"This gaudy, gilded stage" : rhetorics of libertinism in the drama of the court wits, 1671-1678

My dissertation explores the ideological meanings attached to the Court Wits’ representations of libertine figures in their plays during the 1670s. In describing the Marquis de Sade, Michel Foucault wrote, "the libertine is he who, while yielding to all the fantasies of desire and to each of its furies, can, but also must, illuminate their slightest movement with a lucid and deliberately elucidated representation" (Order 209). This definition is equally true for the Restoration Court Wits, an elite fraternity of literary and political figures known for their hedonistic philosophy and Epicurean lifestyles that included George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham; John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester; Sir Charles Sedley; Sir George Etherege; and William Wycherley. Not the least part of these lifestyles was a cultural posing, a penchant for self-consciously theatrical affectations and adventures.= Throughout their literary works, and especially their dramas, the members of this coterie drew upon their infamous reputations in order to cast versions of themselves as the central figures in the theater of Restoration court life. In particular, I argue that the Wits use these figures to resist the limitations imposed by aristocratic ideology's rhetoric of national heroism and progressive ideology's articulation of innate virtue. I conclude that these playwrights employ rhetorical strategies to expose the ideological limitations of their day and, in doing so, resist their culture's move toward what Foucault calls bourgeois sexuality. To demonstrate this thesis, I examine nine plays written by members of this circle. Chapter One introduces the Court Wits' fraternity and defines what I mean by the aristocratic, progressive, and libertine ideologies. Chapter Two argues that Buckingham's The Rehearsal deploys libertine ideology in the form of epideictic rhetoric to respond to aristocratic ideology's discourse of national heroism, transforming heroic drama into farce through gender parody and thereby undermining its claim to verisimilitude. Chapter Three studies Wycherley's early comedies, Love in a Wood, The Gentleman Dancing Master, and The Country Wife, to argue that these plays serve as a kind of deliberative rhetoric, a use of art to explore the possibilities of libertine ideology to reshape aristocratic society at this time. In particular, Wycherley employs libertine ideology in these plays to reject progressive ideology's argument that honor is a virtue that anyone could cultivate through introspection and moral behavior. Chapter Three examines the rhetorical choices of Etherege and Wycherley in The Man of Mode and The Plain Dealer, respectively, arguing that each turns away from radical libertinism and embraces an integration of the libertine into society's institutions. Chapter Five analyzes plays by Rochester and Sedley to demonstrate that each pushes libertine ideology to its most extreme limits in order to test whether it remains a viable alternative to aristocratic and progressive ideologies. Although Rochester and Sedley maintain that libertinism is such an alternative, by 1680 the Wits' fraternity and their experimentation with libertinism disintegrates as its members find themselves aligned with different political factions during and after the Exclusion Crisis of the later 1670s.