Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Focusing on the five most famous or infamous libertines of the 1660's and 1670's (Rochester, Sedley, Etherege, Wycherley, and George Villiers duke of Buckingham) Webster reads this selective group of libertine's real-life performances and their libertine plays as attempts by their authors to both fashion themselves and fashion new kinds of characters (often based on real-life libertines) to contest normative codes of subjectification. Webster focuses on the political aims and effects of libertine self-fashioning/performance, but the libertines are slippery figures and libertine drama can be read in many ways and made to mean many contradictory things.
Since each dramatist or poet uses the libertine discourse in a different way for different ends it is very difficult to say anything about libertinism that applies to all libertines. For instance the most famous play of the Restoration, _The Man of Mode_,was written by one libertine, Etherege, but loosely based on the exploits of another, Rochester. But Webster does not consider to what extent the play is simply a means for Etherege to make money off of his more famous friend's notoriety. For Rochester writing and libertinism were both socially marked aristocratic activities; but for those who were not born to the aristocratic class and who made their living by their pen, like Etherege and Wycherely, the practice of libertinism could be interpreted as a means to an end; the end being social advancement at court, and a steady income from the theatre. Though each libertine had a separate political agenda, some were Whigs and some Tories, none of them were interested in toppling a political system upon which their status depended. So the libertine was political, but not a political radical as Webster contends. The libertines like everyone else at this time were caught up in the debate as to where power should reside: with the people or with a monarch or somehwere inbetween (ie parliament). Interestingly enough it was the libertines who had the least status that were most loyal to Charles II while the libertines with titles tended to side with the Whigs. To me this seems to be the most interesting of the many libertine paradoxes but Webster leaves it largely unexplored.
Webster is convinced that libertinism waned because the critics of Charles II began to view his libertine friends and the libertine theatre that he sponsored as agents of disorder (a misperception in Webster's view) instead of as agents of reform. The villainizing of the libertine began in the late 1670's and continued throughout the long 18th century. Webster contends that the libertines were very influential but since they never mounted anything like a united front or offered anything in the way of clear political directives (George Villiers would be the exception here as he did have clear political ideas and ambitions) its difficult to see exactly how they could have been perceived as politically influential. They were friends with each other and with Charles II but friends with important differences. Their individualism and their individual applications of a philosophy that was never strictly defined makes it very difficult to say exactly what libertinism meant to any particular libertine at any given time or exactly what the political ramifications of libertinism, if any, might have been. The libertines certainly were very popular in the aesthetic sphere but it is not clear how this kind of popularity translated into political influence.
What makes the libertine seem so attractive in some of the plays is that he appears to be a political free agent capable of determining his own life and unlike the other characters he seems capable of seeing life for what it is, but, in actuality as Webster reminds us, the libertine is very much a part of the social world and must maneuver within that world as it exists. Thus in many of the plays the libertine is portrayed as a strategist (or as Webster calls him a "trickster"). But he's also (often though not always) a character that realizes the limits of his own self-serving practices and at least gestures toward some kind of reform. The extent to which this gesture toward self-reform was a political comment on the reign of Charles II (and if it was a political coment what kind of comment it was) remains unclear. It is also unclear whether this gesture toward reform is genuine or strategic; the ultimate aim of the libertine is never spelled out. Critical reception of libertine plays has been as controversial as the plays themselves. For three centuries a debate has raged over whether the plays were meant to celebrate vice and folly or expose it and censor it.
As far as audience response to the libertine Webster has a theory for that too but very little real evidence to support just how the audience perceived libertinism as it was performed on stage. Webster argues that the character made people conscious of themselves as judges of their social and politicial worlds and of themselves and this is certainly possible and various versions of this view have been argued and forwarded by others, but its also possible that the public wanted quick fix solutions and were not particularly interested in the theatre as a forum for public debate but were more interested in the theatre as a place offering escape from the complexity and confusion of the social world, and the fantasy/illusion of independence that is roguish romance would have offered an attractive few hours of entertainment. Whether the plays offered a relief from subjectification or an analysis of it or both is uncertain. To what extent these plays are an accurate representation of the social world and to what extent they exagerrate or distort the social world and with what purposes/intentions those exagerrations/distortions are made, if that is in fact what they are, is unclear. These uncertainties inform all studies of the Restoration stage. Audience response like authorial intention is purely a matter of speculation.
Libertinism is effective as a critique of norms and status and power but it really offers nothing in the way of solutions to the age's anxieties about the unstable nature of these abstractions/constructions on which society rests and relies and with which it legitimizes itself; and thus the plays often end ambiguously. In his conclusion Webster discusses Jeffreys' 1994 play and the 2005 movie version of _The Libertine_. Even though the play and film end as ambiguously as the original libertine plays often did (as it is unclear whether Rochester's repentance at the end of the play/film is genuine or just a mock repentance) Webster elides this ambiguity which has been central not just to Rochester's mythos but to the libertine mythos in general. Webster does not acknowledge that there is ambiguity in this ending; he simply avoids it altogether and ends his book with the generality that the lasting appeal of the libertine is his unapologetic pursuit of pleasure which unnerves a society that is obsessed with containing sexuality in moral codes. This tendency to sweep away ambiguity with generality seems to be a habit of mind that informs many of his readings, including his reading of the ending of _The Man of Mode_.
*Webster is arguably more comfortable with his theoretical armature than with the plays themselves. Plus the omission of poetry (where sexual topics were treated with much more candor than was permitted on stage) leaves this study feeling curiously incomplete and shallow. Theres a lot of information here but also a lot of speculation. I found this book valuable because it does raise a lot of interesting issues even if I do not always agree with the readings of the individual plays or the much too pat conclusions.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality
Performing Libertinism in Charles II's Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality examines the performative nature of Restoration libertinism by reading reports of libertine activities and texts of libertine plays within the context of the fraternization between George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir George Etherege, and William Wycherley. Webster argues that libertines, both real and imagined, performed traditionally secretive acts, including excessive drinking, sex, sedition, and sacrilege, in the public sphere. This eruption of the private into the public challenged a Stuart ideology that distinguished between the nation's public life and the king's and his subjects' private consciences. Although this eruption was contained by the early 1680s, the libertine performances this book analyzes nevertheless played an important part in the history of English radicalism.
Get 20% OFF
No comments:
Post a Comment