Otway's "Caius Marius" and the Exclusion Crisis

Abstract

The remarkable revival of interest in Shakespeare's plays at about the time of the Exclusion crisis has not gone unobserved, but it is perhaps time to take another look at it. As Christopher Spencer has written, During the fifty-two months from December, 1677, to March, 1682, eight plays based upon Shakespeare were performed for the first time since before the Civil War; and Romeo and Juliet and King Lear, which had appeared previously but without much success, were revived in new and successful adaptations.' All ten of these plays were historical or pseudo-historical in their settings and all were tragedies except D'Urfey's reworking of Cymbeline. The reason for this renewed interest, Spencer believes, is that serious playwrights were moving from heroic drama to something more realistic and had come to prefer blank verse to the heroic couplet. Finally he notes that the theater became increasingly political after 1677 and argues that Shakespeare's history plays and tragedies offered a realism strikingly in contrast with the fantasy of the heroic plays-a realism that could readily be made to comment on political affairs. One demurs at the implication that heroic drama is potentially less political, because all Dryden's heroic plays have at least a general political application,2 but Spencer may be right to say that what was appealing in Shakespeare was his strong sense of order, loyalty, obedience, and the dangers of Civil War.3 I think, however, that we can be more specific about the attraction to Shakespeare and can even suggest tentatively why these particular plays should have been adapted: Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Romeo and Juliet, the three parts of Henry VI, Richard II, Coriolanus, and King Lear. One feature they have in common is banishment or exclusion, although several other plays at this time are equally concerned with the subject. We should remember that the Exclusion bills introduced in the House of Commons, the first of them in May 1679, prescribed the permanent banishment of the duke of York who, if he ever returned to England, would be subject to the penalties for high treason. Exclusion was literally banishment, and vice versa, so any dramatic representation of banishment in this period was almost certainly applied to the political nation. For example, Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear (1681) begins with the immediate exclusion of Edgar from his father's affections (I discard him here from my Possessions, / Divorce him from my Heart, my Blood, and Name), continues with Lear's denunciation of Cordelia (I here disclaim all my paternal Care, / And from this Minute hold thee as a Stranger), and is followed by the banishment of Kent (We banish thee for ever from our Sight / And Kingdom). All three actions occur within the first hundred and seventy-five lines. The audience in 1681 would