Female Spectatorship, Jeremy Collier and the Anti-Theatrical Debate

Jean I. Marsden

In 1662, Richard Baker defended the stage by protesting "Indeed, it is not so much the Player, that makes the Obscenity, as the Spectator himself." ¹ Baker's words, written in response to William Prynne's massive diatribe against the theater, Histrio-Mastix, the Players Scovrge, or Actors Tragaedy (1633), express the shift in emphasis from actor to spectator that was to become the central focus of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century writing for and about the stage. Taking issue with Prynne's description of the actor as not only obscene but hypocritical, Baker represents theater as the interaction of spectator and spectacle, a communal experience in which the audience plays a crucial role in interpreting the representation. This emphasis on audience response is a critical component in the many discussions of the theater published during the next fifty years. While Baker's own work deals more with exposing the fallacies of a previous generation of anti-theatrical prejudices, its emphasis on theater as representation and the dynamics of audience response is crucial to the Restoration and eighteenth-century understanding of drama. His book represents the first of a series of often sophisticated discussions of the complex relationship between visual representation and the spectator, and between spectatorship and desire.

These commentaries, most notably those in opposition to the theater, articulate a complex concept of spectatorship, prefiguring Lacan and an entire generation of film theorists. ² They detail a system of voyeurism, involving an image (here a living image), an audience which watches that image, and a reflexive gaze which excites desire. As Baker explains, it is the spectator who makes the obscenity, who creates the erotic context for what he--or she--sees. In addition, as revealed by attacks on the theater such as Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), concerns of spectatorship cannot be separated from sexuality, particularly female sexuality. While critics had attacked the immorality of the stage for over a millennium, among English writers the link between spectatorship and female sexuality can be traced to the explosion of publications which followed Collier. Earlier writers, such as Prynne or Stephen Gosson, had focused their arguments on issues such as the corruptness of actors or the [End Page 877] hypocrisy involved in acting, and in particular on the evils of dressing men in women's clothing. ³ This late seventeenth-century concern with spectatorship appears to be an English phenomenon; continental writers express little interest in the dynamics of audience response. ⁴

It is only in the late seventeenth century that attacks on the stage begin to focus directly and repeatedly upon the effect of theater on the audience, and in particular on the female members of the audience. Sexuality becomes the issue upon which this controversy pivots, both the sexuality of the female spectator and the sexuality of the female image that she watches. Specifically, the anti-theatrical writers express an unconcealed fear of the female gaze and its ramifications. How will women respond to what they see upon the stage--and how will their reaction affect family and state? Interestingly, these opponents of the stage take women more seriously than those who defend it, admitting the consequences as well as the potency of the female gaze, a gaze which they link inexorably to a woman's sexuality. Defenders of the stage not only downplay any potential danger, but frequently ignore the female spectator altogether.

Ironically, there is no female voice in this debate. Despite the widespread concern with the effect of theater upon women, and the emphasis on the female spectator that appears in prologues and epilogues, few women actually recorded their responses to the theater. For us, they remain a silent and mysterious presence upon whom a generation of moralists projected their own fears. We know they were capable of expressing both displeasure and pleasure, as Wycherley's bitterly witty "Epistle Dedicatory" to The Plain Dealer makes clear; the ladies in the London audiences plainly objected to the obscenity of The Country Wife and were adept at communicating their objections. ⁵ Nonetheless, no woman published her views, leaving us without a first hand account of theater-going in the Restoration and early eighteenth century. As a result, we find ourselves confronted with a theorized spectator, a woman constructed through the writings of men. ⁶ Unlike recent work by scholars such as David Roberts and Laura Rosenthal which focuses on actual women in the theater, my interest in this essay is the phantom woman, that figure whose shadowy existence and dangerous gaze, it was argued, could lead to moral corruption and social catastrophe. ⁷ [End Page 878]

Jeremy Collier and the "Inclination of Ladies"

Jeremy Collier was neither the first nor the most extreme of the anti-theatrical polemicists. The first two decades of Charles II's reign saw little in the way of actual publication against the theater, but by the end of the century even this tacit support had eroded. While Anthony Horneck's treatise, Delight and Judgment: Or, a Prospect of the Great Day of Judgment, And its Power to damp, and imbitter Sensual Delights, Sports and Recreations, appeared in 1684, it was not until the last decade of the seventeenth century that the great wave of anti-theatrical books and pamphlets appeared. The timing of this onslaught is not surprising; in the 1680s, London's playhouses had struggled, reduced to a single company by poor audiences and political unrest. After 1695, when audiences were once again sufficient to support two licensed playhouses, theaters rebounded and the number of new plays increased. Times and audiences had changed, however, and the often bawdy drama popular during Charles II's reign was openly opposed, if not by the audiences themselves, then by a growing faction of clergymen, both Anglicans and Dissenters. The first flood of print lasted into 1699, followed by a second burst in 1704. ⁸ Similar attacks continued to be published through much of the eighteenth century, mostly, however, in the years prior to the passage of the Licensing Act in 1737. While it is simplistic to link changes in drama to Collier's works alone, Collier's popularity suggests that his ideas had widespread support.

The authors of the earliest attacks were most often churchmen, such as Horneck, Collier, and Arthur Bedford, who wrote books and pamphlets, letters, and sermons; Collier himself contributed five books and pamphlets to the growing mass of publications. ⁹ From the publication of Collier's work onwards, the pernicious influence of theater upon women became a central feature of these works, and by the eighteenth century attacks on the theater were often designed for a female audience. Whether sermons, learned treatises or letters to "Ladies of Quality," these works share a common anxiety regarding the effect of women watching dramatic representations. For the authors, the danger of theater lies in its ability excite the passions and "fasten upon the Memory" through the medium of sight. ¹⁰ Even concerns over profanity or blasphemy wane in comparison to the corruption which can result from watching actors and actresses perform "Love-representations" (281) and "all the Topicks of Lewdness" (55). Thus, Horneck claims, spectators see acts performed which in turn prompt them to similar actions: [End Page 879]

Here all the wanton looks, and gestures, and postures that be in the mode, are practiced according to art, and you may remember, you have seen people when dismist from a play, strive and labour to get that grace and antick meen [sic], they saw in the mimick on the stage. ¹¹

The theaters, in essence, become schools of immodesty as the audience seeks to reproduce what it sees represented so that sight inevitably leads to sin. The only way to fight against such corruption, Horneck notes, is to reject sight entirely, to withdraw the eye from that object completely, "as if it were actually pluck'd out, or were of no use in the body." ¹² The physicality of Horneck's image graphically illustrates the physicality of the concern; for him and for the writers who follow him, the gaze is no abstraction but an entity capable of producing a dangerously sensual response.

The erotic link between sight and body is intrinsic to these anti-theatrical arguments, and their descriptions of the carnality of the gaze are explicit and even violent. Like Horneck, the anonymous author of The Conduct of the Stage Consider'd. Being a Short Historical Account of its Original, Progress, various Aspects, and Treatment in the Pagan, Jewish and Christian World (1721) focuses directly on the eye as a conduit for sin. Citing St. Chrysostom, an early Christian opponent of the stage, the writer uses a biblical example of sexual transgression as his analogy for the dangers of the theater:

SPEAKING of David and Bathsheba, he says David saw her, and was wounded in his Eye. Let those who hear this who contemplate the beauty of others, and who are possess'd with an unruly Desire after Stage-Plays, who say, we behold them without hurt. What hear I? David is hurt, and art not thou? He is wounded, and can I trust to thy Strength? Did he fall who had so great a measure of the Spirit? And canst thou stand? Yet he beheld not an Harlot, but an honest Woman, and that not in the Theatre, but at home; but thou beholdest an Harlot in the Playhouse, where even the very Place itself makes the Soul liable to Punishment. ¹³

In this passage, the author makes clear the associations between spectatorship and sexuality. The "unruly Desire after Stage-Plays" is translated into a more specific sexual desire mediated through the gaze. Like David, the spectator at the playhouse will be "wounded in his Eye," in other words overcome with desire, through the simple act of gazing upon a female image represented by the actress upon the stage. The danger lies not in the "Harlot"/actress, but in the act of looking itself.

While references to Church fathers such as Chrysostom and Cyprian [End Page 880] were also common in earlier centuries (Prynne cites them extensively), by the end of the seventeenth century the polemicists focus more definitively on passages which stress the role of the spectator rather than, as in the past, those citing the evils of cross-dressing or the sinful nature of pleasure itself. ¹⁴ Citing Salvian, the author of The Stage Condemn'd (1698) equates the spectator with what he or she sees because "the Pollution of the Theatre and Stage-Plays are such, as make the Actors and Spectators equally guilty; for whilst they willingly look on, and by that means approve them, they become Actors themselves by Sight and Assent." ¹⁵ Sight creates a bond between spectator and event, which of necessity implicates the observer. Because of the link between sight and desire, the nature of this guilt is always distinctly sexual, so that "the Pleasures that are reap'd from the Stage must needs be sensual." ¹⁶

Through their reiteration of the sensual pleasures of the stage, these works establish a dynamic of spectatorship which links the gaze inevitably with the sexuality not only of the object gazed upon but of the spectators themselves. Theater thus becomes dangerous not merely as representation in itself but as representation before an audience. Through the medium of sight, theater both excites the passions of viewers and encourages them to imitate the passions they see enacted before them. Ultimately, concerns of spectatorship underlie almost every argument against the immorality of the stage. This link between sight and sex becomes of primary importance with regard to the female spectator, whose gaze becomes the true source of anxiety for Jeremy Collier and his followers.

Collier's popular and controversial A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of English Stage articulates the problem of the female gaze more cogently than either his supporters or opponents. As the title indicates, Collier has two main concerns, immorality and profanity; what is less clear is that the immorality he cites is almost entirely directed toward women: the roles they represent on the stage and their experience as members of the audience. After a short "Introduction," he begins his book with a lengthy chapter on the "Immodesty of the Stage," the immodesty, that is, of its female creations (of the nine characters he cites specifically for immodesty, eight are women) (3-4). ¹⁷ For Collier, "immodesty" connotes openly sexual behavior, whether in speech or action; as modesty characterizes the female sex, "immodesty" represents something gone badly awry, something unnatural, in the behavior of a woman. He returns to this topic throughout the remaining chapters of his diatribe. Even within his discussion of "immodesty" he raises only two topics unrelated to women. ¹⁸ These pale beside the potential [End Page 881] danger of Restoration drama's sexualization of "Ladies of Quality" and the damaging effect these characters have on the women who watch them.

Like his contemporaries, Collier couches his argument in terms of spectatorship. He claims that theater itself is not an evil thing, but that when it has been abused, it can provoke an evil response. ¹⁹ He compares watching drama to looking upon a "Lewd Picture," well drawn by a "Masterly Hand" (5). Gazing upon a sexualized image creates desire, "rais[ing] those Passions which can neither be discharged without Trouble, nor satisfyed without a Crime" (5). In the theater, these dangerous images are represented by actresses playing the roles of women who take sexual "liberties"; the end result of such representation is to "Tincture the Audience," leading them to "make Lewdness a Diversion" (5). Again, it is the event of spectatorship which is crucial; Collier's emphasis on audience response, particularly that of the women in the audience, suggests that plays become dangerous only in representation. When staged, a play puts into effect a complex network of cause and effect in the audience, beginning with sight and leading to general moral debasement, characterized by desire, and from there to "lewd" action. In this process, physical representation before the eyes of an audience is imperative. Collier reiterates his interpretation of drama as performance later in the work when he describes language as heard rather than read. Even here, however, the auditor becomes an observer as Collier explains that "Words are a Picture to the Ear" (204).

The emphasis on spectatorship becomes central to Collier's attack on the representation of women in late seventeenth-century drama. His objections to these representations are threefold. First, he complains that the women in these plays "speak Smuttily," expressing their sexual desires without constraint (18). Collier's concern here is less with the language itself than it is with the connection between words and action. He uses Euripides's Phaedra as an example of a woman possessed by an "infamous Passion" who nonetheless concealed her desire, remaining "regular and reserv'd in her Language" and thus managed to retain her modesty (9-10). For him, Phaedra's chaste language represents a deeper sexual virtue. She feels an "infamous Passion," but because she does not express it, it remains cloaked and is ultimately destroyed. In contrast, openly sexual language not only expresses improper appetites but in itself engenders these appetites. Here Collier turns quickly from language to action, and begins arguing that playwrights deliberately depict women as mad or silly in order to "enlarge their Liberty" (10) and [End Page 882] to allow them to behave in an openly sexual manner. Speech thus provides the opportunity for action.

Collier's second objection develops directly out of his apprehension that smuttiness is an expression of deeper desires, desires which have grave social consequences. Playwrights not only allow their female characters to talk of sex and behave in an openly sexual manner, but they "Represent their single Ladys, and Persons of Condition, under these Disorders of Liberty" (12). "Disorders of Liberty," unnatural states of sexual freedom unrestrained by patriarchal control, are reprehensible in English drama not simply in themselves but because of the high rank of those who embody these immodest desires. Collier's emphasis on "single Ladys" and "Persons of Condition" indicates the key role class plays in his concerns over sexuality. While immodesty is never fitting, it becomes a disorder when women "of condition" engage in it. Single ladies should not acknowledge desire, and when such behavior occurs in the upper classes, the danger increases. Not only should persons of quality represent models of virtue, but upper-class women's failure to do so could upset the lines of patrilinear succession. Such behavior threatens the social fabric by making the lady of quality no better than a whore, an erasure of social distinction which Collier deems a "monstrous" irregularity (12).

Collier's final protest against the improper depiction of women on the English stage again interweaves class and sexuality as he objects to prologues and epilogues, citing them as "Lewdness without Shame or Example" (13). "Here," he continues, "are such Strains as would turn the Stomach of an ordinary Debauchee, and be almost nauseous in the Stews. And to make it the more agreeable, Women are Commonly pick'd out for this Service" (13). While we might expect Collier to decry the use of women for such a "nauseous" duty, his argument quickly turns from the sexualized woman who speaks the prologue to the woman who hears it as Collier voices his objection in terms of the woman in the audience rather than on the stage. The reason behind such a shift in focus is founded in Collier's careful differentiation between the illusory and the real, a distinction based on the principle of identification. When delivering a prologue or epilogue, the actress "quit[s] the Stage, and remove[s] from Fiction into Life" (13), speaking in her own voice rather than that of a fictional lady of quality. The social distinction which made the representation of "liberty" in the character of the lady a "Contradiction to Nature" (12) here compels Collier to censure playwrights less for making women speak indecently than for allowing an upper-class female audience to hear such indecent words. Collier suggests that the erotic [End Page 883] behavior of a lower class woman, the actress, in her own character, is of little moment. It has no natural or political implications and does not threaten the structure of society. It is the fictional representation which constitutes the danger because, Collier fears, ladies in the audience will identify with the character on the stage, not with the actual actress.

Searching for a more decorous model for staging female behavior, Collier turns to Roman and Greek playwrights, most notably Plautus, Terence, and Sophocles. Using a profusion of examples, he argues that, in contrast to modern plays, classical playwrights properly depicted the behavior of women. In these plays, only "prostituted and Vulgar People" indulge in sexual liberties (15). Women of quality are by contrast both silent and modest. Terence, as he notes, "is Extreamly careful in the Behavior of his Women," rarely allowing them "any Share of Conversation upon the Stage" (20). Sophocles does not allow his lovers to appear on stage together, "for fear," Collier suggests, "they might prove unmanagable" (29). Collier's reading of the classics provides a curious model of female behavior. While female sexuality seems a province only of the lowest classes, prostitutes and the vulgar, Collier's emphasis on the careful corralling of women, silencing them and keeping them isolated lest they spontaneously engage in an immodest act, reveals female sexuality to be latent in his mind if not in the plays of Plautus, Terence, and Sophocles. His argument that a pair of lovers could prove "unmanagable" tells us more about his views of sexuality than those of Sophocles; sexuality, particularly female sexuality, is always latent and apt to explode into "liberties" if not rigidly controlled.

This fear of latent unmanageability provides the key to one of Collier's deepest concerns, the effect that watching libertine plays will have upon the female spectator. As he comments frequently, "the Ladies" make up a considerable part of the audience, and it is the response of this audience to the immodest representations of the seventeenth century which troubles him. The male audience is virtually ignored throughout A Short View. At the very best, Collier argues, late seventeenth-century drama presents a confusing contradiction for women. Such drama assumes that ladies have vicious imaginations and are "pleased with Scenes of Brutishness" (7). At the same time, he notes, conduct books and the "Customs of Education" (7) require women to behave in a very different fashion, with meekness and chaste modesty. In essence, the plays leave women in an untenable position; on the one hand, the plays themselves are immodest, on the other, a truly virtuous woman should not be able to recognize this immodesty: "'tis almost a Fault for them to Understand they are ill Used. They can't discover their [End Page 884] Disgust without disadvantage, nor Blush without disservice to their Modesty" (7-8). Recognizing that the plays are indecent, not to mention laughing at the lewd jests, incriminates a woman because it indicates that she is familiar, in theory if not in practice, with such indecency and that her understanding, and hence her virtue, is tainted. Following this logic, however, an indecent play should not trouble the truly modest woman as she would not know that she had been "ill used."

The inherent contradiction becomes even more problematic, for as Collier argues such tainted understanding goes against all the manifestations of female modesty, a quality which is at the core of a woman's nature. Citing Rapin, he notes that modesty "is the Character of Women. To represent them without this Quality; is to make Monsters of them, and throw them out of their Kind" (9). Declaring that modesty was "design'd by Providence as a Guard to Virtue," Collier goes on to describes it as an almost physical entity, "wrought into the Mechanism of the Body" (11), a theory which was promptly attacked by his detractors. ²⁰ Reading the description of how this mechanism operates, however, reveals an acutely sensual apparatus which seems to parallel closely the operation of the passions themselves:

[Modesty is] proportion'd to the occasions of Life, and strongest in Youth when Passion is so too. 'Tis a Quality as true to Innocence, as the Sences are to Health; whatever is ungrateful to the first, is prejudicial to the latter. The Enemy no sooner approaches, but the Blood rises in Opposition, and looks Defyance to an Indecency. It supplys the room of Reason, and Collection: Intuitive Knowledge can scarcely make a quicker Impression; And what then can be a surer Guide to the Unexperienced? It teaches by suddain Instinct and Aversion; This is both a ready and a powerful Method of Instruction. The Tumult of the Blood and Spirits, and the Uneasiness of the Sensation, are of singular Use. (11)

In this schema, modesty is instinctive, characterized by physical manifestations such as blushes and a "tumult of Blood and Spirits." By the end of this passage, as Collier describes the result of modesty as tumultuous "Sensation," modesty seems almost indistinguishable from the youthful passion it is supposed to protect against.

Despite or perhaps because of the tumultuous nature of feminine modesty, Collier finds it severely threatened by the "liberty" of stage representations. Somehow the mechanism fails to work once a woman steps inside a playhouse. Instead, like his contemporaries, he finds the stage dangerous because of its ability to strike through the eye and [End Page 885] excite the passions, encouraging the spectator to imitate what she sees before her. He proposes a theory of identification in which the female spectator equates herself with the female character she sees on the stage, although not the actual actress. Thus, when replaying the scene in her mind, she enacts it herself, so that the erotic conduct becomes her own. In this manner, he explains, "Love-representations oftentimes call up the Spirits, and set them on work. The Play is acted over again in the Scene of Fancy, and the first Imagination becomes a Model . . . thus the Disease of the Stage grows catching" (281). The scene represented in the theater is internalized, so that the mind's eye replays the picture, creating a spectator within as well as without. When the subject is love or the sexual liberty which Collier claims disfigures so much contemporary drama, the internal spectator creates an endless cycle of contagion.

Lurking behind Collier's fear of female spectatorship and his outrage over the stage depictions of women is the figure of the prostitute, the overtly sexual woman in the audience and the potential alter ego to the ladies Collier addresses. The third part of a female sisterhood which also comprises the actress and the lady, she becomes the locus of Collier's sexual and social fears. Citing the character of Leonora in Dryden's The Spanish Friar, he protests her "lascivious" raptures and questions sarcastically "Are these the Tender Things Mr. Dryden says the Ladys call on him for? I suppose he means the Ladys that are too Modest to show their Faces in the Pit" (9). Only such "ladies" of the galleries, their faces hidden "modestly" behind the vizard masks which advertised their trade can enjoy such entertainment: "it regales their Lewdness, graces their Character, and keeps up their Spirits for their Vocation" (9). But if only prostitutes can gaze upon these stage representations of sexual liberty with pleasure, what does that say about the ladies of quality, those virgins and matrons who continue to frequent the theaters? This question becomes key to the anxieties underlying Collier's attack on the immodesty and immorality of the stage. Haunted by the specter of the immodest woman he questions, "Do Women leave all the regards to Decency and Conscience behind them when they come to the Play-House? Or does the Place transform their Inclinations and turn their former Aversions into Pleasure?" (7). What happens to ladies when they act as spectators? As Collier asks, "can this Stuff be the Inclination of Ladies?" (284). If it is, then the lady has the proclivities of a whore. Unlike ancient Roman and Greek drama (excepting of course Aristophanes) where sexuality is restricted to slaves and prostitutes and where these class distinctions prevent the mirror effect of theater, in England a woman can go to theater and see versions of herself [End Page 886] represented on stage. Responding to these images, her gaze excites desires which can perhaps be too easily satisfied. Thus, through the visual medium of the playhouse, the lady is transformed into the whore. Collier links such catastrophic behavior with leveling classes and destroying English society. If the ladies in the theater begin behaving like the ladies on the stage, the consequences for society are disastrous, no less than "Poverty and Disease, the Dishonour of Families, and the Debauchery of Kingdoms" (55).

Collier's followers go even further and make the connection between the lady and the prostitute explicit. The author of The Stage Condemn'd first cites the ladies as the chief supporters of theater (their "Encouragement and Presence is the most powerful argument (after all) for the Defence of the Stage"), and thus indirectly cites the instigators of the lewdness which characterizes the stage. ²¹ Using classical sources, he then articulates what Collier left implicit, that the sight of the stage play would result in uncontrolled sexual behavior on the part of the female spectator:

It were to be wished that our English Ladies and Gentlewomen, would be pleased to consider, 'That the wise Roman Senate approv'd the Divorce which Sepronius Sophus gave to his Wife for no other Reason, but that she resorted to the Cirques and Playhouses without his Consent; the Sight of which might make her an Adultress, and cause her to defile his Bed. And the Christian Emperor Justinian made the following Constitution, That a Man might lawfully put away his Wife, if she resort to Cirques, to Play-houses or Stage-Plays without his Privity and Consent, because her Chastity might thereby be endangered. ²²

Citing St. Cyprian he later adds, "thus is Adultery learned whilst it is beheld." ²³ Women, it seems, are peculiarly susceptible to visual stimulation. The author charts a direct cause and effect relation between the female gaze and the excitation of desire, desire which is seemingly impossible to control once it has been raised. Thus a man is justified in divorcing his wife simply because she watches a play; her gaze sets in motion a chain of events which results inevitably in promiscuity.

With increasing anxiety The Stage Condemn'd paints a lurid picture of women driven mad with desire by stage representations, claiming "it is a Miracle if there be found any Woman or Maid, which with those Spectacles of strange Lust, is not frequently inflam'd to down right Fury." ²⁴ The real threat posed by these representations of sexual behavior is that the control which a patriarchal society must have over female sexuality will vanish, and with it the entire structure of society. [End Page 887] Virginity as well as the chastity of the marriage bed will be lost, leaving chaos in its wake. ²⁵ This paradigm establishes a firm link between female spectatorship and female promiscuity so that by definition the only woman who can attend the theater is the whore. Fifty years later, the author of the anonymous An Address to the Ladies on the indecency of appearing at Immodest Plays (1756) indicts the entire female (but not the male) audience, complaining "when I hear of Plays which are big with obscenity, being performed Night after Night, to crowded Houses, I am almost tempted to suspect that the whole Female World, either are or would be Prostitutes." ²⁶

Linked by their sex with the characters represented on the stage, at the very least the female audience pays their "sisters" to prostitute themselves upon the stage. At the worst, inflamed by a gaze which supposedly filled even the chastest woman with uncontrollable desire, they became the third part of the sisterhood, the whores who lined the galleries or walked the streets outside Drury Lane. The potential for such sexual transgression on the stage or off raises the horrifying specter of uncontrolled female sexuality, a prospect with grave consequences for both the domestic circle and the state. In their discussions of female spectatorship, the anti-theatrical writers envision a world in which families are ruined by female license. Innocent virgins are seduced by villains once they have witnessed amorous interludes, chaste matrons return adulteresses from the theaters, and ladies make up for the "deficiencies" of their lords with footmen. ²⁷ Simple theater-going has larger implications, as the author of An Address to the Ladies reminds his female readers: "A Nation's Taste Depends on you. / --Perhaps a Nation's Virtue too." ²⁸ For these writers, female spectatorship leads to the breakup of the family, the corruption of lineage, and the resultant dismantling of hereditary lines of wealth and power--in effect shattering the social structures upon which national security depends.

The Lady Vanishes: Defenses of the Theater

Whereas the attacks on the theater show a certain uniformity of method and philosophy, the defenses of the stage which sprang up shortly after the publication of A Short View were disparate and often misdirected. Playwrights such as Congreve, Dryden, D'Urfey, and Vanbrugh responded directly to Collier's complaints, often refuting his arguments against their plays point by point. Other critics and playwrights responded more generally, often admitting that stage representations were immodest or even perverse, but defending the stage in [End Page 888] general for its ability to teach, in particular through the means of satire and caricature. In their accounts, theater acts as a mirror in which human follies are faithfully represented. ²⁹ Where attacks on the theaters saw libertine or foolish characters as potentially dangerous examples, the defenses point to them as instructive models for how not to behave. In their arguments, the experience of spectatorship is educational, largely because the spectator's identification with the image on stage is rational rather than emotional, providing a sense of distance between spectator and representation. Where the opponents of the stage detail an economy of gaze and desire, most of the defenses assume a link between gaze and reason, so that watching a play becomes an ongoing process of analysis which prevents the onset of desire.

Often contemptuous of Collier and his arguments, the defenses seem to have misjudged the growing opposition to the immorality of late seventeenth-century comedy which made Collier's works so popular. In addition, most writers misconstrue the nature of the degeneracy Collier feared. Where the attacks on the theater concentrate on the nature of stage representations and the moral effect of those representations on the audience, many defenses of the theaters focus on the morality of the actors and actresses rather than on the morality of the audience. ³⁰ But the anti-theatrical writers seem only tangentially concerned with the moral status of the actors (that argument is more characteristic of earlier attacks on the theater, such as Prynne's, or of contemporary French anti-theatrical writings). Nonetheless, the defenses continue to assure those opposed to the theater that while actresses may triumph on the stage, they do not offstage; young men will not mistake them for ladies and "catch the real Itch of Love from their counterfeit Scrubbado." ³¹ Likewise, Oldmixon contends that few women have thrown away "favors" on actors and that dancing schools are more dangerous than playhouses. ³² Again, such assurances miss the mark as actors themselves are not a threat in the eyes of the anti-theatrical writers; virtually no one expresses concern over the potential for relationships between actors or actresses and members of the audience. The actor/actress becomes dangerous not in him/herself, but as the means of representation, as object of the gaze.

By focusing on the influence of actors, arguments such as those made by Oldmixon and Drake overlook the very real concern expressed by Collier over the moral ramifications of the female gaze. References to women are largely absent from defenses of the stage and when women are considered, by and large the issue of female spectatorship is subsumed under a general defense of the morality of Englishwomen. [End Page 889] Writers argue that Collier's opinion of the ladies is too harsh, that their essential piety and virtue prevents them from being corrupted by a "meer Representation." ³³ While willing to admit that women in other cultures may have been led astray, the defenses argue that English women possess special virtues which protect them against "disorders of Liberty." The anonymous The Stage Acquitted argues that, by virtue of the cooler English climate, English women have cooler passions than those of ancient Greece; their sexuality is more under control and can tolerate the temptations of the theater. In other words, Collier misjudged the nature of his countrywomen and thus his arguments have no merit. This ethnocentric argument sidesteps both the question of spectatorship and of character depiction, and ultimately concedes that the stage does have the power to corrupt. ³⁴

While some critics, such as John Dennis, admit the dubious morality of the female characters in some plays, most choose to ignore the issue. (Congreve even remarks flippantly that "it was a mercy that all four Women [in Love for Love] were not naught; for that had been maintaining that there was not one Woman of Quality honest"). ³⁵ But even those playwrights who defended the honor of their female characters, sent mixed messages. In the "Preface" to The Phaeton (1698), one of the first responses to Collier to appear after A Short View, Charles Gildon describes in great detail the honorable nature of his character Althea, concluding the "Preface" with a paean to the ladies of "Honour, Piety, and Sense" who have supported the plays to which Collier objects. Yet this defense of the moral uses of drama and Gildon's own virtuous representation of women is followed immediately by a prologue which stresses the sensual appearance of the actresses who represented these virtuous women. The prologue begins with a male actor pleading for the play, but he is soon elbowed out of the way by "Mrs. Cross and six of the Youngest Actresses" who insist that their pleading will be more effective because they evoke the body: "Pray let us speak--We shall be understood, / We speak the Language of All Flesh and Blood." They explicitly display themselves as sexual objects, claiming that by doing so they arouse support from the (male) audience:

If then this Charming Tribe shou'd fail to win ye,
I needs must say some strange dull Devil's in ye.
Cannot our Eyes, our Youth, our Form appease ye?
And have we Nothing?--Nothing that can please ye? ³⁶

Pointing to their sexual attractiveness ("eyes," "youth," and "form"), they suggest that they can provide additional charms. The prologue concludes [End Page 890] with the women making a Lysistrata-like threat to withhold sexual favors if the play does not receive audience support. While in the prologue the actress has moved, as Collier noted, "from fiction into life" and is thus less dangerous as an example to the women in the audience, prologues such as this display the actress as sexual object and make obvious the erotic overtones of even a "moral" play such as Phaeton.

The conflict which Gildon fails to see, but which Collier does see, is between the simple morality of a character and the sexual content of that character as represented by the "Flesh and Blood" actress on the stage. Where Collier does object to the specific words and actions of female characters, he is even more concerned with the effect these representations will have on the women audience members who may identify with the women they see upon the stage. Eventually Collier, like Bedford, Law, and most of the anonymous authors, completely rejects the feasibility of theater as legitimate entertainment. Yet, few of the defenses even consider the issue of female spectatorship and its ramifications. Filmer denies the connection between the gaze and desire (and ignores completely the troublesome issue of the female gaze) central to all attacks on the theater in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, contending that "tho the Eye may like and look upon a beautiful Woman, yet the Heart must Lust after her, before that Look becomes Adulterous." ³⁷ He does not consider what happens when a woman looks upon a handsome man or watches a tempting seduction.

Those few writers who do consider the female spectator mostly envision her learning from the drama she watches, stressing drama's capacity to represent society. Such arguments, however, also necessitate admitting the misogyny which underlies much late seventeenth-century comedy. Vanbrugh, for example, cites The Relapse for giving a "homer check to the Lewdness of Women" when Worthy admits in soliloquy that had Amanda succumbed to his blandishments he would have left her. ³⁸ His argument admits the principle of female identification with the character on stage, but depends on her recognizing the misogyny of the libertine creed in order to control her own desires. Dennis, the most prolific defender of the theater, avoids the problem of the female spectator in his original response to Collier, but returns to the question twenty years later. ³⁹ In a letter addressed to Judas Iscariot, Esq [Barton Booth], Dennis writes that women are, if anything, too consciously prim in their response to drama, sitting through depictions of rapes and seductions in tragedies while "flinch[ing] back like unback'd Fillies, at the least Approach of Rem to Re in Comedy." ⁴⁰ He attributes this [End Page 891] skittishness less to the immodest subject matter than to the satiric commentary on women which appears in Restoration comedy. Even though it is openly sexual rape fails to insult because "a Rape in Tragedy is a Panegyric upon the Sex . . . for she is to remain Innocent, and to be pleas'd without her Consent; while the Man, who is accounted a damn'd Villain, proclaims the Power of Female Charms, which have the Force to drive him to so horrid a Violence." ⁴¹ In contrast, comedies present no such "panegyric upon the Sex," and, Dennis claims, any objection to comedy constitutes a refusal to look in the satiric mirror provided by comedy, thereby denying it its role as moral corrective. Thus, the female spectator's "modesty" represents her rejection of the roles staged before her, not her identification with these characters.

Only The Stage Acquitted deals with the larger implications of female spectatorship. Admitting like Vanbrugh and Dennis that "bad" women serve as negative examples, the author also proceeds to show the positive consequences of female identification with stage representations:

I must own, I think there can be no more engaging and pleasing Object in the world, than the Poets draught of a good Wife. Belvidera, and Monimia, Melesinda, Portia &c. are what all men would desire; they give so taking a Beauty to a Woman, that all the sensible of the Sex must be in Love with it. And on Conjugal Love the Happiness and being of Families and Nations depend, therefore the Poet here too is highly meretorious. But you say this is sufficiently recommended by the Pulpit; I grant 'tis recommended, but a bare Precept is less touching than Example. The Pulpit gives the Rule, the Stage the Example. This explains that, by this you see what that recommends; and by seeing the Charms of the Example, you are struck with the Beauty of the Precept; so that here again the Stage discovers Merit that challenges the publick protection, since the Cement and Interest of all Families are advanced by it. ⁴²

The author's argument for the usefulness and morality of the stage depends upon mechanisms of spectatorship: visual examples and identification with these examples. Here the gaze constitutes a necessary part of moral instruction; the author repeatedly stresses the necessity of sight: by the stage "you see what [the pulpit] recommends," by "seeing" the "Charms" of "Example" the spectator, if male, is drawn to desire the charming example, and, if female, to emulate it. Thus the stage becomes even more powerful as a moral instrument than the pulpit. In this model, however, the possibility of female desire is avoided: men may look upon Belvidera and Monimia with desirous eyes, but the question [End Page 892] of women desiring what they see or of having unruly and disastrous desires excited by stage representations is put aside.

The author also evokes the larger concerns raised by Collier: stability of family and nation. Where Dennis addressed the issue of national security more generally by claiming that drama provides a check to rebellion while exalting the mind of the people, here the writer underscores the role that controlled female sexuality plays in both the private and public spheres. "Conjugal love," or the sanctity of the marriage bed represented through the chastity of the wife, he argues, comprises the "happiness" and essential being of the domestic unit and the national unit; that which enhances conjugal love thus constitutes "publick protection" and advances civic interest. Theater directly contributes to civil order by means of visual representation. Rather than being wounded in the eye and corrupted by desire, the spectator "discovers merit."

Even representations of female lewdness contribute to public protection--at least in the eyes of John Dennis. Dennis argues that one of the great benefits of the current stage to family and to the state is its function as an antidote to sodomy. Arguing that "the Corruption of the Nation . . . partly proceeds from having no Plays at all," Dennis divides the "reigning Vices" into four categories: love of women, drinking, gaming, and "unnatural sins." ⁴³ He dismisses drinking and gaming as made ridiculous by the stage, but considers the issue of desire, both "natural" and "unnatural," at some length. While Dennis never addresses the problem of women's desires, he seems extremely concerned by the dangerous nature of some men's desires. He concedes at length that the stage does foment the "love of women," but maintains that this is, if anything, a necessary evil; such lust is completely natural and thus less vicious than drinking, gambling or sodomy, and, more importantly, it distracts men from their potential homoerotic desires, "the Restraining of which, the Happiness of Mankind is, in so evident a Manner, concerned." ⁴⁴ By providing such a check on dangerous inclinations, Dennis argues, the stage is to be praised rather than condemned. In contrast to Collier, Dennis sees sexual and political threat located within the sodomite rather than the promiscuous woman. Indeed, throughout his writings, he considers female sexuality almost exclusively as image: the figure on the stage rather than the woman in the audience. With its actresses depicting scenes of love, the theater presents appropriate objects for the male gaze. In this sense, the objectified woman acts as a social safeguard, a means of regulating unruly male desires for the betterment of society. ⁴⁵ [End Page 893]

Near the end of his life Dennis returned to this theme, defending the stage once again against charges of immorality, this time from the writings of Law rather than Collier. Notably, the only charge against the stage with which he can agree is that of illicit sexuality, that it may--perhaps--"excite in Men a Desire to the unlawful Enjoyment of Women." ⁴⁶ "Unchast and immodest Images" of women ought to be banished, he agrees, but he finds a moral purpose even in these images:

And yet I cannot help thinking, that if ever those Passages could be excusable, they would be so at this Juncture, when the execrable Sin of Sodomy is spread so wide, that the foresaid Passages might be of some Use to the reducing Mens Minds to the natural Desire of Women. Let Fornication be ever so crying a Sin, yet Sodomy is a Crime of a thousand times a deeper Dye . . . I cannot here omit observing one Thing, That this unnatural Sin has very much increased since Collier's Books were publish'd against the Stage. ⁴⁷

Here as elsewhere, Dennis focuses explicitly on male rather than female desire, and thus in his eyes the immorality of the playhouse is relative. Yes, the plays may tempt men into illicit yet "natural" sex, but men will thus be prevented from performing the "unnatural" act of sodomy. Depicting men as innately and constantly desirous, Dennis suggests that the visual representation of female unchasteness acts to regulate this desire into proper channels. As support for this claim, he links what he sees as the rise of sodomy (citing "no less than four Persons condemn'd for it the last Sessions: The like of which was never heard of in Great Britain before") to Collier's attack on the "profaneness" of the stage and the subsequent popularity of more decorous drama. ⁴⁸ Deprived of "unchaste images," men become worse than immoral.

As Dennis's argument for a traditional system of voyeurism suggests, the debate over the morality of the stage was founded on two different ways of looking at the theater and at women. Collier and his followers consider women as potentially desiring subjects; in their arguments against the theater they construct a vision of the female spectator predicated upon the potential for uncontrolled sexual desire. By contrast, the defenders of the stage, many of them playwrights accustomed to constructing stage representations of women, ignore the possibility of a link between the female gaze and desire. In this sense, the crucial difference between the opposing arguments is the gendered nature of spectatorship. For the opponents of the stage, the gaze of both sexes can generate desire, wounding the spectator in the eye by exciting lust. By contrast, while those who support the stage construct a gendered theory [End Page 894] of the gaze; while the male gaze may excite desire, in women the gaze operates differently: rather than desire, it leads to education (via satire), or, because of the cold and damp English climate, the female gaze may have no effect whatsoever.

A common tie on both sides of the debate becomes theater's role in the control of society and social hierarchies, an issue strongly linked to sexuality. As seen by the emphasis on female chastity, sexual incontinence, specifically female sexual incontinence, equals social incontinence. Even the defenders of the stage find the regulation of female desire essential, since they suggest that the theater provides a public service in this regard. In contrast, the male gaze seems to keep society running--without the male gaze and its corresponding female object, desire runs amuck, threatening both individual and state. While all agree that uncontrolled female sexuality can undermine the foundations of society, the crucial distinction between the anti-theatrical polemicists and theater loyalists appears in their construction of both the female spectator and the female image. In their recognition of women as gazing subjects rather than in the traditional role as passive objects of male desire, Collier and his followers articulate a new understanding of the female spectator, a role inextricably linked to the female sexual body.

University of Connecticut

Notes

1. Richard Baker, Theatrum Redivivum, Or the Theatre Vindicated, in Answer to Mr. Pryn's Histrio-mastix: Wherein his groundless Assertions against Stage-Plays are discovered, his miss-taken Allegations of the Fathers manifested, as also what he calls his Reasons, to be nothing but his Passions (London, 1662), 31.

2. See for example Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (Screen 16:1 [Autumn 1975]: 6-18); Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987); Teresa de Lauretis, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1984) and Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987).

3. Stephen Gosson, Plays Confuted in Five Actions (London, 1582). Cross-dressing on stage violated the edict in Deuteronomy 22:5 against cross-dressing: "The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment."

4. As Jonas Barish notes, in the seventeenth century "the French writers . . . began to probe the nature of the actor's psychic life," seeing in some cases "an unholy pact between [the actor's] conscious self and his own darkest impulses." The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 196-97. Jacques Benigne Bossuet represents perhaps one exception to the rule in his discussion of the spectator in Maximes et reflexions sur la comedie (1694).

5. See The Plain Dealer (2.1.390-462) in which Wycherley satirizes the "modest" woman's response to The Country Wife as well as the sardonic "Epistle Dedicatory" addressed to "Lady B--" (Mother Bennett, a well-known bawd) in which he rails at the women who object to his plays.

6. In this they are not much different from current film theorists who also have a difficult time accommodating the female spectator to their theories of spectatorship. See Jackie Stacey on the problems of contemporary film criticism, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1994), especially chapter two: "From the Male Gaze to the Female Spectator."

7. David Roberts, The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, 1660-1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), and Laura Rosenthal, "'Counterfeit Scrubbado': Women Actors in the Restoration," The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 34:1 (1993): 3-22. See also Howard Love, "Who were the Restoration Audience?" and Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume "'Restoration Comedy' and its Audiences, 1660-1776," both in The Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980): 21-44 and 45-69 for more general accounts of the Restoration theater audience.

8. For a useful summary of the anti-theatrical debate see Sister Rose Anthony, The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy, 1698-1726 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1937).

9. In addition to A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage, together With the Sense of Antiquity upon his Argument (London, 1698), Collier wrote four additional treatises on the theater: A Defence of the Short View (London, 1699); A Second Defence of the Short View (London, 1700); Mr. Collier's Dissuasive from the Playhouse (London, 1703); and A Farther Vindication of the Short View (London, 1708). References to the stage and drama appear in many of Collier's other works. A Short View is hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page number

10. A Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage, With Reasons for putting a Stop thereto: and some Questions Addrest to those who frequent the Play-Houses (London, 1704), 22.

11. Anthony Horneck, Delight and Judgment: Or, a Prospect of the Great Day of Judgment, and its Power to damp and imbitter Sensual Delights, Sports and Recreations (London, 1684), 214.

12. Horneck, 217.

13. The Conduct of the Stage Consider'd. Being a Short Historical Account of its Original, Progress, various Aspects, and Treatment in the Pagan, Jewish and Christian World. Together with the Arguments urg'd against it, by Learned Heathens, and by Christians, both Antient and Modern. With Short Remarks upon the Original and Pernicious Consequences of Masquerades (London, 1721), 14-15.

14. Such references are common in the more theologically oriented of the treatises such as The Conduct of the Stage Consider'd. Figures cited most commonly include St. Chrysostom, St. Cyprian, Salvian, Tertullian and Lactanius.

15. The Stage Condemn'd, and The Encouragement given to the Immoralities and Profaneness of the Theatre, by the English Schools, Universitys and Pulpits, Censur'd. King Charles I. Sundays Mask and Declaration for Sports and Pastimes on the Sabbath, Largely Related and Animadvertsed upon. The Arguments of all the Authors that have Writ in Defence of the Stage against Mr. Collier, Consider'd. And the Sense of the Fathers, Councils, Antient Philosophers and Poets, and of the Greek and Roman Stages, and of the First Christian Emperours concerning the DRAMA Faithfully Deliver'd. Together with the Censure of the English State and of several Antient and Modern Divines of the Church of England upon the STAGE. And Remarks on diverse late Plays, as also on those presented by the two UNIVERSITIES to King Charles I (London, 1698), 69.

16. The Stage Condemn'd, 172.

17. The only male character is Horner in Wycherley's The Country Wife.

18. Collier's other concerns are the obviousness of the bawdry--it is not even masked by double entendre--and the disrespect such bawdry displays toward religion.

19. Collier would later deny theater even this limited good. See A Farther Vindication of the Short View.

20. See, for example, Edward Filmer: "I ever look upon the great Modesty of the generality of our Women, to have been the happy Effect rather of a pious, careful, and wary Education, than of any thing extraordinary in the Contexture of their Bodies." A defence of Plays: Or, the Stage Vindicated, From several Passages in Mr. Collier's Short View , &c. Wherein is offer'd The most Probable Method of Reforming our PLAYS. With a Consideration How far Vicious Characters may be allow'd on the STAGE (London, 1707), 16.

21. "Epistle Dedicatory," The Stage Condemn'd.

22. "Epistle Dedicatory," The Stage Condemn'd.

23. The Stage Condemn'd, 66. He continues his cause and effect argument, adding, "she who at first came perchance a chast Matron to the Play, returns unchast from the Playhouse."

24. The Stage Condemn'd, 106. In this passage the author cites Salvian's Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres.

25. Almost every attack on the theatre uses this argument for the regulation or outlawing of theatre.

26. An Address to the Ladies on the indecency of Appearing at Immodest Plays (London, 1756), 10.

27. "And how would many noble Families be lineally descended down, if the Stage did not teach Ladies, that the Footman can amply make up the Deficiency of my Lord." A Letter to a Noble Lord, To whom alone it Belongs. Occasioned by a Representation at the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane of a Farce, called Miss Lucy in Town (London, 1742), 4.

28. Quoted in An Address to the Ladies, 18. The lines cited are from a poem by William Whitehead.

29. This argument is most effectively presented in John Dennis's The Usefulness of the Stage, to the Happiness of Mankind, to Government, and to Religion. Occasioned by a Late, Book Written by Jeremy Collier, M.A. (London, 1698).

30. John Oldmixon, for example, reminds his readers that actors, "as well as their Fellow Subjects, are liable to the Laws made against Immorality and Profaneness." Reflections on the Stage, and Mr. Collyer's Defence of the Short View. In Four Dialogues (London, 1699), 188.

31. [James Drake], The Ancient and Modern Stages Survey'd. Or, Mr. Collier's View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage set in a true light. Wherein some of Mr. Collier's mistakes are rectified, and the comparative Morality of the English Stage is asserted upon the Parallel (London, 1699), 107.

32. [Oldmixon], 189.

33. Filmer, 37.

34. A more successful tack is taken by Thomas D'Urfey, who defends the honor of Englishwomen in the theater by reminding his readers that the late Queen Mary attended the theater and remained, of course, morally unscathed. "Preface" to The Campaigners: Or, The Pleasant Adventures at Brussels. A Comedy. With a Familiar Preface Upon a Late Reformer of the Stage. Ending with a Satyrical Fable of the Dog and the Ottor (London, 1698), 26.

35. Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Amours of William Congreve Esq; Interspersed with Miscellaneous Essays, Letters, and Characters Written by Him. Also some very Curious Memoirs of Mr. Dryden and his Family, with a Character of Him and his Writings by Mr. Congreve. Compiled from their respective Originals, by Charles Wilson, Esq. (London, 1730), 32-33.

36. Charles Gildon, "Prologue" to The Phaeton (London, 1698).

37. Filmer, 32.

38. Vanbrugh, A Short Vindication of the Relapse and the provok'd Wife, from Immorality and Profaneness (London, 1698), 76-77. The lines from the Relapse to which Vanbrugh refers are:

Could women but our secret counsels scan,
Could they but reach the deep reserves of man,
They'd wear it [the robe of virtue] on, that love might last;
For when they throw off one, we soon the other cast. (5.4.24-29)

39. For a complete listing of Dennis's critical works, see The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943).

40. "To Judas Iscariot, Esq; On the present State of the Stage," April 3, 1719, in Dennis, (2.166). Dennis continues on to accuse women of being afraid to watch satires on their sex: "I have been sometimes apt to entertain a Suspicion, that 'tis not the luscious Matter which disturbs them in Comedy, but the secret implicite Satire upon the sex. For a Woman in Comedy never grants the last favour to one to whom she is not marry'd, but it proclaims the Man's Triumph and her Shame. It always shews her Weakness and often her Inconstancy, and sometimes her Fraud and Perfidiousness. But a Rape in Tragedy is a Panegyrick upon the sex: For there the Woman has all the Advantage of the Man. For she is suppos'd to remain innocent, and to be pleas'd without her Consent; while the Man, who is accounted a damn'd Villain, proclaims the Power of Female Charms, which have the Force to drive him to so horrid a Violence" (Dennis, 2.166).

41. Dennis, 2.166.

42. The Stage Acquitted. Being a Full Answer to Mr. Collier, and the other Enemies of the Drama. With a Vindication of King Charles the Martyr, and The Clergy of the Church of England, From the Abuses of a Scurrilous Book, Called, The Stage Condemned. To which is added, the Character of the Animadverter, and the Animadversions on Mr. Congreve's Answer to Mr. Collier (1699), 79.

43. Dennis, 1.155.

44. Dennis, 1.156.

45. The author of The Stage Condemn'd responds to Dennis's argument by using Stubbs's outdated argument regarding crossdresssing (189); although female crossdressing was common in Restoration drama, male crossdressing was extremely rare.

46. Dennis, 2.314.

47. Dennis, 2.314.

48. Dennis, 2.314.