The Horror Plays of the English Restoration

Anne Hermanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317028536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria medieval y moderna temprana

A decade after the Restoration of Charles II, a disturbing group of tragedies, dubbed by modern critics the horror or the blood-and-torture villain tragedies, burst onto the London stage. Ten years later they were gone - absorbed into the partisan frenzy which enveloped the theatre at the height of the Exclusion Crisis. Despite burgeoning interest, until now there has been no full investigation into why these deeply unsettling plays were written when they were and why they so fascinated audiences for the period that they held the stage. The author's contention is that the genre of horror gains its popularity at times of social dislocation. It reflects deep schisms in society, and English society was profoundly unsettled and in a (delayed) state of shock from years of social upheaval and civil conflict. Through recurrent images of monstrosity, madness, venereal disease, incest and atheism, Hermanson argues that the horror dramatists trope deep-seated and unresolved anxieties - engaging profoundly with contemporary discourse by abreacting the conspiratorial climate of suspicion and fear. Some go as far as to question unequivocally the moral and political value of monarchy, vilifying the office of kingship and pushing ideas of atheism further than in any drama produced since Seneca. This study marks the first comprehensive investigation of these macabre tragedies in which playwrights such as Nathaniel Lee, Thomas Shadwell, Elkanah Settle, Thomas Otway and the Earl of Rochester take their audience on an exploration of human iniquity, thrusting them into an examination of man's relationship to God, power, justice and evil.

Chapter 1
Horror and Spectacle

In the central years of the reign of Charles II lies a curious group of English plays. Written and performed in the 1670s, these plays are characterised by a cynical and unrelenting depiction of evil, violence, an insatiable human drive for power, and an explicit absence of providential justice or moral absolutes. While some critics still consider these plays to be part of the heroic genre which became popular during the 1660s, it is now generally acknowledged that they form their own category, as coined by Robert D. Hume: the “horror” or the “blood-and-torture villain” tragedies. Hume was the first critic to classify the horror tragedy as a common type of serious drama, arguing that the horror plays depict “gross brutality” and “the trappings” of the genre include “sex, death, ghost[s] [and] madness,” suggesting that “[e]xcept by way of negative examples, contemporary literary theory has little justification for blood-and-torture villain tragedy.”¹ Other early proponents of the idea of a horror play are Maximillian E. Novak, who has compared Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco to a modern horror movie,² and Paul D. Cannan, who calls Nathaniel Lee’s play, The Rival Queens, “well established in the horror tragedy mode.” More recently Janet Todd and Derek Hughes have referred to the “sensational horror tragedy of the 1670s,” and Jean I. Marsden has discussed the “cult of horror,” tying its prevalence to political turmoil but arguing the movement takes place later in the decade – as a reaction to the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis.³ Despite recent burgeoning interest, however, there has not been a full investigation into why these deeply unsettling plays were written when they were and why they so fascinated audiences for the brief time that they held the stage.

Although the tumultuous events of the 1670s have produced a great deal of analysis from historians, theatre and literary critics have traditionally chosen to pass by the serious plays written and performed during the early and mid-seventies in order to concentrate instead on the more overtly partisan plays written directly after the chimeric Popish Plot of 1678 and into the subsequent Exclusion Crisis.⁴ In order to analyse the unique voice of the so-called horror plays and their precursors, one must go back to the 1670/71 theatrical season, when early signs of the subgenre, such as William Joyner’s The Roman Empress, emerge. The last classic horror tragedies, Elkanah Settle’s The Female Prelate and John Crowne’s Thyestes, produced during the 1679/80 season, form an endpoint to the short history of the horror plays. By this time interest in the genre, by playwrights and audiences, had begun to wane. As the country threatened to founder under internecine strife, shifts in censorship and politics changed the face of the drama. By the 1678/79 season, London’s theatres were feeling the sting: the King’s company, already dealing with internal disputes, was closed for part of the season.⁵ The Duke’s company fared better, but only seven new plays are known to have been acted by both companies during this period (if you take the likely production of Edward Ravenscroft’s Titus Andronicus; or, The Rape of Lavinia in the autumn of 1678 into account). After a precedent set by Lord Chamberlain Arlington, “the Lord Chamberlains took an increasingly large interest in the affairs of the theatre.” Between 1680 and 1683, records show “a larger number of censored and suppressed plays than at any other period […] [and] a majority of the recorded instances of suppression of plays […] comes as a result of royal command or of the interference of the Lord Chamberlain.”⁶ Importantly, the beginning of this new decade is also the point at which King Charles’s fortunes in his battle with the exclusionists begins to shift and “English monarchical authority [is once again] […] vigorously asserted.”⁷ This was no longer a time of hidden anxieties: the outbreak of the two crises associated with popery and arbitrary government forced underlying fears, simmering since the Restoration of Charles II, onto the table. After 1680, the dramatists, responding to a changing environment and reflecting shifting emphasis, became not more political but, rather, more overtly partisan in the politics they espoused. In this new environment, the horror plays vanished from the stage.

The drama of the 1670s reflects and responds to political, social and artistic issues specific to this decade, but it also must be regarded as part of the complete experience of the seventeenth century. The traumatic events of the middle of the century were not resolved with the return of the monarchy. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion silenced public scrutiny of the civil wars and the execution of Charles I, but underlying, unresolved anxieties were difficult to suppress, and by the mid-1660s the image of the glorious return of the monarchy was increasingly strained. Concerns specific to the 1670s stem from a growing disaffection with Charles and his policies. By the mid-1670s a coalition of interests had allied themselves against the crown. The conversion of Charles’s brother James to Catholicism sparked fears of a ‘popish’ successor and of a return to civil strife. As Charles regularly prorogued parliament and aligned himself with the absolutist Louis XIV, alarm spread that he would repeat his father’s deadly errors and attempt to establish an arbitrary government. The recurrent warning cry in contemporary treatises and satire urged people to avoid a return to 1641. Those living through this decade found themselves in a unique position: current unease and fear of arbitrary rule and Catholic succession were inextricably linked to persistent, collective reflection back to these earlier unresolved traumatic experiences. These anxieties drove the focus of, and were influenced by, contemporary literature and drama. Tragic dramatists of the 1670s reshaped and parodied earlier dramatic forms such as the masque, tragicomedy and heroic drama in order to confront very specific issues in crisis at the time.

The themes of these dramatic tragedies and their public staging were critically affected by practical shifts in the world of the theatre. Having only two rival companies with a monopoly over what was produced in the public theatre created a singularly competitive race to draw in the small pool of theatregoers. Both acting companies built state-of-the-art theatres which allowed them to offer to the public spectacular visual productions, once the preserve of the elite. This study will investigate the troubling themes of the horror plays in relation to the specific political, historical and social concerns of the 1670s. But first, it will investigate the practical events that took place on stage to establish how the writers of the horror plays were able to use shifts in the public’s perception of theatrical experience to their advantage and the significant role these dramatic pieces played in the evolution of the partisan plays of the Exclusion Crisis.

It has been difficult to come to a critical consensus on the establishment of genres for Restoration serious drama. Many twentieth-century critics saw Restoration drama as a homogeneous, uniform body of work that undergoes a shift from heroic drama in the early Restoration to a more private, sentimental tragedy towards the end of the 1670s.⁸ It is now generally accepted in drama and theatre criticism that there was not a monolithic genre, namely ‘heroic drama,’ dominating the first two decades of serious theatre in the Restoration. The character of the drama was multi-faceted. There was certainly a fashion for rhymed tragedy that was sustained by key playwrights such as John Dryden until well into the 1670s; however, as Derek Hughes argues, “beyond that many distinctions and qualifications need to be made.”⁹ Although critics are now acknowledging the unique political voice of the plays of the 1670s, by and large there is still a tendency in contemporary criticism to conflate rhymed tragedy with heroic drama. Paulina Kewes, for example, acknowledges the significance of the traumatic events of the civil war on Restoration drama and argues that the drama was highly political throughout the Restoration period; however, she still considers Nathaniel Lee’s and Thomas Otway’s early plays as rhymed heroic dramas. Don-John Dugas speaks of Settle’s use of the horror formula in The Empress of Morocco but considers the play as an heroic spectacular.¹⁰ In even more recent scholarship, Felicity Nussbaum articulates an ongoing attitude that is most damaging to Restoration tragedy when she says, “[w]e are accustomed to think of tragedies such as Lee’s bombastic The Rival Queens […] as relics of a genre that, mercifully, came and went quickly, and that soon attracted ridicule.”¹¹

Some recent critics have gone to the other extreme and developed such narrow categories to describe the various genres at work during the middle years of the Restoration that they tend to confuse rather than clarify our understanding of the drama. J. Douglas Canfield, even though he acknowledges the difficulty in establishing appropriate distinctions between the plays, still puts forward five generic groups: Heroic Romance, Romantic Tragedy, Personal Tragedy, Political Tragedy and Tragical Satire. In the first two, threats to heroic characters are external. In Personal Tragedy, the threats to the “great souls of heroes” are internal. Political Tragedy focuses on threats to states, and Tragical Satire concludes either with poetical justice “that is draconian and virtually apocalyptic” or with none at all.¹² Canfield’s generic classifications are too subtle, however, and each genre (exemplified by only a handful of plays) overlaps with the next so that distinctions are difficult to keep in mind. Canfield’s main theme is that the plays reflect the struggle of the aristocracy to maintain what they see as their natural right to rule in the face of burgeoning unrest and opposition. This narrow focus, however, deliberately downplays the importance of these very oppositional forces in the dramas. Canfield says “real oppositional ideology […] [is] at best wildly caricatured, at worst totally absent.”¹³ As a result, he omits a discussion of the palpable violent, jarring images inherent in the drama of the period and rates it as ideologically static. There is no acknowledgement of a progression of ideas paralleling the dynamic political and social changes which were occurring. By contrast, scholars such as Derek Hughes, Nancy Klein Maguire, Paul Cannan, Robert D. Hume, Jessica Munns and Susan J. Owen suggest that Restoration drama is reflective of rapidly changing societal and political circumstances. Although the approaches and classifications of these critics differ, their redefinitions of Restoration subgenres suggest that the character of the drama continued to evolve and change throughout the period.

In the first decade of Charles II’s reign, the theatrical spectacles for the most part were patterned on, and served the same function as, those in pre-civil war days. Nancy Klein Maguire’s analysis of the plays of the 1660s distinguishes two subgenres: divided tragicomedy and rhymed heroic plays, both of which share similarities with the masque. She argues that the early playwrights – ‘Royalist’ aristocrats who had lived under the reigns of both Charles I and Cromwell – appropriated earlier tragicomedy’s movement from a threatened to a stable environment, attempting to turn “the ‘tragedy’ of Charles I into the tragicomedy of Charles I/II.” The playwrights

[…] deliberately set up a state of anxiety whose resolution reinforced the established regime and confirmed the divine right of the Stuarts […] Dramatizing the tensions resulting from regicide and restoration […] they attempted to redefine the society by fabricating pious, backward-looking, and repetitious myths of monarchy.

Maguire argues that the use of these genres allowed theatre managers to present “a fictional world distanced from predictable cause-effect relationships where deeply-felt issues could be ignored.” Maguire limits h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Horror and Spectacle
• 2 Memory, Re-enactment and Trauma
• 3 Monstrous Women: Aphra Behn’s Abdelazer; or, The Moor’s Revenge and Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco
• 4 Degenerate Rulers: Nathaniel Lee’s The Tragedy of Nero and The Rival Queens
• 5 Patrilineal Discord: Nathaniel Lee and John Dryden’s Oedipus and Thomas Otway’s Don Carlos
• 6 Forsaken Justice: Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine and the Earl of Rochester’s Lucina’s Rape Or the Tragedy of Vallentinian
• Bibliography
• Index