Heroic Drama Research Articles

Seneca, Corneille, and the Ghost of Jesuit Classicism

Abstract The precise effects of Jesuit education can be difficult to discern in a given writer or artist. Little is known about Pierre Corneille’s (1605–84) humanist formation at the Jesuit college in Rouen; like his philosophical orientation, its nature must be extrapolated from scanty, equivocal evidence. This article traces Corneille’s reception of Seneca (c.4 bce–65 ce) in his early tragedy Médée and his heroic drama Cinna in an attempt to come to grips with his idiosyncratic classicism, which diverges considerably from contemporary Aristotelianism. Corneille is a practical man of the theatre and focuses less on Aristotle than on Seneca’s philosophical prose, as well as his tragedies. By the time he comes to compose Rodogune, Corneille has absorbed Seneca so completely that it seems almost impossible to articulate precisely how his work is “Senecan,” except to point to Seneca’s shadow. Perhaps Jesuit classicism is easier to study in a less idiosyncratic writer like Thomas Corneille (1625–1709)?

Проблема судьбы и героизма у Лермонтова и Льва Толстого. Философский анализ

The article provides a philosophical analysis of the problem of fate and heroism based on the works of Mikhail Lermontov and Leo Tolstoy. The author examines this problem against the background of the modern cultural and philosophical context, bringing the philosophy of literature closer to the philosophy of culture and philosophical anthropology. The article demonstrates that for Lermontov and Tolstoy a hero becomes a hero when he meets his fate, opposing his will and honor to inevitability, strives to become a demigod and to compare to eternity and multicolored fullness of the nature’s life. The author analyzes the motives of childishness, merging with nature, meeting with destiny, aristocratic rejec­tion of modern European rationalism (the philosophy of the bourgeois and raznochintsy), the rejection of history with its reasonable “sense and purpose” and the ideas of justice and retribution. All these features of the worldview and art of Lermontov and Tolstoy are dictated by their heroics. An unreasonable and unjust world where blind fate reigns is the world depicted in their works and aes­thetically justified in them. The article also discusses Lermontov and Tolstoy’s zealous persecution of pseudo-heroism of “our time”: the profanation of fatalism leads to the degeneration of heroism. Thus, the European world of “knowledge and doubt”, which has rejected the idea of fate, is contrasted with the world of heroic play. Both the former and the latter are mythologemes, Lermontov and Tolstoy strive to build another, mythological world of childishness and aristoc­racy outside of history next to the real world of the Pechorins.

The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743), ed. Bill Overton, with Elaine Hobby and James McLaverty.

<i>The Collected Verse of John, Lord Hervey (1696–1743)</i>, ed. Bill Overton, with Elaine Hobby and James McLaverty.

Scribleriana

Scribleriana

The «Comedias» in «Ancient Language»: From 16th-Century Spanish Heroic Drama to the «Comedia Nueva»

This article explores the history of the so-called comedia in ancient language, ranging from the late sixteenth century to the work of Rojas Zorrilla and Moreto. I examine issues of chronology and authorship, specially regarding the oeuvre of Hurtado Velarde, as well as several literary features such as the linguistic differentiation among characters, spatio-temporal setting of the plots, or recurrent characters and scenes. Thus, I argue that during a first period most playwrights based their plays on cycles previously developed in the Romancero; the second period was determined by the central presence of highlanders, namely female warriors; during the final period, playwrights resumed certain literary features of the first period, paying particular attention to events that had been accepted as historical.

IVAN KUKULJEVIĆ SAKCINSKI U SLOVENSKOJ PRIJEVODNOJ KNJIŽEVNOJ KULTURI SREDINOM 19. STOLJEĆA: JURAN I SOFIJA ILI TURCI KOD SISKA I OBLIKOVANJE SLOVENSKOGA NACIONALNOG IDENTITETA

IVAN KUKULJEVIĆ SAKCINSKI IN THE CULTURE OF MIDNINETEENTH-CENTURY SLOVENE LITERARY TRANSLATION: JURAN AND SOFIA, OR THE TURKS AT SISAK AND THE FORMATION OF THE SLOVENE NATIONAL IDENTITY In 1850, Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski’s Illyrian-Croatian plays Juran i Sofija ili Turci kod Siska (Juran and Sofija, or the Turks at Sisak, 1839) and Stjepko Šubić ili Bela IV. u Horvatskoj (Štepan Šubic, or Bela IV in Croatia, 1841) were published in Slovene translation in the book Dve igri za slovensko glediše (Two Plays for the Slovene Theatre). First, the paper considers the plays in a wider context of contemporary Slovene-language drama of the same period, and then in a somewhat narrower context of dramatic works in the Slovene language in (South) Slavic literature, wherein the discussion takes into account the position of these two plays in the developing system of genres of translated drama, since these two works occupy a distinctive place because they representing model heroic plays. Special emphasis is placed on the first play, which is not only Kukuljević’s most well-known work, but was, generally speaking, better received in the Slovene context. This can be explained in a number of ways: 1) due to to specific socio-political conditions (the translation into Slovene is from the period of Bach’s s absolutism marked by increased German pressure on the Slovene and Croatian territory); 2) due to obvious social relevance of the Turkish topic (in the Battle at Sisak the Slovenes and Croatians behave heroically, independently and cooperatively); and 3) due to the play’s specific features, in particular its dramatic personae, setting, and Slavic character (in the play, Toma Erdödy, Juran and Andrej Turjaški act in accordance with Slavic reciprocity, and the setting of the play is Slavic). These features, in turn, enabled identification with the characters and promoted national emancipation. The genre of the heroic play filled the gap in the Slovene literature, which Fran Levstik anticipated in his 1858 Slovene literary programme, which is also the first Slovene programme of this type. Keywords: translation, adaptation, Slovene-Croatian relations, Turk

Screen Metamorphoses of Ivan Pyryev

Ivan Aleksandrovich Pyryev passed away fifty years ago. However, for all these years he did not become a purely historical figure, his films have not gone into nothingness, disputes about his personality and creation have not ceased. The director, screenwriter, organizer of film production, he left a rich creative heritage. Having not received a special education and actually a dilettante in art, Pyryev, nevertheless, for half a century of work in the cinema has reached the highest professionalism, having traveled from the actor and the assistant to the screenwriter, helmer, director of Mosfilm, initiator and the first head of the Union of Filmmakers of the USSR. Ivan Pyryev's creation is known to many millions of viewers of different generations for those lyrical, musical comedies with which the heyday of Soviet cinema of the socialist realism period is identified: The Country Bride, Tractor Drivers, They Met in Moscow, Symphony of Life, Cossacks of the Kuban. Analyzing the era of the Stalin Renaissance, it should be noted that Pyryev filmed, in fact, always in demand, a movie about the struggle between good and evil, about the desire of heroes to go through any obstacles to reach happiness. And this means that I.A. Pyryev created genuinely national films in the 1930s and 1940s. These same tendencies became the basis of the pictures set by him during the Great Patriotic War, the heroic drama Secretary of the Communist Party District Committee and the lyrical comedy Six O'Clock in the Evening After the War, each of which inspired the audience with faith in victory and gave hope for happiness. The appeal of Pyryev in the late 1950s to the adaptation of F.M. Dostoevsky was unexpected and paradoxical. The explanation here is one: the turbulent, reeking talent of the artist pushed him to new creative searches in order to escape from stereotypes of the Soviet theme. His best screen interpretations of Dostoevsky's novels are the films Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Not all succeeded Pyryevs screen reading of the most complicated works of Russian literature was not absolutely efficient. However, he did a lot to passionately, persuasively and passionately told about the tragic fate not only of Dostoevsky's heroes, but of Russia itself. He created films about love, its immense power, condemning nihilism, cynicism and lack of spirituality. That is why the phenomenon of Pyryev, as a unique phenomenon of domestic cinema, remains an object of close attention and research of modern film studies.

Heroic Restorations: Dryden and Milton

Heroic Restorations:Dryden and Milton Thomas H. Luxon In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (2004), Steven Zwicker maintains that "Dryden seldom wrote of, or even seems to have imagined, a coherent and progressive literary career of the kind that was often on Spenser's or Milton's mind."1 In the same 2004 Companion, Annabel Patterson challenges Zwicker's claim. Patterson reminds us that in fact Dryden was driven, almost from the beginning of his career, by a "grand ambition"—to redefine "the heroic," both in subject and in form. She advances the fascinating (and counterintuitive) thesis that Dryden's ambition to reinvent English heroic poetry for his age probably also drove his political affiliations: "Most of this has to do, obviously, with Dryden's idea of the heroic, as something that writers, especially if they have the laureateship in mind, must redefine for their own place and time."2 I cannot let it go without saying that John Milton was driven, from a very young age, by much the same ambition. Milton realized his ambition in three heroic poems (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain'd, and Samson Agonistes) published between 1667 and 1674, exactly the years [End Page 199] when Dryden was experimenting with his reinventions of heroism for the Restoration stage.3 This essay will sketch out the very different modes by which Milton and Dryden pursued this ambition of redefining heroism for an age that was gradually coming to recognize itself as postheroic. What could convincingly count as heroic behavior in an age like theirs? What depiction of heroism could survive the corrosive context of Stuart England from the late 1630s on without degenerating into satire or even farce?4 Both poets regarded their ambitions as crucial to the future of the English people. Both believed that heroic virtues bound civil societies together and that poets could inspire such virtues in people and rulers alike. The task of redefining heroism for a post-heroic age looked very different to these two poets, one a disappointed republican and the other an ambitious "Servant to His Majesty," and critics have justifiably belabored those differences. But after reviewing those, I want to concentrate some attention on an important, but misunderstood, intersection of their ambitious paths—Dryden's adaptation of Milton's great epic as a heroic drama: The State of Innocence and the Fall of Man.5 Dryden imagined that his project was to restore traditional heroism for what he regarded as a new age. As Marcie Frank puts it, he took advantage of Milton's own self-presentation as "old fashioned" by exaggerating it, as if Paradise Lost belonged to a pre-Restoration era.6 For Dryden, "old fashioned" is largely code for the "good old cause," and royalists were ever anxious to depict that as hopelessly outdated. But far from being old-fashioned, Milton actually wanted to start fresh. He chose to celebrate versions of heroism hitherto ignored.7 In book 9 of Paradise Lost, the narrator dismisses first the classical "argument[s]" of Homer and Virgil (PL 9.13–19), and then the romance subjects of Ariosto and Tasso (9.27–41), proposing instead tragic "disobedience" and "Patience and Heroic Martyrdom," subjects hitherto "Unsung" (9.32–33).8 Milton also used Adam, Eve, and Raphael to illustrate and promote more domestic forms of heroism such as condescension, marital conversation, friendship, self-esteem, and sacrifice. As late as 1693, Dryden still maintained that Milton's "Subject is not that of an [End Page 200] Heroique Poem; properly so call'd: His design is the Losing of our Happiness; his Event is not prosperous, like that of all other Epique Works" (Works 4:14–15). Nevertheless, twenty years earlier, he chose a version of the Miltonic subject for his latest experiment in heroic drama, an opera in five acts, dedicated to celebrating, among other things, heroic beauty and the more domestic virtues of human behavior, marriage, mutual submission, love, and the cultivation of a "Paradise within." The literature of the coming centuries, in novels and plays, would continue to explore these more domestic heroisms long after Dryden's earlier experiments with heroic drama turned into fodder...

Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi

Reviewed by: Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic by Ramesh Mallipeddi Morgan Vanek (bio) Ramesh Mallipeddi. Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic. U of Virginia P, 2016. Pp. xiv, 265. US$49.50. Politically suspect, self-indulgent, ineffective: sentimentalism, Ramesh Mallipeddi admits, and metropolitan sympathy for slaves' suffering in particular, "has been the target of withering critique" by scholars of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world (4). In Spectacular Suffering, however, Mallipeddi invites us to reevaluate sentimental sympathy—not to recuperate this metropolitan preoccupation with the injured black body but rather to develop a new theory of slave agency that will better account for the "embodied [End Page 192] dimensions of black experience in slave narratives and in black cultural and aesthetic forms" (5). To this end, the book's first half examines scenes of physical distress in sentimental responses to slavery from metropolitan observers like Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne, while the second turns to the less well-studied archives of slaves' representations of their own experiences of dispossession, which range from Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative and Ignatius Sancho's Letters to medical records, captains' journals, and the proceedings of parliamentary investigations of the slave trade. By reading these archives together, Spectacular Suffering demonstrates how "the emergence of actual slaves as speaking subjects in the English public sphere was . . . shaped by the discursive parameters" of the metropolitan focus on spectacular suffering (71), and how these slaves, as speaking subjects, nonetheless managed to leverage spectatorial sympathy to generate a "melancholic counterknowledge of colonial modernity" (11). With attention to the methodological challenges that necessarily attend any excavation of these fragmentary archives, Mallipeddi thus strives to shift the focus of contemporary scholarship on the Atlantic world and begins to bridge the current "chasm between recovery projects that aim to generate historical knowledge about slavery . . . and those that take corporeal dimensions of slave existence as their point of departure to trace acts of regeneration and recuperation undertaken by enslaved people themselves" (15). Meticulously researched, clearly written, and original, Spectacular Suffering delivers on this promise: Mallipeddi both exposes the troubling ways contemporary critics reproduce their metropolitan subjects' tendency to foreground spectacle and suffering and demonstrates how recentring slaves' "bodily experience as a source of knowledge" can open new avenues of inquiry about how the "ostensible objects of sentimental compassion" generated their own "affective response to . . . the commodification of their bodies" (4–6). Instructors will find Mallipeddi's first three chapters especially useful, as the book begins with compelling close readings of widely anthologized and frequently taught texts (Behn's Oroonoko, Steele's Spectator No. 11 [Inkle and Yarico], and Sterne's Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey) that demonstrate just how similar the transformations of the injured body at the centre of sentimental representations of slave distress are to the transformations of the body that underpin the commodification and punishment that characterize Atlantic slavery. In Chapter One, for instance, Mallipeddi identifies Oroonoko as a "foundational" illustration of this dynamic (47), weaving together research on the conventions of heroic drama, the logic of the fetish, and the processes of trade and mercantilist exchange to expose "the changing valences of the black body as a consequence of its commodification" (50). In Chapter [End Page 193] Two, Mallipeddi takes a similar approach, combining Jürgen Habermas' and Michael Warner's analyses of the public sphere with a close study of the heroic epistle (or lover's complaint) to argue that, in Steele's Spectator No. 11, the sympathy the heroic epistle makes available to Yarico, its heroine, emerges only "via a bracketing of racial slavery," by foregrounding her abandonment rather than her enslavement (70). By tracing this move through the many adaptations Steele inspired, furthermore, Mallipeddi discovers that this gesture also tightly circumscribed the sympathy available to Mary Prince, whose nineteenth-century History of her own enslavement was censored for acknowledging any forms of freedom she found within either slavery or sexual relationships; like the fictional Yarico, Mallipeddi observes, Prince is authorized to vouch for her experience as a woman or a slave, but not both. More striking, Mallipeddi finds that contemporary critical emphasis on the auction...

Tyrannick Faith: Martyr Drama, the Heroic Mode, and Dryden's Tyrannick Love

Tyrannick Faith:Martyr Drama, the Heroic Mode, and Dryden's Tyrannick Love Geremy Carnes Religious uniformity (as promulgated under the 1662 Act of Uniformity and later renewals of the act) was Restoration England's chief strategy for addressing the nation's deep religious divisions. The ultimate failure of the Stuart monarchy may be attributed in part to the failure of this strategy, which kept alive the wounds of the Civil War and amplified political dissent. Recognizing the dangers that uniformity posed to their reigns, the Stuart kings often pursued other strategies, including toleration (which they attempted to grant in 1660, 1672, and 1687, with increasingly disastrous results). As their poet laureate, John Dryden also explored the possibilities of state management of dissent through toleration. Michael McKeon has observed that Dryden signaled his misgivings about the kingdom's prevailing model of unity-in-uniformity in the poem that earned him the poet laureateship, Annus Mirabilis (1667). Writing in response to the Fire of London and the Second Dutch War, and to the fractures in English unity those events had exposed, Dryden promoted an alternative model that "involves the abolition of division by subsuming group interests under that of the court." According to Dryden, it is possible for the state to maintain stability even with a diverse, sectarian population, but it requires universal submission to "court ideology."1 That such submission would be an enormous prop to the power of the court is, of course, the most attractive aspect of this model of toleration, at least for Dryden and his patrons. Colin Jager finds Dryden maintaining similar positions in his poetry of the 1680s as well. In Religio Laici in particular, Jager perceives an anxious exploration of "the role of state power in creating and sustaining the largely empty spaces of tolerance"—empty spaces that set the boundaries of what cannot be tolerated, but that seek to avoid differentiating between anything that manages to exist within those boundaries.2 [End Page 31] As political propaganda, the poems considered by Jager and McKeon were, inevitably, of limited use, confined as such works were to a relatively elite sphere of circulation and discussion. But Dryden also had access to a social arena that could more widely disseminate his arguments for religious toleration: the theater. As a site where people of diverse backgrounds and opinions came together to observe characters of diverse backgrounds and opinions resolve conflicts, the theater was an appropriate (if potentially dangerous) place to mount a vigorous defense of religious toleration. Most of Dryden's plays have little to say in support of toleration, and many even seem to argue against religious plurality (a fact no doubt indicative of the public's general feelings on the subject). Yet a few of his dramas do exhibit tolerationist agendas, and none more daringly than his heroic martyr drama, Tyrannick Love; or, the Royal Martyr (1669). Tyrannick Love is one of Dryden's least studied plays, no doubt due to its poor critical reputation. Although it had a successful initial theatrical run and was revived several times in subsequent decades, its critical reputation decayed with that of heroic drama itself, and it has never recovered. Scholars generally view it as a poorly plotted and hastily written propaganda piece, starring a villain whose bombast threatens to slip into self-parody.3 Eventually it even fell out of favor with its own author, who, embarrassed by the grandiloquence of Maximin (and The Conquest of Granada's Almanzor), said of some of their lines, "I knew they were bad enough to please, even when I writ them: But I repent of them amongst my Sins."4 I would argue, however, that the play ultimately fails not so much as a result of careless composition as of its outsized ambitions.5 The play is one of only a handful written in the Restoration to take religion as its central subject, and possibly the only one performed.6 Even more audaciously, Tyrannick Love confronts the problem of religious dissent and seeks to resolve it by urging toleration, even for (indeed, especially for) Catholics. The difficulty of supporting such an agenda in Restoration England is reflected in the play's artistic...

Crowd control in restoration tragedy

ABSTRACTThis article traces the development of heroic drama into a more affective mode of tragedy. Using contemporary reappraisals of Aristotelian catharsis as an optic for this generic development, it shows that the emotions involved in the love plots and melodramatic endings that distinguished affective tragedy from its forebears were thought to have a normative ethical content as well as a purgative effect. This view poses a challenge to the accepted wisdom that affective tragedies neutralised or avoided political controversy by divesting audiences of their judgement. With particular reference to Nahum Tate’s The Ingratitude of the Commonwealth and Thomas Otway’s Caius Marius, two plays written at the cusp of the transition described here, this article demonstrates the role pathos played in granting audience members access to one another’s subjectivity. It makes the case that the emotional response to such overtly sentimental tragedies was intended as a means of modelling the intersubjective relations at the heart of all political communities, whose make-up and power were crucial points of contention in the period’s ongoing disputes over sovereignty.

Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660–1690 by Brandon Chua

Reviewed by: Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660–1690 by Brandon Chua Jeremy W. Webster Brandon Chua. Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660–1690. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell, 2014. Pp. xiv + 215. $85. Mr. Chua argues that the Restoration heroic play, which served as the "primary dramatic vehicle for the depiction of autonomous and heroic service to the state," provided "a unique medium for Restoration writers to interrogate notions of authority, obligation, and agency, as late seventeenth-century political thought continued to redefine the relationship between [End Page 73] the macrocosm and the microcosm, the constitution of the state and the proper regulation of the body." In contrast to previous studies, Mr. Chua maintains that Restoration heroic plays are neither ideologically reactionary nor "politically interesting only to the limited extent that they provide a war-weary audience with much needed reassurance and comfort by reasserting and confirming the currency of late-Stuart values." Rather, Mr. Chua insists that heroic drama depicts "multivalent negotiations of ideal forms of civic virtue and service" and actively engages "with the complex public debate over the place of affections in a new political order whose terms and repercussions for civic purpose remained uncertain and contested." He succeeds in adding significantly to our understanding of the ways in which heroic drama, broadly defined, participated in the Restoration settlement, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Early chapters focus primarily on writers and plays that are most traditionally associated with the genre. Chapter 1 examines the ways in which the heroic play's use of emotional appeals problematized the "issue of distinguishing an autonomous and virtuous citizenry under a legitimate government from a slavish and corrupt one bound to a tyrant." Drawing on William Davenant's 1653 A Proposition for Advancement of Morality, By a New Way of Entertainment, which argued that heroic drama performed a vital public function, since this genre "played on the affections of a populace, securing, as a result, a voluntary commitment on the part of the individuals to a state-authorized vision of civility." Chapter 2 explicates how "the humanist discourse of friendship" in Robert Boyle's Henry V (1664) "articulates a model of political obligation that would enable the Restoration government to distinguish the legitimacy of the restored Stuart monarchy from its Cromwellian predecessor." Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, Parts One and Two (1670–1672) take center stage in chapter 3, in which Mr. Chua contends that "it is not coercive force that renders [Dryden's hero Almanzor] subservient to civic authority but the countervailing passion of love." In each of these chapters, Mr. Chua convincingly contends that heroic drama's emphasis on its hero's passions engages contemporary political discourse largely focused on solidifying the restored regime's political power and stability. Mr. Chua's argument becomes more complex when his historical survey moves to later works that draw on "heroic idioms," a phrase he largely leaves undefined, while moving away from characteristics typically associated with early Restoration heroic drama. Chapters 4 and 5 address two plays performed in 1680 at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, each an attempt "to preserve the heroic tradition established at the start of the Restoration and to renegotiate the relationship between heroic autonomy and political contingency in a public and dramatic realm increasingly hostile to conventional iterations of the political restoration plot and its idealized forms of service and public purpose." In the former, Mr. Chua reads Crowne's The Misery of Civil War, which "attempt[s] to reorient the Restoration heroic play in the form of Shakespearean history" in order to demonstrate the "importance of political obedience" and articulate "a wider concern over the uses of narrative convention for the purposes of political and moral instruction in an increasingly polemicized political sphere where commonplace lessons [End Page 74] on virtue and vice are subjected to combative interpretation and the service of partisan interests." If Crowne seeks to "redefine the relationship between politics and pleasure, the passions and politics," Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus "harnesses contemporary anxieties over the profligate nature of the...

The Even Longer Restoration

The Even Longer Restoration David A. Brewer There are good reasons to think of the Restoration as a limited, potentially quite limited period in politics. Arguably the political situation had altered in a significant way by the mid-1660s, as the regime change of 1660 failed to deliver on many of the hopes placed upon it. Certainly the years of the Exclusion Crisis and then those of the reign of James II took the relationship between governors and the governed in directions largely unthinkable in the preceding decades. And the Revolution of 1688-89 unquestionably changed things irrevocably. So as a political era, the Restoration is, at most, a scant three decades long. Similarly, it makes sense to think of the Restoration as a limited period in terms of some sorts of literary production. Heroic drama, stage comedies that revolve around the ostentatious cuckolding of cits, verse full of the rudest words imaginable just aren't a big part of new writing from the 1690s on, and the unacceptability of many Restoration texts to significant segments of the eighteenth-century public seems telling in terms of how we think about periodization. But it's not nearly as easy (or useful) to delimit the Restoration in some other realms, particularly the complex array of bookselling and reading practices we could call "literary culture." Put simply, the presumptions and habits that took hold in the years we generally term the Restoration (say, 1660-88) in some ways predate and in many ways outlast even the most expansive of our conventional definitions of the period: e.g., those that would rebrand it as "late Stuart," going all the way to 1714. That is, many of the things that seem most characteristic of Restoration literary culture can be found as early as 1650 and as late as the 1770s—hardly our standard way of defining the period, and even more chronologically expansive than the "long Restoration" recently claimed for Milton (Hoxby and Coiro). Today, I'd like to sketch out how I see Restoration literary culture perpetuating itself long after other aspects of the age had passed and to suggest why this may have been the case. In doing so, I'd like to at least passingly reflect upon what it might mean for periods not to be coterminous with themselves (e.g., for Restoration literary culture to last four times longer than Restoration politics). Probably the most efficient way of doing this would be to glance at a few of the phenomena I've been working on in my current book project as they manifest in what we would conventionally term the Restoration and then look at their counterparts from the 1760s. So three quick areas to consider: 1) One of the most fascinating developments of the later seventeenth century is the emergence of authorial names as the principal means through which authorship was imagined and negotiated and marked. These names typically amount to a set of tacit [End Page 96] instructions as to what to do with a text/what sort of attention to pay to it and the readers, writers, and booksellers who surround it. A wonderful example would be Samuel Pepys's copy of the 1680 Poems on Several Occasions by the Right Honorable the E. of R--- (the first collected edition of poems by or allegedly by Rochester, full of rude words, sodomized link boys, and other libertine provocation). However, when Pepys had it bound to match the other books in his library, he added a spine label that read "Rochesters Life" (see fig. 1). Read one way, this suggests that the volume at hand is not the naughty verse but Gilbert Burnet's pious account of Rochester's deathbed penitence: Some Passages of the Life and Death of the Right Honourable John Earl of Rochester.1 Read another way, the label suggests that the naughty verse is autobiographical and so is, in some important way, Rochester's life. Either way, though, the label orients you with respect to the text and it does so first and foremost through the use of what David Hume would later call "the very name of Rochester" (2:453). In passing, I should...

“And am I thus Rewarded?” The Rejected Hero and the Raped Heroine in Mary Pix’s Ibrahim

Abstract This article assesses Mary Pix’s tragedy Ibrahim (1696) at the transition from traditional heroic drama to pathetic she-tragedy. Considering the coexistence of different ‘heroic modes’ towards the turn of the century, Pix’s tragedy can be placed between Dryden’s heroic drama The Indian Queen (1665; revived 1696) and Manley’s she-tragedy The Royal Mischief (1696). Ibrahim made use of traditional, popular theatre practices such as an oriental set and the incorporation of rape as stage spectacle; yet with the increased presence of women on the Restoration stage, Pix attributed a double function to the raped Morena as a reward for the male hero and as a heroine in her own right, thus mitigating the focus of earlier heroic plays on male heroship.

Robert Damora and the mission of American architecture

In the United States of the 1950s, many architects, artists and historians were engaged with issues surrounding the nature of an authentic American architecture, and their professional responsibility to define its contours and potential. These issues included questions about the relationship of design to a democratic society and the expressive possibilities of architectural monumentality. This essay examines the contribution made by the master architectural photographer Robert Damora (1912–2009) with his wife Sirkka (b. 1924) to the development of a response to these concerns. It addresses his part in shaping American modern design through: his documentation of the work of prominent American modern architects and designers such as Marcel Breuer, Walter Gropius, Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, Florence Knoll, Edward Durrell Stone, Paul Rudolph and Philip Johnson; post-war studies of new housing types and innovative concrete construction; photographic interpretations of corporate work such as the Hancock Tower in Boston. Like his contemporaries Julius Shulman, Balthasar Korab and Ezra Stoller, Damora also communicated to the public the heroic drama of modern buildings through the two-dimensional medium of photography, yet unfortunately his work remains less-known than that of his peers. The essay seeks to fill this gap by presenting Damora's own participation in envisioning a new American ideal of a refined yet functionalist way of living, both through the medium of photography and through such exploratory architectural projects as the Seeds for Architecture programme of the Universal Atlas Cement Company.

Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter: Theatrical Heroics in a Strange New World

Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter (written 1687 or 1688) reacts to the crisis surrounding James II and the demise of the Stuart dynasty which Behn had supported during her entire writing career. In her last play, however, Behn develops a political vision that appears to depart from her earlier royalism, and to this purpose makes special, genre-bending use of the conventions of the heroic play that had been en vogue during the early years of the Restoration. The Widow Ranter is an unusual tragicomedy that accords both its comic and its tragic plot a heroic inflection. It is therefore proposed that a reading of The Widow Ranter through the lens of heroism, and more specifically through the conventions of heroic drama, can shed a fresh light on the vision of political authority that Behn projected at the end of her play, her career and the Stuart era. That her inspection of political authority is set in the colony of Virginia enables Behn to adopt a distancing perspective on the turmoils of late-Stuart England, and also establishes a strong generic link with the heroic drama and its preference for exotic settings.

The Horror Plays of the English Restoration

Anne Hermanson. The Horror Plays of the English Restoration. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. 186 pp. $109.95 USD, £60 (hardback). ISBN 9781472415523.In order to explain the emergence of the genre of horror tragedy on the English stage during the 1670s, Anne Hermanson analyzes the cultural climate of social dislocation during this period. Hermanson begins by asking why these plays were written at this particular time, and why did they enthrall audiences during the period from 1670 to 1680, only to die away? In this timetable Hermanson is perhaps a little too selective; Thomas Porters The Villain was first performed in 1662 and was drawing audiences, due to Samuel Sandfords lurid performances, well into the eighteenth century, while a play such as Mrs. Pix's Ibrahim of 1696, a product of the 1690s horror revival, is astonishingly violent. However, undoubtedly the majority of plays in which villainy and gruesome violence are on display were written in the 1670s and early 1680s. For Hermanson, the reason for this is rooted in the traumatized collective psyche of the English people following the death of their king, Charles I, and the subsequent civil war. The turmoil, unrest, and instability of the period informed its drama, and many playwrights were writing from their own personal experience of violence and the ideological conflicts of the time. In this book, Hermanson successfully weaves together the influences of politics on the plays, but also (and often in surprising ways) the influences of theatre history, sociology, psychology, gender, religious ideology, philosophy, and scientific discovery.The methodology that Hermanson employs is built upon the foundation of seminal studies such as Derek Hughes' English Drama 1660-1700 and Susan Owen's Restoration Theatre and Crisis, which examine the complex interaction between drama and sociopolitical strife. Like Hughes and Owen, Hermanson grounds her textual interpretations of the dramas within a meticulous analysis of Restoration political history; however, her work does not attempt a comprehensive study of the major and minor plays of the period, rather, it discusses representative and selective plays. In all, the author paints a vivid, imaginative picture of Restoration culture that offers the first comprehensive study of macabre and gruesome dramas, and their appeal to authors and audiences alike.The opening chapter, "Horror and Spectacle," begins with a brief over- view of the political history of England leading up to the civil war, continuing through the Interregnum, the Restoration of the king, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. Hermanson contextualizes the horror tragedies of the 1670s by comparing and contrasting them in a broad, sweeping manner to heroic drama, court masques, and Roman and Jacobean drama, providing examples from the Roman tragedies written by Seneca, as well as the Restoration dramas of Nathanial Lee, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, John Dryden, and Elkanah Settle, among others. At the start of her examination, she follows R.D. Hume in locating the evolution of spectacle within the context of rivalries between the King's Company and the Duke's Company. The audience's desire for spectacularly elaborate, violent portrayals progressively increased throughout the 1670s, placing the dramas alongside the public obsession with public execution during the period of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. Interestingly, however, Hermanson argues that the function of violence in the horror plays of the period was not to teach or instruct the audience. They are not, she claims, "morality plays," and at the end of the performances,there is little if any moral closure or edification... [the villains] die without remorse. The playwrights give a voice-often in the form of a "dying speech"-to those who are least likely to merit it; and the legacy of their words outlasts them... [they] regularly chose to amplify the voices of the guilty and silence the voices of the innocent. …

Publio Ventidio Baso, en los márgenes de la historia y la literatura

Publius Ventidius Bassus, Julius Caesar's protégé and Mark Antony's lieutenant, was celebrated in the first century of our era by many of the most renowned authors of Antiquity: for his proficiency in the leadership of legions against the Parthian invasions, and for his political cunning and fidelity in the revolts that succeeded Caesar’s death. In the early 17th century, Shakespeare found inspiration in historical sources dealing with Ventidius's life and circumstances, recovered his figure dramatically and devoted a scene of Antony and Cleopatra to him. Late in the same century, Dryden reinvented and magnified him for his so-called "imitation of Shakespeare" in All For Love. Publius Ventidius assumes different personae in each of these works: he is a mere incidental note in Plutarch's biography of Mark Antony; Antony's true decision-maker and lieutenant during the Mutina and Perusia wars in Appian's history; the only hero of the Parthian campaign in Cassius Dio's history; a measure of the protagonist's real greatness in Shakespeare's tragedy; and a sign of the clash between the old agonistic generation and the pragmatic youth in Dryden's heroic drama. These historical and fictional recreations will be of utmost interest in the present article.

“Kings and their crowns”: Signs of Monarchy and the Spectacle of New World Otherness in Heroic Drama and Public Pageantry

“Kings and their crowns”: Signs of Monarchy and the Spectacle of New World Otherness in Heroic Drama and Public Pageantry Ana Elena González-Treviño (bio) Kings and their crowns have but one destiny: Power is their life; when that expires, they die. John Dryden, The Indian Emperor, V, ii In Restoration England, the portrayal of exotic New World cultures in seventeenth-century heroic plays and public spectacle bears evidence of the imaginative introduction of alternative models of empire and rule along with their distinctive aspect and ambivalent connotation. The former splendor and subsequent downfall of the Aztec empire served as an appropriate theme for heroic drama during the English Restoration because it mirrored issues of contemporary interest such as imperial domination, the torture and martyrdom of a supreme ruler, and the fantasy of a prelapsarian state of innocence ruled by nature rather than art. The Aztec empire also continued to tantalize economically: were there yet undiscovered sources of wealth in the American continent which the “cruel Spaniards” may have failed to obtain, but which could be within the reach of the diligent English? “Indian plays,” as they came to be known, heavily relied on visual representation through scenery and costume for their original impact—as did the recently restored monarchy. In this article I examine specific costuming strategies that demonstrate the key role of performative practices within the scope of drama and public spectacle to nurture changing approaches to government, in particular those regarding the crown as symbol of monarchy and empire, in contrast with the feather headdress, an indispensable accessory for the characterization of exotic [End Page 103] majesty. There were, as it turns out, significant costume exchanges between the dramatic and the public spheres that gave testimony to the two spaces’ perhaps unexpected cultural proximity. Juxtaposing exotic monarchs from the so-called Indian plays and public pageants with public images of the newly crowned Charles II reveals analogous processes in the construction of monarchical identity. Scholars have long established that serious drama frequently contained allusions to the historical events surrounding the English crown from regicide to Restoration. More recently, they have underlined the significance of English Protestant defensiveness against continental Catholicism, burgeoning trade, and imperial concerns within the heroic plays of the period.1 Bridget Orr has meticulously analyzed Dryden’s Indian Emperor to reassess the prevailing, traditional reading that “the preponderance of exotic settings in the heroic plays […] facilitated the presentation of domestic political crises or that they followed the French fashion for the representation of la gloire.” Instead, she proposes that [the] heroic plays produced between 1658 and 1688 [also constitute] a collective narrative that depicts the most significant past possessors of universal monarchy. They dramatize crucial episodes in the classical, Oriental, and Hispanic empires, and explore the justifications for imperial conquest, the inevitability of endless expansion, and the equally inexorable centralization, corruption, and decline of such states.2 The pre-Hispanic Aztec empire with its widespread domination over vast territories and diverse peoples throughout Mesoamerica indirectly formed part of this group. Though English audiences may not have been fully aware of the extent and magnitude of the Aztec empire’s power, they were familiar with the dramatic reality of its downfall, even if their sense of its otherness kept them from categorizing it alongside more familiar empires, such as the Roman or Mughal. Derek Hughes in particular has drawn a parallel between Aztec human sacrifice and European practices of torture explicitly presented on stage in Dryden’s The Indian Emperor,3 while Bridget Orr explains the complex processes of both distancing and identification that audiences may have experienced, including the fact that presenting Montezuma’s torture on stage violated the conventions of heroicdrama.4 The Spanish annihilation of Aztec sovereignty in Charles V’s ambition to create a “universal monarchy” serves both as a warning to English expansionism, and a vehicle for the construction of English national identity in which presumably more civilized settlements served as the ideological justification for the appropriation of land.5 [End Page 104] An overlapping of familiar and exotic symbols invariably occurred through the representation of an outlandish locale with extravagantly costumed Amerindian courtiers. This created a spectacle...

The Triplets of Granada: Dryden’s Heroic Versification

The Triplets of Granada: Dryden’s Heroic Versification Melissa Schoenberger Dryden certainly had rhyme in mind as he penned his defense Of Heroique Plays, which appeared with the published text of The Conquest of Granada.1 After making the bold initial claim that “it is very clear to all, who understand Poetry, that serious Playes ought not to imitate Conversation too nearly” (8), Dryden addresses the public reception of rhyming lines, which has suffered as a result of literary tastes too influenced by habit: But it was only custome which cozen’d us so long: we thought, because Shakespear and Fletcher went no farther, that there the Pillars of Poetry were to be erected: That, because they excellently described Passion without Rhyme, therefore Rhyme was not capable of describing it. But time has now convinc’d most men of that Error. ’Tis indeed, so difficult to write verse, that the Adversaries of it have a good plea against many who undertake the task. (8) Like Milton’s preface to Paradise Lost, Dryden’s defense scolds “custome,” though he concludes that poets have not gone far enough with rhyme, where Milton dismisses it as the technique of a “barbarous age.” Despite Dryden’s frequent rhetorical efforts to extol the value of plays written in rhymed verse, the best defense of his heroic plays lies in the lines themselves. With The Conquest of Granada, Dryden not only proves that rhyming verse can convey a “Passion,” but he also sustains that passion across ten acts and 4,880 rhymed lines, a relatively large number of which rely on triple—rather than double—rhymes. The Conquest of Granada marks a significant increase in the triplet’s appearance in Dryden’s dramatic works. While he first employs the triplet in his third [End Page 41] heroic drama, Tyrannick Love, it figures much more prominently in his fourth. Only 0.78% of the lines in Tyrannick Love form triplets, yet in the very next play, this percentage more than quadruples: 3.81% of the lines in The Conquest of Granada belong to triple rhymes. Because of its relative brevity, The State of Innocence causes a minor plateau in the overall scheme; 3.79% of its lines fall into triplets. The general trend, however, is an upward one, and Aureng-Zebe rounds out the set with a concentration of 5.33% triplets. This general increase agrees with the pattern of triplet usage in Dryden’s non-dramatic works, but here I am primarily interested in the question of why the triplet appears so often in The Conquest of Granada.2 Although Dryden uses triplets quite frequently in this fourth work, he does not distribute them evenly among his characters. Almanzor, the mysterious warrior who arrives at Boabdelin’s court early in the play, performs more triplets than any other character.3 Of the sixty-three triplets in The Conquest of Granada, Almanzor speaks or contributes to twenty-six, and several of those spoken by other characters refer to him. Dryden assigns a mere eight triplets to Abdelmelech, chief of the Abencerrages, and no other character speaks more than six times in triple rhyme. It makes sense, then, that in his treatise on heroic drama, Dryden defends his hero as fervently as he defends his lines. Almanzor, Dryden’s most extreme version of the hero, is his most expansive rhymer. The playwright compares Almanzor to such classical warriors as Achilles and Rinaldo, and devotes the bulk of his apology to charges of inconstancy. “Almanzor is tax’d with changing sides,” acknowledges Dryden, but “what tye has he on him to the contrary? he is not born their Subject whom he serves: and he is injur’d by them to a very high degree” (16). Critics of this character had apparently found fault with his capacity for accomplishing “impossibilities” including “being a stranger” who “appeases two fighting factions, when the Authority of their Lawful Sovereign could not” (17), but Dryden provides swift justification for his hero, conceding the point, then answering it cleverly: “This is, indeed, the most improbable of all his actions: but, ’tis far from being impossible. Their King had made himself contemptible to his people, as...