Zeal-of-the-Land Busy Restored

Abstract

After the reopening of the playhouses at the Restoration theatre managers had perforce to build their initial repertoire from the rich stock of pre-Civil War playscripts. The earliest recorded performance after the king’s return was of Epicoene, or The Silent Woman — a harbinger of the strong Jonsonian presence in the list of subsequent revivals. Jonson’s renewed prosperity in the playhouse was buttressed by a formidable and burgeoning critical reputation. It was therefore natural that novice dramatists should have consulted Jonsonian precedents as they nerved themselves to devise new plays for contemporary audiences. Equally, staging Jonson’s own plays in the unprecedented circumstances of the early 1660s demanded of the players a responsiveness to the ways in which mid-century experience might have rendered some of their materials freshly resonant or politically sensitive. The present essay aims to explore two related, and mutually illuminating, case studies in the history of the Jonsonian presence in the early Restoration playhouses — namely, the difficulties which attended the return of Bartholomew Fair to the stage and the ingenious use made of that comedy by a new dramatist in writing a comedy adventurously addressed to urgent current preoccupations.