The Virtuoso

Thomas Shadwell's The Virtuoso is a Restoration comedy first produced at Dorset Garden Theatre in 1676 by The Duke's Company. Well received in its original production, it was revived several times over the next thirty years and “always found Success.”

Thomas Shadwell is acknowledged as the most topical of the major Restoration playwrights and the uniqueness of The Virtuoso lies primarily in its highly relevant satire on contemporary science and on the Royal Society, which, founded in 1660, was of great interest to Restoration audiences.

Shadwell was also known as the Restoration's leading advocate of Ben Jonson’s style of humour comedy, in which each humours character displays one unique and excessive folly. In his Dedication to The Virtuoso, Shadwell claimed that he had created four entirely new humours characters, by which he meant the titular virtuoso Sir Nicholas Gimcrack, Sir Formal Trifle (described in the cast list as “the Orator, a florid coxcomb”), Sir Samuel Hearty (“a brisk, amorous, adventurous, unfortunate coxcomb; one that by the help of humorous, nonsensical bywords takes himself to be a wit”), and Sir Nicholas’s uncle Snarl (“an old, pettish fellow, a great admirer of the last age and a declaimer against the vices of this, and privately very vicious himself.”) Though some critics believe that Sir Nicholas is an inconsistent character, of the four, his is the character with the most significant literary legacy. Scholars have discerned the influence of Sir Nicholas in the works of numerous subsequent playwrights, including Thomas d'Urfey, Lawrence Maidwell, Susanna Centlivre, Aphra Behn, and Peter Pindar.

Bruce and Longvil, two young men-about-town, described by Shadwell in the cast list as "Gentlemen of wit and sense,” have fallen in love with the two nieces of the virtuoso, Sir Nicholas Gimcrack. Bruce is in love with Clarinda and Longvil with Miranda. Unfortunately, Clarinda is in love with Longvil and Miranda with Bruce. Each lady also has a rival suitor. Clarinda is wooed by her uncle's best friend, the absurd orator Sir Formal Trifle, and Miranda by a gallant fool, Sir Samuel Hearty.

To gain admittance to Sir Nicholas's house where they can see their beloveds, Bruce and Longvil feign an interest in Sir Nicholas's absurd experiments, which include learning to swim on dry land by imitating a frog, transfusing the blood of a sheep into a man (resulting in a sheep's tail growing out of the man's anus), and bottling air from various parts of the country to be stored in his cellar like wine.

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