Lothario's Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-running Restoration, 1700-1832 by Daniel Gustafson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Lothario's Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-running Restoration, 1700-1832 by Daniel Gustafson Elaine McGirr Daniel Gustafson, Lothario's Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-running Restoration, 1700-1832. Bucknell University Press. 2020. 238 pp. "When did the Restoration end?" is a question much debated in the Restoration offices. In Lothario's Corpse Daniel Gustafson makes a compelling case for a Restoration that is, if not unending, at least subject to unexpected revivals. The Restoration, after all, Gustafson reminds us, is a period "organized around reappearance, revival, and reenactment" (169); this spirit of returning animates much of the eighteenth century. Lothario's Corpse further reminds us that the act of proclaiming something–a body, a movement, an ideology–dead, is to acknowledge its continuing power. Lothario's modern presence in our vocabulary as the prototypical seducer, as charismatic as he is bad, is evidence of the continuing attractions and dangers of the Stuart rake identity and politics he embodied. Gustafson sets the scene with two spectacular stories of "corpsing"–breaking character & punctuating the theatrical illusion. These two examples bookend the period under consideration–from Powell's dresser's unlicensed moonlighting as the corpse in 1703 to Robert Coates's over-the-top and much-encored death throes in the 1820s. These moments of theatrical corpsing, however, were for me upstaged by Lothario's corpse behaving as it should. Gustafson reminds us that the final act of The Fair Penitent [End Page 111] takes place in full sight of Lothario's corpse, which frames and contextualizes the violence that preceded and follows his fateful duel with Altamont, something all too easy to forget when reading, but viscerally powerful in performance. Like Lothario's corpse, then, the spectre of Restoration libertine drama– and the radical freedoms promised by the Restoration rake–haunts the eighteenth-century cultural and political imagination, and this ghostly quality means it is never as dead as its detractors need it to be. Moreover, as Gustafson persuasively demonstrates, the Restoration rake had its uses in developing, contesting, and naturalizing the liberty of the British subject. Gustafson argues that the "characters and scenarios" of Restoration libertine drama "occupied the cultural imaginary in ways that contributed to a series of extended debates over political liberty, theatrical culture, and modern institutions of social discipline" (4). Significantly, Gustafson extends the field of analysis beyond the text or performance history of libertine dramas to engage with what he calls "poses"–"the repertoires of behavior associated with the figure of the rake" (12). Like the "dear perfidious" Lothario himself, it is the simultaneously radical and absolutist, appealing and abhorrent comic rake figure who is the most frequently revived in Lothario's Corpse and the political and cultural debates around sovereign desire, personal liberty and self-possession Gustafson traces. Thus, The Fair Penitent's Lothario gives way to The Beggar's Opera's Macheath and The Provok'd Wife's Sir John Brute, who find living parallels in Boswell and Wilks, and then more ghostly ones in Rochester and Charles II. The book moves chronologically, starting with the 1690s reformation of manners, morals and the stage, and ending with the 1830s return to Restoration figures and debates, not necessarily as nostalgic conservatism, but, like the Restoration itself, as a kind of novel return, a revival that is always also an adaptation. I found this Gustafson's most compelling line of argument. His attention to detail in echoes, shadows and allusions to libertine drama and its rakes was largely compelling, as in the argument in Chapter 2 tracing Dorimant and "Dorimant" through stage, periodical, and other utterances. Gustafson details how Dorimant was claimed and repurposed as an avatar for both anticapitalism and commercial politeness. The chronological range of the book and the wealth of examples also amply highlighted the pervasiveness of Lothario's corpse as well as the political range his libertine assertion of personal liberty could be put to. But this range also limited the depth of attention Gustafson could afford each pivotal moment under analysis. The analysis of Dorimant could have benefitted from the significance of performers, with their own ghosts and associations: in the 1720s, Dorimant was one of Wilks...