With two brilliant stage successes in the same season, 1696-1697, John Vanbrugh won sudden fame in a most challenging arena: in a dramatic repertory that featured the works of John Dryden, George Etherege, William Wycherley, Thomas Otway, and William Congreve. As the architectural historian John Summerson wrote of him, "If he was deep, the depths were flood-lit by a wit which had few equals in his time and has had few since." For more than a decade Vanbrugh wrote for, built, and managed London theaters. At about the same time, he began to win equal fame as an architect, working with Sir Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. No other figure in British cultural history has won such acclaim in his or her own time as litterateur and artist; few have maintained their early fame, whatever it was, in both endeavors. But Vanbrugh's two original plays, The Provok'd Wife...