Although The Conscious Loversdutifully finds its way into anthologies of eighteenth-century drama as an example of sentimental comedy in its early days, few modern readers would argue that Steele's last dramatic composition is a living classic. Current sentimentality takes a different form and chooses different objects of concern, while the history of response to the play is not rich in incentives to rehabilitation. The most memorable commentary on the piece, indeed, comes from Fielding's Joseph Andrews, where Parson Adams commends it on the grounds that it includes passages "almost solemn enough for a sermon" (Bk.3, ch.9). Against this unpromising backdrop I make no new claims for the work's intrinsic merit; I would, however, like to resituate The Conscious Lovers as an example of innovation: self-conscious innovation, in fact, conceived in an explicitly polemical spirit and designed to change the ground-rules of contemporary drama. Solemn sermons may have few charms today, but the process of literary-historical and generic change is deservedly a focal point for much present-day discussion.1 In its time Steele's play figured prominently as a departure from traditional comic forms, undertaken in an environment where tradition could not easily be left behind. The pressures exerted by such novelty may be read not only in the explicit controversy excited among Steele's contemporaries but also in many of the internal structures and metaphorical resources of the play-text itself. I want to explore both the public debate and the formal structures and resources, stressing above all the importance of the genealogical idea and the related question of legitimate descent both as they affect Steele's own play and as they become stock terrain for the eighteenth-century combat over the significance and worth of sentimental drama.
It will be useful to re-establish first of all that Steele really did think of himself as an innovator, a propagandist for a new comedy, which was to replace Restoration bawdy on stage. This preliminary must be looked after because the nature and indeed the very existence of such a thing as "sentimental drama" have been contested in the critical literature. While older commentators such as Ernest Bernbaum acknowledged the presence of a new subgenre, pointing out origins, a thematic repertoire, and a possible sociology for the form, by the 1950s skepticism had set in. John Loftis, for example, claimed that while there are plenty of plays about merchants in the eighteenth century, there is no such thing as a generically certifiable "sentimental play" (Comedy 127-132). This view may be compared with the latest contribution to the relevant taxonomies from Douglas Canfield, whose Tricksters and Estates provides a theoretical propaedeutic to his major Broadview anthology. This anthology is distinguished by an excellent selection of well-edited plays and a set of somewhat idiosyncratic categorizations: The Conscious Lovers is slotted in the top-level apparatus as a "tragicomic romance" along with Southerne's Oroonoko and Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (ix). A more balanced and erudite treatment is provided in Robert Hume's authoritative The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Hume's history is, in fact, an account of generic change, with persuasive material on the passage from "hard" to "soft" or "humane" comedy as the seventeenth century draws to a close.2 Nonetheless, Hume also stresses the extreme particularity of the eighteenth-century theatre scene: he does not deny that there are sentimental plays, but he does caution against dividing theatrical history into clear "before" and "after" periods. As he puts it, "The history of drama, closely considered, is infuriatingly untidy" (9). Such a view is tacitly endorsed in Richard Bevis's survey of drama from the Restoration to 1789. In a chapter entitled "Anything Goes," Bevis stresses the sheer diversity of comic production between the Glorious Revolution and The Licensing Act (146-178).
What to conclude from this brief review? For one thing, an ever more detailed accumulation of facts about eighteenth-century theatrical life and a new caution about the wisdom of relying on fast and leaky definitions of genre as such have combined to problematize the concept of a thematically, formally, or even historically coherent sentimental type. Gone are the days when Ernest Bernbaum could describe the production of Gibber's Love's Last Shift in 1696 as "the beginning of a new epoch in English dramatic history" (1). In place of such certainties we have had attempts to redraw the generic map as well as counsels to abandon generic classification altogether; we have had accounts of eighteenth-century theatrical life stressing manic but theoretically uninteresting change and other accounts insisting that little, if anything, changed at all. In the context of this kind of flux it is indeed difficult to advance arguments about the consistency and character of the comedy of feeling.3
In the face of all this refined denial, however, I would like to uphold a few points. It is clear, first of all, that Steele was determined to market his work as a substantial departure from the old ways. This is true of his earliest dramatic efforts as well as of The Conscious Lovers. In the Preface to The Funeral, for instance, Steele advertised the "innocence" of the production (Plays 19), and The Lying Lover-was to be a full-blown exercise in dramatic reform, "a Comedy, which might be no improper Entertainment in a Christian Commonwealth" (115). After writing these early plays Steele began polemicizing about drama in his periodical journalism; from 1709 on he campaigned in The Tatler, The Spectator, and elsewhere for the reformation and renovation of the theatre. He was appointed manager of Drury Lane partly in the hope that he would be able to embody his ideas in practical reform of the repertoire. The Conscious Lovers itself was incubated for a long time-John Loftis claims that Steele may well have been working on it as early as 1710 (Steele 184)-and during the period immediately before its production it was the object of much advance publicity in various forms (Loftis, Steele 183-193; Steele, Plays 279-82). In every respect this comedy was heralded as a daring production, intended to mark a break both from the imputed depravity of Steele's predecessors and from the more purely aesthetic canons governing the resources and effects appropriate to traditional comic art.
Public reaction to The Conscious Lovers is somewhat difficult to interpret. It is well known that the play enjoyed remarkable success, with an initial run of eighteen nights and many revivals thereafter (Plays 282). As for money, it took in more than any other play hitherto put on at Drury Lane. Buoyed by popular acclaim and especially grateful for the excellent performances put in by the original actors, by the time of the composition of his Preface Steele could declare himself satisfied with the reception he had been given.
General attestations of popularity, then, are easy to come by; more difficult to determine are the reasons for the public's approval. Steele's editor Shirley Strum Kenny emphasizes that private testimony demonstrates how "people widely responded to Steele's play in the way he had intended" (Plays 286), particularly in their willingness to recognize Bevil Jr. as a new kind of virtuous hero explicitly crafted to supplant the Dorimants of the previous age. But comments on the aesthetic novelty of the play are rare. There are hints, such as one poet's reference to "more than Classic ground" (qtd. in Plays 285), that readers and viewers understood how Steele's new morality went hand in hand with a new aesthetic, but even where they occur they are not especially stressed. Critical self-consciousness, unfortunately, was largely the preserve of the play's many detractors, and so the best measure of Steele's iconoclasm is by way of inference from what his enemies said of his work.
