Theater Reform and the Masque in Marvell's Upon Appleton House

The signature scene shifts, pastoral settings, and perspectival instabilities of Andrew Marvell’s Upon Appleton House squarely align the poem with the theatrical tradition of the court masque, a tradition that was effectively moribund at the at the time of the poem’s composition in 1651.  The influence of the masque on Upon Appleton House (and other Marvell works) has been widely noted, but the significance of his poem in the longer history of English theater––specifically, in the discourse of theatrical reform––has not been fully considered.  In Upon Appleton House, Marvell not only applies the strategies and techniques of the masque, but he also engages with ideas central to the ongoing debate between opponents and defenders of the stage.  As such, his poem anticipates the reforms and innovations attempted by William Davenant, Richard Flecknoe, and others who campaigned to revive theater in Interregnum England.  However, Marvell’s appropriation of masque theatrics is not tethered to the goals of reform.  His poem is distinctly the product of the post-regicide, pre-Protectorate imagination, when the theaters are shuttered, dramatic performance is driven underground, and the fate of the commonwealth is precarious.  Accordingly, his method is not to establish a mode of theater palatable to republican interests, but instead to defamiliarize theatrical representation in a way that responds to the uncertainty of the moment.

“Past Remembrance or History”

Chapter 3 begins with the imaginative vacuum created by the Leveller community’s relative silence after 1653 when John Lilburne was exiled and tracks the Royalist use of literature to reimagine sovereign absolutism beyond the limits of Stuart martyrology as it had emerged in the immediate aftermath of Charles I’s 1649 execution. Writers like William Davenant (1606–1688) and Aphra Behn (1640?–1689) understood this project in clearly hermeneutic terms as they argued that the revitalization of Royalism depended on dissuading members of the commonalty that they were capable of independently producing the kind of knowledge that would ground their claims of political authority and entitle them to political participation.

Inscribing Textuality

In The Preface to Gondibert (1650), William Davenant proposes a new literary aesthetic predicated upon philosophical and scientific learning. Like Milton, he was concerned with poetic form, though, unlike Milton, Davenant wrote numerous plays. Milton’s minimal engagement with dramatic form could be construed as representative of him positioning himself in opposition to the aesthetics of drama and the politics of the Restoration stage. This chapter addresses how Davenant’s notions of aesthetics and how Milton’s engagement with the theatricality of ink informed their ideas of drama. By placing these two authors in dialogue with one another, we are presented with a rich cultural poetics that is underpinned by questions of authorship and continued anxieties regarding the moral and didactic space of the stage and of the page.

All Roads Lead to Rhodes

This chapter explores the reopened theater with particular attention to William Davenant. He transformed English theater in significant ways. Restoration theater artists not only intensified onstage explorations of an increasingly interconnected global network, but also defended the revived theater as more sophisticated than a posited barbaric past. Further, they understood theater as a mechanism for national refinement. Davenant became the most successful advocate for this vision, arguing for the positive effects of theater through its capacity to help England emerge from its crude provincial past and match the more advanced European and Asian empires. The Siege of Rhodes transformed theatrical possibilities, featuring moveable scenery, a new genre (the heroic), and the professional actress. At the moment of the Stuart restoration, after defeat and exile, it also marked the first English stage representation of an admirable Ottoman Empire. Davenant's production flattered, but also revealed the vulnerabilities of the restored monarch's cosmopolitics. Even though the play features the defeat of Christians at the hands of Ottomans, The Siege does not promote fear or hatred, but rather envy of this empire's sophistication and power. Ottomanphilia became fashionable in the Restoration. Charles II wore Eastern clothing to the opening of Roger Boyle's play Mustapha. Davenant's immensely popular Siege of Rhodes inaugurated, a new form of cosmopolitanism that promoted the widespread consumption of global objects and ideas as signs of sophistication.

Poetry and Sovereignty in the English Revolution

This book presents a new interpretation of the poetry of the English Revolution, by focusing on royalist poets who left royalism behind following the execution of the king. These poets reimagined the traditional language of allegiance, articulating a flexible yet absolute form of sovereignty, applicable to a republic, or even to a Cromwellian monarchy. This sovereignty was artificial, and generated through the poetic imagination. Several chapters chart the poets’ close acquaintance with Thomas Hobbes, offering new readings of the reception and adaptation of Hobbes’s ideas in contemporary poetry. This context yields new insights into well-known poems by Andrew Marvell, Edmund Waller, and John Dryden. But it also newly opens up major works that have been neglected, including the two original English epics of the Commonwealth period, by William Davenant and Abraham Cowley, along with the early career of Margaret Cavendish, and the plays of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery. A final chapter traces how the poets survived the restoration of Stuart monarchy, showing how they continued to apply their ideas in the heroic drama of the 1660s. The book builds on recent work in both literary criticism and the history of political thought, to contextualize the poets within a distinctive strain of absolutism inflected by reason of state, neostoicism, scepticism, and anti-clericalism. It demonstrates a vivid poetic effort to imagine the expanded state delivered by the English Revolution.

Poetry as Optical Technology

This chapter explores the impact of Johannes Kepler’s mechanical model of vision on early modern poetic theory. It begins with an overview of classical visual and optical theory as they relate to Plato’s and Aristotle’s descriptions of poetry as an image-making technology. At the same time, it explains how their poetic theories are in turn connected to a philosophical tradition that associates heightened visual capacity with spiritual insight and intellectual and moral authority. The chapter then moves into an exploration of how early modern poetic theorists both inherited and adapted this existing intellectual tradition in response to the optical and visual theory of the period. By comparing Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poetry (1595) and George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589)—two works that pre-date Kepler’s theory—to later, seventeenth-century works by William Davenant, Thomas Hobbes, and John Dryden, this chapter shows that the changing status of the image in seventeenth-century European culture resulted in a complementary alteration within theories of poetic representation.

Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance

If maps are instruments of power, then it matters that in Renaissance Britain they were often found in the pockets of ordinary people. Pocket Maps and Public Poetry in the English Renaissance demonstrates how early modern British poets paid by the state adapted inclusive modes of nationhood charted by inexpensive, small-format maps. It places chapbooks (“cheapbooks”) by Edmund Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, William Davenant, and John Milton into conversation with the portable cartography circulating in the same retail print industry. Domestic pocket maps were designed for heavy use by a broad readership that included those on the fringes of literacy. The era’s de facto laureates all banked their success as writers appealing to this burgeoning market share by drawing the nation as the property of the commonwealth rather than the Crown. This book investigates the accessible world of small-format cartography as it emerges in the texts of the poets raised in the expansive public sphere in which pocket maps flourished. It works at the intersections of space, place, and national identity to reveal the geographical imaginary shaping the flourishing business of cheap print. Its placement of poetic economies within mainstream systems of trade also demonstrates how cartography and poetry worked together to mobilize average consumers as political agents. This everyday form of geographic poiesis was also a strong platform for poets writing for monarchs and magistrates when their visions of the nation ran counter to the interests of the government.