Vanbrugh’s The Confederacy and Other Adaptations

Abstract

Although Vanbrugh is now generally thought of as the writer of just two plays, The Relapse and The Provoked Wife, an exclusive concentration on these two works gives a completely misleading sense of his place in his contemporary theatre. In addition to the incomplete Journey to London, he was responsible (or, in the case of Squire Trelooby, partly responsible) for nine other plays. To ignore them is to misunderstand the nature of his achievement and, also, the particular role that he saw for himself as a theatrical practitioner.