Literature Compass
Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama: New Directions in the Field
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Literature Compass
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Article Eighteenth Century < Compass Sections, theatre < culture < Key topics, The Restoration < movements < Key topics, 1700 1799 < 1000 - 1999 < Period, 1600 - 1699 < 1000 - 1999 < Period, literary criticism and theory < movements < Key topics, cultural studies < movements < Key topics, drama and theatre < Key topics
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Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama: New Directions in the Field If the novel still to some extent dominates eighteenth-century studies, in recent years the drama has emerged as a genre of considerable interest. Much innovative scholarship lately has revived interest in plays of this period by exploring their complex constructions of the gender, subjectivity, class, authorship, nationalism, ideology, and
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imperial relations, revealing that they differ in key ways from the period’s fiction. Taken traditionally as a weakness but in more recent work as a point of interest, the drama often confronts head-on certain issues that the novel tends to raise only obliquely or implicitly.
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In The London Merchant (1731), for example, Thorowgood makes an explicit case for
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the worthiness of the merchant class; in The Way of the World (1700), Millamant negotiates up front her position as a wife; in Inkle and Yarico (1787), the young merchant
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tries to sell into slavery the Native American women who rescued him and carries his child; in The Man of Mode (1676), Dorimant argues that the acceptable transgressions of
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the elite should be forbidden to shoemakers; in Cato (1713), the hero pronounces on the
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relationship between skin color and virtue (there is none); in the late-century pantomime Omai (1785), Captain Cook literally becomes a god. Readers of Samuel Richardson may come to believe that this period equated female virtue with virginity, but in Robert Dodsley’s popular The King and the Miller of Mansfield (1737) the heroine, after having been seduced by a rakish courtier, happily marries her sweetheart. The plays do not necessarily confront the period’s pressing social changes with a more progressive vision
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than other genres; nevertheless, they tend to address certain issues more openly and more confrontationally. Until the last thirty years or so, however, most Restoration and eighteenth-century plays met with one of two critical fates: neglect or scandal. Many, dismissed as ephemera, had simply fallen into the first category, but a handful of Restoration comedies provoked so much critical distress that John Harwood could devote an entire volume— Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy (1982)—to exploring how conflicts over these
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plays forced to the surface certain critical values. Thanks to Robert Hume (1976), we no longer think of the controversial “sex comedies,” such as The Country Wife (1675) and The Man of Mode (1676), as typical or even representative of Restoration comedy; these
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plays and a few others, however, gave the period a reputation for reckless libertinism.
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While Restoration audiences appreciated the brilliance of Wycherley and Etherege, they also enjoyed less edgy forms of entertainment. Further, reaction against the sex comedies
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began shortly after their appearance: Wycherley and Behn both felt the need to defend themselves against accusations of bawdiness; at the end of the seventeenth century
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Jeremy Collier and others attacked the stage as immoral; in the early eighteenth century,
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The Spectator (no. 16, Tuesday, May 15, 1711) criticized The Man of Mode because it held a morally bankrupt figure (Dorimant) up for admiration. David Garrick transformed (one is tempted to say “castrated”) The Country Wife into The Country Girl (1766), changing the married Margery Pinchwife into a single young lady and Horner into a decent eligible bachelor. The sex comedies that have historically generated so much controversy, then, do not represent the period as a whole.
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An interest in both describing theater culture with greater accuracy and exploring the ways in which theater engaged some of the most pressing social, cultural, and political controversies of the time has led scholars in recent years to expand their scope of interest beyond the famous sex comedies. Nevertheless, attention to the field has in some ways depended on these brilliant plays. Responding to the moral judgments they had long attracted, Norman N. Holland proposed a new kind of critical appreciation in The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1959).
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Holland defended the sex comedies against accusations of immorality (because the plays sometimes reward rakes) and triviality (because the plays attend mainly to manners). The good fortune of bad people in these plays only reflects, he argued, life itself. More
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significantly, Holland insisted on the analysis of manners as an important form of artistic
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expression. The plays, he argued, investigate the tensions between social conventions and anti-social “natural” desires. While more recent critics might not admit Holland’s
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designation of “natural” desires even in the original scare quotes, Holland’s book helped to advance a new kind of conversation about the explosive social analysis and intellectual
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depth of these plays.
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These days, few would deny that Wycherley, Etherege, and Congreve deserve serious analysis. If earlier generations of critics argued over whether or not the plays encouraged immorality, contemporary scholars are more likely to consider whether libertinism means the same thing for women as it does for men; when, if, and why the stage reformed; and how seventeenth-century audiences understood English identity in the context of the French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Native American, and African figures on the stage. Since Holland and others who brought serious attention to Restoration sex
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comedies, interest has expanded in at least two directions: first, as already suggested, critics have become interested in a much broader scope of theatrical activity, including plays by women, by Whig writers, and by writers taking the form in different aesthetic directions. We have also seen considerable interest in performance: in actors and actresses, in audiences, in the mechanics of staging, in less scripted kinds of productions, and in the sociology of the theater, although to some extent this latter has always been part of the field. Second, the plays and the theater of the late seventeenth century and
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eighteenth century, as opposed to the brief and explosive Restoration period alone, have attracted more serious consideration and appreciation, with a particular revival of interest in early eighteenth-century sentimental drama (Steele, Addison, Centlivre, Rowe, Lillo,
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Cibber), the stage’s engagement with imperial expansion in popular plays like
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Southerne’s Oroonoko, Foote’s The Nabob, and Colman’s Inkle and Yarico, and women writers (Behn, Centlivre, Cowley, Inchbald, Lennox, Griffin) who flourished at various times.
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In this essay, I will survey the critical trends of the last twenty years or so as
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evidenced by monographs. Certainly no article of this length can be comprehensive;
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instead, I hope to offer an overview of the field in spite of the inability to account for all of the contributions to it. Thus I will mainly discuss works that attempt to make larger points about dramatic writing itself in this period, overlooking the many excellent studies of related issues (such as dramatic criticism in the period) and of single authors. Recent books in the field have tended to be organized around the following categories, into which I have accordingly divided this essay: genre, gender and sexuality, ideology and politics, and the British empire. Many studies, of course, touch on several of these issues
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and in some cases my categorization will be, of necessity, almost arbitrary. Nevertheless, I believe these categories might be productive for offering a handle on the recent directions of this fast-growing field. Before turning to these categories of interest, however, I will briefly address some methodological distinctions that cut across them. All scholarship at one point must define, implicitly or explicitly, the nature of the object of study. Drama offers unique problems in this respect: while poetry and fiction speak directly to individual readers,
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most plays have been written for a theater, actors, and a live audience. Thus the analytical techniques of new criticism and close rhetorical reading have often come across to critics of the drama as not fully sufficient in themselves, although they have
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been used to great advantage. Nearly all critics recognize drama as a profoundly social
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form, yet they differ widely in their balance of attention between the text of the play and social context of its performance. Pat Gill’s Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and
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Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners (1994) provides a good example of the more rhetorically-oriented approaches, offering close feminist readings of canonical sex
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comedies, focusing sharply on language and characterization. Bringing Freud’s
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interpretation of the joke to bear on the humor of Restoration sex comedy, Gill locates her discussions in the context of contemporary debates about women and gender, but her primary interest remains on the plays themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, Helen M. Burke’s Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712-1784 (2003) offers less in the way of close readings (as traditionally understood) and instead “reads” the situation of performances on the Irish stage in the context of British imperialism. Burke reveals the significance of the theater as an institution in
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eighteenth-century Irish culture that witnessed the violent clash of different forms of national identity. Along similar lines but in another context, John O’Brien in Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690-1760, expands our understanding of eighteenth-century commercial diversions by looking at this alternative form of entertainment in the context of an emerging popular culture with competing definitions of the public sphere. While Gill looks closely at the language of traditionally admired plays, O’Brien investigates performances of spectacle and Burke looks broadly at a range of
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social phenomena for which the theater had become a flashpoint. Other kinds of studies combine these strategies. Daniel O'Quinn’s Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800 (2005), for example, looks at play texts, the aesthetics of
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performance, and the historical context of British imperialism to illuminate ways in
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which the London stage at the end of the eighteenth century articulated a crisis of governance that linked internal and imperial rule. He looks at better-known plays by
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Elizabeth Inchbald and Samuel Foote, but also at popular pantomimes in the context of the specific imperial tensions of the last three decades of the century. The more
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thoroughly contextualized studies have opened up not only new strategies for reading
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familiar plays, but opportunities to think about productions (such as a popular pantomime at the end of the century about the voyages of Captain Cook) that held great interest in their time but have not made it into anthologies and might not even be comprehensible as texts removed from their immediate political context and performance apparatus. While the analysis of texts from any genre involves choices about context, the dramatic text’s unique link to performances gives these choices a particular urgency.
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Approaches to Restoration and eighteenth-century drama have in common with the study of any genre the choice between focus on a small group of texts for particular attention or the comprehensive study of a particular span of time. Both approaches have yielded important insights into different kinds of questions. Scholars who focus on a small group of plays have often done so with the explicit purpose of making a case for their literary and intellectual value—an issue with perhaps more urgency in the study of this period’s drama where this case has had to be actively made. Norman Holland thus
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focuses on three writers who have become central to this period’s canon in order to make the case for their value. In her much later English Dramatic Form 1660-1760 (1981), Laura Brown also focuses on a select group of what she considers the best plays,
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although less to make a case for their value than as the basis for conclusions about
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generic change over time, insisting that the best examples of any genre reveal the most about its limits and possibilities. Even more recently, Brian Corman (1993) looks at six
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representative comedies in three different seasons to make the case that comedy changes from the harsh satires of the early Restoration to a more humane perspective in the early
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eighteenth century. By contrast, in The Development of English Drama in the Late
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Seventeenth Century (1976) Robert Hume argues that studies that only look at a few canonical plays have given us a skewed perspective on the period. In this book Hume accounts for every play performed in the period 1660-1710, a critical strategy that allows him to refute common misconceptions about the period. Thus we now know that Wycherley’s daring and sexually charged Country Wife drew audiences, but cannot be said to be representative of the degree of sexual explicitness in Restoration drama. Derek Hughes takes a similar approach with more of an interest in themes that emerge in this
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period. Hughes traces, for example, the profound influence of Thomas Hobbes over the comedy of the period and the importance of the problem to restoration itself in the tragedies. While both of these books can be frustrating in the necessary brevity with which they treat each play, they nevertheless provide excellent and essential overviews of the drama of this period. All of these methods carry their own risks and rewards. While allowing for considerable overlap, we might nevertheless trace an evolution beginning with early
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theater historians who appreciated some of the plays but also frequently condemned their immorality and/or superficiality; an analytical phase ushered in by Holland and others that brought the techniques of close reading to bear on a few highly valued play texts;
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reactions against this narrowing of focus that sought to make generalizations on the basis
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of a wider range of texts; argument about change over time based on representative plays rather than a comprehensive overview; an overlapping continued focus on a limited group
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of valued plays with the inclusion of previously neglected women writers and the analysis of the ideological stakes of these plays; and recent work that combines all of the
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above in various ways, but attends in particular to performance, the material culture of
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theater production, and the historical context in which productions took place. One might be tempted to suggest that we have in some ways come full circle and that the newer forms of performance criticism resemble the earlier theater histories, but there are significant differences. While the earlier theater histories did the invaluable work of recovery, the newer cultural analyses place theater activities in the broader context of Britain’s ideological stakes in empire, gender, race, class, and internal regulation. But any chronological account of criticism is necessarily incomplete: while a broad overview
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suggests a certain evolution of interest along the path I have outlined, the foundational work of recovery continues to be important, as do fresh critical analyses of canonical plays. So just as close reading has not simply replaced recovery, so cultural contextualization has not replaced close reading. Cultural criticism alerts us to the broad conflicts in which these plays participate; close analytical readings reveal the moments in which the plays challenge, skew, invert, and deconstruct the morals, assumptions, and expectations of their time and our own. Three hundred years later, some of these plays
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continue to pose startling questions about gender, sexuality, marriage, commercial culture, cosmopolitanism, ethnicity, national identity, and imperial relations. The renewal of interest in such pressing issues has made these plays all the more intriguing.
Genre
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Perhaps more than scholars in any other area of eighteenth-century studies, those
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in drama have been drawn to questions of genre. Most agree that at this time genre figured heavily in the shaping of plays and of audience expectations; further, the genres
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themselves prove ideologically sensitive and politically revealing. Lisa Freeman, Robert
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Hume, Laura Brown, J. Douglas Canfield, Matthew Kinservik, and Brian Corman have all addressed some of these issues. Laura Brown’s Development of English Drama was one of the first studies to point the way beyond the localized interpretive conflicts that had interested critics (for example, whether or not we are supposed to applaud Dorimant in The Man of Mode) to the suggestion that genre itself defined the parameters of the plays and their ideological force. While Brown’s argument linking radical republicanism and the libertine spirit has not convinced some subsequent critics, who would point to the
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unbridgeable class differences between those two groups, her readings of Wycherley, Behn, and Etherege along these lines capture the sharp rebelliousness and scathing satire of these writers that recent ideological criticism sometimes misses. Her larger point is that drama changes generically in response to shifting class relations and changing economic conditions: for example, with the full emergence of a capitalist economy by the end of the seventeenth century, the aristocratic heroic figures from the 1660s and 1670s became increasingly unconvincing, ultimately replaced by passive figures like Barnwell
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in Lillo’s The London Merchant. She further argues that the generic limits of the period’s drama could not accommodate the emergent bourgeois demand for literary expressions of interiority, so the stage essentially gave way to the novel as the eighteenth century’s most
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compelling and convincing literary form. Like her argument about the radicalism of the
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libertines, this one has also been subsequently challenged. There are other explanations, as we will see, for the decline in the number of new plays produced in the eighteenth
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century, and this numerical decline does not necessarily indicate the diminished significance of theater in the later period. Nevertheless, The Development of English
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Drama has proven to be a seminal work of literary criticism offering considerable insight
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into the political complexity of these plays, their class investments, and their generic constraints.
In two books on Restoration drama (one on comedy and the other on tragedy), as well as in his organization of the crucial Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama, J. Douglas Canfield makes a different kind of case for the importance of genre. While Brown explores the ideology of genre itself, Canfield uses the analysis of ideology as a way of determining genre. In his anthology and in the
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critical studies, which account for a broad range of familiar and also lesser-know works, Canfield divides plays into genres defined by their function or effect--although probably in ways that contemporaries themselves would not have recognized. Canfield’s anthology, for example, has sections on social comedy, subversive comedy, corrective satire, and laughing comedy; tragedy divides into heroic romance, political tragedy, and personal tragedy. Split-plot plays like Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko become “tragicomical romance.”
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While such fine and ahistorical divisions can seem excessive (rarely, by comparison, do critics of the novels attempt to group these texts into so many different kinds), genre studies have proven productive to critics of drama because, as Lisa Freeman
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points out, Restoration and eighteenth-century playwrights themselves clearly operated in
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terms of genre. Returning to Brown’s method of focused close reading rather than the comprehensiveness of Hume and Canfield, Freeman addresses Brown’s troubling
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conclusion about the generic inadequacy of eighteenth-century plays. Freeman agrees that the novel develops new conceptions of character that stress interiority. She makes
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the case, however, for thinking about eighteenth-century theatrical productions not as a
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series of failures (certainly many plays were appreciated during their time) but as providing alternative models of subjectivity to those found in the novel. Playwrights did not fail to plumb the inner depths of individuals, but instead worked in an alternative medium, self-consciously creating new works on the basis of a set of standard, genrebased expectations. Fops, for example, appear in many different comedies, and would have been immediately identified by the audience by a certain set of characteristics: big hair, high heels, too much ribbon, and French words thrown randomly into casual
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conversation. Playwrights, however, artistically took advantage of these expectations rather than blindly fulfilling them. The expectations themselves also changed over the course of the period, and Freeman proposes the changing social structures as instrumental in this difference. While Restoration comedies extended the witty spirit of the court of Charles II, by the eighteenth century comedy appealed to emergent middle-class interests in commercial and sentimental value. Comic plays, however, did not attempt to capture the inner life of characters, but rather exposed and even highlighted the distance between
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the performing body and the created character. The stage at this time even theorized in its own way the problem of generic expectation by producing an inordinate number plays about plays: in an age fascinated by problems of sentimental sincerity, Fielding and
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others dramatized their own theatricality. Tragedy underwent a significant change as
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well, in Freeman’s view. Tragedy had long explored royal authority and succession, assuming that the monarch represented the nation. Eighteenth-century shifts in power
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from the divine right of kings to the fiscal authority of an emergent middle class, however, threw the genre of tragedy into a crisis. In this context, The London Merchant
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emerged as a whole new type of tragedy, taking an apprentice rather than a prince as the
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representation of national identity
While Canfield and Freeman look at the range of competing genres on the stage to offer insight into audience expectations and cultural function of theater, Matthew Kinservic follows the changes in one particular theatrical genre: satire. While critics had traditionally separated sentimental from satiric comedy, Kinservic argues that the preferred style in the eighteenth century emerged as a combination of the two. Writers like Henry Fielding caused trouble by ridiculing particular living people on the stage: he
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mocked Colley Cibber, for example, as “Ground-Ivy.” Sentimental satire, by contrast, asks not that we identify the object of satire (Ground-Ivy=Colley Cibber), but instead that we identity with the satiric object, sharing the play’s optimism that he or she will reform. (On sentimental comedy, see also Frank H. Ellis’s Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice as well as sections in Freeman and Brown.) Kinservic further makes the intriguing point that the Licensing Act of 1737 encouraged this kind of sympathetic identification. When after 1737 it became increasingly difficult to have a new play
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performed on stage as the repertoire significantly narrowed, theaters maintained audience interest through acting styles that deepened character. Given the difficulty of getting new plays produced on the stage, the Licensing Act
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also contributed significantly, Kinservic argues, to the mid-century Shakespeare revival
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and to “the age of the actor.” In invoking the last phrase, Kinservic refers to the proliferation of treatises about acting, the new forms of theatrical celebrity, and the
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blossoming of popular theater criticism in the newspapers that not only evaluated new plays but analyzed the performance choices in familiar ones. In the second half of the
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eighteenth century, for example, the actress Hannah Pritchard playing Lady Macbeth
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stunned audiences by setting down her candle and rubbing her hands to remove their imagined their bloodstains. Actresses before her had continued to hold the candle throughout the scene. Audiences thus closely scrutinized the minute gestures of actors; painters reproduced those gestures on the canvas. The Shakespeare revival—for Kinservic the other major result of the Licensing Act-- itself has attracted new kinds of attention and analysis in scholarship. While earlier generations had taken adaptations such as Nahum Tate’s famous King Lear with the
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happy ending as evidence of the period’s silliness, Jean Marsden in The Re-imagined Text (1995) has shown how rewritings of Shakespeare engaged and revealed Restoration and eighteenth-century literary theory. Michael Dobson’s important Making of the National Poet (1992) shows in careful detail the responsibility of eighteenth-century playwrights, editors, and critics for the place of Shakespeare in the literary canon. Eighteenth-century stage managers and others, he shows, promoted Shakespeare as part of the formation of British nationalism. In addition to his insightful reading of the Shakespeare phenomenon,
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Dobson also brings into view new explorations of the mobilization of Shakespeare in the popular culture of the period. Dobson defamiliarizes our sense of Shakespeare in important ways as, to a large extent, the product of the period’s need for such a symbol of
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English cultures, whereas Kinservic’s research reminds us of the practical and
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commercial considerations that have shaped the literary history of drama.
Gender and Sexuality
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Gender and sexuality have become crucial to the criticism of this period’s drama
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in at least three ways: in studies of actresses and actors, in analyses of the representation
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of women and sexuality in the plays, and in challenges to the traditional canon by the inclusion of women playwrights. When Charles II reopened the theater, he declared that henceforth women would play the female roles. This marked a radical shift in English performances, and critics have discussed the difficulties the first actresses faced, the new forms of eroticism the female body brought to Restoration theater, the new opportunities for female employment it afforded, and the controversies raised around this kind of public exposure for women. On the one hand, scholarship has pointed out that
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contemporaries regularly accused actresses of prostitution, how no respectable woman would undertake a stage career, and how many of the plays sexually exploited female bodies. On the other hand, we have also learned how actresses may have opened the door for female playwrights; how by the eighteenth century certain actresses became wealthy and even respectable (Sarah Siddons, for example); how even in the Restoration, actresses endured insults but some nevertheless socialized in elite circles. Eighteenthcentury scholarship in general has become interested in the emergence of a Habermasian
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public sphere represented by coffee-houses that excluded women, but the theater not only permitted female participation but actually required it. While this brief overview might seem to suggest an irreconcilable divide in
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interpretations of the actress’s position, the most recent criticism has recognized the need
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for coming to terms with both realities. In her recent Fatal Desire, for example, Jean Marsden suggests that the hiring of actresses led to a remarkable development in the
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literary history of drama at the end of the seventeenth century: while earlier tragic authors focused on a central male figure, the late seventeenth century preferred “she-tragedies”—
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an entire subgenre generated, according to Marsden, by an interest in the novel
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possibilities of the actress. These “she-tragedies” uniquely placed women at the center of tragic action, which in some ways empowered women but in other ways degraded them by exploiting the erotic potential of the suffering female body. While Laura Brown had argued that “she-tragedies” emerged out the loss of confidence in the aristocratic male hero in the face of a rising bourgeois culture, Marsden attributes the creation of this genre to the voyeuristic pleasures opened up by the employment of actresses. (Some of the women playwrights, Marsden suggests, nevertheless found alternatives.) In her earlier
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Sexual Suspects (1992), Kristina Straub had complicated the dilemma of the exploitation of the performer by looking at not just actresses but actors as well. Straub demonstrates that certain kinds of degradation obtained for all bodies on stage in the Restoration as well as in the eighteenth century. While for women this took the form of accusations of promiscuity and even prostitution, men labored under homophobic suspicions of their sexual orientation. The eighteenth-century stage, Straub observes, saw countless nervous jokes about male homoeroticism played out against an emergent heteronormativity that
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the theater helped shape. Players could earn wealth and fame, but still faced various prejudices: “actors,” Cheryl Wanko has observed in her study of performer biographies (2003), “occupied a liminal position in relation to the English class structure that even
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Garrick's immense success and widespread recognition in the 1770s could not completely resolve into respectability" (14).
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Actors and actresses remained under sexual suspicion in part because certain
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plays called on them to perform sexually knowing characters. The sexual explicitness of Restoration drama, as mentioned in the opening, has become legendary and in certain
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ways shaped the destiny of the field. In The Country Wife, for example, Horner sets out to
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cuckold a husband right in front of him, a plot that literally succeeds. While the sexual radicalism of the period as a whole has no doubt been exaggerated, certain Restoration plays nevertheless indulge in a level of explicitness that became largely unacceptable by the middle of the eighteenth century. This sexual frankness itself has become one object of critical attention, explained in a number of ways. While Marsden and Gill have suggested that the employment of actresses led to erotic writing, others would have it the other way around and explain the appearance of actresses as part of a larger backlash
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against the reign of Oliver Cromwell, during which the government condemned theater as immoral. Charles II himself indulged in public displays of affection for the mistresses he installed at Whitehall, calamitously producing many bastards but no legitimate heirs. The bawdiness of the court culture clearly shaped the bawdiness of the drama, but critics disagree on how and why. In earlier criticism scholars had debated whether these plays celebrated natural desires or promoted immorality, but Harold M. Weber changed the conversation in his
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Restoration Rake-Hero (1986) by trying to capture the full complexity of the libertine. Weber argues that the secularization of sexuality in this period opened up new kinds of questions and possibilities, producing characters that push the boundaries of social
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constrains. Weber explores libertines not as characters lacking self-control, but as those
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with philosophical commitments to a specific version of freedom. More recently critics have looked at this question ideologically. In his influential work on seventeenth-century
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libertinism, James Turner (2002) has suggested that erotic satire in general often aimed to restrain women from gaining authority through misogynistic insult. Pat Gill makes a
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similar point about the sex comedies, suggesting that while they display some amount of
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tolerance for male promiscuity, the female versions meet with public humiliation. In George Etherege’s Man of Mode, for example, Dorimant’s mistress Mrs. Loveit endures social contempt, a fate that Belinda, whose reputation he protects, barely escapes. Dorimant, however, is poised at the end to marry the heiress. Without denying the misogyny in much libertine writing, Jeremy Webster nevertheless has recently represented libertines as a circle of elite men who fell out of favor at court in part for their radical ideas, and who turned to writing for the stage as an alternative sphere of
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influence. In some ways Webster’s argument harkens back to Laura Brown’s, except that Webster locates the radicalism in the men themselves, while Brown looks at the clash between the radical rhetoric of libertinism and the generic demands of Restoration comedy. While feminist critics have addressed the misogyny of the sex comedies and the she-tragedies, they have investigated a wider range of gendered issues as well. Feminist criticism of this period perhaps began in earnest with Susan Staves’s landmark Players’
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Scepters (1979). In this book, Staves reveals an analogy between the politics of gender and the politics of authority in general in this period. In short, Staves traces the way contractual agreement gradually but decisively replaced divine right theory in the late
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seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thomas Hobbes had argued for absolutist
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authority, but on the basis of contract rather than divine right: for their own good, the people must agree to obey a single leader or face a life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and
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short. Locke went a step farther, suggesting that if the monarch failed to live up to his obligations, then the people had the right to replace him. Defenders of divine right (Sir
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Robert Filmer in particular) had insisted that the king rules the country in the same way
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that a father rules his family: through the laws of nature. But once the divine right of kings had come into question, Staves argues, some saw the opportunity to question the absolute authority of husbands and fathers as well. Thus the drama of the period becomes preoccupied with family authority, and many plays feature a heroine who clashes with parental authority over the choice of a husband. As Staves points out, while the stage only presented a limited number of options for women, it defended with some consistency the daughter’s right to a contractual marriage agreement.
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Since then, feminist reading has become crucial to the field. While all of literature encodes gender in one way or another, the plays of this period engage the shifting identities of men and women with particular urgency and insight. While Staves focused on the changing hierarchies of gender and authority, Jacqueline Pearson in The Prostituted Muse (1988) brought attention to the images of women on stage and plays written by women. Her recovery project has permanently changed the field, shedding light on previously neglected works by Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, Catherine
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Trotter, Mary Pix, Delaviviere Manley, Susanna Centlivre, Eliza Haywood, and other women playwrights who flourished in the Restoration and shortly thereafter. Seven years later, Ellen Donkin (1995) demonstrated that at the end of the eighteenth century (her
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book covers 1776-1829) another group of women playwrights had become integral to the
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theater: Frances Brooke, Hannah Cowley, Hannah More, Sophie Lee, Elizabeth Inchbald, Frances Burney, and Joanna Baillie. It is difficult to imagine that only twenty years ago
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someone could have written about Aphra Behn, Susanna Centlivre, Hannah Cowley, and Elizabeth Inchbald as “neglected,” but this only shows how far we have come. A year
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after Donkin’s book came out, Katherine Quinsey published an excellent collection of
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essays with a wide range of approaches to women, feminism, and theater of this period called Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama (1996). Heidi Hutner published a collection of essays devoted to Aphra Behn (1992), Janet Todd an invaluable literary biography of Behn (1997), and Derek Hughes the first full-scale critical book on Behn’s practice as a playwright (2001). Behn, in fact, has attracted so much critical interest of late that she has earned an unquestioned place as a major author in the study of the long eighteenth century. Serious work on Aphra Behn and others
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suggests that women playwrights of this period no longer function as interesting novelties, but have taken their rightful place as key figures in their own right. Since Pearson and Staves, feminist work on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama has flourished, offering new ways into questions of gender, authority, and authorship. My own Playwrights and Plagiarists (1996), for example, returns to the issues of contract and property raised by Staves, but extends them to women writers and to property relations not just as represented in the plays but in gendered conceptions of
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the ownership of literary property itself. Dramatists had long borrowed freely from other dramatists, but even before legal protections of authorship new forms of literary professionalism raised new and gendered questions around this practice. While I
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compare male and female practice, Misty Anderson focuses on women writers, arguing
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that representations of marriage in comedy provide a key opportunity for feminist intervention. Early women playwrights may not radically overturn gendered
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expectations, she argues, but they tend optimistically to imagine for their heroines some possibilities for negotiation that might not actually have been available in the culture.
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While gender and sexuality have received considerable attention in the last two
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decades, possibilities for new work remain vital. Relatively speaking, we still only have a moderate understanding of the ways in which women contributed to the eighteenthcentury stage compared to the ways that women contributed to the novel. Including women playwrights in course syllabi has probably become the norm, but a quick search of the MLA bibliography still reveals considerably less analysis of women’s plays (with the spectacular exception of Aphra Behn’s work) than of those written by men. We still need a better understanding of the lives and careers of actresses and of the various
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women who contributed to the stage in less public ways. Finally, while the exploitation of female bodies and female sexuality has been acknowledged and explored, we also need a fuller appreciation of the uniqueness of theater as a public space that not only permitted but actually required the presence of both men and women. While by no means enjoying that space as equals, men and women nevertheless shared the moment of performance, displayed their pleasures and disappointments, read reviews, gossiped about actors, and looked around to see who else had come to the play. Theater thus offers, I
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believe, not a microcosm of the larger world, but an unusual space for experimentation with an exploration of the meanings, limits, and new possibilities of gender and sexuality.
Politics and Ideology
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The political engagement of Restoration and eighteenth-century theater has always been clear to critics, but it has attracted particular attention in the last twenty years
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with the renewed sensitivity to literature’s political dimensions in general. New historicism recognized the central place of theater in national politics, particularly during
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the reign of Queen Elizabeth. In the Renaissance, theater expressed the monarch’s
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authority and the monarch displayed her power theatrically; at the same time, performances could also express anxieties over the state. Paula Backscheider’s Spectacular Politics (1993) brings some of these strategies to bear on thinking about Restoration and eighteenth-century drama: she explores, for example, the ways in which Charles II deliberately exerted his influenced over various kinds of performances in the hope of consolidating his authority. While Backscheider offers important insights into period and into eighteenth-century popular culture, the monarch-centered strategies of
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new historicism in general never gained a lot of traction in Restoration and eighteenthcentury theater studies, probably due to the shift in structures of authority described by Staves. New historicist analysis of early modern drama often returns to the central authority of the monarch. Many of the conflicts that led to the English Revolution, however, had not been resolved, and even though Charles in certain ways established his authority, in other ways the monarchy was never the same. Backscheider’s own study, in fact, ultimately turns from the monarch to mass culture for explanatory power and ends
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with an exploration of eighteenth-century gothic drama, another genre recently attracting new kinds of attention in the field. Although monarch-centered strategies of reading have held less force in this
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period, much of the newer criticism has revealed the profound involvement of drama in
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party politics and explored drama as a key cultural site for the expression of ideological conflict. “Politics” and “ideology” are overlapping categories, yet they nevertheless
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describe different points of emphasis in criticism: political readings tend to look at the ways in which the plays express loyalty to a party or engage philosophical questions of
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authority, whereas ideological readings explore various constellations of power assumed
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by the text. If the drama never entirely focuses on the figure of the monarch, the plays undeniably engaged the volatile political conflicts of the era. Nancy Maguire (1992), for example, looks at the problem of Restoration tragedy in a culture in which a king had been beheaded in recent memory. With divine right theory so deeply undermined by the English revolution, this genre had to change. Maguire suggests that forms like the splitplot tragedy and tragicomedy emerge to negotiate the politically explosive suggestions of traditional tragedy. Susan Owen (1996) also looks at the theater’s political challenges
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during the Restoration. While previous studies had tended to divide dramatic productions into “Whig” and “Tory” loyalties, Owen shows that many of the plays offer mixed messages in this regard. But one place where they clearly reveal their differences, Owen finds, is on the topic of libertinism. Whigs took full advantage of the opportunity to criticize Charles by representing sexual aggression as a metaphor for tyranny, whereas Tory playwrights tended to indulge sexual irregularity. Mostly, though, Owen complicates our understanding of the political landscape by pointing to previously
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unacknowledged Whig influences on the stage: “Assumptions about the conservatism of Restoration drama have led to the marginalization of oppositional drama and to the false idea that there is no Whig writing of any significance before 1688” (29). Owen explores
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both Whig writing and the extreme ambivalence in many Tory plays; she argues that a
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high degree of selectivity in most accounts has skewed our understanding of the drama of this period.
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Owen’s critique returns us to a problem raised earlier in this essay: do we seek to draw conclusions by accounting for all the plays of the period (with an emphasis on the
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popular ones), or do we offer close readings of the few plays that seem to offer the
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greatest complexity? It seems to me that the answer depends on what questions we want to ask. Surely Owen could not make the kind of argument she does about the politics of the stage without looking at a wide range of plays. If we are trying to make an argument about the political function of theater (especially in relation to specific party politics), we are better off reading all the plays and also attending to the number of times they were each performed to gage their popularity. Laura Brown, however, makes the case for another possibility, as noted earlier: “the best works are more representative of their
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genre and of their period than minor or average works, because they come closer to fulfilling the potential of their form. They grasp the realities of their age more fully, and they embody its concerns and contradictions more completely” (xiv). Setting aside for now the question of which plays can qualify as “the best”—a necessarily shifting category—perhaps casting a broad net has advantages for thinking about politics while the sharper focus had advantages for thinking about ideology. Those with broad nets, such as Owen, Hughes, and Hume, have offered important correctives to irresponsible
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generalizations based on only a few plays. Critics with a sharper focus, however, have been able to offer a kind of insight into meaning and ideology that can’t be done when trying to cover so much ground. Robert Markley (1998), for example, offers
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sophisticated close readings of the Restoration playwrights who have been considered the
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most complex, exploring the problems of language and wit the plays of Wycherley, Etherege, and Congreve. Markley begins by tracing the ideal of comic wit back to its
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roots in the display of aristocratic finesse, but then shows how Restoration writers ironize, deform, and even attempt to revive this connection, in part through the figure of
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the rake. Thus Markley shows in intriguing detail the ways in which aristocratic ideology
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and its failures shape sexual politics in these writers. Certainly both styles contribute productively to the field.
Empire New attention in literary studies to Britain’s imperial exploits has generated welcome interest in the stage’s profound engagement with colonial tensions and expansionist impulses. Here we find some of the same kinds of methodological divisions
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as elsewhere. Bridget Orr in Empire on the British Stage (2001), for example, does an admirable job of surveying the truly astonishing variety of Restoration plays that take on the problem of empire. Her most important insight is that the writing for the stage in this period defies a simple “Orientalist” discourse. Critics before Orr had mostly assumed that plays about empire use exotic locations to allegorize local politics (an argument still found in much criticism). Against this, Orr suggests that the theater truly engaged global politics in ways that do not simply condescend to a generic exoticized “other”:
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Restoration playwrights, and thus presumably audiences, distinguished between the various ethnic and national represented on stage. This does not mean that they did not stereotype, but that they had a more particular sense of difference than critics often credit
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them with. Further, English playwrights did not necessarily rest assured in their own
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national superiority, as the plays often express their admiration and fear of other empires. Finally, Orr devotes attention to the variety of ways in which writers conceived of the
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idea of empire itself during this period. In contrast to Orr’s gestures toward provincializing England, Heidi Hutner (2001) and Cynthia Lowenthal (2003) each look at
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the various ways in which the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage promoted British
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imperialism. For Hutner, this promotion depended on the feminization of the exotic “other” and the exoticization of the feminine. Hutner offers extended readings of six Restoration plays, suggesting that "in the dramatic literature of the seventeenth century, English patriarchal culture attempts to define and, for English Royalists after 1660, restore itself over the body of the native woman or the European woman who has gone native" (3). Hutner supports her argument through productive contextualization of plays like Dryden’s Indian Queen with contemporary narratives about Pochahontas and
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Maliche, the legendary native woman who betrays her country for the love of a Spanish conquistador. Lowenthal looks at the wide variety of ways in which the stage contributed to the formation of identity, an approach that includes informatively historicized chapters comparing Spanish and English dramatic representations of empire, as well as a chapter on English representations of Turks and Moors. Her readings explore the “romance of conquest”; that is, the way that playwrights displace imperial aggression onto plots of erotic desire. Lowenthal also includes chapters on merchants, rape, and actresses. While
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it is not always clear how these various categories contribute to her general category of “identity,” Lowenthal nevertheless offers a deeply historicized account that places changes on the stage in the context of Britain’s emergence as an imperial and commercial nation.
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While the books already mentioned investigate the “exotic” plays of the Restoration, the problem of empire has begun to attract attention in the study of
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eighteenth-century drama as well. Helen Burke’s Riotous Performances (2003) looks not so much at play texts but at riots and other kinds of conflicts in the Irish theater.
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Methodologically innovative, Riotous Performances demonstrates the deeply political
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implications of conflicts around performances and of conflicts that become performances in the context of British imperialism and Irish nationalism. Burke shows that the theater became a flashpoint in the colonizing (and decolonizing) process: a site for the attempted formation of British hegemony, but also at times an opportunity for Irish “subversive remembering” (98). In Staging Governance, Daniel O’Quinn turns his attention to the heart to the empire, arguing that at the end of the eighteenth century the London theaters rehearsed both anxieties and compensatory fantasies about imperial expansion. O’Quinn
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convincingly identifies the last thirty years of the eighteenth century as a period of crisis over empire, citing such events as the American war, conflicts over the governance of India, and the exploration of the South Seas by Captain Cook. In O’Quinn’s sophisticated analysis, the stage is not simply a mechanism for expressing British superiority but a key location for the cultural exploration of empire’s vulnerabilities. In this sense, O’Quinn describes theater at this time as “autoethnographic” (11). These and other studies of the stage’s engagement with empire often call attention to periods, texts,
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and locations that have been either overlooked or treated in cursory ways. Finally and perhaps most innovatively of all studies in eighteenth-century theater in the last twenty years, Joseph Roach’s Cities of the Dead (1996) offers a complex
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comparative analysis of various sites of performance in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
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century Atlantic world. Writing neither a traditional history of the stage nor analysis of drama texts, Roach argues that while Benedict Anderson has demonstrated the
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significance of print culture in general and daily newspapers in particular in the formation of national identity, an equally strong case could be made for performance as having this
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function. Anderson’s focus on print limits his capacity to theorize nationhood to societies
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with print cultures. Roach, by contrast, suggests that performance offers more productive possibilities for a comparative approach, as all societies at some point define themselves and their identities through some kind of performance. Thus Roach juxtaposes the London performance of Dryden’s Indian Queen with the visits of the four “Indian kings” (described in The Spectator) and with Native American condolence counsels. Roach’s most inventive and at the same time most risky strategy is his imaginative reconstruction of performances and performers who have left less evidence and different kinds of
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evidence than literary critics usually turn to, a strategy that in lesser hands could have proven quite troubling. Yet this risky strategy is part of Roach’s point, for threaded throughout Cities of the Dead is a contemplation of the tensions between remembering and forgetting in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British imperial project. Performance, Roach suggests, constitutes one form of cultural memory, and sometimes even memorialization. Thus eighteenth-century biographies of the actor Thomas Betterton insist that Betterton performed Shakespearean roles in a manner handed down
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from actor to actor since Shakespeare’s time. Shakespearean tragedies, themselves so popular in the Restoration and eighteenth century, thematize the function of memory: the ghost of Old Hamlet demands to be remembered. The series of substitutions involved in
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actors handing down their roles find in Roach a vexed parallel in the legitimization of
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royal authority, also handed down from one public figure to the next. Eighteen-century productions of Macbeth thus paraded a line of royal descendants across the stage,
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suggesting an unbroken line of authority (in the face of contemporary evidence to the contrary.) Actors in some ways could radiate the authority of the monarch, but at the
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same time only became shadow kings with wooden swords. The London stage celebrated
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such vulnerable forms of continuity, but at the same time specialized in “forgetting” much of the imperial violence--the slave trade in particular--underwriting British prosperity. Roach, however, shows how other circum-Atlantic cultures defined themselves through memory and performance as well. By reconstructing performances such at the Native American condolence counsels and African-American funeral processions in New Orleans, Roach reveals forms of nationalism that the British empire
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endeavored to “forget” but that were, as in Burke’s description of Irish theater, subversively remembered in a different context.
Conclusion The study of Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, then, has emerged in the last two or three decades as a vital field: we have come a very long way from worrying about whether or not The Man of Mode will contribute to the delinquency of minors. In
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addition to work already mentioned, the field has benefited from many excellent singleauthor studies, such as Jessica Munn’s study of Thomas Otway (1995) and Christopher Wheatley’s book on Thomas Shadwell (1993) and David Bruce Kramer’s discussion of
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Dryden (1994), as well as important articles exploring the meaning of particular plays.
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The field has moved from the study of a small handful of powerful plays to including not just literally every dramatic text produced in the period, but readings of performers,
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scenery, audiences, controversies around the plays and the context of production. Scholars have also moved toward thinking about performance as not just limited to the
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institution of the theater but as a vital phenomenon found in a variety of locations. All
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this has invigorated the field in significant ways. With new scholarly interest in the social and cultural challenges of modernity—questions about gender, sexuality, commerce, nationalism, imperialism, identity, and cosmopolitanism—Restoration and eighteenth-century drama seems to matter now more than ever.
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Works Cited
Anderson, Misty G. Female Playwrights and Eighteenth-Century Comedy: Negotiating Marriage on the London Stage. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Backscheider, Paula R. Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Burke, Helen M. Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater,
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1712-1748. Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2003. Brown, Laura. English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981.
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Canfield, J. Douglas, editor. The Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early
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Eighteenth-Century English Drama. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 1977. --------Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy. Lexington:
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University Press of Kentucky, 2000.
--------Tricksters and Estates: On the Ideology of Restoration Comedy. Lexington:
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University Press of Kentucky, 1977.
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Corman, Brian. Genre and Generic Change in English Comedy 1660-1720. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation and Authorship, 1660-1769. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Donkin, Ellen. Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London, 1776-1829. New York: Routledge, 1995. Ellis, Frank H. Sentimental Comedy: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge
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University Press, 1991. Freeman, Lisa A. Character's Theater: Genre and Identity on the Eighteenth-Century English Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Gill, Pat. Interpreting Ladies: Women, Wit, and Morality in the Restoration Comedy of Manners. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Harwood, John T. Critics, Values, and Restoration Comedy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.
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Holland, Norman N. The First Modern Comedies: The Significance of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1959. Hughes, Derek. English Drama, 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.
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--------The Theatre of Aphra Behn. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
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Hume, Robert. The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
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Hutner, Heidi. Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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---------ed. Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1993.
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Kinservik, Matthew J. Disciplining Satire: The Censorship of Satiric Comedy on the Eighteenth-Century London Stage. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Kramer, David Bruce. The Imperial Dryden: The Poetics of Appropriation in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.
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Lowenthal, Cynthia. Performing Identities on the Restoration Stage. Carbobdale: Souther Illinois University Press, 2003. Maguire, Nancy. Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy 1660-1671. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Markley, Robert. Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley and Congreve. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Marsden, Jean I. Fatal Desire: Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660-1720.
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Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. ---------The Re-imaged Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
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Munns, Jessica. Restoration Politics and Drama: The Plays of Thomas Otway, 1675-
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1783. Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 1995. O’Brien, John. Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690-1760.
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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. O'Quinn, Daniel. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770-1800.
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Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
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Orr, Bridget. Empire on the English Stage, 1660-1714. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Owen, Susan J. Restoration Theatre and Crisis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pearson, Jacqueline.
The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women & Women Dramatists,
1642-1737. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Quinsey, Katherine M. Broken Boundaries: Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
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Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Rosenthal, Laura J. Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996. Staves, Susan. Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Straub, Kristina. Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology.
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Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Todd, Janet. The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.
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Turner, James Grantham. Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London: Sexuality,
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Politics, and Literary Culture, 1630-1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
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Wanko, Cheryl. Roles of Authority: Thespian Biography and Celebrity in EighteenthCentury Britain. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech UP, 2003.
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Weber, Harold. The Restoration Rake-Hero: Transformations in Sexual Understanding
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in Seventeenth-Century England. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press 1986.
Webster, Jeremy W. Performing Libertinism in Charles II’s Court: Politics, Drama, Sexuality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Wheatley, Christopher. Without God or Reason: The Plays of Thomas Shadwell and Secular Ethics of the Restoration. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1993.
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Select Bibliography for Further Reading
Note: The essay itself leans toward the early part of the period, but the bibliography also includes some of the recent books focusing on the later part of the period. In the essay and in this bibliography, I have focused on critical works; a wealth of new editions, however, has contributed substantially to the field and deserves an essay of their own. This bibliography is indebted to the Frances M Kavenik’s British Drama, 1660-1779, A
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Critical History.
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Bevis, Richard W. The Laughing Tradition: Stage Comedy in Garrick’s Day. London: G. Prior, 1981.
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Bolton, Betsy. Women, Nationalism, and the Romantic Stage: Theatre and Politics in
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Britain, 1780-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Burroughs, Catherine B. Women in British Romantic Theatre: Drama, Performance, and
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-------. Steele at Drury Lane. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952. Love, Harold, ed. Restoration Literature: Critical Approaches. London: Methuen, 1972. McVeagh, John. Thomas Durfey and Restoration Drama: The Work of a Forgotten Writers. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000. Milhous, Judith. Thomas Betterton and the Management of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 16951708. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. Moody, Jane. Illegitimate Theatre in London, 1770-1840. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Literature Compass
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Literature Compass
