The New International Encyclopædia/Vanbrugh, Sir John

VANBRUGH, vän'brōō. Sir John (1664–1726) . An eminent English architect and dramatist. He was born in London, the grandson of a Protestant refugee from Flanders, said to have settled in England in the time of Queen Elizabeth. John Vanbrugh at about nineteen went to France, presumably to study architecture, but he returned to England some two years later and got a commission in the army, in which he presently became a captain. In 1690 he was again in France, and was arrested on suspicion of being a spy, at length being made a prisoner in the Bastille. He was released late in 1692 and returned to England. His first play was The Relapse, or Virtue in Danger, a sequel to Colley Gibber's Love's Last Shift, from which Sir Novelty Fashion reappears in Vanbrugh's piece as the inimitable Lord Foppington. It was produced at Drury Lane about the end of 1690, and it at once established its author as one of the leading wits and dramatists of the day. In the following spring his comedy of The Provok'd Wife, brought out at the Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre, met with an even better reception. The year 1698 is notable in dramatic history for the publication of Jeremy Collier's famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. Vanbrugh was among those specially attacked, and he published in the same year a pamphlet in reply called A Short Vindication of The Relapse and The Provok'd Wife from Immorality and Profaneness. Of his other works, several of them more or less free adaptations from the French, the best is The Confederacy, a brilliant comedy, which was produced in 1705 at the new theatre that he built in the Haymarket for himself and Congreve.

Meanwhile, he had been making his way as an architect. In 1701 he began erecting for the Earl of Carlisle the palace of Castle Howard in Yorkshire. In 1702 he was appointed Comptroller of the Board of Works. His reputation was such that in 1705 he was engaged to erect Blenheim Palace, which Parliament had voted to the Duke of Marlborough: but the Duchess, after her husband's death, refused to pay Vanbrugh his salary and dismissed him from his office. After much trouble, he managed to get nearly all the money due. He was knighted in 1714, and died at Whitehall.

His comedies have not maintained their popularity, their licentious tone preventing their being read to the extent to which the keenness of their satire and the genuine character of their humor would otherwise entitle them. Lacking the polish of Congreve's style, they are at the same time free from the stiff artificiality that disfigures so much of his work.

At his death Vanbrugh left an unfinished comedy called The Journey to London, which Gibber completed and produced at Drury Lane in 1728 as The Provok'd Husband. Consult: W. C. Ward, Introduction to ed., Sir John Vanbrugh (London. 1898): Swain, Introduction to the Best Plays of Sir John Vanbrugh (ib., 1896); Leigh Hunt, The Dramatic Works of Wycherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar, with Biographical and Critical Notes (new ed., ib., 1855); Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers (ib., 1819); Dametz, John Vanbrughs Leben und Werke (Vienna, 1898).