Thomas Shadwell

• Born: 1640(?)
• Birthplace: Norfolk, England
• Died: November 19, 1692
• Place of death: Chelsea, England

Other Literary Forms

Thomas Shadwell, a prolific writer of comic drama, was also an energetic theatrical critic and polemicist, and a writer of pastorals, operas, and adaptations. His poetic output is divided into four categories: prologues and largely satiric epilogues that are found included in the printed texts of his own or others’ drama; songs from his plays; satires and lampoons; and a translation of The Tenth Satyr of Juvenal (1687), to which is prefixed the translation of a short poem by Lucan. Shadwell was an active and fierce participant in the literary wars of his time and produced many pamphlets flaying the enemies of the Whig cause. The Horrid Sin of Man-Catching, the Second Part (1681) is dedicated to the Whig leader, the earl of Shaftesbury. Some Reflections upon the Pretended Parallel in the Play Called “The Duke of Guise” (1683) provoked a savage attack from Thomas Otway in his play The Atheist: Or, The Second Part of the Soldier’s Fortune (pr. 1683). A few of Shadwell’s letters have survived, but the chief interest of his nondramatic work lies in the theatrical polemics found in the prose dedications to his plays. The ideas Shadwell presented in these dedications constitute a theory of dramatic method. His prologues are used as pleas for a reintroduction of Jonsonian classical values into dramatic structure as an alternative to prevailing Restoration comic misrule.

Achievements

Thomas Shadwell owes his immortality in large part to ridicule. John Dryden, his former friend, reserved some of his fiercest satiric lines for Shadwell. Dryden wrote in his mock paean of praise to fools, MacFlecknoe (1682): “Sh— alone, of all my sons, is he/ Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity./ The rest to some faint meaning make pretense,/ But Sh— never deviates into sense.” It is a tribute of sorts to Shadwell that he generated such brilliant and lasting malice. In far less memorable lines, another contemporary poet and dramatist, John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, in his “Allusion to the Tenth Satyr . . . of Horace” (1675), indicates some other elements in Shadwell’s achievements: “Of all our Modern Wits, none seems to me/ Once to have toucht upon true Comedy,/ But hasty Shadwell, and slow Wycherley./ Shadwell’s unfinish’d works do yet impart/ Great proofs of Nature, none of Art.”

Shadwell’s plays were performed on the London stage well into the eighteenth century. He has not been regarded as a great dramatist but as one of interest in theatrical history. Contemporaries saw him as a force to be reckoned with, as an advocate of once fashionable Jonsonian classicism. Sir Walter Scott, writing on Restoration drama long after Dryden and Shadwell and their quarrels had turned to dust, felt compelled to defend Shadwell. Scott pointed out that Shadwell’s strengths lie in his comedies, which, although lacking “any brilliancy of wit, or ingenuity of intrigue,” have “characters that are truly dramatic, original and well drawn, and the picture of manners which they exhibit gives us a lively idea of those of the author’s age.”

Between 1887 and 1907, at least eight doctoral dissertations, largely concentrating on Shadwell’s use of his source materials in his comedies, appeared in Germany and Switzerland. Praise for Shadwell’s “uncompromising and at the same time felicitous realism” in George Saintsbury’s introduction to the Mermaid edition of four of Shadwell’s plays, which appeared in the early twentieth century, contributed to creating the climate for Montague Summers’s sumptuous five-volume The Complete Works of Thomas Shadwell, which was published in 1927. Limited to 1,290 sets, privately printed in magnificent typography by the Fortune Press (which produced ninety five-volume sets on Kelmscott unbleached handmade paper, and the remainder on machine-made paper, with lavish illustrative portraits), the volumes are collectors’ items. The bibliophilic elements in Summers’s edition reflect the fact that Shadwell’s reputation is largely confined to scholarly circles and to students of dramatic history. Summers concludes his introduction of more than two hundred pages by asserting that Shadwell’s work is “incalculably important as a picture of his times.” In his comedies, “we have the whole tribe of fops, virtuosos, debauches, cuckolds, coarse country clowns, crooked politicians, business men, minor poets, sportsmen, loose wives, whores, puritans, cavaliers, the whole kaleidoscope of Restoration life.”

Among twentieth century scholars, there is a consensus that Shadwell’s plays, whatever their artistic deficiencies, are of great value as a reservoir of information about their times. Shadwell’s canvas is a wide one, and, in this respect, he differs from other late seventeenth century dramatists of comparable stature, who generally limited their attentions to narrow court circles. Shadwell has survived Dryden’s mockery to become recognized as an adherent of Jonsonian traditions on the Restoration stage, as a superb recorder of contemporary life and manners, and, at his best, as a master of vibrant comedy.

Biography

The facts of Thomas Shadwell’s life are unclear, and even the date of his birth is shrouded in uncertainty. He was born between 1640 and 1642, probably at Santon Hall in Norfolk, to John and Sarah Shadwell; his father was a Royalist lawyer. After receiving a liberal education, being tutored from an early age in music and the general arts, he attended the King Edward VI Grammar School at Bury St. Edmunds. The theme of the apposite education for a young man entering the world is especially prominent in Shadwell’s later drama. His early years on the family estate provided the foundation for the pastoral and Horatian ideals that pervade his writings, in which they are more than a mere literary convention.

Shadwell was admitted to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which he left without taking a degree on July 7, 1658. He enrolled in the Middle Temple, London, no doubt hoping to follow his father in a legal career. There is evidence that between 1664 and 1665, Shadwell was with his father, recorder of Galway and Attorney General of Connacht, in Ireland. In the years immediately preceding the 1668 production of his first comedy, The Sullen Lovers, Shadwell met the man who was to become his patron, the influential and well-connected William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle. Dedications in printed texts of Shadwell’s plays to Cavendish and members of his family attest Shadwell’s indebtedness to a man who had known Ben Jonson and had patronized the arts for a long period. Sometime between 1663 and 1667, Shadwell married a leading lady in the Duke’s Company, Anne Gibbs, who appeared in the prominent role of Emilia in his first produced drama. Subsequently, Shadwell’s life followed the routine of the professional writer and dramatist heavily engaged in literary activity in post-Restoration London. In defense of his artistic beliefs and as a paid propagandist for the Whig cause, Shadwell was constantly involved in literary feuds with rivals. In 1681, a year of particularly intense political activity, Shadwell was forced to leave the theater and to write under assumed names. In 1688, the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the start of the reign of William and Queen Mary, Shadwell’s personal and theatrical fortunes were restored. He returned to the London stage with The Squire of Alsatia, became the poet laureate, and enjoyed prestige and success until his death.

Evidence suggests that physically, Shadwell was big and by character blustering, hardly noted for tact, but rather for crudity of expression. He died in 1692 from an overdose of opium, to which he was addicted (in common with many of his contemporaries, he suffered from severe gout), and is buried at St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea, London. Shadwell had five children, one of whom, John, achieved eminence as Queen Anne’s royal physician and was knighted by her.

Analysis

The 1680’s were times of personal danger for Thomas Shadwell. He was lampooned, personally assaulted by Tory bullyboys, and his plays were hissed off the stage. Attacks on Catholicism in his The Lancashire Witches, and Tegue o Divelly the Irish Priest, and his known association with the earl of Shaftesbury and his circle, made Shadwell particularly vulnerable after the failure of the 1678 Popish Plot. Shadwell’s creative works are indissolubly intertwined with the attitudes of his age. He spiritedly defended himself against his enemies. Of particular relevance to analysis of his work is his philosophical, rather than political, battle with the earl of Rochester. Conducted in poems, pamphlets, and plays, it was a conflict between two basically opposed attitudes toward life and ways of living: Rochester’s hedonism and love of extremes had their foundations in the writings of Thomas Hobbes; Shadwell’s love of the middle way and his adherence to altruism were rooted in the classics. These contrasting ideologies found their way in one form or another into Shadwell’s eighteen known dramas, which move from adherence to Jonsonian principles, through the fierce satires of the late 1670’s and early 1680’s, to the mellow, less intemperate, late plays extolling the middle way of conduct.

George Saintsbury, in his introduction to Thomas Shadwell (1903), draws attention to Shadwell’s accuracy of observation, his keen eye for contemporary manners, and his dramatic energy and gusto. Attacked by some critics for a seeming lack of selectivity, Shadwell was in fact a dramatist whose techniques reveal careful selective principles at work: the pairing of characters into types and humors in order to present antithetical viewpoints; the reworking of source materials; the interesting use of metaphor and place to convey meaning. Shadwell is, in the words of John Loftis in The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume V: 1660-1750 (1976), “Among the major dramatists” of the Restoration, the only one who “broadens the social range, providing engaging portraits of men outside fashionable society and venturing to criticize gentlemen not only for social affectation.” Shadwell’s dramatic rendering of the conflict between hedonism and altruism is universal. As the shrewd Sir Walter Scott observed, in his notes to Peveril of the Peak (1823), acknowledging his debt to Shadwell’s The Volunteers, Shadwell was indeed “no mean observer of human nature.”

The Sullen Lovers

The Sullen Lovers, Shadwell’s first London comedy, created a stage sensation with its caricaturing of contemporary court personalities. Samuel Pepys went to see the play three times in three days, noting in his diary that “Sir Positive At-all . . . is . . . Sir Robert Howard.” Both men were singularly competent in pronouncing opinions on everything from warfare and domestic architecture to ball games and how they should be played. Pepys’s enthusiasm also owed something to his fascination with the reaction of court figures to the play as they watched it being performed early in May, 1668. Pepys saw it again in April, 1669; Charles II chose The Sullen Lovers as one of the plays to be acted at Dover when his court, in May, 1670, went to meet his sister the duchess of Orleans on her return from overseas. There was a revival at Lincoln’s Inn Fields on October 5, 1703, when it was announced that the play had not been acted for twenty-eight years. Shadwell’s main source was Molière’s Les Fâcheux (pr., pb. 1661; The Impertinents, 1732; also known as The Bores, 1891). Shadwell utilizes Molière’s method of exhibiting various fools, individually and in pairs or various combinations, before the audience. In Shadwell’s play, the fools represent the humors of classical Jonsonian drama. The Sullen Lovers is interesting as a Jonsonian play of humors using neoclassic structural and characterization devices, as an attempt to produce a psychological drama, and as a satire on contemporary court figures. Each character represents an idea or controlling thesis, the idea being made concrete by the dramatist’s skillful play of contemporary allusions juxtaposed to the specific gestures, mannerisms, and speech peculiarities of living persons.

In The Sullen Lovers, Shadwell considers various modes of living in a world of utter folly. Contrast is provided by the device of marrying three pairs of humors: a pair of social misfits, Emilia and Stanford; a couple, appositely named Sir Positive At-All and Lady Vaine, totally devoted to the pursuit of folly; and Lovel and Carolina, wry and detached. Lovel and Carolina best represent the Shadwellian middle course, in contrast to the total isolation of the first pair, Emilia and Stanford, and the uncritical participation of the second pair, Sir Positive At-All and Lady Vaine, in the vanities and follies of the world in which they live. The plot dynamics revolve around the two self-confessed misanthropes, Emilia and Stanford, who are given much of Shadwell’s powerful satiric invective and who are persistently pursued by a gang of idiots. The misanthropes escape from London, which is identified, as in so many of Shadwell’s dramas, with corruption and vice. Emilia, influenced by Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), cultivates privacy and thinks of taking vows and entering a nunnery. Stanford dreams of an escape to a deserted Caribbean island. Deliberately refusing the company of others, they attract some idiosyncratic characters. The attack on Stanford’s citadel is led by the self-obsessed dramatist, Sir Positive At-all, while Lady Vaine, a prostitute disguised as an aristocrat and the first of Shadwell’s long line of theatrical hedonists, leads the attack on Emilia. In the second act, the “sullen lovers” of the title, Stanford and Emilia, meet. Acts 3 and 4 trace the development of their relationship and their realization that dissembling is the sole way to deal with idiocy. In the final act, they marry. Shadwell’s The Sullen Lovers is an interesting synthesis of Jonsonian and Restoration modes of drama. Its use of humors is decidedly Jonsonian, while its emphasis on wit, sexual intrigue, and satire are typical of Restoration comedy.

Epsom-Wells

In Epsom-Wells, in many ways his most representative Restoration drama, Shadwell brilliantly utilizes the indecent characters and libertines about whom he complained in the preface to The Sullen Lovers. Epsom-Wells has as its setting a fashionable spa not too far from London where a rich galaxy of bawds, pimps, courtesans, gamblers, fops, and other contemporary types gather. The plot structure is multidimensional. Lucia and Carolina, two honorable young girls on holiday, are pursued by two rakes, Rains and Bevil, who have deliberately gone to Epsom to seduce women and to drink. They are debauchees whom Shadwell uses as commentators on the folly of their world. Lucia and Carolina are representatives of freedom. They prefer Rains’s and Bevil’s antics, without succumbing to them, to the hypocrisy of London. According to Shadwell’s dramatis personae, usually a rich source of information about the humors of his characters or their dominating ideas, Lucia and Carolina are “Two young ladies, of Wit, Beauty and Fortune,” not pressured, as are so many of their contemporaries, into finding a rich husband or forced into marriage by their father. They have the privilege of bestowing their virginity on men of their own choosing. After having tantalized Rains and Bevil throughout the play, they marry them in the final act.

Other plot strands focus on the Woodlys, a young married couple. Mr. Woodly romps with Rains and Bevil: Mrs. Woodly, driven by licentious passion, sleeps with them. The last act sees them divorcing and celebrating their freedom. In addition to the Woodlys, Shadwell’s Epsom-Wells is inhabited by the Biskets, Fribbles, and Justice Clodpates of the world. Bisket and Fribble, both London merchants, are cuckolded in the liberating Epsom atmosphere. Bisket is a “Comfit-maker, a quiet, humble, civil Cuckold, governed by his Wife, whom he very much fears and loves at the same time, and is very proud of.” Fribble, on the other hand, is “A Haberdasher, a surly Cuckold, very conceited and proud of his Wife, but pretends to govern and keep her under.” Mrs. Bisket is “An impertinent, imperious Strumpet, Wife to Bisket.” Dorothy Fribble is “an humble, submitting Wife, who Jilts her Husband that way, a very Whore.” Bisket and Fribble transform everything, including their own wives, into objects for materialistic exploitation, and value their wives’ sexual indiscretions for the business opportunities thereby created. Clodpate is “A Country Justice, a publick spirited, politick, discontented Fop, an immoderate Hater of London, and a Lover of the Country above measure, a hearty true English coxcomb.” Clodpate is given some magnificent lines of raillery against London, a “Sodom” full of “Pride, Popery, Folly, Lust, Prodigality, Cheating Knaves, and Jilting Whores; Wine of half a crown a quart, and Ale of twelve pence.” Clodpate pursues Lucia and Carolina; jilted by them, he turns to Mrs. Jilt, a London prostitute in search of a wealthy husband and pretending at Epsom to be a lady of virtue. Luckily for Clodpate, the marriage between them turns out to be invalid. He returns to the country having enjoyed Epsom. Mrs. Jilt returns considerably richer to London. She is more in accord with Kick and Cuff, “cheating, sharking, cowardly Bullies,” gigolos who fill out Shadwell’s rich galaxy of the various humors congealing in a world such as Epsom-Wells.

Underpinning the play are differing attitudes to life and how it should be lived. The play opens with its characters taking the waters of the wells, waters that liberate the self from the inhibitions and artificial disguises of London and its social world. In Epsom, the true, animalistic Hobbesian nature of people is allowed to run rife. Cuff and Kick are unabashed animals, visualizing the vacationing women as wild beasts. Cuff has “a great mind to run roaring in amongst ’em,” although there is a danger that he will be torn “in pieces.” Bevil and Rains are intellectual hedonists. The chief target of their invective is Clodpate, the failed hedonist forced to spend his existence in far away Sussex, railing at folly. In his epilogue, Shadwell urges “Gallants, leave your lewd whoring and take wives,/ Repent for shame your Covent-Garden lives,” although this message ill accords a play in which marriage encourages whoring. Epsom-Wells is a fascinating mixture of sexual intrigue, philosophical debate, satire, allusion, and sheer entertainment. It is hardly a wonder that it was a contemporary hit, first performed December 2, 1672, and seen three times in a single month by Charles II, who included it among his Christmas revels. Epsom-Wells remained in the London repertory for many years; Henry Purcell wrote music for a 1693 revival, and there is a record of a 1724 performance.

The Libertine

Shadwell’s comedies have obscured his efforts in other dramatic modes. Like many other Restoration dramatists, he turned his talents to adaptation. The Libertine, based largely on Molière’s Dom Juan: Ou, Le Festin de Pierre (pr. 1665, pb. 1682; Don Juan, 1755), is a variation on the Don Juan theme. Written in prose, the play exhibits fantastic extremes, coincidences, masques, brutality, and farce. Shadwell revels in the Hobbesian hedonism epitomized in his presentation of the flouting of all religious and civil authority by Don Juan (named “Don John” by Shadwell).

The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater

It is not surprising that Shadwell’s next adaptation should be a rewriting of William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (pr. c. 1607-1608). In The History of Timon of Athens, the Man-Hater, his major deviation from Shakespeare’s text is to give Timon a faithful mistress named Evandra and an unfaithful one named Melissa; further, he allows Timon to die onstage with Evandra, who stays with him when all his seemingly faithful but false friends have deserted him. Shadwell makes his spectacle serve a purpose, uses cosmopolitan scenes and stage devices such as machines, and deals with Restoration social problems. The play is of interest both in the history of Shakespearean adaptations and as an illustration of Shadwell’s recurring devices, particularly the use of paired characters.

The Royal Shepherdess

Shadwell’s experiments with pastoral and opera are not without interest. The Royal Shepherdess exhibits his use of dance, song, and exaggerated farce not in a comic mode but in a pastoral form, drawing on his master Ben Jonson and using his masque forms. Didacticism creeps in with a contrast between Horatian genteel life and the squalor of low life presented against a backdrop of pastoral illusion.

The Tempest and Psyche

Shadwell’s two operas, the first, The Tempest, based on Dryden and Sir William Davenant’s The Tempest (1667), the second, Psyche, on the Molière-Corneille-Quinault tragedy ballet, were considered “significant milestones in the evolution of English opera” by Michael W. Alssid. Both illustrate Shadwell’s dexterity at stagecraft. In The Tempest, he shortens and rearranges between forty and fifty speeches, creating space and time for dancing, singing, and dramatic spectacle. In Psyche, he produces a moral allegory of the struggle within the heroine, Psyche, between the forces of ambition, power, plenty, and peace. Both operas and the pastoral are professional theatrical pieces written to make money. They reveal Shadwell’s mastery of stagecraft, his didactic strain, and his sense of spectacle, providing as well an insight into the multiple forms of drama found on the Restoration stage.

The Lancashire Witches, and Tegue o Divelly the Irish Priest

For a number of reasons, The Lancashire Witches, and Tegue o Divelly the Irish Priest is among Shadwell’s most interesting works. The genesis of this play was deeply political, reflecting Shadwell’s role as a Whig propagandist. Shadwell’s address to his readers gives an account of the delays and excisions in the text of the play demanded by his Tory political opponents before it could be performed in the autumn of 1681. Shadwell was forced to omit most of his political materials, and censorship transformed the play into an absurd but highly popular farce. Explicit political ideology was replaced by supernatural motifs that implicitly represent forces of disruption at work in society.

The play is set far away from the intrigues of London, on a country estate, an emblem for tranquillity and positive values. The action focuses on the master of the estate, Sir Edward Hartford, “a worthy Hospitable true English Gentleman, of good understanding, and honest Principles.” Sir Edward detests “Foppery, slavish Principles, and Popish Religion.” He is an empiricist who argues that witchcraft has natural causes. Often misled in personal matters and motivated by materialistic considerations, he tries to marry his daughter Isabella to Sir Timothy Shacklehead, “a very pert, confident, simple Fellow.” Sir Edward’s son Hartfort—“A Clownish, sordid Country Fool, that loves nothing but drinking Ale, and Country Sports”—is intended for the highly intelligent Theodosia Shacklehead. Witchcraft conspires to bring two reformed rakes, Bellfort and Doubty, to Sir Edward’s estate. Much of the action of the play is concerned with the ways in which Isabella and Theodosia disrupt the estate, play elaborate games with Bellfort and Doubty, and disguise themselves as witches. Mistaken identity and disguise give Shadwell the opportunity to present highly amusing dramatic moments. In act 4, Lady Shacklehead, on the way to a nighttime assignation with Doubty, finds herself attacked by a lecherous priest named Tegue, who mistakenly has intercourse with a witch, Mother Dickenson, thinking that she is Lady Shacklehead. In act 5, Sir Edward’s friend Sir Jeffery Shacklehead discovers his scarcely clothed wife wandering around in the dark. He is duped by her sleepwalking performance and quickly improvised nightmare, in which she exclaims “Oh! the Witch, the Witch, oh she pulls the cloaths off me. Hold me, Sir Jeffery, hold me.”

Although there are many farcical elements in the play, ranging from rock throwing, chair pulling, disrobing on a darkened stage, and chases, the chaos has a serious side. The buffoons, witches, Smerk, Sir Edward’s chaplain, and Tegue are representatives of the forces of disorder threatening the ordered Hartford estate and, by implication, Charles II and England itself. Shadwell, playing on audience prejudice, depicts his arch-villain Tegue as both Irish and Catholic, a dissembling troublemaker plotting insurrection. Lively theater is created by Tegue’s lecherous drunken antics and by the highly energetic activities of the witches.

Shadwell even includes a witchhunt that degenerates “into a mad farce controlled by secular and religious professionals seeking to enhance their own reputations by finding and condemning great numbers,” according to Kunz. Passages in the play expunged by the censor are printed in italics in the printed text, revealing that Sir Edward’s estate is but a microcosm for the garden of England, which—if it is to survive—must be cultivated according to solid Whig principles. This political statement forced Shadwell as a dramatist and verse satirist into seven years of submerged existence while the country changed religions and rulers and then did an about-face.

Bibliography

Alssid, Michael W. Thomas Shadwell. New York: Twayne, 1967. This volume, part of Twayne’s English Authors series, gives a straightforward account of Shadwell’s life and drama, attempting some critical evaluation. A useful introduction. Supplemented by a bibliography and an index.

Armistead, J. M., and Werner Bies. Four Restoration Playwrights: A Reference Guide to Thomas Shadwell, Aphra Behn, Nathaniel Lee, and Thomas Otway. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. Part of the Reference Guides to Literature series, this volume carries basic information on dates, plays, and editions, and includes a bibliography. It is invaluable for research papers.

Bruce, Donald. Topics of Restoration Comedy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974. This survey of Restoration comedy concentrates on it as a “debating” comedy, with a moral pupose in this debate. Bruce refers to Shadwell’s plays extensively and examines seven of his plays within the context of the moral topics enumerated. Notes, bibliography, chronology, and index.

Burns, Edward. Restoration Comedy: Crises of Desire and Identity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987. Chapter 4 deals with Shadwell as a professional dramatist, as one of a group of dramatists whose plays are still underrated. Burns praises these writers for their energy and ferocity, opposing them to the suavity of the gentlemen playwrights. Chronology, notes, short bibliography, and index.

Hume, Robert D. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. 1976. Reprint. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1990. Hume tries to correct earlier stereotypes of Restoration drama by examining a large number of plays and paying special attention to their chronological sequencing. Contains many references to Shadwell and a full analysis of his The Squire of Alsatia. Two indexes.

Kunz, Don Richard. The Drama of Thomas Shadwell. Salzburg, Austria: University of Salzburg Press, 1972. This volume looks at the life and works of Thomas Shadwell, particularly his plays and the techniques used therein.

Loftis, John, Richard Southern, Marion Jones, and A. H. Scouten. The Revels History of Drama in English, Volume V: 1660-1750. London: Methuen, 1976. Contains a section on Shadwell in connection with the comedy of humors and includes other useful references to his plays throughout the volume. Complemented by a bibliography and an index.

Wheatley, Christopher J. Without God or Reason: The Plays of Thomas Shadwell and Secular Ethics in the Restoration. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1993. Wheatley examines ethics during the Restoration, focusing on Shadwell’s plays. Bibliography and index.