Plays, written by Sir John Vanbrugh, volume the second — Reading Companion

Money and Marriage as Paired Games

The catalog subjects list this as comedy and 18th-century English drama, but the excerpts reveal a specific preoccupation: the transactional nature of marriage. In The Confederacy, Clarissa is described as an "expensive luxurious woman" who will "run in debt to all the shopkeepers" and lose money at cards while her husband earns at Westminster. The play's title itself suggests a secret alliance, likely between wives or servants against husbands. Vanbrugh's characters treat matrimony as a financial arrangement to be exploited or endured. The Country House and A Journey to London continue this theme: in the latter, John Moody's comic report of a journey full of contradiction—"Slap goes one thing, crack goes another"—mirrors the chaos of a household where the lady's desires clash with the coach's limitations. The humor arises from the gap between characters' self-interest and the disorder it creates.

Dialect, Status, and the Servant's Voice

Vanbrugh gives servants distinctive speech patterns that mark both region and rank. John Moody in A Journey to London speaks in a thick Northern dialect: "I'm staut still, and a faithful awd servant to th' family." His repeated exclamations—"Gadswookers," "murrain upon all rogues and whores"—contrast with the more polished but equally scheming language of his masters. The maid Flippanta in The Confederacy has a name that hints at her flippant, quick-witted role. These characters are not mere foils; they drive the plot through their observations and actions. The prologue's "Shabby Poet" also occupies a liminal status, neither fully inside nor outside the theatrical world. By giving servants and marginal figures strong voices, Vanbrugh broadens the social range of his comedy beyond the usual Restoration elite.

Structure and Self-Reference in the Prologue

The prologue to this volume is unusual: it is spoken by a "Shabby Poet" who explicitly discusses the playwright's career. He mentions a brother who "writ for praise" and "meddling with some folks in black"—likely a reference to Vanbrugh's own clashes with the clergy over his earlier play The Relapse. The poet shows his ragged coat and laurel crown, complaining that the honor is worthless without means to eat. This self-referential opening frames the entire collection as the work of a writer aware of his precarious position in the literary marketplace. The prologue's structure—a series of complaints punctuated by gestures to the audience and the theater—mirrors the episodic, argument-driven style of the plays themselves. Readers encountering this volume should note how Vanbrugh uses the prologue to establish a tone of ironic self-deprecation that colors the comedies to follow.

Because the excerpts are drawn from multiple plays within the volume, readers should pay attention to how Vanbrugh varies his comic strategies: The Confederacy relies on intricate plotting among couples, while The Country House and A Journey to London lean on farcical arrivals and dialect humor. The Provok'd Husband, left unfinished by Vanbrugh and completed by Colley Cibber, may show a different hand. Approach each play as a distinct experiment in stage comedy, united by a skeptical view of human motives.

Vanbrugh’s scheming servants made me think of my grandmother’s house, where every whispered plot felt theatrical. This reminded me of a quieter warmth I found once in Christmas at McCarthy's — Reading Companion, whose domestic chaos felt less like satire and more like a held breath, a family holding together against the cold.