Davenant, Saint-Évremond, Dryden, and the Ocular Dimension of Travel

Abstract

The closure of the public theatres in 1642 and the political discontinuity of the Interregnum necessarily affected the production of drama in England. Whilst aesthetic continuity cannot by any means be assumed, in this chapter I trace new lines of interconnection between Interregnum entertainments not formerly linked (as voyage dramas) to the other plays of this study, in order to ask whether there may be value in seeing some kind of continuous innovation in the theatre, however limited that might be. I interrogate the effects of the hiatus in playing and of the altered conditions that accompanied the reopening of the theatres, and in particular I am interested in how changing stage technologies affected the playgoer’s experience of voyage drama. Categorical distinctions between Renaissance plays and Restoration plays are predicated on the assumption that these periods possess substantial aesthetic differences, and it is not my intention to deny that such differences exist. Rather, I take these differences as the impetus to investigate the concomitant alteration (if there were any) of imaginative activity and mind-travelling at the theatre.