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

The new form tends to the monumental, both in plot details and in dialogue. Characters wait to see what will happen, whether in the case of Bevil Jr.'s refusal to express overt opposition to his father's plans to marry him to Lucinda or in the polite stalemate that obtains between him and Indiana. As for the dialogue, entire scenes are in effect monologues punctuated by the occasional enabling "phatic" interjection from a supposed interlocutor. There is little sense of conversational give and take, and therefore little opportunity for one speaker to act forcefully upon another, changing opinions and influencing action. Overall these features create a sense of the indecorousness of worldly self-assertion, or perhaps, more grandly, of the potential blasphemy of human undertaking as a whole.

The contrasts between the two top-level plots and the servants' business are even clearer. As noted, Tom and Phyllis deliver most of the overt comedy in a play otherwise devoted to a "joy too exquisite for laughter" (Plays 299). While the emotions and speech of the upper-class lovers are deeply serious and resolutely moral throughout, Tom and Phyllis exchange the erotic banter more typical of the "gay couple" of earlier comedy. When Phyllis wishes that she did not have to get around town on foot, for example, Tom quips, "Do you wish yourself lame?" (1.1.249-50). When he is not exchanging repartee directly with his beloved, Tom affects the cynicism of a full-blown Restoration rake. As he informs Humphrey, "the Laquies are the Men of Pleasure of the Age" (1.1.170-171), and to prove it he refers to his passion for Phyllis as a throwaway dalliance: "I love to fret, and play with the little Wanton" (1.1.226-27). Phyllis, for her part, is a self-conscious imitator, explicitly playing the "Coquet" to Tom's "Coxcomb" (1.1.256-257).

The purpose of this contrast is twofold: first of all, Tom and Phyllis are more natural and direct than the serious lovers; in this respect they are used as positive foils, allowing a very light satire to be directed at the self-absorption and contrived melancholy of the principal characters. The second function of the subplot, however, trains the satirical gaze on Tom and Phyllis themselves. Steele exploits the convention that the servants' concerns must be less worthy than those of their betters, making his point by reference to fashion. Phyllis's wardrobe consists of things her mistress has discarded as unfashionable, last season's wear, and to go along with her dress, as Tom puts it, "she has always new Thoughts and new Airs with new Cloaths" (1.1.231-32). The result is that she epitomizes "the whole Town of Coquets at second hand" (1.1.234). The hand-me-down sensibility of the two servants, in sum, shows the proper place of the now old-fashioned Restoration ethos. Humphrey speaks with authority when he says to Tom, "I hope the Fashion of being lewd and extravagant, despising of Decency and Order, is almost at an End, since it is arrived at persons of your Quality" (1.1.66-168).