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The Dramatic Background of Richardson's Plots and Characters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Ira Konigsberg
Ira Konigsberg*
Affiliation:
Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass.
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Abstract

Samuel Richardson used in his novels character types and plots already developed in the English drama. Playwrights such as Charles Johnson, George Lillo, and even Henry Fielding had presented the same story as Pamela—the attempted seduction of a poor but innocent maiden by a well-born rake— and characters similar to the novel's virgin heroine and libertine hero. In the first part of Clarissa Richardson handled a theme common in the drama, that of enforced betrothal, and developed this theme with characterizations, character relationships, and dramatic confrontations already used by playwrights. Throughout the novel Clarissa resembles a type of suffering heroine and Lovelace a type of rakish villain popular in the drama, and the second part of the novel strikingly resembles Charles Johnson's play Caelia. The characters of Sir Charles Grandison also have their dramatic counterparts, especially the hero, who is clearly a product of the theater's men of sense.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 83 , Issue 1 , March 1968 , pp. 42 - 53
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1968

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References

1 As early as 1894 Walter Raleigh in The English Novel (New York) suggested that the drama influenced Richardson's narrative method; and in 1907 Erich Poetzche in Samuel Richardson Belesenheit (Kiel) listed the dramatic quotations and references to plays that appear in Richardson's novels and correspondence, and made a general comment about the possible influence of the drama on the author's fiction.

2 “Samuel Richardson's Novels and the Theatre: A Theory Sketched,” PQ, XLI (1962), 325–329.

3 “Theatrical Convention in Richardson: Observations on a Novelist's Technique,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature (Chicago, 1963), pp. 239–250. My own paper is part of a more extensive treatment of the general subject which will soon be published by University of Kentucky Press.

4 Helen S. Hughes, in “Characterization in Clarissa Har-lowe,” JEGP, xiii (1914), 110–123, discusses the dependence of Clarissa and Lovelace on earlier dramatic types. Ernest Bernbaum, in The Drama of Sensibility (Boston, 1915), pp. 164–165, mentions the relationship of the novelist's work to the sentimental drama. Levin L. Schucking, in “Die Grund-lagen des Richardson'schen Romans,” Germanisch-romanische Monatsschrifl, xii (1924), 21–42, 88–110, suggests that Richardson's characters are related to those in the drama of pathos and sentimental drama. The most developed discussion of this subject appears in Alan Dugald McKillop's Samuel Richardson, Printer and Novelist (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1936), pp. 138–154. McKillop's analysis, however, is brief and limited to Clarissa.

5 See, e.g., Richardson's Preface and Postscript to Clarissa.

6 Although many of the dramatic quotations in Richardson's works were probably taken from Edward Bysshe's The Art of English Poetry (see A. Dwight Culler, “Edward Bysshe and the Poet's Handbook,” PMLA, LXIII, 1948, 871), the novelist's use of such passages frequently indicates his familiarity with their sources.

7 I discuss this point in “The Tragedy of Clarissa,” MLQ, xxvii (1966), 285–288.

8 Katherine Hornbeak suggests that Richardson's fiction was influenced by the domestic conduct books of his period (“Richardson's Familiar Letters and the Domestic Conduct Books,” Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, xix, 1938,1–29). Richardson's knowledge of these works may have been responsible for his interest in certain areas of conduct, but certainly the plot and characters of Pamela, for example, could hardly have been derived from the codebooks' general discussions of the proper relationship between master and servant. Some of the novelist's themes had been dealt with by the periodicals, but here too the treatment generally was more ethical than literary; what sketches we do find are quite different from Richardson's more developed stories. In earlier fiction only occasionally are there resemblances to Richardson's novels, and these resemblances are not great. Earlier fiction was mostly concerned with presenting unusual characters in uncommon and exciting adventures. I shall discuss several times in this paper those essay sketches and novels which have some resemblance to Richardson's works.

9 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa: Preface, Hints of Prefaces, and Postscript, in trod, by R. F. Brissenden, Augustan Reprint Society Publication No. 103 (Los Angeles, 1964), p. 7. The phrase appears in a section probably written by Philip Skelton.

10 Richardson, p. 42. The remainder of my paragraph refers to pp. 29–32 of McKillop's book. Richardson first used the Pamela story in two brief epistles in Letters Written To and For Particular Friends, On the Most Important Occasions, which was published after the novel in 1741. In a letter to Rev. Johannes Stinstra, the novelist declares that the story of Pamela had been suggested to him fifteen years before he “sat down to write it” by a friend's narration of a true-life adventure (Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll, Oxford, 1964, p. 232). Richardson also mentions this friend's narration in a letter to Aaron Hill (Selected Letters, pp. 39–40). Dottin and McKillop believe that though the germ of the story may have had its origin in this source, it is hardly possible that the novelist would have remembered details related fifteen years earlier (Samuel Richardson, Paris, 1931, pp. 104, 148, and Richardson, pp. 27–28). In the letter to Stinstra the novelist claims that both Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are wholly “invention” (p. 233).

11 The influence of Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne upon Richardson's Pamela is now denied by most critics. The best refutation of such influence is by McKillop, in Richardson, pp. 35–10.

12 See Morris Golden's Richardson's Characters (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963) for a recent attempt at a psychological exploration of Richardson and his characters.

13 Unless otherwise stated, all citations from plays in my text are to the microcard collection Three Centuries of Drama, ed. Henry Whells (New York, 1954).

14 The relationship of Caelia and Clarissa is discussed in Sec. iii of this paper.

15 The London Stage 1660–1800, A Calendar of Plays, Entertainment & Afterpieces, Part 3: 1729–1747, ed. Arthur H. Scouten, i, n (Carbondale, Ill., 1961), passim.

16 Citations from Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded in my text are to the Shakespeare Head Edition (Oxford, 1929).

17 For a discussion of class warfare as a major theme in Richardson's first two novels, see William M. Sale, Jr., “From Pamela to Clarissa,” in The Age of Johnson (New Haven, Conn., 1949), pp. 127–138.

18 In The A pprentice's Vade Mecum: Or, Young Man's Pocket Companion, a short manual of good behavior for apprentices written by Richardson in 1733, the novelist praises Lillo's The London Merchant: or, the History of George Barnwell (1731). See Alan Dugald McKillop, “Samuel Richardson's Advice to an Apprentice,” JEGP, XLII (1943), 40–54.

19 Bernbaum in The Drama of Sensibility, p. 61, and McKillop in Richardson, p. 31, mention the general similarity between Silvia and Pamela.

20 It is not certain that the work was performed (see Part 3 of The London Stage, I, 145–147). An earlier and shorter version titled The Welsh Opera was produced in 1731.

21 The Complete Works of Henry Fielding, Esq., ix (New York, 1902).

22 Robin and Sweetisa also are satirical portraits of Sir Robert Walpole and his mistress Maria Skerrett.

23 See H. J. Habakkuk, “Marriage Settlements in the Eighteenth Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xxxii (1950), 15–30.

24 The novel is based upon Aphra Behn's brief tale, The Wandering Beauty (1698). Blackmore's novel can be read iu Four Before Richardson, Selected English Novels, 1720–1727, ed. W. H. McBurncy (Lincoln, Neb., 1963).

25 Richardson earlier had treated such a subject in epistle cxxxiii of Letters Written … On the Most Important Occasions. The epistle is written by a young lady to an unwanted suitor, who has been proposed as her future husband by her parents.

26 See John Harrington Smith, The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (Cambridge, Mass., 1948), passim, for a study of the gay lady in the drama of the Restoration period.

27 The play may have been written by Hildebrand Horden (Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, Volume I: Restoration Drama, 1660–1700,4th ed., Cambridge, Eng., 1955, p. 413).

28 Citations from Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady in my text are to the Shakespeare Head Edition (Oxford, 1930).

29 See Christopher Hill, “Clarissa Harlowe and Her Times,” Essays in Criticism, v (1955), 331; and Ian Watt, The Rise of The Novel (London, 1957), pp. 155–161.

30 Many of these heroines appear in “she-tragedies,” a term used by Rowe in his Epilogue to The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) to describe those plays with suffering heroines as their protagonists. Such dramas were plentiful during the Restoration and early eighteenth century.

31 See Sec. in of this paper.

32 Richardson cites both of these plays by Otway (see Clarissa, vii, 132).

33 The letter, dated 26 Jan. 1747, is in Foster MS. xiii. (Much of Richardson's correspondence is in the Foster Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.) The gentleman mentioned in the letter may be Richardson's early patron (see McKillop, Richardson, pp. 120, 133–134).

34 Samuel Johnson, “The Life of Rowe,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, H (Oxford, 1905), 67; and H. G. Ward, “Richardson's Character of Lovelace,” MLR, vii (1912), 494–498.

35 This novel is printed in Four Before Richardson.

36 Also see Spectator Nos. 203 (by Addison) and 602 (author unknown).

37 McKillop, Richardson, p. 148.

38 See McKillop's Richardson, pp. 149–153. Clarissa at times seems to heroicize like the women in the heroic drama. See, e.g., her passionate and theatrical behavior in the penknife scene (vi, 66–69). Helen S. Hughes, in “Characterization in Clarissa Harlowe,” op. cit., tries to show that certain characters in the heroic drama had a more direct influence on Clarissa and Lovelace.

39 Caelia was performed for either one or two nights in 1732 (Part 3 of The London Stage, i, 254–255). Johnson in his “Advertisement to the Reader” in the publication of the work claimed that the characters of Mother Lupine and her women were ill-received by the audience.

40 The Wife's Relief (1711) and The Country Lasses (The London Stage 1660–1800, A Calendar of Plays, Entertainment & Afterpieces, Part 2: 1700–1729, ed. Emmet L. Avery, I and II, Carbondale, 111., 1960, passim, and Part 3, I and ii, passim).

41 Bernbaum, The Drama of Sensibility, p. 165; McKillop, Richardson, p. 144; Nicoll, A History of English Drama, 1660–1900, Volume II: Early Eighteenth Century Drama, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, Eng., 1955), p. 122.

42 The Gay Couple, pp. 211–215. For an example of the indistinct virtuous heroes that occasionally appeared in fiction, see Mrs. Davys' The Reform'd Coquet(1724).

43 In Part ii of Pamela (Vol. iv, Letter xii), the heroine writes a critique on Steele's The Tender Husband (1705).

44 Richardson “heard the greatest part of The Gamester read by Mr. Garrick” (Selected Letters, p. 224).

45 Anna Howe also is a gay lady with a humble suitor. Mr. Hickman receives the same abusive treatment as his counterparts in the drama. Richardson first handles such a relationship in epistle LXXXIII of Letters Written … On the Most Important Occasions, in which a gay lady describes her relationship with her suitor. See Smith, The Gay Couple, pp. 197–198.

46 The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Shakespeare Head Edition (Oxford, 1931).

47 There are, however, enough close similarities in the plots, actions, characters, and even dialogue of Clarissa and Caelia to suggest that Richardson may have been directly influenced by Johnson's play.