Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeen ...

Butler argues that The Wits examines the ways in which the country gentlemen were setting themselves up in London as a permanent establishment, and he argues that Davenant’s resolution, in which the country gentry return to their proper place on country estates, having found themselves out of their depth in the town, is an echo of Charles I’s proclamation of 1632 to the gentry. He does not suggest that Davenant was deliberately currying favour with the king, but it is likely that such a message would find favour with those around the court, and, despite Herbert’s remark that the king disliked the play, it is a possible reason for the king allowing it. Butler also discusses two other plays on the same theme but from the opposite point of view which appeared around this time. Both Weeding of Covent Garden by Richard Brome and Covent Garden by Thomas Nabbes present Covent Garden as an ambiguous place, a metaphor for the results of Charles’s rule. Brome and Nabbes were professional dramatists and not amateurs dependent on court favour as Davenant was. It is likely that certain sections of the audience might see Davenant’s play as demonstrating the view of the court and therefore a threat.

After the Restoration, The Wits was one of the first plays Davenant put on at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, when it played for eight days running.²⁷ Pepys saw it on 15 August 1661 and remarks that it was, “never acted yet with Scenes; and the King and the Duke and the Duchess was there: […] and endeed, it is a most excellent play—and admirable Scenes”.²⁸

It is not surprising that the play was popular after the Restoration. It is a bawdy comedy, full of sexual innuendo with amoral characters tricking other amoral characters but with a tidy ending that sees the more likeable characters as coming out on top. This was the kind of play that was successful for some while after 1660, but tastes changed, and Pepys remarks, on seeing a coarsened version of the play on 18 April 1667, that it was a play he “formerly loved, and is now corrected and enlarged: but though I like the acting, yet I find not much in the play now”. The 1673 edition has stage directions for “hangings” as in “Young Pal beckens Luce from behind the Hangings”,²⁹ as for a platform stage presentation, and does not appear to have been rewritten for performance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Although it would have been very suitable for a discovery of the bed behind the shutters, it is impossible to know how Davenant presented it in the 1660s. The last recorded performance was again at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1726.