A microcosm of fashion and politics, Restoration drama charted new theatrical territory as it mirrored and critiqued the myriad cultural shifts taking place throughout England. The desire to understand how these changes—the expanded presence of women in the public sphere, Whig politics, formalized capitalist institutions—materialized in London’s playhouses steers the nine articles making up Theatre and Culture in Early Modern England. Catie Gill’s introduction reveals that the dramatic texts considered in this collection do more than merely redefine theatric genres: they work to define the post-Commonwealth subject, to moderate “the individual’s desire for freedom and their need to conform to established social convention.” She argues, “The rakish wit who earlier in the period followed Hobbes’s precept that desire is insatiable had, by the mid-eighteenth century, largely given way to the man of sense,” the Libertine who desires a new type of freedom (9).
Throughout the collection, the reader finds that key moments in social redefinition can be best articulated through seemingly benign—and therefore often overlooked—dramatic moments. For example, Jacqueline Pearson connects acts of reading with emerging concepts of gender and class. Early in the period, “reading is vigorously mocked” (43). Devotional reading becomes synonymous with hypocrisy, scholarship with pedantry, and professional reading with the crass city professional or uncultivated country squire, both of which “lack the true masculinity of the ‘accomplish’d man’” (43). Yet by 1700, reading comes to define the new subject: “The real man does not display his reading: true masculinity is declared in scenes of reading, but tends to be confirmed rather by flinging the book away” (50). Similarly, Juan A. Prieto-Pablos illustrates how the stigma and anti-Royalist politics staining coffeehouses transferred to the men who frequented them. Initially viewed as breeding grounds of discord, by period’s end these spaces come to embody English culture—redefining both coffeehouse and client.
Beyond objects and places, social categories are also remapped. Once united by social equality and shared humility, the cultural construct of the master/servant relationship has collapsed by 1700. Paddy Lyons demonstrates how Lockean ideas of class-consciousness and social aspiration allow the institution of servitude to move from a feudal to a bourgeois system. Lyons argues that the redefinition of servitude “prompted a geometry of both connection and disconnection. … The servant seems at once to stand as the political unconscious … and to look forward almost unknowingly to times still to come” (32).
In two separate chapters, Sandra Clark and Warren Chernack both write about the Earl of Rochester’s adaptation of Beaumont and Fletcher’s Valentinian (1684). A critique of Charles II, the work highlights London’s “changed attitudes towards sex, tyranny, and monarchy,” writes Clark (75). Making this connection must have proved incredibly dangerous for Rochester; Clark notes, “the only power [Emperor] Valentinian acknowledges is that of desire. … There is no bond between ruler and subject.” Rochester’s play depicts an anarchic world where “only self-assertion in pleasure seems to have any meaning” (85–86). Chernack smartly notes that in resisting rape, Rochester’s female protagonist commits a political act—one that serves as a warning to Restoration monarchs. In the same vein of interpretation, Jorge Braga Riera investigates the period’s culture of translation using George Digby’s Elvira (1664). With fifteen Spanish plays reimagined for London’s stages between 1660 and 1685, Riera looks to understand various authors’ “conservation and substitution strategies” (116). As with adaptations of Renaissance texts, playwrights like Digby complicate English culture by incorporating foreign plots, language, and politics.
A radical moment in Restoration drama comes in 1695–96, when four female playwrights enter the city’s theater scene in a single season—only to find their work satirized a year later in the pseudonymous The Female Wits (1697). Moving past the play’s misogyny, Jane Milling views this satire as “advertisement and sophisticated legitimization” (129). Yet, the theater’s perceived female “threat” was not limited to new playwrights. As Fiona Ritchie demonstrates, male authors were increasingly vocal about the presence of women in playhouses—often attempting “to prescribe and control women’s reactions to the plays, and indeed their behavior in the theatre” (143). With 54 percent of new plays either referencing or directly addressing female audience members, “these texts demonstrate how … models of sexual difference were evolving to a perception of women as different from, rather than simply inferior to, men” (144).
Finally, coauthors Maria José Mora and Manuel J. Gómez-Lara write about the culture of marriage in Durfey’s The Marriage-Hater Matched (1692). The play follows various free-loving characters forced or tricked into marriage. Ending with seven couples wedding, “the resolution of the plot seems to confirm that there is, indeed, a divine will enforcing this universal law [of marriage]” (152). The play’s promarriage politics are in direct conversation with William and Mary’s Society for the Reformation of Manners—a movement advocating monogamous marriage as a means of restoring decency to England. Here, as in all the plays discussed throughout these chapters, we come to better appreciate how playwrights reacted to, and engaged with, London’s changing moral climate. By complicating our understanding of how Restoration subjects navigated these new cultural waters, the ideas and observations found throughout this collection pivot future readings of the period’s drama, and English culture more broadly, in small but important ways.
