Thomas Otway Research Articles

The Early Plays; The Middle Period Plays; The Late Plays

The Early Plays; The Middle Period Plays; The Late Plays

Some Current Publications

Some Current Publications Garth Libhart ________ ANNE FINCH, COUNTESS OF WINCHILSEA Chan, Chris. “Anne Finch’s ‘Contemn’d Retreat’ and the Politics of Lyric.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 53, no. 3, Spring 2020, 463–80 pp. Chan analyzes Finch’s poem “Upon the Hurricane” (1713) in order to question two prevailing models for understanding the development of English lyric poetry: the romantic model, which emphasizes a turn from public to private and a retreat into nature that began in the eighteenth century, and what Chan calls the “transhistorical” approach, which understands lyric poetry as a cohesive form across time that is grounded in the expression of interiority. The critical reception of Finch’s poetry, Chan suggests, has exemplified the romantic model, stressing its introspective focus and disentanglement from public and political life. Such an approach, according to Chan, ignores the material conditions surrounding Finch’s poetic production, particularly the poet’s forced exile. After discussing how William Wordsworth’s celebration of Finch’s originality set the stage for later critics to see her work as removed from the political concerns of her day, Chan demonstrates how Finch’s “Upon the Hurricane” complicates this view: for example, the poem uses politically charged images like the oak tree to symbolize Stuart strength against an onslaught of political challenges, such as the Popish Plot and the 1688 Revolution. What is more, the poem avoids using the first-person pronoun, which Chan sees as characteristic of Finch’s “impersonal lyricism,” a strategy she deploys as a Stuart sympathizer writing in tumultuous times (473). At the same time, the poem references its speaker’s “contemn’d retreat,” signaling Finch’s bitterness over her exile and reasserting her authorial presence. Chan concludes that Finch’s poem requires a rethinking of lyric theory, for it shows that even poems with speakers who present themselves as exiles nevertheless maintain the ability to engage with the sociopolitical circumstances of their day. Kairoff, Claudia and Keith, Jennifer, editors. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea: Later Collections, Print and Manuscript, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. This volume of Anne Finch’s writing, edited by Claudia Kairoff and Jennifer Keith, follows the 2019 publication of Volume 1. Together, the two volumes form the first complete critical edition of Finch’s works, the culmination of a 17-year undertaking that brings together Finch’s writing in one set. Whereas Volume 1 concentrates on Finch’s early manuscript texts, such as Poems on Several Subjects Written by Ardelia (pub. 1713), Volume II covers later works from both print and manuscript, including the Wellesley Manuscript, additional poems, and correspondence. The volume also contains introductions to Finch’s life and work by Kairoff and Keith, as well as several essays that provide an account of Finch’s textual life and afterlife: for instance, R. Carter Hailey offers an analysis of textual variants in Finch’s authorized publication, and Rachel Bowman contributes an account of the reception and transmission of Finch’s work from the eighteenth to early twentieth century. See also ARTS & VISUAL CULTURE (Erwin) ANNE KILLIGREW See ARTS & VISUAL CULTURE (Erwin) MARY BEATRICE OF MODENA See ARTS & VISUAL CULTURE (Erwin) APHRA BEHN Bowditch, Claire and Elaine Hobby. “Aphra Behn at Her 350th Anniversary.” Women’s Writing, vol. 27, no. 3, 2020, pp. 265–74. Bowditch and Hobby’s essay is the introduction to a special number of Women’s Writing marking the 350th anniversary of the staging of Behn’s first play, The Forc’d Marriage (1670, published 1671). In this essay, Bowditch and Hobby reassess the circumstances surrounding the play’s theatrical run(s) by analyzing the questionable aspects of John Downes’ account. Downes, the prompter of the Duke’s Company, writes in his memoirs that the poet Thomas Otway acted as the King in the play during its initial six-day run. However, Bowditch and Hobby note that Otway still would have been a student at Oxford in 1670, making it unlikely that he acted the part at a later date than Downes claims. The essay goes on to consider additional developments in theater history and Behn studies to conclude that, while scholars can...

Venice Preserved by Thomas Otway

Reviewed by: Venice Preservedby Thomas Otway Angelina Del Balzo Thomas Otway, Venice Preserved. Directed by Prasanna Puwanarajah. Presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK. 05 24- 09 7, 2019. Design by James Cotterill. Lighting design by Jack Knowles. Sound design by George Dennis. Movement by Polly Bennett. Fights by Kate Waters. Video by Nina Dunn. Costumes by Sian Harris. Props by Lauren Simmonds. With Jodie McNee (Belvidera), Michael Grady-Hall (Jaffeir), Stephen Fewell (Pierre), John Hodgkinson (Antonio), Natalie Dew (Aquilina), Steve Nicolson (Renault), Les Dennis (Priuli), Kevin N. Golding (Duke of Venice), and ensemble. Called "one of the first names in English drama" by Samuel Johnson, Restoration tragedian Thomas Otway has now all but disappeared from the repertoire, along with most of the period's major tragic dramatists. After dropping out of the repertoire in the late nineteenth century, Venice Preservedreemerged with a successful revival directed by Peter Brook at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1953, starring the legendary John Gielgud and Paul Scofield. Afterwards, it has enjoyed the occasional revival every decade or so, mostly in the United Kingdom. Director Prasanna Puwanarajah's summer 2019 production at the Royal Shakespeare Company presented a streamlined narrative that eschewed period specificity for a cynical take on the play's political stakes, emphasizing the personal relationships at its center. At first glance, Venice Preservedseems like an odd choice for Puwanarajah's directorial debut at the RSC. As an actor, he has been outspoken about racist practices in British theater and film. In an interview with the Financial Times, he described the play as being "about crumbling city states that were once great empires, it's about the rise of the morally impure protagonist in that space, it's about idiots in power… It has incredible characters who are at the edges of a revolution." 1He remarks in the same interview that his everyday experience of racism has only gotten worse after the European Union referendum. In a political moment in which fascism is ascendant, the murky rebellion at the center of Venice Preserved [End Page 299]speaks to a zeitgeist where lasting progress can feel elusive. Puwanarajah's take on the play's politics is one in which there is no side that offers a clear way towards a better future. This vision of the play, described by Puwanarajah as "Restoration noir," was interpreted through a design rooted in cyberpunk à la "Blade Runner" (1982), an aesthetic developed in the eighties in a response to Japanese anime, sci-fi dystopia, new technologies in surveillance and gaming, and the wealth disparities from Thatcherism and Reaganomics. In many ways this is an inspired choice as a setting for a Restoration tragedy, as both cyberpunk and Restoration tragedy respond to periods of conservative reaction to previous political instability, rendered aesthetically through visual excess in art and fashion. A particularly evocative image connecting these disparate modes was when the conspirators don the Guy Fawkes masks from "V for Vendetta" (1982–89), Alan Moore and David Lloyd's graphic novel about an anti-fascist vigilante. The pop culture afterlife of the Gunpowder Plot referenced the other Popish Plot of 1678, a cyberpunk gesture to the anti-Catholic paranoia that informed the play's premiere. Puwanarajah's slimmed-down text intentionally avoided many of the "operatic qualities" (his words) that characterize Restoration tragedy, but the central emotional stakes remained the love between Jaffeir and Belvidera, played with intensity by Michael Grady-Hall and Jodie McNee, respectively. Jaffeir's sincerity is never in doubt, but his presentation here as a beta male in pleated khakis made apparent from the opening the weakness that lead him to offer Belvidera as collateral to the conspirators. Stephen Fewell's Pierre, in contrast, had charisma to burn; a disillusioned military officer, he appeared to be the only character who believed in idealistic rebellion. These three central performances elevate the conflict from Jaffeir's initial petulant reaction against his senator father-in-law, showing how his equally compelling but irreconcilable loyalties to his friend and his wife can only lead to tragedy. The crowd-pleasing sections of the production were dominated by John Hodgkinson's...

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.

Review of Apmhitryon; or, the Two Sosias dir. by Michael Cordner

Reviewed by: Review of Apmhitryon; or, the Two Sosias dir. by Michael Cordner Elaine McGirr Review of Apmhitryon; or, the Two Sosias. Dir. Professor Michael Cordner Jun 15-18 2017 University of York, Department of Theatre, Film & Television, https://amphitryontftv.com/ Jupiter desires the beautiful but faithful Alcmena, so assumes her absent husband Amphitryon's form to enjoy her. Mercury takes on Amphitryon's servant Sosia's shape to keep watch. The early return of the real Amphitryon and Sosia threatens to expose Jupiter's deception and destroy the domestic peace just as the victorious Amphitryon returns home from his foreign wars. This basic summary makes it easy to see the attractions of the Amphitryon myth for dramatists: a plot that unites theatrical spectacle with questions of identity and constancy, metatheatrical commentary on the art of acting or impersonation, and the opportunities provided for both heroics and farce by the intermingling of gods and mortals. John Dryden's 1690 Amphitryon does all this and more, and for this reason [End Page 112] was popular with actors and audiences for well over a hundred years. Michael Cordner's new production for the University of York proves that Amphitryon works as effectively in the twenty-first century as it did in the Restoration. Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 113] The play marks a departure from Dryden's earlier tragicomedies, such as Marriage a la Mode (1673), which neatly separates high and low plots until the comic denouement restores right rule at home and at court. Amphitryon's structure and conclusions are altogether messier, befitting Dryden's sense of the post-Glorious Revolution settlements and appealing to modern suspicion of overly tidy narratives. Amphitryon's two plots – Jupiter's impersonation of Amphitryon to enjoy Alcmena and Sosia's comic attempts to know himself when faced with his double, the disguised Mercury – interrupt each other and share stage space throughout the play, leading to intrigue, accident, and a questionably happy ending. Alcmena's story is hard to parse without clear generic guidelines: how audiences feel about what happens to her depends on whether she is in a comedy or tragedy. Jupiter's desire to "owe nothing to so dull a name as Husband" is taken straight from a Restoration proviso scene, in which the gay couple pledge to retain the passionate intensity of courtship; at the same time, Alcmena's unwitting adultery is also the plot of she-tragedies, such as Thomas Otway's The Orphan (1680) in which Monimia is tricked into consummating her marriage with her husband's twin – and must die for this sexual fault. Is Alcmena the passionate mistress or the ruined wife? When it premiered in 1690, Amphitryon was one of the highlights of an otherwise disappointing season. The play, groused John Downes, was one of the handful that succeeded more than "indifferently." This faint praise is a useful summary of the play's performance history: Amphitryon; or the Two Sosias had a good initial run, thanks in part to Henry Purcell's contribution of three original songs, and was revived regularly, but not frequently, throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century before falling out of the repertory in the mid nineteenth century as newer versions of the Amphitryon myth succeeded Dryden's telling. Michael Cordner's production is the first modern revival of note. Thomas Betterton created the role of Jupiter, the god who upstages mortal Amphitryon at every turn; indeed, Amphitryon was given to lesser actors from the role's inception. Joseph Williams, the original Amphitryon, was ever but a pale imitation of Betterton. This casting would seem to encourage audiences to see Jupiter as the worthier lover, and thus also encourage audiences to sympathize with, rather than condemn, Alcmena. This solicitation of audience sympathy became more explicit when the role passed from Betterton to the seductive Robert Wilks, who made Jupiter one of his signature roles. His Jupiter attracted audiences and Alcmenas for more than twenty years. Betterton was a heroic lead; Wilks a romantic one. In the hands of Betterton or Wilks, Jupiter's seduction plot fell neatly into comic rake territory. Throughout the Wilks...

The Intellectual Context of Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved

This essay examines Thomas Otway's play Venice Preserved and its relation to the rhetoric of contemporary loyalist authors in both canonical sources, such as Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha , and ephemeral pamphlets. Otway incorporates two major intellectual trends, the anti-myth of Venice and Filmer's philosophy, into Venice Preserved , linking the play to proto-Tory thought. Otway also applies a loyalist interpretation of the English Civil War to his conspirators, connecting them to recent historical events. Finally, Otway's play owes a literary debt to Milton's Paradise Lost , as Pierre's rhetoric parallels that of Milton's Satan. In this final area, Otway follows the lead of Roger L'Estrange and uses Milton's work to enhance the loyalist cause. Once Venice Preserved is read within this context, its loyalist allegiance becomes apparent.

“Saved by the historic page”: Charlotte Smith’s Arun River Sonnets

THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORY IN CHARLOTTE SMITH'S POETRY HAS ATTRACTED much attention in recent years. With discussions usually focusing on the two mature works, The Emigrants (1793) and Beachy Head (1807), a portrait has emerged of Smith as a kind of author-historian with diverse interests in natural and political histories. Scholars of her work have yet to note the topic's significance in her earliest poetry, and no sustained analysis of its initial appearance as a subject of serious interest for Smith has been offered hitherto. Although over the course of her career she would gradually depart from the restrictive sonnet form for the freedom of blank verse in order to explore ideas of greater complexity and depth, her earliest sonnets contain the genesis of her unique melding of local history and emotional inflection that she helped popularize in loco-descriptive verse. Of primary interest are her sonnets to the Arun River. First published in the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets in 1786, they memorialize locally-born poets William Collins, William Hayley, and Thomas Otway, and demonstrate that Smith was interested both in the history of her Surrey homeland and in the poet's role as chronicler of local legends. In the absence of any existing study into how Smith presents the issue of history in these poems, a brief overview of them is organized thematically at the outset of this essay and is followed by a discussion of their engagement with various poetic traditions. In the Arun River sonnets, Smith celebrates the literary history of her surroundings at Woolbeding House, an ancient stone-built home in Sussex, near Midhurst, where she resided with her family for roughly two years. (1) She and her children moved to Woolbeding in the spring of 1785, after having spent several difficult months in Normandy in an effort to flee her insolvent husband Benjamin's creditors. (2) The series consists of four poems. Sonnets xxvi and xxxn describe the poet's perception of the ghostlike presence of Thomas Otway, who was born in nearby Milland in 1652, with his father serving as rector of Woolbeding's All Hallows Church. Sonnets XXX and XXXIII pay tribute to Sussex-born poets William Collins and William Hayley, as well as Otway, and praise the region as enchanted for poetic creation. (3) Smith describes Otway, Collins, and Hayley as poets of her own sensibility, whose presence can be felt by their present-day through the land. (4) In the four sonnets, the process by which these kindred spirits preserve the life stories of their famed ancestors, particularly Otway's, is one of Smith's primary themes. In particular, the Arun sonnets focus on the endurance and fortitude of the poets' life stories. The topic of how the past is preserved--both verbally and on the historic page--also recurs in these and in the later Sonnet XLVI, Written at Penshurst in Autumn 1788. The latter work is her early poetry's most extensive and overt exploration of the artist's role as historian, but its relevance to the sequence is lost on us unless we grasp the significance of the Arun sonnets written two years earlier. In Sonnet XXVI, To the River Arun, she describes a process of verbal storytelling, in which the tale of Otway is handed down through time and becomes a kind of local lore. On thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn, No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear, Yet shall the mournful Muse thy course adorn, And still to her thy rustic waves be dear. For with the infant Otway, lingering here, Of early woes she bade her votary dream, While thy low murmurs sooth'd his pensive ear, And still the poet--consecrates the stream. Beneath the oak and birch that fringe thy side, The first-born violets of the year shall spring; And in thy hazles, bending o'er the tide, The earliest nightingale delight to sing: While kindred spirits, pitying, shall relate Thy Otway's sorrows, and lament his fate! …

Notes on Anne Bracegirdle

A great deal has been documented regarding Anne Bracegirdle’s theatrical career and her planned but failed abduction by Captain Richard Hill and his accomplice Lord Mohun which occasioned the tragic death of the actor William Mountfort. However, until now little appears to have been researched in the context of her intriguing ancestral roots. In 1680, at the age of nine, a young girl found herself playing the part of a Page in Thomas Otway’s ‘The Orphan’ upon the stage of the Dorset Garden Theatre in London. The girl in question was Anne Bracegirdle daughter of Justinian and Martha of Northamptonshire. Justinian, a gentleman, had apparently suffered a great loss through problematic dealings of surety to friends and in such dire circumstances felt it wise to place his young daughter with the actors Thomas Betterton and his wife Mary Saunderson Betterton who were then living in London.1 The necessity of adoption resulted in an acting vocation for young Anne, for under the Bettertons’ care and guidance she rose from child player to one of London’s most respected Restoration actresses. She was admired equally with Boutel, Barry, Gwynn, Oldfield, and the formidable Mary Saunderson Betterton her devoted custodian.

The “Famous Mrs. Barry”: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity

The “Famous Mrs. Barry”: Elizabeth Barry and Restoration Celebrity Kate C. Hamilton (bio) In September 1675, the seventeen-year-old actress Elizabeth Barry performed as the maid Draxilla in Thomas Otway’s Alcibiades. Despite her minor role in the production, the young ingénue managed to attract attention—of exactly the wrong sort. As Thomas Davies explains in Dramatic Miscellanies (1784), “Mrs. Barry had an excellent understanding, but not a musical ear; so that she could not catch the sounds or emphases taught her; but fell into a disagreeable tone, the fault of most young stage-adventurers.”1 According to the famous actor Colley Cibber, the career of the late-seventeenth-century’s most famous tragedienne nearly ended before it began. He wrote in his 1740 memoir, “There was, it seems, so little Hope of Mrs. Barry, at her first setting out, that she was, at the end of the first Year, discharg’d the Company, among others, that were thought to be a useless Expence to it.”2 Despite this initial failure, Barry returned to the Duke’s Company within the production year, giving a successful performance as Queen Isabella in the Earl of Orrery’s Mustapha (1676). As the eighteenth-century theater historian and Barry biographer, Edmund Curll, explains: The first Night she played the Hungarian Queen … The very Air she appeared with, in that distressed Character, moved them [End Page 291] with Pity, preparing the Mind to greater Expectations, but when she spoke these Words to the insulting Cardinal, My Lord, my Sorrow seeks not your Relief; You are not fit to judge a Mother’s Grief: You have no Child for an untimely Grave, Nor can you lose what I desire to save. … these Passions were so finely expressed by her, that the whole Theatre resounded with Applauses …3 Barry’s emotional range—and especially her use of pathos—particularly inspired her late-seventeenth-century public acclaim. According to the prompter for the Duke’s Company, John Downes, Barry’s tragic roles in The Orphan (1680), Venice Preserv’d (1682), and The Fatal Marriage (1694) “gain’d her the Name of Famous Mrs. Barry, both at Court and City.”4 In these pathetic and “she-tragedies” of the 1680s and 1690s, she played fallen aristocrats, rape victims, and other striking embodiments of gender, class, and sexuality that became central to her stage persona. At the same time, her cultural visibility was doubly enhanced through her personal relationship with John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, a court libertine whose own notorious “performances” gained him another sort of public notice. How might have Barry’s relationship with Rochester impacted her performance and reception in tragic roles? In other words, how did Barry’s ties to Rochester impact her celebrity persona in the late-seventeenth century? We can understand Barry’s celebrity according to what Chris Rojek calls “cultural impact,” or “being talked about” in overlapping networks of theatergoers, playwrights, court figures, and players.5 This expansive definition of celebrity allows us to contextualize the phenomenon within the pre-1700 emergent print culture and to treat Barry as more than an object of interest, but also as a partial agent, in the construction of her public image. Though numerous scholars have recognized Barry’s impact upon the London stage by linking her with larger cultural and historical narratives on performance and gender, few have considered her celebrity strategy within a Restoration context. This is largely because our modern definition of celebrity is at least implicitly dependent upon a mass consumer and mass print culture to disseminate images of and interest in a famous figure. It is true that there were vastly more print sources in circulation after 1700, and contemporary scholars have successfully explored celebrity in relation to later actresses like Colley Cibber, Sarah Siddons, and Fanny Kemble.6 But assuming that celebrity depends on some tipping point in the [End Page 292] number of print media in a culture may overplay the material, quantifiable features of fame and “being talked about.” As Joseph R. Roach has argued, the concept of celebrity forms a “strand, thin but bright, [which] connects the Stuart Restoration and the theater it launched...

Unauthorized Intercourse: Early Modern Bed Tricks and their Under-Lying Ideologies

Putting one character in bed with another, while either one or both are under the impression they are embracing someone else, is referred to as a ‘bed trick’ in drama studies. This article investigates four bed tricks in three early modern plays. Using the analysis of both Thomas Middleton/William Rowley’s Jacobean tragedy The Changeling and the historical Essex/Somerset scandal as a backdrop, it compares the bed tricks and their embedded power relations of gender in Thomas Otway’s Restoration tragedy The Orphan with those in Aphra Behn’s Restoration comedy The Lucky Chance . My main interest is to demonstrate how the bed tricks in these plays function as projection screens for early modern cultural anxieties and fantasies, which circle specifically around the problematic semiotic representation of female virtue and the question of female agency. While The Orphan uses the bed trick to destroy its heroine before idealizing her as a martyr of patriarchy, The Lucky Chance employs its two cases of unauthorized intercourse to stage a female fantasy of control and independence.

Dramatic Text, Music Text:

Even in the midst of their dubious claim that “philosophers did not go to the opera very often,” Slavoj Žižek and Mladen Dolar cannot escape acknowledging the combination of “the splendor of court spectacles, the pomp of national myths, and the sentimental melodramas” that have traditionally driven opera in its social contexts (1).1 Discussions of the Restoration dramatic stage follow the same tripartite preoccupations—they also typically focus on the return of theater to London after the Interregnum, the appearance of women on stage in drama, and the increasing importance of music to theater life before the full arrival of opera seria in the eighteenth century with Georg Friedrich Handel’s appearance in London. However, the specifically interactive relationship between English nationalism, literature, theater, and music is often overlooked. In particular, the role of musical form in these displays of nationalism, especially in conjunction with patriotic libretti, is largely ignored, despite its ability to bridge the divisions between each disciplinary field. Textual studies of libretti rapidly recognize the pro-Imperial feeling that followed the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, the Exclusion Crisis’s attempts to prevent the Catholic James II from ascending to the throne in 1685, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when James (the last Catholic monarch of England) was displaced by the Hanoverian Protestant William III and Mary II (formalized in 1689). This is readily seen in the histories of John Dryden, Nahum Tate, John Crowne, and many others. Moreover, anti-Papist sentiments frequently appear in an only vaguely coded form as resistance to tensions based on the French and Italian influences via Catholicism on James II and Charles II.

RECOGNIZING WOMEN'S DRAMAS AS POLITICAL WRITING: THE PLAYS OF 1701 BY WISEMAN, PIX AND TROTTER

This essay considers three plays by women playwrights produced in 1701—Jane Wiseman's Antiochus the Great, Mary Pix's The Czar of Muscovy, and Catharine Trotter's The Unhappy Penitent—to be heirs to the Restoration plays of Thomas Otway and Nathaniel Lee, as well as the dramatic works of female predecessors Elizabeth Cary, Aphra Behn, and Margaret Cavendish in their focus on politics. Although these plays have not received the attention they deserve either from contemporaries or from modern scholars, they provide commentary on contemporary political concerns, most notably the declining popularity of William (criticized for the pernicious influence of his favorites), the opposition he faced in the House of Commons from the Country Whigs, and the resulting and significant curtailment of his royal powers in the Act of Settlement of 1701. All three playwrights set their plays far away from England, examine abuses of monarchical power, and demonstrate an interest in women as political agents, anticipating the ascension of Anne as William's health was in visible decline. While it is not surprising that the plays produced or published during Anne's reign would praise women's involvement in politics, it has not been recognized that plays from the end of William's reign criticized his rule in an oblique, but still recognizable, manner.

The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy (review)

Reviewed by: The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy Misty Krueger Stewart, Anne Marie . The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2010. 134 pp. As the title of Ann Marie Stewart's The Ravishing Restoration: Aphra Behn, Violence, and Comedy suggests, Stewart examines the presence of sexual violence—rape and attempted rape—in Aphra Behn's comedies. In her introduction, Stewart claims to "deconstruct" Behn's plays in order to isolate how "cultural assumptions" shaped dramatic scenes of violence against women (16). Stewart explains that the purpose of her study is to question "how and why Behn utilizes sexual violence in her plays" and to examine the relationship between such scenes of violence and the genre of comedy of intrigue (21). Ultimately, Stewart concludes that Behn's "creations" are both "unique" and "complex" (21). For the most part, The Ravishing Restoration is concerned with isolating tokens of rape or attempted rape scenes in Restoration drama, complicating genre distinctions, and providing close readings of Behn's and other playwrights' plays. Readers who desire a lengthy discussion of how sexual violence functions in a specific Behn play will be delighted, for Stewart studies nine of Behn's plays that include rape or attempted rape scenes. Further, Stewart includes an overview of other Restoration dramatists' renderings of sexual violence in order to offer a context for studying Behn's plays. After an introduction that sets up Stewart's argument and provides some (albeit not enough) context for critical scholarship on sexual violence against women in the Restoration, Stewart focuses an entire chapter on Restoration dramatists other than Behn. With an argument that spans approximately one hundred pages, Stewart gives [End Page 10] other dramatists a large amount of textual space in The Ravishing Restoration. After quickly introducing comedy of intrigue as a genre in the first chapter, Stewart discusses approximately sixty plays, some comedies and many tragedies. In a book about Aphra Behn's comedies, a reader might wonder why half of the chapter examines tragedies. However, Stewart contends that some of Behn's "comedies" might better be understood as "tragicomedies" because of their blending of "life-threatening attacks" and "serious action" with playfulness and happy endings (25). After reading the first chapter, it is apparent that Stewart's close readings of fourteen plays by playwrights other than Behn serve as a springboard for her discussion of the author's work in the second half of the book. Playwrights studied in the first chapter include John Dryden, John Crowne, Susanna Centlivre, John Vanbrugh, William Congreve, William Wycherley, the Earl of Rochester, Thomas Otway, and Mary Pix. Ultimately, Stewart describes these authors' works in order to show how Behn's examples of rape or attempted rape compare to other playwrights' treatment of sexual violence. The Ravishing Restoration shows that Behn created different kinds of heroines subjected to assault; as an early example in the book, Stewart argues that Behn's characters are "typically virtuous, unmarried, and vulnerable" whereas playwrights such as Crowne's are "loose, worldly women" (26). Stewart also portends that Behn's comedies include more scenes of rape than her contemporaries' work; and Stewart astutely points out that threats of sexual assault in Restoration comedies are part and parcel of the battle of the sexes, in addition to observing the ways in which Behn's rape scenes bear rhetorical similarity to late seventeenth-century she-tragedies and heroic tragedies. Stewart's second chapter, interestingly titled "Seducing Behn: Staging Power and Persuasion," exclusively analyzes nine of Behn's plays and all of her rape or attempted rape scenes. The Ravishing Restoration seldom discusses performance history, but it does consider how Behn's plays reflect cultural values and attitudes about women in late seventeenth-century England. Further, the book's close readings provide a helpful evaluation of Behn's characters and plot development as Stewart demonstrates why plots "suddenly [turn] violent" and the tones of scenes change "from seduction to attempted rape"—oftentimes due to a breakdown in communication between characters (61). Stewart does a fine job of tackling the frequently studied The Rover, and the book particularly shines in its analysis of Behn's tragicomedies such as...

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Between Revolutions: Re‐Appraising the Restoration in Britain

Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater Peter P. Reed (bio) Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater. Jason Shaffer. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007 264 pp. Jason Shaffer’s Performing Patriotism, a study of American theatre’s Atlantic genealogies, returns to the archives to recover the complexities of early American stage and performance practices. By Shaffer’s account, early American theatre—focused on the revivals and influences of traditional British offerings such as Joseph Addison’s Cato, Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved, and George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer— looks distinctly and deliberately un-American. Shaffer, however, sees the Anglo-Atlantic tones of early American performance not as evidence of national underdevelopment but as an opportunity to examine the collaborative, constructed, and contingent aspects of American identities. Even before William Dunlap’s 1830 history of American theatre, observers had alternately bemoaned and celebrated the ever delayed-but-inevitable emergence [End Page 734] of American theatre as a national(istic) cultural institution. Less concerned with the origins of an emergent American theatre, Shaffer demonstrates that even at a moment of national political origins, the practices of a national theatrical imaginary happily recycled, revised, and reinvented the materials bequeathed by English theatre. Shaffer formulates national identity as a constantly shifting process of restaging and revising the performative relics of the circum-Atlantic world. Roots matter, but culture’s routes—a concept early American theatre history seems uniquely able to comment upon—emerge as the study’s dominant theme. American theatre, and even Americanness itself, becomes a matter of genre, of the constant repetition and revision of circulating performances. This process continues today, Shaffer contends, and early American theatre remains important not as a static originary point for American culture, but because it transmits forward (even to Mel Gibson’s 2000 blockbuster film The Patriot) the perdurable processes of mythmaking and identity-rehearsal occurring on the northwestern edges of the Anglophone circum-Atlantic world. Shaffer selects his sampling of early American dramas not by their supposed “American” qualities but by their popularity and frequency, avoiding the teleological and tautological problems of earlier American theatre histories. Formal rather than chronological organization foregrounds theatre’s overlapping survivals and substitutions rather than linear historical progressions. Shaffer’s discussion of Addison’s Cato, for example, moves deftly from script to staging to offstage reprisals of the roles, gleaning a powerful sense of “collective improvisation” from multiple and multivalent deployments of the play. Subsequent chapters treat other under-examined forms of performance, including colonial college theatre, revolutionary propaganda plays, and post-Revolutionary comedy. The sequence has its logic, as dramas shifted from cagey analogy to outright propaganda. Although the book rarely relies on easy linear narratives of historical developments, it does leave an impression of American theatre as increasingly engaging its immediate cultural contexts. Performing Patriotism serves at least three masters, contributing to related conversations in Atlantic cultural history, early American literary studies, and theatre and performance history. Shaffer’s study represents the still-debated Atlantic and cultural turns in American history, examining the cultural representations of political expression and national identity. Despite [End Page 735] engaging some polarizing issues in early American history (the possible “Anglicization” of American culture and the nature of early American governance), Shaffer understands that the broad array of evidence indicates multiple, simultaneous, and competing deployments of English performances. To its credit, the study avoids the oversimplification of claiming one simple political or cultural function of theatre. Shaffer’s study, especially its treatment of the relationships among theatrical conventions and print culture, also engages literary scholarship in early American print performance culture such as Jay Fliegelman’s Declaring Independence, Sandra M. Gustafson’s Eloquence Is Power, Christopher Looby’s Voicing America, and Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic. Shaffer’s study can provide early American literary scholars an expanded picture of the early American relationships between texts, manuscripts, material culture, and ephemeral performances. Performing Patriotism speaks most directly to recent work in performance studies and American theatre history, which shares many of these concerns. Developing the performance-studies notion that the ritualized, scripted, and re-enacted qualities of theatre...

Fatal desire: women, sexuality, and the English stage, 1660-1720

Informed by film theory and a broad historical approach, Fatal Desire examines the theatrical representation of women in England, from the Restoration to the early eighteenth century-a period when for the first time female actors could perform in public. Jean I. Marsden maintains that the feminization of serious drama during this period is tied to the cultural function of theater. Women served as symbols of both domestic and imperial propriety, and so Marsden links the representation of women on the stage to the social context in which the plays appeared and to the moral and often political lessons they offered the audience. The witty heroines of comedies were usually absorbed into the social fabric by marrying similarly lighthearted gentlemen, but the heroines of tragedy suffered for their sins, real or perceived. That suffering served the dual purpose of titillating and educating the theater audience. Marsden discusses such plays as William Wycherley's Plain Dealer (1676), John Vanbrugh's Provoked Wife (1697), Thomas Otway's Orphan (1680), Thomas Southerne's Fatal Marriage (1694), and William Congreve's Mourning Bride (1697). The author also addresses tragedies written by three female playwrights, Mary Pix, Catharine Trotter, and Delarivier Manley, and sketches developments in tragedy during the period.

Insurgent Allegories: StagingVenice Preserv'd,The Rivals, andSpeculationin 1795

Theatre is first and foremost a social experience, and thus poses fundamental questions regarding the relationship between artistic production and political reception. As audiences are transient and hybrid, one is forced to think through not only the ephemerality of response, but also its unpredictability. These challenges for cultural analysis are not confined to performance, but the analysis of specific performances can be conducted in a fashion that sheds light on more general problems for thought itself. This essay aims to do just this by looking closely at roughly three weeks of theatrical production in the patent theatres in the mid-1790s. The period in question – from October 21, 1795 to November 8, 1795 – is not a random selection, for during this brief period the license for one of the most popular and successful plays in the traditional repertory, Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd, was revoked and the play was consigned to theatrical oblivion because it was deemed too incendiary for the London stage. However, the precise nature of the play's alleged threat to British society was itself a contested issue and raises key questions about intention and the destruction of tradition. After the Pitt government eliminated Venice Preserv'd from the cultural horizon, a fascinating series of events transpired in the London theatres that allow us to re-structure the questions pertaining to the relationship between governance and art. In the demonstrations of loyalty and disloyalty which suffused not only the productions of Venice Preserv'd in late October, but also productions of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals and Frederick Reynolds's Speculation in early November, one can discern an instability in the notion of patriotic or national affiliation which, I want to argue, was far more threatening to William Pitt's governance than any particular expression of anti-government sentiment.

Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-1683

Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-1683

Pope-Burning Pageants: Performing the Exclusion Crisis

On November 17, 1677, Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician was performed at Dorset Gardens by the Duke of York's Company. All we know of the play comes from a letter of Andrew Marvel: “Today is acted the first time Sir Popular Wisdom, or the Politician where my Lord Shaftsbury and all his gang are sufficiently personated. I conceive the King will be there.” Though we are offered little else, the fact that Shaftsbury and his gang are ridiculed is, I think, enough to situate the play fairly with other royally endorsed parodies of the Whig party that found a ready marketplace in the King's Theatre in the years of fervent, 1677–1683. Plays such as John Crowne's The Ambitious Statesman (1679) and City Politiques (1682), Thomas D'Urfey's Sir Barnaby Whig (1681) and The Royalist (1682), and Thomas Otway's Venice Preserv'd (1681) all were having no end of sport lampooning the Whig platform, with scarcely the benefit of a rebuttal.

Restoration politics and drama: the plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-1683

Restoration politics and drama: the plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-1683