IV. HERMENEUTICS...

Buckingham's Old-Fashioned "Muse"

Potential evidence of a collaborative sibling bond between George and Mary Villiers comes to hand from two sources. The first is the pen royal. In a letter to his beloved sister, "Minette," Charles II writes, "Leave this [confidential correspondence] to our sister of Richmond [Mary Villiers], knowing as you do, the attachment he [her brother] hath for her and the tricks she hath so well served him" (D'Aulnoy 228). The second location is a recorded episode involving George Villiers and Bishop Burnet. Villiers shared with Burnet a draft of a severe character-sketch of Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York, of which Burnet strongly disapproved (O'Neill 249). This same sketch could well have been the germ of a collaborative Villiers venture, which culminated in Mary Villiers's 'lost' -- and, obviously, pre-empted -- play, The Pair-Royal of Coxcombs, which she judiciously excerpts in Female Poems...by Ephelia (1679). As her amusing title suggests, the harsh satire Burnet originally saw may have been reworked as a farce-burlesque. As almost all of Buckingham's literary work was collaborative, his Duchess (as he called his older sister) may have played a heretofore unacknowledged role in his material. The character and range of Mary's work as the Ephelia poet, who boasts of a bold satiric vein ("To A Proud Beauty, 54-55), and whose vignettes of her contemporaries demonstrate impressive comic skill, certainly align with the colorful work of the younger Buckingham.

Calling again upon biographical facts, these siblings were relatively unencumbered in the late 1670s to enjoy each other's work. Buckingham had withdrawn, in political disgrace, to Yorkshire, to write poetry and letters; and Mary Villiers, after the death of her third husband in 1678, was free (for the first time in decades) to take hold of her life and do entirely as she pleased. It was in 1678 that she made the sensitive transition from coterie poet to published author, with a bold political broadside poem to the King on a convulsive crisis of state: the Popish Plot.

The subject couplet in Buckingham's verse-epistle to Captain Robert Julian, the so-called Secretary to the Muses, does not refer, I maintain, to Etherege, but rather to the circumstances in 1677 of two of the cleverest wits at Charles's court: the Villiers siblings. I shall be interested to see how this important couplet is glossed by Harold Love and Robert D. Hume, editors of an upcoming edition of Buckingham's work.