Project Gutenberg's The Man Of The World (1792), by Charles Macklin

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Title: The Man Of The World (1792)

Author: Charles Macklin

Release Date: December 25, 2004 [EBook #14463]

Language: English

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Charles Macklin THE MAN OF THE WORLD (1792)

With an Introduction by
Dougald MacMillan

Publication Number 26

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1951

GENERAL EDITORS

H. RICHARD ARCHER, Clark Memorial Library
RICHARD C. BOYS, University of Michigan
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California, Los Angeles
JOHN LOFTIS, University of California, Los Angeles

ASSISTANT EDITOR

W. EARL BRITTON, University of Michigan

ADVISORY EDITORS

EMMETT L. AVERY, State College of Washington
BENJAMIN BOYCE, Duke University
LOUIS I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
CLEANTH BROOKS, Yale University
JAMES L. CLIFFORD, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, Queen Mary College, London
H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California, Los Angeles

INTRODUCTION

During his extraordinarily long career as an actor, Charles Macklin wrote several plays. The earliest is King Henry VII; or, The Popish Imposter, a tragedy based on the Perkin Warbeck story, performed at Drury Lane 18 January 1745/6 and published the same year. As the Preface states, it "was design'd as a Kind of Mirror to the present Rebellion"; and it provided the author with a part in which he could express, through the character of Lord Huntley, his own aversion to foreign influences in the land, to "French and Priest-rid Weakness" and "Romish Tyranny." This and his succeeding plays were obviously composed to provide parts for himself; so no others were published until he had retired. They were his stock in trade, since Macklin seldom maintained a stable connection with one of the theatres. Instead he appeared now here now there for brief engagements or on special occasions, rather than as a regular member of the company, often carrying his plays with him. Thus a number have survived only in manuscript. The Larpent Collection contains seven,—the tragedy just mentioned, four farces, and two five-act comedies, one of these in three states.[1] This is The Man of the World here reproduced for the first time in over a century and a half, despite the opinion expressed by Isaac Reed, in 1782, that "This play, … in respect to originality, force of mind, and well-adapted satire, may dispute the palm with any dramatic piece that has appeared within the compass of half a century…."[2] Originally it had been performed in Dublin in 1764 under the title The True-born Scotchman, but in 1770 the Examiner of Plays in London refused to license it. It was re-submitted in 1779 and again forbidden, but was finally allowed and performed at Covent Garden on 10 May 1781, with the author in the part of Sir Pertinax Macsycophant.

Himself irascible and passionate, Macklin had been the most admired Shylock of his century. His specialty was the performance of character parts, often dialect roles, either broadly comic or cruel and ironic. The central figure of this, his best comedy, is such a part. It combines those features that the author could portray so effectively, the broad dialect, the callous selfishness, the hypocrisy, the passionate resistance to all appeals to sentiment and the imperviousness to affection. One can detect in the creation strong resemblances to Macklin's interpretation of Shylock, something of Sir Giles Overreach, who was also known to eighteenth-century play-goers, and possibly of Tartuffe. In his resolute defiance of the conventions of comedy of sensibility, Macklin resisted the pressure to allow Sir Pertinax to soften in the end and terminate the play on a note of happy reconciliation and family harmony.

In thus preserving the toughness of Sir Pertinax consistently to the end, Macklin remained true to the tradition of critical, satiric comedy that he had been bred in but that by this time had almost disappeared. Protesting against the refusal of a license for his play, in 1779, Macklin composed a defense of satiric comedy. He insists upon the reformatory function of comedy and upon the satiric method of performing this task. "The business of the Stage," he says, "is to correct vice, and laugh at folly … This piece is in support of virtue, morality, decency, and the Laws of the Land: it satirizes both public and private venality, and reprobates inordinate passions and tyrannical conduct in a parent … Now, with regard to my comedy is it not just and salutary that the subtilty [sic], pride, insolence, cunning, and the thorough-paced villany [sic] of a backbiting Scotchman should be ridiculed? What a wretched state the Comic Muse and the Stage would be reduced to, were the prohibition of laughing at the corruption and other vices of the age to prevail!"[3] True the Comic Muse, long sick, as Garrick said in his prologue to She Stoops to Conquer, had almost died, though farces had done something to sustain her. Fielding's and Garrick's little satires had largely avoided sentiment; and the personal, often gross farces of Foote had continued to use ridicule. But even these lack the forceful pertinacity of Macklin's denunciation of hypocrisy and vice. It is perhaps too bad that he fell so far into caricature in the portraits of Lord Lumbercourt and his daughter, that the main love stories do smack of sensibility, and that he turned his hero into a mouthpiece for the opposition to the Tory ministries of the early years of George III. And it is perhaps true that all the characters, including Sir Pertinax, are more true to the theatre than to the actual life of the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Still, Sir Pertinax is vigorous, and the author's position is unmistakable.

The earliest portion of The Man of the World in the Larpent Collection is a passage in the fourth act of The School for Husbands, performed at Covent Garden as The Married Libertine on 28 January 1761, twenty years before The Man of the World was finally presented in London. Elsewhere I have compared the three complete versions submitted to the Examiner and have shown why the Lord Chamberlain could not permit it to be licensed.[4]

The Man of the World was first published in England, with Macklin's farce Love a la Mode, by subscription, in a handsome quarto. Facing the title-page is a portrait of the author, "in his 93.^d Year," engraved by John Condé after Opie, for which the trustees of the fund paid 25 guineas. Preceding the text of the play are