The Comical Revenge, or, Love in a Tub by Sir George Etherege (1636-1691) was first staged in 1664 when Etherege was 28. In the early years of the “Restauration” of the stage, the plays that were performed were mostly the works of an earlier era, since theatre as a profession had been in hiatus for eighteen years. Jonson and Fletcher were among the most popular older playwrights– Shakespeare was too poetical and romantic for the time. Contemporary playwrights, like Cowley, Tuke and Dryden, were still struggling to find a voice, a style.  What the “Town”[1]and it’s new, Cavalier, society was waiting for was a play that reflected their image and style – their manners. They got a taste of it for the first time with Love in a Tub.

As Etherege puts it himself in a later play, we are given our first picture of “men of great employment”…  that were … “every moment ratling from the Eating-Houses to the Play-Houses, from the Play-Houses to the Mulberry Garden,” not to mention the brothels, where they can enjoy “the harmless lust of the Town.” Which was, of course, far from harmless.[2]

The main plot is an almost ludicrous melodrama involving love, jealousy, dueling and attempted suicide, all in verse (rhyming and not rhyming) of questionable quality. The gentlemen – unlike the true Restoration rakes of later dramatic appearance– are fiercely honorable and deeply emotional to the point of near farce. Lovis wants his dear friend Colonel Bruce (a Cavalier war hero) to marry his sister Graciana. But Graciana loves Lord Beaufort. Lovis nearly goes mad. Bruce challenges Beaufort to a duel but then Beaufort saves the Colonel’s life so Bruce cannot duel with him, but Beaufort takes this as a rebuke to his honour and insists so Bruce can do nothing else but fall on his sword. He appears to be at the verge of death however, somehow, miraculously, he survives. These are throwbacks to earlier romances of a pre-Restoration era. The only exception, among the “gentlemen” is Sir Frederick Frollick who drinks nightly, tears up the “Town”, visits the maids and has no real interest in love but does enjoy the fact that the Widow is filthy rich (in fact her name is Mrs. Rich). Frollick is the first appearance of what is to come on the Restoration stage. The verbal sparring between Sir Frederick and the Widow introduced a style of wit hitherto unknown upon the English stage but which would become the centre piece of Restoration comedy.

       But the real interest of the play is one of the two comic sub-plots which centers around a character called (and here I quote from the Personae Dramatis) “Dufoy, a saucy impertinent French-man, Servant to Sir Frederick.” Dufoy is given by Etherege a ridiculous French accent in which almost every word ends with an accented é [3]The first word he speaks in the play is the common oath “Pox” on his master whos truck Dufoy the night before while “in his cups”. This, it turns out is not a coincidence, since Dufoy, later on (Act II, 1) tells the audience that he has to daily take his medicine because he has “de clapé”. At the time there was little or no distinction between gonorrhea and syphilis – in fact many surgeons thought that they were the same thing. But it becomes very clear that what Dufoy has is syphilis because his “medicine” is the famous Diet Drink.[4] Dufoy goes to great and bizarre lengths to hide his condition from everyone, particularly fellow servants in several households.

       Two chambermaids, Betty and Lettice, discover the secret. Dufoy has been pretending to be in love with Betty and she has found out the truth. She says to Lettice: “dissembling rascal; h’as got the foul disease; our coachman discover’d it by a bottle of Diet Drink he brought and hid behind the stairs.” Betty has drugged Dufoy and the coachman enters with a Tub without a bottom and “a shut at the top to be lock’d, and a hole to put ones head out at.” Dufoy is locked into this walking Tub and, when he wakes up, the chambermaids mock him, including saying he was in the right Tub because he was beginning to sweat. A short time later, Sir Frederick is arrested by bailiffs and Betty releases Dufoy to go and rescue his master.

       At another point in the play Dufoy states that he is “more den half de Mercurié.” The probable reason for making the character French (aside from the “humour” of the improbable accent) is the fact that syphilis was often referred to as the French disease. We can only assume that this subplot was considered quite musing among the theatre-goers and gentlemen about town in 1664, since the play was quite a success. Within a very few years the topic would be great deal less amusing and many of those who sat laughing in that audience would find themselves infected with the disease that they had laughed at.

The Merry Men

       The chief wit, poet and man about town of the Restoration, was John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester(1647-1680). At the time of the Restoration, Rochester was 13 and a student at Oxford where, it was said, he became debauched. Because his father had been so loyal to Charles II while in exile, he was made much of by the new king when he arrived at court. He was sent by the king on a European tour (France and Italy)for 3 years and was said to have been reformed by his tutor. He returned in1664 and until 1676 led a life of dissipation during which for five years he was always drunk and during which he:

1:abducted his future wife.

2:lived a few times in the Tower of London for insults to the King (who always forgave him).

3:become the wittiest man of a witty age.

4:wrote a lot of poetry of great quality and filth.

5:had sex with as many women as he could.

6:trained Elizabeth Barry to be a great actress.[5]

7:got syphilis.

8:insulted just about everyone.

9:fought courageously at sea.

10:slept with Nell Gwyn.

11:drank with The Merry Gang: Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset; John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave; Henry Killigrew; Sir Charles Sedley; the playwrights William Wycherley and George Etherege; and George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. 

12:took the “cure.”

With all this behind him he was still only 29 years old and in failing health. He would die at 33.

       Rochester was closely associated with the theater. Aside from being close friends with Etherege and Wycherly, writing a number of prologues and epilogues and being a regular audience member, he was a model for a number of major Restoration drama characters. He was portrayed as Dorimant in The Man of Mode, Etherege’s last and best play. In Nathaniel Lee’s Princess of Cleves he is the pattern for the Duke Nemours and in Aphra Behn’s The Rover, Part II he is Willmore. He was also, most likely, the model for Harry Horner in Wycherly’s great comedy, The Country Wife (which, after the fall of the House of Stuart, was banned from the stage). In additionhe is believed to have trained Elizabeth Barry to become the greatest actress of the era after having seen her booed off of the stage at her first performance.[6]

The Disease

       Sometime after the age of 13, Rochester contracted syphilis. Indeed, it would have been somewhat of a miracle if he hadnot. Some claim that it was while he lived a “debauched” life at Oxford, some say he caught it in France (the “French pox”), or could just as well have been at London brothel. In order to understand the treatment it is necessary to understand a little bit about the disease.

       Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease (although it can be passed on congenitally).[7]It is likely to have been brought back from the America’s by the men in Columbus’ ships as a kind of natural payback for the smallpox that was to ravage and almost wipe out the indigenous people of New World. It has three distinct stages. In the first stage it presents itself as a chancre, or sore, at the point of entry (the genitals). It is often small and painless but noticeable.  The second stage produces painful sores and pock marks that can be extremely unpleasant but they eventually go away. The Third stage presents itself in various ways, motorp roblems, heart problems, brain problems – always fatal. There are varying numbers of years between stages when it is latent but spreading. It is caused by a bacteria know as Treponema pallidum and is cured with antibiotics, especially penicillin. It is still going strong with 45 million known cases in2015.

        Since it’s arrival in Europe in the 1490’s it has been traditionally treated with(among other things) mercury. For hundreds of years previously, Arab doctors had treated skin conditions with mercury. Mercury (Hg) weighs 13.6 times as much as water. Iron, stone and lead float on its surface. And it is a deadly poison. There were a number of outbreaks of mercury poisoning in Japan in the 1950’s. The worst was in Minamata where 600 died and 3,000 were confirmed as infected. It is still referred to as Minamata disease. In Grassy Meadows, Ontario, First Nations people continue to suffer from mercury poisoning in the fish and the water from industrial dumping of mercury in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

The Tub (again)

In the fifteenth century bathhouses had been very popular – for bathing. In fact since there was little segregation of the sexes it was said – in Paris at least – that Parisians were cleaner then than they are today. However this also led to the spread of syphilis and so the bathhouses lost their popularity. A few bathhouse owners adapted their establishments to the treatment of the disease rather than its spread.

In London, Madame Fourcard’s bath-house in Leather Lane, off Hatton Garden was the most famous.  Her Quacksalvers[8]were Batten and Ginman, who applied the mercury. Surgeons who applied mercury-based ointments reported a lessening of their patients' pain and a clearing of ulcers. But they tended to use such enormous quantities of the toxic metal that a price was paid in physical side effects including new ulceration, skin eruptions, paralysis, shaking, anorexia, gastric distress, nausea, rotting and loosening of teeth, unquenchable thirst while producing gushing saliva measured in pints and quarts.

Mercury was rubbed into the open sores after being mixed with fat, butter, vinegar, incense, lead and sulphur.

The patient was then saturated with it in fumigating chamber and soaked with it in a super-heated tub. All this was repeated for several times a day for 6 weeks or more, all while breathing mercury saturated air. Patients also received mercury enemas and something called the “diet-drink” which contained mercury.

Mercury poisoning makes the sufferer drool and the quacks thought it a good sign if the patient drooled several pints a day. Half of the patients died of dehydration, heart failure, suffocation, and (of course) mercury poisoning. They lost red blood cells, and suffered liver and kidney failure. They also went mad – mad as a hatter.[9] A large number committed suicide rather than continue with the treatment. Those who survived usually left with chronic disabling mercury poisoning that never left them. As the saying went then: “five minutes with Venus meant a lifetime with Mercury.”

The Cure

       Although the usual course of treatment was for 6 weeks, sometimes it was longer. Rochester’s friend Henry Savile’s treatment lasted for 6 months. He must have had tremendous strength and stamina, and yet Savile wrote about Jane Roberts, a fellow patient, that wha tshe had endured “would make a damned soul fall a-laughing at his lesser pain. It is so far beyond description or belief”.

       And the very worst part of it all is that no one was cured. Mercury cured nothing; it only did irreparable damage. But the patients thought it worked for one reason. They went in for treatment when they entered the second stage of syphilis and the second stage usually lasts for about six weeks. So it looked like they had been cured. But they were only waiting to be killed by the third stage – if the mercury didn’t do it first.

       So it turns out that much of the audience in 1664, who sat and laughed at Etherege’s jokes about syphilis and mercury and the tub would not be laughing later. Or reciting the rhyme:

Rub-a-dub-dub

               Three men in a tub

       And how do you think they got there?

               The butcher, the baker,

               The candlestick-maker,

       They all jumped out of a rotten potato,

       T’was enough to make a man stare.

[1] This was the term that was used to reference London, generally pronounced “Tawn”

[2] The original Mulberry garden was a tree-planted pleasure ground and occupied the site of the present Buckingham Palace andgardens. Its name derives from a garden of mulberry trees planted in the reign of James I. in 1609.[

[3] And Etherege would have known better since he had spent some tim ein France.

[4] See below.

[5] They had a daughter.

[6] Rochester himself wrote a play that got him sent to the tower. Here’s the cast list: DRAMATISPERSONÆ:

BOLLOXIMIAN, King of Sodom

CUNTIGRATIA, His Queen

PRICKETT, Young Prince

SWIVIA, Princess

BUGGERANTHUS, General of the Army

POCKENELLO, Pimp, catamite and the King's Favourite

BORASTUS, Buggermaster-general

PENE & TOOLY, Pimps of Honour

LADY OFFICINA, She-pimp of Honour

FUCKADILL A Maid of Honour

CUNTICUL A Maid of Honour

CLITORIS Maid of Honour

FLUX Physician-in-ordinary to the King

VIRTUOSO Dildo and Merkin maker to the Court

[7] As in Ibsen’s Ghosts.

[8] A combination of Quack and Quicksilver (another name for mercury).

[9] Victorian hatters used mercury in their work and often went mad.

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