The Relapse and Other Plays

by John Vanbrugh, Brean Hammond (Editor)

John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), one of the principal Restoration dramatists, is best known for comedies that capture the hilarious idiosyncrasies and unique subject matter of marital discord. This collection contains five of his most rollicking comedies on marital disharmony, edited to the high standard of the Oxford English Drama series in modernized spelling and including full notes and glossary. In addition to his most famous plays, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife, the collection also includes The Confederacy, A Journey to London, and The Country House. There is a critical introduction, wide-ranging annotation, and an informative bibliography which together illuminate the plays' cultural context and theatrical potential.
The only selection of Vanbrugh's plays currently in print, this book is ideal for readers, performers and students alike.

Genres: Plays, Drama, 18th Century, 17th Century

432 pages, Paperback

First published September 12, 2004

About the author

Sir John Vanbrugh was an English architect and dramatist, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), which have become enduring stage favourites but originally occasioned much controversy.

Vanbrugh was in many senses a radical throughout his life. As a young man and a committed Whig, he was part of the scheme to overthrow James II, put William III on the throne and protect English parliamentary democracy, dangerous undertakings which landed him in the dreaded Bastille of Paris as a political prisoner. In his career as a playwright, he offended many sections of Restoration and 18th-century society, not only by the sexual explicitness of his plays, but also by their messages in defence of women's rights in marriage. He was attacked on both counts, and was one of the prime targets of Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. In his architectural career, he created what came to be known as English Baroque. His architectural work was as bold and daring as his early political activism and marriage-themed plays, and jarred conservative opinions on the subject.

Reviews

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm awarding this 4* (3.5) because on the strength of the title play alone, which I found to be droller than anything by friend-of-Swift Sheridan, this more than deserves to be brought back into print (brought out in 2004, it was reissued by OUP in '09, but I could only find it used).

The last three-- increasingly short--plays are the rather amusing The Confederacy (4* but as it is a more or less faithful adaptation of a French play by Florent Dancourt, those stars belong to the originator!), the unfinished and unfunny A Journey to London (2*, written late in life, it seems), and the very brief, amusing farce (again cribbed from a French original), and the one-act The Country House in which the householder of a summer residence is perpetually beset by more and still more visitors, who arrive but never leave--or at least until....

*********

3* for the even more cynical, less funny, and certainly less easy-going second play, The Provoked Wife, whose titular character has a husband so relentlessly, boorishly, and violently, well, aristocratic as to drive her to cuckhold him, but which nevertheless also features the seeker Heartfree, who, beneath his cynical façade and in spite of the debauchery and superficiality of all around him, somehow retains some vestige of an idealism which is (Vanbrugh seems to suggest) foreign to these shores (or at least to the latter part of this century), and who sincerely beseeches:

Heartfree: All revolutions run into extremes; the bigot makes the boldest atheist, and the coyest saint the most extravagant strumpet. But prithee advise me in this good and evil, this blessing and cursing, that is set before me.

************

4* for the quite witty and well-written first play, The Relapse, in which I found this gem for all y'all Bookstagrammers (yaas I just lernt me that word) out there:

Amanda: I love a neat library too, but t'is I think the inside of the book should recommend it most to us.
Foppington: That I must confess I am nat altogether so fand of. Far to mind the inside of a book, is to entertain oneself with the forced product of another man's brain. Naw I think a man of quality and breeding may be much better diverted with the natural sprauts of his own. (2.1.197-204)