The Kit-Cat Club: Friends Who Imagined a Nation. Ophelia Field

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СКАЧАТЬ the book was only for the ‘most Judicious’ audience. Though the 500 subscribers were both Whig and Tory, and Dryden, with his Jacobite sympathies, gave the work several Tory dedications, the publication still had a distinctly Whiggish colouring; the author was grimly amused, for example, to find Tonson had made an illustration of the hero Aeneas bear a marked resemblance to King William.

      Subscription editions were a bargain way for the nobility to patronize writers: a hybrid solution at a time before the general public was literate and prosperous enough to act as the greatest patron of them all. By advertising their names as subscribers in the publications, aristocrats shifted from commissioning books towards being their celebrity promoters. This was Tonson's answer to issuing more specialist or scholarly works with high unit costs. In the case of Dryden's Virgil, besides the deluxe editions sent to the subscribers, Tonson also published a cheap edition, for the general public to buy from his shop. Dryden and Tonson's collaborations before the Kit-Cat's foundation had helped popularize classical translation in England, and Dryden and Congreve's translation of Juvenal and Persius in 1693 ushered in the notion of the translated author, as Dryden put it, ‘speak[ing] that kind of English, which he would have spoken had he lived in England, and Written to this Age’.¹⁴ Such accessible publications, with their attractive illustrations and lack of scholarly paraphernalia, were part of the Kit-Cat's patriotic agenda to better educate their literate countrymen and did much to pave the way for the neoclassical populism of the later eighteenth century.

      One Kit-Cat subscriber to The Works of Virgil, whom Dryden described as ‘without flattery, the best Critic of our Nation’,¹⁵ was William Walsh. Walsh's reputation as a critic must have been based on his conversation at the Witty Club rather than his writing, since what little Walsh had published (through Tonson) was mostly amorous poetry and boasts of his exploits with women. Walsh was an object of ridicule for his excessive love of fine clothing and his wig containing over three pounds of powder that produced little puffs of cloud with every sharp movement of his head. In 1697, Walsh was in his mid-thirties and beginning to suspect his name would not become immortal. His estate, by this date, was reportedly ‘reduced to about £300 a year, of which his mother has the greatest part’.¹⁶ Though he had been seeking patronage from Somers since 1693, this winter marked a turning point, after which Somers' support was decisive in getting Walsh elected to a parliamentary seat for Worcestershire.

      At Dryden's Witty Club, Walsh had drunk and quipped with Dr Samuel Garth, who was now also his fellow Kit-Cat. Garth attended that winter, eager to see Stepney and Prior after their long stints overseas. Garth had known ‘Lord Dorset's Boys’ at Cambridge and had written a poem praising Prior and Stepney as the best and brightest hopes of English literature. Like them, Garth had had to make his own way in the world after receiving a mere £10 legacy from his family. Now, at 37, he was a respected physician, but still writing poetry—largely revisions of his mock-epic Dispensary. He had subscribed five guineas (some £700 today) to Dryden's Virgil.

      Though many Kit-Cat patrons dabbled in authorship, there was no real risk of confusing the bluebloods with the literary thoroughbreds at the Club's table. At this meeting of 1697, Congreve was the leading literary man. He was overseeing a new production at Inner Temple of his three-year-old hit, Love for Love (1694). This play, his third, was originally the debut production of a new theatre company that had splintered off from the United Company in 1695. The defection had been led by Bracey's mentors, the Bettertons, so she went with them, and her suitor Congreve devotedly followed, promising to write for the new company. More importantly, Congreve used his credit with Dorset to obtain an audience with the King for Bracey and the Bettertons, thereby gaining a royal charter for their new company. Congreve was offered shares in it by way of thanks.

      Betterton's company set up in an old tennis court building at Lincoln's Inn Fields, and the King himself was in the audience on the opening night. Bracey played the complex lead role of Angelica in Love for Love, and also spoke the Epilogue, in which Congreve had her complain of men who ‘wanting ready cash to pay for hearts, / They top their learning on us, and their parts.’ There may have been self-mockery in this, given the lewd pun in ‘parts’ and the fact that Congreve certainly remained short of ‘ready cash’ at that date.

      Montagu showed his approval of Love for Love by appointing Congreve in March 1695 to a commission for regulating and licensing hackney and stagecoaches, with a salary of £100 (around £10,000 today) plus a percentage fee for each licence issued. Congreve could lease out the actual work to a clerk at a much smaller salary, pocketing the difference. This commission was a clear example of the Kit-Cat Club's modus operandi for literary patronage, the patrons frequently dispensing public offices rather than cash from their own private pockets. (Such ‘jobs for the boys’ were, of course, of little use to the female authors whom Tonson published, the most notable of whom were Aphra Behn, Katherine Philips and Susanna Centlivre.)

      In April 1697, Congreve was further made one of eleven managers of the Malt Lottery, a government scheme for raising duties on malt used for brewing and distilling. The following month, Montagu added yet another post for licensing hawkers and pedlars. All this added up to a secure but still modest income for the playwright. Congreve's work in progress that winter was a poem, ‘The Birth of the Muse’, which would be dedicated in gratitude to Montagu, ‘by turns the Patron and the Friend’, when Tonson printed it the following year.¹⁷

      Congreve's involvement made Montagu into a ‘great favourer’ of Betterton's new theatre company, in preference to the United Company at Drury Lane.¹⁸ Though the two companies' rivalry was never partisan, both being essentially Whig, the Kit-Cats clearly backed the new house at Lincoln's Inn. Montagu, who, like Tonson and Somers, had taken a sudden interest in Vanbrugh's career after the success of The Relapse the previous winter, saw Vanbrugh's second comedy, The Provok'd Wife, in manuscript and persuaded (perhaps paid) the playwright to adapt it to better suit Betterton's company. For Vanbrugh, this was a smart move, as he now had access to a more talented cast: The Provok'd Wife's portrayal of marital misery was brilliantly brought to life by Mr Betterton, now in his sixties, and the ageing actress Mrs Barry. Bracey played Belinda.

      In 1697, therefore, Congreve and Vanbrugh were showing their work on the same stage. They avoided direct competition thanks to the fact that Congreve produced a tragedy instead of a comedy for the same season as Vanbrugh's Provok'd Wife. Congreve's tragedy was The Mourning Bride and, as usual, the lead role was written for his beloved Bracey. Both Vanbrugh's comedy and Congreve's tragedy were hits, with the playhouse ‘full to the last’.¹⁹ When his plays gained universal applause, Vanbrugh, flamboyant and sociable, relished the attention. Congreve pushed himself forward in less obvious ways: when he put his name as author on a playbill in 1699, Dryden remarked that this was ‘a new manner of proceeding, at least in England’.²⁰

      A contemporary critic said Vanbrugh's writing seemed ‘no more than his common Conversation committed to Paper’.²¹ This is tribute to the artfulness of 1690s conversation as much as to the seeming artlessness of Vanbrugh's writing, and if conversation was an art form, the Kit-Cat Club was its medium—the reality that Vanbrugh and Congreve refined and amplified. Indeed, their shared love of writing in naturalistic speech explains their general preference for comedy over tragedy, a genre in which more formal verse was expected. The playwrights' writing methods, however, were stark contrasts: while Vanbrugh rapidly churned out ‘new’ plays translated from classical or French sources, Congreve wrote and revised laboriously, relying on original if convoluted plots.

      The surprising absence of reference to one another's СКАЧАТЬ