Some Notes to English Restoration Studies

Shaftesbury on the Offensive
In 1675, Shaftesbury published the modestly-titled A Letter from a Person of Quality (1675), part of the 1670s print polemics (that also included, for example, Marvell's 1768 An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government). After Titus Oates alleged the Popish Plot in 1678, Shaftesbury really went on the offensive; Oates began to support Shaftesbury beginning in November of 1678 (Greene xii). On 11 May 1679, "the Commons, led by Shaftesbury's followers, voted … to introduce a bill excluding the Duke of York from the throne" (Greene xiv), which led the king, of course, to dissolve Parliament. Shaftesbury was instrumental in finding, or suborning, new witnesses to substantiate Oates's Popish Plot (Greene xiv) - including Thomas Dangerfield (a.k.a. Willoughby), "a counterfeiter and robber" whose only political allegiance seems to have been opportunism, whose testimony to Parliament (in October 1680) that "York had offered him twenty guineas to murder the king" led Parliament to quickly approve a bill of exclusion (Greene xv). But the rhetoric was changing, and Shaftesbury's claims of Popery were being successfully reinterpreted by Tories as cries for commonwealth (Greene xvi-xvii). It became clear that Charles II could simply continue to dissolve or simply not meet Parliament, or else block exclusion bills in the Lords, and thus prevent any legal solution; an outright attack on the king, the only alternative, would not find substantial support. Shaftesbury was stuck and about to face a backlash.

Shaftesbury on the Defensive
Tories targeted Shaftesbury, claiming that a written plot for rebellion, referred to as the "Association," had been found in Shaftesbury's closet (Miller 273). In November 1681, Shaftesbury was accused of treason, partly for the "Association." As part of the politicalization of juries during the Exclusion Crisis, "Monmouth, Essex[,] and other Whig notables were conspicuously present [at the trial]; the prosecution witnesses were loudly hissed and had to have an armed escort when they left the court" (Miller 284). The jury's inability to come to a verdict led to "wild popular rejoicing" (Miller 284). In December 1681, London saw bonfires celebrating the "failure of the prosecution of Shaftesbury; those who tried to put them out were beaten up" (Miller 82). The king was "infuriated": he moved to challenge London's charter over its juries' continued Whig rulings (Miller 284). In 1682, Tory sheriffs were declared to have been elected for London, and Shaftesbury fled into exile in Holland (Miller 284). With Shaftesbury gone, the supposed "Rye House Plot" against the king provided the pretext for several trials and executions (Greene xvii). Shaftesbury died in exile in 1683 (Miller 284).

Shaftesbury and Partisan Clubs
Shaftesbury's supporters in the call for a new Parliament took to wearing green ribbons in 1676. Miller notes this as "the first truly partisan club" and adds that, "by the end of 1678[,] this club had its headquarters at the King's Head tavern" (73), where it coordinated with the Commons and coordinated membership. In 1679, this club financially supported the bonfires that celebrated the first bill of exclusion and the return of Monmouth (Charles II's eldest legitimate son whom many hoped would be legitimated) to London (Miller 73). By late 1679, Shaftesbury's had spawned other such exclusionist clubs (Miller 73).

Shaftesbury in Theatre
Shaftesbury found himself reflected in theatre as well, perhaps most notably as Achitophel in Dryden's Absolom and Achitophel, which polemically but incorrectly derided Shaftesbury as "unfixed in principle" (Greene xii). 1980's The Misery of Civil War (1680), by John Crowne, used copious deaths and blood to, as Marsden puts it, "startle the audience into recognizing the potential ramifications of … siding with Shaftesbury and Monmouth against Charles II and his brother James, Duke of York" (179). Autumn 1681 saw the privately-performed Whig comedy, Rome's Follies; or, the Amorous Fryars, dedicated to Shaftesbury (Owen 162). Aphra Behn's The City-Heiress (1682) attacked Shaftesbury (Hughes 139).

Different Views
Brown's 1933 biography quotes relatives' praise of Shaftesbury, including his "skill in weapon, agility, and strength of body scarse paraleld in his age" (3). Haley's more academic 1968 biography begins by negotiating the legacy of Absalom and Achitophel, pointing out that Dryden described Achitophel as wanting to drag monarchy "to the dregs of a Democracy" (Haley 1); Haley continues with an apologia for Shaftesbury's views, such as his concern for Popery, seeking to characterize the sometimes apparently strange concerns of the time. Haley writes that "the name of Shaftesbury was blackened freely as that of a man whose malevolent influence had inspired plans for assassination and rebellion even after his own death" (736), and he concludes:

It was Shaftesbury's function to transmit part of what he had taken over from Parliamentarians of the Civil War to become part of the Whiggism of the eighteenth century, and of the liberalism of the nineteenth. He died while the people under his command were still in the wilderness; others would lead them into the promised land. (746)

While rhetorical (and rhetorically charming), there is merit here: the view jives with the majority of historians' preference for the Whigs as the progressive party. Perhaps one cannot expect biographers to be objective. It seems that the differences between interpretations of Shaftesbury come down to Tory or Whig sentiments. Miller's bias is altogether clear, and both his word choices and citations lay particular emphasis to Shaftesbury's financial life, hinting at less than noble motives .² Greene, on the other hand, says of Shaftesbury:

Throughout his life, he opposed Catholicism and absolutism, and fought for liberty of the subject. His use of the Plot, with the resulting judicial murders of innocent Catholics, cannot be easily justified, though it must be remembered that his methods were part of an age which used the law courts to further political ends. (Greene xii)

It seems for everyone important to note that "the other guy did it too" - only the "other guy," whose sins thus become primal, changes depending on the writer.

A Review of Jean I. Marsden's The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Theory (1995)

Sources used:

Marsden, Jean I. The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, & Eighteenth-Century Theory. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.

Marsden's thesis is that adaptation of Shakespeare, common immediately after the Restoration, slowly died down and gave way to criticism as a form of commentary upon Shakespeare, a trend that reflected changing values that shifted away from moralistic ones with critiques of his metaphor and towards toleration of Shakespeare's ambiguity. This correlates with Shakespeare himself becoming canonized, his texts historically removed so as to become politically inert, and textuality rising with print culture so that Shakespeare's words became sacred and the staging of them secondary. Her methods are historical, based primarily upon reading of Shakespearean adaptations and criticism from the playwright's time to 1800. Her range of discussion is historically vast, occasionally falling into the pitfall of repetition and use of evidence out of sequence.

In examining a book's potential biases, it is often useful to know something about the author. Marsden's CV reveals another book as well as copious articles (including one in The Cambridge Companion to Restoration Drama) and papers. Many show a feminist stance, and the worthiness of the book at hand is emphasized by the fact that this bias is not imposed upon her history of Shakespearean adaptation and criticism. Despite her more theoretical background, this work is essentially one of comparative textual study -- and, not being bogged down with theory (which she limits to occasional and interpretable references to Foucault), it is all the more useful as a result.

Introduction

"Between 1660 and 1777, more than fifty adaptations appeared in print and on the stage," all of them significantly augmented, cut, or rewritten; "adaptations which made substantial changes were not written after the 1780s" (1).

"In the course of the eighteenth century[,] … fewer playwrights wrote or produced adaptations and the[y] … changed less and less" (1)

Part I: The Re-Imagined Text 1. Radical Adaptation

Linguistic and Moral Simplification
- The Restoration distrusted Renaissance ambiguity, instituting an authoritarianism of meaning.
- Actresses and scenery led to new scenes being written to take advantage of them.
- The Restoration preferred the moral messages of Shakespeare's mimesis to his language or poesy.
- Characters became simplified into good and bad, reflecting partisan and dichotomous rhetoric of the time; D'Avenant's Macbeth makes Macbeth a monster (24).
- Neat endings with moral instruction were thus required, so Shakespeare's were tidied up (27-28); chance was eliminated -- the gods saw that the just was done (29).
- The Restoration exhibited a "profound distrust of language" (20) echoed in Bacon, Hobbes, Locke.
- Around 1700, inverted commas began appearing in print to mark Shakespearean cut lines (21), the "precursors to quotation marks" (24), but this was not consistently or dutifully employed and at best represented a "embryonic need to differentiate Shakespeare from non-Shakespeare" (22).
- Radical adaptations were also encouraged by the unavailability of good Shakespearean texts (24).
Rewritten Women
- The addition of women meant more titillating scenes, excuses for ankle-showing (30).
- Women were made good or bad, compliant or not; Marsden sees Cleopatra's domestic calling in All for Love in this light (32-33), while Dryden's Troilus and Cressida (1678) became a tale of two good, faithful lovers.
- Love stories proliferated and many were added or enhanced in Shakespeare (34); Aaron Hill's Henry V (1723) made Katherine a credible love.
- The threat of rape was much used and commonly added to Shakespeare (38-39).
Politicizing Shakespeare
- Adaptation could be used for political commentary, since they were harder to censor (41).
- Shadwell, a Whig, featured a successful and good rebellion in his Timon of Athens (1678) in a time when rebellion against proper authority was as common a theme as it was doomed to fail (43-44).
- Coriolanus became The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth: Or, the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus (1682), filled with failed murderous factions (42-43).
- Edward Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus, Or the Rape of Lavinia (1687) responded to the Popish Plot by emphasizing plotting and purjury (41-42).
- Tate's Lear (1681) has no French invasion but a civil war instead.

2. The Beginnings of Shakespeare Criticism

Theory and Nationalism
- "The fundamental contention of these early critics is that Shakespeare is the greatest English poet, perhaps the greatest poet of all time" (49).
- Though Shakespeare was criticized by neoclassicists, those same critics praised Shakespeare's disunity as nationalistically English when contrasted to French propriety (50, 54).
The Defeat of Rymer: Thomas Rymer's The Tragedies of the Last Age Consider'd and Examined by the Practice of the Ancients, and by the Common Sense of All Ages (1677) applied classical unities and received little response, but his A Short View of Tragedy; Its Original, Excelency, and Corruption. With Some Reflections on Shakespear, and other Practitioners for the Stage (1693) drew heated attack for its hostile critique of Shakespeare.
Linguistic and Moral Chaos
- Shakespeare's rhetoric was seen as the product of a ruder, pun-loving age (61), as bombastic (62), and as concerned with "a sound of words, instead of sense" (63). His metaphor was seen as unlifelike, used much too often, and as morally suspect for its failure to instruct (63).
- The Restortation applied the "almost Manichean" view that anarchy or chance was against God or Providence (67).
The Emergence of a Shakespearean Text: Pope's and others' editions increasingly treated Shakespeare's text as sacred.

Part II: Refined from the Dross 3. Adaptation in Decline

From 1700-1740, not many adaptations were produced and those produced died quicker; at the same time, more and more unaltered production were made, many of which thanked the "ladies" who demanded them in prologues and epilogues (76). Productions hit their height in 1740-1741, when Shakespeare accounted for almost a fourth of London's theatrical production. After 1740, Shakespeare was "as frequently read as seen" (75).
David Garrick produced many productions and adaptations, principally cutting instead of rewriting. The shift was from claiming to refurbish Shakespeare, as Tate did, to claiming to restore more of Shakespeare wonders, and most plays appeared "unrevised, if not complete" (77).
Shakespeare Abbreviated: The late 18th-Century saw many abbreviations of Shakespeare, sometimes with brief additions that were meant to jive with earlier adaptations.
Domesticating Shakespeare: Shakespeare was given a smaller, more domestic scale.
Dutiful Daughters and True Britons: Daughters, who in Shakespeare frequently disobeyed, were made to resist defying their fathers.

4. Criticism at Mid-Century

Mid-Century criticism moved away from learned concerns like the unities as articles circulated for the masses and the patronage system broke down.
Shakespeare was seen as more ancient, part of an English legacy to be revered.
Shakespeare moved from the playhouse to the coffeehouse and to private libraries.
A New Empire of Wit: Mid-Century criticism opposed the rakishness of the Restoration, which they thought had done violence to Shakespeare. Nationalism at this time became more pro-Shakespeare and more anti-French.
Genius, Liberty -- and Feeling
- At this time, Shakespeare became praised for his "feeling" and for the "sublime" qualities of his language, his works for being "written from the heart" (113).
- Criticism became less considered with performance.
Text and Meaning
- Shakespeare's language was no longer considered barbaric but rather possessing the verbally sublime.
- Shakespeare became sacred and attention was paid to his ghost and its reaction to contemporary versions (121).
Johnson and Shakespeare: Samuel Johnson's "Preface" (October 1765) was not representative of the age, but was a kind of throwback in its attacks on Shakespeare's morality and bombasticism.

5. The Search for a Genuine Text

Garrick's 1769 Shaespeare Jubilee openly declared Shakespeare as the "God of our idolatry" (127, with citation). Shakespeare's corpus was becoming a secular Bible.
The Response to Johnson: Johnson was derided as archaic, his praise forgotten and his criticism condemned, often simply for finding fault.
Acceptance of the Complete Text
- Shakespeare, previously derided for his moral implications, became a moral model.
- Criticism took an anti-plot and pro-character stance, praising Shakespeare's human depictions.
- In this context, Falstaff was declared not a coward but a courageous knight (139).
Shakespeare and Subjectivity
- Shakespeare's ambiguity began being praised in the late 1700s, his lyric being found magical and supernatural.
- This was not a political hazard, as it had been in the Restoration, because of Shakespeare's very distance and canonization.
The Author in the Text
- At the end of the century, Shakespeare was found connective, associative, and worthy of praise for his distant metaphors.
- Forged Shakespearean documents started appearing, apparently from Ireland, and this was followed by the public. This eventually came to include new works, though all was exposed as a fraud.

Conclusion

The move was not towards perception of Shakespeare's genius but from appreciation of his mimentic genius to appreciation of his linguistic genius. In the Restoration, dialogue could be changed because Shakespeare's text was not sacred and his genius lie in plots or situations, in universal characters. (Dryden remarked that "words are not like landmarks, so sacred as never to be removed" [154]). By 1750, cuts were made but not adaptations. Shakespeare's text became sacred, laying an emphasis on the words themselves, and could not be altered.

This is followed by an appendix listing Shakespearean adaptations in chronological order. Surely, if one is interested in such adaptations in general or one in particular, Marsden's is a good book to consult, made all the better by its (now unfashionable) readability -- as well as its relative objectivity in the sense that it catalogs, neither condemning nor praising (although she is justifiably a small bit harsh in describing the Restoration -- supposedly anti-Puritan, remember -- moral response to Shakespeare).

The appendix begs a consideration, however. The chronological nature of the book is too vague, leaving the reader at times with little idea when a generalization applies -- whether, say, 1760 or 1770. The overall trend is clear, but the organization of the book could use some work. While Marsden considers criticism as well as adaptation, the limited number of adaptations that survive might have made good chronological linchpins for the book, allowing more honest (making for less of a grand narrative) and historically specific discussion of concerns.

These concerns, unfortunately, are not brought up by J. A. Bryant in his review for Sewanee Review CV.1 (Winter 1997). Bryant agrees with Marsden on the whole, but observes that she "might have considered" Shakespeare's own sources in the study of adaptation. At best, this is an excellent point: especially early adapters might well have justified themselves by seeing Shakespeare more clearly as existing in a continuity of tales and stories, thus giving themselves justifiable leave to adapt more freely. This is, unfortunately, all too characteristic of Shakespeare studies and may be a bi-product of our intimate familiarity with Shakespeare's texts, if not of outright Bardolotry. At worst, however, Bryant is forcing an expansion of Marsden's topic against the will of the author.

What Bryant doesn't point out (and he might have, had he read the book rather than skimmed it for a review), is that Marsden has a limitation in her scope that lies closer to home: the fact that she generally avoids new versions which are not adaptations, such as All for Love or The History of Henry the Fifth, which might have produced interesting readings. Similarly, though she makes reference to them, she occludes editions of Shakespeare with new stage directions and the like, though these might equally qualify as adaptation.

Bryant's apparent summary of Marsden's thesis, or emphasis on the changing role of the individual writer, is far overstated: though such nearly utterly theoretical ideas appear in Marsden, they do not have dominance and are subsumed within a more general, and more responsible, accounting of literary context, placed in something approximating a historical continuity. Bryant himself acknowledges the marginal function of such arguments within Marsden's text, though he does so by referring to that role as "cursory," though Bryant goes on to label these theoretical arguments as "in the main credible" -- surely an attempt to find problems so as to seem properly critical in a review. Sacrificed in the process is the possibility of giving the reader a feel for the texture of Marsden's text, which is much more readable than Bryant's evaluation of it on this point.

Bryant is utterly right, however, that Marsden gets out of her field in her occasional equivocation between the Shakespearean situation in 1800 and today -- when film adaptations, in particular, proliferate. It is as if, for a Restoration scholar, the great issues were settled (conveniently and just barely) within the scope of her specialization -- often a problem in academia today with its strong anti-humanistic (if not clearly irresponsible, given its effects) emphasis on specialization. This should serve as warning, though Bryant uses the point as a more "collegial" and comfortable one without wider implications than the rather limited ones for the book being reviewed.

Classical Adaptation in the English Restoration

Sources used:

Burian, Peter. “Tragedy adapted for stages and screens: the Renaissance to the present.” Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. P. E. Easterling, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Burrow, Colin. “Virgil in English translation.” Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Charles Martindale, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Laird, Andrew. “Approaching characterization in Virgil.” Cambridge Companion to Virgil. Charles Martindale, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Walkling, Andrew R. “Politics and the Restoration masque: the case of Dido and Aeneas.” Culture and Society in the Stuart Restoration: Literature, Drama, History. Gerald MacLean, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

It is frequently argued that adaptation, whether of Shakespeare or of the classics, frequently provided a shield for criticism that might be dangerous if not defensible as simply being an interpretation. At the same time, we should not lose track of poetics, of the power of the individual text and the ability of adaptors, whether into drama or opera, to make changes based on their own response to previous adaptations and what they reveal, or twist, in their classical sources.

Greek plays were rarely adapted “until the end of the eighteenth century” (228). Significant exceptions include John Dryden’s and Nathaniel Lee’s Oedipus (1678), though it reduces “supernatural and ritual elements” and “turn[s] fate into a psychological datum by emphasizing the mutual attraction of mother and son” (240) - they wonderfully emphasize the love between the two (244). Dryden and Lee responded to Corneille’s Œdipe (1659), explicitly attacking it in their preface (243); they also added “a Jacobean ending that leaves corpses littering the state (243).³

Adaptation of classical tragedy into opera benefited by the notion that Athenian originals were sung (261) - “an historical error with the most fruitful consequences” (262; think of Eco’s The Promised Land of Error). As Burian puts it, “the ‘inventors’ of opera quite self-consciously took upon themselves the task of reviving something unknown since antiquity: the fusion of music and drama in a continuous and unified work of art” (262). From the beginning of opera in the Italy of the 1400s and 1500s, then, classical themes and this “new” medium were wed. “The French tragédie en musique of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries … frequently turns to Greek tragic subjects and tends,” like French drama in comparison to English, “to be more ‘regular’ (i.e. Aristotelian)” (263). In contrast, the English are notable in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries more for their lack of adaptation of classical tragedy.

Virgil was frequently used during the civil wars by royalists, though any “simply triumphalism” of the ending of The Aeneid are absent (26). “With the Resoration,” Burrow notes, “he is marched into Toryism” and the despairing voices during the civil war period disappear (27). Annotations of Virgil appeared following the restoration: John Boys’s 1661 annotations of books 2 and 6, entitled Æneas his Errours and Æneas His Descent into Hell, treated Virgil as “an imperial triumphalist” whose wanderings correspond to the royal exile (27).

Dryden, who had used Virgil as a source before and wrote of Virgil as anti-emotional bastion of reason (28), prominently translated Virgil in 1691, after he had become a Catholic and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, thus during the reign of William of Orange. Burrow writes: “His Virgil has been seen as a ‘Jacobite’ work … support[ing] … the exiled James II” (29); Dryden stresses “legitimate kingship and succession” and a hostility to foreign rulers (29). Dryden’s “Life of Virgil” presents Virgil as Dryden, at odds with his nation’s ruler (30). Appropriately for the sometimes difficult ambiguity of Dryden’s politics, he describes Virgil as a closet Republican whose expressions were governed by prudence (30). But Dryden, Burrow argues, saw the interpretive problem of Aeneas as foreign king; Dryden shows hostility towards natives who resist Aeneas while simultaneously emphasizing Aeneas’s need to acculturate into native culture (30) - the analogy to Dryden’s attitudes toward William is inescapable.⁴

In short, Virgil proved quite malleable and found strength in outsiders: as Burrow puts it, “he more usually gives a voice to those who feel that they are on the outside of a dominant culture” (36) - which could be argued in the case of Tate and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (see Walkling). It remains to be pointed out, when addressing adaptation, that Virgil himself “adapted”: as Laird has pointed out, Virgil had “a remarkable number of ‘sources’ for Dido: Homer’s Crice, Calypso and Nausicaa; Medea in Euripides. Apollonius and Varro Atacinus … as well as historical accounts of Cleopatra and even Scribonia (the wife whom Augustus divorced)” (289).

A Response to Ann A. Huse on Dryden’s All for Love

Sources used:

Ann A. Huse. “Cleopatra, Queen of the Seine: The Politics of Eroticism in Dryden’s All for Love.” Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 63.1-2 (Winter 2000). San Marino, California: Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 2001. A special combined issue entitled “John Dryden: A Tercentenary Miscellany.” Note that, like many academic journals, Huntington Library Quarterly is running behind in its publication schedule; thus, the date of the issue does not match the time of publication.

Hughes, Derek. “Restoration and Settlement: 1660 and 1688.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

The cunning title of this article, and its promise to discuss the merged dialectics of eroticism and politics, rests on (so to say) fertile ground. For, as Derek Hughes has put it:

“Politican insurgency was at this time commonly paired with female insubordination” (127);
“the usurper in The Generall is tempted to rape the heroine, his proposed sexual violence paralleling the violence by which he has already gained the kingdom” (129) - a statement which could equally apply to many raping or lusty usurper-figures;
“in associating the triumph of monarchy over rebellion with that of reason over sexual passion, Orrery gave a rather unrealistic assessment of Charles II’s virtues” (129) - a sentence that intrigues with the possible tensions between stage(d) presentations of licentiousness, with their intended moral-political message, and the sexual-political realities of Charles II’s own licentiousness;
“his [Charles II’s] promiscuity and extravagance offended many of his own supporters” (129);
“plays such as Mary Pix’s Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperour of the Turks (1696), Charles Gildon’s The Roman Bride’s Revenge (1696), and Cibber’s Xerxes (1699) … like many deposition plays, … resemble Orrery’s The Generall in associating tyranny with rape: an association that is partly due to political symbolism and partly to the fashion for seeing Anne Bracegirdle and Jane Rogers, actresses who specialized in vulnerable beauty, titillatingly ruffled” (136-137) - an assertion worth great praise for its attention to the dynamic of titillation at staged acts which nonetheless remove the audience and its response from moral critique by imposing a moral message;
“even during the reign of Charles II, the politicized dramatization of rape changes … [it] succeeds, and royalty, not a usurper, performs it” (137); and
“there was some debate as to whether the subject’s right to rebel against an unsatisfactory king did not by analogy imply the wife’s right to rebel against an unsatisfactory husband” (138-139) - a smart case of unintended implications that should remind us of Milton’s divorce tracts.

Though it uses such phrases as “participating in … a highly sexualized discourse of national character” (24), Huse’s article, however, is most noteworthy for its avoidance, rather than productive engagement, with such compelling, if not titillating, territory.

Huse’s article is split into two parts. The first begins well enough, describing how Cleopatra was clearly correlated to “one of Charles II’s French mistresses, Louise de Kéroualle, duchess of Portsmouth, and the Roman Catholic spy for Louis XIV” (23). She had become, in popular conception, far more powerful than she actually was, nothing less than a “metaphor for the English court’s intimacy with religions and monarchs stigmatized as foreign and indeed anti-Christian” (24). She “became the most expensive of the king’s women: … her expenses rose to £40,000 per annum in gifts and pensions” (31). Huse discusses how Charles supported the monarchy with French subsidies, agreeing to “squelch all plans harmful to French interests” (28); it was “widely (and accurately)” suspected that Louis XIV could “bribe Charles to cripple England’s governing bodies when they turned against France” (28), which he clearly did with his actions against Parliament. She goes on to discuss, in “the homophobic strain of anti-popery” (29), how Charles II was also figured as the metaphorical lover of Louis XIV.

We might expect to find a compelling, or at least interesting, argument here about Dryden using this symbolism in All for Love to make a fairly uncharacteristic critique of monarchy, or at least a warning of Charles II’s increasingly apparent associations with Catholics. And we get, for a time, exactly that. Huse pursues this line to some degree, repeating the traditional association of Cleopatra with “luxury” (26) and “the extravagance of women” (33); Louise de Kéroualle “was [also] known for her taste in luxury goods” (30). She properly notes “All for Love’s obsession with gems” (31) and asserts that “Dryden’s Cleopatra resembles de Kéroualle more than she does Shakespeare’s queen when expressing her regret for her missed chance at domesticity” (32), indeed a noted shift from Shakespeare.

One question that is begged here is how any of this, in more general terms, applies more to All for Love than to Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606 or 1607). Huse seems to note this problem and attempts to expel such concerns with a rather odd passage in which she seeks to remove Shakespeare from the conversation by asserting, in essence, that Antony and Cleopatra was defined by contemporary concerns about landowners neglecting their duties to their communities, including offering public feasts and festivals - an interesting reading of a few lines of Shakespeare, but not a compelling case that Shakespeare does not similarly depict a titanic, though flawed, figure, enthralled by foreign luxury and sexuality (which, of course, he clearly does). Huse asserts that “All for Love is cast on a larger sale than its supposed [italics mine] source text: what is regional [presumably domestic] in Shakespeare becomes international in Dryden” (28). Her logic is that the issues confronting England have changed, moving more towards concerns of foreign influence over the king, but this reasoning says nothing substantive about the plays themselves; had Shakespeare written All for Love and Dryden Antony and Cleopatra, we could say the same.

Huse proceeds to destroy her own apparent argument however, characterizing Dryden as agreeing not with Ventidius but with the more sympathetic Dolabella. She concludes that Dryden suggests “that the king may be sleeping with a foreign woman without being in bed with her religion or her monarchy” (35) - an argument which, if true, ignores the fact that Antony out of love still forsakes his nation. As if not content with the more conservative and reasonable argument, however also more obvious, Huse continues, arguing that Antony’s - and thus Charles II’s - sexual tryst with a foreign woman actually invigorates him (36), the only real evidence being Dryden’s conventional description of Antony’s love as a “perpetual Spring” (III.124-125). She concludes this line of argument, ridiculously, by claiming that “Dryden responds [to critiques of Charles II’s foreign sexual entanglements] that the monarch can reign only if provided with the thrill of the foreign to keep him awake and to keep alive in him a memory of himself as a vigorous young man” (37). Yet in the actual play - if we are willing to let it interfere with career-building articles - it is Ventidius, not Cleopatra, who most recalls to Antony’s mind his youthful vigor in past battles; Cleopatra, by contrast, recalls years of lounging and feeling in love, hardly the image of a king awake and responsible to his realm.

Huse’s article then takes a sudden shift, addressing Dryden’s dedication to the play. It is, after all, dedicated to Thomas Osborne, the state treasurer and the Earl of Danby, known for his anti-Catholic and anti-French sentiments. Here again, Huse avoids the more responsible interpretation that Dryden made his dedication as part of an attempt to receive money, which he had previously from the treasurer (37-38). Moreover, the fact that Danby also negotiated with the French on behalf of the king and was rumored to be having an affair with Louise de Kéroualle himself (44) does not dissuade Huse from pursuing a more arcane argument than that political allegiances could act as a red herring to financial interests. She goes to far as to suggest that, because Dryden offers advice and thereby represents the king, he demonstrates to “his patron … the political profit of ventriloquism” (43), of aping the king and following in goose-step fashion. She resolves that “Dollabella is an idealized version of Danby” (45), turning the relationship between play and dedication upon its head. She concludes with no greater insight on All for Love, except the reduction of the play and its characters to a complex and contradictory attempt to advise and to insinuate himself to Danby.

The article is wonderful for its work on Louise de Kéroualle and is worth citing in that regard, though in no other.

A Response to Katherine M. Rogers on Otway's Venice Preserved

Sources used:

Rabkin, Norman. Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Rogers, Katherine M. "Masculine and Feminine Values in Restoration Drama: The distinctive Power of Venice Preserved." Texas Studies in Literature and Language: A Journal of the Humanities 27.4 (Winter 1985). Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Rogers argues that Restoration drama is much better in its depiction of masculine values than feminine ones, which are often used simplistically in juxtaposition as a negative example. She responds to Norman Rabkin's book, which she claims asserts that "in Otway's Venice Preserved, … nothing counts but personal relationship" (390). In contrast, Rogers claims that Otway dramatizes a conflict between masculine values (embodied by Pierre) and feminine ones (embodied by Belvidera), ultimately debunking "a patriarchal society which professes allegiance to abstract ideals but [which] is animated more powerfully by its appetite for violence and retributive justice" (391). For Rogers, "nowhere else in Restoration drama is the conflict between masculine and feminine values developed in so moving and balanced a way, for other plays either celebrate only masculine values or display feminine ones in such a form that they cannot command respect" (395). Jaffeir is pulled, according to Rogers, between Pierre and Belvidera, between loyalty / masculine virtues and her feminine concern for human life itself (393). Jaffeir straddles between the two, alone understanding the implications of both the horror and the lack of a future with Belvidera (394).

In her reading, Priuli's anger at his daughter's marriage to Jaffeir is based upon his fatherly desire to oppress his daughter, his property (391). Belvidera and Jaffeir, prompted by his wife's appearance, become emblems of "domestic love" (392). Pierre, by contrast, "berates his devoted mistress, the prostitute Aquilina" (392) and disdains a companionate relationship (II.i.54-57; Rogers's citation). For Rogers, Pierre acts as devil, recruiting Jaffeir, who betrays himself, for slaughter. When Jaffeir returns to Belvidera, in Rogers's reading, she asserts female values of empathy and peace (392). After Jaffeir reacts against Renault's planned cruelty and callous destructiveness, his compliance with Belvidera's wish that he inform the Senate condemns him in his own eyes (392). Pierre, in the Senate, can only see Jaffeir's revelation of the plans as selfish, displaying Jaffeir's own nature. Jaffeir wants to kill Belvidera when she tells him that Pierre will be executed as a traitor, according to Rogers, "in the name of a sterile concept of retributive justice" (393). Rogers writes that "Jaffeir redeems his manhood by stabbing Pierre (to save him from shameful death) and then himself" (393). Seeing Belvidera as the embodiment of compassion, Rogers focuses acute attention upon her tragedy at the play's end, her values "destroyed … in a man's world" (393).

Interestingly, Rogers makes reference to Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus as a rare play that also illustrates such a conflict. Rogers reads Titus as feminine for caring for Teraminta by marrying her despite his father Brutus. He then shifts back to masculine as he sends her away before joining for the feminine reason of saving Teraminta, a plot against his father (395). Titus shifts back to masculine with his quick repenting, eagerly accepting his father's death sentence for treason. Teraminta's "almost unnoticed" death, leaving masculine values to rule: Titus dies resolutely, while Brutus rejects pleas for mercy (including from Titus's mother) and "that there is any occasion for grief" at all. Rogers, unsatisfied with the play's conclusion, writes that "the play coherently develops a tragic theme, but the harsh ideal it extols is too one-sided to be morally acceptable. We long, moreover, for the honest penetration [surely politically incorrect…] of Otway, who would have recognized the egotism and callousness that taint Brutus's idealism" (396).

Again and again, Rogers also deals with Dryden's All for Love, necessary because it would seemingly provide a good example of another play that similarly addresses masculine and feminine values. At times, she does not seem able to make up her mind. In general, she asserts that "the play does not make us doubt the rightful supremacy of masculine values" and "suggests no reservations about Ventidius's virtue" (398), almost surely an error. She concludes that "All for Love fails to move as Venice Preserved does, largely because, while centering on female values, it does not realize them in a vital and convincing way" (400). On the other hand, she claims that the play depicts "the triumph of love" (398) - the two cannot exist simultaneously. She demonizes Cleopatra as ultimately selfish (399) in order to make Belvidera wise.

Rogers does not utterly dispel the notion that Venice Preserved fits such a description simply in its nihilism. She defends the play as possessing Shakespearean ambiguity (397), but this fits both her thesis and a more nihilistic interpretation. Otway may be disparaging of all sides in the conflict, or he may have "exposed the dangers of doctinaire ideology" (397). Rogers describes Otway's "failure to give … characters self-knowledge even at the end" (401), which would tend towards indeterminacy if not nihilism, but Rogers defends this as realistic and, though a slight of hand, equivocates between that and her thesis - which, after all, she believes (to be "real"). She claims that Otway dramatizes "the danger of abstract political ideals" (402), thus implicitly endorsing the feminine, but this seems a stretch when a more nihilistic "they're both wrong" would do.

For Rogers, Pierre cares rightly about liberty and merit, but too bloodthirsty; his real motivation is "envy and rage against the privileged" (396). For one advocating balance, she goes considerably lighter on Belvidera and feminine values. She writes that "perhaps one had better trust to personal feelings such as love and compassion" (397). She even undermines her argument, attempting to claim rationality for feminine values, thus stripping male values of any basis (398). Similarly, I am not so sure that Jaffeir goes so radically "against his nature to join a violent conspiracy" (402) - in other words, that his nature is no naturally aligned with Belvidera's feminine values. In short, I am not sure what is gained by speaking of masculine and feminine values instead of, say, public and private, reason and emotion, civic or filial.

Rogers is ultimately undone by this feminism. Discussing Otway's The Orphan, she writes that "by the time he wrote Venice Preserved, he saw a larger significance in the victimization of women and clearly recognized the consequences of neglecting the values they represent" (401). But Belvidera's urging of confession to the Senate leads to Jaffeir's death (which may, after all, be a matter of masculine civic duty rather than feminine love) - and, by Rogers's own confession, she does not understand the implications of her urging. And I am less than certain that Otway had become the twentieth-century feminist Rogers at times wants him to be. Pretending to dramatize Otway's balance between masculine and female values, Rogers instead endorses the female, taking advantage of the ambiguity inherent in Menippean satire to write upon Otway's text. If there is one saving grace to this approach, it is that we may speak of the violence she does to his text, and perhaps the agony of her argument, which seems on a metatextual level to be at times a better commentary on the play than the essay itself. There is merit here, but the argument must be sifted and then decoded to be of use.

“Now is it fit I should be saved?”: Political Humor’s Double Edge in Crowne’s City Politiques

Sources used:

Crowne, John. City Politiques. Ed. John Harold Wilson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967. All citations to City Politiques come from this edition.

Ogg, David. England in the Reign of Charles II. Second ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. 1956 reprint edition used.

Wilson, John Harold. “Introduction.” See John Crowne’s City Politiques.

Anthony Kaufman’s “Civil Politics-Sexual Politics” seems to make four points, not necessarily without ambiguity or, to be less generous, contradiction:

Crowne’s City Politiques is political, satirizing the Whigs as power-hungry hypocrites whose influence is destabilizing;
Craffy represents the figure of the Whig poet, whose “rhetorical sophistication ... lack[s] ... principle” (75);
Crowne, suspicious of Catholicism and of the court to which he belonged, also satirized the Tories as lacking friendship or values; and
Florio may represent Rochester as a figure of licentiousness with destabilizing influence, a point which undercuts the third point, since Rochester associated with Whigs.

There is evidence for all four points, though some are stronger than others.

1. There can be relatively little disagreement with the notion that City Politiques is political. Kaufman agrees that the play satirizes “the motivations and nature of self-seeking men [Whigs] engaged in the quest for power” and adds that “the contemporary audience delighted in Crowne’s portrayal of prominent Whiggish figures as crazed poltroons[,] ... as self-serving hypocrites, interested in wealth and titles, whose patriotic rhetoric inadequately disguises their lust for power” (72). The impotence and of both the aged Podesta and old Bartoline is emphasized for comedic effect. Politically, the Bricklayer appears to endorse the strong-arm tactics that were used to tar the Whigs: “We have a hundred thousand men, and they are always in the right” (IV.i.396-397). Friendship, even family, has no role for these Whigs: Bertoline plays both sides and is willing for the sum of ten pounds to appear in court against his brother, which shocks Lucinda (III.64-68). Thus, as Kaufman puts it, “the English audience of 1683 could respond to this representation of what was widely felt to be implicit in the Whig opposition: the anarchy of civil war which had almost become a horrifying reality” (73). Crowne himself seems to endorse this view, saying in his preface that, when he wrote the play during the height of the Exclusion Crisis, “half the nation was mad” (page 5).

On the other hand, as Kaufman puts it, “Florio, the vigorous Tory youth, [has] energy [which] recalls that of the Merry Monarch himself” (74). As Kaufman puts it, “the Whigs ... play at civil politics. The cunning Tories, Florio and Artall, play at sexual politics” (75), and the two overlap - or, as Kaufman more dramatically (though less accurately) puts it, achieve “coalescence” (75).

2. Kaufman claims that Craffy exhibits “Whigist rhetorical sophistication and lack of principle” (75), asserting that this was a common generalization at the time. Kaufman refers to “Craffy’s seditious and execrable poetry” (75). Kaufman writes that “the Whigs ... represent a debasement of literature ... [into] mere propaganda,” adding, “(that the Tories too do this, Crowne of course ignores)” (75). Kaufman continues: “the association of bad art and Whiggism was recognized ... by Tory partisans, who ... disregard[ed] such artists as Shadwell and the political achievement of John Locke” (75). While not without some merit, this is surely a minor point.

3. Halfway through his essay on City Politiques, Kaufman offers a brave corrective: “despite Crowne’s firm royalism, City Politiques is by no means a single-minded or politically simple play” (77). He continues, correctly stating that “it has been universally assumed, I believe, that Crowne, a royalist patronized by the king, was single-mindedly Tory in his drama. In fact, the Englishmen who became known by the derisive name of ‘Tory’ differed in their perceptions of political realities” (77). Kaufman is not alone on this: David Ogg (559-656) has delineated the variety within both parties during the period of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis with some alacrity. For example, many Tories supported the king but were opposed to, and even outspoken about, the threat of Roman Catholicism. This seems to fit Crowne, whose anti-Catholicism is well-established (see Kaufman 77). Moreover, as Kaufman characterizes him, “Crown was at the time of the play a court man (who nonetheless appears to have disliked the court milieu” (72).

The critique of Tories comes in the form of Florio and Artall, who Kaufman characterizes as “ambiguous and finally inadequate characters who represent for Crowne a sense of debasement” (77). If the Whigs have no friendship or loyalty in their pursuit of power, Florio and Artall have none in pursuit of sex; upon meeting, as Kaufman reminds us, they bicker (77). Thus Artall, though masked, states:

I have no only debauched women but the whole age, poisoned all its morals, murdered thousands o’ young consciences, sung others asleep, pumped others with drunkenness, sin I honored and privileged as a peer to the devil. Heaven I affronted, libeled His court, and in my drunken altitudes have endeavored to scour the whole creation of souls and spirits. Now is it fit I should be saved? (IV.ii.18-24)

Artall earlier makes such arch-rakish statements to Florio (II.i.233-241, III.270-275). His statements, protected by his mask, can all too easily be read as those of a charming rake rather indicative of a dangerous, if not satanic, lack of morality or moral compass. Indeed, these are not just rakes: these are, rather, cheerful hypocrites whose debaucheries make men cuckolds, no matter how old and humorous the victims - and, while we may laugh at the Whigs, not granted sympathetic speeches through which we would otherwise pity them, reduced to a type, we do not have to celebrate those who do the cuckolding.

Moreover, such an argument is not altogether without precedent. As Kaufman puts it, “critics have noted the tendency of the comedy of the later seventeenth century to laugh at deviation from the norm and, at the same time, to suggest the inadequacy of the norm itself” (78). This is, it seems, a far more reasonable position than it may at first appear.

4. Kaufman argues that Artall represents the notorious Earl of Rochester, who “associated with Whiggish leaders towards the end of his life” (77).⁵ Florio recalls Artall as “king of libertines” (III.353-354). Indeed, Florio is characterizes as “a debauch” in the dramatis personae. Of course, the final and strongest evidence of a link between the two is that it was seen by contemporaries (80), including those who attacked Crowne on the deceased Rochester’s behalf shortly after the play premiered. The problem with such a reading is that, to the extent that Rochester was a Whig, the entire schema of one’s political interpretation of City Politiques may be thrown off by linking him with the rakish, supposedly Tory Artall.

This is not a problem that rests solely with Kaufman. Canfield’s introduction to the play characterizes it as unambiguously “pro-royalist,” as a “Tory satire,” and even, invoking dramatic staging itself as political act, as a case of the “Stuart Revenge” against the Whigs after the effective failure of the Exclusion Crisis. Yet, after a cursory discussion of Crowne’s techniques of narrative distance from his political satire and his avoidance of using any actual names, notes: “Nevertheless, Crowne was roughed up in an alleyway by an unknown assailant a week after City Politics was staged. Apparently, someone took exception to what was seen as an unflattering portrayal of the late, celebrated (and Whiggish) libertine John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, in the character of Artall.” From this, Canfield concludes: “Thus, despite Crowne’s protests of satiric innocence, contemporary audiences readily saw through the thin disguises of his characters.” He concludes, hammering home his unambiguous message: “His play unabashedly celebrates Tories triumphant ... over the Whigs” (646).

One immediate solution, or gesture towards the same, presents itself: perhaps Artall does not so much represent the Tories, with whom Crowne sided, as the court with which he was uncomfortable - the court with which Rochester participated and in which Tories were famous and notorious for their philandering. Separating the court, the behavior, from the Tories, or the politics (narrowly defined) may allow us to not only reconcile this issue with respect to City Politiques but suggest a need for more complex and less dichotomous broadly political readings in general.

Some Notes to William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700)

Sources used:

Canfield, J. Douglas and Maja-Lisa Von Sneidern, ed. The Broadview Anthology of Restoration & Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001. Cited as “Canfield” for introductory material. It is unclear who has written the introductions to the plays, which have different editors, so all have been cited as Canfield, referring more to this edition than the man himself.

Corman, Brian. “Comedy.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge University Press, 2000. All citations to Congreve come from this edition.

Gill, Pat. “Gender, Sexuality, and Marriage.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Hughes, Derek. “Restoration and Settlement: 1660 and 1688.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Roach, Joseph. “The Performance.” The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk. Cambridge University Press, 2000.

In the play, Miabell courts the rich heiress Millamant and her £12,000 fortune, though it requires the consent in marriage of Lady Wishfort, her aunt and guardian. Noted for its “complex web of social relations," The Way of the World was “considered in subsequent theater history to be a jewel of great comedy” (Canfield 760). According to Canfield, Etherege’s The Man of Mode, Wycherley’s The Country Wife, and Congreve’s The Way of the World are “the best-known comedies of the period” (526).

Canfield writes that, “though performed in 1700, this play is often thought as one of the last true Restoration comedies” (760). He explains:

It is important to see how this play both follows and differs from plays like Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676). Both plays bring witty rakes into proximate union with heiresses. Yet Congreve was writing in a new social atmosphere that seems to have emerged after 1688... [and was against] the excesses of the comedies of the 1670s, in particular plays like Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675). ... Congreve massages the plot in such a way as to avoid any further attacks... . Whereas we are allowed to witness the messy consequences of dorimant’s various affairs in The Man of Mode, the entire plot of The Way of the World hinges on the fact that Mirabell is a reformed rake, [supporting yet controlling] his former lover. (Canfield 760)

Joseph Roach notes that Congreve in the play mocked the onstage commotion of scene changes, complete with brief music and occasional “dance or novelty act,” and the formal announcement of entrances and exits: “witty Mirabell [in Act II] welcomes even wittier Millamant by comparing her arrival in St. James Park accompanied by a fop to a great shiop being piloted into harbor” (27). Later, Millamant’s abrupt exit like a “whirlwind” - complete with “her maid in train” - during Mirabell’s soliloquy addressing her, “exploit[ing] such a rapidly changing panoply of dramatic opportunity” (27). Roach also notes Congreve’s writing of sexy and fantasy-inspiring roles, including Mrs. Millamant, for Anne Bracegirdle, known as the “Romantick Virgin” (36). The scene in which Mirabell and Millamant negotiate their own intended union is thought the most famous scene “in Restoration comedy after the china scene in The Country Wife” (Canfield 760).

Brian Corman writes of the play:

Virtually the entire action is subordinated to the courtship of Mirabell and Millamant, but since the obstacles to their marriage involve most of the other characters, an apparently simply story becomes unusually complicated. Mirabell tries to trick the principal blocking character, Millamant’s aunt, Lady Wishfort, into granting her permission in order not to lose half of Millamant’s fortune. He must also content with three rival suitors. None poses a serious threat, but each further complicates the action. He must also deal with the consequences of his earlier affair with Lady Wishfort’s daughter, Arabella, now Mrs. Fainall after a hasty marriage to a man of low moral standards occasioned by arabella’s fear that she was pregnant. Fainall wishes to prevent Millamant from inheriting the money controlled by Lady Wishfort so that he can win control of it for himself. And his mistress, Marwood, seeks to prevent the marriage to revenge her sense of having been slighted by Mirabell. (66)

Crucial here is the lack of threat amidst complication. Characters seem more important than plot. Compared to earlier comedies, Corman argues that “Congreve’s richer, more well-rounded characters receive a more humane treatment than earlier, simpler comic types. Also more complex are Congreve’s villains,” Marwood and Fainall, who is granted no small amount of wit” (67).

As Derek Hughes has reminded us, the play “(as has often been recognized) implicitly support[s] a contractual theory of government: … the power of a capricious and tyrannical parent, whose authority comes by mere biological transmission, is eventually superseded by the authority of legal contract” (138). So too, then, with the husbands, who are protractedly tested by their potential wives (138) - and here we should remember the parallel between the King and the people as husband and submissive wife. Millamant may eventually “dwindle into a wife” (IV.1.177), but her wifely subordinate position is contractual, consentual, and chosen.

The dogmatic Pat Gill sees “good-natured, [but] morally lax” Mrs. Fainall’s fate at the end of the play, like Bellinda’s in The Man of Mode (1676), as “the promise of [a] dreary, strained future[...]” - and as a cruel fate (194).

Some Notes to Nicholas Rowe's Tamerlane (1701)

Sources used:

Featuring none other than Betterton as the titular character, Tamberlane was first performed at the Lincolns Inn Fields theatre in late 1701. Canfield records that the play was “played every year for the next seventy-five year on the anniversaries of William’s birth (November 4) and his landing in England to accept the throne (November 5), which also happened to be ... Guy Fawkes Day” (38). The play was “the second most popular tragedy (or serious play), outside of Shakespeare, on the eighteenth-century English stage” (Canfield 38).

Tamerlane is typically viewed as “a thinly veiled, idealized portrait of William III” and Bajazet as “a thinly veiled, demonized portrait of Louis XIV” (Canfield 38); indeed, Rowe’s dedication suggests that the titular character is “not unlike His Majesty” (Canfield 38). This idealization, so apparent by comparison to Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, had predecessors in distorted historical writings that softened the historical figure, even making him a friend to Christianity (Canfield 38).

The historical Tamerlane savagely reestablished Mongol control from India and Asia Minor in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century; the implication is that William III should similarly savage Louis XIV and the French, and implication made fairly explicit in the dedication which claims the parallel between Tamerlane and William III “wants nothing to His Majesty but such a deciding victory as that which Tamerlane gave peace to the world” (Canfield 38).

Canfield remarks, “Rowe’s purpose is not merely war-inspired propaganda ... [but also] to fashion an ideal, constitutional, bourgeois monarch, who works hand-in-glove with his ‘senate’ or parliament, and an ethos where worth is based not so much on birth as on merit” (39).

NOTES
¹ These notes were originally assembled for Robert McHenry's class taught at University of Hawai'i at Manoa in Fall 2002. [BACK]
² Miller points out that, in the Dorset by-election of 1675, Digby had accused Shaftesbury of being against the king and for a commonwealth (Miller 233); Shaftesbury responded with a lawsuit and won £1000 for being slurred by a commoner, which apparently set off a rash of such political lawsuits (236). [BACK]
³ As Burian puts it, in the final scene, “Creon kills Eurydice, Adrastus kills him and in turn is killed by Creon’s soldiers. Only then is Jocasta revealed, ‘stabbed in many places of her bosom …’ … . Oedipus, who has been confined to a tower for protection against Creon’s attack, appears at its windows, bemoans Jocasta …, and throws himself to his death” (243-244). [BACK]
⁴ Burrow writes in conclusion that, of the many historic translations available, one should read Dryden’s: “His is the only English Virgil to be consciously founded on the idea that it is right for a translator to bring his own experience to bear on the original, and his is the only English translation to take fire from the delicious friction between the translator’s concerns and thos of his original” (36). [BACK]
⁵ Kaufman points out that, in Florio expressing disdain for courting “popularity,” Crowne clearly distances him from Shafesbury (78). [BACK]