Abstract
Every schoolboy once knew that the Restoration of the king meant the restoration of the theatre and it was often claimed that that very connection meant the degeneration of drama. Such simplified views point the way to a more complicated truth. From the first, Restoration drama, as we shall see, was essentially political drama, drawing on the circumstances and attitudes that had led to the theatre’s reopening for its peculiar matter and flavour. It was new and effective but like much political drama rather limited. Although it derived from earlier drama, its distinctive affiliation was with contemporary panegyric, political pamphleteering and propagandist display. From the beginning Charles’s return had called forth theatrical show on the grandest scale. The numerous official occasions provided an opportunity for lavish, ingratiating spectacles, presented before the king, mostly organised by the City of London and performed in the streets or important civic buildings. John Tatham’s The Royal Oak for the Lord Mayor’s Day 1660 had ‘twice as many Pageants and Speeches as have been formerly showen’, and the coronation triumphs in 1661 were reckoned greater than anything seen before in England or Rome.1 The tradition of street pageantry was an old one and incorporated emblematic imagery, verbal and visual, with a long ancestry of political service.
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Notes
John Tatham, The Royal Oake With Other various and delightfull Scenes presented on the Water and the Land (1660), sig. A1a.
For the tradition of emblematic pageantry, G.R. Kernodle, From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1944), pp. 58–76, 90–3
Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages, vol. II, Part I (1963), pp. 206–44
L.J. Morrissey, ‘English Street Theatre: 1655–1708’, Costerus, 4(1972), 105–38
Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (1975), pp. 29–87, esp. p. 41.
John Ogilby, The Relation of His Majesty’s Entertainment (1661), p. 2 (the humbler first version).
For the contemporary importance of Claudian, James D. Garrison, Dryden and the Tradition of Panegyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), pp. 22–7, 63–82, 87–99.
Ogilby, The Relation of His Majestie’s Entertainment (1661), p. 2.
John Tatham, London’s Triumphs (1664), pp. 14–16.
Harold Love, ‘State Affairs on the Restoration Stage, 1660–1675’, Restoration and 18th Century Theatre Research, 19 (1975), 1–9.
Most of the available information about the theatre of this period has been assembled in The London Stage 1660–1800 (11 vols, Carbondale, 1960–8), Part I, ed. William Van Lennep, with a Critical Introduction by Emmett L. Avery and Arthur H. Scouten (1965).
Details of extant plays and performance dates (if any) derive from this work and, unless otherwise stated, from two other standard works, Alfred Harbage, Cavalier Drama (New York and London, 1936) and
Allardyce Nicoll, A History of English Drama 1660–1900 (revised edn., 6 vols, vol. I, Restoration Drama 1660–1700 (Cambridge, 1952).
Allardyce Nicoll, ‘Political Plays of the Restoration’, MLR, XVI (1921), 224–42. Nicoll provides an extensive list of examples.
John Tatham, The Rump: Or The Mirrour of the late Times. A New Comedy (1660), sig. A1a; Love, ‘State Affairs’, p. 1.
[Anthony Sadler,] The Subjects Joy for the Kings Restoration, Cheerfully made known in A Sacred Masque: Gratefully made publique for His sacred Majesty (1660), sig. A2b.
John Wilson, Andronicus Comnenius (1664), sig. A3a–b.
Cf. The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, ed. Edward, Surtz, S.J. and J.H. Hexter (New Haven and London, 1965), pp. 240–1.
Edward Howard, The Usurper (1668), p. 72, p. 65, p. 70.
John Tatham, London’s Triumphs (1664), pp. 7–8.
Stephen Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1975), passim.
Glynne Wickham, ‘The Restoration Theatre’, English Drama to 1710, ed. Christopher Ricks (1971), pp. 370–4; and note 64 below.
An important general study of changing ideas of kingship in Restoration drama is Susan Staves, Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (Lincoln and London, 1979), Ch. 2, ‘Authority and Obligation in the State’, pp. 43–110, includes discussion of early Restoration tragedy.
Prologue to Nahum Tate’s The Loyal General (1680): the Stuart succession was then under its next major threat.
Sir Robert Howard, Four New Plays (1665), sig. a2a; Essays of John Dryden, I, 120.
Ibid., p. 124; Bruce King discusses philosophical scepticism in Dryden’s Major Plays (Edinburgh and London, 1966), pp. 7–19.
Citations refer to the edition of the play in The Works of John Dryden, vol. VIII, ed. John Harrington Smith, Dougald MacMillan, Vinton A. Dearing et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962).
Emrys Jones, ‘Bosworth Eve’, Essays in Criticism, 25 (1975), 38–54.
[John Caryll,] The English Princess, or, The Death of Richard the III (1667), p. [66], p. 11, p. 8, p. 26, p. 61, p. 64, p. 33.
Edward J. Dent, Foundations of English Opera: A Study of Musical Drama in England During the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1928), pp. 41–77
Stephen Orgel, ‘The Masque’, English Drama to 1710, ed. Christopher Ricks (1971), p. 366. Davenant had worked with Inigo Jones on the last true Caroline masque.
The Dramatic Works of Sir William Davenant, ed. James Maidment and W.H. Logan, vol. III (Edinburgh and London, 1873), pp. 257–8.
The Dramatic Works of John Dryden, With a Life of the Author by Sir Walter Scott, Bart., ed. George Saintsbury (8 vols, Edinburgh, 1882), IV, 124. For other usages of ‘restore’, pp. 71, 95, 104, 107, 162.
[Winifred Gardner,] Lady Burghclere, The Life of James First Duke of Ormonde 1610–1688 (2vols, 1912), vol. I, p. 363; vol.II, pp. 10–11, 144–59, 288;
The Dramatic Works of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, ed. W.S. Clark II (2 vols, Cambridge, Mass., 1937), vol. I, pp. 3–60 (citations from plays use this edition); DNB entry ‘Boyle, Roger’.
G. Wilson Knight, The Golden Labyrinth: A Study of British Drama (1962), p. 170.
J.H. Wilson, A Rake and His Times: George Villiers 2nd Duke of Buckingham (1954), pp. 58, 80–3, 86–92, 97–100, 106–9, 116–17
Alfred Harbage, ‘Elizabethan-Restoration Palimpsest’, MLR, XXXV (1940), 287–319, argues for Ford’s substantial authorship, pp. 297–304
H.J. Oliver, The Problem of John Ford (Melbourne, 1955), pp. 131–4, introduces the Shirleys as candidates for authorship
cf. H.J. Oliver, Sir Robert Howard (1626–1698): A Critical Biography (Durham, North Carolina, 1963), pp. 140–1.
Sir Robert Howard, Five New Plays (1692), p. 209.
Howard’s The Duell of the Stags: A Poem (1668) fabricated a Clarendonian scare to warn against the favourite’s resurgence and to promote Buckingham (sig. A2b, pp. 1–3, 7, 13)
Charles E. Ward, ‘An Unpublished Letter to Sir Robert Howard; MLN, LX (1945), 119–21, testifies to the poem’s contemporary political reading.
Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1976), pp. 260–2.
L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (1937), p. 299
‘Restoration Comedy: The Reality and the Myth’ (1937), reprinted in Explorations (1963), pp. 132–3
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (1961), pp. 252–4.
A.S. Bear, ‘Criticism and Social Change: The Case of Restoration Drama’, Komos II (1969), 23–31;
Harold Love, ‘Bear’s Case Laid Open: Or, a Timely Warning to Literary Sociologists’, Komos II (1969), 72–80.
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© 1984 Nicholas Jose
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Jose, N. (1984). Theatrical Restoration. In: Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature, 1660–71. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06635-3_7
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