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Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) A nonjuring clergyman, whose Short View is the most serious attack ever made on the stage in this country. It was replied to by Congreve and other dramatists, but Collier was completely victorious, and the best proof of his success, and of the necessity for his attack, was the marked improvement in decency which it produced.
-Lowe1
ROBERT W. Lowe's Victorian assessment of "the Collier controversy" would have dumbfounded Jeremy Collier. Did he in fact "succeed," and if so, what is the evidence for his success? Early historians of English drama assert that by publishing A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage in London in 1698, Collier "caused" the rise and dominance of "sentimental comedy," but this tidy explanation of dramatic evolution was demolished by Joseph Wood Krutch as early as 1924.2 Since that time Collier has resided in an odd, twilight zone. He is regularly deplored, sneered at, quoted, awarded "victory" in disdainful tones-but most twentieth-century scholars (myself included) have tiptoed quietly around virtually all questions concerning the significance of this stormy and conspicuous episode in the history of British theater.
Did Collier himself believe that he "succeeded"? Hardly. In his replies to his critics, Collier bitterly condemns the "incorrigibleness" of contemporary playwrights in refusing to accept correction and amend their ways.3 Most of the plays Collier had excoriated remained staples of the London repertory, many of them for decades. Arthur Bedford's enormous catalogs of offensive passages in old and new plays, and Collier's own collection of horrors from post-1698 plays, demonstrate to their disgust that chastisement had achieved nothing.4 The license granted to Vanbrugh and Congreve by the queen in 1704 (authorizing them to operate a company at Vanbrugh's new Theatre in the Haymarket) must have seemed the crowning indignity and proof of failure to Collier and his allies.
The uproar generated by Collier's book demonstrates beyond doubt that he seemed important (and threatening) to contemporary playwrights, and his formative influence on English drama was proclaimed by virtually every literary historian for fully two centuries. Three hundred years after the publication of Collier's jeremiad, the time seems ripe to reconsider some assumptions about historical causation. We need to inquire whether Collier really mattered, and if...