2. Loyalty marketed: The works of the early Hanoverian laureates, 1700–30

The court does not much feature in scholarship on early eighteenth-century cultural production and consumption, and nor does the laureateship. This chapter seeks to redress the balance. It argues that while in this period the prevailing norms of cultural production certainly became more associated with the concepts of the town and the public, the court retained a significant role, coexisting and interacting with them. The laureateship is evidence of this. It was an office based conceptually in the court, proving the importance of the court as a space of cultural production and consumption, but it faced outwards to the town and the public.

The central issues of this chapter will be framed by a two-sided question. On one side is the question of what involvement contemporaries conceived the court as having in high culture, and particularly literature, in the early eighteenth century. It is generally supposed that culture underwent a great change between the early Stuart and early Hanoverian periods, going from ‘courtly’ to ‘commercial’. Having been produced in a court-based system, by patronized artists, for an audience centred on the court, they came to be produced (according to this narrative) in a marketplace system, by independent professionals, for an increasingly middle-class public. The marketplace (and, to some extent, political parties) therefore supplanted the court, becoming central to the production and consumption of culture. In this chapter, this narrative of cultural transformation will be questioned.

On the flipside is the second question: what was the role and status of the laureateship in this period? In considering the extent to which culture was characterized by reference to the court, and the conceptual relationships between court, town and public, it is reciprocally necessary to consider the laureates’ works, and how contemporaries perceived the laureates. This chapter will focus on the laureates Nicholas Rowe (appointed 1715, died 1718), Laurence Eusden (died 1730), and Colley Cibber (died 1757), especially the former. Whereas subsequent chapters will examine the Hanoverian laureate appointment processes, the public standing and the official odes of the laureates, this chapter will start from a thematically earlier position, focusing primarily on the works that the laureates wrote before becoming laureate. It was on the basis of their pre-laureate works that Rowe, Eusden and Cibber made their names, gained their success within the particular cultural geography that will be elaborated in this chapter and eventually earned their appointments to the laureateship. In a sense, their appointments signalled royal patronage over their entire oeuvres, and symbolically confirmed that they had spent their careers working to make themselves the most eminent and serviceable poets in the eyes of the supreme arbiter of such things, the monarch. It is therefore vital to analyse their pre-laureate writings.

Moreover, there is an important dynamic at play between these writers’ pre-laureate reputations, mostly established under Queen Anne, and their appointments as laureate, under Georges I and II: the establishment of the Hanoverian regime on pre-existing foundations, and the relatively smooth rapprochement effected between the Hanoverian court and the metropolis. As argued previously, the court’s location within the town, and within London, was highly significant; and the public that was being conceived at this time was London-centric, overlapping with and partially building upon the concept of the town. The most important geographical distinction in eighteenth-century society was between a court-centred metropolis on the one hand and the nation beyond London on the other, rather than between the court and the town, or the court and the public. This was perhaps never more evident than during George I’s reign: the early Hanoverians nestled into London, only ever leaving it to return to Hanover, and Londoners embraced them. Hence this chapter’s apparently oxymoronic title: the early Hanoverian laureates were those who had achieved success with the court and town during the later Stuart period.

In terms of the conceptual geography of culture, the approach here will be different to the previous chapter’s. Chapter One focused on the conceptual spaces employed by Britons to understand the production and consumption of culture, how those spaces related to each other and where and why the laureateship was positioned among them. Here, the emphasis will fall rather on what those concepts denoted, and on how they determined meaning. Each concept – court, town, world, public, playhouse, coffeehouse and so on – was associated with its own particular group of people, who constituted the creators and especially the audience of cultural products. Each concept was also associated with its own particular set of values, as determined by its physical nature, the types of people who inhabited or constituted it and the types of activities engaged in by those people. In turn, these values determined the meaning of the cultural products that related to that concept, both as the values that motivated their creation and as the values by which they were judged. There was nothing rigidly consistent about any of this; as mentioned in the Introduction, the usage of these concepts was varying and undogmatic. It is informative rather for its extent and general patterns than for its intellectual sophistication. By studying how the poets laureate positioned their work, and the values by which they recommended it and expected that it would be judged, we can see more clearly how Britons of the early eighteenth century conceived of the cultural landscape and of the court’s place within it.

Because of the emphases found in the scholarship with which it will engage, this chapter will focus on the concepts of the town and the public, but not the world, even though the latter was still regularly referred to by early eighteenth-century Britons. Here, until the final section, the world will be elided with the public, despite the relationship between the concepts of world and public being more complex than such an elision would suggest.

Courtly to commercial?

Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718), appointed poet laureate a year after George I’s accession, was one of the most respected literary figures of his time, and several of his plays remained repertory staples throughout the eighteenth century. In current scholarship, he tends to be defined in three ways: as a professional playwright who was expertly catering to new, middle-class audiences; as a party-political figure, ardently serving the Whig cause; and as Shakespeare’s first ‘modern’ editor.1 In each of these respects, Rowe is depicted as characteristic of his period and of the triumph of the public as an entity. Because his literary work was produced in line with the prevailing trends of literary value, and excelled according to the criteria of those trends, he enjoyed critical esteem and popular success. To understand this three-pronged characterization, the way in which Rowe’s society – the Britain of William III, Anne and George I – is understood by scholars must be looked at in more detail. It will be shown that scholars have often implied or stated a certain dynamic between spaces, audiences and values, which will feed into this chapter’s analysis of the laureates’ work.

The first salient point regards the state of drama around the turn of the eighteenth century. As outlined in Chapter One, when the playhouses had been restored by Charles II, drama had been closely bound up with the court: the two theatre companies held royal patents and were named after the king and his brother; a court-based coterie had written many of the new plays in the 1660s and a lesser number thereafter; king and courtiers frequently visited the playhouses or had plays acted at court; playwrights and actors (such as Dryden and Nell Gwynn) often ended up with court connections; and literary patronage was centred on the king and a court-centric aristocracy. With this court-based patronage system thus dominating the production and consumption of drama, plays were written according to the interests and ideals of the king, aristocracy and upper gentry. Playwrights’ appeal to this audience was an important factor in their success, and the highest form of success was conceptualized as having a play performed at court or gaining the king’s personal approval. This meant a preponderance of heroic dramas, aristocratic wit-based comedies and refined, cosmopolitan plays translated from French and Spanish originals.2

By the end of the seventeenth century, however, drama was undergoing radical changes. Audience complexion was changing. There were an increasing number of people who had the inclination and resources to visit the theatre, and an increasing proportion of them were not gentry or courtly. Theatre thus became more orientated towards what scholars generally describe as ‘the middling sort’, ‘the (new) middle class’, ‘the public’ or ‘the town’.3 There is a certain overlap between these formulations: they comprise the notion of a literate, numerous, expanding set of persons who were fairly prosperous, but who were not aristocratic, and who were to have an increasing impact on all areas of public life over the course of the eighteenth century. But these terms also have more specific applications. The ‘new’ or ‘rising’ middle class of the eighteenth century has long been a truism of historiography and of literary and theatre scholarship, gesturing vaguely towards the modern, transhistorical definition of that class. Recent decades, however, have seen social historians attempting to recreate a more historically exact middle class, often using the contemporary term, ‘middling sort’.4 They have defined this ‘middling sort’ as ‘independent trading households’, where ‘trade’ stretches from lower artisanship to well-educated professionalism, and where bureaucrats are permitted ‘independence’.5 And they have argued that this group was indeed on the rise, and was indeed exercising an ever more prevalent role in public life; its numbers, economic heft, social prominence, ideological character and political voice were inexorably gaining ground, especially in London. Crucial to its identity and power was its relationship with commerce: the rise of the middling sort was a phenomenon that was symbiotic with the commercialization of Britain.6

As for ‘the public’ and especially ‘the town’, they are both often held to contain significant gentry elements; the gentry, although numerically small, exercised a disproportionate influence over taste and fashion.7 But ‘the public’ had a fundamentally middle-class identity, while ‘the town’ held a mixture of social classes: there the middle class confidently rubbed shoulders with the upper.8 Especially in cultural matters, the basic novelty and substance of ‘public’ and ‘town’ were that they were an impersonal mass of paying consumers. As Cibber put it, ‘’Tis dangerous to Quarrel with a whole Town … their Will is Law, and ’tis but reasonable it shou’d be so, since they pay for their Power.’9 Moreover, the lower gentry were not very distinct from the upper middling sort, and indeed are sometimes still included in broad definitions of an eighteenth-century middle class, while the richest members of the middling sort rivalled the peerage for wealth.10 Finally, whatever else might be said about these formulations, it is usually the case that scholars hold them in contradistinction to the court.11 Lawrence Klein (though not inclined to make much of the middle class) perhaps put the case most dogmatically, arguing that a town or public based in coffeehouses developed an ideology of politeness as part of ‘the larger process’ by which a ‘cultural regime centred on a court was transmuted into a post-courtly one’.12 Nor was this accidental; according to Klein, Whig writers, especially Joseph Addison, were intentionally undermining the court (and church), and intentionally replacing them with coffeehouses in particular and the town in general as spaces of cultural authority.

Because theatre was now financed, enjoyed and criticized by this new audience, its values changed accordingly. Plays became more sentimental, feminine, didactic and moralizing; less cynical and witty; looser in genre; more reflective of contemporary, middle-class life. Although determinations of the genres of this period are problematic, it is instructive to note some of the designations that have sometimes been employed: sentimental comedy, crying comedy, humane comedy, reform comedy, domestic tragedy, she-tragedy. Meanwhile, heroic drama was falling into abeyance by the turn of the century (albeit with occasional revivals later on).13

There is much that might be objected to in these generalizations. Theatre scholars, it might be argued, have drawn too simplistic a connection between the characteristics of eighteenth-century drama and the supposed values of a supposedly middle-class audience. However, recent scholarship has generally served to shore up this picture, and to bestow evidential rigour on what were once vague assumptions. Historians of the middle class have found that this group did indeed generate and follow a distinct structure of values, and that these values broadly correlate with the tendencies identified by theatre scholars in later Stuart and early Hanoverian drama.14 Various reasons have been advanced to explain this middle-class attitude. Hunt suggests that there was a ‘middling urge to understand and better control the social world in which commerce was conducted’,15 and that ideals of morality, virtue, sociability and sympathy were manifestations of this ‘urge’; they would bring stability and trust to a commercial world that had a short supply of both. Similarly, Brewer observed that the middle class faced problems of economic volatility and debt, and sought to deal with them by placing a premium on certain relevant personal qualities. It was important to show reliability, candour, affability, generosity, politeness and civility, and to encourage these qualities in others.16 Middle-class persons thus had material reasons to care about other middle-class persons and to show sympathy towards them, as well as to demonstrate their own feelings, but within careful constraints of morality and politeness.

Jonathan Barry, meanwhile, pointed out that the middle-class life cycle was more variable than that of the higher and lower social groups, in terms of both the changes that would occur over an individual life span and the differences between individual middle-class persons’ experiences. This, he argued, gave the middle class a strong sense of the importance of personal qualities, which would be crucial in determining each person’s fortunes. Success or failure was dependent on ‘the classic virtues’. ‘These moral evaluations thus came to play a major part in the self-classification of the middling sort,’ being used both to distinguish this group from those above and below it, and to distinguish individuals within the group.17 It might also be argued (although Barry did not extend his observation this far) that this concern with stereotypically middle-class qualities, and with their importance in determining an individual’s fortunes, would have fuelled a middle-class interest in drama based on domestic, relatable, middle-class family stories. Whether or not these reasons are found convincing, the important point here is that the middle class were indeed committed to values of politeness, sociability, virtue, morality, domesticity and sentiment. It seems fair, then, that theatre scholars have linked the changes they see in drama of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with the increasingly middle-class character of audiences.18

The wider literary scene was changing, too. Because of the expansion of a literate, middle-class reading public, who were confident enough to want to have their voice heard and had sufficient leisure time to read imaginative writing, literature was no longer produced by the economic and ideological impetus of a patronizing court and aristocracy, but by that of this new readership. It was therefore produced and consumed in a literary marketplace.19 Again, this had far-reaching ramifications for the kind of literature that was produced. When literature had been produced for (and to some extent by) a court-based coterie, dramatic forms had been the most highly valued. Of the non-dramatic forms, the most heavily practised and valued had been harsh satire and fulsome panegyric.20 Now, both forms were subject to a growing number of objections: the panegyric was sometimes considered too obsequious, the satire too rude.21 The preferred writing was softer, politer and more accessible; it was based on contemporary life. Humble prose also became more commercially viable and (in some instances, especially as the early eighteenth century wore on) more respectable: for example, The Spectator and Samuel Richardson’s novels.22 Drama did not suffer much in absolute terms; even the two most high-profile writers of the eighteenth century, Pope and Johnson, harboured ambitions of being a playwright at certain points in their careers.23 But literary ambition was no longer as heavily concentrated upon the stage as it had been during the Restoration period, and the careers of Pope and Johnson flag up the point that a lessening proportion of high-profile writers wrote primarily for the stage.24

For all the sentiment, mildness and politeness of this period, however, these were also the years of ‘Rage of Party’. Undoubtedly, this ‘Rage’ was a more restrained affair than had been the Exclusion Crisis and Tory Reaction. Under Charles II, those who had lost the political game had sometimes paid with their lives. By the time of Anne’s reign, this was no longer the case. Nevertheless, the political nation was split into two partisan camps.25 Party needs and party principles fuelled the production and consumption of literature. Parties also served to heighten, but to some extent fragment, the value accorded to literary works. It was widely recognized by contemporaries that any work that came evidently from one side would be hyperbolically lauded by its sympathizers and hyperbolically damned by its opponents. Yet a work that could bridge the gap between the parties, like Addison’s Cato, was all the more valued as a result.26

The final salient point to make about early eighteenth-century society is that it saw a slowly increasing interest in the works of the British past. The middle-class public was patriotic, and was interested in an incipient national canon. Milton came of age with Addison’s Spectator essays; Spenser enjoyed a minor boost in popularity, foreshadowing his later triumphs; and Shakespeare’s reputation was, for the first time, elevated beyond that of any other modern writer. Pope wrote imitations of Waller, Cowley, Spenser and even Chaucer; Prior had great success with a poem in Spenserian stanzas (1706). The first two decades of the eighteenth century were still very different to the 1760s and 1770s in terms of appreciation of the nation’s literary heritage, but it was nonetheless the case that a firm notion of that heritage was being formed, and that it was much to a contemporary writer’s advantage to craft some sort of personal relationship with it.27

This was the literary landscape of the early eighteenth century as it generally appears in the relevant scholarship. The town and public had superseded the court. Those persons who constituted the town and public wanted literature in keeping with their own values. The activities through which they produced and consumed literature formed a new commercial system, replacing the old courtly-patronage system. Writers, readers and theatregoers, in conceptualizing the town as the forum for cultural products and the public as the consumers of those products, created and judged literary works by reference to these values. And this was the context in which Rowe and Cibber, arguably the two most successful and genre-defining playwrights of the early eighteenth century, were working. They understood the forum, audience and values that were dominant, they positioned their work adroitly and their writings chimed well with the values in question. Thus they enjoyed critical and popular success.

Meanwhile, the court is generally assumed to have been insignificant.28 It is held that, at the Hanoverian succession, the newly triumphant Whigs gave the laureateship to Rowe as a reward for his commercial success and party-political service, bypassing a king who, after all, did not even understand English. But the laurel (in this interpretation) was not very material to Rowe’s standing at the time or to later scholarly assessments of him. It was a small additional emolument for an inveterate place-seeker. The works that he produced in fulfilment of its function – the biannual panegyrical odes – were ignored by contemporaries because they were anachronistic; they were not characteristic of or valued by his age in the way that his plays (and his Shakespeare edition) were.29

As mentioned in the Introduction, however, there is a body of scholarship that strikes a different note. Historians such as Hannah Smith and literary scholars such as Dustin Griffin have sought not to overturn the novel, commercial and public characterization of the early eighteenth century, but rather to show both the persistence and adaptability of traditional practices, and to reintegrate the court. This chapter will do likewise. It will do so by analysing how Rowe, and then Eusden and Cibber, positioned their work, and what values their work embodied and appealed to for success. This analysis will show that the three men did indeed write commercially, position their work within the town and before the public, and seek to succeed by the values relevant to this positioning. At the same time, though, they were solicitous to place their work in the court, for the attention and patronage of royal, aristocratic and other courtly figures. More significantly still, they sometimes envisaged their courtly and non-courtly audiences as overlapping, and sometimes as symbiotic, but rarely as rivals. By appealing to the court, they hoped to appeal to the town and public; by appealing to the town and public, they hoped to appeal to the court. Again, the town’s situation as ‘the court end of London’ becomes relevant; again, the public’s centring on a London world comprising both court and town becomes clear.

Rowe’s plays as commercial

Rowe’s plays (which are all tragedies, except for the never-revived Biter) are justly understood as being ‘sentimental’, ‘domestic’, ‘moralizing’ and ‘she-tragedies’. They were produced specifically for consumption by the new kinds of audience delineated above, whose principles and practices of consumption they ably serviced. This is best seen in Rowe’s first play, The Ambitious Step-Mother (1701). In its dedication, Rowe explained his theory of tragedy. Noting that ‘Terror and Pity are laid down for the Ends of Tragedy’ by Aristotle, Rowe pronounced his inclination towards the latter. The audience ‘should … always Conclude and go away with Pity, a sort of regret proceeding from good nature, which, tho an uneasiness, is not always disagreeable, to the person who feels it. It was this passion that the famous Mr Otway succeeded so well in touching, and must and will at all times affect people, who have any tenderness or humanity.’30 Thus he recast Aristotelian tragedy in a mould that was determined by, on the one hand, an audience of ‘tenderness’ and ‘humanity’, and, on the other, by recent English practice, exemplified by Thomas Otway. Pity stemmed from, and satisfyingly reminded viewers of, their ‘good nature’; it was even a sort of pleasure, being ‘not always disagreeable’.

The prologue (which followed in the printed work, but of course would have initiated the performative experience) gave such ideas in a more artful, less theoretical form.31 It began:

If Dying Lovers yet deserve a Tear,
If a sad story of a Maids despair,
Yet move Compassion in the pitying fair,
This day the Poet does his Art employ,
The soft accesses of your Souls to try.32

In these opening lines – the consonants of which imparted a soft, delicate air – the play was configured around tears, sadness, compassion and pity. The female element was heavily emphasized: Rowe appealed to the ‘pitying fair’ in the audience, and emphasized ‘a Maids despair’. The titular subject of the play – The Ambitious Step-Mother – became immediately sidelined. She could not function as an object of pity or female identification, and therefore had to give way to ‘Dying Lovers’ and despairing maids.

The relationship between playwright and audience was set out as an emotive, intimate one. The ‘Art’ of the ‘Poet’ was ‘The soft accesses of your Souls to try’. Rowe thus envisioned the playwright’s task as touching his audience’s sensibilities. In so doing, he would ‘try’ – and potentially confirm – both his and their capacities for passionate sensitivity. Tragedy was thus a profoundly moving and open experience, in which both playwright and audience bared their souls to each other, and, ideally, came away confirmed in their humanity. The prologue continued in the same vein, referencing Otway and ‘humane nature’ again, and equating ‘Grief’, particularly that of ‘the weeping fair’, with ‘niceness of Taste’ and ‘the Tragick Muse’. Finally, Rowe made a rousing demand: ‘Assert, ye fair ones, who in Judgment sit,/Your Ancient Empire over Love and Wit;/Reform our Sense, and teach the men t’Obey.’33 Even allowing for the tongue-in-cheek tendencies of eighteenth-century prologues, it is clear that Rowe here presented a theory of tragedy that emphasized the humane, the sentimental and the feminine.

While Step-Mother concerned high politics in an eastern kingdom, Rowe’s later plays evinced a desire to bring the action ever closer to contemporary life. The cardinal quotations here are from The Fair Penitent (1703), in the prologue to which Rowe promised that he would not give the audience a tale of kings and queens, because such tales took place in ‘a higher Sphere./We ne’er can pity what we ne’er can share.’ Therefore, ‘an humbler Theme our Author chose,/A melancholy Tale of private Woes’. Here, ‘you shall meet with Sorrows like your own’.34 The play itself was an adaptation of Philip Massinger’s The Fatal Dowry (published 1632), but with Massinger’s emphasis on the bridegroom transferred to the eponymous ‘penitent’ bride. Eighteenth-century audiences viewed her as a realistic, relatable female character, whose story aroused both pity (in her favour) and moral considerations (at her expense).35

After The Fair Penitent, Rowe actually strayed back towards ‘higher Sphere[s]’; but he always tried to make his characters relatable, domestic and relevant to modern concerns. For example, Ulysses (1706) began with a jaunty prologue in the ‘mock-epic’ style that Brean Hammond has identified as being characteristic of this period. According to Hammond, writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, having been brought up on the classics and desirous of writing epics, found themselves pulled towards contemporary, realistic and middle-class life by their audiences. Thus a ‘credibility gap’ opened up between the classical and the contemporary urges. Writers found that the only way to bridge this gap (and, at the same time, a brilliant way of achieving comic effect) was by developing a ‘mock-epic’ style in which modern life and classical literature were ironically, jarringly melded.36 Rowe’s Ulysses prologue was a manifestation of this phenomenon. It began, ‘A Lady, who, for Twenty Years, withstood/The Pressing Instances of Flesh and Blood’ was ‘Left at ripe Eighteen’ by her husband, Ulysses, who had gone to ‘Battel for a Harlot at Troy Town’. Penelope (the ‘Lady’) was inundated with ‘fresh Lovers … Much such as now a-days are Cupid’s Tools,/Some Men of Wit, but the most part were Fools./They sent her Billets doux, and Presents many,/Of ancient Tea and Thericlean China.’ Happily, though, Penelope was ‘Coxcomb Proof’.37 Then, Rowe abruptly abandoned this tongue-in-cheek jauntiness so typical of contemporary prologues, and stated, in all seriousness, that ‘Our English Wives shall prove this Story true’, by remaining chaste while their husbands fought and died abroad.38 Rowe ended with a celebration of British heroism, on show at that time in the War of the Spanish Succession, and exhorted ‘Ye beauteous Nymphs’: ‘with open Arms prepare/To meet the Warriors, and reward their Care’.39

The play itself confirmed this switch to seriousness. Ulysses was modern in both a realistic and an exemplary sense. He became agitated at the thought that Penelope might be cheating on him, and at one point even cursed her infidelity, before being reproved by his friends for his overreaction.40 But he was also chaste, pious and virtuous; it was these qualities, rather than his classically heroic prowess, that most distinguished him from the villainous suitors, and that guaranteed his eventual success. Whereas the suitors were constantly ‘Immerst in Riot, and defying/The Gods as Fables’,41 Ulysses was restrained and good, and made repeated appeals to the gods.42 Eventually, he was reunited with Penelope. Having warmed up his audience with a typically mock-heroic prologue, Rowe therefore revealed his prevailing inclinations even before that prologue was finished, and carried them sombrely through the rest of the play. Distant and classical subjects could indeed be made incongruous by comparing them to modern life; but that incongruity was neither necessary nor urgent. For Rowe, the Ulysses story was affective, moral and relevant. Ulysses and Penelope could easily function as a realistic couple, sharing the concerns and experiences of their audience, and giving an ideal for modern domesticity.

Indeed, although Rowe’s subsequent plays all concerned royal subjects, his emphases remained domestic, sentimental and modern. The plays were uniformly geared towards questions of love and lust. Questions of state and narratives of heroism were present, but marginal. However much the plays initially seemed to be about politics and principles, they always turned out to be convoluted love affairs. The various romantic and sexual desires of each character were (almost always) the sole agents and motivators of the plot and (almost) the sole concern of the dialogue. The Royal Convert (1708) was on one level an allegory in favour of Protestantism and the 1707 Union between England and Scotland; yet the play was mostly concerned with the various personal loves and lusts of each character. As the despairing Seofrid put it: ‘What is the boasted Majesty of Kings,/Their Godlike Greatness, if their Fate depends/Upon that meanest of their Passions, Love?’43

In many respects, Rowe was following the model made definitive by Pierre Corneille: a plot confined by the three dramatic unities; each character ‘loving’ and/or ‘loved by’ another character; some presiding issue of politics and/or government; that presiding issue brought into tension with, or subjected to the test of, or riven by the demands of, amour.44 In The Royal Convert, the (female) character Rodogune even started shrieking about her ‘injur’d Glory’,45 calling to mind the ‘gloire’ tediously insisted upon by the characters in such Corneille plays as Le Cid. But whereas Corneille always at least intended love to be a subordinate issue, and imagined himself to be exploring questions of state, Rowe’s plays were unashamed in placing love at the forefront. Rowe’s female characters were also stronger, and far more vocal about female oppression, than Corneille’s. The injuredly glorious Rodogune, for example, ranted at some length about the sufferings of women and the unfairness of male dominance.46 She hoped one day for women to be in charge, and to subdue and oppress men; but she herself actually spent most of the play controlling and oppressing two of the other characters, Aribert (a man) and Ethelinda (a woman). In Jane Shore, the titular character herself (who, unlike Rodogune, was an object of sympathy) made a similar complaint, although without Rodogune’s hopes of revenge.47 Neither complaint was refuted by any of the other characters. Indeed, Shore’s complaint was given the extra impact of being allowed to close out the play’s first act. In Rowe’s hands, then, the neoclassical model of tragedy was adapted to become modern and affective. Whereas Corneille was concerned with creating poetic masterpieces, and wrote in a theatrical context dominated more overtly by the court, Rowe was giving his middle-class, paying audiences a spectacle of relevance and sentiment.

Party-political matters loom larger in Rowean scholarship than do elaborations of his middle-class sentimentality, but the latter actuates the plays far more than does the former.48 As a corrective against this tendency, only a brief analysis of partisan politics will be given here; a more searching interrogation of the nature of political parties will be given in Chapter Three. For the most part, Rowe’s plays did not contain political messages and references, and their overall designs were not determined by political intentions. However, Rowe may have hoped that their sentimentality, politeness and conscious modernity, and the fact that they were written by a known Whig, would in some way have advanced the party cause.49 Several of his plays, meanwhile, did carry scattered political references. Jane Shore seemingly contained some overtly partisan lines, although these, and the overall design of the play itself, have been debated.50 The Royal Convert contained an overt celebration of the 1707 Act of Union and, in its narrative, offered a more extended endorsement of that Act, showing Saxons and Britons joining together.51 Jane Gray was an explicit and thoroughgoing attack on Jacobites and popery.52 Rowe’s second play, Tamerlane, was a celebration of William III, mainly depicting him in conflict with Louis XIV, but also casting attendant invective on William’s domestic malcontents, and making William the mouthpiece of Whiggish religious doctrine. The dedication, prologue and epilogue of Tamerlane set out these applications, but were hardly necessary to reveal so blatant a parallel.53 It seems, then, to have been Rowe’s general practice to make his political references unmissable. He was not subtle in either Tamerlane, The Royal Convert or Jane Gray. This fact renders unlikely the more speculative assertions of scholars on his other plays. If Rowe had wished to make them politically relevant, the evidence would probably not be hard to find.54

In fact, when Rowe addressed the issues of parties directly, he evinced a commonplace strain of distaste for them.55 In the dedication to his 1714 Tragedies, Rowe complained that parties were selfish, factional groups, pursuing their own interests at the expense of the nation’s. Parties worked for the ‘Subversion of the established Government’, and were ‘Enemies’ of George I, Protestantism and ‘our Libertys’. Against this, Rowe contrasted the ‘honest Man, and … good Subject’, who would write and act ‘in Defence of the Legal Constitution’.56 On a related note, Rowe claimed that his own plays furthered the cause of virtue and morality, which was linked to the cause of Protestantism, Hanoverianism and liberty. This was most evident in Jane Gray, where Jane was idealized as a character (pious, virtuous, meek, self-sacrificing) to represent the purity and goodness of the cause she represented (the Protestant succession). By making his audience love and feel pity for Jane, Rowe believed that he was inculcating Whiggish principles in the nation, and thus assisting the patriotic causes of George I, Protestantism and liberty. Thus in his final play, the sentimental side of Rowe’s practice became synonymous with the partisan side. But again, Rowe did not see himself as making a ‘party’ argument. In fact, by using Lady Jane Grey, he was emphasizing the supposedly patriotic and non-partisan nature of his principles. Jane was a historical figure who had lived long before Whiggism and Toryism; a spotless and celebrated Protestant heroine; a founding figure in Anglican mythology; an innocent young girl, rather than an intellectual or controversialist; she was also wedded to an Englishman, unlike her successor, whose marriage left England at Spain’s mercy. Rowe was thus making Whiggism synonymous with national identity.

Of course, Rowe’s anti-party analysis would have been recognized by contemporaries as Whiggish.57 Although his distaste for parties was undoubtedly genuine, it was this genuine distaste that gave his argument force. He was claiming that Whiggism was synonymous with the national interest, and so could not be considered partisan, whereas Jacobites (and indeed all Tories, insofar as they could be tarred with the same brush) represented a partial, partisan and unpatriotic interest. At the same time, this partisan/anti-partisan attitude is characteristic of a culture that was actuated by both commercial and party-political values. Rowe was a Whig, for whom there was cultural authority in the party cause; the furtherance of that cause was thus a factor that made a literary work valuable. But politics was only one consideration, and only one source of value. For Rowe, it was not to override such values as sentimentality, sociability, politeness, humaneness and contemporaneity, which values were appropriate for a commercial, middle-class culture. Rowe’s plays might therefore have been designed and celebrated on account of their partisan worth, but only occasionally and secondarily. Party concerns were sometimes mixed with sentimental, moralizing and contemporary concerns, but were usually excluded by them. Indeed, it seems likely that Rowe and his audiences shared a conviction that had his plays been too party-motivated, their value would have been fatally compromised. Rowe’s ideal was expressed towards the end of his 1714 dedication. ‘I could not but congratulate the Publick, upon seeing Men of all sides agree so unanimously as they did upon … the Applause of Mr. Addison’s Cato, and the Encouragement given to Mr. Pope’s Translation of Homer … I hope it is an Omen of their Unanimity in other Matters.’58 For Rowe, the greatest value was in uniting ‘the Publick’.

Rowe himself was familiar with uniting ‘the Publick’ in ‘Applause’, because his own plays were huge and enduring successes. He appears to have made an impact with his debut, Ambitious Step-Mother;59 Tamerlane and The Fair Penitent, although destined to become repertory staples, initially had moderate but not extraordinary success;60 his comedy, The Biter, had a decent, six-night first run;61 Ulysses appeared ten times in its first season, and The Royal Convert had a five-night run followed quickly by two further performances;62 Jane Shore proved Rowe’s greatest immediate success, being staged eighteen times in its first month and a half;63 and Jane Gray enjoyed decent popularity, but not as much as Shore.64 When Jacob Tonson published Rowe’s Shakespear, he made sure that the advertisements and title page featured Rowe’s name prominently, hoping to create interest in the work by playing on Rowe’s reputation. Tonson was also creating a link between two great playwrights, past and present, which, due to the incipient energies of patriotic canon formation, boosted Rowe’s reputation further. The popularity of Rowe’s Shakespear duly fed into the feverish popularity of Rowe’s next play, The Tragedy of Jane Shore. Written in Imitation of Shakespear’s Style, which, in turn, fed back into the popularity of Rowe’s Shakespear (with Tonson capitalizing on Jane Shore by expanding Shakespear to include Shakespeare’s non-dramatic verse).65 The production of Jane Gray was accompanied by a storm of opportunistic publications, with publishers rushing out fictional and non-fictional works on Jane Grey to take advantage of Rowe’s appeal.66 Nor did that appeal diminish quickly. Tamerlane and Jane Gray remained repertory staples until almost the end of the century, and The Fair Penitent and Jane Shore well into the nineteenth. Excluding Shakespeare, The Fair Penitent was the sixth most frequently performed tragedy of the 1700s.67 In terms of publication, these four plays were to be printed some 140 separate times between them, prior to modern editions. Rowe was widely esteemed as one of the great literary figures of his time. Over fifty years later, Johnson admitted to him having many great qualities, especially admired his command of blank verse and was able to quote sections of his plays from memory.68

It seems just, therefore, to view Rowe as a characteristic figure of his age: someone whose work held a particular appeal for contemporary consumers of literature. It is likewise natural that, looking at the content of his work, and looking at the conditions of the time, a correlation has been drawn between sentimental, middle-class, patriotic plays and sentimental, middle-class, patriotic audiences. Equally, Rowe was the perfect playwright for a time of party rage, being able to both stoke that rage and calm it. Thus a play like The Fair Penitent could appeal to spectators’ sense of humaneness and sympathy, while Tamerlane could be celebrated by Whigs as a partisan piece. Indeed, Tamerlane was played throughout the eighteenth century on 4 and/or 5 November, serving as a Whiggish commemoration of William’s arrival. Rowe’s work was esteemed highly in the early eighteenth century, and this esteem was at least partly due to its ability to meet the demands of a commercial and party-political culture. Critical pamphlets on Jane Shore and Jane Gray both described the plays in question as having received ‘the Applause of the Town’.69 This ‘Town’ was where Rowe, theatregoers and readers alike conceptualized the plays and themselves as being situated. It was Klein’s town, a rival to the court, superseding it as the prime forum of cultural production and consumption. Likewise, it was the middle-class public, neither located nor interested in the court, that funded, enjoyed and celebrated Rowe’s plays.

Rowe’s plays as courtly

Up to this point, the discussion has been intentionally confined to the two standard interpretations of Rowe’s work. It has demonstrated the nature of Rowe’s appeal to a middle-class paying public based primarily in a non-court town, and shown how his works were celebrated according to the standards of just such an audience. It has also shown how Rowe’s works derived value from the party-political situation, by giving political comment, advancing a party cause, and yet encouraging an end to party strife; but it has argued that this party element was not as important to Rowe’s work as recent scholarship has claimed. Taken together, these two interpretations would suggest that Rowe was characteristic of an age of post-courtly culture, and that Rowe’s success resulted from his ability to meet the standards created by a new system of cultural production and consumption, based physically and conceptually outside of court. But it is now time to change this picture. It is time to consider, once again, how contemporaries conceived of the court’s involvement in culture. This chapter will not examine the practicalities of such an involvement, which are investigated elsewhere in the monograph. Instead, emphasis will fall on what literary works themselves can tell us about the role the court was conceived to have in literary production, and about how fair it is to characterize early eighteenth-century culture as ‘commercial’ and ‘post-courtly’.

The starting point is Rowe’s first play, Ambitious Step-Mother. The dedication to this play was quoted above as an illustration of how Rowe’s tragedic theory centred on pity. But Rowe’s dedication was not just a manifesto; it was also, of course, a dedication. The dedicatee was the earl of Jersey, who was specified as being ‘Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty’s Houshold, &c’.70 Rowe had many, conventional praises to offer to Jersey, and explicitly solicited his patronage. Particularly telling is the passage in which he praised Jersey’s ‘Taste and Judgement’, and said that ‘all men that I have heard speak of your Lordship’ had encouraged him to ‘hope every thing from your Goodness. This is that I must sincerely own, which made me extremely Ambitious of your Lordship’s Patronage for this Piece.’ He then admitted that his play had faults; but, ‘since the good nature of the Town has cover’d, or not taken notice of ’em’, he would not worry about them too far himself.71 Thus Rowe begged a traditional patron–client relationship of Jersey, hoping for financial and other less tangible forms of beneficence. And for all that he acknowledged the authority of the town – an authority that had even encouraged him to think his play better than it was – that authority was secondary to the ‘Taste and Judgement’ of Jersey. Indeed, the ‘good nature’ of the town, which was elsewhere portrayed as an authoritative humaneness, here became a benign failing: a cheery disregard for the exact standards of true judgement. In this dedication, then, Rowe recognized a predominantly patronage-based system of literary production and consumption. The fact that he had chosen the ‘Lord Chamberlain of his Majesty’s Houshold’ implied the same notion revealed so often in Restoration dedications: that the patronage system was centred on the court, and reached its apex in the king.

The play itself, although rife with love and sentiment, was a heroic tragedy, and would not have been too out of place in the 1660s or 1670s. Likewise Tamerlane, which, although generally studied for its relation to political parties, was, most immediately, a panegyric to the king. Tamerlane’s dedication, to the marquis of Hartington, was an explicit example of the idea that the playwright should appeal to a noble patron who was himself a direct servant of and link to the king. Although Hartington was highly praised for his own sake, his ‘crowning good quality’ was deemed to be ‘your Lordship’s continual adherence and unshaken Loyalty to His present Majesty’. Rowe ‘cannot help distinguishing this last instance very particularly’.72 Rowe then springboarded from Hartington into a ‘Panegyrick’ on William.73 After panegyrizing at some length, he said, ‘If your Lordship can find any thing in this Poem like [William] … I persuade my self it will prevail with you to forgive every thing else that you find amiss.’74 Of course, this was typical panegyric rhetoric, and should not be read in too wide-eyed a fashion; but it was nonetheless significant that Rowe claimed the entirety of his play’s value to rest in its ability to represent the monarch (and, by extension, the monarch’s qualities and glory). Rowe finished by noting that his dedication to Hartington had given him ‘the pleasure of expressing those Just and Dutiful Sentiments I have for his majesty, and that strong Inclination which I have always had to be thought … Your Lordships most Obedient, Humble Servant’.75 Once again, Rowe cast the playwright as servant to the noble courtier, and expressed the idea that through that patronal relationship, the playwright could satisfy the more abstract patronage he received from the king by offering him praise.

The dedication was always the first thing to appear in a printed work, and would therefore have framed and conditioned the work itself. On stage, the prologue came first; and, in Tamerlane’s prologue, Rowe delivered a similar message to that which he gave Hartington, but in a form appropriate for the setting. He told his crowd that

Of all the Muses various Labours, none
Have lasted longer, or have higher flown,
Than those that tell the Fame by ancient heroes won …
Like [Virgil to Augustus] (tho’ much unequal to his Flame)
Our Author [Rowe] makes a pious Prince his Theme.76

Again, it was asserted that the highest form of poetic value came from representing a glorious monarch. This assertion was supported not by some reference to Otway making English audiences cry, but by one made to the classical, timeless image of Virgil and Augustus. This was in keeping with a courtly-patronal mode of literary production: a prince eternally re-enacting the ideal of Augustus, held in a relationship of reciprocal glory with a poet who re-enacted the role of Virgil; the poet entirely dependent on the prince; the prince dependent on the poet for the transmission of their reputation to posterity. Rowe then gave a panegyric on William in artful rhyming couplets.77 The play that followed was a panegyric in the form of a heroic tragedy, although, like all of Rowe’s plays, its generic model was primarily Cornelian and its spirit was primarily sentimental. This mixing of forms and values – the courtly and heroic with the sentimental and middle-class – was significant, as will be demonstrated below.

All of Rowe’s plays had dedications, and they all fitted the values associated with the court-centred patronage system. The Fair Penitent, though famous for offering the middle-class audience ‘Sorrows like your own’, was dedicated to the duchess of Ormond, who, like Hartington, was used as a springboard to her monarch (Anne). Indeed, the duchess was ‘the Noblest and Best Pattern’ of Anne’s ‘own Royal Goodness, and Personal Virtues’.78 The prologue itself, which began by disavowing ‘the Fate of Kings and Empires’, nonetheless ended with a brief encomium to the queen. Rowe was attempting to ‘shew [the audience] Men and Women as they are’; and, ‘With Deference to the Fair’, he had to admit that ‘Few to Perfection ever found the Way’. But ‘This Age, ’tis true, has one great Instance seen,/And Heav’n in Justice made that One a Queen.’79 He asserted the contemporary realism of his play; he gave a smile to ‘the Fair’; then he bowed his tragedy onto the stage with a tribute to Anne. Although she was far distant from the world of the play, she stood over it as a positive ideal of womanliness, in contrast to the shortcomings of the titular penitent. The modest tale of everyday passions was placed under the presiding spirit of a perfect queen and set before the appreciative eyes of a courtly authority. Rowe hoped that ‘the Misfortunes and Distress of the Play … may be not altogether unworthy of [the duchess]’s Pity. This is one of the main Designs of Tragedy, and to excite this generous Pity in the greatest Minds, may pass for some kind of Success in this way of Writing.’ The duchess’s praise would have meant ‘much more to me than the general applause of the Theatre’.80 For Rowe, drama was best appreciated by the great, courtly figures, whatever principles it was composed upon. Courtly figures were not distinct from the theatregoing audience, but crowned it, and represented its qualities and ideals in their highest forms. Anne was the perfect woman and patroness. The duchess of Ormond, who was a link to and stand-in for Anne, was the perfect sentimental theatregoer.

As mentioned above, Rowe’s subsequent plays returned to the world of courts and princes. He may have treated his subjects in a way that appealed to a middle-class, paying audience, but they were princes and courtiers all the same. And although (as mentioned above) The Royal Convert included a pro-Union message, the explicit articulation of that message only came as a subsidiary part of a long closing panegyric to Anne. Ethelinda ended the play with a recitation of a prophecy, beginning, ‘Of Royal Race a British Queen shall rise,/Great, Gracious, Pious, Fortunate and Wise.’ This went on for a total of twenty-one lines, explaining that ‘this happy Land her Care shall prove,/And find from her a more than Mother’s Love … most in peaceful Arts she shall delight,/And her chief Glory shall be to Unite.’81 The Union thus appeared as but an aspect of Anne’s own ‘Glory’, and an emblem of the greatness of her reign.

None of this is to say that Rowe was writing the sort of material that was written under Charles I or Charles II, or that the conditions of cultural production and consumption had not changed since the mid seventeenth century. The situation had certainly changed since then; but the conceptual role of the court, and the practical agency of a patronage system centred on the court, had not lapsed. Instead, Rowe’s work shows that the court was conceived as being intimate with, and important to, middle-class theatregoers and readers. He was positioning his plays not simply within the town, or on a stall for a paying public, but also in the court. The traditions, themes and values characteristic of the courtly production and consumption of culture were mixed with those characteristic of audiences and activities situated outside the walls of the court.

For example, Rowe’s dedications were ostensibly private epistles to individual patrons. Yet they were invariably printed at the beginning of each of his publications (as was conventional). Every single reader who bought one of Rowe’s publications would not only have been confronted with, but also to some extent had their reading of the play conditioned by, a dedicatory epistle that was not actually addressed to them personally. Therefore, the dedication was functioning as an essential aspect of commercial publication. Rowe was broadcasting his position within a court-based patronage system so as to increase his profitability. The fact that he came under the patronage of some great, courtly nobleman served as a recommendation to middle-class, paying consumers, who were thus encouraged to buy his wares and finance his writing. The particular use that Rowe made of his dedications conferred a further profitability to his product. By the artistry of his praise, he was showing off both his literary ability and the strength of his relation to his patron; by extending that praise to the reigning monarch, he suggested a patronal relationship with the crown itself, and emphasized his loyal monarchist sentiments; and by the values he exhibited in the dedication – for example, a polite distaste for partisan rage, or a tragedic theory centring on pity – he turned a private dedicatory epistle into an advertisement for his readers. In all these ways, then, courtly patronage was marketable. On opening the publication, buyers would have seen that Rowe was validated by the patronage system, and, in reading through the dedication, they would have assessed the strength of his position within that system, and found his credentials glowingly contextualized within a semi-mythical private dialogue between him and his patron. Thus Rowe’s commercial and critical success with paying customers was built upon the idea that his play had a position at court, as well as in the town playhouses.

At the same time, court and patron benefitted too, and Rowe’s own position within the patronage system was strengthened by his success with paying customers. In his dedications, patron and court had an idealized picture of themselves promulgated to all of Rowe’s readers. Their putative good qualities were trumpeted through the marketing of mass-produced texts. In particular, they were shown to be great patrons, who had enabled Rowe to produce such great works of art. The individual patron, the court and the patronage system itself had created Rowe’s tragedies. Thus a literary work was produced through the ideological and financial agency of court-based and town-based audiences and the public working in conjunction: indeed, working through each other. As a result, cultural value was understood in accordance with the ideals that pertained to each of these forums and audiences. To a lesser extent, political partisanship was involved as well. Rowe’s most direct discussion of party matters was usually found in his dedicatory epistles and in connection with the various royal figures in his plays. The Whig cause operated within and by means of the court, the town and the public.

This chapter has already demonstrated some of the manifestations of all this in Rowe’s work. One was the Step-Mother dedication to the lord chamberlain, in which Rowe justified his play to the dedicatee by reference to the judgement of ‘the Town’, while justifying it to his readers by reference to the patronage of a great courtly figure in possession of ‘Taste and Judgement’. Another was Tamerlane, where Rowe offered his audience a dramatized panegyric of William, complete with Whiggish proselytizing and sentimental subplots. The Fair Penitent provided the image of an idealized courtly patron and viewer, the duchess of Ormond, who both stood in for Queen Anne and exemplified the sentimental humaneness that Rowe sought from his paying audience. And Ulysses and The Royal Convert created an ideal of sentimental, contemporary, patriotic, middle-class monarchy, many decades before George III would famously embody the same. Indeed, the prophecy at the end of the latter presented Anne as the apotheosis of three separate strands of cultural value: courtly, party-political and paying public. She was a great classical prince, a forger of Whiggish Union and a loving mother to her nation. Each strand of her identity was dependent upon the others.

However, the best example came in Rowe’s final drama, Jane Gray. Performed and published just after the Hanoverian succession, Jane Gray was dedicated to Caroline, the new princess of Wales, and immediately identified her with England’s Protestant martyr-queen. ‘A Princess of the same Royal Blood to which you are so closely and happily ally’d, presumes to throw her self at the feet of Your Royal Highness for Protection,’ Rowe announced. He had drawn his Jane Grey in approximation to the actual historical figure, but had also somewhat ‘improv[ed]’ her, to make her worthier ‘of those Illustrious Hands to which I always intended to present her’.82 The identification was further strengthened when Rowe then celebrated Caroline’s own Protestantism and patriotism. She chose the British rather than the Imperial crown, because doing the latter would have required her to convert to Catholicism;83 and she had now become ‘the brightest Ornament’ and ‘the Patroness and Defender of our holy Faith’.84 But she was not just a religious paragon. She was ‘the Best Daughter to our KING, and Best Wife to our Prince’,85 a model of touching domesticity. Caroline thus appeared not just as Rowe’s patron, but as a great royal figure who had given the poet his subject and inspired him in his art, as Virgil was held to have done by representing Augustus as Aeneas. Moreover, she protected and exemplified the values of Rowe’s readership: love of Britain, devotion to Protestantism and domestic femininity. The last theme in Rowe’s dedication was the obligation that Britain owed to its new princess. Since the Hanoverians had saved Britain from popery, ‘every particular Person amongst us ought to contribute’ to ‘discharg[e] that Publick Obligation’.86 Jane Gray was Rowe’s own ‘Offering’.87 Again, though, the dedicatory epistle was not sent in private; it was published with every copy of the play. The reminder of ‘Publick Obligation’ therefore worked in two ways. On the one hand, it informed readers of how obliged they were to their magnificent new princess; on the other, it allowed them to buy into Rowe’s ‘discharging’ of ‘that Publick Obligation’. By purchasing and reading Jane Gray, they could give Rowe’s offering their endorsement, and thereby register their own loyal gratitude.

In the prologue, Jane Grey herself was focused upon. It was shown that she was both a great prince and a humble exemplar of sentimental values. She was ‘A Heroine, a martyr, and a Queen’; irrespective of Rowe’s ‘Art’, his choice of subject ‘shall something Great impart,/To warm the generous Soul, & touch the tender Heart’.88 She shone with royal resplendence, yet she had an affective relationship with her audience, based on a sympathetic humaneness. ‘To you, Fair Judges, we the Cause submit,’ Rowe continued. ‘If your soft Pity waits upon our Woe,’ then ‘the Muse’s Labour’ would have been successful.89 Rowe was again appealing to his favourite constituency: the female, deep-feeling audience. But in this instance the ‘Sorrows like your own’ were those of a queen. The relatable, sympathetic, sentimental heroine was Jane Grey. By activating his audience’s pity for her, Rowe created an affective bridge between the patriotic identity of Protestant Britain and the real-life character of Princess Caroline.

These themes were all emphasized throughout the play as a whole. For example, the legitimacy of Jane’s rule was explained to be based on the realm’s consent (including parliament’s approval), making Jane a symbol of the Hanoverian succession. Jane herself was depicted as patriotic, Protestant, self-sacrificing, meek and humane. At one stage, she spoke of the difficulty of being queen; she had only taken on the royal burden ‘To save this Land from Tyranny and Rome’.90 This was a reminder of both the Jacobite threat and the gratitude Britons owed to their new royal family. Just before Jane died, she prayed that Heaven would raise up a ‘Monarch of the Royal Blood,/Brave, Pious, Equitable, Wise, and Good’, and that this ‘Hero’ would save Britain from Rome, then leave behind a son who would ‘guard that Faith for which I die to-day’.91 With these words, Jane created a transcendental royal line, carried across dynasties, united by its virtues and its Protestantism, but also valid on the basis of ‘Royal Blood’. She emphasized that her own story – a sentimental she-tragedy – was synonymously a story of party struggle (against the Tories of Jacobite inclination) and of courtly greatness. The epilogue then gave a similar message to that found in the dedication, making the Caroline–Jane parallel clear for spectators. It emphasized that Caroline was ‘the Fairest of her Sex’, and that the audience owed her ‘Gratitude’.92 Rowe also warned against ‘vile Faction’, and said that ‘If you are taught to dread a Popish Reign,/Our Beauteous Patriot has not dy’d in vain.’93 Again, the various priorities appropriate to different conceptual spaces were here working in tandem. The relatable, sympathetic female character served as a celebration of Whiggism and of the court because she was a relatable, sympathetic female character. The Whig cause was revealed to animate both the sentimental, identifiable story and the court because it was the Whig cause. And the court presided over both the story and Whiggism because it was the court. The product itself – Jane Gray – was a work not of patronage, or of party, or of professionalism alone, but of all three coexisting in synonymity.

The work of Nicholas Rowe, then, presents a challenge to the conventional modern picture of eighteenth-century culture. It is not simply the case that culture was produced for the public, town, marketplace and/or political party. In fact, Rowe’s work suggests that the court was still a central concept in understandings of culture, and that those audiences and activities that were contained within that concept – royals, aristocrats, court officials, patronage – were still of vital importance to cultural production and consumption. The concepts of the town and the public, which denoted middle-class and non-courtly audiences, and commercial and party-political modes of production and consumption, did not supersede the court; they worked in conjunction with it. It is because Rowe’s work satisfied the attendant values so adeptly that he was so highly esteemed by contemporaries. He was commercially successful with both theatregoers and readers, critically lauded and valued both as a strident Whig and as someone whose work appealed across the party divide. Finally, he was made poet laureate by his Hanoverian king, in operation with the new parliamentary and ministerial Whig regime. His appointment was the supreme and appropriate honour for a man who succeeded according to a particular set of values, determined by a conceptual geography of culture in which the court coexisted with town and public. The laureateship was not an anachronism. In fact, it was highly characteristic of early eighteenth-century culture.

Eusden and Cibber

Upon Rowe’s death in 1718, he was replaced by Eusden, later to become notorious as a drunken clergyman, but then a Cambridge Fellow, young poet and member of the Addison–Steele nexus of writers.94 Eusden had just written a poem on the marriage of the duke of Newcastle. Newcastle was lord chamberlain, and a pugnacious one; later, as a leading figure in successive ministries, he gained a reputation for pettiness, defensiveness and jealousy over his prerogatives. It therefore seems highly likely that the 1718 appointment decision was his. When Eusden eventually died in a stupor of provincial booze, he was replaced by Cibber. Cibber was a famous playwright and actor, a firm Whig and one of the managers of Drury Lane theatre. He was a friend and associate of many of the leading governmental figures, including Walpole himself, and contemporaries sometimes or partially credited his appointment to this closeness.

In the work of Eusden and Cibber, a similar case to that of Rowe is revealed. It was commercial, courtly and (sometimes) party-orientated; it sought success with town and public, traditional forms of patronage and (sometimes) party advantage. The poem that apparently gained Eusden the laurel – A Poem on the Marriage of His Grace the Duke of Newcastle (1717) – is a good example. It was a panegyric and an epithalamium, praising Newcastle and his bride. Eusden aspired to ‘reach transcendent Worth with Praise’, and to depict ‘A British Pollio … More bright, than Pollio, whom a Virgil drew’.95 The poem was classical and courtly, invoking the timeless examples of Virgil and his patrons, and using them to praise Newcastle and to re-enact the Virgilian patronal model (Pollio being one of Virgil’s patrons). But it also included themes that were more specifically typical of early eighteenth-century poetry, and that were present across all kinds of poems that seem more directed to the public than to a patron. For example, Eusden represented Venus and Minerva having a civil, high-society sort of debate, in which Venus announced her concern for Britain’s welfare, and designated it ‘that blest Isle’ where ‘Triumphant Beauty reigns,/And willing Youth wears Love’s delightful Chains./Not ev’n Augustus dares to disobey,/His Carolina’s Looks confirm my Sway’.96 Thus the prince of Wales and his wife were held up as epitomes of the polite, loving spirit that apparently animated Britain; the monarchy was the crown of a sentiment that was here cast as patriotic. But Minerva insisted that she was more concerned for Britain: ‘My Pow’r shall Brunswick’s [i.e. George I’s] lawful Crown protect,/And still his Councils, and his Arms direct.’97 She then cited Newcastle as the greatest and most patriotic Briton, and boasted that he did not feel Venus’s powers. Venus retaliated by causing Newcastle to fall in love with Henrietta Godolphin and marry her. ‘Britannia’s Welfare is my great Design,’ she announced; by inducing Newcastle and Henrietta to marry, she had guaranteed Britain a ‘num’rous Line’ of patriotic progeny.98 There was also, at the start of the poem, a warning against ‘baneful Faction’, which ‘would its Pow’r advance/By Popish Chains, and Vandal Ignorance’.99 This was contrasted with the bright glories and patriotism of Newcastle.

The whole performance was delivered in typically refined couplets, and it sold so well that a second edition was published in the same year, before Eusden had even been made laureate.100 Thus Eusden enjoyed commercial success, struck a minor blow for his party and received the patronage of a great courtly figure, all of which factors contributed to his rise to the laureateship. Again, cultural production and consumption appear not simply as commercial, or party-political, or even courtly, but mixed. Paying readers liked Eusden’s courtliness; court-based figures presumably liked Eusden’s popular appeal and his ability to write competent, modern verse. Both sets of people also liked his party spirit, and the party faithful liked his courtly and popular appeal. By satisfying the needs and ideals of these different constituencies, Eusden’s poem was exemplary of the then prevailing conditions of cultural production.

As laureate, Eusden continued in this vein, writing panegyric poetry that was designed to appeal to the individual addressee, the court more generally, the paying public and (sometimes) the party of (governing) Whigs. It appealed to them not as separate constituencies, but by way of each other. The court as formulated in Eusden’s poetry was not distinct from the public; it stood at the head of it, epitomizing its values and concerns and leading it in taste. The Walpolean Whigs, meanwhile, were solidly identified with the court. In An Epistle to Walpole (1726), Eusden celebrated the addressee’s elevation to ‘the Most Noble Order of the Garter’,101 and felt no hesitation in offering his verse to him, confident that ‘On whom George smiles, a Walpole will not frown’.102 Walpole was deemed the ‘Delightful Wonder of each British Tongue’,103 and his chief quality was his ‘em-bosom’d Care’ for ‘Albion’.104

Cibber did not write much in the way of non-dramatic verse, but this did not mean that his appointment was incongruous. He was a hugely successful dramatist, some of whose plays were among the century’s most popular. Although he was most well known for his prose comedies, he wrote verse tragedies too, one of which, his adaptation of Richard III, remained a popular favourite well into the nineteenth century.105 Most of Cibber’s plays debuted around the same time as Rowe’s (from the late 1690s into the 1710s), and were in fact the comedic analogues to Rowe’s; they have often been seen as typifying the sentimental and middle-class inclinations of the time, just as Rowe’s did in tragedy.106 Like Rowe, Cibber was a Whig, and his plays sometimes delivered overt party messages.107 But, again like Rowe, Cibber’s work was also orientated towards a courtly audience and its attendant values. The best example of how these strands operated in conjunction is The Non-Juror (1718). This play was an adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe, given a heavily anti-Jacobite design. This anti-Jacobitism identified the play as Whiggish, but it also identified it as a paean to George I and the Hanoverian monarchy. Suitably enough, the play ended with the observation that ‘no Change of Government can give us a Blessing equal to our Liberty’, followed by the couplet, ‘Grant us but this and then of Course you’ll own,/To Guard that Freedom, GEORGE must fill the Throne.’108 It might be argued that Cibber’s praise of George I was not very meaningful in and of itself; it was simply a stock doctrine of Whiggism. But even if that argument has some merit, it actually highlights the point being made here. The court interest was not separate from the party interest, but was bound up with it; dictates of court and party coexisted, cooperated and maintained each other. The play was also an enormous commercial success, delighting audiences and being published in a fifth edition before the year was out.109 Cibber made an unprecedented sum of money from the copyright (£105), and was given a huge gift of £200 by the king, to whom the dedicatory epistle was addressed.110 Again, the persistence and nature of the court as a cultural forum is evident.

In the works of the three poet laureates of the early Hanoverian period, then, literary figures are revealed to have been working within a conceptual geography of culture in which court, town and public were each important and were interrelated. The question now is this: were the laureates anomalous? Was it because they were unique (in the respects demonstrated above) that they were appointed to the laureateship, and, as laureates, did they continue to behave in unique ways because they were encouraged to do so by their office? Is it wrong to draw wider conclusions from a study of them?

Testing the laureate paradigm against the wider literary scene suggests that, in fact, the laureates’ situation was far from abnormal. For example, the institutional court still practised direct financial patronage, and still conferred fixed employments, even upon non-laureate poets. George I gave an enormous patronal gift of £500 to Richard Steele for his Conscious Lovers, a popular, sentimental, moralizing, reforming comedy by a stalwart, vigorous Whig.111 For his services to the Walpolean Whigs, Edward Young was recommended by Walpole for a court pension, which he duly received.112 Queen Caroline’s patronage of Stephen Duck was famous among contemporaries. She granted him a series of courtly employments, ensured that his publications were financially successful by encouraging her acquaintances to subscribe to them, which would in turn have increased their popular sales appeal.113 Meanwhile, Richard Savage dubbed himself a ‘Volunteer Laureate’, and published an annual panegyric for Caroline.114 Not only did this secure him a pension from her, but it also gave him a marketable identity, and allowed him to publish a regular, royally authorized product each year.115

Indeed, on every occasion of note for the royal family – accessions, marriages, returns from abroad, recoveries from illness, births, deaths – the nation would be convulsed by poetical activity. Poets of every stripe and pedigree would compose something suitably panegyric, and publish it for retail: sometimes with a politically partisan bent, sometimes with a dedicatee (distinct from the subject or addressee of the poem itself), sometimes in an imagined dialogue with another poet.116 Oxford and Cambridge would commonly produce an entire volume of such poems on these occasions, written by current dons and undergraduates, in English, Latin, Greek and other languages (albeit not with retail in mind).117 Many of these poems were ‘odes’, either sharing the pseudo-Pindaric form of the laureate odes, or written in some other ‘ode’ form.118 The Prior poem mentioned priorly – his Spenserian ode – was in fact An Ode, humbly inscrib’d to the Queen.119 As late as 1789, the now-canonical poet William Cowper wrote a poem in response to George III’s recovery from illness, and had it presented to Princess Amelia, in the hope that it would be shown to the queen. He said of the poem that ‘though it be praise it is truth’, and ‘it seemed necessary that I, who am now a poet by profession, should not leave an event in which [George and Charlotte’s] happiness and that of the nation are so much concerned, uncelebrated’.120 It was specifically because he was a ‘poet by profession’ that he should give vent to his devotion to the king and queen, and should mark an occasion that was equally of royal and patriotic importance. Such poems were not the products of any one simple system of literary production and value; they were commercial, they were patronized, they were courtly, they were political, they were professional, they were nationally conscious. They understood poetic worth, and potential reward and advancement, as being conferred by a set of values that related to multiple sources, among which was the court.

The theatre, meanwhile, presents a similar picture. While it is certainly the case that it was not as closely associated with court-based personnel as in Charles II’s reign, the Hanoverian theatre nonetheless retained associations with the court that were both functionally and ideologically vital. For one thing, public theatre still operated under the system of royal patents. This situation became somewhat confused in the first few decades of the eighteenth century, when theatres began to operate under licences, temporary patents or under no official authorization at all; but the 1737 Licensing Act returned the system to something like its original purity, for the most part eliminating all but two patented companies.121 Moreover, as Smith and Harry William Pedicord have demonstrated, the relationship between the Hanoverian family and London theatres was not just regulatory and negative, but was active, patronal and mutually beneficent.122

The spaces in question

The last point that needs to be made concerns the terminology used by the three laureates in their assessments of the conceptual geography of culture. As set out in the Introduction, late seventeenth-century writers predominantly conceptualized the cultural landscape in terms of the town and the world, rather than the public; but this situation changed between 1700 and 1730, such that writers, although still making reference to the town and the world, were primarily concerned with the public, which bore a complex and variable relationship to the concepts of the town and the world. The triumph of the public as a concept in cultural production was part of a significant shift in the conceptual geography of culture, from the dominance of specific, physical locations to that of transcendent, metaphorical locations. This came about as a result of three factors: the increasing extent and importance of print culture; the expansion of London, in terms of its physical size, its dominance of print culture and its improved transport links to the rest of the country; and the increasing viability of non-dramatic forms of literature.

However, for many writers the older terms of the town and the world remained the preferred expressions until at least 1720, and, for perhaps most writers who had started their careers before Anne’s accession, until their deaths. Between 1696 and 1718, Cibber published some seventeen plays, most of them full length and most of them with dedicatory epistles. In these plays’ dedicatory epistles and other paratexts, Cibber consistently identified his main audience as ‘the Town’; and, in contrast to that strain of later Stuart rhetoric that had held theatregoers’ taste to be partial and degraded, portrayed himself as an autochthonous creature of the playhouse, servicing a theatregoing audience whose taste was the highest and purest imaginable, specifically because it operated within the playhouse. Meanwhile, he used the word ‘publick’ only rarely, only as an adjective, and only in reference to serious matters of national weal. Eventually, in 1719, he used the term ‘the Publick’ as an audience of cultural products, interchangeably with ‘the Town’. Thereafter, he published few further plays; but, when he did, his paratexts employed both terms.123

With Nicholas Rowe, the case was similar: throughout his career, he used the term ‘the Town’ rather than ‘the Publick’ to identify his main audience. When he used the word ‘publick’, it was as an adjective, referring to the ways in which his aristocratic dedicatees served the nation. There were only two uses of ‘the Publick’ as a noun in his paratexts. The first was in the Tamerlane dedication (1702), in which he explicitly contrasted Hartington’s and William’s work, ‘so necessary to the Publick’, with his own work, ‘the entertainment of leisure Hours only’.124 The second was towards the end of his life, in the dedication to the volume of his collected tragedies (1714). This was the usage quoted above: ‘I could not but congratulate the Publick, upon seeing Men on all sides agree so unanimously as they did’ in applauding Cato and Pope’s Homer translation. In both cases, therefore, writers who had begun their careers at the turn of the eighteenth century tentatively started using the word ‘the Publick’ in the 1710s. Yet Cibber’s usage of ‘the Publick’ came as part of a discussion in which he surveyed his career as a whole and explained that he would be ceasing to write plays from now on, while Rowe’s also came in relation to political partisanship and as part of a retrospective of his writing career. On the whole, ‘the Town’ remained the primary concept that they used to situate, and make sense of, their playwriting.

This is important, because the town was the specific physical location that was ‘the court end of London’. In social terms, it was defined by its aristocratic and gentry inhabitants, whereas the neighbouring city was defined more by middle-class elements: shopkeepers, artisans, aldermen, citizens.125 Both before and after the Hanoverian succession, it therefore remained standard for writers in general, and playwrights in particular, to conceptually position their work in the midst of the particular section of metropolitan society that congregated around, and passed in and out of, the walls of the court. This, ultimately, is why Rowe’s, Eusden’s and Cibber’s works looked both ways, to court and to public. Those works were being situated in a town that was not simply a precursor to the public, but constituted the interface of court and public. It was the hinterland of the former and the heartland of the latter.

Conclusion

When the Hanoverian royal family arrived, it was swiftly accepted into the arrangement elaborated above, and in turn made itself comfortable within it. The town needed a court and the court needed a town. Hence, just as various individuals acting for their own gain had brought about the formation of the laureateship and the formalization of the court’s cultural role in the later Stuart period, various individuals acting for their own gain effected something similar after 1714. Playwrights like Cibber and Rowe, successful purveyors of cultural products for the town in which they were based, immediately turned their attention to the new royal family and court establishment, welcomed its leading figures, and sought success with the town by celebrating the new regime. In turn, court and government officials placed the cultural authority of the new court upon the foundations of the old, one aspect of which was the appointment of Rowe as poet laureate. For the next two reigns, the court remained closely identified with London. Georges I and II did not leave London to visit other parts of Britain; Jacobitism (as seen in Fielding’s Tom Jones, and in the Oldmixon letter discussed in the next chapter) was a feature of places like the West Country, rather than of London. This physical reality underlay the conceptual geography by which cultural products were produced, consumed and given meaning. George III would glory in the name of Britain; George IV would visit Scotland; but the physical court of Georges I and II was physically nestled in London.