The Restoration English History Plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery

Abstract

The two English history plays written by Roger Boyle, earl of Orrery, during the first decade of the Restoration, The History of Henry the Fifth and The Black Prince, were instrumental in reviving the genre in the late seventeenth century. Although Boyle's Restoration plays have commonly been understood as inaugurating English heroic drama, this article situates them instead in an enduring tradition of seventeenth-century English history plays. Both complimentary and critical of court policy, these plays respond to the experience of the Second Anglo-Dutch War, from the early enthusiasm for war to the later disappointment with its disastrous outcome. The article aims to demonstrate how later seventeenth-century history plays, like their Elizabethan counterparts, continued to serve as vehicles for political critique and an important forum for the debate of pressing topical issues.