The London Merchant

Or the Real Birth of the Modern Theater

Welcome back! Today, I want to continue your tour of the Theater / Ideas factory. You’ve previously seen the section where I question the traditional ideas of how theater is made in America, and then saw the area where I examine theater education. Today is where I discuss plays and other theater writing. [I wish to thank playwright Justin Sherin, whose Substack “Plays for Today” nudged me in this direction.]

Today, I want to talk about a play that is largely forgotten: George Lillo’s 1731 domestic tragedy, The London Merchant, or The History of George Barnwell. Usually, play anthologies provide one or two plays from the English Restoration of the 1670s and 1680s, and then jump a century to maybe a play like She Stoops to Conquer or The Rivals from the 1770s. I get it: Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, John Gay, and Henry Fielding don’t get much attention these days, at least as playwrights, and theater history teachers usually take use the hundred year gap to talk about the great actors of the 18th century: Betterton, Garrick, Siddons, et al.

But I think by doing so, you miss an important “hinge of history,” as Thomas Cahill called them, “essential moments” in the story of the evolution of Western sensibility “when everything was at stake” and the “great gift-givers, arriving at the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration, leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they found.” Well! That’s a lot to lay on George Lillo’s doorstep, but I do think that his play served as an off ramp from the cynicism of the Restoration while pointing directly at the plays of Ibsen 150 years later.

The context of Lillo’s play is helpful to understanding the play. Charles II, who had spent the Puritan Revolution laying low in France, returned in 1660 set off a time of libertinism and debauchery that lasted until he died 25 years later. He was replaced on the throne by the morally conservative William and Mary in 1689. Nine years later, a clergyman named Jeremy Collier published a long attack on the English theater entitled A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, which set off a major controversy that raged for years. When the dust had settled, Collier emerged largely victorious (helped along by social changes that elevated the importance of the middle class), and domestic tragedy (tragedy with protagonists drawn from the middle class) and sentimental comedy (“tearful comedy”) gained ascendance. The London Merchant was a domestic tragedy that was notable for having a tragic protagonist who was not only not an aristocrat, but actually was an apprentice from the lower class! (Arthur Miller was still defending his right to call Willy Loman a tragic hero over 200 years later in “Tragedy and the Common Man.”)

The London Merchant has a clear demarcation between characters who are good and characters who are evil, as evidenced by the names gives to them: Thorowgood (a virtuous business owner), his true-hearted daughter Maria (the name associated with Jesus’ mother), and his two apprentices, Trueman and Barnwell all representing Team Good, and Millwood alone (a femme fatale whose name describes what she does to the “wood” of Barnwell) representing Team Bad. Lucy and Blunt, Millwood’s servants, are caught somewhere in the middle and are converted from Team Bad to Team Good.

Millwood is a fascinating character who is in many ways a throwback to the “bad old days” of the Restoration era—a sexual libertine who uses her beauty and worldly wiles to seduce the naive and virginal Barnwell and lead him ever deeper into moral decay until, at the last, she convinces him to kill his beloved rich uncle in order to inherit his money. Once she has received these ill-gotten gains from Barnwell, she immediately and coldly dumps him. The characters regularly address the audience, sharing their inmost thoughts, struggles, and plans forthrightly while delivering an overt warning to an audience filled with young apprentices to keep away from bad female influences or else. Barnwell and Millwood are eventually caught and brought to justice. Barnwell faces his hanging stoically, expressing heartfelt repentence and faith in God’s mercy; Millwood does the opposite, refusing to repent and shaking her fist at God to the last minute.

Now, if you’re rolling your eyes and wondering why the hell I am promoting this play as a “hinge of history,” I don’t blame you. It sounds like a moralistic cross between a soap opera and an After School Movie. And you wouldn’t be wrong to describe it that way. I would argue that, if played with commitment, it still would pack a punch (I was often surprised at how many of my students really loved reading it), but the reason I am discussing it is due to a single extraordinary scene near the very end of the play, Act IV Scene II, in which Millwood is unmasked and captured.

Millwood, cornered, enters with a pistol, but is quickly disarmed by Trueman, who declares “Here thy power of doing mischief ends, deceitful, cruel, bloody woman!” But instead of being led away, the most powerful and unexpected scene ensues.

Millwood, disarmed, hurls invective at Trueman, hinting at the theme that is to follow: “Fool, hypocrite, villain—man! thou canst not call me that!” Trueman self-righteously intones, “To call thee woman were to wrong thy sex, thou devil!” Millwood gives as good as she gets—better! “That imaginary being is an emblem of they cursed sex collected—a mirror, wherein each particular man may see his own likeness and that of all mankind.” Boom!

At this point, the older Thorowgood, seeing that Trueman is out of his depth, steps in to engage Millwood, warning her portentously “Think not by aggravating the faults of others to extensuate thine own, of which the abuse of such uncommon perfections of mind and body is not the least.”

And now, in a series of speeches that actresses in search of classic audition material ought to add to their repertoire, Millwood brings down the hammer. It is worth quoting the exchange in full:

MILLWOOD: If such I had, may well I curse your barbarous sex, who robbed me of ‘em ere I knew their worth; then left me, too late, to count their value by their loss. Another and another spoiler came, and all my gain was poverty and reproach. My soul disdained, and yet disdains, dependence and contempt. Riches, no matter by what means obtained, I saw secured the worst of men from both. I found it necessary therefore to be rich, and to that end I summoned all my arts. You call ‘em wicked; be it so! they were such as my conversation with your sex had furnished me withal.

Taken aback, Thorowgood tries to minimize her story by essentially replying with an 18th century #NotAllMen. “Sure, none but the worst of men conversed with thee.” But Millwood will have none of it.

MILLWOOD: Men of all degrees and all professions I have known, yet found no difference but in their several capacities; all were alike wicked to the utmost of their power. In pride, contention, avarice, cruelty and revenge, the reverend priesthood were my unerring guides. From suburb-magistrates, who live by ruined reputations, as the unhospitable natives of Corwall do shipwrecks, I learned that to charge my innocent neighbors with my crimes was to merit their protection; for to screen the guilty is the less scandalous when many are suspected, and detraction, like darkness and death, blackens all objects and levels all distinction. Such are your venal magistrates, who favor none but such as, by their office, they are sworn to punish. With them, not to be guilty is the worst of crimes, and large fees privately paid are very needful virtue.

Clearly caught off guard by the congency of her speech, Thorowgood nevertheless tries to keep her accusations within bounds: “Your practice has sufficiently discovered your contempt of laws, both human and divine; no wonder then that you should hate the officers of both.” Millwood flattens his attempt with a paraphrase of Hobbes:

I know you and I hate you all; I expect no mercy and I ask none; I followed my inclinations, and that the best of you do every day. All actions seem alike natural and indifferent to man and beast, who devour, or are devoured, as they meet with others weaker or stronger than themselves.

Thorowgood, giving credit where credit is due, compliments Millwood’s intellect: “What pity it is, a mind so comprehensive, daring, and inquisitive, should be a stranger to religion’s sweet and powerful charms.” Batter up:

MILLWOOD: I am not fool enough to be an atheist, though I have known enough of men’s hypocrisy to make a thousand simple women so. Whatever religion is itself, as practiced by mankind it has caused the evils you say it was designed to cure. War, plague, and famine, have not destroyed so many of the human race as this pretended piety has done, and with such barbarous cruelty, as if the only way to honour heaven were to turn the present world into hell.

At this, I imagine Thorowgood struck dumb, with no further retort. A pause lengthens, as Millwoods words sink in for characters and audience alike, and then Thorowgood, surprisingly, admits defeat: “Truth is truth, though from an enemy spoke in malice.” I suspect you could hear a pin drop. And then comes the moment when the Ibsenite drama is truly born.

Thorowgood turns to the audience, an audience presumably filled not only with apprentices, but with magistrates and clergymen and men of all kind, and he says:

THOROWGOOD: You bloody, blind, and superstitous bigots, how will you answer this?

His implied accusation hangs in the air, as the powerful search their consciences and question their actions. Millwood joins Thorowgood at the edge of the stage, perhaps standing right next to him, scanning the audience.

MILLWOOD: What are your laws, of which you make your boast, but the fool’s wisdom and the coward’s valor? the instrument and screen of all your villainies, by which you punish in others what you act yourselves, or would have acted had you been in their circumstances. The judge who condemns the poor man for being a thief had been a thief himself had he been poor. Thus you go on deceiving and being deceived, harrassing, plaguing, and destroying one another; but women are your universal prey.

And then, now speaking in verse, Millwood sums up:

Women, by whom you are, the source of joy,

With cruel arts you labour to destroy;

A thousand ways our ruin you pursue,

Yet blame in us those arts first taught by you.

Oh may, from hence, each violated maid,

By flatt’ring, faithless, barbarous man betray’d,

When robbed of innocence and virgin fame,

From your destruction raise a nobler name;

To right their sex’s wrongs devote their mind,

And future Millwoods prove, to plague mankind!

And having delivered her warning, Millwood exits under guard, leaving Thorowgood and the others presumably speechless and ashamed.

If it was Ibsen, the door would slam upon her exit.

Compared to Nora’s calm, cold speech to Torvald at the end of A Doll House, Millwood’s is a flamethrower that leaves only scorched earth in its wake. But the effect is similar: the audience has been directly confronted and condemned.

It’s an amazing theatrical moment, especially in 1731, and every time I read it I shake my head in admiration. And shame, because her questions still remain unanswered, and our preying on women unabated.