Kingship and Tragedy (1660–1715)

The book explores the representation of kingship on the English Restoration stage. In the early years of the Restoration, monarchy itself presided the re-opening of the theatres and the protagonists of the events of 1659-60 found stage epigones in authentic ‘Restoration plots’ that informed a tragicomic re-actment of the recent events that had just brought Charles Stuart back to the throne. This calls into cause a close and at times problematic relationship between the court and the theatre opening the investigation of how the very events of the early 1660s were dramatized, especially in celebratory plays such as Orrery’s (The Generall and Henry the Fifth) but also John Dryden’s congratulatory but subtly controversial The Indian Queen and The Indian Emperor. Despite this promising début, the Stuarts’ ‘honeymoon’ with the nation was doomed to be short-lived and so was the notion of sacred kingship, deeply engrained in pre-revolutionary royal ideology, which was now proving difficult to be restored. The last decades of the seventeenth century saw, indeed, the emergence of a new concept of kingly power and of its limitations, deeply affecting the political, as well as ontological structures on which monarchy was built and culminating in the Exclusion Crisis and later on in the Glorious Revolution. Theatrical production faithfully recorded, problematised and at times anticipated the symbolic as well as institutional shifts that would lead the nation towards its constitutional eighteenth-century arrangement. And the theatre itself rapidly changed its modes accordingly: from early Restoration tragicomedies to the sombre tragedies of the 1670s and 1680s to the pathetic stage heroes of the early 18th century.