Derek Hughes
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119746
- eISBN:
- 9780191671203
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119746.003.0007
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
By 1676, the festive comedy of the early Restoration had given way to darker treatments of human desire. In serious drama, the heroic idealism of Earl of Orrery — the object of such festive plays as ...
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By 1676, the festive comedy of the early Restoration had given way to darker treatments of human desire. In serious drama, the heroic idealism of Earl of Orrery — the object of such festive plays as The Comical Revenge — had all but disappeared, though John Dryden, Thomas Otway, and Nathaniel Lee had continued to use the old genres and subjects to criticize the ideals formerly associated with them. However, by the end of 1676, all three had abandoned the heroic play, though minor writers protracted the genre into 1678, chiefly in the form of Siege, Conquest, and Destruction plays. One late exercise in the heroic mode that did not follow the Conquest pattern was Charles Davenant's rhymed opera Circe, the last operatic spectacular until Dryden's Albion and Albanius.Less
By 1676, the festive comedy of the early Restoration had given way to darker treatments of human desire. In serious drama, the heroic idealism of Earl of Orrery — the object of such festive plays as The Comical Revenge — had all but disappeared, though John Dryden, Thomas Otway, and Nathaniel Lee had continued to use the old genres and subjects to criticize the ideals formerly associated with them. However, by the end of 1676, all three had abandoned the heroic play, though minor writers protracted the genre into 1678, chiefly in the form of Siege, Conquest, and Destruction plays. One late exercise in the heroic mode that did not follow the Conquest pattern was Charles Davenant's rhymed opera Circe, the last operatic spectacular until Dryden's Albion and Albanius.
Lana Cable
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199295937
- eISBN:
- 9780191712210
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199295937.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
This chapter explores ambiguities and contradictions in the thinking of Milton and other republicans, whose ideas about toleration came into conflict with their demands for freedom of conscience. ...
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This chapter explores ambiguities and contradictions in the thinking of Milton and other republicans, whose ideas about toleration came into conflict with their demands for freedom of conscience. Beginning with the politics of virtue whereby they strove to displace divine right with secular claims to an ethical absolute, the chapter demonstrates how republican requisites for both societal cohesion and free conscience were compromised by simultaneous commitments to temporal and eternal orders of value. Drawing on evidence of rhetorical strain in Milton's Readie and Easie Way, deliberative pathos in Samson Agonistes and Buckingham's The Rehearsal, and the devastating triumph of virtue over uncertainty dramatized during the Exclusion Crisis by Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, the chapter demonstrates representative variations on the free conscience dilemma. Restoration era pressures for free agency are thus shown to be a struggle both for and against temporal reality, both for and against an eternal ideal.Less
This chapter explores ambiguities and contradictions in the thinking of Milton and other republicans, whose ideas about toleration came into conflict with their demands for freedom of conscience. Beginning with the politics of virtue whereby they strove to displace divine right with secular claims to an ethical absolute, the chapter demonstrates how republican requisites for both societal cohesion and free conscience were compromised by simultaneous commitments to temporal and eternal orders of value. Drawing on evidence of rhetorical strain in Milton's Readie and Easie Way, deliberative pathos in Samson Agonistes and Buckingham's The Rehearsal, and the devastating triumph of virtue over uncertainty dramatized during the Exclusion Crisis by Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus, the chapter demonstrates representative variations on the free conscience dilemma. Restoration era pressures for free agency are thus shown to be a struggle both for and against temporal reality, both for and against an eternal ideal.
Derek Hughes
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119746
- eISBN:
- 9780191671203
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119746.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
In November 1682 the ailing King's Company merged with the more adventurously and expertly managed Duke's, and for the next thirteen years the London stage became a monopoly. The absence of ...
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In November 1682 the ailing King's Company merged with the more adventurously and expertly managed Duke's, and for the next thirteen years the London stage became a monopoly. The absence of commercial rivalry induced an unenterprising reliance upon stock plays, and new plays for a while became scarce and unadventurous. Most comedies, for example, are farcical or lightweight, and in the period up to the end of the 1688 season only four plays (Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleve, Thomas Otway's The Atheist, Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance, and Charles Sedley's Bellamira) provide a serious and exploratory treatment of human sexuality. The Tory triumph turned hitherto ambivalent dramatists into partisans and thereby assisted the decline of tragedy. With The Duke of Guise and Constantine the Great, John Dryden and Lee make their last, and least distinguished, contributions to Exclusion Crisis drama.Less
In November 1682 the ailing King's Company merged with the more adventurously and expertly managed Duke's, and for the next thirteen years the London stage became a monopoly. The absence of commercial rivalry induced an unenterprising reliance upon stock plays, and new plays for a while became scarce and unadventurous. Most comedies, for example, are farcical or lightweight, and in the period up to the end of the 1688 season only four plays (Nathaniel Lee's The Princess of Cleve, Thomas Otway's The Atheist, Aphra Behn's The Lucky Chance, and Charles Sedley's Bellamira) provide a serious and exploratory treatment of human sexuality. The Tory triumph turned hitherto ambivalent dramatists into partisans and thereby assisted the decline of tragedy. With The Duke of Guise and Constantine the Great, John Dryden and Lee make their last, and least distinguished, contributions to Exclusion Crisis drama.
Derek Hughes
- Published in print:
- 1996
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198119746
- eISBN:
- 9780191671203
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119746.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
The first tragedy known to have been premiered after the Revolution was Nathaniel Lee's anti-Catholic pot-boiler The Massacre of Paris, written during the Exclusion Crisis and banned. Here ‘A hundred ...
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The first tragedy known to have been premiered after the Revolution was Nathaniel Lee's anti-Catholic pot-boiler The Massacre of Paris, written during the Exclusion Crisis and banned. Here ‘A hundred thousand Souls for justice call’, but they cry in vain, for, as so often in Lee, the innocent die and the wicked remain unpunished. However, in post-Revolution Whig tragedy monarchy and justice were no longer irreconcilable. The change first appears in George Powell's unimpressive Othello clone The Treacherous Brothers, in which the chastity of a virtuous queen is slandered by two villainous brothers of low social place, but is providentially vindicated in time to prevent her execution. In the many previous Restoration imitations of Othello, the villain had always been an essential part of the order that he subverted; but then renewed confidence in the social order meant that the outsider regained meaning as a source of evil.Less
The first tragedy known to have been premiered after the Revolution was Nathaniel Lee's anti-Catholic pot-boiler The Massacre of Paris, written during the Exclusion Crisis and banned. Here ‘A hundred thousand Souls for justice call’, but they cry in vain, for, as so often in Lee, the innocent die and the wicked remain unpunished. However, in post-Revolution Whig tragedy monarchy and justice were no longer irreconcilable. The change first appears in George Powell's unimpressive Othello clone The Treacherous Brothers, in which the chastity of a virtuous queen is slandered by two villainous brothers of low social place, but is providentially vindicated in time to prevent her execution. In the many previous Restoration imitations of Othello, the villain had always been an essential part of the order that he subverted; but then renewed confidence in the social order meant that the outsider regained meaning as a source of evil.
Margaret J. M. Ezell
- Published in print:
- Published Online:
- September 2017
- ISBN:
- eISBN:
- 9780191849572
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780191849572.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
The changing nature of London’s commercial theatres was seen in the increasing involvement of singers, dancers, and spectacular effects. Many playwrights including Dryden, Wycherley, and Behn were ...
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The changing nature of London’s commercial theatres was seen in the increasing involvement of singers, dancers, and spectacular effects. Many playwrights including Dryden, Wycherley, and Behn were adapting earlier plays by Shakespeare and Molière. New playwrights including Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway relied on sensational violence and effects in their tragedies and created the proto-types for the ‘she-tragedies’ offering spectacles of female suffering.Less
The changing nature of London’s commercial theatres was seen in the increasing involvement of singers, dancers, and spectacular effects. Many playwrights including Dryden, Wycherley, and Behn were adapting earlier plays by Shakespeare and Molière. New playwrights including Nathaniel Lee and Thomas Otway relied on sensational violence and effects in their tragedies and created the proto-types for the ‘she-tragedies’ offering spectacles of female suffering.
Helen Slaney
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198736769
- eISBN:
- 9780191800412
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198736769.003.0006
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
When English theatres reopened in 1660 following the restoration of the monarchy, Seneca remained a resource for tragedians. In particular, playwright Nathaniel ‘Mad Nat’ Lee made extensive use of ...
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When English theatres reopened in 1660 following the restoration of the monarchy, Seneca remained a resource for tragedians. In particular, playwright Nathaniel ‘Mad Nat’ Lee made extensive use of senecan tropes and modes of expression. His early work Nero draws on the pseudo-Senecan Octavia, and later in his career he collaborated with John Dryden on a version of Oedipus. The use of densely figured language to express passion, resulting in a feeling of excess, may be termed ‘hypertragedy’. But this important aspect of the senecan aesthetic was entering a period of decline as developments in scenographic technology began to prioritize spectacle over speech.Less
When English theatres reopened in 1660 following the restoration of the monarchy, Seneca remained a resource for tragedians. In particular, playwright Nathaniel ‘Mad Nat’ Lee made extensive use of senecan tropes and modes of expression. His early work Nero draws on the pseudo-Senecan Octavia, and later in his career he collaborated with John Dryden on a version of Oedipus. The use of densely figured language to express passion, resulting in a feeling of excess, may be termed ‘hypertragedy’. But this important aspect of the senecan aesthetic was entering a period of decline as developments in scenographic technology began to prioritize spectacle over speech.
Ros Ballaster
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198737261
- eISBN:
- 9780191800740
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198737261.003.0012
- Subject:
- Literature, European Literature, 17th-century and Restoration Literature
The ‘rise’ of the novel in England is deeply related to the ‘new’ culture of stage fiction in Restoration England. While novel-writing remained, for the majority of Restoration English authors, a ...
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The ‘rise’ of the novel in England is deeply related to the ‘new’ culture of stage fiction in Restoration England. While novel-writing remained, for the majority of Restoration English authors, a part-time or temporary occupation fitted around the interstices of writing for the major cultural mediator of story in the period, the stage, the restored stage did respond to the new forms of story that were emerging in the shorter novel imported or imitated from France. However, the new evaluation of character in terms of moral reflection rather than heroic action posed new challenges for playwrights seeking to turn the novel into dramatic form. English plays written and produced in the last few decades of the seventeenth century by Thomas Otway, Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Southerne, and Catharine Trotter adapted influential contemporary novels composed in French and translated into English, and highlighted the power of fiction to animate imaginative conception.Less
The ‘rise’ of the novel in England is deeply related to the ‘new’ culture of stage fiction in Restoration England. While novel-writing remained, for the majority of Restoration English authors, a part-time or temporary occupation fitted around the interstices of writing for the major cultural mediator of story in the period, the stage, the restored stage did respond to the new forms of story that were emerging in the shorter novel imported or imitated from France. However, the new evaluation of character in terms of moral reflection rather than heroic action posed new challenges for playwrights seeking to turn the novel into dramatic form. English plays written and produced in the last few decades of the seventeenth century by Thomas Otway, Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Southerne, and Catharine Trotter adapted influential contemporary novels composed in French and translated into English, and highlighted the power of fiction to animate imaginative conception.
