Critical Introduction to Tunbridge-Walks
The Author: Thomas Baker | Tunbridge-Walks and
the London Stage | Gender Class and Character
in the Play |
People and Places Behind the Play
The Author: Thomas Bakcr
Thomas Baker (1680/81-1749)
The Humour of the Age (1701)
Tunbridge-Walks (1703)
An Act at Oxford (1704) revised to Hampstead Heath (1705)
only 3 perf.
The Fine Lady’s Airs (1708) 5 perf.
The Female Tatler (1709-10)
Little is known of Thomas Baker,
the author of the 1703 play Tunbridge-Walks—and
scholars disagree on the little that is known. The author of four
plays produced between 1701 and 1708, including Tunbridge-Walks,
Baker has also been credited by some with having produced the satirical
periodical, the Female Tatler, before abandoning all literary
activity in 1711. He seems to have worn many hats (or, perhaps,
masks): playwright, essayist, attorney, schoolmaster, and clergyman.
The eighteenth-century theatrical dictionary Biographia
Dramatica paints
him as the model for Tunbridge-Walks’ effeminate
fop, Maiden, but John Harrington Smith claims that “nothing…more
improbable than this could…be imagined” (Smith,
Introduction).
Also unlikely, according to Smith, is the report found in several
sources (Chetwood; Baker,
David, “Tunbridge Walks”; “Baker,
(Thomas)”)
that Baker died of Morbus Pediculosus, a skin disease
particular to beggars and others exposed to extremely unsanitary
conditions (Introduction).
Much of this material is indeed suspect. It seems clearer that
Baker practiced law while working as a playwright, though he may
not have had a degree in law (ODNB; Smith,
Introduction),
and that he disappeared rather abruptly from the London literary
scene.
Though Baker’s life remains something of a mystery,
we may perhaps construct some sense of his character from his literary
productions, particularly the Dedications, Prologues, and Epilogues
to his plays, and those he wrote for others’ works. These
documents reveal a man who increasingly saw himself engaged in
a struggle with contemporary theatrical tastes, and the contemporary
theatrical reform movement. Eventually he seems to have given up
the struggle and retired to live in relative obscurity. Baker felt
compelled (and sometimes was compelled) to defend his
work against the clerics and moralists who sought to prove that
the theatre in general, and Restoration comedy in particular, were
licentious and immoral. Perhaps not surprisingly, it is Tunbridge-Walks,
his least bawdy play that was most successful.
Thomas Baker, Playwright
In the first decade of the eighteenth century, Thomas Baker and
his London audiences were caught in a transition between the waning
bawdy Restoration-style comedy and emerging sentimental and moralistic
styles. Pamphlets such as Jeremy Collier’s Short View
of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698),
in which plays were represented as lewd and licentious, had inspired
a movement calling for reform or even abolition of the theatre.
This movement, led—as Baker points out in his dedication
to An Act at Oxford—mainly by Non-conformist Protestants
(9), fragmented audiences. The Restoration stew of stock characters,
sexual innuendo, and satirical topicality could no longer be counted
on to please. J.L. Styan’s observation that “Restoration
comedy was a kind of improvised charade,” in which the interaction
of the players and the audience held the key to the play’s
success, was perhaps more true than ever at this vexed moment (2).
Baker’s first comedy, The Humour of the Age, apparently
struck the right chord—it premiered in March 1701 to an appreciative
audience. But in the Prologue, Baker muses on the changing preferences
of London audiences:
. . . your Tasts so strange of late we find,
New Authors have small hopes to prove you kind.
Now ‘tis not Sense, and Wit best entertains,
Nor what’s writ most by Rule, most Favour gains:
But he that has most Whimsies in his Brains. (12-16)
Baker’s distinction
between newfangled “Whimsies” and
traditional “Sense, and Wit,” and “Rule” is,
no doubt, a bit of special pleading. Nevertheless it is clear that
he is having difficulty sizing up the expectations of audiences.
In his Dedication to Humour of the Age, Baker again emphasizes
the “hazardous” nature of the playwriting “Enterprize,” defending
the “Sense and Wit” of Restoration-style comedy against
the “Knavery and Hypocrisy” he attributes to newer
styles of drama and their proponents:
[F]or a man that thinks in
this Age, to raise his Credit by writing, exposes his Sense by
so hazardous an Enterprize, he may as well expect to raise his
Means by buying Stock when ‘tis got to
the highest Value; for Sense and Wit are as much out of Fashion,
as Knavery and Hypocrisy are in. (ii)
What justice there might
be in Baker’s characterizations
of the contending styles is open to debate. What seems clear, however,
is that even at the beginning of his playwriting career, he was
sensible of the volatility of the London theatrical scene. His
anxiety turned out to be well grounded: the actors performing his
play were charged with immorality, though they were eventually
acquitted (ODNB, Baker).
In Baker’s
next endeavour—Tunbridge-Walks, or The Yeoman
of Kent,
which premiered in January of 1703—he seems to have come
closest to mollifying
the uncertain humour of theatrical audiences It was the most successful
of his plays, receiving regular performances up until the mid-century
(ODNB, Baker). Choosing Tunbridge, the spa town south of London,
as the setting for his play, Baker parodied the intermingling of
social classes and diverse attitudes, and represented onstage the
heterogeneous theatre audience created by changing habits of residence
in and around London (Loftis 101).
Perhaps encouraged by the success
of Tunbridge-Walks,
Baker became more daring with his third play, An Act at Oxford (1704).
But here he misjudged—the play was banned, presumably because
of its satirical treatment of the University and its scene of attempted
rape. Baker speaks of the charges against his play in the Dedication
of the printed version, railing against the hypocrisy of
some of the Great Sticklers against the Theatre, [who] hate
to see any Act but themselves, and can’t endure to be out-done
in Personating Men of Religion, Justice, and Loyalty, by those
that tread the Stage: But their Living in a Practice which they
can’t bear to see Represented, plainly evinces they think
there is no Sin but Scandal. (viii-ix)
Baker’s attempt to
cast aspersions on the integrity of his opponents seems to have
failed—his less volatile rewrite
the play, Hampstead Heath, fizzled. Heath’s Prologue
makes no effort to disguise Baker’s simmering indignation:
Who scarce wou’d write, or who for Action drudge,
When ev’ry mounted Foretop is a Judge:
Wit must seem flat, and Sense but heavy Stuff
To Noddles cram’d with Dighton’s musty snuff… (iii)
Baker’s
fourth and last play, The Fine Lady’s Airs (1708),
was more popular, but “proved . . . too satirical for
the taste of the time,” though it was revived at least once,
in 1747 (ODNB; Oulton 45). After writing a prologue for Susanna
Centlivre’s popular play The Busie Body, which premiered
in May 1709, Baker disassociated himself from the theatre by choosing
a career path “more serviceable to the Publick, and beneficial
to my self” (Baker, A Fine Lady’s Airs “Dedication”)
but most likely continued to satirize society as a journalist.
Thomas Baker, The Journalist
Some have suggested that, following Baker’s disenchantment
with playwriting, he may, either individually or in partnership
with Delarivier Manley, have adopted the pseudonym of Mrs. Crackenthorpe
in the tri-weekly periodical, The Female Tatler, modeled
on Addison and Steele’s Tatler (Anderson; Graham;
Morgan; Smith, “Thomas
Baker”). The Female
Tatler began circulation on July 8, 1709, publishing satirical
portraits, gossip, and mock advertisements (ODNB, Baker). It
was sufficiently successful that when Mrs. Crackenthorpe changed
printers after a little more than a month, the original printer
continued to issue a fake Female Tatler. If Baker
hoped to distance himself from the scorn and criticism he experienced
as a playwright by turning to journalism and assuming a female
persona, he was probably disappointed. According to a rival paper, The
British Apollo, Baker suffered a beating after The Female
Tatler ridiculed a prominent London family (Morgan viii).
Whether or not Baker was involved with The Female Tatler this
incident could only have increased his bitterness. Whoever “Mrs
Crackenthorpe” was, she seems to have abandoned the fray
soon after this incident. In November, after suffering repeated
attacks by rival publications and a presentment by the Court (Anderson
357), “Mrs. Crackenthorpe” elegantly resigned because
of an “Affront offer’d to her by some rude Citizens,
altogether unacquainted with her Person” (Female Tatler,
Oct. 31, 1709-Nov. 2, 1709). The paper continued to publish
until at least the spring of 1710 (Morgan v).
Baker The Obscure
As a comedic
and satirical playwright and journalist writing in a time when
theatrical taste was moving away from “exposing Vice and Folly” (Baker, Act
at Oxford 7) towards portraits of respectability, seriousness,
and exemplary morality, Baker eventually became disillusioned.
His resistance against theatrical moral reform limited him as
a playwright to the Restoration comic style which, “because
of significant changes in the conditions of performance by the
end of the seventeenth century, especially in the predisposition
of the audience, … was relatively
short-lived” (Styan 2). As a result, Baker seems to have
have left London altogether for a position in Bedfordshire where
he worked as a schoolmaster and vicar until his death in 1749 (Victoria
History, 2:
181 n.; 3: 128). One of the few surviving descriptions of Baker
in his later years, by his successor at Bolnhurst, implies that
his self-imposed exile did not relieve his troubles, but rather,
turned his disappointment into a well-seasoned bitterness: “Baker
was a man of strange turn, imperious and clamorous upon topics
of no service towards the promoting of true religion in his parish
and not a little addicted to stiff and dividing principles” (M/s
39B101). Though removed from London society, Baker seems to have
been determined to remain fractious to the last.
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Tunbridge Walks and the London Stage
Thomas Baker’s most successful play, Tunbridge-Walks, premiered
at the Drury Lane Theatre Royal in January 1703. Drury Lane
was then one of two theatres operating in London. The other
was Lincoln’s Inn Fields, under the management of Thomas
Betterton, one of the period’s most well-known actors.
Betterton and several other leading actors had left Drury Lane
in 1695 because of disagreements with manager Christopher Rich
over the payment and treatment of actors. However, despite
Rich’s focus on profit and the poor and spotty pay, the
actors who made up the original cast of Tunbridge-Walks had
remained with Rich after the split, probably because with the
departure of principal actors left starring roles for them
to fill. In 1703, then, the cast of Tunbridge-Walks consisted
mostly of actors who had once played second-fiddle to those
like Betterton, but who had since come into their own as the
principal actors at Drury Lane (Dobbs 63-4).
Robert Wilks, who
played Reynard, was on his way to becoming one of the most
famous actors of his time; he would also become a manager at
Drury Lane. A handsome, and his critics suggest, a vain man,
Wilks was rumored to have fathered the illegitimate daughter
of Jane Rogers, the popular actress who portrayed Belinda,
before moving on to a relationship with another woman after
the child was born. There certainly was animosity between Wilks
and Rogers by 1712, when she tried to turn an audience against
him for his role in giving a part to another actress that she
felt was rightfully hers. Unfortunately, since there are no
dates attached to the rumoured affair, it is impossible to
know whether Reynard and Belinda were played by lovers in 1703,
or if the romance between the two actors was over by that time.
Either way there must have been a certain chemistry between
the two.
William Pinkethman (Squib) and William Bullock
(Maiden) were a pair of popular comedic actors who often acted
together as fools who would tease and torment each other, as
Squib and Maiden do in this play. Evidence suggests that much
of both actors’ comic talent was physical. Playwright
and journalist Richard Steele, a fan of the pair, remarks that
when the judgment of any good author directs
him to write a beating for Mr. Bullock from Mr. William Pinkethman,
or for Mr. William Pinkethman from Mr. Bullock, those excellent
players seem to be in their most shining circumstances, and
please me more, but with a different sort of delight, than
that which I receive from those grave scenes of Brutus and
Cassius. (Female
Tatler 7)
Given the duo’s reputation
for slapstick comedy, scenes like the Tavern scene in Tunbridge-Walks must
have involved a good deal of comic stage business. Aside from
their team shenanigans, Pinkethman was known for speaking prologues,
as he does in Tunbridge-Walks, and Bullock for playing
women, or men dressed as women, a talent that qualified him
to play the effeminate Maiden.
While the entire cast of Tunbridge-Walks was
relatively well-known at
the time, the other actor worth knowing in some detail is Susanna
Verbruggen, who played the witty Hillaria. Verbruggen was a
popular comedic actress whose talents enabled her to play both
pretty young heroines and unattractive spinsters, as well as
transvestite breeches” roles,
which required her to dress as a man. She was around 37 years
old in 1703, and although all accounts suggest she was a very
attractive woman, it is interesting to imagine Hillaria as
not so very young. Tunbridge-Walks was one of Verbruggen’s
final plays, as she died in childbirth later in 1703.
Tunbridge-Walks was
the second of Baker’s plays to be performed at Drury
Lane. The first, The
Humour o’ the Age (1701), was censored for obscenity,
and several of the actors involved were charged. Tunbridge-Walks was
a very successful play, published in the year it was first
performed. It was revived regularly throughout the first
half of the eighteenth century. In the years between its
premier in 1703 and the end of Queen Anne’s reign in
1714 it was mounted at least twenty six times, putting it on
the list of the most popular plays of the period (Kavenik 72).
It was republished seven times in London and Dublin between
1703 and 1764, including two separate London editions in 1736.
Despite its contemporary success, Tunbridge-Walks had
fallen out of popularity by the end of the eighteenth century,
and no new edition has appeared since 1764.
Like most
works of literature, Tunbridge-Walks to some extent
a product of its time. The turn of the eighteenth century marks
a change in the political, social and economic atmosphere in
England. Since 1660, England had been through the restoration
of Charles II, the brief reign of James II, and the “Glorious
Revolution” that brought the protestant King William
of Orange to the throne. In 1703 Queen Anne had been on the
throne for a year and England was at war with France and its
allies, attempting to limit France’s growing
power on the continent and Spain’s continuing influence
in the new world. In his dedication of Tunbridge-Walks to
John Howe, paymaster of the forces, Baker makes reference to
the war and to contemporary debates over the establishment
of a standing army. Baker’s characterization of Captain
Squib may be seen as an intervention in that debate. During
the period between wars from 1697 to 1702, while argument over
a standing army was raging, the stereotype of the cowardly
militia officer was a popular one. Kevin Gardner argues that
by making a mockery of the insufficient and inadequate militia
and promoting soldiers as heroes, playwrights of the period
helped to promote the eventual establishment of the standing
army.
The play
follows the ancient formula in which young love is frustrated
by an interfering parent who must be circumvented if love is
to triumph. But Tunbridge-Walks also
responds to changing theatrical tastes and to the emerging
conventions of the eighteenth-century stage. The best example
of how comedy was changing at the turn of the century is the
growing disapproval of coarse sexual humor. Bawdy humour was
common on the Restoration stage but was slowly losing favour,
though older plays continued to be acted and enjoyed for years.
The address to the author by the mysterious C. W., claims that
the play contains, “No
Smutty Jests, but Wit without Offence” (see in context),
then goes on rather cheekily to suggest that Baker is “not
to Blame, if Envious Fools will find / Scandal and Lewdness
which were ne’er design’d” (see in context).
In making audience responsible for any potentially indecent
interpretation of the play, the lines implicitly respond to
the obscenity charges against Baker’s
earlier play, The Humour o’ the Age. The modern
reader can decide for herself whether Tunbridge-Walks is
as free from “Scandal
and Lewdness” as C.W. maintains; nevertheless it is safe
to say that scenes like the one in which an ostensibly love-mad
Reynard “Tumbles” Hillaria’s
maid, Lucy, offer the opportunity for some bawdy stage
business.
There are several theories concerning the rise
of moral outrage at the end of the
seventeenth century. One suggestion is that theatrical audiences
were increasingly made up of women, who demanded more decorous
entertainment (Smith,
Gay Couple 132-137). Prologues to plays written
during the 1690s and following express a sense of frustration
with trying to satisfy what appears to have been a predominantly
male taste for lewd jokes, while at the same time refraining
from offending the ladies. Another factor may have been the
influence and tastes of the reigning monarch. When Charles
II was restored, he brought with him a love of theatre influenced
by his time in France; women were for the first time allowed
to act on the English stage, which may have added to Restoration
plays' sexualized content. Although Restoration theatre faced
criticism even in its hey-day, the theatre's rather liberal
morality continued pretty much unabated until the reign of
William and Mary. William disregarded the theatre it and Mary,
oddly, supported both rather immoral plays and Christian moralist
groups that opposed them. Frances Kavenik explains Mary’s “complex
relationship with the theatre” (68) by noting that she
had enjoyed acting at court in her youth, but felt her responsibility
as a role model for her people. Susan Owen suggests that the
plays of the Restoration were met with “a reaction of
titillation and relish [which] co-existed with moral disapproval” (44).
The 1702 succession of Queen Anne, a strongly religious monarch
with no personal interest in the theatre (Kavenik 66), saw
the ascendancy of moral disapproval as well.
Two important
voices of moral reform at the turn of the century were Anglican
clergyman Jeremy Collier, author of the influential pamphlet, A
Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English
Stage, and the playwright
and journalist Richard Steele. Collier’s attack on the
theatre is part of a tradition of religious antitheatricalism
that reaches back at least to Shakespeare’s
time. Steele, however, is very much a man of his time, whose “whiggish
views of the importance of trade to the nation” led him
to champion the merchant class in his plays, making them moral
exemplars instead of the butts of sexual jokes, as was common
in the Restoration (Loftis 111). Steele’s
turn-of-the-century plays contest the assumption that the landed
gentry had an inherent right to wealth and status and that
the rising business and merchant class, the citizens or “cits” of
restoration plays, made themselves ridiculous by affecting
gentility. J. Douglas Canfield points out that the popular
restoration conceit of the cit cuckolded by the aristocratic
rake “is
a special reaffirmation of class dominance” (27). The
pervasively nasty portrayal of the cit in restoration comedy
reveals an underlying sense of aristocratic vulnerability,
and an anxiety about growing mercantile influence. As John
Loftis points out, the aristocracy was hardly independent of
the merchant class: many marriages took place between aristocrats
who needed money and merchants who wanted titles, while aristocratic
younger sons often went into trade themselves. With resolutions
like the cross-class marriage of Belinda and Reynard in Tunbridge
Walks, these realities begin increasingly to register
in the drama at the end of the seventeenth century (Loftis
100).
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Gender
Class and Character in Tunbridge-Walks
The drama of the Restoration and the
eighteenth century was an intricate reflection of contemporary
concerns regarding gender and class. Dramatic representations
of masculinity and femininity, status and worth, were rooted
in the ideological tensions arising from the restoration
of the Stuart monarchy (Mangan 96). English society was
changing and these changes were reflected on the stage.
As a version of the classic Restoration
comedy of wit, Baker’s Tunbridge-Walks revolves
around a pair of wits, male and female, who “outwit those
who stand in their way . . . expose and ridicule those who
are less witty that they . . . [and] often try to outwit each
other” (Fujimura 66). Still, Baker’s play departs
from convention in several ways. The female wit of the play
is Hillaria, and the most obvious contender for the role of
male wit is her brother Reynard; together they plot to secure
their financial futures. Reynard satisfies the role of male
wit by deceiving his future father-in-law and marrying Belinda,
though he manages to do so only through Hillaria’s scheming.
Hillaria banters her way into a profitable marriage with her
devoted suitor Loveworth after declaring (or perhaps confessing)
her chastity. Both characters deploy their wits in an apparent
celebration of amoral independence, but the play’s resolution
eventually reinforces traditional values of domesticity, rusticity
and patriarchy. Tunbridge-Walks incorporates the stock
characters of Restoration comedy, the fop, the rake, the lady
wit, and the country bumpkin, who function according to type,
but with variations that point to the play’s awareness
of, and hesitant participation in, the changing values of the
society and the stage.
The Fop
Restoration and eighteenth
century drama was “crammed
full of fops” (Staves 415) and Tunbridge-Walks’ Mr.
Maiden is a particularly extravagant one. A fop is a person,
generally a man, who is “foolishly attentive to and vain
of his appearance; a pretender to wit, wisdom, or accomplishments” (OED).
Fops are characterized by their “refusal to fight, extreme
complaisance, sexual passivity, avoidance of drunkenness, fondness
for the company of women, concern with fashion, interest in
dancing and singing, and delicacy of all kinds” (Staves
421). Though stage fops were stock comic characters, foppery
was also a historical phenomenon (Staves 414); Restoration
theatre-goers often claimed to be able to identify prominent
local characters; popular actors of fop roles changed their
performances over the years to reflect current styles and personages.
This element of verisimilitude probably added to audiences’ enjoyment
of the fop figure.
In Restoration comedies the fop was
a foil for the rake; his effeminacy was mocked in order to
celebrate the rake’s
virility and masculine spirit. As time progressed, however,
the fop began to be taken more seriously, as the concept of
the ideal male changed from headstrong young devil to civilized,
sensitive, and moral young man. This new “male gender
role that eschewed the violence of the rake for the domesticity
of the faithful husband, who avoided smut, drunkenness, and
violence . . . also put aside those extravagances of
the fop that were now associated with the molly” (Trumbach
166). By the 1720s, after Tunbridge-Walks was written,
the characteristics of the Restoration fop would be divided
between the new exemplary hero and the demonized molly, or
male prostitute.
The Restoration fop represents a feminization
of the masculine role. During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries the qualities that defined ideal gendered behaviors
for men and women shifted toward the feminine (Lowenthal 179).
In earlier seventeenth century and Restoration comedies the
sacrifice of the fop to the comedic needs of the play represented
a protest against this changing gender definition (Staves 419).
Though fops are effeminate characters, they are seldom explicitly
or exclusively homosexual. Because they often function
as the rakes’ competition,
fops are necessarily “heterosexual threats . . . possess[ing]
a menacing social potency” (Gill, “Gender” 204). They are idle
threats, however, because the fop never ends up married to
the heroine. George Haggerty makes the point that “success
must always elude the fop. Not necessarily interested in homosexual
intercourse, yet more interested in impressing the rakes than
the ladies (Haggerty 50), the fop is ridiculed his extravagant
behavior and his aristocratic pretensions.
Baker’s Mr.
Maiden is one of the few “explicitly homosexual” fops
of the period (Staves
415). He “[loves] mightily
to go abroad in Women’s Clothes,” asserts that
he has “never [lain] with
a Woman in [his] life” (2.42),
and appears more frightened than anything when he realizes
that Hillaria wants to marry him. When Squib asks about his “[a]ccomplishments
. . . with the Ladies” (1.39)
Maiden replies that he “can Sing
and Dance” and “dress a Lady up” (1.40).
He also comments, suggestively, that a “Gentleman
took a fancy to [him], and left [him] an Estate” (1.40), though this turns out to be part of a plot to
make him ridiculous. Though today Maiden’s sexuality
would remove him from the marriage market, he presents a threat
to the other males in Baker’s
play. Maiden remarks, “whenever I marry, I don’t
doubt of a good Fortune” (5.59), and Squib
clearly views him as a threat, telling him, “if you offer
Love to any thing that’s under Fifty
. . . I’le cut your Throat” (1.45).
In Tunbridge-Walks, Maiden’s
status as an object of ridicule culminates in his exposure
as a poor milliner, rather than a gentleman of estate. Maiden’s
class and economic status is crucial to his eventual humiliation.
Characters in early eighteenth-century plays are generally “acutely
aware of social distinctions” (Loftis 100) and those
of the upper class are realistically painted as wary of the
encroachment of merchants into the ranks of the gentry. Reynard
explains to his friends that “some Gentlemen . . . brought
[Maiden] hither to make him ridiculous” (5.52). Before
his true identity is revealed, Maiden is ridiculed as a fop;
at the end of the play, however, he is mocked even more viciously
as a merchant-class pretender to gentility. Where the fop is
concerned, then, the ideologies of masculinity and gentility
in the play are mutually reinforcing.
The Rake
Another point at which
Baker departs somewhat from Restoration norms is in his characterization
of the rake figure. The rake was an ideal of masculinity that
enjoyed its heyday in the Restoration, a “sexually predatory
male, whose goal [was] to have as many affairs in as short
a time as possible” (Mangan
107). The rake is portrayed as an amoral hedonist; nevertheless
his customary attraction to the heroine “betrays a clear
preference for the established class dictates and customary
social decorum” she embodies (Gill, “Gender” 196). The rake was
normally contrasted with the fop; the effeminate man’s
sexual passivity served to accentuate the natural appetite
of the rake (Staves 422). By the mid-eighteenth century,
however, the rake was going out of style, replaced by variations
on the sentimental or exemplary hero, who exhibited more refined
behavior. Baker’s play treads the line between the two
traditions: celebrating rake Reynard’s wit and deceit
in the pursuit of his prize, and mocking and humiliating fop
Maiden; but also honoring gentleman Loveworth’s loyalty,
perseverance, and courage and punishing through humiliation
and failure the false rake, Squib. Loveworth’s progression
from apparent rake at the beginning of the play to sincere
and faithful lover by the end is perhaps an appropriate illustration
of the movement of comedy away from the rake hero toward the
sentimental hero.
There are two candidates for the rake figure
in Baker’s Tunbridge-Walks.
Reynard is closer to the conventional rake, winning his bride
Belinda by deceit. Nevertheless his admirable qualities--his
intelligence and wit, his ingenuity his genuine admiration
for Belinda, and his constancy in pursuing her--soften the
picture considerably. A scheming fortune hunter who claims
that Belinda’s “Fortune is the chiefest Bait” (3.8) and that “Conscience, and Honesty . . . are obliterated
now-a-days” (5.10-5.11), Reynard also admits to loving
Belinda, and though he dupes her father to win her hand, he
eventually agrees to live under Woodcock’s rule. While
Reynard does not fully embody the womanizing spirit of many
Restoration rakes, and while he requires the assistance of
his sister to outwit Woodcock, his character, his self-confidence,
and his aristocratic background qualify him as a rake.
Squib
affects the womanizing spirit that Reynard lacks, but he is
missing other essential qualities of the rake. Though he claims “a
Stock of Mistresses” (4.71) the
audience is given leave to doubt his word. Challenged by Loveworth
and revealed as a coward, Squib’s primary adversary is
Maiden. The two pretenders play off of each other as Squib
threatens and bullies Maiden with one breath, and coaxes him
to the tavern for a “Bumper of Barcelona” (3.26) with the next. His masculinity seems to depend
on Maiden’s
effeminacy. When Squib is unmasked as a merchant the audience
is encouraged to associate his cowardice, exaggeration, and
brutish behavior with his inferior social rank. The unmaskings
of Squib and Maiden work in concert to instruct the audience
in an ideal of masculinity neither character approaches. In
the end it is Reynard’s wit, Loveworth’s faithfulness
and courage, and even Woodcock’s Kentish honesty and
eventual kindness that are promoted as truly masculine, while
Squib and Maiden are exposed as frauds.
The Lady Wit
While Reynard is
not quite the epitome of rakishness, his sister Hillaria is
a true lady wit. The lady wit in the seventeenth century was
the mistress of the male wit, or the rake-hero; they schemed
together to achieve their ends, usually marriage. By the beginning
of the eighteenth century, however, plays increasingly tended
to pair the lively, witty heroine with the serious hero, and
the lively hero with the serious heroine, with the intent of
domesticating both. Baker follows this formula in Tunbridge-Walks.
The position of women in restoration comedies was a complicated
one, tied to conceptions of morality, as well as of class.
While the lady wit is definitely flirtatious and seems unconcerned
with morality, she “walks a fine
linguistic line: she engages in provocative banter but never
indecorous innuendo” (Gill, “Gender” 198-9). Importantly, the conventional
lady wit, unlike her male counterpart, always maintains her
virginity, so that she can make an acceptable wife in the end
(Gill, “Gender” 196). Critics suggest that the popularity of the witty
female reflects a desire to see “a marriage of intellectual
equals whose guarded admissions to one another seem to suggest
genuine affection” (Gill, “Gender” 196). Audiences enjoyed seeing
clever men and witty women make intellectually stimulating
matches that had the potential to be about more than money.
Further, according to Jessica Munns, “where there had
been a tacit consensus that females are subordinate, there
was now an increasing awareness that such subordination was
a social rather than natural or inevitable inequality” (144).
The lady wit reflects this growing awareness, in that her wit
is equal or even superior to that of her male counterpart;
she also shows that gender subordination is alive and well,
by sacrificing her independent spirit and capitulating to marriage.
In Tunbridge Walks, Baker makes Hillaria
the brains of his play, and then marries her to Loveworth in
what looks like a last resort. Though Loveworth has pursued
Hillaria throughout the play, she somehow finds it necessary,
in the final act, to convince him of her worth as a wife: “I’le
tell you one thing, I am a Maid . . . and since I bring you
nothing, I’le manage your Estate . . . prudently” (5.82). If Hillaria is tamed, it is not by Loveworth,
but by a social and dramatic need for the transformation of
the shrewd coquette into a woman of loyalty and virtue. While
Loveworth is sincere and faithful, he is no match for Hillaria
in terms of wit. In fact, Hillaria is without a worthy match
in the play: Squib and Maiden are too foolish, Reynard turns
out to be her brother, and Woodcock, the only man in the play
who can hold his own against Hillaria, is indifferent to her
charms. In the end she accepts Loveworth more or less
by default: “Psha!
my old Suitor, Mr. Loveworth, how insipid is a Fellow’s
Company one has been acquainted with a Month; I begin now to
hate him so very heartily, that the Devil take me, if I don’t—marry
him” (4.22). It is, however, part of the traditional
lady wit’s
character to claim that she will never marry the man who courts
her, and then to finally decide that she loves him after all.
Hillaria’s marriage is perhaps the play’s strongest
indication of the subordination of women.
Belinda is the sentimental
heroine of the play. She admires Hillaria and “[hates]
the Country” (2.2),
but she is “fix’d, never to Marry without [her
father’s] Consent” (2.76). Conspiring
with Hillaria and Reynard, she manages to obey her father’s
decree while defying his wishes. Belinda approaches the ideal
comic heroine of theatrical moralists: chaste, naïve,
rich. Initially tractable, she is the ultimately the
instrument of Reynard’s domestication. By playing on
her father’s foibles Belinda gains the man she desires
and the promise of a secure life, though she is denied the
excitement of London society. Hillaria finally gains the same
security only by admitting how much she is like Belinda: chaste
and willing to bend to the realities of married life. Belinda
chooses marriage with Reynard; Hillaria, with no money and
no living parents, has no other option than to marry Loveworth.
The Country Bumpkin
Much of
the play’s action and energy revolves around Woodcock,
the blocking figure who must be duped for the comedic happy
ending to take place. The generic odds are stacked against
Woodcock from the beginning. Wealthy countrymen, lacking gentility
but possessed of attractive daughters and tempting fortunes,
were typically the satiric butts and victims of the town wits’ jokes
and plots in Restoration comedy (Canfield 97-120; Corman 59).
Woodcock, though, is a typical country bumpkin only in his
stubborn rural chauvinism, for he turns out to be the most
acute male character in the play, a stronger candidate for
the “male wit” role that the urbane Reynard. He
matches Reynard’s
and Loveworth’s logic when they try to prove the city
better than the country, he immediately sees through Reynard’s
feigned madness, and he recognizes Hillaria’s sudden
interest in a country life as an bid for his fortune. In the
end, Woodcock’s parochialism is his downfall: he
fails to see through Reynard’s rustic attire and Kentish
accent. Worried that Belinda will elope with a town wit, he
abandons all precautions and presses her to marry the disguised
Reynard. The irony of the situation is that Woodcock’s
mistrust of the urban characters is entirely well-founded.
Reynard and Hillaria are unscrupulous
fortune hunters, and Reynard does win Belinda’s hand
through fraud and deception. In the end, though, Woodcock clings
to a good deal of patriarchal authority. Reynard and Belinda
may marry in spite of him, but they are compelled to live and
raise their offspring on his terms if they hope to benefit
from his fortune. Thus, Woodcock is, in important respects,
a departure from the stereotypical country bumpkin and blocking
father figure. Unlike the urban pretenders, Maiden and Squib,
he is outwitted but not undone. His own wit and grudging good
will entitle him to take charge of the future.
[back to top]
People and Places Behind Tunbridge-Walks
As
Richard Perkinson noted in 1936, Tunbridge-Walks; or,
the Yeoman of Kent is one of many seventeenth century
and early eighteenth century comedies that “utilize a
popular locale as the background for a...comedy of the manners
and intrigues of habitués for which the localities were
thought characteristic” (270). Perkinson observes that “provincial
locales,” like the spa town or Tunbridge Wells, Kent
are “a ground upon which [dramatists] can display the
conflict between country and city” (286). Tunbridge-Walks does
present this conflict, but it also moves beyond rural-urban
rivalries to display the love/hate relationship between England
and the continent.
Tunbridge Wells as a Watering-Place
Spas—resorts where people traveled to
drink or bathe in waters from natural springs, first for medicinal
reasons and later for recreation—earned their name from
the continental resort city of Spa in what is now Belgium.
At least in part, it was tension between England and the continent
in the seventeenth century, along with promotion by opportunistic
English physicians, which fostered a “homegrown” spa
culture in England (Hembry 40-43). Tunbridge Wells, a town
that eventually grew up around a single spring “discovered” by
Dudley, Lord North around 1606 (Burr 4-16), was one of the
first of these mineral springs to be discovered and promoted
in England for vacationers seeking diversion and health. Visits
by royalty in the seventeenth century helped make Tunbridge
Wells one of two of England’s most popular resorts, a
rival to Bath (Hembry 79-93). In the decades leading up to
Thomas Baker’s Tunbridge-Walks, Tunbridge Wells
had come to attract an eclectic mix of people—rich and
not-so-rich, titled and untitled, Londoners and local country
folk—all gathered in pursuit of the chalybeate waters’ health
benefits as well as the amusements and society that had sprung
up around them (Gomez-Lara; Hembry 82). Benjamin Allen, who
published a series of medical pamphlets in the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth century, described the Tunbridge Wells
water was “about four Grains lighter than the German
Spaw, to which it is preferable on that account. The Ground
above and about this Spring, is a cemented Rock; and the Spring
is large, of long use, and much celebrated and frequented” (26). Allen
recommends the “homegrown” waters over the Continental
ones, and encourages people to drink the waters at the site
because of the limited duration of their medicinal “Virtue” (26).
The “walks” of
the play’s title adjoined
the main street leading to the wells. People would stroll along
the upper and lower walks to socialize and amuse themselves,
to see people, and to be seen. In 1697, the travel writer Celia
Fiennes reported that the walks were lined not only by lodging
houses, but also by a market, shops, taverns, coffee-houses,
gambling rooms, bowling greens, and chapels for both Anglicans
and Presbyterians (Fiennes
133-35).
At the time the play was written, the walks had only recently
been paved with the distinctive pantiles for which the walks
were later named.
While the waters
were believed to have positive effects for both men and women,
their reputation for increasing female fertility and healing
reproductive ailments helped to created a sexually charged
atmosphere at early-modern spas (Gomez-Lara; Allen; Savidge;
Hembry). Encounters between the sexes were also facilitated
by the crush for lodgings, which placed men and women in close
proximity. The purging effects of the waters, and the prodigious
consumption recommended in the medical literature, prompted
further relaxation of decorum. During the stroll along the
walks, “evacuation” was periodically necessary
(in Act III of Tunbridge Walks, Maiden excuses himself
from Hillaria’s company to “step into the backyard.”).
This provided an occasion for a certain amount of voyeurism
(Gomez-Lara 213-216). The atmosphere of freedom was not, however,
free from social stigma: close proximity meant indiscretions
were readily observable, and spa patrons were subject to word-of-mouth
gossip and ridicule in printed lampoons (in Tunbridge Walks, Maiden
is the target of an anonymous lampoon). A 1702 sermon preached
at Tunbridge Wells condemns the indiscretions prevalent at
the spa, and urges patrons to “avoid all contumelious
Reflections on the Company, whether it be by verbal Affronts,
or especially by defamatory Writings” (Nicholls
17).
The spas were also known for their mixing of social classes,
accepted as a necessary, though temporary feature of spa life
(Gomez-Lara 208, 218-219; Borsay, English Urban Renaissance 271-291).
This social mixing was encouraged by subscription-based entertainments,
open-room architecture, and the ringing of the bells to announce
new visitors (Borsay 271-274). Not surprisingly, watering-places
became marriage markets (Gomez-Lara 219-220; Borsay 243-248).
As Baker’s play suggests, Tunbridge Wells could be a
site for both respectable courtship and seduction. Since clothing
was a key indicator of rank, pretenders could thrive if they
could dress and act convincingly (Borsay 238-241), and hasty
marriages like that between Belinda and Reynard were not entirely
unusual. Baker uses the setting of Tunbridge Wells to explore
satirically the dynamics of rank and status, as well as the
ways in which marriages were conducted. Wealth (like Woodcock’s)
increasingly competed with birth as an indicator of status.
The rigid boundaries between classes were beginning to soften,
as marriage increasingly served to rescue impoverished members
of the gentry like Reynard and Hillaria from insolvency (Borsay
244).
The (Yeo)Men of Kent
As emphasized
in the title of the play, Woodcock is an independent country
landowner, or yeoman, specifically from Kent. Baker’s
play differs from many spa comedies in exploiting a rich body
of local lore, stereotype, and history. As the “garden
of England,” known for its proud, wealthy landowners,
Kent is a particularly fertile setting for such a comedy. A
fourteenth century rhyme conveys the stereotype embodied in
Woodcock’s character:
A Knight
of Cales,
A Nobleman
of Wales,
And a Laird
of the North Countree;
A Yeoman
of Kent
With his
yearly rent
Will buy
them out all three. (Church 27)
Kent’s “steely soil” produced
not only the healing waters of Tunbridge Wells, but also—with
its hops, fruit, and grain and its proximity to London Markets—substantial wealth.
This wealth, along with the distinctive landholding and inheritance
customs of the county and the legend of Kent’s solitary
resistance to the Norman Conquest, gave the men of Kent both pride
and leverage. A century after Baker’s play, a nationalistic
sonnet by Wordsworth capitalizes on the perception, making
the men of Kent an emblem of English pride:
Left single, in
bold parley, ye, of yore,
Did from the Norman win a gallant wreath;
Confirmed the charters that were yours before;—
No parleying now! In Britain is one breath;
We all are with you now from shore to shore:—
Ye men of Kent, ’tis victory or death!
Woodcock’s
rejection of Reynard as a suitor for Belinda rests not only
on his scorn for London and Londoners, but also on his insistence
that “[the] Woodcocks of Kent are
an Ancient Family, and were the first that oppos’d William the
Conquerour; therefore I’le have my Name kept up” (1.15).
Hillaria’s
scheme to help her brother to win Belinda’s
hand also exploits Kentish local lore. Reynard selects of Romney
Marsh, an isolated region of Kent known chiefly for sheep farming
and smuggling (Darton
183) as the site of his fictitious estate.
Woodcock sees in this “A most convenient Place for my
Owling Trade, exporting Wool, and running French Goods” (4.28). Moreover
Reynard’s affected rustic dialect echoes the “Wooing
Song of a Yeoman of Kent’s Sonne,” a courting song
that can be traced back to at least 1611:
Ich
am my vather’s eldest zonne,
My
mouther eke doth love me well!
For
Ich can can bravely clout my shoone,
And
Ich full well can ring a bell.
…
Ich
have been twice our Whitson Lord,
Ich
have had ladies many vare;
And
eke thou hast my heart in hold,
And
in my minde zeemes passing rare. (Dixon 153-154: 7-10, 25-28)
Reynard’s
adoption of an exaggerated Kentish dialect and Woodcock’s
stereotypical local chauvinism combine to add a certain plausibility
to the play’s conventionally
absurd deception.
Connections with—and Disconnections from—the
Continent
Woodcock’s prejudices link the rivalry between rural
and urban dwellers to the fabled English xenophobia. His rigid
view of class and regional segregation makes him a fool in
a society that combines traditional culture based on local
custom with continental fashion and cosmopolitan attitudes
influenced by the “Urban Renaissance” (Borsay
286). Baker’s
Kentish setting naturally foregrounds English ambivalence toward
France and the continent. William III's liberal immigration
policies were still under hot debate, and the War of the Spanish
Succession (1701-1714) had heightened fears of a French invasion
(which would inevitably come through Kent), even as France
was driving British fashion. Centres of leisure like Tunbridge
Wells were “fashionable provincial society’s window
on the world outside” with their “imported theatrical
and musical performers and musical clubs and festivals influenced
by cosmopolitan ideas” (Borsay
286). Reynard remarks
on the abundance of “slender Court-Ladies, with French Scarffs, French Aprons, French Night-Cloaths,
and French Complexions” (1.4), while Woodcock
complains that his “Country is the Seat of Plagues .
. . more pester’d
with French Folks, and Presbyterians, than
the Egyptians were with the Frogs and Lice” (2.43).
The English
were also concerned about the influence of their former Protestant
ally the United Provinces (i.e., The Netherlands), which had
become a major military and economic rival since the 1660s
(Black, European
Warfare 210).
Even during times of uneasy alliance (as when the play was
written) a climate of mistrust prevailed between England and
the Netherlands. During the seventeenth century England had
received many Protestant refugees from the low countries and
many more Dutch Protestants came over with William of Orange
in 1688 (Statt
168-173). Protestant though they might have
been, these immigrants, including Dutch Calvinists and French
Huguenots, were a source of discomfort for many Anglicans,
already concerned about English Protestant dissenters. As Daniel
Statt writes, “after 1689 the religious side of the immigration
question became a facet of the ideological and party fissures
of English society. Many observers harbored sincere fears for
the stability of church and state; others used religious arguments
to cloak cultural animosities, economic self-interest, and
political partisanship” (Foreigners
and Englishmen 101).
The simultaneous strangeness and familiarity of the Dutch presence
in England is reflected in the play, in Maiden’s boast
to have “dress’d
up last Winter in my Lady Fussock’s Cherry-colour
Damask, sat a whole Play in the Front-Seat of the Box, and
[been] . . . taken for a Dutch Woman
of Quality” (2.42). The effeminate Maiden
in drag might not pass for an English woman, but with the distortion
of gender norms attributed to the Dutch, his femaleness could
not be assuredly denied (see Kietzman
98).
Throughout the play, Baker
sets the rural against the urban, with frequent allusions to
a larger context involving England’s
religious and national identity, domestic and foreign cultures,
and changing class structures. In Tunbridge Wells, there was
always the risk of the lower orders infiltrating the ranks
of the rich, as we see repeatedly in the play, and Baker focuses
on these interactions, partly mocking the pretenders, partly
emphasizing the difficulty of maintaining an imagined purity
in class, lineage, religion, and culture. The marriage between
Reynard and Belinda is a union of opposites—gentry and
commons, country and city—but it is an uneasy union, achieved
only through deception, and the future towards which it points
is an uncertain one.
[back to top]
This
account, as published in the “Tunbridge Walks” entry
of the 1782 Biographica Dramatica (Baker, David,“Tunbridge-Walks”),
is almost identical to that published in the Encyclopedia
Britannica of
1778-83 (“Baker, (Thomas)”). Other parts of the Biographica
Dramatica entries
for Thomas Baker use verbatim wording from earlier accounts
of Baker.
“‘Breeches’ parts
for actresses embodied [a] contradiction for women: on
the one hand, women could dress and fight as men; on the
other, we know from contemporary accounts that the audience
saw such parts as a chance to revel in the titillating
sight of the actresses’ legs” (Owen 2).
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