Christopher Marlowe - The Life and Death of Doctor Faustus Made into a Farce

In Greenwich Park , Mountfort scored his greatest success. The comedy is a hilarious mixture of the comedy of manners, humours, and farce. The prologue sounds the dominant motif of the play, that of satiric and energetic sex-intrigue: "At Greenwich lies the Scene, where many a Lass / Has bin Green-gown'd upon the tender Grass." The play hits wittily at fortune-hunters, cits, and old fellows who attempt to ignore their age. There is heavy reference to the contemporary London scene. The comedy was produced in April, 1691, with great success; Gildon says of it: "a very pretty Comedy, and has been always received with general Applause" ( Lives and Characters , p. 102). The gay and witty Florella was played by Mrs. Mountfort—who played a part very much like that in which she was so successful previously, Sir Anthony Love. Mrs. Barry played the passionate Dorinda, a promiscuous and mercenary woman who, at one point in the play, cries out in the best tradition of sentimental comedy: "Oh what a Curse 'tis, when for filthy Gain / We affect a Pleasure in a real Pain." Sir Thomas Reveller, the heavy but comic father, was played by Leigh; Nokes and Underhill played comic cits, and Mountfort himself played opposite his wife as Young Reveller. The play was revived repeatedly, and remains a delightful work.

Mountfort's best part of his last year came in December, 1691, when he played the hilarious lout, Mr. Friendall, of Southerne's The Wives' Excuse . The play is good comedy, but quite serious, as Southerne focuses on the distress of an intelligent, sensitive woman, saddled with a foolish husband who is the perfect representative of a frivolous and malicious society. On Friday, 2 December 1692, Mountford acted what must have been his final role, Alexander in The Rival Queens .

Mountfort's life ended at the height of his fame, in the most spectacular and dramatic murder of its time. The notorious Lord Mohun, then age fifteen, frequented the playhouse in 1692, often in the company of Captain Richard Hill, age twenty. Hill hoped to win the affections of Anne Bracegirdle, known not only for her beauty and acting ability, but also for her chastity—supposedly a scarce virtue among the actresses of the time. In A Comparison between the Two Stages , the following dialogue takes place:

Sullen : But does that Romantick Virgin [Bracegirdle] still keep up her great Reputation?

Critick : D'ye mean her Reputation for Acting?

Sullen : I mean her Reputation for not acting; you understand me—.... 5 5 (London, 1702), p. 17.

Hill, making no headway with Mrs. Bracegirdle, concluded that she was in fact interested in Mountfort; they had often appeared on the stage together. More than once Hill was heard to utter threats against the actor, although Mohun was apparently on friendly terms with Mountfort Hill, determined to abduct the actress, persuaded Mohun to be his accomplice. They set Friday, 9 December 1692, as the date, and about ten o'clock in the evening, accompanied by some soldiers under Hill's command, they ambushed Mrs. Bracegirdle, her mother and her brother, Hamlet Bracegirdle, along with a man named Page, in Drury Lane. The actress's mother and Mr. Page fended the villains off for a time, in a moment a crowd gathered, and the would-be kidnappers saw that their plan was useless. Hill escorted the actress home and after having muttered a threat at Mr. Page proceeded to pace up and down outside their door. Approximately an hour and a half later, Mountfort appeared in Howard Street—apparently intent on confronting Hill and Mohun. Mohun greeted the actor courteously and asked if he had been sent for. Mountfort professed that he did not know anything of the business at hand, that he had come there by chance, adding that Mrs. Bracegirdle was no concern of his. What happened then happened fast and the witnesses disagree (see Borgman, pp. 135ff). It would seem, however, that Hill first struck the actor, then quickly drew and ran him through before Mountfort could draw. On his deathbed, traditionally the locale for truth-telling, Mountfort reported that " My Lord Mohun offered me no Violence, but whilst I was talking with my Lord Mohun, Hill struck me with his Left Hand, and with his Right Hand run me through, before I could put my Hand to my Sword " (Borgman, p. 140). It would seem clear that Hill gave the actor his deathblow and then, while the cry of murder was raised, escaped into the night. Mountfort, fatally wounded, staggered toward his own home in the next street. As Mrs. Mountfort opened the door, her husband fell bleeding into her arms; at one o'clock in the afternoon of the next day, he died. According to the "Account," he was to have played Bussy D'Ambois that night—Marlowe's tragedy of a young man who meets his death through assassination.

Although Hill made good his escape, Lord Mohun stood trial in Westminster before his peers. Mohun's defense was simply that he was not privy to Hill's design and did not assist and encourage him in it. The lords, having heard the evidence, retired, and the next day, Saturday, 5 February, acquitted Mohun of wrongdoing by a vote of 69-14. The prisoner was discharged.

The United Company found themselves seriously hampered by the death of Mountfort, and even more so when fifteen days later the great comedian Anthony Leigh died. The "Account" says that Mountfort's death "had so great an Affect on his Dear Companion, Mr. LEE the Comedian, that he did not survive him above the space of a Week." The Company delayed the opening of a new play by one William Congreve, The Old Bachelor . But when that smash hit finally came on the boards in March 1693, Susanna Mountfort played the gay évaporée, Belinda, to great applause. And on 31 January 1694, she married the actor John Verbruggen. The rather mysterious Anne Bracegirdle, for whom Mountfort had been killed, played female leads in all of Congreve's plays, and just as the public had once speculated on her relationship to Mountfort, they now speculated on her relationship to Congreve.

Although farce was popular with London audiences during the Restoration, there was considerable controversy as to what it was and what it was worth. In a period in which the canon of English literary criticism was being formed, farce illustrates the disparity between received classical principles and the playwright's actual craft. Dryden, who himself "stooped" to writing farce, nonetheless sneers in his preface to An Evening's Love, or The Mock-Astrologer [1671]:

Farce … consists principally of grimaces … Comedy consists, though of low persons, yet of natural actions and characters; I mean such humours, adventures, and designs, as are to be found and met with in the world. Farce, on the other side, consists of forced humours, and unnatural events. Comedy presents us with the imperfections of human nature: Farce entertains us with what is monstrous and chimerical. 6 6 Essays of John Dryden , ed. W. P. Ker (New York: Russell & Russell, 1900; rpt. 1961), I, 135-136.

Farce was theoretically unpopular because it relied on the extravagant and unnatural, as opposed to the play of real character found in comedy. And whereas in seventeenth-century comedy the avowed intention is usually to expose and thus to reform the vices and follies of the age, farce uses the grossly physical to draw a laugh; there is nothing to be learned from the slapstick and pigsbladder.

Though sneered at by theorists and subject to endless abuse in the prologues and epilogues of the day, farce continued as pleasing to Restoration audiences as it is today. James Sutherland notes that shrewd actor-playwrights such as Mountfort, Betterton, Underhill, Jevon, Dogget, Powell—men who knew intimately the tastes of the town, chose to write farce. 7 7 English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 132. Tate's A Duke and No Duke , Aphra Behn's The Emperor of the Moon , and Jevon's The Devil of a Wife , were among the most popular offerings, and although the Restoration wit may have gone to "Dr. Faustus" with a certain sense of intellectual slumming, he did continue to support quite generously the farceurs of that time. Moreover, farcical elements appear regularly in the supposedly elegant and artificial Restoration comedy of manners.