Caesar's Gift: Playing the Park in the Late Seventeenth Century

Abstract

London's royal parks figure prominently in seventeenth-century English Comedy. While critics of Caroline Drama debate the political significance of park scenes, writers on Restoration Comedy focus on their potential either for sexual carnival or collective healing in the aftermath of the Great Fire. Such attention neglects the profoundly political changes that befell the parks during the period 1642-1676: changes in appearance, use and cultural symbolism that determined dramatic representations of them. The performance of park scenes understood in such a context helps in turn to articulate a new concept of the peripatetic in literary studies.