Blackwell Reference Online

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Leave this gaudy gilded stage,From custom more than use frequented,Where fools of either sex and ageCrowd to see themselves presented.To Love's theatre, the bed,Youth and beauty fly together,And act so well, it may be saidThe laurel there was due to either.John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,‘Song’ (Vieth 1968: 85–6)Rochester's connection between what was then called sexual conversation and the conversations heard on the Restoration stage and in the theatre was hardly unusual during the period, but it is suggestive of the ways in which libertine behaviour and ideas were intimately intertwined with stage presentation. It has sometimes been thought that the poem was written to the best actress of the Restoration, Elizabeth Barry, who was Rochester's mistress for a time. Such a possibility would hardly have surprised contemporary and later moralists. Indeed, the assumed relationship between social life and stage representation led to the general condemnation of Restoration comedy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by critics such as Thomas Thornton, who, speaking of one of Otway's comedies, lamented its ‘favourable reception with audiences whose minds were corrupted by habit and example, to a perfect relish of grossness and contempt of decency’ (1813, 3: 99). Similar attacks upon the libertine nature of both the plays and the audience may be found in writers from Sir Richard ... log in or subscribe to read full text