The Heroic Drama's Legend of Good Women

Abstract

Charles II's return to England in 1660 breathed new life into the traditional monarchical notions of the body politic and the king's two bodies.1 In the first few years of the Restoration, Charles advertised his own vigorously overflow ing, bastard-producing sexuality as a sign of England's reviving commercial, political, and social health—of the body politic's post-Cromwellian vigor and fruitfulness.2 But such a stance invited close scrutiny of his body natural and left Charles wide open to criticism for adulteries that continued long after he married in 1662.3 A series of natural and military disasters at mid-decade— plague, fire, and war—were seen by many as divine punishment for the King's and the Court's luxury and debauchery.4 Some, like Marvell in Last Instructions to a Painter, charged that the King's mistresses had unmanned him by exercis ing influence in important policy decisions. These masculine wives trans gressing Nature's law seemingly threatened both the King and the English body politic.5 This essay reads an exotic but popular genre as a creative re sponse to the body politic in crisis, to the body politic reduced to little more than the body natural. In a series of so-called heroic dramas culminating in Tyrannick Love (1669) and The Conquest of Granada (1670-71), Dryden articu lated and managed these anxieties over women's influence by downplaying women's threat to the (male) body politic. Rather than emasculating their blustering, overblown heroes, Dryden's heroines tame their passions and thus help to heal divisions within and between states. The heroic drama thereby attempts to defuse and dispel anxieties over the sexual threat posed by both women and the King.