Sir John Vanbrugh and his plays. The Relapse (1696)

British architect who brought the English Baroque style to its culmination in Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire. He was also one of the dramatists of the Restoration comedy of manners. Vanbrugh’s grandfather was a Flemish merchant, and his father was a businessman in Chester, where the young Vanbrugh (by tradition) went to the King’s School. In 1686 he was commissioned in a regiment of foot soldiers and in 1690, while visiting Calais, France, was arrested as a suspected English agent. While imprisoned in the Bastille, he wrote the first draft of a comedy. After his release in 1692, he was a soldier again for six years but appears to have seen no active service.

Writer

Vanbrugh’s first comedy, The Relapse: Or Virtue in Danger, was written as a sequel.It opened in 1696 and was highly successful. His next important piece, The Provok’d Wife (1697), was also a triumph. In 1698 the churchman Jeremy Collier published an attack on the immorality of the theatre aimed especially at Vanbrugh, whose plays were more robust than those of such contemporaries as William Congreve. Vanbrugh and others responded, but to little effect, and Vanbrugh kept silent until 1700. Then came a sequence of free and lively adaptations from the French, more farce than comedy, including The Country House (first performed 1703) and The Confederacy (1705).