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.

Introduction

This chapter introduces Restoration theatre and Restoration cosmopolitanism, a form of cosmopolitics born out of the newly energized merger of vigorous global ambitions with an intensified striving for sophistication — the convergence, we might say, of the risky and the risqué — and on display on stage. It emerged in the context of two major factors: first, that the monarch and much of the court had spent many years in exile during the civil wars, and second, that during those years they witnessed ways in which the continental monarchs and their courts had enriched themselves through trade, aggression, and plunder in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The chapter explores Restoration cosmopolitanism as engaged, critiqued, and embodied by the theater, and as a force, like the Enlightenment itself, with profoundly mixed implications. It explains how the book alters standard narratives about Restoration drama by showing how attention to this highly contested cosmopolitanism, which grew out of the period's most intriguing accomplishments and disturbing atrocities, reveals an otherwise elusive consistency among comedy, tragedy, heroic plays, and tragicomedy; disrupts a generally accepted narrative about early capitalism; and offers a fresh perspective on theatrical performances.

Histories of Their Own Times

This chapter explains how Colley Cibber became a crucial figure in the preservation of Restoration cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century, through both his fop performances and his influential Apology. As a prominent Whig who was cozy with the Walpole administration, he repudiated Restoration absolutist ambitions. While rejecting Tory politics, he nevertheless embraced Stuart glamor and particularly Stuart theatrical innovations. In ways that would have been clear to contemporary readers but now demand excavation, Cibber set up his Apology as an alternative to Gilbert Burnet's ubiquitous History of His Own Times, which dwells on the brutality of Stuart rule. Cibber shared Burnet's rejection of absolutist politics, but nevertheless recovered the glamor and theatrical innovation of the Restoration by impersonating and exaggerating its fops in repeated gestures of deliberate anachronism that promoted the pleasures of the foppish spirit of national and gendered fungibility.

Travesties

This chapter turns to the comedies of William Wycherley, which have long been taken to epitomize the libertine spirit of Restoration court culture. However, it argues that Wycherley (and others) pushed back against the court. The playwright's close relationship with the monarch enabled this resistance: he enjoyed royal patronage, had an affair with a royal mistress, and even received a personal visit from a concerned Charles II when he fell ill. The connection began before the poet's birth: Wycherley's family lost much of their wealth supporting the Stuarts during the civil wars, which gave William access to the court's inner circle. Such deep connections have often been read to suggest that Restoration plays promoted the aristocratic ideology of the Stuarts. The libertinism in the comedies, Jeremy Webster, Harold Weber, and others have argued, emerged from a libertine court culture, and the scandalous nature of the plays reflected the scandalous experimentation at court. But Wycherley did not include scandalous scenes to create libertine solidarity; instead, he exploited the leeway created by libertine envelope-pushing to critique royal ambitions with two figures that have entered standard theatrical vocabulary: in The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672), the fop, and in The Country Wife (1675), the provincial girl shocked into sophistication. Wycherley immortalized but did not invent these two figures; in different ways they each come to embody anxieties at the heart of many comedies of the period. The chapter concludes that Wycherley is an outlier for his extremity and wit, but representative in his concerns.

Epilogue

This chapter turns to Joseph Addison's Spectator and finally to Adam Smith, who transformed the theatrical cosmopolitanism of the Restoration into a theory of emotions and cosmopolitics. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith aims to understand both emotions and political economy. The chapter explains that the book shows how these two points of interest were profoundly intertwined in the Restoration. In order to try to understand the significance of this intersection, the book turns, as does Smith, to the theater for insight. Restoration theater has been underestimated, partly because the two worlds of Amber and Bruce Carlton have been often read in different contexts and in different kinds of critical projects. While certainly theater audience members of the Restoration period would have had different expectations for comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and heroic drama, they nevertheless witnessed them in the same moment of imperial ambition, political turbulence, and cosmopolitan explorations. Restoration plays have sometimes been read as frivolous entertainment or nationalist propaganda, but the book characterizes them as more ambitious and more capacious, often too edgy or insufficiently nationalistic for subsequent contexts. It makes the case for key theater experiences that were produced with wit, daring, and insight as not expressing the last gasp of absolutist monarchy, but instead engaging some beginnings: of war capitalism, of the embrace of sophistication, of England's entrance into the slave trade in earnest, and of new possibilities for human passions redirected for this expanding world.

“Have You Not Been Sophisticated?”

This book demonstrates how the figure of the actress in the eighteenth century evokes her Restoration origins and commonly performs roles that demand the transformation of provincialism to worldliness. William Congreve's best-known comedy of this period, Love for Love, reprises the Restoration by reviving The Country Wife's Margery Pinchwife in the character of Miss Prue. By reaching back to Margery, Congreve created an iconic figure who continued to resonate back to the Restoration in all of her various embodiments. The iconic provincial girls of the Restoration and eighteenth-century stage became closely associated with particular actresses, whose reputed life stories mirrored the character of the rustic girl in her transformation from country naïveté to worldly (and global) sophistication by way of the theater. The chapter explores Miss Prue and her close association with Frances Abington, then looks back to Margery Pinchwife and her association with Elizabeth Boutell. The chapter turns to perhaps the most memorable of these provincials: Polly Peachum in The Beggar's Opera, inextricably associated with the life and art of Lavinia Fenton.

Restoration Legacies

This chapter looks at William Congreve's enormously popular but now unfamiliar play The Mourning Bride (1697) alongside Aphra Behn's play about an Indian queen, The Widow Ranter, and her heroic novella about an enslaved African prince, Oroonoko. The Mourning Bride has become almost invisible in scholarship, but it remained one of the most frequently performed tragedies throughout the eighteenth century and consolidated Congreve's reputation as a serious artist. This tragedy persists mostly through the misquotation “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”. The discussion focuses on Zara, a powerful African queen reduced to captivity and humiliated by her European lover for whom she betrays her nation. Zara echoes the powerful Indian queens created by John Dryden. Dryden's Mesoamerican plays first appeared at the beginning of England's entry into the African slave trade in the form of a royal monopoly; The Mourning Bride appeared in the midst of a pamphlet war over the fate of the Royal African Company generated by the threat to its monopoly when its governor, James II, fled the country. While The Mourning Bride does not depict plantation slavery or the slave trade itself, it nevertheless registers the impact of trafficking in African bodies. Congreve's Zara evokes the exotic queens of the Restoration, but is a more complicated figure who demands respect for her dignity and empathy over her abuse. As the chapter suggests, Zara moved audiences not just as a “woman scorned,” but as an African who has been deracinated and enslaved.

Indian Queens and the Queen Who Brought the Indies: Dryden, Settle, and the Tragedies of Empire

This chapter explores how “mixed marriages” captivated audience sympathies. In their dramas, John Dryden (The Indian Queen; The Indian Emperour); Elkanah Settle (The Empress of Morocco); Edward Howard (The Womens Conquest); and Aphra Behn (The Rover; The Widow Ranter) explore intercultural romance as a figure for the benefits and volatility of cosmopolitanization. Often in the plots, opposition to affection across boundaries is what leads to disaster. Restoration theater culture produced some remarkably powerful exoticized women. The dramatic unions between European men and foreign women point in two directions at once. On the one hand, they work through new questions about race, gender, and identity in a globalized context. The sexual union of two figures from different nations explores the boundaries of identity and of humanity itself. At the same time they have a specific referent that has attracted less attention. The paradigmatic “mixed marriage” in this period was between Charles II and his Portuguese bride. Dryden's and Settle's plays work through broader issues of shifting identities in a globalized context through powerful exoticized women who resonate as figures for the Portuguese queen. Settle, creates a vicious Empress of Morocco at the height of conflicts over the expense of defending Tangier as an English colony. Dryden, offers a more complicated picture. His Indian queens seek power, but also remains vulnerable to falling in love and suffering rejection and abandonment. These abandoned women also evoke the losers of not just love but of history, those peoples left vulnerable by England's cosmopolitanizing ambitions.