Search Results

After the Revolution, there was an appreciable revival in the demand for new plays: between November 1688 and the opening of the actors' breakaway company in April 1695 there were forty-six known premieres. There was also a boost in quality, associated with the arrival of William Congreve, the maturing of Thomas Southerne, and the brief returns of Thomas Shadwell and of John Dryden, stripped of his laureateship and short of money. Dryden's four last plays contain two of his finest (and one of his worst), and respond to the deposition of James II with detailed studies of displacement and exile. Nevertheless, there were clear and quite rapid breaks with earlier drama. However, tyranny was now more easily subject to justice, and in both tragedy and comedy justice was frequently freed from the epistemological and linguistic problems that had bedevilled it in the 1670s.

On April 1695, for the first time in over twelve years, London found itself with two rival theatrical companies, for the oppressive tactics of the new manager of the United Company, Christopher Rich, had driven a group of senior actors under the leadership of Thomas Betterton to set up a breakaway company at the old Lincoln's Inn Fields theatre. The renewal of competition hugely increased the demand for new plays, and between the secession and the end of 1700 over ninety premieres are recorded. In any circumstances, such a glut of new plays would have contained much that was mediocre or incompetent, but matters were made worse by the slump of the mid-1680s, during which many established dramatists fell silent without being replaced by new talent. The only significant new dramatist to appear in the 1680s was Thomas Southerne.

The comic revival of the late 1690s had no counterpart in tragedy, which continued its general decline into cliched political complacency and aimless sensationalism. As in the earlier part of the decade, the greatest artist in the sphere of serious drama was not a playwright at all, but Henry Purcell, whose last opera, an adaptation of the John Dryden-Robert Howard The Indian Queen, was performed by the Patent Company, probably late in 1695. This is the first tragic semi-opera, though the tragedy is simplified by the idealization of Montezuma. The only spoken tragedy that could possibly merit modern revival, however, is Thomas Southerne's long-popular Oroonoko, his most ambitious and complex study of moral and cultural dislocation. The dislocation is explicitly given a moral and symbolic quality, for Oroonoko's ancestral sun-worship is interpreted as hunger for a guiding light, and his perplexing sufferings bring a diminishing sense of guidance and direction.