Richard Steele and the Genealogy of Sentimental Drama: A Reading of The Conscious Lovers

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2004 by Hynes, Peter

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These examples suggest, I hope, a consistent pattern. Whenever the question of ancient title, of pure and regular descent, comes up, Steele treats its partisans with satirical contempt. Why? A traditional and perfectly valid answer leans on the social aspect of Steele's ambitions as a reformer of both manners and plays. Speaking for merchants and the middle station generally, he wants to deflate the collective ego of the aristocrats and to promote a tolerance, or even a celebration, of interclass unions. From a slightly different angle, somewhat like the approach recommended by Fredricjameson in The Political Unconscious (78-82), an analysis of such social thematics might also conclude that Steele's drama seeks to resolve a real social tension on the symbolic level by representing a compromise: a marriage between two socially heterogeneous, even antipathetic groups. This resolution is played in two different registers: the hardheaded negotiation of the two patriarchs, Sir John Bevil and old Sealand, designed to unite a son-any son-of the upper crust with a daughter-any daughter-of the bourgeoisie; and the frankly extravagant wishfulfillment of the Bevil/Indiana plot, where the same economic and social result is achieved but at no cost in discipline. Aberrant, subversive desires, it seems, turn out to serve the same ends as the conscious planning of the authorities.

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I would like to add to this account of the symbolic resolution of a social problem by giving the issue ametadramatic twist. The "regular" of Mrs. Sealand's speech is of course one of the magic words of Neoclassical dramatic theory: good drama, as the critics had it, obeys the rules. Good drama, moreover, has history behind it, a lineage going back to the Greek and Roman playwrights. Over and over again seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critics describe the history of drama as a family affair: literary fathers hand down an inheritance to their literary sons, and the preservation of legitimate descent is as important to artistic genealogy as it is to the specifically social. A corollary to this prejudice is that departures from legitimacy maybe described in terms of miscegenation and bastardy, for here the orderly line of descent is interrupted and confused. As it happens, both opponents and defenders of sentimental drama indulge heavily in this sort of metaphor. Voltaire, although guilty of writing sentimental comedies himself, was nonetheless in theory opposed to the larmoyant. In the rather tortuous preface to Nanine, his adaptation of Richardson's Pamela, he writes of the experimental mixed form: "Ce serait manquer a la fois l'objet de la tragedie et de la comedie; ce serait une espece batarde, un monstre ne de l'impuissance de faire une comedie et une tragedie veritable" (871). More tersely, Colle dubbed sentimental comedy a species of "theatrical sodomy," drawing attention not just to the perverseness of the new genre but also to its supposed sterility, its inability to reproduce itself (qtd. in Gaiffe 132-33). In this the French authors are echoed by Goldsmith's celebrated "Essay on the Theatre," with its references to "a kind of mulish production, with all the defects of its opposite parents, and marked with sterility" (213).

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Richard Steele and the Genealogy of Sentimental Drama: A Reading of The Conscious Lovers

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2004 by Hynes, Peter

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