| Chapter 1: | Royalist Dramatist |
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In the dedication to Endymion, Porter Davenant writes that Porter “rescued his Work from a cruel Faction; which nothing but the Forces of your Reason, and your Reputation could subdue”.24 Whether he is referring just to Herbert or to others who were disturbed by his rise to favour is unclear in this instance, but it seems there was a faction who deliberately cried down his plays.
The Wits was licensed on 19 January 1633 and appeared at Blackfriars three days later. Five days after that, on 28 January, it was presented at court before the king and the queen, where Herbert reports it as “well liked” but that “the kinge commended the language but dislikt the plot and characters”.25 Since it was the king who had allowed the play, this seems unlikely. Davenant called himself “Servant to Her Majestie” on the title page for the first time when the play was published in 1635. As plays in the repertory were not released for publication, one can assume the King’s Company were not interested in presenting the play again. Nevertheless, it sold well enough to be reprinted several times.
What The Wits shows is how much Davenant had matured as a dramatist. The play has a straightforward plot and recognisable characters, although he follows Jonson in naming characters for their characteristics. He still uses extravagant language, but it is more carefully structured to give a comic effect, and his tendency towards hyperbole is better employed in presenting the lives and preoccupations of his characters than in the more melodramatic writing of his earlier plays.
Both Nethercot and Edmond discuss the play as no more than an ingenious, bawdy comedy of manners about people living off their wits, which sets men against women, town against country, but in which all ends happily. However, in Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642, Butler argues that comedy is political, that politics belong in the town, and that the 1630s were a time of change in the shape of society, such that