Читать книгу The Toy Shop (1735) The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) - Dodsley Robert - Страница 1

The career of Robert Dodsley (1703-1764), or "Doddy" as Samuel Johnson affectionately called him, resembles nothing so much as the rise of Francis Goodchild in Hogarth's Industry and Idleness (1747) series. Like Goodchild, Dodsley began as a humble apprentice and, through energy, ingenuity, and laudable ambition, grew prosperous and gained the esteem of all London. Today Dodsley is remembered as the most important publisher of his period, a man who numbered among his authors Pope, Young, Akenside, Gray, Johnson, Burke, Shenstone, and Sterne. His long-labored Collection of Poems (1748) rescued many of his contemporaries' works from pamphlet obscurity and even now provides both the best and the most representative introduction to mid-eighteenth-century English poetry. His twelve-volume A Select Collection of Old Plays (1744) made the lesser Elizabethan dramatists, long out of print, available again.

It is one of the minor ironies of literary history that the man who did so much to insure the survival of the poems and plays of others has had his own almost entirely forgotten. For Dodsley was not always a bookseller. When he escaped his country apprenticeship and fled to London to work as a footman, Dodsley had his heart set on literary distinction; and it was first as poet and later as playwright that he came to the attention of the Town. Although a few of his poems are as ingratiating as Dodsley himself is reported to have been, most are now aesthetically irretrievable. His dramas, in contrast, remain interesting. Two of the best —The Toy-Shop (1735) and The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) – were much more popular than his earlier poems and for a time made him seem the equal of fellow dramatist Henry Fielding. So great was the vogue of these two works that Dodsley has been described as the principal developer of the sentimental or moralizing afterpiece.1 Both works are short afterpieces intended to complement or contrast with the full-length play on the day's bill and both moralize conspicuously; the two plays could, however, hardly be more different in tone and technique.

The Toy-Shop grew out of Dodsley's admiration of and consequent desire to emulate the witty raillery of Augustan satire. When he sent Pope his newly minted collected poems, A Muse in Livery (1732), Dodsley also included an orphan muse in the packet. In February of 1733 Pope politely responded that he liked the play and would encourage John Rich to produce it, but that he doubted whether it had sufficient action to engage an audience. Dodsley apparently did all he could to strengthen his acquaintance with Pope, including publishing a laudatory Epistle to Mr. Pope, Occasion'd by His Essay on Man in 1734; and the following February when Rich finally produced The Toy-Shop at Covent Garden, some thought that Pope was the author and Dodsley's alleged authorship a diversion. Understandably, Dodsley was delighted to have his play even momentarily mistaken for the work of Alexander Pope.

The Toy-Shop was enormously popular. "This little Performance, without any Theatrical Merit whatsoever," the Prompter wrote on 18 February, "received the loudest Applauses that I have heard this long while, only on Account of its General and well-Adapted Satire on the Follies of Mankind."2 Dodsley's afterpiece was performed thirty-four times during the 1735 season. In print it was even more in demand. For his benefit performance on 6 February, Dodsley advertised that "Books of the Toy-Shop will be sold in the House."3 There were at least six legitimate editions of the piece within the year. It was pirated, translated into French, and subsequently anthologized in almost every collection of English farces.4

Every critic has concurred with Pope in finding the play plotless. The short first scene establishes the premise: that the Master of the shop is "a general Satyrist, yet not rude nor ill-natur'd," who moralizes "upon every Trifle he sells, and will strike a Lesson of Instruction out of a Snuff-box, a Thimble, or a Cockle-shell" (p. 10). Working within a tradition that includes Lucian's sale of philosophers and, just after The Toy-Shop, Fielding's auction in The Historical Register, For the Year 1736 (1737), Dodsley acknowledged that his premise was adopted directly from Thomas Randolph's Conceited Pedlar (1630). His metaphor of the world as "a great Toy-shop, and all it's [sic] Inhabitants run mad for Rattles" (p. 45) recalls the brilliant penultimate verse paragraph of "Epistle II" of Pope's Essay on Man, wherein mankind is shown as eternally addicted to "toys" of one kind or another:

With so many unmistakable resemblances to Pope in Dodsley's play, it is not surprising that some spectators thought they detected the hand of the author of The Rape of the Lock.

Following a hint from Pope that the strength of his afterpiece lay in its mixture of morality and satire, Dodsley titled his work "A Dramatick Satire" and begged indulgence in the epilogue for his "dull grave Sermon" (p. 5). In fact, the merit of the work is the wit with which the Master of the shop extemporizes over each sale. "Why, Sir," one character says, "methinks you are a new Kind of a Satirical Parson, your Shop is your Scripture, and every piece of Goods a different Text, from which you expose the Vices and Follies of Mankind in a very fine allegorical Sermon" (p. 17). Jean Kern lists the satiric allegory as one of the five major forms of dramatic satire during this period, but judges The Toy-Shop a failure in that genre because, instead of a sustained allegory, Dodsley provides "a jumble of annotated sales of abstractions with no controlling metaphor. The toys for sale are interesting only for the value which the characters assign to them; the result is a miscellany of characters assigning a miscellany of values."5 Thus, the problematic nature of a genre that attempts to dramatize satire with no more than perfunctory recourse to plot or characterization and Dodsley's failure to sustain consistently his comparison between those objects that mankind values and mere toys both contribute to the play's lack of "Theatrical Merit." It may also suggest why The Toy-Shop was even more popular in print than on the stage. Nevertheless, even with all its dramatic inadequacies acknowledged, the play retains a charming Tatler-esque ingenuity that still amuses.

Income from The Toy-Shop and the gift of a hundred pounds from Pope allowed Dodsley to open, under the sign of Tully's Head, the bookshop that was to become so important in the history of English literature. Dodsley the bookseller did not cease writing; when The King and the Miller of Mansfield opened at Drury Lane on 29 January 1737, with young Colley Cibber in the role of Henry II, it was evident that Dodsley's stagecraft had improved. The play was a triumph, with thirty-seven performances in 1737 – the most popular play of the year and one of the most popular plays of the century.

The Toy-Shop had been Dodsley's attempt to adopt sophisticated city ways; The King and the Miller of Mansfield is a return to his "native Sherwood." Instead of indulging in the sometimes labored, sometimes second-hand wit and contemptuous satiric stance of the earlier play, The King and the Miller of Mansfield reflects the earnest sentimentality and democratic impulse of the ballad, later printed in Percy's Reliques (1765), upon which the play is modeled. The plot is simple. Henry II, lost and separated from his courtiers in Sherwood Forest, is given shelter by honest John Cockle, a miller in nearby Mansfield and one of His Majesty's Keepers of the Forest. Meanwhile, at the miller's house, his son Dick and Dick's former sweetheart Peggy plan how to gain access to the king so that he might redress the wrongs done to their innocent love by the lust of the haughty Lord Lurewell. By coincidence Lurewell is one of the courtiers lost in the forest. In the final scene, with all the principals assembled, the king's identity is made known and distributive justice dispensed.

Allardyce Nicoll argues that the success of The King and the Miller of Mansfield makes Dodsley the most important sentimentalist of the thirties.6 Certainly the play was frequently produced with revivals of earlier sentimental works like Cibber's Love's Last Shift (1696) and Steele's The Conscious Lovers (1723); and, in fact, it would be difficult to find a list of definitive characteristics of sentimental drama that Dodsley's play does not satisfy in every particular. The bourgeois nobility and integrity of Dick and Peggy poignantly engage the audience's pity and admiration, while the improbable resolution affirms the inevitable triumph of goodness. There is even – what some critics have required of sentimental drama – love of rural scenery and use of native setting.7

Dodsley has cleverly integrated scene and theme in The King and the Miller of Mansfield. The moral and social problem stressed in the play is the existence and abuse of aristocratic privilege. Implicitly the play assumes that rank should correlate with goodness. The king himself is the best example of this. Alone at night in Sherwood Forest, Henry asks himself, "Of what Advantage is it now to be a King? Night shews me no Respect: I cannot see better, nor walk so well as another Man" (p. 11). Cut off from the trappings of monarchy he finds his common humanity and, at the conclusion of the play, redresses the wrongs of rank when he knights the instinctively noble miller and reproves the vicious but hereditarily titled Lord Lurewell. His accidental separation from the corruption of court and courtiers initiates Henry's contact with John Cockle, representative of all the middle-class virtues. Significantly, they are in the miller's environment: rural England, symbol of uncorrupted beauty, correlative to the innocent beauty of young Peggy before her acquaintance with Lords "of Prerogative."8

As critics have noted, the whole sentimental movement in English drama is opposed in tone to the cynical ethos of aristocratic privilege; but Dodsley explicitly advocates a democratic sensibility that estimates individual worth independent of the accident of birth. The "bourgeois sententiae" of The King and the Miller of Mansfield are certainly as ideologically explicit as the arguments for the value of the mercantile middle class in Lillo's The London Merchant (1731).9 Dodsley did, after all, have working-class credentials; his years in "service" furnished the materials for Servitude: A Poem (1729) and A Muse in Livery (1732). The allegorical frontispiece to A Muse in Livery shows a young man aspiring to knowledge, virtue, and happiness but manacled by poverty to misery, folly, and ignorance, his foot chained to a giant stone inscribed "Despair."

Despite the play's clear egalitarian sympathies, it seems excessive to characterize Dodsley's work as "revolutionary" and to be reminded too forcibly of the coming events in France. And yet, as has also been suggested, things might now look different had there been a revolution in England. Plays like Dodsley's discomforted the government. As Fielding notes in the dedication of The Historical Register, For the Year 1736, the Gazetteer of 7 May 1737 had accused his play and Dodsley's The King and the Miller of Mansfield of aiming at the overthrow of Walpole's ministry. "Bob Booty" reacted to this threat from the stage by enacting legislation in June requiring that all new plays and all alterations of old plays be approved by the Lord Chamberlain; in contrast, the reaction of the monarchy to Dodsley's work was much more ingenious. The third performance of The King and the Miller of Mansfield, that from which the author was to receive the proceeds, was held "By Command of their Royal Highness the Prince and Princess of Wales." Both royal personages were present to honor the apprentice from Mansfield. "The Boxes not being equal to the Demand for Places, for the better Accommodation of the Ladies, Side Boxes [were] made on the Stage."10 Although the production of Dodsley's best play, Cleone (1758), was still twenty years in the future, it seems safe to regard this night as the height of Dodsley's dramatic career.

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