedition – in a word, hypocrisy incarnate” (Collinson 167). Stage Puritans regularly concealed their corruption and perversion behind a mask of moral purity. Religious cant immediately identified them as Puritans. “Brethren” and its levelling connotations in particular “served as recognizable shorthand for characterising Puritans” (Hornback 44). Constant references to God and “the spirit” emphasised their godliness – although, as Hornback points out, “actual Puritans typically opposed taking the Lord’s name in vain” (Hornback 45). Satirical references to actual Puritan beliefs such as the need for more reformation, the lack of hierarchy in Eden, or their suspicion of devils also worked as identifying features (Hornback 51). Finally, despite their emphasis on preaching and scripture, stage Puritans were generally depicted as ignorant and violent, a dangerous combination which could easily lead to rebellion – and, in these plays, often did (Hornback 48, 55). According to Hornback, the association of the godly with ignorance was rooted in the movement’s inclusion of unlearned “brethren” under the same umbrella term “Puritan” as more learned preachers (49).

  • 7 See for example John Denham’s Prologue to His Majesty at the First Play Presented at the Cock-Pit i (...)
  • 8 Antony McKenna argues that in Molière’s plays, the link between medical and religious satire is onl (...)

6Stereotypical representation of the Puritans on stage returned after the Restoration. It went on throughout the period, fuelled by the Puritan ban on the stage and by the parallel between the restoration of the stage and that of monarchy – a staple of Restoration drama from 1660.7 The title character of Behn’s Sir Patient Fancy (1678) shares many of the traits of his French model. Sir Patient, like Argan, is a wealthy citizen and a credulous cuckold who blindly trusts charlatans and tries to use his paternal authority to impose on his family his misguided conceptions. Unlike Molière, however, Behn does not leave the association between trust in medicine and fanatical religious beliefs as a subtext requiring textual keys.8 Sir Patient is clearly identified as a Puritan: he calls other London officeholders “brethren” (5.1), is afraid of spirits (3.3) and violently rants against the music played at his house during revelries, which he associates with Roman Catholicism and terms “Antichristian”:

Sir Pat. Ah the house is beset, surrounded and confounded with profane tinkling, with Popish Horn-Pipes and Jesuitical Cymballs, more Antichristian and Abominable then Organs, or Anthems.
Nurs. Yea verily, and surely it is the spawn of Cathedrall Instruments plaid on by Babylonish Minstrells, only to disturb the Brethren. (3.3)

Behn here amplifies the Puritan association of church organs with Catholicism and High Anglicanism that led to the destruction of many such instruments during the Interregnum (Lehmberg 26‑29), turning it into a rejection of all sound and music, considered heretical. Although Sir Patient Fancy’s name is meant to reflect his hypochondriac tendencies, it can also be construed as a typically Puritan name referencing the virtue of patience, faith-related names being one of the identifying characteristics of stage Puritans (Zeal-of-the-Land in Bartholomew Fair, Mrs. Saintly in Limberham, or The Kind Keeper, Tickletext in The Feign’d Curtezans, and of course Testimony, to mention but a few). Other characters also contribute to the depiction of Sir Patient as a ridiculous stage Puritan. His wife defines his religion as nothing more than rebelliousness and contradiction: “[he] is as vainly proud of me as of his Rebellious opinion, for his Religion means nothing but that, and Contradiction” (2.1).

7Behn’s satirical use of Puritanism is not limited to Sir Patient. The play’s many doctors are also associated with Puritanism and significantly called “damn’d canting Rascals” (5.1) by one of the wits, as well as “New-fashon’d Conventiclers” (5.1). Two of them come from the Low Countries where religious dissidents could obtain medical degrees, which was not possible in England (Birken). In Behn’s adaptation, the Puritan motif is part of a larger satirical network amplifying and acclimatising Molière’s satire. Sir Patient is a Puritan, a fool believing in charlatanism, and a citizen promoting mercantile values at odds with those of the elite. As religious satire is made explicit, Puritan figures invade the stage, providing a large part of the play’s comedy. The same goes in Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice, in which Testimony, a “Canting Hypocritical Fanatick” according to the dramatis personae, is added to the original sources, Moreto’s No puede ser and its first Restoration adaptation, Tarugo’s Wiles. Testimony becomes a central antagonist, contributing an additional comic dimension to the play that is absent from the Spanish source and its earlier adaptation. Several episodes of comedy, featuring Testimony making sexual innuendo to female characters (1.1), accusing anyone and everyone of being a papist (2.2), or getting beaten up by the radical Anglican Hothead (5.4) are added to Moreto’s original, which features no such religious satire.

8The addition of stage Puritans and their prevalence in these adaptations is a testament to the relevance of these figures – and to the lingering trauma of the Interregnum – as well as to their comic potential. They act as purveyors of comical catharsis, understood here both as one of the formal functions of the play and as the resulting psychological effect on the audience. Dramatically, they act as “barrier characters,” a term used by Philip Stewart to designate characters that must be either defeated or banished for the play to end well and for society to be rehabilitated (184). And by showcasing ridiculous behaviours, they have a moralising effect on the audience: “Comme la passion tragique, le ridicule est une question d’excès ; en l’observant sur la scène on apprend à être économe sans être avare, pieux sans être dévot ou hypocrite, et ainsi de suite” (Stewart 186). The effect of comic catharsis is thus twofold. Through mockery and laughter from audience and characters alike, these figures are drained of their threatening quality and reduced to ridiculous, easily defeated antagonists. Sir Patient rejects the Puritan faith without much fuss at the end of Behn’s play, Testimony is run off stage by Hothead, leaving the young lovers free to marry without interference. The comedy also serves as a reminder that such behaviours are to be avoided, keeping the audience from repeating the errors of the past. The trauma of the interregnum is allayed as former threats as rendered powerless in the stage-world and as moral teachings encourage people to steer clear of puritanical behaviours.

  • 9 Pepys for example regrets the anti-puritanism of Bartholomew Fair in the entry of 4 September 1668:(...)

9But instead of uniformly prompting a comic catharsis, the play could be seen as dividing the audience between those who feel they are being targeted by the satirical representation of Puritans,9 and those who laugh at it. Yet the status of the stage Puritan as a Restoration comedy stereotype erodes its historical realism, as Florence March notes about Sir Patient Fancy:

À cette date, le personnage du puritain est devenu un archétype de la comédie de mœurs de la Restauration qui déréalise en grande partie la réalité historique de l’Interrègne tout en en réactivant paradoxalement la mémoire. Sir Patient Fancy ne provoque donc pas tant un rire d’exclusion, qui viserait les bourgeois présents dans la salle, qu’un rire inclusif, rassembleur, dont le potentiel réparateur se fonderait sur la construction d’une mémoire collective pour dépasser le traumatisme sans pour autant l’ignorer. (2023, 21)

10Moreover, unlike actual scapegoats, stage Puritans are not automatically banished at the end of the plays but are likely to undergo some kind of reformation, giving up their puritanical ways in favour of religious conformism and a general moderation that contributes to the happy ending. Sir Patient Fancy ends with the eponymous character’s self-proclaimed reformation:

  • 10 Behn’s use of the word “reformation” also seems ironic considering that Puritans advocated further (...)

Sir Pat. I forgive it you, and will turn Spark, they live the merriest lives – keep some City Mistress, go to Court, and hate all Conventicles.
You see what a fine City Wife can doe
Of the true breed: Instruct her Husband too:
I wish all civil Cuckolds in the Nation,
Would take Example by my Reformation.
(5.1) 10

Although Sir Patient’s changes appear minimal (he remains, after all, an inane, avaricious citizen cuckolded by his wife), the play still emphasises the notion of reformation, which rhymes here with nation. The ending of Behn’s play seems to suggest that the nation can be reformed and the Interregnum’s trauma be overcome, and that Puritans do not have to be excluded for society to endure. Sir Patient’s example presents Puritans as reformable figures that, given the right incentive, can assume sparkish manners – considered here, as in many Restoration comedies of manners, as the norm. The nation represented by Behn is not so much one of toleration based on the neighbourly coexistence of various religious confessions and opinions, as one of conformity to the moderate Anglicanism displayed by other characters.

  • 11 For an analysis of the play as a “product of both the tragicomedy and heroic schools,” see Gellert.

11The notion of reformation is even more conspicuous in William Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers (1663), an adaptation of Measure for Measure with elements from Much Ado About Nothing. In Davenant’s play, puritanical Angelo becomes a heroic lover11 whose tyrannical, unseemly behaviour is motivated by his love for Isabella. He condemns Claudio to death as a means of luring Isabella out of the convent and propositions her to test her virtue. The Mariana plot and the bed trick are also excised, leaving Davenant’s Angelo innocent of the wrongdoings committed by Shakespeare’s. As Caitlin McHugh notes, “[the] faults [of Davenant’s Angelo] lie in confusing his public duties and power with his private desires and in failing to trust his love to be virtuous” (44). Not only is Davenant’s Angelo forgiven for his inconsequential mistakes at the end of the play, but he is given Isabella’s hand in marriage by the Duke – who offers to marry her himself in the original. Davenant’s reformation of Shakespeare’s character is retroactive. He keeps most of Angelo’s lines and actions identical to Shakespeare’s original but does not reveal until the end of Act 4 that Angelo was actually motivated by true love, not lust and pharisaical adherence to the law. Gone is the misruling hypocritical Puritan of the first four acts – a mere disguise:

My heart does differ from my looks and tongue,
To know you much I have deceived you long. […]
I'll now, at once, cast off my whole disguise. (4.1)

By changing Angelo’s true motives and only revealing them at the end of the play, Davenant retains Shakespeare’s puritanical character and the anti-Puritan satire that goes with it, but devises a final twist enabling the reformation conducive to a happy ending. In The Law Against Lovers, Puritanism is but a fearful disguise donned by misguided lovers, easily discarded and forgotten.

12By orienting their satire towards reformation, not exclusion, Behn’s and Davenant’s plays urge a reconciliation of the social body as a means of overcoming the trauma of the Interregnum. But they pair it with derision, making Restoration stage Puritans oscillate between rejection and eventual reconciliation and reintegration into society – but only once they let go of their puritanical tendencies. And while their references to Puritans and the Interregnum serve to come to terms with collective trauma, they also regularly reactivate their memory, preventing the audience from moving on.

Updating the figure of the Puritan

  • 12 For example, Crowne’s 1681 Shakespeare adaptation Henry the Sixth: the First Part was suppressed be (...)
  • 13 An interesting change made by Behn is the addition of another stage Puritan, Ananias Goggle, to the (...)

13As the period went on, stage Puritans became tied with current issues, echoing contemporary fears of history repeating itself. The 1680s in particular saw a wide range of comedies featuring political satire as a reaction to the political unrest sparked by the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. In 1680, anti-Catholic satire echoed the exclusionist offensive, but was partly censored12 and soon replaced by negative references to the Interregnum and anti-Puritan satire in line with the anti-exclusionist counter-offensive of 1681-82 (Whiting 31). The fear of another civil war was exploited by the anti-exclusionist camp, as in Charles II’s declaration of 8 April 1681 read in all churches, associating the actions of the Whigs with those of the Puritans in the 1640s and reminding the people of “the miseries endured during the commonwealth” (Whiting 30‑31). The stage mirrored this argument. Stage Puritan now conjured up the memory of the Interregnum in relation to current events. A clear example is Behn’s and Thomas D’Urfey’s reworkings of early Restoration plays satirising the Puritan regime. Behn adapted John Tatham’s The Rump (1660) with The Roundheads, or, The Good Old Cause (1681), while D’Urfey reworked Robert Howard’s The Committee (1662) into The Royalist (1682).13

14Crowne’s Sir Courtly Nice was published in 1685, after the Exclusion Crisis had seemingly been resolved with James II/VII now on the English throne. Crowne’s religious satire reflects this slightly more serene context: he uses a specular structure to mock both Puritans and the fear of a Whig rebellion replicating that of the Puritans. Testimony has all the characteristics of the stage Puritan: he is called a “canting Coxcomb” (4.1) and a “rude Clown” (2.1); uses affected, redundant language; considers Anglican ministers to be “formal, weak, ignorant, poor Souls” (1.1); abhors Lent and fasting, calling it “Popery” (1.1); and his Puritan cant poorly conceals his secret lust. Testimony’s topicality is not intrinsic but generated by his interactions with another religious extremist, Hothead, an Anglican described in the dramatis personae as “A cholerick Zealot against Fanaticks.” Hothead’s topical references link Testimony with the crisis of the early 1680s: he accuses Testimony of being in a plot (1.1), threatens him with forcing him to take the oath of allegiance (3.1), declares that “[t]he rotten rump shou’d ha’ been burnt – when ’twas only Roasted” (3.1), refers to coffee-houses, calling them “fanatic” (4.1), and announces that “Forty One is coming in ding dong” (4.1). It is through Hothead’s foreboding comments that Testimony becomes tied with the Exclusion Crisis. The stage Puritan serves to reactivate the memory of the Interregnum, while his Anglican counterpart connects him with current events. As such, the trauma of the Interregnum is not so much represented or written in the play as referenced through key words and phrases leaving the audience free to extrapolate.

15Crowne’s play could be seen as openly partisan to the Crown – after all, it dramatises one of the main arguments of the anti-exclusionist camp which, in 1685, was considered to have prevailed. Besides, the play was commissioned by Charles II before his death. Yet, rather than only target the Whigs, Crowne mocks the conflict itself, seen as a meaningless dispute between two equally ridiculous parties. Admittedly, representing the crisis as ludicrous could be seen as a critique of the Whigs who started it, but by representing both sides as equally ridiculous, Crowne avoids alienating part of the audience and potentially reigniting the conflict. Testimony and Hothead’s ceaseless bickering regularly delays the plot, introducing serious concerns that turn into trivial comic episodes in the world of the comedy. These arguments, generally being watched by other characters, in particular by Leonora and Viola, the play’s witty genlewomen, function metadramatically as scenes within scenes amusing both on and off-stage audiences. Testimony and Hothead appear as opposites, equally ridiculous and endowed with similar comic traits. Both attempt to violently impose political and religious concerns upon matters of the heart, turning these concerns into irrelevant tomfoolery which serves to entertain the rest of the household and the audience. Through the mise en abyme of these arguments, Crowne overtly dramatises the Exclusion Crisis from a distanced perspective, depicting it as nothing more than a laughing matter.

16Although Crowne’s play satirises the Exclusion Crisis, the figure of the stage Catholic is conspicuously absent from it, presumably for reasons of censorship and patronage. Yet I would argue that Crowne’s use of the stage Puritan implicitly conjures up the figure of the stage Catholic.

Stage Puritans and stage Catholics: a continuum

17The notion of a correlation between Puritans and Catholics did not appear during the Restoration. According to Jonathan Scott, “the equation of radical protestantism [sic] with popery had been a feature of English protestant thinking since the time of Elizabeth and James I” (164). As shown by Adam Morton, the notion of “popery”, although originally and etymologically associated with Roman Catholicism, was used in remarkably plastic ways in the early modern period:

[The catch-all label “popery”] had the immediacy of a clarion call and the imprecision of a mirage. “Popery” could mean papal power, or, slightly wider, all Catholic practice, or, stretching beyond Catholicism, episcopacy or any aspect of doctrine and liturgy in any denomination, and, stretching farther still, any belief (religious or otherwise) deemed unreasonable or “superstitious.” “Popery” was also used in contradictory ways. […] “Popery” was used by Whigs in the later 17th century to damn Stuart “absolutism” as a “popish” emulation of Louis XIV and an affront to the “Protestantism” of parliamentary liberty, and by Tories who labeled those Whigs “popish” because their drives for parliamentary reform fundamentally undermined the monarchy, as popes had throughout history. (410)

The plastic use of the accusation of “popery” and the equation it created between Puritanism and Catholicism was reinforced over the period as fear of a potential catholic threat rose:

But if the 1660s were characterised by recurrent public and governmental fears about Cromwellian plotters and 'fanatic' conspirators, the small Roman Catholic minority of England with its influence in court circles and its ties with France was the object of increasingly widespread popular suspicion in the following decade. (Horwitz 201‑202)

The fear that history would repeat itself and a dissenting religious group would threaten the monarchy again and impose arbitrary government on an unsettled country, rose again during the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, except that the fear now concerned Puritans as much as Catholics, if not more. As Morton notes, even Tories seized the “popery” motif to try and discredit their adversaries, as attested by satirical prints like Roger L’Estrange’s piece of Tory propaganda styling “Popery in Masquerade” a committee composed of various Protestant groups. In L’Estrange’s print, the word “popery” comes to designate the very faction that claimed to be fighting against popery. On the right hand-side, the Pope is shown watching the proceedings and encouraging the committee in French, by saying “Courage mes enfants.” In the caption that accompanied the print when it was first published, L’Estrange described the Pope as “Half-Pope, Half-Puritan”.

Figure 1. After Roger L’Estrange, The Committee or Popery in Masquerade (1680)

Figure 1. After Roger L’Estrange, The Committee or Popery in Masquerade (1680)

Engraving, 29.0 x 41.4 cm, RCIN 807512, Initially printed with an explanation in verse of the composition. This print from the Royal Collection is missing the publication details (London, printed by Mary Clark for Henry Brome at the Gun in St Paul's Churchyard, 1680) found in a different version of the British Museum. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III, 2024

  • 14 For more on the subject of the European evolution of comedy and laughter since the Antiquity, see M (...)

18The correlation between Puritanism and Catholicism was mirrored and bolstered on the stage. Both the stage Puritan and the stage Catholic originate in the same comic tradition and have many characteristics in common. As noted by Sophie Murray, anticlerical satire was inherited from late-medieval society: “Jests and satires that made the religious and secular clergy the butt of their humour, and exposed the failings of religious life, were simply part of the discourse of late medieval society, helping to shape ideals of religion and reconcile communities to human failings” (28). It was later taken up by the commissioners in charge of proceeding to the visitations of English monasteries in the 1530s, turning these humorous representations of monasticism meant to entertain and promote improvement in the Church into a justification for the suppression of religious houses by the Crown (27, 30). Monks, nuns and friars were depicted as sinful, with ignorance, lust, sloth and greed their defining features under a pretence of poverty, chastity and obedience. This characterisation of clerics was taken up by the Martinists in the Martin Marprelate tracts targeting the Anglican bishops and clergy, and was then reversed, adapted, and used to attack the Puritans in the anti-Martinist pamphlets. Thus, anti-Catholic and anti-Puritan satires have a common origin falling within the European tradition of the carnivalesque reversal of values and hierarchies where the spiritual is debased and reduced to the physical and material reality of food, drink, and sex.14 It is no surprise that stage Puritans and Catholics on the Restoration stage have traits in common. In John Dryden’s The Spanish Friar, or, the Double Discovery (1680), Friar Dominic displays the same avarice, lecherousness and hypocrisy found in stage Puritans. The difference lies in his appearance: Friar Dominic is the stereotypical “barrel-bellied” monk whose excesses are reflected in his body, while Sir Patient and Testimony are frail – Testimony is described as a “weak rickety thing” (1.1). But they still share similar visual signs: a black and white habit (the colours of the Dominican order and a conventional visual sign of the rigidity of Puritans) and closely cropped hair (the Roman tonsure for one and the roundhead for the other), a far cry from the long ringlets fashionable at the time. Restoration stage Puritans and Catholics appear as variations on the theme of anticlericalism, both belonging to the overarching archetype of the hypocritical stage cleric.

19The historical and dramatic link between these two figures is reinforced by the “haunted” – and haunting – nature of dramatic performance as Marvin Carlson phrases it. Carlson emphasises the fact that “audience reception of each new performance is conditioned by inevitable memories of this actor playing similar roles in the past” (58). In view of the characteristics stage Puritans and Catholics have in common and in view of the Restoration theatre’s tendency to typecast, it is not surprising that the same actors took Puritan and Catholic roles. Anthony Leigh, one of the most famous comic actors of the period, played both Sir Patient and Friar Dominic (Payne Fisk). Having the same actor take both parts probably triggered a form of recognition in the spectators who had seen both plays and for whom the characters came to overlap with each other.

20Finally, the link between stage Puritans and Catholics is reinforced by the adaptation process at the heart of the corpus under study, comedies adapted from European sources which can be considered as products of a “cultural transfer,” a complex interaction between different poles that gives new meanings to cultural objects while leading to forms of hybridisation (M. Espagne). It is this hybridisation which participates in the association of the stage Catholic with the stage Puritan. No example demonstrates this more clearly than Matthew Medbourne’s 1670 adaptation of Tartuffe. Its very title, Tartuffe, or the French Puritan is a mark of its hybridity, discernible throughout. Although Medbourne turns his Tartuffe into a Puritan, he stays very close to his source: according to Susan Jones, he uses “vocabulary that does not necessarily stray far from the source-text [but] resonates in a specifically anglicized dramatic frame” (142). Medbourne’s adaptation stands as the openly hybrid product of a cultural transfer between France and England. By adapting a Catholic character and source to stage a Puritan, Medbourne creates a hybrid Tartuffe that evokes both Puritans and Catholics, increasing the plasticity of the signs used to portray these figures and contributing to their amalgamation.

21This association between stage Puritans and Catholics cannot be expressed in terms of linear evolution or interchangeability. Stage Puritans and Catholics were by no means identical. They coexisted on the Restoration stage, but were bound together to such an extent that Puritans conjured up Catholics, and Catholics conjured up Puritans. It was through their shared status as potentially threatening non-Anglicans, through a shared comic grammar and dramatic heritage resonating in the audience’s memory, and through the process of adaptation and cultural transfer that a continuum between these two figures was established. According to Patrick Duggan, performance does not represent trauma with verisimilitude. Rather, it “deploys the structural echoes of trauma” (335). The continuum between stage Puritans and Catholics worked in a comparable way. By using similar comic figures and structures both to deal with the traumatic memory of the Interregnum and tackle contemporary issues, Restoration theatre reflected and reinforced the interpretation of current events as history repeating itself.

22The figure of the Puritan haunts the Restoration stage. It provides a way for dramatists and audiences to cope with the trauma of the Interregnum while also expressing and reinforcing contemporary fears. Stage Puritans embody current religious concerns that are not limited to the potential re-enacting of the Puritan Commonwealth but extend to the Catholic question. Through dramatic heritage, which could be conceived in terms of a memory of the text, and through the audience’s historical and dramatic memory, stage Puritans and Catholics come to form a continuum that broadens the scope of their topicality and creates an underlying network of meaning.

  • 15 Tartuffe, directed by Iqbal Khan, new version by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, featuring Asif Khan (...)

23This might be a testament to the sheer plasticity of the dramatic type of the religious hypocrite, perhaps due to its meta-theatricality, rooted in the etymological origins of the word “hypocrite” meaning “actor” in ancient Greek. Once again, no example is more telling than Molière’s Tartuffe. First turned into a “French Puritan” in 1670, Tartuffe became a nonjuring Church of England clergyman in Colley Cibber’s 1717 adaptation entitled The Non-Juror. He then morphed into a Methodist in Isaac Bickerstaffe’s The Hypocrite (1768). More recently, Tartuffe went through yet another transformation in a new adaptation for the British stage by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, where he was a Muslim.15

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Notes

1 See entries for 11 September 1661, 6 January 1663, and 20 January 1669.

2 Emerging from eighteen years of banned theatrical activity and faced with the sudden reopening of theatres, Restoration dramatists turned to earlier English plays and foreign works (mainly Spanish comedia from the Siglo de Oro, French classical theatre and Italian commedia dell’arte) to rebuild a dramatic corpus that would satisfy eager audiences. The corpus under study in this article is far from an exception as adaptation and appropriation were key creation processes of the dramatic corpus of the Restoration. Several studies have focused on these processes: for a few recent examples, see Jones, Braga Riera and Dobson. For theoretical approaches of adaptation and appropriation in general, see Hutcheon and Sanders.

3 It is worth mentioning that the notion of trauma and traumatic memory as they are used in this article are anachronistic. Trauma only took on a psychological meaning with the rise of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at the end of the 19th century.

4 Although theatre and performance have historically been absent from trauma studies – which can in part be explained by the prevalence of the notion of the “unspeakable”, and thus “unperformable”, in trauma canon – several scholars have recently investigated the relationship between memory, trauma and performance. Like these studies, this paper’s historical and dramatic approach can be seen as a contribution to trauma studies and their renewal. See Trezise and Wake; Duggan; and Wallis and Duggan.

5 The Marprelate controversy started when a Puritan writer (or writers) published pamphlets under the name Martin Marprelate attacking the Church of England and more particularly its bishops, who commissioned in response pamphlets railing Marprelate and Puritans at large.

6 The Elizabethan and Jacobean clown is a protean entity. The term could designate both a type of comic actor and a boorish fellow (etymologically the word “clown” meaning “clod” or “lump”). The period sees the development of various types of clowns, such as the “clown-fool” in Shakespeare’s drama (March 2020, 80) The puritanical clown could be considered as a particular type of Elizabethan/Jacobean clown characterised by hypocrisy and rebelliousness and associated with all the typical Puritan vocabulary (“brethren”, “cant”, etc.).

7 See for example John Denham’s Prologue to His Majesty at the First Play Presented at the Cock-Pit in Whitehall (1660): “This truth we can to our advantage say, / They that would have no king, would have no play: / The laurel and the crown together went, / Had the same foes, and the same banishment.”

8 Antony McKenna argues that in Molière’s plays, the link between medical and religious satire is only expressed through a small set of textual clues, the main one being the expression “impie en medicine” found in Dom Juan 3.1 (McKenna 16).

9 Pepys for example regrets the anti-puritanism of Bartholomew Fair in the entry of 4 September 1668:Up, and met at the Office all the morning; and at noon my wife, and Deb., and Mercer, and W. Hewer and I to the Fair, and there, at the old house, did eat a pig, and was pretty merry, but saw no sights, my wife having a mind to see the play “Bartholomew-Fayre,” with puppets. Which we did, and it is an excellent play; the more I see it, the more I love the wit of it; only the business of abusing the Puritans begins to grow stale, and of no use, they being the people that, at last, will be found the wisest.”

10 Behn’s use of the word “reformation” also seems ironic considering that Puritans advocated further reformation of the Church, which is here abandoned in favour of another type of reformation: conversion to religious conformity.

11 For an analysis of the play as a “product of both the tragicomedy and heroic schools,” see Gellert.

12 For example, Crowne’s 1681 Shakespeare adaptation Henry the Sixth: the First Part was suppressed because of its anticatholic satire (Neman).

13 An interesting change made by Behn is the addition of another stage Puritan, Ananias Goggle, to the many already featured in her source. Behn uses Goggle to satirise Puritan religious beliefs and attitude, adding another dimension to Tatham’s satire, which focused on Puritans as political rebels, depicting them as hypocritical bureaucrats incapable of governing (Whiting 37).

14 For more on the subject of the European evolution of comedy and laughter since the Antiquity, see Minois.

15 Tartuffe, directed by Iqbal Khan, new version by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto, featuring Asif Khan as Tartuffe. Produced in Stratford-Upon-Avon by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2019.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1. After Roger L’Estrange, The Committee or Popery in Masquerade (1680)
Légende Engraving, 29.0 x 41.4 cm, RCIN 807512, Initially printed with an explanation in verse of the composition. This print from the Royal Collection is missing the publication details (London, printed by Mary Clark for Henry Brome at the Gun in St Paul's Churchyard, 1680) found in a different version of the British Museum. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III, 2024
URL http://journals.openedition.org/1718/docannexe/image/13637/img-1.png
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Alice Marion-Ferrand, « Purging the Past and Gauging the Future: Stage Puritans as Manifestations of Religious Trauma in Restoration Comedies Adapted from European Sources (1660-1689) »XVII-XVIII [En ligne], 81 | 2024, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2024, consulté le 12 novembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/1718/13637 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/130q9

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Auteur

Alice Marion-Ferrand

Alice Marion-Ferrand is a third-year PhD stipend student at Paul-Valéry University in Montpellier, France. She works under the supervision of Professor Florence March at the Institut de Recherche sur la Renaissance, l'âge Classique et les Lumières (IRCL - UMR 5186) on a research project entitled “Religion on the English Comical Stage from the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution (1660-1689): European Sources and Appropriations.”

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