Robert Gould's attacks on the London stage, 1689 and 1709: the two versions of "The Playhouse: A Satyr".

Scholars have paid astonishingly little attention to Robert Gould's "The Playhouse: A Satyr," first published in a collection of his poems in 1689 and reissued in 1709 shortly after his death in a longer and significantly revised version. Montague Summers reprinted the 1709 text as an appendix to The Restoration Theatre in 1934, but neither version of the poem has been much consulted or cited by theatre historians. There are three obvious reasons for this. Gould was a brutally effective satirist, but not a good poet by twenty-first century standards; his fiercely moral views of drama and theatre have led to his being classified as an anti-theatrical propagandist; and his viciously negative accounts of such noted performers as Thomas Betterton and Elizabeth Barry have repelled and irritated virtually all readers. Why then should we resurrect these neglected verses? I would suggest that we have two good reasons for doing so. Their gritty invective is in fact representative of an important kind of satire popular in the later seventeenth century, satire of a sort that is now only starting to get critical attention. (1) Their principal value, however, lies less in their style or in their exemplification of a particular type of Restoration satire, than in the details of their content. I shall argue that "The Playhouse: A Satyr" is in fact an important primary source for students of English drama and theatre in the period ca. 1675-1710.

As a poem, as opposed to as a source of information on the theatre, "The Playhouse" belongs firmly to the tradition of satire as attack--and in particular, abusive attack. Surveying and trying to categorize Carolean satire, Robert D. Hume says "One gets a sense of satire as something nasty and savage, expressing ill-will and hostility." (2) He makes a clear distinction between this type of satire and Augustan satire which claims to be motivated by a desire to reform or morally improve its targets. The high-toned, magisterial view of satire offered by Dryden in his oft-quoted "Discourse" of 1692 is a world away from the vicious, personal, abusive poems written by the hundreds during the late seventeenth century. (3) As Hume observes, such poems seem "designed to hurt, to damage, and to demean." While Gould bemoans the fact that both plays and players have become degenerate, offering unfavorable comparisons with the glories of the past, he makes no attempt whatsoever to propose a remedy for the ills which he perceives. Gould certainly claims a moral basis for the hostilities which he expresses, but this is abusive and destructive satire, not corrective satire. If one is looking for context, one turns not to Dryden's "Discourse," or Pope, but rather Catullus' invectives, or to Skelton, Cleveland, and Oldham (and in a later period, to Churchill and "Peter Pindar").

"The Playhouse" contains highly specific, much neglected commentary on plays, playwrights, actors, and audience. Unlike most anti-theatrical writers, Gould was definitely a regular playgoer, thoroughly familiar with playhouse practice. He was also a produced (if unsuccessful) playwright. However hostile his assessments, his poem contains quite a lot of useful reception information, and insofar as the contents are factual rather than evaluative, they seem to be quite accurate. Gould may be pompous, priggish, and hateful, but he appears to know whereof he spoke. The only significant scholarship concerned with Gould's life and works is a rather mechanical life-and-works dissertation of two generations ago by E. H. Sloane. (4) Because "The Playhouse: A Satyr" was not separately published, it did not get an entry in Arnott and Robinson's English Theatrical Literature (1970), but it is actually a far richer source of contemporary dramatic and theatrical detail than many of the seventeenth-century items to be found there.

A brief account of Gould may be in order before I analyze his satire. His year of birth is conjecturally 1660 and he died in late 1708 or early 1709. He began his working life in the service of the Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, where he gained a certain amount of access to, and interest in, London literary life, though he had little formal education. He dedicated an early poem, "Presbytery Rough-Drawn" (published in 1683) (5) to the Earl of Abingdon and thereafter received both encouragement and financial aid from him. Having left the Dorset household, he appears to have served as a clerk to Abingdon for a time, and when he left London he went to Wiltshire and Oxfordshire where the Earl had properties and family connections who were of help to Gould. (6) While in the country, 1689-99, Gould wrote a number of poems dedicated to local figures of note, but his only contact with society came through nearby Bath. His play The Rival Sisters was performed at Drury Lane in 1695, perhaps through the influence of the Earl of Dorset who was Lord Chamberlain at the time, or more likely because the patent company at Drury Lane were in desperate need of new material to draw audiences, as they were now the second-class venue. His second play, Innocence Distressed, was never produced. The only modern anthology of Restoration verse which includes work by Gould is the 1969 Penguin collection edited by Harold Love. Gould survives now, if at all, as a specimen of the misogyny aimed at Aphra Behn: "For Punk and Poetess agree so Pat, / You cannot well be This, and not be That," (7) and as a sample of the kind of resentment and hostility directed towards such performers as Betterton and Barry.

THE 1689 VERSION

In January 1689 Gould published a collection of poems called Poems Chiefly Consisting of Satyrs and Satyrical Epistles. In the prologue to the section devoted to satires he asks his audience "How am I then too blame, when all I write / Is honest rage, not prejudice or spite?" (134). Yet however honest the rage, the poems that follow, seem both hostile and spiteful. They range from attacks on individuals to the more generic "Satyr on Man" and "Satyr Against the Pride, Lust and Inconstancy, etc of Woman." "The Playhouse. A Satyr" decries the immorality of the theatre and all those associated with it. Sloane makes only brief reference to the first version of "The Playhouse," mentioning it in the context of Gould's later attempt to have his first play performed by the very people he had viciously satirized. The title page states that the poem was "Writ in The Playhouse the year 1685." A draft may indeed have been written at that time, but references to Behn's The Emperour of the Moon (March 1687) and Shadwell's The Squire of Alsatia (May 1688) prove that Gould added material to the poem and perhaps made other revisions as well. There are three extant manuscript versions of the poem. (8) These are largely the same and although there are many small differences between them and the printed work, these may be seen as adjustments rather than substantive alterations to either style or content. (9) The only possible exception to this occurs with

 
   For Oaths ye Bullies yet around 'em crow'd 
   Are neither halle so Blasphemous nor Loud 
   All sacred things they Laugh at and detest 
   God not consider'd, or butt made a Jest; 
   But they'll in earnest one day come to see, 
   Heaven will not allwayes wink at their Impiety 

lines which are replaced by "(But that's not much, for, the plain truth to tell, / They're without brains, why not without their Smell?)" (162), when printed. The change is a better fit with the surrounding lines and perhaps Gould also decided to remove these lines as the religious references might lead his audience to expect a more typical anti-theatrical diatribe than that which he was about to provide.

The dedication to the Earl of Dorset shows that Gould was originally unable to get "The Playhouse" published: "Deny'd the Press, forbid the Publick view, / This Trifle for a Refuge flies to you." The poem is a somewhat wandering diatribe, but oddities of structure and sequence aside, it has four quite distinct targets. These are (1) the audience; (2) the (im)morality of modern plays; (3) eighteenth-century playwrights, including a commentary on current conditions of playwriting; and (4) four of the principal United Company actors.

In its first published form, it can, on one level, be viewed as part of a longstanding tradition of anti-theatrical writing. The underlying premise of many such writings was that not only were plays immoral, displaying sin for entertainment, but that through the enjoyment of such material the audience also became contaminated. (10) After a general opening, Gould dedicates the first eleven pages of his poem to an outpouring of venom against those who attend the theatre. He is particularly sour about the prostitutes who infest the "Middle Gallery":

 
   Where reeking Punks like Summer Insects swarm, 
   And stink like Pole-cats when they're hunted warm: 
   Their very Scents cause Apoplectick Fits, 
   And yet they're thought all Civet by the Cits. 
 
   Here, every Night, they sit three hours for Sale, 
   With dirty Night-rail, and a dirtier Tayl: 
   If any Gudgeon bites, they have him sure, 
   For nothing Angles Blockheads like a Whore. 
   To keep their Masks on is their only way, 
   For going barefac't wou'd but spoil their Play; 
 
   Who e're does grapple with these Fire-ships, 
   May tast the Mercury upon their Lips. 
 
(162-63) (11) 

Gould has if anything greater scorn for "Court-Ladies" who ascend to "this Bitch-Gallery"

 
                     ... muffi'd up in a disguise; 
   And by pert carriage …