This is the breeziest play I’ve read so far, and also the latest. It was famously revived by the RSC last year as The Fantastic Folliest of Mrs. Rich. The clips for that production look absolutely fabulous, and I'm gutted that I didn't see it.
It was wildly jarring to go from all the death and hate of and formal iambs of 1631’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore yesterday all the way to the lightness and liveliness of 1700’s The Beau Defeated; Or, The Lucky Younger Brother today. I had trouble taking The Beau Defeated seriously, at first, to be honest.
Not that a play needs to be serious, but I really struggled to change my mindset here. So I went back to Cavendish’s Concerning the Reading of Plays and then really thought about what she says:
..for plays must be read to the nature of those several humours, or passions, as are expressed by writing: for they must not read a scene as they would read a chapter; for scenes must be read as if they were spoke or acted. Indeed comedies should be read a mimic way, and the sound of their voice must be according to the sense of the scene.
I guess it’s not so different from the way an actor has to inhabit a character or a scene, except a reader has to inhabit all the characters, and the whole play. After that, I was able to get my head around Pix’s writing. I’m glad I did, because it’s an entertaining, cleverly structured play.
No More Restoration Rakes
We’re past peak-Restoration “immoral” sex comedies and more into sentiment. Many of the same elements are here, such as marriage, money, disguises, and class concerns, but love seems to have replaced sex, and rakes are outright villains now, rather than ambiguous anitheros we root for. Other than that, not much has changed, as this play's villainous rake tells us, in what I think must be direct reference to the Restoration:
There's nothing new under the sun. The world is a continual round of nauseous repetition: In the last generation, and this, young girls were mad for husbands, then mad to get rid of 'em; sharpers had their cullies, gamesters, their fools. Physicians killed their patients and were paid for't; courtiers' promises and bullies oaths ever made a great noise and signified nothing.
The basic plot revolves around two rich widows whose stories are comically contrasted. Mrs. Rich is a wealthy “citizen” or commoner whose husband had been a banker, and Lady Landsworth, who was married “a mere baby” to elderly former debauchee who kept her like a nun. Both women are eager to marry again.
Mrs. Rich is painted as a foolish, thrusting climber. “Cit,” short for “citizen,” is a deadly insult to her. Mrs. Rich’s goals, as she tells her excellent maid, Betty (who keeps the plot moving behind the scenes), are extremely straightforward:
Mrs Rich: I will have a title, and a name. That’s resolved. A name that shall fill the mouth.
Betty: Ah, Madam, a great name will become you extremely, but a name is not sufficient. I believe that you must have a husband, too. And you ought to take care what choice you make.
Of course, she doesn’t, surrounding herself instead with two women gamblers--Lady La Bassett and Mrs. Trickwell--who fleece her for a hundred pounds at a sitting at ombre, and a rakish fop named Sir John Roverhead, who has his eye on marrying Mrs. Rich for her money, if he doesn’t first run off with her dim, spoiled niece, Lucinda.
The visiting Lady Landsworth also confesses to Betty, in the same scene, that she’s looking for a new spouse, but her desires are quite different:
Lady L: He should be genteel, yet not a beau; witty, yet no debauchee; susceptible of love, yet abhoring lewd women; learned, poetical, musical, without one dram of vanity. In fine, very meritorious, yet very modest; generous to the last degree, and master of no estate; mightily in love with me, and not so much as know I am worth the clothes I wear.
Betty: Ha, ha, ha. To your romances again, lady-fair. ‘Tis only there you can converse with those heroes. This town affords no such, I can assure you.
That’s an interesting line, because as a reader, you’d think that the rich Mrs. Rich would have a better chance of marrying for a title, given all her money and her very narrow interests. Lady Landsworth’s dream sound like just that...a dream.
There's Someone For Everyone...Eventually
Before the play even starts, however, Lady Landsworth has already found a man who exactly meets her requirements in Younger Clerimont (we never learn his first name), a clever but impoverished and extremely melancholy young man whose dim country squire older brother got all the money when their father passed away. He burned his will in a rage to disinherit the oafish older brother and then died before making a new one. She’s led Clerimont to believe that she’s a professional kept woman, to test him. She wears a mask every time they meet, both to hide her identity and to suggest that she’s a “mistress.”
(Can I just say I love the mask convention in these plays. Any play in which people wear masks or vizards is ok with me. Disguises are good, too, but masks are really the thing.)
Mrs. Rich, on the other hand, already has her eyes on Sir John, who is a terrible, terrible choice, only wants her money, has any number of other women, and uses the same cheesy poems on all of them.
The two plots revolve around Betty, Mr. Rich (Mrs. Rich’s brother in law) and Lady Landsworth and eventually Mrs. Clerimont (a cousin), and Younger Clerimont’s friend Belvoir all plotting to help save Mrs. Rich from herself and for Betty, Mrs. Clerimont, and Belvoir to help clear up a very clunkily plotted misunderstanding between Lady Landsworth and Younger Clerimont that nearly ruins their relationship.
In a surprisingly mean twist, Mrs. Clerimont foists Clerimont’s dim countrified brother Elder Clerimont--who brings his hounds and his even dimmer huntsman Toby with him everywhere--off on Mrs. Rich, with a highly improbable story that he’s a “the greatest, nicest beau in Christendom,” who has sworn only to court in this “strange disguise” until he can meet a woman who will love him in spite of it. This neatly mirrors and spoofs Lady Landsworth’s design.
The frantic denouement has Lady Landsworth and Betty & co. hiding in the closet while Mrs. Clerimont coaxes Clerimont the Younger to say the right things to re-endear him to Lady L, and then almost immediately Mrs. Rich agreeing to marry Clerimont the Elder, just as Betty & co. stop the loathsome Lucinda from eloping with Sir John, who is revealed to be an imposter, just as “Lady” La Bassett is.
In contrast to the last comedy I read, The Roaring Girl Sir John and La Bassett depart with curses, and Trickwell slinks out. It’s much more satisfying than all the forgiveness in The Roaring Girl.
A Class Act
The class thing is interesting here. The lines between rich citizens and poor nobility are getting more blurred (Lady L seeks out Mrs. Rich, not the other way around), but it’s still clearly good theater to mock people who get above themselves. It’s fascinating that Pix, a professional writer, daughter of a headmaster, and wife of a tailor, would paint the citizen as such a dunce, but I suppose you have to know your audience. Also, even today it’s not just the upper class who enforces and upholds class distinctions, that’s for sure.
It definitely sounds like Pix’s plot is punishing the rich cit Mrs. Rich, despite her far more realistic plan for finding a husband; she’s a laughingstock who ends up marrying a buffoon. Certainly, Mrs. Rich is shocked when she finds out her husband is a country bumpkin (though it helps that he says she can stay in London as much as she likes and he’ll be in the country). Their absurd marriage seems like it might last. The rich noblewoman Lady Landsworth, by contrast, whose idea is ridiculously romantic, gets the man of her dreams--though both she and Mrs. Clerimont seem doubtful it will last, Mrs. C saying “‘twill scarce hold out seven years.”
Money Changes Everything
Finally, it’s worth stressing that they both end up marrying into the same untitled family, the Younger Clerimont finds out that the "mistress" he was in love with is riche woman, Lady L's penniless lover unexpectedly has his rightful inheritance restored, and Mrs. Rich is richer than ever. She's already talking about buying Elder Clerimont a title.
So while the play is a pretty biting attack on people getting above their station, maybe Mrs. Rich makes the better match; and only the true class imposters (La Bassett and Sir John) really come off too badly. The real happy ending is that everyone who isn’t a villain ends up reasonably wealthy at the end, citizen or noble. Marriage and titles may be beside the point, but money isn’t.
The epilogue, spoken by the rich citizen Mr. Rich, sums up pretty well:
The truly great are of a quite different character.
The glory of the world our British nobles are,
The ladies too renowned and chaste and fair:
But to our city Augusta’s sons,
The conquering wealth of both the Indias runs;
Though less in name, of greater power by far.
Honors alone but empty ‘scutcheons are.
Mixed with their coin, the title sweetly sounds,
No such allay as twenty thousand pounds.