Early historians of English drama assert that by publishing "A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaness of the English Stage" in London in 1698, Jeremy Collier caused the rise and dominance of "sentimental comedy."

Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) A nonjuring clergyman, whose Short View is the most serious attack ever made on the stage in this country. It was replied to by Congreve and other dramatists, but Collier was completely victorious, and the best proof of his success, and of the necessity for his attack, was the marked improvement in decency which it produced.

-Lowe1

ROBERT W. Lowe's Victorian assessment of "the Collier controversy" would have dumbfounded Jeremy Collier. Did he in fact "succeed," and if so, what is the evidence for his success? Early historians of English drama assert that by publishing A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage in London in 1698, Collier "caused" the rise and dominance of "sentimental comedy," but this tidy explanation of dramatic evolution was demolished by Joseph Wood Krutch as early as 1924.2 Since that time Collier has resided in an odd, twilight zone. He is regularly deplored, sneered at, quoted, awarded "victory" in disdainful tones-but most twentieth-century scholars (myself included) have tiptoed quietly around virtually all questions concerning the significance of this stormy and conspicuous episode in the history of British theater.

Did Collier himself believe that he "succeeded"? Hardly. In his replies to his critics, Collier bitterly condemns the "incorrigibleness" of contemporary playwrights in refusing to accept correction and amend their ways.3 Most of the plays Collier had excoriated remained staples of the London repertory, many of them for decades. Arthur Bedford's enormous catalogs of offensive passages in old and new plays, and Collier's own collection of horrors from post-1698 plays, demonstrate to their disgust that chastisement had achieved nothing.4 The license granted to Vanbrugh and Congreve by the queen in 1704 (authorizing them to operate a company at Vanbrugh's new Theatre in the Haymarket) must have seemed the crowning indignity and proof of failure to Collier and his allies.

The uproar generated by Collier's book demonstrates beyond doubt that he seemed important (and threatening) to contemporary playwrights, and his formative influence on English drama was proclaimed by virtually every literary historian for fully two centuries. Three hundred years after the publication of Collier's jeremiad, the time seems ripe to reconsider some assumptions about historical causation. We need to inquire whether Collier really mattered, and if so, how and to what? My answer is essentially that "Collier" mattered quite a lot to playwrights and performers in the period from 1698 to 1705, but very little to the history of drama and theater. Collier's importance, I believe, lies neither in "the controversy" (much noise, little effect) nor in its generic effects (minimal). I shall argue that this episode has something to tell us about the cultural position of drama at the end of the seventeenth century. Perhaps even more important, we need to realize that the failure of Collier and his allies to instigate reform was to have dire and unforeseen consequences for the drama of a generation later.

I. TWENTIETH-CENTURY VIEWS OF COLLIER

A survey of modern views of Collier and the controversy quickly establishes radical contradictions that are not so much a matter of disagreement as a failure in basic historiographic method. Four positions can be found: (1) that Collier caused generic change; (2) that Collier was important in unspecified ways; (3) that Collier was symptomatic, not causative; and (4) that Collier had no significant impact on drama or theater and that his importance has been grossly exaggerated.

The nineteenth-century attitude towards Collier was (from our point of view) remarkably positive. The Dictionary of National Biography calls his political pamphlets "clear, brilliant, and incisive," quoting Macaulay's opinion that they are the work of "a great master of sarcasm, a great master of rhetoric." The DNB says of A Short View that "It appeared at a time when the immorality of the theatre had reached its utmost pitch, when ladies, if they could not resist going to see a new play, went in masks, and when it was generally recognized that a play could scarcely please the public unless it was grossly indecent. Collier's mode of dealing was unsparing and courageous ." The DNB grants that Collier goes too far, detects allusion where none was intended, and "commits the mistake of attributing to the corrupting influence of the stage" immorality that drama merely reflected from life. Collier's lack of "artistic taste" is granted, as is his failure "to make ... distinction between offences of diverse magnitude." But A Short View is said to have enjoyed "a marvellous success," and Collier to have "remained the victor" when he answered replies from the playwrights. The writer of the entry presumes that the drama was filthy and much in need of a stern corrective, that Collier was courageous, even heroic, in daring to mount his assault against smut ("a noble protest against evil"), and that his campaign exerted a powerful influence on playwriting and theatrical repertory: "Collier's pamphlet ushered in a new era in dramatic literature."

Similar assumptions underlie most late nineteenth-century accounts of the evolution of English drama from "Restoration" to "sentimental." Ward, BeIjame, and Aitken think in very much these terms, and so do many of their successors, even if they have a distinct preference for the smutty Restoration comedies in contrast to the sanctity of Steele's "sentimental" version of the genre. This notion of "history," however, rests centrally on moral objections to Wycherley, Etherege, Congreve, and the rest and on a tidy theory of generic change long since discredited.

Even those early critics who believed firmly in the existence of "sentimental comedy" as a kind of platonic form that displaced its predecessor were never very comfortable with the (admittedly peculiar) idea that Jeremy Collier was its champion. Collier harshly attacked Love's Last Shift (1696)-taken, for much of the twentieth century, as "the first sentimental comedy" -and had no kind words for any of the later exemplars of "new" comedy. As long ago as 1915, Ernest Bernbaum insisted that Collier was against all modern plays, and observed that "Comedy might well have grown modest in utterance without becoming sentimental in spirit."5 F. W. Bateson rightly notes that "the rise of 'sentimentalism' coincided with the attacks of Jeremy Collier" and that "undoubtedly the sentimental dramatists sympathized with these attacks," while denying that Collier himself approved of sentimental comedy or was trying to foster it.6 Writing in the present decade, Frank Ellis is openly skeptical about any causative connection between Collier and the genesis of "sentimental comedy."7

Collier's aims and his impact need not, of course, be the same. Modern critics have divided sharply on his objectives. Rhetorically, the first five chapters of A Short View are set up to demonstrate evils and demand "reform," but the last chapter quotes all sorts of authorities on why the stage should be suppressed, and many critics have been inclined to see this as an unmasking of Collier's real aims and agenda.8 Without recourse to historical mind reading or a ouija board, no definitive ascription of motive is feasible. Marvin Carlson sensibly observes that Collier's extended commentary on literary matters and his citation of "authorities and arguments generally accepted by the leading literary theorists of the day" imply a desire not just "to discharge his wrath against the stage but to force reforms."9 My own view is that Collier started out in 1698 prepared to believe that reform was possible (however dodgy the theater might be in moral terms), but that the defiance of the playwrights and their continued offences against his notions of decency led him towards an abolitionist position in his later books, though he never explicitly called for suppression. In any case, the real issue is not Collier's motives so much as his impact. Did he in fact change the drama?

Few critics widely read in plays from the period 1695-17io have thought he did. A generation ago, A. H. Scouten made the obvious but important point that 167os plays and 16gos plays were radically different in all sorts of ways.10 The drama changed further during the 16gos, moving in much more "moral" directions. Ironically, many of the plays attacked by Collier were recent efforts that we now see as part of a widespread movement away from harsh immorality (or amorality) and towards a more humane, sometimes even "exemplary" comedy. Krutch saw very clearly that "since all the characteristics of the movement were discernible before Collier wrote, he cannot be said to be responsible for it." Krutch admits that "without him, Restoration Comedy would have died of its own accord," though he insists that Collier was an "effective mouthpiece of the opposition" and that "he hastened its death."11 We may wonder exactly what measures "effectiveness" or defines "death."

Old plays did not disappear from the repertory, and though new ones exhibited generic change, the difference was in degree and detail, not in kind.12 As early as 1911, Charles Whibley offered a radical denial of longstanding dogma:

The high respect in which Collier has been held remains a puzzle of criticism.... And if the respect lavished upon him is surprising, still stranger is the conviction which prevails of his influence. Scott and Macaulay, Leigh Hunt and Lecky speak with one voice. Yet a brief examination of the facts proves that Collier's success was a success of scandal and no more. The poets bowed their knee not an inch in obedience to Collier. They replied to him, they abused him, and they went their way ... The pages of Genest... make evident the complete failure of Collier's attack .... Dryden, Shadwell, Aphra. Behn and D'Urfey, Ravenscroft and Wycherley were still triumphant .... Love for Love flourished in the nineteenth century. Don Quixote, which Collier thought he had left dead on the field, was still played a quarter of a century after the fray, and The Country Wife long outlived it .... The new plays were of no other fashion than the old.13 Whibley seems to me to underestimate generic change, but I have to agree that Collier would not have liked the comedies of Cibber, Gay, Centlivre, or Fielding.

Krutch quotes Whibley, and his conclusions move a substantial way towards Whibley's position, but he never squarely confronts the challenge that Whibley had raised. Nor have his successors. The result is a peculiar double tradition. Specialists almost always equivocate concerning Collier's impact (or evade the issue), but textbooks and surveys mostly assert Collier's shaping influence with little or no caution to the reader. In the Revels History, John Loftis says that Collier "aroused broadly based support for a reform movement- that generated "a sustained governmental effort to repress the 'immorality and profaneness' of the stage." Oscar G. Brockett, whose textbook remains the most widely used theater history of the later twentieth century, says flatly that Collier's attack was "truly effective" and "succeeded where others had failed because he began with the accepted neoclassical doctrine that the purpose of drama is to teach." Jonas Barish asserts that Collier and his allies "wiped them [the theaters] out as a significant cultural force" and imposed the conversion of "libertine comedy into sentimentalism." David Thomas' recent "documentary history" tells us that "the explosive effect of this lengthy diatribe was both far-reaching and long-lasting" and "gave heart to men such as Steele and Addison who wanted to see a shift from the outspoken satiric approach of Restoration playwrights to the moralising sentimental approach to playwriting pioneered by Colley Cibber."14

Though the popular/textbook tradition continues to preach Collier's importance, the specialist tradition has almost written him out of existence. A Short View is barely mentioned or quoted (let alone found influential) in a majority of scholarly books of the last half-century.15 Such important surveys of trends in drama as those by Arthur Sherbo, Laura Brown, and Derek Hughes mention Collier briefly and dismissively.16 Different as their notions are concerning what drives generic change, they do not find Collier a significant factor. He receives only marginally more credit for influence in some older surveys where he appears as a symptom of changing times, but not as a force for change in his own right.17 My own conclusion of two decades ago was that "Collier's attack in 1698 hurt, but it was a symptom of and an addition to extant problems, not the cause of them."" I am in general prepared to stand by that summation. Why, then, does Collier need to be "reconsidered"? Why not consign him to the obscurity of snide footnotes, quoting his expressions of outrage with the dismissive irony of those for whom his moral and social hangups seem merely silly?

My answer is that a generic historian can afford to do this, but a historicist scholar cannot. Collier had little or nothing to do with the alleged rise of sentimental comedy. His impact on genre, short or long term, was negligible, as virtually every twentieth-century critic has concluded. Misled by a discredited nineteenth-century critical paradigm ("Collier caused sentimental comedy"), we have continued to ask the wrong question and thereby blind ourselves to what is really interesting and significant about "the Collier crisis." If we dismiss the whole matter as a tempest in a teacup, a tremendous fuss over nothing, then we falsify history and fail in our obligation to try to recreate the viewpoints of our subjects. However silly the ruckus may seem to us, the dramatists were extremely upset. They replied immediately and at length, and they kept on doing so. Why?

II. COLLIER AND THE "REFORM"

To make sense of the currents and cross-currents, stresses and tensions of 1698, we must start with a bit of disentanglement. Scholars have long realized that "the Collier controversy" was not "wholly unexpected and unprepared for," but rather that it is merely a high point in long-standing hostility to theater in general and to certain kinds of late seventeenth-century comedy in particular.19 We need to realize that the forces bent on "reform" were remarkably heterogeneous, and that at the time, many of the participants would not have recognized one another as allies.20 Overt objections to the current state of English drama came from at least six distinct sources: (-0 reform-minded playwrights from Shadwell to Steele; (2) Societies for the Reformation of Manners, most particularly the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.);21 (3) abolitionists, by no means all of whom were "Puritan" dissenters; (4) dramatic critics anxious to improve the moral tone of English drama (e.g., Thomas Rymer, James Wright, John Dennis); (5) Grand juries bent on denouncing theaters as a public nuisance; and (6) informers who laid information against actors in the hope of getting them arrested and fined. The last two groups are basically a phenomenon of the end of the 169os and later.

The relative quiescence of anti-theatrical propagandists between 166o and 1695 is easy to understand. Anti-theatrical sentiment (let alone abolitionist sentiment) was closely associated with the Puritans and the Cromwell regime. Charles 11 and James II regularly attended the public theater and had plays performed at court, making the futility of denouncing the theater obvious. Queen Mary, too, was a theatergoer. And any moral zealot prepared to ignore futility might have been discouraged by recollection of what had happened to Prynne's ears. In all likelihood, a great many citizens of London thoroughly disapproved of the theater and stayed well away from it, but even Puritan hotheads chose not to provoke the court. The death of Queen Mary in December of 1694, however, abruptly ended close ties between court and theater. King William did not attend plays.22

Objections to the morality of Carolean plays go back a long wayand the subject remains fraught even at the end of the twentieth century.23 In a celebrated letter of 1665, John Evelyn protests that he is "far from Puritanisme," but finds himself horrified by "wretched & obscene plays" and wonders why the authorities allow such enormities "in a thing which may be so conveniently reform'd."24 As early as 1668 (a decade before the height of 1670s sex comedy), Thomas Shadwell issued a harsh condemnation of the sorts of male and female protagonists to be found in popular plays:

In the Playes which have been wrote of late, there is no such thing as perfect Character, but the two chief persons are most commonly a Swearing, Drinking, Whoring, Ruffian for a Lover, and an impudent ill-bred tomrig for a Mistress, and these are the fine People of the Play; and there is that Latitude in this, that almost any thing is proper for them to say; but their chief Subject is bawdy, and profaneness, which they call brisk writing, when the most dissolute of Men, that rellish those things well enough in private, are chok d at 'em in publick: and methinks, if there were nothing but the ill Manners of it, it should make Poets avoid that Indecent way of Writing.25

Shadwell himself was enough of a commercial playwright to jump on the sex-comedy bandwagon in such plays as Epsom-Wells (1672) and The Virtuoso (1676), but his instincts and preferences were much more in line with comedy that either satirized the low in Jonsonian fashion or presented quasi-exemplary characters of a sort later championed by Steele. The dramatic norms of the 167os and 168os have been substantially misrepresented by twentieth-century critics, who pay a great deal of attention to a few celebrated sex comedies and largely ignore the majority of plays of the time -most of them relatively sedate .romantic" comedy, even in the 1670S.26 Collier never acknowledged the large number of inoffensive comedies, and no doubt he could have found grounds for objection even in many of those; but the fact remains that the dominant tradition in the post-166o theater did not produce many plays of the sort he attacked. No polar opposition ever existed between playwrights and reformers. But abolitionists were something else again.

Objections to drama and theater raised by churchmen of various stripes are recorded by Krutch, who cites Samuel Wesley, Richard Baxter's call for abolition in 1673, and Dr. Anthony Horneck's condemnation of 169o (another abolitionist plea). The revolution of 1688 does unquestionably seem to have encouraged a backlash against the moral laxity of Charles' reign. A sharp rise in the number of prosecutions for obscenity in printed material is one signal of change.27 The foundation of societies for the reformation of manners is another.28 The harsh denunciation of contemporary drama in Sir Richard Blackmore's preface to Prince Arthur (1695) has been widely and rightly quoted as evidence of revulsion even in the world of literature against what had long been popular in the theater. The time might certainly have been thought propitious for a bit of muckraking. Indeed, as E. N. Hooker long ago pointed out, what Collier published in 1698 can be seen as a response to a public call issued a year earlier in the first number of The Occasional Paper:

I cou'd heartily wish that some Lover of Vertue wou'd examine all [modern plays], or at least those of them which are most usually read and acted, and shew the natural tendency they have to Vice, and point out the particular Immoralities into which they may intrap the Unwary.

The author was probably the paper's editor, Richard Willis, later Bishop of Winchester and recently chaplain to King William.29

When Collier published his diatribe in April 1698, he must have been, as Hooker has observed, "well aware that his undertaking would please both church and state."30 Nineteenth-century romanticizing of Collier as a brave, noble voice in the wilderness, single-handedly carrying on a heroic campaign against vice, is very far from the truth. He was not an obscure person. His anti-Williamite pamphlets had got him into hot water, and his giving last rites on the scaffold to Jacobite conspirators had made him (technically, at least) an outlaw. He had long since lost his church income, and the fifty guineas he was allegedly paid for A Short View may have been very welcome indeed.31 But if Collier had ulterior motives in writing his diatribe, they probably had to do with stabilizing his shaky relations with an authority he technically refused to recognize. Given the rest of Collier's considerable publication, we have no reason to suppose that he was anything but sincere in his denunciation of what he regarded as horrible examples of immorality and profanity. The attack was widely admired and approved, and not just by Puritans. Luttrell informs us that the Archbishop of Canterbury wrote to Collier to commend his book, and Oldmixon's History reports that Sir Owen Buckingham (MP for Reading) sent him the considerable sum of twenty guineas.32 Better yet, if Cibber is correct, King William ordered all charges against him dropped as a direct result of the publication of A Short View.33 Collier may have been disappointed by lack of reform on the part of the playwrights, but he benefited substantially from publishing his attack on contemporary plays.'

Two points should be made about the content of that attack. First, a casual reader might get the impression that Collier is laying waste to anyone and everyone, but in fact he refers to only about twenty post166o plays, and in any detail or frequency to only about a dozen. Most of his fire is concentrated on Vanbrugh, Congreve, and Dryden. Dryden is a principal target partly because Collier made a frontal assault on the lighthearted view of comedy expressed in the 1671 preface to An Evening's Love, and partly because he was infuriated by Dryden's allusions to gods, heaven, providence, and clergy in such plays as Don Sebastian, Love Triumphant, Oedipus, and King Arthur. (The title figure in The Spanish Fryar was also, of course, a red flag to Collier.) Collier ignored or was ignorant of Marriage A-la-Mode and The Kind Keeper, which are morally far more disturbing plays. Wycherley gets only minor mentions. Why Behn did not rouse him to apoplexy is difficult to see.

The particulars that exercised Collier tend to surprise first-time readers of A Short View. The first of the six chapters is an introductory blast against immodesty and indecorum, and the last cites authorities against the stage. Chapter 2 deals with cursing and swearing; chapter 3 with abuse of the clergy; and chapter 5 consists of extended denunciations of Amphitryon, Don Quixote, and The Relapse. Only chapter 4 deals with a critical issue that centrally concerns the plays of the time. It is headed, "The Stage-Poets make their Principal Persons Vitious, and reward them at the End of the Play" (140). Collier was fixated on mostly cosmetic issues. The theaters could easily have struck out the oaths and removed clergymen and allusions to the clergy. This would by no means have satisfied Collier, who gets quite hysterical over the impropriety of representing a J.P. and a knight with the disrespect Vanbrugh accords Sir Tunbelly Clumsy. For a great many Londoners, however, I would guess that relatively superficial cleansing would have removed a substantial part of the offensiveness.

Curiously enough, no previous commentator on the Collier controversy has paid any real attention to the fact that a censorship mechanism was already in place. All new playscripts had to be submitted to the Master of the Revels, who was supposed to read through the text, strike out offensive matter, and "license" the piece (or not) for performance. For this he was entitled to receive a fee of E2. Since 1677, however, the Master of the Revels had been the incompetent and lackadaisical Charles Killigrew.35 A look at the kinds of excisions made by his predecessor, Sir Henry Herbert, proves that had Killigrew been doing his job, a lot of the references that enraged Collier would not have been there.36 There is irony here. Unpopular as Collier has been with most late twentieth-century critics, the truth is that a lot of what he was demanding was simply the proprieties of the age. One of the oddities of A Short View is that Collier says absolutely nothing about censorship by the Master of the Revels.37 Did he even know that new playscripts were submitted for government censorship-and had been approved? If reform was indeed his object, his silence on the need for censorship seems peculiar. Why not either denounce Charles Killigrew for failing in his duty, or (if ignorant of his existence) propose the imposition of government regulation? Collier is astonishingly vague about how abuses ought to be curbed. Was he optimist enough to believe that playwrights would reform themselves?

Concern about "obscenity" in new plays was not initiated by Jeremy Collier; neither was it restricted to opponents of the theater. As early as 24 January 1696, Lord Chamberlain Dorset issued a fiercely worded order to both theaters, complaining that plays containing obnoxious matter had been acted without license and directing the managers to submit all manuscripts to Charles Killigrew, who was "to be very carful in Correcting all Obsenitys & other Scandalous matters & such as any ways Offend against ye Laws of God Good Manners or the Knowne Statutes of this Kingdome."38 Dorset says specifically that "several playes" have lately been acted "wherein many things ought to be struck out and corrected,3" and he says that any company ignoring the licencer and his directions will be "Silenced." Someone in a position of power was plainly disturbed by what was being acted in the public theaters. (Dorset himself was a long-time friend of players and playwrights, and one-time habitue of the theater.) 39 Sixteen months later, on 4 June 1697, Dorset's successor Sunderland complained that "many of the new Plays Acted by both Companys... are scandalously lew'd and Prophane, and Contain Reflections against his Majesty's Government." To prevent such "Notorious Abuses" he directs the managers to refrain from performing any new play until it has been brought to his secretary to be vetted. The total ineffectuality of these measures seems to have occasioned almost no commentary, then or now.40

Collier's rhetoric was offensive and abrasive, but his critical position on dramatic propriety was largely consonant with that of some of the major playwrights and critics of his day41 Dryden's admission of fault in the preface to Fables (1700) is often treated as a product of age and weariness, but I suspect that Dryden felt far from comfortable about the degree of titillation built into The Kind Keeper, The Spanish Fryar, and Amphitryon. Congreve and Vanbrugh did not care to yield much ground to their traducer, but James Wright was ready to concede that "Collier's reflections are pertinent and true in the main, the book ingeniously written and well intended" -though he hastened to say that although "abuses relating to the stage" are "too apparent," they should be "reformed" and not the use of the stage "abolished."42 John Dennis replied at great length to Collier in The Usefulness of the Stage (1698); protesting against what he took as Collier's desire to see the theaters suppressed. Dennis is, however, very ready to grant the abuses and the need for reform:

If Mr. Collier had only attack'd the Corruptions of the Stage... I should have been so far from blaming him, that I should have Publickly return'd him my Thanks: For the Abuses are so great, that there is a Necessity for the reforming them; not that I think, that, with all its Corruptions, the Stage has debauch'd the People.43

The stridency of Collier's rhetoric ruffled playwrights and critics, and the perception (right or wrong) that he believed the theaters should be shut down made him an enemy, but we have good reason to believe that many playwrights agreed with much of what Collier said about abuses. His indignation was widely shared, and whatever his aims, the real question was what effect the weight of public opinion could produce.

III. THE PROSPECTS IN 1698

Publication of Collier's A Short View was advertised on 21 April 1698. Twentieth-century commentators generally observe that it immediately caused a furor. I do not deny the plausibility of this supposition, but we may usefully ask what the evidence is, and what sort of furor? There were no daily newspapers to feed the flames of controversy, and virtually no mention of it appears in the weekly and biweekly papers. No cultural papers or magazines were being published at this date. Exactly where and how was the furor occurring? If the theater was immediately attacked from pulpits all over London, no documentation of the fact has yet been found, so far as I know. On 12 May 1698, the Grand Jury of London denounced stage plays and lotteries as tending "to the corruption and debauchery of youth," and Congreve and Durfey in particular for The Double-Dealer and Don Quixote and Tonson and Briscoe for publishing them.44 Nothing followed from this, and nothing was likely to, for whatever the prejudices of a City of London Grand Jury@ under what statutes might a prosecution have been brought?

The principal evidence of "furor" is the flood of answers and further attacks published during the next few months. Hooker's list of "the more important and interesting items" in the controversy contains twenty items published within the calendar year 1698. Charles Gildon replied in the front matter to Phaeton as early as 30 April. The second edition of A Short View was advertised on 14 May, indicating good sales. An anonymous Vindication of the Stage appeared on 20 May; Settle's Defence of Dramatick Poetry on 2 June; Dennis' Usefulness of the Stage on 7 June; Vanbrugh's Short Vindication of the Relapse and the Provoked Wife on 11 June; Congreve's Amendments of Mr. Collier@ False and Imperfect Citations on 12 July; a pair of answers to Congreve on 1 and 8 September; Ridpath's (?) The Stage Condemned on 15 September; Collier's Defence of the Short View on lo November; and an anonymous set of Remarks upon Mr. Collier's Defence on 6 December. After July 1699, further contributions became scattered and sporadic. The intensity of the crossfire over the first few months, however, cannot be denied.45

Hindsight tells us that the indignant dramatists played right into Collier's hands. Who were the readers of A Short View? Not, surely, the regular ticket buyers at Drury Lane and Lincoln's Inn Fields. Those who attended plays or read them would have found little surprising, interesting, or upsetting in Collier's catalog of horrors. A high proportion of theater regulars would surely have attended Love for Love and The Relapse by 1698. Collier himself had been to the theater and had manifestly read some twenty recent plays (as well as quite a number of classical and pre-Restoration plays).46 Many of the anti-theatricalists, however, were proud of not attending the theater, and some boasted of not reading plays. The obvious audience for dramatic muckraking consisted of pious persons not already familiar with the delightfully shocking instances of immorality and profaneness that could be cited and condemned. Exactly why would playwrights have found this so upsetting?

This question takes us into the realm of speculation. Two obvious explanations must be considered. Either the playwrights feared that the theaters could be suppressed (or harshly regulated), or they were suffering from guilty consciences. Or conceivably both. Virtually every commentator from Samuel Johnson to the present has agreed that the defenders of the theater were woefully ineffective in their replies to Collier, a brilliant prosecuting attorney. He quotes evidence (with copious page citations), and he writes with a Rymeresque bounce and gusto that makes A Short View wonderfully lively reading.47 The sincerity of his indignation is hard to deny. Claims of misrepresentation and misquotation made no impression-nor should they, for Collier is generally pretty accurate.48 Collier was, to be sure, grossly insensitive to satire and context: he was a fundamentalist zealot and a literalist, but he was no fool. Collier could not be rebutted effectively so long as the battle was fought on ground of his choosing.49 What he said was in the plays was really there, and to his audience, at least, it was outrageous.

No genuine interchange occurred at all. As Aubrey Williams points out in the best general summation of the controversy ever published, Collier had appealed to "Platonic" premises; the playwrights replied with appeals to Aristotelian principles.50 Answering Collier did nothing but make the situation worse, for what were the playwrights doing but justifying their enormities? No good could come of the attempt.

Was closure of the theaters really an issue? Even in the giddy rhetorical heights of summer 1698, not even the most panicked playwrights seem seriously to have imagined that suppression was a possibility. Religious zealots thought it might be, and continued to hope for it. Krutch notes a 1694 proposal "To supplicate their majesties, that the public play-houses may be suppressed."51 George Ridpath commences his jeremiad by expressing the hope that playhouses "can now be suppressed."52 Richard Burridge's fiery A Scourge for the Play-Houses (1702) calls outright for abolition, as does John Feild's An Humble Application to the Queen ... To Suppress Play-Houses and Bear-Baitings (1703).53 COIlier himself, however, made no such suggestion; his concern was with the impropriety of recent English plays. A few of Collier's more fanatical successors were outright abolitionists-but as Cibber observed, "I think the last time they pull'd down the stage in the city, they set up a scaffold at court."54 The events of the 1640s were not a favorable precedent. William had no reason to care about the existence of the theaters and might cheerfully have pleased the pious by suppressing them, but the government's lawyers must have been well aware that the Drury Lane company operated on the authority of the patents granted by Charles 11 in 1662 and 1663. A royal grant was not be voided lightly, especially where a significant property right would be infringed. Such a move was not impossible, but it seems politically improbable. Theater and crown had been closely associated for more than a century.

Indeed, the actors were technically still servants of the royal household (and remained so throughout the reign of Queen Anne).55

Calhoun Winton is perfectly correct to emphasize the extremity of the hostility directed at the theater, but I can find no evidence that calls for abolition were ever seriously entertained. Clamor from a Quaker such as John Feild carried no weight with the monarch or government. Indeed, if anything, it hurt the cause of reformers and antitheatricalists. Queen Anne's piety probably roused hopes among inveterate enemies of the theater, but she was to prove a stickler for the prerogatives of her family. Rosy dreams of the pious notwithstanding, closure of the theaters was always extremely unlikely. What was vastly more probable-indeed, to be expected-was the imposition of more serious and systematic censorship. By all rights, this ought to have occurred before Collier published A Short View. The orders from Dorset and Sunderland in 1696 and 1697, however, proved totally ineffectual.

Charles Killigrew made no more than the barest pretence of compliance. Aside from knocking out the first act of Cibber's Richard III (ca. December 1699), he seems usually to have done little or nothing to clean up the scripts he was supposed to be censoring.56

Depriving Killigrew of his post as Master of the Revels was apparently more trouble than it was worth. He might, however, have been forced to hire an efficient deputy, or censorship might have been vested in another official, as was apparently intended in 1697. Following Sunderland's early disappearance from office, Killigrew was heckled and admonished from time to time, but nothing changed. Moralists from Puritans to the Archbishop of Canterbury might be appalled at what could be found in plays, but the government did no more than issue some pious proclamations and directives. In retrospect, this seems surprising. The desirability of censorship was widely accepted, and no doubt there were people ready to take the credit for reformation (and perhaps to collect a salary for helping). In February 1699[/17oo?] Nahum Tate put a proposal for reform before the ecclesiastical authorities, suggesting that if the theaters were to be continued, all plays should be reviewed and reformed.57 Tate recommended that plays "be rectify'd by their Authors if Living" and that "proper Persons" be "appointed to Alter and reform Those of Deceased Authors."

Very likely the Bishop of London thought it a fine idea, but the government could not be bothered. By 1700, the total failure of Collier's call to reform was manifest.

The result, by late 1699 or early 1700, was S.P.C.K. informers attending the theaters and laying information against the actors -attempting with the cooperation of sympathetic justices to take enforcement into their own hands.58 Collier unquestionably helped give rise to this vigilante movement, but it is evidence of frustration, not of "success." The resulting trials dragged on over a considerable period, and were no doubt a nuisance to the theater companies, but the ultimate result was predictable. The charges did not stick because the actors could prove that they had spoken texts licensed by the government.59 This result was not definitive until about 1704, but the likelihood of any other outcome was always just about nil. The informers made pests of themselves, but nothing came of it and the whole business petered out.60 The license issued to Vanbrugh and Congreve on 14 December 1704 (permitting them to take over "Betterton's Company" and open Vanbrugh's new Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket) must have seemed a calculated insult:

Whereas We have thought fitt for the better reforming the Abuses, and Immorality of the Stage That a New Company of Comedians should be Establish'd for our Service, under Stricter Government and Regulations than have been formerly We therefore reposing especiall trust, and confidence in Our Trusty and Welbeloved John Vanbrugh & William Congreve Esquires for the due Execution, and performance of this our Will & Pleasure . . . .61

Modern scholars have joked about appointing retired poachers as gamekeepers, but earnest reformers can only have seen this license as an outrage, and its terminology (which was not standard) as a gross and deliberate affront. If the success Collier sought lay in the realms of furor and rhetoric, then he undoubtedly triumphed. Changing the character of drama in the public theater was something else again.

IV. THE "NEW" COMEDY

Whatever alterations playwrights may have thought they were making to satisfy reformers, the results failed to do so. Bedford's The Evil and Danger of Stage-Plays (i7o6) catalogs "almost two thousand instances" of offensive material "taken from the plays of the last two years," and his Serious Remonstrance in behalf of the Christian Religion (1719) denounces "the horrid blasphemies and impieties which are still used in the English play-houses ... from almost seven thousand instances, taken out of the plays of the present century, and especially of the five last years." Twentieth-century critics espy considerable generic change between :[695 and 172o, but it does not seem to have been visible to the anti-theatricalists.

If Charles Killigrew had carried out his duties as Master of the Revels, new plays would have contained fewer overtly offensive expressions, characters, and scenes. We must remember, to be sure, that printed text and performance were not necessarily the same thing. From testimony by informers against Thomas Doggett and others concerning a performance on or about 26 December 17oo, we know that his performance of Sailor Ben (a tremendous favorite with audiences) was richly larded with ad-libbed oaths and references to God.62 Low comedians have always tended to add lines and business of their own, as Aphra Behn protested in the :L68os.63 Anti-theatricalists who based their case on printed texts may not have realized that actual performance must sometimes have been even more offensive to the pious. The fact remains that much of what Collier wanted should have been enforced by the Master of the Revels.

Comedy changed in major ways in the twenty years before Collier, and it continued to do so, albeit slowly. Demonstration of direct impact on most new plays has never been made, and in my opinion, cannot be made. From the time of the DNB, Cibber has been quoted as proof of Collier's impact. Cibber says A Short View "had a very wholesome Effect upon those who writ after this time. They were now a great deal more upon their guard; Indecencies were no longer Wit" (Apology, 1: 275). We must remember, however, that the reaction against sex comedy had been in process for twenty years when Collier published, and that Cibber was writing more than a generation later to a mideighteenth-century audience -no doubt with an eye to shoring up his own reputation for morality.

Playwrights may have been marginally more careful about oaths, but little more than that. There is very limited evidence of textual revision. No doubt some efforts were made to reduce verbal provocation. Dryden mentions in a letter of March 1699 that Congreve's The Double-Dealer is being revived: "in the play bill was printed ... with Severall Expressions omitted: What kind of Expressions those were you may easily ghess; if you have seen the Monday's Gazette, wherein is the Kings Order for the reformation of the Stage."64 A few notorious scenes may have been dropped or cleaned up (evidence is almost totally lacking). From early eighteenth-century commentary and playbill evidence about casts, we know that the nicky-nacky scenes disappeared from Venice PreservU fairly early.65 Sir John Brute's notorious "disguise" in The Provok'd Wife was apparently not altered from clergyman to woman until as late as 1726-and even then, from Collier's class-conscious point of view, the transvestite version was probably no vast improvement.' Substantive adaptation to change the essential moral nature of offensive plays, however, was two or three generations down the road. Garrick's The Country Girl (1766) and Sheridan's A Trip to Scarborough (1777) address some of the fundamental concerns that Collier brought to playtexts, but they do so more than half a century after the Collier controversy and in response to broad social change. To say with Whibley, however, that Collier had no impact, or that dramatists simply derided and then ignored him, would be a falsification. The Way of the World (17oo) has been seen, rightly I think, as a kind of answer to Collier, though Congreve did not explicitly say so. Some other important authors did write plays that respond very directly to Collier, and a brief examination of three such scripts will tell us something about what was really at issue in the dispute.

Steele's The Lying Lover (December 1703) was written "With just Regard to a reforming Age," as the prologue expresses the author's aim in adapting Corneille's Le menteur. The preface says, Tho' it ought to be the Care of all Governments, that publick Representations should have nothing in 'em but what is agreeable to the Manners, Laws, Religion and Policy of the Place or Nation in which they are exhibited; yet ... the English Stage has extremely offended in this kind: I thought therefore it would be an honest Ambition to attempt a Comedy, which might be no improper Entertainment in a Christian Commonwealth.

. . . the Spark of this Play ... makes false Love, gets drunk, and kills his Man [or thinks he has]; but in the fifth Act awakes from his Debauch, with the Compunction and Remorse which is suitable to a Man's finding Himself in a Gaol for the Death of his Friend.... The Anguish He there expresses, and the mutual Sorrow between an only Child, and a tender Father in that Distress, are, perhaps, an Injury to the Rules of Comedy; but I am sure they are a justice to those of Morality- 67

No mention is made of Collier, but Steele's disapproval of the content and morality of English comedy is obviously akin to that expressed in A Short View. Writing a self-justification in -1714 after being expelled from Parliament, Steele mentions The Lying Lover, quotes from the preface, and explains his objectives in the play:

Mr. Collier had, about the Time wherein this was published, written against the Immorality of the Stage. I was (as far as I durst for fear of witty Men, upon whom he had been too severe) a great Admirer of his Work, and took it into my Head to write a Comedy in the Severity he required. In this Play I make the Spark or Heroe kill a Man in his Drink, and finding himself in Prison the next Morning, I give him the Contrition which he ought to have on that Occasion [quoted at length). I can't tell ... what they would have me do to prove me a Churchman; but ... considering me as a Comick Poet, I have been a Martyr and Confessor for the Church; for this Play was damn'd for its Piety.",

Some questions arise. As the audience is quickly informed, Young Bookwit has not actually killed his friend Lovemore, making his agonized repentance (and his father's sorrow) rather bathetic. Not until The London Merchant (1731) did a playwright have the courage to make crime and punishment real. Steele's play wobbles badly between standard comic lines of business and an obtrusively didactic morality. The serious emotion is not well integrated. The verse effusions are crude. "Piety" may or may not have contributed to the play's failure, but the piece was not skillfully executed and did not deserve to succeed. By the first years of the eighteenth century, however, the audience was definitely ready to entertain serious moral points and emotional angst in comedy, as the success of Centlivre's The Gamester was to prove just two years later in 1705.

Almost exactly a year before the failure of The Lying Lover, Farquhar suffered a similar disappointment with The Twin-Rivals (December 1702). It was a serious effort, written by a polished and successful professional playwright, and it enjoyed a front-line cast. Unlike Steele, whose plotting is rather slack and casual, Farquhar contrives genuine alarm and suspense: the stakes are high with no recourse to fakery. The main plot is simple and nasty. Young Wou'dbe seizes possession of the family estate on the death of his father, attempting to dispossess his elder twin brother. He is assisted by a crooked lawyer (Subtleman) and a dishonest steward (Clearaccount), and by Midnight, an old bawd and midwife ready to do or swear to anything for money (a role played by William Bullock in female dress). The elder Wou'dbe, his friend Trueman, and his faithful love Constance are genuinely virtuous characters, but not soppily so. A subplot involves Richmore, a vicious rake who has impregnated the virtuous Clelia (who does not appear) and is finally pressured into agreeing to marry her at the end of the play- though Farquhar denies in his preface that this actually happens, informing the reader that "he was no sooner off the Stage, but he chang'd his Mind." Penitence is not an issue: no "sentimental reform" is to be found here. The elder Wou'dbe regains his inheritance because he is tough and competent and manages to outmaneuver his fiendish sibling by the end of the play. As a picture of human nature, The Twin-Rivals is no cheerier than The Country- Wife, The Plain-Dealer, or the comedies of Southerne. it is, however, free of profanity; it does not reward vicious or debauched persons; it does not offer ugly pictures of clergymen or nobles.

Unlike Steele, Farquhar bluntly announces the connection of his play to Collier in his preface:

The Success and Countenance that Debauchery has met with in Plays, was the most Severe and Reasonable Charge against their Authors in Mr. Collier's short View; and indeed this Gentleman had done the Drama considerable Service, had he Arraign'd the Stage only to Punish it's Misdemeanours, and not to take away it's Life.... The only way to disappoint his Designs, is to improve upon his invective, and to make the Stage flourish by vertue of that Satyr, by which he thought to suppress it.

I have therefore in this Piece, endeavour'd to show, that an English Comedy may Answer the strictness of Poetical justice.69

Farquhar goes on to complain that the English audience will not tolerate "A Play without a Beau, Cully, Cuckold, or Coquet," and further blames his play's failure on prejudice among the Ladies against "formidable Stories of a Midwife" and charges of personal satire in the depiction of Richmore. "The most material Objection against this Play," he goes on to say,

is the Importance of the Subject, which necessarily leads into Sentiments too grave for Diversion, and supposes Vices too great for Comedy to Punish. 'Tis said, I must own, that the business of Comedy is chiefly to Ridicule Folly; and that the Punishment of Vice falls rather into the Province of Tragedy; but if there be a middle sort of Wickedness, too high for the Sock, and too low for the Buskin, is there any Reason that it shou'd go unpunish'd? 70

A theorist of satire might question whether there is much of a lesson to be learned from The Twin-Rivals: any viewer as essentially wicked as Young Wou'dbe, Richmore, or Midnight is not to be reformed by watching them come to disaster. That Farquhar makes vice ugly, however, cannot be denied.

Colley Cibber's The Careless Husband (December 1704) offers us a marked contrast. It is neither explicitly a rebuttal to Collier nor an attempt to put his theories into practice, and unlike the plays by Steele and Farquhar, it was an immediate and lasting success. Cibber sets his action in high life (two lords, one knight, three "Lady" members of the gentry, and one maid constitute the cast). The principal plot line concerns Sir Charles Easy's adultery with Edging (his wife's maid). The play opens with Lady Easy lamenting her position as a wronged wife, but determined to be tolerant, to forgive, and to please her erring husband. When she finds Sir Charles and Edging taking a post-coital nap in act 5, scene 5 ("The Scene opens, and discovers Sir Charles without his Periwig, and Edging by him"), she breaks into anguished verse, but controls herself and "Takes a Steinkirk off her Neck, and lays it gently on his Head." Waking and discovering it, Sir Charles realizes what has happened, heaps reproaches on himself, and repents.71

The permanence of Sir Charles' reform may be doubted, but the play is at least technically moral. Adultery is condemned; Lord Morelove is united with the giddy Lady Betty Modish; Lord Foppington's sexual designs come to naught. To judge from later commentary, much of the play's attraction lay in its "convincing" presentation of what could be taken as high life and the elegant speech of upper class characters. The language is decorous; the characters are genteel rather than "low"; no woman of quality is ruined within the action of the play. Cibber's prologue is a mini-treatise on the theory of satire. To lash the "Incorrigible Fool" or criminal is pointless. The playwright should shun presentation of "vile Scum" in order to concentrate on persons of good station who "have some weak Part, where Folly's found":

We rather think the Persons fit for Plays,

Are they whose Birth and Education says

They've ev'ry Help that shou'd improve Mankind,

Yet still live Slaves to a vile tainted Mind.72

This theory of satiric drama might justify The Lying Lover, but it would definitely condemn The Tz@in-Rivals for concentrating its fire on characters beyond redemption.

Even if we presume that Collier was a reformer and not an abolitionist, we must grant not only his failure, but the inevitability of that failure. Looking at the efforts of three playwrights disposed (for whatever reasons) to modify their practice in ways that would satisfy the demands of reformers, one sees just how great was the gap between even the "new" comedy and Collierite theory. All three comedies are duly shorn of significant profanity, and the authors go to considerable lengths to avoid rewarding the undeserving. Would Collier have approved these plays? My best guess is that he would have found The Lying Lover relatively inoffensive, but would have considered The TwinRivals low and nasty. I can only suppose that he would have been appalled by The Careless Husband. Adultery and attempted fornication among the gentry and nobility were not the sort of thing Collier was prepared to find edifying, no matter what the presentation. His fulminations against Foppington in The Relapse are famous, and Cibber's tolerant irony about him in this play could only have set Collier to ranting. From the twentieth-century point of view -and indeed, from that of their authors-these are relatively moral comedies that definitely reflect the influence of the reform movement. They underline an important fact: Collier wanted something very different. He demanded not only didacticism (which Steele, Farquhar, and Cibber supply in generous measure), but also decorum of a truly stultifying kind. Taking out oaths and clergymen would make a bare beginning on satisfying Collier. What he wanted was genuinely exemplary comedy-something that Steele endeavoured to supply in The Conscious Lovers (1722) but is otherwise virtually unknown in English drama of the time.

V. THE IMPORTANCE OF JEREMY COLLIER

By way of conclusion, I want to address two troublesome issues. We need to return, first, to the immediate significance of the hullabaloo circa 1698. Second, we should inquire what the long-term causative importance of "Collier" was, if any. In both realms I shall offer relatively radical (and perhaps controversial) hypotheses.

The uproar caused by the publication of A Short View is surprising, if one pauses to consider it. Jeremy Collier was a disreputable political fanatic, and his readership was pretty plainly not constituted of persons who attended the theater. Why, then, should playwrights respond with long, loud, and woefully ineffective answers? What did they have to fear? Collier's gutsy style no doubt encouraged abolitionist extremists, but Collier himself never called for closure of the theaters, and there is no evidence that this was ever more than a pipe-dream for fanatics. More serious imposition of censorship was not only possible but highly likely-but dramatic censorship had existed in England for more than a century and was a fact of life.

On purely rational grounds, the playwrights ought to have ignored Collier, as Farquhar observed early in the affray: "The best way of answering Mr. Collier, was not to have replyed at all; for there was so much Fire in his Book, had not his Adversaries thrown in Fuel, it would have fed upon it self, and so have gone out in a Blaze."73 The pious could have read A Short View with horrified delight, while drama and theater developed pretty much as they would have in any case. The move away from Carolean sex comedy had been in progress for twenty years, and changing social mores were gradually imposing new verbal and ethical norms on the drama, however slow the audience was to abandon its enjoyment of favorite older plays. No doubt this was not so clear in 1698. But what practical object could there be in returning Collier's fire? None that I can think of.

Collier's answerers are indignant, contemptuous, derisive-and almost without exception defensive. Most of them admit the existence of abuses. The writers' defensiveness, however, seems to go far beyond what discomfort about excesses and abuses should warrant. Any explanation of the malaise they exhibit must be conjectural, but the depth and extent of the unease are quite obvious and should not just be ignored. As a hypothesis, I offer the observation that the real importance of the Collier controversy lies not in its supposed effects on drama, but in what it implies about the cultural position of drama at the end of the seventeenth century.

The market for plays was very limited indeed. Two small theaters struggled to stay in business. From what we know of their finances, we may estimate that total theater attendance averaged no more than 500 to 6oo per day-perhaps 40 percent of capacity. A significant number of these people were probably habitues. We have no way to guess what proportion of the London population attended the theater at all, but it was probably a very small one. How many Londoners approved of what was to be found in The Relapse or The Old Batchelour? Contrariwise, how many would have found themselves largely in agreement with Collier's strictures?

The theaters were socially conspicuous, but drama was a negligible presence in the print culture world of the time, as Edward Arber explained as long ago as 1906: The Restoration Drama deserves all the obloquy and scorn that it can ever receive; because its Dramatic Art was deliberately used for the inculcation of Vice and immoral ideas. But, as this Contemporary Bibliography clearly shows, all those Shilling Plays put together do not form Two per Centum of the total English books of the Time; whether as regards their printed bulk, or their prices.

It was the religious people first, and the Scientists next, that made the fortunes of the London Book Trade. They often subscribed as much for the folios of a single Writer, like Tillotson or Rushworth, Baxter or Ray, Manton or Bunyan, as would have bought a complete set of all the Plays of that Time....

Taking a broad view of English books during these forty-two years [16681709]; what kinds of books were the most popular? Clearly, Religious Books... of which there were endless Editions. 74

A startling proportion of the books advertised in the Term Catalogues were religious (sermons, tracts, ecclesiastical history, theology). Writing the history of literature, we quite naturally see drama as central, a conspicuous expression of evolving culture. In Williamite London, I suspect it seemed peripheral, a disreputable entertainment for a shrinking elite that had lost its court patronage. Few people attended the theater and few bought published plays.

Late seventeenth-century drama had always appealed to a relatively narrow spectrum of public taste, and by the 16gos, the old audience had pretty well died off. Dramatic norms were changing (at least as embodied in new plays), but the theaters' repertory naturally continued to reflect the tastes of those who bought tickets. Those tastes were alarmingly remote from the dominant norms of the time. No doubt they had been so in 1675 as well, but as long as the king was a conspicuous patron and supporter, majority opinion remained largely irrelevant. Twentieth-century scholars of the post-ethics period tend to regard Collier with scorn as a bigot bent on the destruction of a major literary genre. An honest historicist, however, is compelled to admit that circa 1698, Collier's views were probably more or less representative of the predominant public opinion. A referendum on the closure of the theaters would no doubt have passed by a resounding majority. Nonetheless, I would hazard the guess that the defensiveness of the playwrights is less a matter of practical threats than of an acute sense of their cultural marginalization. Whether they felt guilty or felt outraged, they protested far too much and with telling ineffectuality.

Turning to the broader issue of Collier's impact, we find ourselves in the murky realms of historical causation. What exactly are some of the forces that exert significant causal influence on the evolution of drama and theater? Here are four instances where I believe we may be reasonably certain that such influence exists: (1) Ideological pressure exerted by those who buy tickets. If "the audience" (or a substantial majority of it) does not want fornication to occur within the span of the play's plot, then it will not occur. The sex comedy of the 167os was written and staged because the audience enjoyed it, and died when it went too far and the audience tired of it. (2) Limitations on the number of theaters. The duopoly created by the patent grants of 1662 and 1663 put all but two theaters out of business and destroyed the possibility of "niche competition." What happened at Goodman's Fields and the Little Haymarket between 1728 and 1737 is clear evidence of how differently London theater might have developed if free of the patent restrictions.75 What was profoundly destructive about Walpole's Licensing Act was not the imposition of censorship, but rather the closure of the nonpatent theaters. They were shut down as a sop to the patentees at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, who might otherwise have objected loudly to reimposition of censorship, but were happy to accept it as the price of having the competition put out of business. The 1737 Licensing Act had a critical effect not only on the number of theaters and in reducing competition, but ultimately on the size of the patent theaters, which in turn affected the nature of the plays that could be affectively performed in them. 76 (3) Allowing authors freely to publish their plays after 1660 quickly helped plays become "literature" and contributed to the eventual indentification of authors on playbills.77 (4) External events-such as the political crisis in England between 1678 and 1683 - got picked up in new plays (and adaptations of old one), and contributed significantly if temporarily to their content and ideology.78 I do not for amoment deny that non-literary factors exert powerful (and demonstrable) influence on the drama.

Collier was long presumed to have exerted such influence, but no one has ever demonstrated it. he certainly did not "cause sentimental comedy." He neither forced the revision of old plays nor exerted significant influence on the content of new ones. Jonas Barish asserts that Collier and his followers "must have made it relatively easy for the authorities to step in and pass the terrible Licensing Act of 1737, which killed the free theater and drove its most gifted writer, Fielding, from the stage altogether."79 Is this true? Walpole's act came more than a full generation after moral outcry came to naught. In all likelihood a majority of Londoners regarded the theater as an evil in both 1698 and 1737, but Walpole's motive was political, and he had no trouble at all passing the act.80 Collier managed to make a terrific noise in 1698, and the panicked responses of playwrights tell us a lot about their insecurity and cultural marginality. But beyond that, was he in any way important?

In the context of 1698, what ought to have happened was the imposition of more serious censorship. Any historical logic I can think of says that the government should have pleased the pious by taking some easy and obvious steps to reduce the clamor.81 What actually happened was nothing-which is astonishing, and is powerful evidence of the ineffectuality of Collier's demands for reform. Killigrew was occasionally ordered to exercise "care" in his work, but such orders produced no change. Following the 1715 patent grant to Steele, Drury Lane successfully defied Killigrew's power as censor (and refused him his fees), and his petition to George I for redress was apparently ignored.82 Censorship fell into desuetude after 1715. This has occasioned no astonishment among twentieth-century commentators, but it should have. The collapse of censorship can fairly be called astounding. The reformers made a tremendous noise, and the language of royal proclamations against immorality and profaneness certainly gave them ground for belief that their demands would be listened to. John Feild, for example, quotes at length from the proclamations of Mary, William, and Anne in support of his insistence that the theater should be suppressed. Nothing happened, and I can only conclude that the "sustained governmental effort" to clean up the stage reported by John Loftis was no more than lip service. The authority of the Lord Chamberlain over the theater had been amply demonstrated in direct political censorship during the Exclusion Crisis (:[678-1683), and as Walpole was to prove, the government definitely had the power to enforce substantial changes if it cared to bother.

Reconsidering Collier's role in the history of English drama, we should now see that his reform movement failed. This is a result that most twentieth-century critics would applaud, but the most significant long-term effect of this failure has gone unrecognized for almost three hundred years. There is a huge irony here. What is truly important about "the Collier crisis" is not his impact on the drama (or lack thereof), but rather the failure of the authorities to set the moribund censorship mechanism back in working order. If Killigrew had been replaced circa 1700 by a competent and energetic Master of the Revels, or if a licenser had been appointed, then there would have been no Licensing Act Of 1737, for censorship of the sort Walpole wanted would already have been in effect. Failure to reinvigorate moral censorship was to lead to the imposition of political censorship as draconian as ever existed under the Stuarts -a censorship not finally abolished until 1968. The generic and theatrical results of the 1737 act were indeed catastrophic: noncompetition, generic stasis, and growing elephantiasis of the patent theaters as they expanded their capacity to accommodate the growing population of a booming city. Not until 1843 did Parliament remove the patent theater restriction, by which time English drama had become a rather sorry form of popular entertainment featuring music and spectacle. Jonas Barish would have us believe that Collier's success made the Licensing Act "easy." I would suggest, on the contrary, that Collier's failure made it inevitable.83

[Footnote]

19 Krutch, Comedy and Conscience, 92.

20 This is a point well demonstrated by John Loftis, Comedy and Society from Congreve to Fielding (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 25-34.

21 On which, see Arthur H. Scouten, "The S.P.C.K. and the Stage," Theatre Notebook-ii (1957): 58-62.

[Footnote]

34 Notwithstanding Collier's popular modern reputation as fanatic and buffoon, scholars have long realized that he was an intelligent, educated, and interesting writer on a wide range of religious and cultural subjects. On his broader cultural outlook, see Kathleen Ressler, "Jeremy Collier's Essays," Seventeenth Century Studies, 2d ser., by Members of the Graduate School, University of Cincinnati, ed, Robert Shafer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1937), 177-285. On the political-ideological dimension of Collier's work, see J. Hopes, "Politics and Morality in the Writings of Jeremy Collier," Literature and History 8 (1978), 159-74.

[Footnote]

40 See PRO LC 5/152, P. 19. For discussion of the Lord Chamberlain's orders in relation to Collier, see Matthew J. Kinservik, "Disciplining Satire: The Plays of Fielding, Foote, and Macklin" (Ph.D. diss,, Pennsylvania State University, 1996), chap. 1.

41 Collier seizes gleefully on damaging admissions by his opponents. He quotes Edward Filmer, for example, to the effect that the stage is "guilty of remarkable Abuses ... that a due regulation in these Matters has been expected, and earnestly desir'd by the most sober part of the Nation.... That many of our Modern Poets have been very much to blame, and err'd in Fundamentals" (A Farther Vindication, 4, paraphrasing Filmer's A Defence of Plays: or, the Stage Vindicated [London, 17071).

[Footnote]

place, as not to have seen the Behaviour of their Women bold, and the Gestures lewd" (A Second Defence of the Short View of the Prophanenesse and Immorality of the English Stage, &c [London, 1700], 56). As Sister Rose Anthony points out (The Jeremy Collier Stage Controversy, 225-27), this is powerful evidence that Collier was not the author of A Letter to a Lady Concerning the New Play House (London, 17o6), whose author says "I never in my Life saw a Play, and have not read very many; a few of them were sufficient to give me a Surfeit" (to). The British Library, however, continues to catalog this widely-distributed pamphlet under Collier's name, and David Thomas prints an extract from it attributed to Collier without caution (Thomas and Hare, Restoration and Georgian England, 191-92).

47 Collier's connection to Rymer was recognized by Spingarn nearly a century ago, but Collier's position as critic (rather than reformer) has only very recently been seriously analyzed. See Paul D. Carman, "'The Generation of a Critic': The Emergence of Dramatic Criticism in England" (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1997).

48 See Benjamin Hellinger, "Jeremy Collier's 'False and Imperfect Citations,"' Restoration and Eighteenth Century Theatre Research 14.2 (1975): 34-47.

49 For a discussion of this point, see Maximillian E. Novak, "The Artist and the Clergyman: Congreve, Collier, and the World of the Play," College English 30 (1969): 555-61.

[Footnote]

83 For helpful critiques of a draft of this essay, I am indebted to Paul D. Carman, Kathryn Hume, Paulina Kewes, Matthew J. Kinservik, and Judith Milhous. It was written while I was on sabbatical as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. An oral form of the piece was delivered as the Opening Lecture at the BSECS annual conference, 3 January 1998, St. John's College, Oxford.

[Author Affiliation]

The Pennsylvania State University