William Wycherley: The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672)

Hippolita, Mrs Caution and Monsieur

[Image source: https://theatricalia.com/play/cwm/the-gentleman-dancing-master/production/s37 . From a 1961 production of The Gentleman Dancing-Master at the Pembroke Theatre, Croydon, directed by James Gillhouley. Hippolita was played by Hazel Penwarden, Mrs Caution by Athene Seyler, and Monsieur by Ronald Falk.]

William Wycherley was in Madrid on embassy duty from February 1664 to March 1665, and it was surely here that he saw or read the Calderón plays that underlie the first two of his own plays. (Both Calderón plays were included in the Tercera parte de comedias, published in August 1664.)

Love in a Wood based its "high" plot (the one about Christina and Valentine) on Mañanas de abril y mayo.

The Gentleman Dancing-Master, Wycherley's second play, takes the basic situation from Calderón's El maestro de danzar, written in the early1650s: a girl, surprised with her lover by her father, passes him off as her dancing-master. Calderón, maybe intending a tribute, adopted the title and the situation from a comedy by Lope de Vega, written back in 1594. That's how far back Mr Gerrard's breaking of the strings goes; though the actual instrument changed from vihuela (Lope) to guitarra (Calderón) to fiddle (Wycherley). 

In some small ways Wycherley's treatment unconsciously restored lopesca elements such as coarser comedy and eroticism. However the author that most often comes to mind when reading The Gentleman Dancing-Master is Molière -- but the Molière of the skits and entertainments rather than the masterpieces. 

The Gentleman Dancing-Master is largely farcical in nature, delighting in a sequence of extended routines. It was evidently designed to showcase the comedy talents of James Nokes (Monsieur) and Edward Angel (Don Diego), but there's plenty of opportunities for the other actors too; think of the maid Prue's attempts to stir an insensible Monsieur (Act IV), or Flirt's punitively comprehensive mistress-contract (Act V). 

Calderón's play is entertaining but is not very hilarious,  a rather high-toned romantic drama in which violence threatens but honour is finally preserved, jealousy dispelled and love triumphant. Though it's titled El maestro de danzar, the dancing-master situation only occupies part of Act II.

Wycherley picks on this small part of Calderón's play and magnifies it into a screwball comedy, an extended caper on the edge of detection.

Among his more important transformations: Calderón's Enrique and Leonor are devoted and secretly engaged lovers. Wycherley's Hippolita and Gerrard, on the other hand, have literally just met. Hippolita has just 24 hours to find a way of not marrying her idiotic cousin "Monsieur", who's so obsessed with French manners and dress that he even speaks in a fake French accent. She thinks the best way is to get married to someone else, but she doesn't know anyone else, so she dangles a carrot to lure the unknown Mr Gerrard to the house. There is instant mutual attraction, but they don't know anything about each other and aren't fully committed. At this juncture having to improvise being dancing-master and pupil is no easy matter, and one of Wycherley's most blissful ideas is to make Gerrard particularly bad at it. He's handsome, gentlemanly, ready enough for swordplay or breaking windows, but he cannot dance, sing or play, and is not even much good at lying; Hippolita has to do all the work. It's a thoroughly feeble performance, but happily he's up against two of the world's worst interrogators. 

Don Diego. None but thee, ladron! and thou diest for't. [Fight.

Mrs. Caution. Oh! oh! oh!—help! help! help!

Hippolita. O—what, will you kill my poor dancing-master? [Kneels.
Don Diego. A dancing-master! he's a fencing-master rather, I think. But is he your dancing-master? umph—
Gerrard. So much wit and innocency were never together before. [Aside.
Don Diego. Is he a dancing-master? [Pausing.
Mrs. Caution. Is he a dancing-master? He does not look like a dancing-master.
Hippolita. Pish!—you don't know a dancing-master: you have not seen one these threescore years, I warrant.
Mrs. Caution. No matter: but he does not look like a dancing-master.

Don Diego. Nay, nay, dancing-masters look like gentlemen enough, sister: but he's no dancing-master, by drawing a sword so briskly. Those tripping outsides of gentlemen are like gentlemen enough in everything but in drawing a sword; and since he is a gentleman, he shall die by mine. [They fight again.
Hippolita. Oh! hold! hold!

Mrs. Caution. Hold! hold!—Pray, brother, let's talk with him a little first; I warrant you I shall trap him; and if he confesses, you may kill him; but those that confess, they say, ought to be hanged—Let's see—
Gerrard. Poor Hippolita! I wish I had not had this occasion of admiring thy wit; I have increased my love, whilst I have lost my hopes; the common fate of poor lovers. [Aside.
Mrs. Caution. Come, you are guilty, by that hanging down of your head. Speak: are you a dancing-master? Speak, speak; a dancing-master?
Gerrard. Yes, forsooth, I am a dancing-master; ay, ay—
Don Diego. How does it appear?
Hippolita. Why, there is his fiddle, there
upon the table, father.
Mrs. Caution. No, busybody, but it is not:—that is my nephew's fiddle.
Hippolita. Why, he lent it to my cousin: I tell you it is his.
Mrs. Caution. Nay, it may be, indeed; he might lend it to him for aught I know.
Don Diego. Ay, ay: but ask him, sister, if he be a dancing-master, where.

Mrs. Caution. Pray, brother, let me alone with him, I know what to ask him, sure.
Don Diego. What, will you be wiser than I? nay, then stand away. Come, if you are a dancing-master, where's your school? Donde? donde?
Mrs. Caution. Why, he'll say, may be, he has ne'er a one.
Don Diego. Who asked you, nimble chaps? So you have put an excuse in his head.

Gerrard. Indeed, sir, 'tis no excuse: I have no school.
Mrs. Caution. Well; but who sent you? how came you hither?
Gerrard. There I am puzzled indeed. [Aside.

Mrs. Caution. How came you hither, I say? how—
Gerrard. Why, how, how should I come hither?
Don Diego. Ay, how should he come hither? Upon his legs.
Mrs. Caution. So, so! now you have put an excuse in his head too, that you have, so you have; but stay—
Don Diego. Nay, with your favour, mistress, I'll ask him now.
Mrs. Caution. Y'facks, but you shan't! I'll ask him, and ask you no favour, that I will.
Don Diego. Y'fackins, but you shan't ask him! if you go there too, look you, you prattle-box you, I'll ask him.
Mrs. Caution. I will ask him, I say!—come!
Don Diego. Where?
Mrs. Caution. What!
Don Diego. Mine's a shrewd question.
Mrs. Caution. Mine's as shrewd as yours.
Don Diego. Nay, then, we shall have it.—Come, answer me; where's your lodging? come, come, sir.
Mrs. Caution. A shrewd question, indeed! at the Surgeons'-arms, I warrant you; for 'tis spring-time, you know.
Don Diego. Must you make lies for him?
Mrs. Caution. But come, sir; what's your name?—answer me to that; come.
Don Diego. His name! why, 'tis an easy matter to tell you a false name, I hope.
Mrs. Caution. So! must you teach him to cheat us?
Don Diego. Why did you say my questions were not shrewd questions, then?
Mrs. Caution. And why would you not let me ask him the question, then? ....

(From Act II Scene 2.)

Full online text of The Gentleman Dancing-Master (in W.C. Ward's 1888 edition of Wycherley's plays):

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55426/55426-h/55426-h.htm .

Hippolita and Prue

[Image source: https://www.michelevazquez.com/directors-gallery-1/the-gentleman-dancing-master . From a 2005 production of The Gentleman Dancing-Master by the Pearl Theatre Company, New York, directed by Gus Kaikkonnen. Hippolita was played by Marsha Stephanie Blake, Prue by Michele Vazquez.]

The father in both plays is called Don Diego, but it makes a great deal of difference that Calderón's Don Diego is presented as a fairly typical Spanish father of the time, unemphatically protective of his daughter's honour, whereas Wycherley's "Don Diego" isn't Spanish at all, but just an Englishman who's nuts about all things Spanish and goes to ridiculous lengths to behave like a Spaniard; his extreme haughtiness, readiness to take offence and virtual imprisonment of his daughter are all poses. 

Both plays end with their Don Diegos resigning themselves (without very much struggle) to their daughters' choices. In Calderón it's because the young man is serious nobility; in Wycherley it's because it's too late, the couple already got married. Wycherley's Don Diego tries to pretend that he knew what was going on the whole time. It's a lie, but it expresses a deeper truth. In this play where not only the actors but all the main characters know they are performing, we find ourselves basking in a world that's detached from real consequences. We always suspected (didn't we?) that Don Diego and even Mrs Caution were at some level quite amenable to this so-called dancing-master. The more ramshackle Hippolita's contrivance appears, the more it seems to be hanging by a thread, the more we feel assured that everything is going to work out just fine.

Don Diego and Prue

[Image source: https://www.michelevazquez.com/directors-gallery-1/the-gentleman-dancing-master . From a 2005 production by the Pearl Theatre Company, New York, directed by Gus Kaikkonnen. Don Diego was played by Dan Daily, Prue by Michele Vazquez.]

Hippolita and Monsieur 

[Image source: http://www.guskaikkonen.com/more-direction2.html . From a 2005 production by the Pearl Theatre Company, New York, directed by Gus Kaikkonnen. Hippolita was played by Marsha Stephanie Blake, Monsieur by Sean McNall.]

Hippolita

[Image source: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O86954/catherine-feller-as-hippolita-in-caricature-sommerlad-gilbert/ . A caricature by Gilbert Sommerlad showing Catherine Feller as Hippolita in a 1963 Oxford New Theatre production.]

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Sir Malcolm Arnold's The Dancing Master (Op. 34) is a one-act opera based on Wycherley's play, composed in 1951-1952. The libretto was by Joe Mendoza. It was intended for television but was rejected as being too racy. There was a concert performance in 1962, a semi-staged performance in 2012, and fully-staged performances in 2015 and 2021. 

Here's the thrilling Berlioz-like introduction, in a performance by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by John Andrews:

*

Useful on the Spanish background:

Nora Rodríguez Loro, "Calderón and Wycherley’s Dancing-Masters", in English and American Studies in Spain: New Developments and Trends (Universidad de Alcalá, 2015), pp. 136-143 [PDF].

Daniel Fernández Rodríguez, "Tradición y reescritura : 'El maestro de danzar', de Lope a Calderón", Dicenda : Cuaderno de filología hispánica vol 36 (2018), pp 191-207. [PDF]

As yet there's no adequate online text of Calderón's El maestro de danzar. You can read a scanned version, with difficulty, here:

https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/comedia-famosa-el-maestro-de-danzar-3/

Lope de Vega's El maestro de danzar (scanned version):

https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra/el-maestro-de-danzar/

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Another post, on Wycherley's Love in a Wood:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/05/william-wycherley-love-in-wood-1671.html

William Wycherley: Love in a Wood (1671)

Ranger and Lydia in William Wycherley's Love in a Wood (1671)

Love in a Wood isn't performed nearly as often as it merits and I couldn't find any stills, so I made my own illustration, incompetently pilfering Sir Peter Lely (Lydia is based on the beauty in "The Music Lesson", Ranger on Lely's portrait of William Wycherley himself).

Lydia and Ranger are one of the five very distinct couples with which the play ends, and I may as well start with this pair. But immediately I realise I've made a stupid mistake, because Lydia ought to be wearing mourning. We never learn why, but it's relevant to Wycherley's wonderfully intricate plot: Lydia tricks Ranger into mistaking her for Christina, who's also in mourning. (The trick backfires on her.)

When we first meet Ranger, drinking at the French House* with Vincent and Dapperwit, he's briefly called away to a lady in a coach; returning, he says: 

Ran. I have had just now a visit from my mistress, who is as jealous of me as a wife of her husband when she lies in:—my cousin Lydia,—you have heard me speak of her.

Vin. But she is more troublesome than a wife that lies in, because she follows you to your haunts. Why do you allow her that privilege before her time?

Ran. Faith, I may allow her any privilege, and be too hard for her yet. How do you think I have cheated her to-night?—Women are poor credulous creatures, easily deceived.

Vin. We are poor credulous creatures, when we think 'em so.

Ran. Intending a ramble to St. James's Park to-night, upon some probable hopes of some fresh game I have in chase, I appointed her to stay at home; with a promise to come to her within this hour, that she might not spoil the scent and prevent my sport.

Vin. She'll be even with you when you are married, I warrant you. 

(Act I Scene 2)

["Mistress" as used by the men is about as vague in its meanings as "girlfriend"; intentionally so, to preserve the atmosphere of masculine freedom and sexual boasting. In this case, the respectable Lydia is evidently Ranger's fiancée. (Whereas the reputation of young Lucy, Dapperwit's "mistress", is more in question; at the end Dapperwit's outraged that Gripe should outsmart him by marrying Lucy, his former "wench".)]

[* Probably Chatelain's French House in Covent Garden. It's about a 20 minute walk from there to St James's Park. Evidently Ranger has no intention of keeping his appointment with Lydia.]

Though engaged to be married, Ranger still wants his sexual adventures, at least for now. Lydia wants to keep tabs on him. Each plays tricks on the other; Lydia isn't taken in by this one, contrary to Ranger's belief in the credulity of women. 

On the whole the pair seem pretty well matched. Of the five couples at the end, they're one of the more hopeful prospects. I'd give them six months at least: not because Ranger has forsworn his rakish adventuring -- that's as maybe --, but because they intrigue with equal enthusiasm, they seem to understand each other, and they're both able to compromise. 

If you've ever surrendered to the fascinations of Love Island or Made In Chelsea or MAFS you'll recognize this kind of discussion. Love in a Wood has something in common with that kind of show. 

To be honest, we don't care very deeply about the post-show futures of the participants. What we relish is the behaviour, the dynamics, the untruths and awkward moments that unfold before our eyes. We love it when people talk behind each other's back, like Dapperwit while Ranger is downstairs.

Dap. This Ranger, Mr. Vincent, is as false to his friend as his wench.

Vin. You have no reason to say so, but because he is absent.

Dap. 'Tis disobliging to tell a man of his faults to his face. If he had but your grave parts and manly wit, I should adore him; but, a pox! he is a mere buffoon, a jack-pudding, let me perish!

(Act I Scene 2)

And we love it when people get to hear what their partners say about them, as when Lydia overhears Ranger saying this sort of thing to Christina:

Ran. .... Besides, I would not for the world have given her troublesome love so much encouragement, to have disturbed my future addresses to you; for the foolish woman does perpetually torment me to make our relation nearer ....

Ran. If she were here, she would satisfy you she were not capable of the honour to be taken for you:—though in the dark. Faith, my cousin is but a tolerable woman to a man that had not seen you.

(Act 2 Scene 2)

And we love that delicious moment when someone blatantly caught in the wrong tries to work out exactly how much the other person knows:

Ran. Indeed, cousin, besides my business, another cause I did not wait on you was, my apprehension you were gone to the Park, notwithstanding your promise to the contrary.

Lyd. Therefore, you went to the Park to visit me there, notwithstanding your promise to the contrary?

Ran. Who, I at the Park! when I had promised to wait upon you at your lodging! But were you at the Park, madam?

Lyd. Who, I at the Park! when I had promised to wait for you at home! I was no more at the Park than you were. Were you at the Park?

Ran. The Park had been a dismal desert to me, notwithstanding all the good company in it, if I had wanted yours.

Lyd. [Aside.] Because it has been the constant endeavour of men to keep women ignorant, they think us so; but 'tis that increases our inquisitiveness, and makes us know them ignorant as false. ...

(Act III Scene 3)

(Ranger's rapid calculations go something like this: She knows I broke my promise to visit her at her home, but she can't be sure I went to the Park... unless she was at the Park herself and saw me .... but if she was, then she also broke her promise to me ....)

Meanwhile Lydia, holding back from outright confrontation, at least gets some revenge for those overheard comments: 

Lyd. [to Dapperwit] Take him with you, sir. I suppose his business may be there to borrow, or win, money, and I ought not to be his hindrance; for when he has none, he has his desperate designs upon that little I have -- for want of money makes as devout lovers as Christians. 

Dap. I hope, madam, he offers you no less security than his liberty.

Lyd. His liberty! As poor a pawn to take up money on, as honour. He is like the desperate bankrupts of this age, who, if they can get people's fortunes into their hands, care not though they spend them in jail, all their lives.

(Act III Scene 3)

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Let's briefly run an eye over those other couples:

Christina and Valentine. The posh pair, who look like they've stepped out of a heroic tragedy. Christina is simply a jewel. But let's hope that Valentine learns to master his jealousy and propensity for violence. 

Dapperwit and Martha. Dapperwit is a self-conscious wit, all the funnier because he's not actually very good at it, though he can certainly manage slander, lying and selfishness. And, with all that, a certain winning childishness. "A pox, I think women take inconstancy from me, worse than from any man breathing," he remarks at one point. Unceremoniously dumped by Lucy, he thinks he's struck gold when Martha is all over him; she's the only daughter of the aged and wealthy alderman Gripe. Then he learns that Martha is only marrying him because she's six months pregnant...

Gripe and Lucy .... and besides, the miserly old puritan instantly determines to marry young Lucy to prevent Martha inheriting his money. Secondary benefit, he obtains the object of his lecherous desires. Third benefit, he gets to reclaim all the money he previously had to pay Lucy to avoid a court case for assault. Lucy, willingly embracing a hard-nosed approach to life, wins big for her rapacious mother Mrs Crossbite and the seedy fixer Mrs Joyner. 

Sir Simon Addleplot and Lady Flippant. There's precious little enthusiasm on either side for this match, and that's before they learn the state of each other's finances. At least these two incompetent players in the marriage market have finally found someone they're capable of deceiving. They're both very funny, though. The widowed Lady Flippant's method is to haunt fashionable meeting places and take every opportunity to state how opposed she is to marriage. Sir Simon plumes himself on his Macchiavellian pursuit of two women, all the while adopting a clownish disguise that haplessly reveals his true character. 

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I've now mentioned twelve of the main roles. There's one more: Mr Vincent, the pot-companion of Ranger and Dapperwit, and the friend of Valentine. He attracts our attention (more than he should?) because he's the one major character who has no stake in the game, either sexual or financial. And because his good sense is very much needed by his fellows. 

Dominic F. Martia argues that Vincent is placed in contrast to Mrs Joyner: he is a virtuous enabler who assists others, not to line his purse but from true friendship and principle. There's a lot to be said for this idea, but in the earlier part of the play there are distinct hints of a more mixed picture. He's a "good-fellow" (II.1), characterized by his fondness for a bottle or three. There are also hints that his relations with women are troubled, that he doesn't talk to them easily (anyway not without a drink) and that he sometimes raises his fists. (Some of this is Dapperwit's trash-talking, but not all.) If Vincent is admirably discreet and unjudgmental, if he deprecates airing others' dirty linen, it's maybe because he has plenty of his own.

Here as elsewhere Love in a Wood blithely sketches a London in which dazzle and squalor don't just coexist but are intertwined. It's celebratory in form, but its darker shadows are a crucial part of the picture.

[Dominic F. Martia, The Restoration Love Ethos and the Representation of Love in the Plays of William Wycherley, PhD dissertation (Loyola University, 1972). https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1207 . Lively, informative and full of good ideas: recommended!]

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Love in a Wood, William Wycherley's first play, was first performed during Lent (Feb-Mar) in 1671, at the first Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. It was published in 1672 (or perhaps late 1671). 

Online text of Love in a Wood:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55426/55426-h/55426-h.htm

This is W.C. Ward's 1893 edition of Wycherley's plays. Be warned, Ward numbers the scenes differently from the 1996 Oxford edition of Wycherley's plays by Peter Dixon that I've referenced here. 

Dixon's notes are a treasure trove; I just wish he'd added one on the play's opening speech.

Lady Flip. Not a husband to be had for money!—Come, come, I might have been a better housewife for myself, as the world goes now, if I had dealt for an heir with his guardian, uncle, or mother-in-law; and you are no better than a chouse, a cheat.

(Act I Scene 1)

Am I the only person who has no idea what Lady Flippant means by "dealt for an heir with his guardian," etc ?

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The two emblematically confusing night-scenes in St James's Park are surrounded by scenes in nearby locations: the play is lovingly organized as a kind of gazetteer of fashionable London. The settings are:

I.1 Gripe's house in the evening (in the City)

I.2 The French House (Covent Garden -- evening)

II.1 St James's Park at night

II.2 Christina's lodging (in the "Old Pall Mall", i.e. the street called Pall Mall -- after midnight)

II.3 The street outside (Pall Mall -- night)

II.4 Vincent's lodging (near Pall Mall -- night)

III.1 Mrs Crossbite's house (in an obscure retired street -- or alley -- the next morning)

III.2 Mrs Crossbite's dining room

III.3 Lydia's lodging (the location isn't specific, but it seems to be near Covent Garden)

IV.1 Gripe's house

IV.2 Another room in Gripe's house 

IV.3 The Old Pall Mall (i.e. Pall Mall -- about 19:30)

IV.4 Vincent's lodging (near Pall Mall -- about 20:00)

V.1 St James's Park (at night)

V.2 The dining room at Mulberry Garden House (at the west end of St James's Park -- night).

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A post about the Mulberry Garden, mentioned several times in Love in a Wood and the location of its final scene (gracefully glancing at the secondary meaning of the title, which primarily means "love in a state of confusion"):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/04/mulberry-garden.html

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Another post, about Wycherley's The Gentleman Dancing-Master:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/07/william-wycherley-gentleman-dancing.html

Mulberry Garden

Black Mulberry (Morus nigra)

[Image source: https://www.moruslondinium.org/events .]

 

I remember plain John Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great,) in one uniform cloathing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts with him and Madame Reeve at the Mulberry-garden, when our author advanced to a sword, and chadreux wig. -- Posterity is absolutely mistaken as to that great man; tho' forced to be a satirist, he was the mildest creature breathing, and the readiest to help the young and deserving; tho' his comedies are horribly full of double entendres, yet 'twas owing to a false complaisance for a dissolute age. He was in company the modestest man that ever convers'd.

(From the Gentleman's Magazine, 1745. The correspondent, a certain Mr W.G., being then in his 87th year.)

The correspondent seems to be remembering Mac Flecknoe: "coarsely clad in Norwich drugget". Dryden was attacking Thomas Shadwell, who did indeed come from Norfolk. (Dryden himself was born in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire.) Drugget was a coarse, cheap, semi-woolen fabric. (Incidentally, WG later remarks that "Shadwell in conversation was a brute.") 

Pace Scott, it isn't impossible that a fifteen year old WG should have eaten tarts with Dryden and Anne Reeve before the Mulberry Garden closed in around 1674. (And hence, I suppose, the point about Dryden's readiness to help the young and deserving.) But I do have to agree with J R Lowell that WG can't have remembered a time before Dryden paid court to the great. Dryden's first real success was the 1665 hit The Indian Queen, but he had been seeking favour ever since the Restoration (1661). In 1668 he was appointed Poet Laureate with an income of £200 a year -- the same salary Sir Peter Lely received as court painter. 

Perhaps the whole memoir is a fabrication. There's something almost too convincing about this picture of Dryden in his glory days, still inwardly so plain and modest. (Dryden's family had been Puritans.) Incidentally Scott seems to remember it when constructing Claud Halcro's pet story of meeting "glorious John" in The Pirate. 

This Mulberry Garden was originally a four acre plantation of James I in c. 1609, at the west end of St James's Park. The north wing of Buckingham Palace now occupies the site. James wanted to kickstart a British silk industry, and he encouraged others to plant the trees too. Nearly all the trees were black mulberries, the ones with delicious fruit, though it was well known that they were inferior from the silkworm point of view; perhaps the white mulberry didn't thrive in Britain during the Little Ice Age. One aged tree still survives in Buckingham Palace garden. Anyway, the silk industry never took off, but the Mulberry Garden blazed briefly during the Restoration as a pleasure garden with refreshments, visited by Pepys, and celebrated in the plays of Sedley and Wycherley. (It's an easy but perhaps false assumption that the tarts were mulberry tarts; other sources mention the Mulberry Garden's cheesecakes.)

"Madame Reeve" was Anne Reeve or Reeves, a minor actress in Dryden's company. She was apparently Dryden's mistress from around 1671 to 1675. Dryden never said so, but it was a regular feature of his enemies' writings. (Dryden had married in 1663 and had three sons.) Anne, never a leading actress, disappeared from stage records around 1675. The tradition is that she entered a convent.

In S.G.'s poem on the previous page of the Gentleman's Magazine (to which Mr W.G. responds), Reeve is named in a list of actresses who had appeared in the first performance of Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1673). A note adds: "Mrs Anne Reeve, Dryden's mistress, acted the part of Amarillis in the Rehearsal, &c. She died a religious." 

"A chadreux wig". More commonly Chedreux: a famous Paris maker of perruques. It doesn't seem to mean any particular style of wig, just the normal curled long-bottomed wig of the Restoration era. 

E.g  in John Oldham's Imitation of Juvenal 3:

What wouldst thou say, great Harry, shouldst thou view

Thy gaudy fluttering race of English now,

Their tawdry clothes, pulvilios, essences;

Their Chedreux perruques, and those vanities

Which thou, and they of old, didst so despise?

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Sir Charles Sedley's play The Mulberry Garden,  first performed 18 May 1668. Pepys was at the first night and was unimpressed, but it proved popular. 

Wildish. What, is there store of game here, gentlemen?

Modish. Troth, little or none; a few citizens that have brought their children out to air 'em, and eat cheesecakes.

Wildish. I thought this place had been so full of beauties, that like a pack of hounds in a hare warren, you could hunt one for another: what think you of an arbor and a bottle of Rhenish?

The scene proceeds: Olivia and Victoria are secreted in the next arbour while Estridge and Modish are lured by Wildish into ever more outrageous brags about what they get up to with these ladies. (But if I were Olivia I am not sure the scene would make me more inclined to marry Wildish.) 

The Mulberry Garden has plenty of lively dialogue, switching into pleasing couplets for the "high" characters. But the stagecraft is rather basic; it's a sequence of situations rather than a logical development. The main issue is resolved by an external political event: the Commonwealth becomes the Restoration and everyone can be friends again. Its high and low characters don't interact, not in credible ways anyhow, and it doesn't build an organic picture of society in motion. All this is in marked contrast to Wycherley's brilliant Love in a Wood (below). 

If you want to read The Mulberry Garden online, ignore the ruinous Michigan text (OCR problems I suppose), and instead read it in the 1675 edition on Google Books.

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Mulberry_Garden_a_Comedy/mhNSAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

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William Wycherley's Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, first performed in Lent 1671. The final scene in Wycherley's park-ranging play takes place in "The dining-room at Mulberry Garden House". Wycherley may preserve the name of its proprietor: at one point he calls it "Colby's Mulberry Garden"; Sedley gives the name as Coleby.

L. Flip. Have I not constantly kept Covent-Garden church, St. Martin's, the playhouses, Hyde Park, Mulberry garden, and all the other public marts where widows and maids are exposed?

 (Act I Scene 1 -- Lady Flippant assuring Mrs Joyner that she has done everything possible to get a new husband.)

Mrs. Joyn. Your reputation! indeed, your worship, 'tis well known there are as grave men as your worship; nay, men in office too, that adjourn their cares and businesses, to come and unbend themselves at night here, with a little vizard-mask.

Gripe. I do believe it, Mrs. Joyner.

Lucy. Ay, godmother, and carries and treats her at Mulberry-garden.

Mrs. Cros. Nay, does not only treat her, but gives her his whole gleaning of that day.

....  

Lucy. But I have the boldness to ask him for a treat.—Come, gallant, we must walk towards the Mulberry-garden.

Gripe. So!—I am afraid, little mistress, the rooms are all taken up by this time.

Mrs. Joyn. Will you shame yourself again? [Aside to Gripe.

Lucy. If the rooms be full we'll have an arbour.

Gripe. At this time of night!—besides, the waiters will ne'er come near you.

(Act V Scene 1 -- Gripe trying to get out of spending any money.)

My post about Love in a Wood:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/05/william-wycherley-love-in-wood-1671.html