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

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СКАЧАТЬ friendly rivalry for a common cause. The ‘poor house’ was Betterton's theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields, under the patronage of Montagu and the rest of the Kit-Cat Club. Betterton's low rumbling voice and round belly made him perfect for the part of Shakespeare's Falstaff. Prior, meanwhile, had penned ‘a Prologue for Sir John [Falstaff] in favour of eating and drinking’,⁴⁶ which teased the Knights of the Toast for living on ‘meagre Soup and sour Champagne’ instead of good English fare like Falstaff. It also teased Jacob Tonson as looking like ‘old plump Jack [Falstaff] in Miniature’.⁴⁷

      It is significant that the Kit-Cats so honoured Falstaff, a character moderating tragedy with comic excess and abundance, resilient in his frivolity, regenerative in his adaptability, and a patriotic nobleman who fondly mentors young Hal, the future King of England. Falstaff could be viewed as a hero of English paternalism and materialism, while his love of food and drink was a straightforward connection to Kit-Cat dining. As A Kit Cat C—b Describ'd (1705) put it: ‘None but Sir John Falstaff's of the Party: Fat, Corpulent Lords, Knights and Squires, were to be Admitted into [the Kit-Cat] Society by the Laws of its First Institution.’⁴⁸ Falstaff's capacious love of life was contrasted to images of rectitude, chastity and neo-Puritanism in the performance. The Club, which counted ‘keeping up good Humour and Mirth’ as an objective equal to ‘the Improvement of Learning’,⁴⁹ was making the case for a new style of Whiggism—with hedonistic appetites, yet with heart, honour and national pride.

      The plan for the 9 January theatre outing was for the Kit-Cats to dine at Dorset's townhouse then proceed to Lincoln's Inn. Prior had had difficulty breathing a few days earlier, so he went to the dinner intending only to ‘sit down to table when the dessert comes, eat nothing but roasted apples, and drink sack and water’.⁵⁰ The others would have honoured the Falstaffian spirit of the evening with a hearty meal. Their drunken posse, when it turned up at the theatre, must have looked the epitome of privileged debauchery to the servants sent ahead to save their seats. A satirist described Montagu in the theatre ‘sitting on the Kit-Cat side, and Jacob T[onson] standing Door-Keeper for him’.⁵¹ The Toasters, on the other side, were led by the Earl of Carbery, acting as ‘general of the enemy's forces’, despite also being a member of the Kit-Cat Club by this date.⁵²

      Congreve described the theatre as an open arena full of ‘washy rogues’ to whose semi-illiterate judgement he reluctantly submitted his ‘repartee and raillery’.⁵³ Elsewhere, he despised the ‘swarm of Scribblers’ and City men who arrived before three o'clock to make sure they had enough elbow room, and who ate plum cake while watching the play.⁵⁴ If the people in the pit did not approve of the performance they blew on little toy whistles called ‘cat-calls’.

      The constant, defensive reference to the verdict of the pit by Congreve, Vanbrugh and other Kit-Cats hints at major tension between these writers and their audiences, and reflects their anxiety about the coarsening of the culture. The Kit-Cat Club emerged while popular culture was perceived as expanding at an unprecedented rate, and highbrow authors sought to cling to the opinions of the tasteful, educated few. The Kit-Cat critics were unified, for example, in their distaste for the popular entr'acte entertainments (rope dancers, singers, trained animals, tumblers and acrobats) added to even the most serious plays. They also distrusted mechanical innovations in scenery and special effects that appealed to the pit. Prior's Prologue for Falstaff, in this case, urged the audience to ‘save the sinking stage’ by preferring English comedy to the ‘Apes’ of French farce.⁵⁵

      Watching this performance, which probably consisted of extracts featuring Falstaff rather than an entire history play, the Kit-Cats would have been as much part of the show as the actors: Dorset boasting his ribbon of the Garter; Garth in his distinctive red cloak; Walsh with his heavily powdered wig. The key difference between theatres in this period and those in the Restoration was a larger forestage, so most of the action took place in the middle of the audience. Theatres remained well lit throughout the performances, and after 1690 there was some reintroduction of seating on the stage itself, further blurring the demarcation between the play's intrigues and those in the audience.

      The plan to assist Betterton's theatre succeeded beyond expectations. Nearly three weeks later, a Londoner wrote: ‘The Wits of all qualities have lately entertained themselves with a revived humour of Sir John Falstaff…which has drawn all the town more than any new play that has been produced of late.’⁵⁶

      The Kit-Cat Club continued its outings to the theatre over the next few years. In 1700, one satire referred to the Dorset Garden Theatre on the Thames at Whitefriars, ‘Where Kit-Cats sat, and Toasters would be seen.’⁵⁷ They could attend either the opening night and support the theatre and its company, or the third night to support the playwright. Such excursions were an ideal way for the Club to publicize itself and its patronage, showing London society it was no gang of political conspirators skulking down a back alley like the regicide, republican clubs of the seventeenth century, and that the Kit-Cat's members refused to be cowed by the Collierites' moral condemnation of their dramatic poetry.

      Congreve's new comedy of manners, The Way of the World, began rehearsals at Lincoln's Inn soon after the Falstaff performance closed. Again, the hopes and incomes of Betterton's company were pinned on the new play, with Vanbrugh remarking that ‘if Congreve's Play don't help 'em, they are undone’.⁵⁸ The play, however, though costing its author some ‘care and pains’ to write,⁵⁹ was a risky work which Congreve said he doubted London's degenerate audience would appreciate, rather than one designed for popularity. Betterton's actors no doubt felt some ambivalence about the work—so brilliant, yet so difficult—as they rehearsed it. Congreve knew that parts of the play were provocative: two fingers stuck up to those who wanted less cynicism and more moral certainties on the English stage. The Prologue, for example, to be spoken by Betterton and concerning the author's intentions to entertain rather than reform, addressed itself sarcastically to any Collierites in the audience:

      Satire, he [Congreve] thinks, you ought not to expect;

      For so reformed a town who dares correct? To please, this time, has been his sole pretence, He'll not instruct, lest it should give offence.

      The Way of the World, like Congreve's earlier plays, reflected the author's view of the urbane society in which he moved: the primacy of male friendships, bonded as much by clubbing and card-playing as business contracts and kinship. Congreve complicates theatrical stereotypes by making the play's hero, Mirabell, one of these suave and socially adept young London gentlemen—qualities traditionally belonging to morally suspect stage villains. Mirabell's final proof of integrity in the play, furthermore, is his kindness to Mrs Fainall, his former mistress. Even today, the question of one's moral duties to one's ex-lovers would be subtle territory for a play; in 1700, facing an audience of Collierites, it was an astonishing question to pose.

      Congreve laughs at the affectations of Mirabell's friends, in the characters of Witwoud and Petulant, yet at the same time invokes sympathy for the social insecurities that require such pretences, as when Witwoud laughs at Petulant's attempts to feign popularity by saying he will dress up in costume and ‘call for himself, wait for himself, nay and what's more, not finding himself [at home], sometimes leave a letter for himself’.СКАЧАТЬ