ABSTRACT
It could be said of all Durfey's stage productions during the last ten years of his life as an active dramatist (1699-1709) that - to quote the epilogue to his last play The Modern Prophets (1709) - they were written 'to please with Novelty'. After being savaged by Collier in 1698 and, before that, having suffered from a change in audience taste which saw intrigue comedy losing its appeal, he sought novelty in subject matter and in style as a way of regaining favour and, perhaps, escaping further attack. For instance in Massaniello (1699-1700), as we have seen, he attempted a new kind of tragedy. After the turn of the century he produced in Wonders in the Sun (1706) a comic opera stranger than anything so far and comedies aimed at contemporary targets such as The Modern Prophets (1709) or, thereafter, claiming to display original and experimental characters such as The Bath (1701) and The Old Mode & the New (1703). Though none caught on with audiences, some of the new ventures - the lower-class tragedy, the opera of the absurd, the new-made Restoration comedy - are interesting attempts. They show him trying to write for the stage without falling foul of the new restrictively polite taste and without appearing dull. His down-to-earth language in Massaniello - discussed in an earlier chapter - hints at a new style for new material but the result is mixed. Durfey did not have a good ear for verse. Sometimes the characters speak in prose, which can be successful. Eric Rothstein's sympathetic view that Durfey achieves 'a new kind of verisimilitude' by basing the devices of Restoration tragedy in 'the anarchic brutality of the mob' only goes so far to redeem the play, which breaks down on the issue of language.1 The grossly written mob scenes, Rothstein shows, are lively but the rest of the play is linguistically defective. Massaniello may be a response to Collier's criticism of licentious comedy in that the play deals with characters who are still delinquent (the kind of characters that interested Durfey) but are shielded from critical objection* because 'tragic' and punished. But he could not persuade audiences to like them.
