The Parson Turn’d Critick: Jeremy Collier and his Antagonists

Abstract

Modern scholars have long recognized the marked presence of dramatic criticism in Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). In a treatise that some believed ultimately sought the closing of the theaters, Collier employed a critical style and method modeled after Rymer and offered relatively close analyses of 20 contemporary plays, all the while citing authorities from Aristotle to Dryden. Despite the importance of criticism in Collier’s attack on the theater, little attention has been paid to his role as a critic. Joseph Wood Krutch provides the most sympathetic account, but he essentially argues that Collier only “pretended” to be a critic to confound his opponents.¹ More recent scholars have been more dismissive. Barish regards Collier’s critical digressions as a distraction from his main purpose, and Aubrey Williams details the positions of Collier’s opponents to prove “the grossness of critical and moral sensibility exhibited by Collier and his supporters.”² And Zimansky states flatly, “Collier is not a critic, and there is little point in discussing his professed views of the drama as though he were” (xlvi). Implicit in all of these arguments is the assumption that Collier cannot be classified as a literary critic because he belongs instead to the lineage of anti-theatrical polemicists such as Stephen Gosson and William Prynne.

Nay,’ tis yet a little more strange, that this Author should quarrel with the Stage for this Boldness with the Clergy, when he himself has furnish’d it with one of the most Divertive Characters for a Comedy; and one that would bear as just and as honest a Satyr, as any that ever appear’d upon it: For his very Remarks upon the Relapse, as he has manag’d them, abstracted from the rest of Mr. Collier’s Singularities, would supply a Subject even for a whole Farce; and carry as fair a Title, call’d, The Parson turn’d Critick, as evergrac’d a Playhouse-Bill.

Elkanah Settle, A Farther Defence of Dramatick Poetry (1698) 62.