Poetic Plate-Fleets and Universal Monarchy: The Heroic Plays and Empire in the Restoration

Abstract

n fullest recent study of Caroline heroic play, Nancy Klein Maguire argues that tragicomedies produced by Davenant, Orrery, and Dryden between 1658 and 1671 repetitively enacted a drama of rebellion against, usurpation of, and restoration of royal power in an attempt to negotiate and perhaps exorcise traumas of recent political history.' The insight is a familiar one, if never so comprehensibly and convincingly documented: my purpose here is to address another crucial dimension of plays' cultural function, one that is occluded by an exclusive emphasis on heroic dramas' paralleling of regicide and restoration. As critics have noted earlier, these plays are about empire as well as domestic sovereignty and subjecthood. Anne Barbeau Gardiner argued in 1970 that Dryden's heroic plays encoded a theory of history that celebrated gradual triumph of Christianity, an account developed by John Loftis, who suggested that representations of conflicts between Europeans and American Indians and Moors illustrated the historical process as conceived to embody a widening territorial expansion of Christendom.2 More recently, David Kramer has analyzed Dryden's construction of an literary persona in context of Restoration literary and military rivalry with France.3 None of these critics, however, attempted to relate their analysis of imperial theme in heroic drama to Restoration debates over empire, or extended their account beyond Dryden's texts to encompass genre as a whole. Yet much of heroic plays' significance in two decades of genre's emergence turns on their role in representing theatrically imperial expansion and decline, translatio imperii-the westward transfer of empire-and clash between Christian European and pagan non-European societies, all of which were central topics in