Introduction

Abstract

Introduction RORY LOUGHNANE, ANDREW J. POWER, AND PETER SILLITOE In late 1624 tides of change were sweeping across Europe. Louis XIII appointed Cardinal Richelieu as First Minister of France on 12 August of that year, the Siege of Breda represented a high-water mark for Spanish success in the Eighty Years’ War, and, as the health of James I declined, England faced up to the prospect of a new monarch for the first time in over two decades.1 The wider contexts for the adventoftheCarolineerainEnglishhistory—royalismandradicalism,cavalierism andparliamentarianism—hasinvitedanapproachtoliterarystudiesoftheperiod that is tied inextricably to the political and theological controversies, conflicts and crises of its day. The writing of the period itself was long treated as a type of stopgap , bridging the creative brilliance of the ‘golden age’ of English writing, from Spenser to Shakespeare to Donne, with the outbreak of civil war, the formation of the English Commonwealth, undone by the later Restoration, and the emergence of Milton, Davenant and Dryden. Thus the ‘first’ Caroline period of literature — more typically discussed as ending in 1642, such has been the predominance of critical writing on dramatic performance, but in fact ending with the execution of Charles I in 1649 — has suffered by negative comparison to what came before and what emerged later. But such a critical vantage point has come under increased attack in recent years as scholars have set out to understand and appreciate the literature of this period on its own merits and not only in the light of the literary successes of the earlier age or the bloody ruptures of the civil war to come.2 On James I’s final months, see Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the 1 First Monarch of a United Great Britain (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), pp. 330–50. Martin Butler’s Theatre and Crisis, 1632–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 2 helped first instigate the revisionist charge. More recently, works such as Reid Barbour’s Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and Thomas N. Corns’s collection The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) and his monograph A History of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007) have helped sustain it. As ever, much criticism has centred on drama in the period, and there have been several excellent revisionist studies of the period, including: Julie Sanders’s Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1999) and The Cultural Geography of Early Modern Drama, 1620–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Adam Zucker and Alan B. Farmer’s collection Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern Stage, 1625–1642 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Yearbook of English Studies, 44 (2014), 1–11© Modern Humanities Research Association 2014 We begin by attempting to situate our current enterprise within recent studies of the period. The present volume brings together fourteen established and emerging scholars of Caroline literature to assess and respond to recent critical approaches, while also shedding new light on overlooked texts, contexts and practices. We have requested that contributors ask new questions about the function, form and features of Caroline literature, shifting the critical question from ‘how is such writing distinct from what comes before?’ or, ‘how does it pre-empt the revolution to come?’ to ‘how might we approach this literature on its own terms?’ This is not to dismiss the political and theological turmoil of the period, or, indeed, to overlook the weighty sense of nostalgia for, and anxious engagement with, earlier writing that is pervasive in this period, but instead to search for new ways to approach an epoch of writing that remains (relatively) neglected in the English canon. The fruits of such an approach — from the identification of a new vogue for the ‘grotesque’ in contemporary poetry to a reconsideration of the evidence for the reputation of the Red Bull theatre and its repertory — attest to the varied ways by which we might revisit and revise opinions about Caroline literary activity. The volume is divided into three discrete sections — drama, poetry and other writing — but, as will become clear, each section...