CHAPTER FIVE

Drama and Political Education

This chapter examines the role of drama in early modern English political culture, a topic that has received considerable scholarly attention during the last few decades. It surveys contemporary views of the uses of drama, Crown surveillance, the popularity of the form and briefly charts differences over time, with treatment of the Jacobean and Caroline period giving special attention to the court masque. The remainder of the chapter focuses on historical drama, highlighting indebtedness to historical texts and linkages to contemporary political issues and debates. An enormous body of scholarship has been produced on the substantive content of the English drama. This chapter seeks neither to summarize nor to supplement that scholarship. Rather it describes the agenda of political issues pursued by the dramatists, the distinctive features of drama as a mode of political communication and the place of that mode of communication in the whole network of channels shaping the period’s political culture.

DRAMATIC THEORY AND THE USEFULNESS OF THE DRAMA

Drama, both tragedy and comedy, was a form of poetry, contrasted to history on the one hand, which dealt with the specifics of actual persons and events, and philosophy on the other, which concerned itself with generalized precepts and abstract principles. Poetry, or poesy, was a term applied to most forms of imaginative literature both verse and prose. The historical play, sometimes labeled “history” and sometimes “tragedy,” was a hybrid, often based on historical sources but less fettered by them than historical writing.

Poetry, and therefore drama, was viewed as a powerful force for moral and political reform. Influenced by the resurgence of Aristotelian poetic theory, sixteenth-century English literary theorists such as Sir Philip Sidney believed that tragedy “openenth the greatest wounds, and showeth forth the ulcers that are covered with tissue, that maketh kings fear to be tyrants, and tyrants manifest their tyrannical humours.”¹ Serious drama was meant to have a political impact. George Puttenham insisted that poesy had always dealt with princes whose “infamous life and tyrannies were layd open.” “Trumpeters of all praise” and “well deserved reproach,” poets possessed the capacity to “worke for a secret representation to others . . . with the same abuses.”² “An excellent Actor” by “his actions . . . fortifies morall precepts with examples; for what wee see him personate, we think truly done before us: a man of deepe thought might apprehend, the ghost of our ancient Heroes walk’t again.”³ The early seventeenth-century playwright Thomas Heywood wrote that tragedies were “to teach the subjects obedience to their King, to show the people the untimely ends of such as moved tumults, commotions and insurrection, to present them with the flourishing estate of such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance, deporting them from all traitorous and felonious stratagems.”⁴

The Puritan polemicist Thomas Scot, who like Heywood emphasized the political potential of the drama, commented, “We see sometimes Kings are content in plays and masks to be admonished of divers things.” He pointed to contemporary figures such as Gondomar, the Duke of Alva, and the Spanish king as suitable subjects for the stage.⁵ Restoration dramatists continued to emphasize the educative function of the drama. John Dryden, who expected tragedy “to Reform Manners by delightful Representation of Human Life in great Persons,” also mentioned the frequency with which “Matters of state are canvassed on the stage, and things of concernment there managed.”⁶

Despite the continuity in dramatic theory, there was considerable change over time in the size and composition of audiences, the degree to which dramatic productions were sponsored and/or censored by successive governments and the kinds of politically relevant subject matter presented. Renaissance drama, and particularly the drama of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, has been explored by a community of scholars who have focused on the political import of these plays and who have debated the extent to which early modern English drama should be seen as conservative, reinforcing traditional ideas of hierarchy and monarchy, or subversive, reflecting a politically conflicted society.⁷

Dramatic productions until 1642 were mounted in commercial and coterie theaters, and serviced primarily by troupes of professional actors and playwrights who required aristocratic and royal patrons as well as public support to survive. Theaters were “frequented by all sorts of people old and younge, riche and poore, masters and servants, papists and puritan, wise men . . . churchmen and statesmen.”⁸ Before the playhouses closed in 1642 they attracted as many as 25,000 Londoners and visitors weekly. Critics viewed theater crowds as a source of social disorder or condemned widespread attendance for keeping playgoers from work or attending sermons. Many Puritans feared the theater as a source of deception and illusion, and some were offended by male actors wearing female dress or wearing clothing inappropriate to the social status of actors.⁹

Despite government licensing and some censorship, early modern English governments were not generally hostile to the theater. The royal family and court patronized the theater and, on some occasions, acting companies. At the outset of her reign Elizabeth confirmed the role of the Stationers Company in overseeing publications, including plays, as well as its authority to destroy presses and punish offending printers. The Master of Revels arranged court functions, licensed companies and playhouses, approved plays before they appeared on stage and sometimes asked for script changes. Printed plays were vetted by ecclesiastical authorities who sometimes required cuts or changes. A government proclamation prohibited unlicensed “interludes and playes, especially on Religion or Policy.” Although plays were not to contain “matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonwealth,” playwrights frequently invited audiences to draw “parallels” between what was presented on the stage and contemporary events. Officials were alert to the possibility of politically offensive parallels, and City of London authorities periodically attempted to suppress the theater. In 1597 in response to a City petition to suppress playhouses, the Privy Council ordered them destroyed, though the order was not enforced. The degree and harshness of censorship has been much debated, with more recent investigations emphasizing intermittent interference and unsystematic practice rather than monolithic power and purpose. Of the roughly two thousand plays seen between 1590 and 1642, only a handful show evidence of censorship.¹⁰

THE EARLY STUART ERA

During the Jacobean era the king, the queen and Prince Henry took over several acting companies. Functioning under royal patronage, plays were unlikely purposely to offend the Crown. At the beginning of the reign several plays dealt with succession issues, and at least seventeen between 1619 and 1625 related to court corruption and evil favorites.¹¹ John Marston’s The Faun, set in Urbino, satirized court life,¹² Ben Jonson’s Sejanus dealt with the corruptions of Tiberian Rome and Samuel Daniel’s Philotas with dishonesty at the court of Alexander. Several dramas showed a disguised ruler who attempts to learn about the ills of his state.¹³

Some have viewed such plays as implying criticism of the current monarch; others as a warning of what might happen if they were insufficiently vigilant. James I allowed the staging of plays presenting evil ministers and favorites. Yet there was regulation and some censorship, including a proclamation forbidding plays dealing with religion and state affairs. Jonson was called before the Council over Sejanus despite the fact that he had kept close to his sources in Tacitus and Suetonius. Samuel Daniel was questioned about Philotas for possible allusions to the Essex rebellion. The deposition scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II was said to have offended Elizabeth and was omitted from the printed text until 1608.¹⁴ In that year the French ambassador obtained suppression of Chapman’s 1608 The Conspriacty and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Biron, which dealt with contemporary French politics. A play about the Dutch massacre of English merchants in Amboyna was disallowed by the Privy Council in 1625 at the request of the Dutch ambassador.

Middleton’s anti-Spanish, antipapist allegorical drama A Game at Chess was immediately recognized as a critique of the king’s Spanish policy. The play used black and white chess pieces to represent figures such as Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador widely believed to have an excessive influence on the king. The play, which some scholars think to have been sponsored by the now anti-Spanish Buckingham, was approved by the Master of the Revels in the normal way. Middleton’s play was “all the neuws,” having been seen by about 30,000 people in nine days, the longest run on the Jacobean stage.¹⁵ The play ran concurrently with anti-Spanish parliamentary speeches and anti-Spanish pamphlets. When the Spanish ambassador complained, the play was suppressed. Despite these examples, in general plays were not tightly controlled.

Plays continued to be popular during the Caroline era, and play texts circulated widely. In 1630 it was reported that Londoners frequented the theaters daily.¹⁶ In 1633 William Prynne, an opponent of the theater, claimed that the Stationers informed him that “above forty thousand play-bookes were printed within the last two years” and were “more vendible than the choicest sermons.”¹⁷

Censorship continued but was not extremely onerous. Davenport’s King John and Matilda, which presents rebellious barons sympathetically, was performed before the king and queen, and Julius Caesar, which featured tyrannicide, was performed in 1630. One contemporary noted that players did “not forbear to represent upon their stage the whole course of this present time, nor sparing either King, state, or religion, in so great absurdity, and with such liberty, that any would be afraid to hear them.”¹⁸ The controversial issue of what policy to follow in the Palatinate was reflected on stage. When the popular exiled Elector Palatine arrived in England in 1635 seeking aid, he was given a variety of royal entertainments. Henry Glapsthorne’s Albertus Wallenstein (1634) provided a Protestant propagandist view of the famous general. There was also Dekker’s Gustavus King of Poland and Alphonsus Emperor of Germany, which dealt with a Spanish tyrant king.¹⁹

THE MASQUE

The court masque was a fixture of Renaissance and seventeenth-century court life. Unique in combining music, visual effects, dance and verbal texts, unlike most dramatic forms it was performed both for and by the royal family and the court. The most respected poets, dramatists, artists, architects and musicians contributed to these coterie performances that reinforced social hierarchy and the separation of the world of the court from that of ordinary people. Masques were extravaganza productions, costly to mount and rarely repeated. They were designed for a small group of participant-observers rather than for the broad mixture of classes that attended the public theater. Typically they celebrated the dignity and glory of the ruler and the mystique of divine right monarchy. Masque kings were represented as embodying the virtues of harmony and unity, the sources of benevolence, peace and justice. The monarch might be cast as David, Neptune, Apollo or a Roman emperor.²⁰

Most featured a two-part organization. The first, the antimasque, typically performed by professional actors, presents dangerous and sometimes malevolent witches or devils engaged in comical or grotesque behavior. Occasionally the antimasque included a critique of current policy.²¹ As noted earlier the Puritan polemicist Thomas Scot indicated that kings were sometimes “admonished” in “plays and masques.”²² The second portion, which displayed and enacted the semidivinity of monarchs, was performed by courtiers and members of the royal family. Courtly dancing was expected of gentlemen and aristocrats. According to Sir Thomas Elyot, dancing not only trained elite men and women in court decorum but also reinforced social hierarchy by formalizing and displaying the rank and gender of the participants.²³ Masquing was one of the very few activities of a political nature that permitted, indeed required, the participation of women. Masques, like the drama, did not win universal approval. Already during Elizabeth’s reign, Sidney’s Arcadia presents masques as pastimes of a ruler who has neglected his responsibilities. Sir Francis Bacon thought of masques as “toys” of the monarchy. George Wither thought the masques shamefully flattered the monarch by assigning him inappropriate attributes and had made “gods and goddesses” of the king and queen.²⁴ The costliness of these productions also provided fuel for those angered by high court expenditures.

Though masques reached their apogee during the reigns of James I and Charles I, they were also featured at the courts of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth. Several Elizabethan masques were performed at the Inns of Court. In a masque performed at Grays Inn, Sir Francis Bacon’s prince seeks advice on enhancing the “honour and the happiness of our state” and how “our government should be rightly bent and directed.”²⁵ Several masques were the joint productions of Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Some were designed to celebrate particular occasions, such as royal marriages, visits of foreign diplomats or the proposed union with Scotland. Pro-union sentiments were voiced in early Jacobean masques and in the king’s 1607 speech before Parliament.²⁶ In Jonson’s The Golden Age Restored (1616), Astraea, the goddess of justice, banishes the ills of the former Iron Age when the court was rife with conspiracy, slander, ambition and fraud. Prince Henry’s masquelike entertainments, which often featured chivalric themes, were used to support vigorous foreign action. The return of Prince Charles from Spain without a Spanish bride was to have been celebrated with a masque financed by the Duke of Buckingham but was unperformed due to the king’s reluctance to offend the Spanish. Jonson’s similarly themed Neptune’s Triumph for Albion’s Return (1624) was canceled for similar reasons. During the period in which Buckingham and Prince Charles opposed James’s foreign policy, masques reflected tension within the court.²⁷

Several Caroline masques also featured political issues. Britannia Triumphans (1637), for example, vindicated the king’s ship money policy. Continental turmoil was highlighted in several masques sponsored by the queen.²⁸ Charles and Henrietta Maria often danced in the idealized fictions performed in the new, lavish, Inigo Jones–designed Banqueting House. Carew’s Coelum Britannicum (1634) was typical in asserting the godlike character of the monarch. The unadulterated adulation and exaltation of divine right monarchy of the masque may have helped to insulate Charles from the harsher political realities of his reign. Yet the myth of national harmony emanating from the monarch must have seemed unrealistic to critics of royal policy and unacceptable to those who rejected the divine right of kings. The last masque of the era, Salmacida Spolia (1640), has been viewed as both courtly escapism and as an assertion of the king’s determination to impose his will on his subjects.²⁹

Despite the masque’s emphasis on the ruler as divine authority and beneficent source of wealth and peace, the masque allowed for some elements of discord, especially in the antimasque. However, it is unclear whether the discordant elements of the antimasque should be seen as voices of criticism. The conventional antimasque offered unpleasant characters doing unpleasant things to serve as a dramatic contrast to the subsequent masque itself, which paraded magnificent characters full of courtly graces and noble behavior. It would be unclear to the court audience whether the negative aspects of the antimasque were meant as social criticism or were merely dramatic devices to highlight the glorification of the monarch and court that followed. This lack of clarity has led scholars to find somewhat different political messages in the same masques. It is also unclear just how well dancers and invited spectators understood the political meanings of some of the more obscure masque figures. Masque themes relied heavily on complex myths and symbols capable of quite different interpretations.

The outbreak of the civil war led to the decline and then the cessation of the masque, though the term continued to be used for noncourtly shows featuring costumes, dance and music. During the Protectorate, Davenant’s masquelike The Siege of Rhodes became an opera with recitative, music and lavish scenery. Opera, however, would be performed exclusively by professionals before a nonparticipatory audience, and historical themes would largely replace mythological and biblical ones. The masque was not revived during the Restoration, perhaps because the persona of Charles II was incapable of generating the necessary mystique of divinity. However, masque-like operas, now performed both at court and in public venues, sometimes featured Royalist messages. The Tory Albion and Albanius characterized London as beguiled by democracy and zeal, mocked the loss of its charter and allegorized England’s recent political history. Albion, who represents Charles II, complains that his heir, like the Duke of York, has been betrayed and forced abroad and proclaims that “zeal and Commonwealth” again infect the land. In the end Albion is saved, Albanius returns and Albion goes to heaven.³⁰

CIVIL WAR AND INTERREGNUM DRAMA

The opening of the Long Parliament did not immediately result in the closing of the theaters. In 1641 Simonds D’Ewes could still complain that parliamentary business was being hindered because “the greater parte” of the members were to be found in “Hide Park & Playes.”³¹ Reflecting longstanding Puritan hostility to the drama, Parliament soon closed the theaters because stage plays did not “well agree with Public calamities” or “Seasons of Humiliations,” the times being more appropriate to “Repentance, Reconciliation and Peace with God.”³² Because the theaters had been closed from time to time in the past, the cessation of public drama was not necessarily seen to be permanent.

Parliament repeatedly issued antitheater ordinances. In 1647 it ordered the suppression of “stage playes and Interludes,” given that they produced “the high provocation of God’s wrath and displeasure.” In the following year the House of Commons again voted to suppress playhouses and apprehend players. Plays were not to be tolerated “amongst Professors of the Christian Religion.” During the Commonwealth the Drury Lane and Fortune theaters were raided.³³

The civil war and Interregnum years were obviously not entirely bereft of dramatic fare, as the need for repeated suppression attempts clearly shows. There were also semidramatic, though unperformed, playlets. Revolutionary era governments did not prevent the advertisement or publication of play texts. A contemporary noted the “liberty to reade these inimitable Playes,” despite the “silence of the Stage.”³⁴ Performances continued at Oxford when the court was established there.

Highly politicized pamphlet dialogues or playlets discussed contemporary issues such as the Parliament’s and the Crown’s right to raise an army. A New Play Called Canterburie His Change of Diot (1641) was accompanied by woodcuts showing Archbishop Laud dining on the “tippits of mens eares.” Another was titled The Earle of Strafford’s Ghost (1644). Mistris Parliament (1648) depicted Parliament as being delivered of a deformed body-politic. There were also the Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1654), which was an attack on the Westminster Assembly, The Cuckoos Nest at Westminster (1648) and The Committee-man Curried (1647). Another playlet condemned ship money judges for having made the laws “a contagious pestilence of the Common-wealth.”³⁵ Such minor unperformed efforts, however, were hardly a substitute for the powerful, publically performed drama of the pre-1642 era.

The trial and execution of the king was itself high drama. As Samuel Butler later remarked, “We perceive at last, why Plays went down: to wit, that Murthers might be acted in earnest. Stages must submit to Scaffolds, and personated Tragedies to real ones.”³⁶

The short-lived Protectorate appeared ready to tolerate a modest theatrical revival. In 1653 the Royalist William Davenant was advising the Council of State that a reformed stage under government oversight could educate the common people. A similar proposal was made to Cromwell’s secretary of state.³⁷ Davenant’s First Days Entertainment at Rutland House (1656), a “declamation and musick after the manner of the ancients” rather than a play, was characterized as “history digested,” providing “publique Entertainments by Morall Representations.”³⁸ Davenant’s History of Sir Francis Drake and his Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru provided support for the Protectorate’s anti-Spanish policies.

Royalists often turned to the tragicomedy, many of which commented on contemporary events. They often featured themes of legitimacy, authority and power, or depicted the loss and eventual recovery and restoration of a ruler. Sir Richard Fanshawe dedicated his 1647 translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido to Prince Charles.

RESTORATION DRAMA

The Restoration brought back the theaters. John Denham cheered the end of the dramaless decades when rebels had broken “the Mirror of the times, the Stage.” “They that would have no King would have no Play. . . . The Laurel and the Crown together went, Had the same Foes and the same Punishment.”³⁹ The restored theater, however, was not the prewar theater. There were fewer theaters, and their fare was often more openly political.⁴⁰

The Restoration audience was diverse, although the upper classes may have been overrepresented. According to John Dryden the theater audience was composed of “persons of Honour, Noblemen and Ladies” or men of pleasure about town. Yet fellow dramatist Sir William Killigrew reported that the audience included “not the king only for state, but all civil people to think they may come as well as any.”⁴¹ In 1662 Pepys found the theater “full of Citizens, there hardly being a gentlemen and women in the crowd. A few years later he found “a mighty company of citizens, prentices, and others” along with “mean people” in the pit. The king and “all civil people” attended. At various time Pepys noticed Lord Arlington, secretary of state and the Archbishop of Canterbury.⁴² Members of Parliament and their families attended when Parliament was in session, and students, lawyers from the Inns of Court, merchants and their wives and apprentices attended, along with courtiers, foreign ambassadors, professional and military men, clergymen and students. The theater audience was large, with daily estimates ranging from four to five hundred, or five to eight hundred, spectators. Between 1660 and 1685 Charles II saw at least 280 public and 125 court performances.⁴³ The publication of most play texts made them available to those who did not visit London.⁴⁴

There appears to have been somewhat less censorship during the Restoration than before 1640, though some plays were prevented from being performed or had to be altered. Control was sporadic, especially between 1673 and 1677. Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus was silenced for “Scandalous Expressions and Reflections upon ye Government,” and John Crowne’s City Politiques was permitted, then withdrawn, then permitted again. Printed play texts were not censored.⁴⁵

Dramatists Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery and the Duke of Buckingham were important political figures as well as playwrights. Leading playwrights Sir John Denham, Sir William Killigrew and Sir Robert Howard were active members of the House of Commons. The political potential of the drama was widely recognized. Elkanah Settle, a prominent playwright, noted how “plays and ballads have reform’d the State.”⁴⁶ The new dedication to Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes suggested that plays heightened “temperance,” “natural justice” and “complacency to Government.”⁴⁷ This was a period in which playwrights, especially loyalist and Tory playwrights, were not hesitant to present their political views or to point to political parallels.

Plays of the early Restoration were characterized by loyalist themes and many mocked or pilloried earlier political and religious figures.⁴⁸ The Earl of Orrery’s The Generall (1661), in an only slightly disguised fashion, lauded General Monk for restoring the rightful king. The theme of rebellion was to be found in half of the plays written between 1660 and 1665.⁴⁹ Anti-popish themes were prominent during the same period that witnessed a flood of antipapist pamphlets, the Popish Plot trials and pope burning processions. Plays were clearly part of the political discourse. Among the most popular was Elkanah Settle’s The Female Prelate, dedicated to Shaftesbury. Not much later Settle would publish The Character of a Popish Successor, a wildly popular Exclusion pamphlet. Another popular dramatist reported that “Plots and Parties” and “state Distractions” were providing “new matter” to the theater. Dramatists “Without desert, can dub a man a Traitor./ And Toryes, without troubling Law, or Reason,/ By loyal Instinct can find Plots and Treasons.”⁵⁰

Numerous plays between 1678 and 1682 reflected the conflicting ideologies of the emerging Whigs and Tories, though not all plays dealing with politics can be confidently labeled Whig or Tory. Thomas Shadwell’s 1681 The Lancashire Witches, usually seen as a Whig drama, was, as Steve Pincus suggests, politically ambiguous.⁵¹ Presentations of court corruption, support for law, opposition to rebellion, and moderation were not exclusively Tory themes, although Shadwell, writing shortly after the Revolution of 1688, claimed that the theater of the previous two reigns had been dominated by “loyal writers.”⁵² The drama, along with most politicized genres, declined after 1682. Exceptions included John Crowne’s anti-Whig The City Politiques (1683), Dryden’s polemical Duke of Guise and his opera-masque Albion and Albanius.

THE PRINTED PLAY PROLOGUES

The Restoration introduced the printed play prologue as a vehicle of political expression during the politically turbulent years 1678–82. Typically a page or two in length, and often having little to do with the play it advertised, the prologue extended the playwright’s opportunities for airing political opinions. Most excoriated Whigs and exclusionists and lauded Tories. The prologue to Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved alludes to the Popish Plot, the martyred king “and the Rebel tribe” and to the times “when each Man dreads, the Bloody Strategems of Busy Heades.”⁵³ Aphra Behn’s Prologue to Romulus condemned the “lies that advance the Good Old Cause,” Whig “green ribbon men” and arbitrary jurors.⁵⁴ A Thomas D’Urfey prologue gleefully announced, “Tories are upmost, and the Whigs defy’d/ Your Factious Juries and Associations/ Must never think to ruine twice Three Nations.” He recommends “Hang[ing] up all those for an Examples show,/ That have deserv’d it Twenty years ago.”⁵⁵ In 1682 John Banks identifies himself with those who love their “Country, and would serve the King” and refers to the current danger “betwixt the Scarlet, and Green-Ribbon.”⁵⁶ A John Crowne prologue lambastes Shaftesbury, Whig coffee houses, City Whigs, packed juries and those who “by Stealth, Promote the Traffick of a Commonwealth.”⁵⁷

Dryden, who often wrote on behalf of the Tory cause, refers to “fawning Whigg Petitions” and the unresolved murder of Sir Edmondberry Godfrey in one of his prologues.⁵⁸ In another he not only harkened back to the sad experience of the civil wars, the murder of the martyred Charles I and the ruin of the monarchy but also reproduced portions of the king’s recent Declaration explaining the royal dissolution of Parliament. Dryden himself was the probable author of the anonymous pamphlet His Majesties Declaration Defended.⁵⁹ Printed play prologues and many of the plays they were designed to promote participated in the political discourse of the era and interacted with pamphlet literature, the news media, nondramatic poetry and the offerings of the pulpit.

THE HISTORY PLAY

Historiography and historical drama dealt with similar material. Both were designed to provide political and moral instruction. While often indicating the historical texts on which they relied, playwrights were freer than historians to alter the order of events and add or subtract characters. John Dryden declared, “I have neither wholly follow’d the truth of the History, nor altogether left it: but have taken all the liberty of a Poet, to adde, alter, or diminish . . . it being not the business of the Poet to represent Historical truth, but probability.”⁶⁰ History was popular, and so were history plays. In 1592 we hear of the many plays borrowed “out of our English Chronicles, wherein our forefathers valiant actes . . . [are revived] and brought to pleade their aged honours in open presence.”⁶¹ More than 150 plays dealing with English history have been identified between 1562 and the closing of the theaters in 1642.⁶²

About 42 percent of reprinted plays were history plays. Plays were widely advertised and booksellers often pasted title pages on posts in the City.⁶³ History plays provided a more vivid experience of history than reading the texts of Holinshed and Hall. The illiterate and the semiliterate of London learned much of their English history from the stage. Historical plays “taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English Chronicles.”⁶⁴ A Jacobean master of revels reiterated the view that “the ignorant, and never understanding vulgare[s]” knowledge of history was drawn from pamphlet, ballad and the stage. Thomas Gainsford confirmed that the “stages of London . . . instructed those who cannot read” in history. Because fewer women than men were literate, the drama was an arena in which women especially might absorb the lessons of history. Until the theaters were closed in 1642, history plays were probably the principal source of historical knowledge for semiliterate and illiterate Londoners.

If some viewed the plays as history reenacted, others read them as “parallels” in which the events and personages of another era might be linked to the present. The best-known example of the latter view is Queen Elizabeth’s anger at the deposition scene in Richard II, about which she was reported to have said, “I am Richard the Second, know ye not that.” She believed the play had been revived to provide support for the Essex rebellion.⁶⁵ Audiences were often explicitly directed to view dramatic performances of past events in light of their own time.

Popularity of the history play was not constant. The decline that took place about 1630 has been variously explained. Some point to a growing disconnect between history and poetry that occurred when historians abandoned the “invented speech” which had allowed them, like dramatists, to place plausible speeches in the mouths of historical characters. But history plays may simply have gone out of fashion. Playwright Thomas Heywood thought that “no history” had been “left unrifled” by the muses.⁶⁶ Although new history plays became rarer, older ones were replayed and continued to be read. The Restoration era again saw a fair number of history plays, though they never quite regained their earlier popularity.

History plays taught political lessons whether intended by the author or not. History and tragedy centered on great and powerful personages and those that surrounded them, not ordinary subjects. Since drama requires tension and excitement, few dramas featured good rulers surrounded by good advisors under conditions of peace and plenty. Typically they featured flawed rulers plagued by succession problems, potential usurpers, rebellions they were unable or unwilling to deal with and evil and self-seeking advisors. Playgoers became privy to the actions and minds of rulers and their closest advisors and enemies. They gained access to political actors and political situations from which they were normally excluded. They saw into the arcana imperii. Playgoers saw monarchies at their weakest. They were exposed to the fragility of monarchical states and witnessed the destructive forces of civil wars. Most important, audiences were placed in a position to evaluate and judge rulers, indeed were being taught to do so. They were invited to judge those who had ruled in the past and to draw parallels to their own time. They became privy to the problems endemic to the early modern monarchy, problems of succession, the impact of dynastic marriages, and the difficulties of having rulers who were too old or too young, too self-centered or more attuned to their personal desires than to the business of the state. Playgoers received a critical political education.

Though audiences were often shown weak, flawed or evil rulers, they were unlikely to be exposed to dramas that were hostile to monarchy itself. The remedy for bad rulers and corrupt courts was not nonmonarchical rule and institutions, but able and moral kings surrounded by good advisors and a contented populace. Because the drama focused on individuals, not institutions, it was unlikely to provide opportunities to propose solutions to problems such as how to finance a growing bureaucracy or to explore the relationship between rulers and representative bodies. Nor could it readily deal with monarchy in the abstract, as an institution. Rather each play was likely to deal with a particular reign, real or fictional.

HISTORY PLAYS SET IN MYTHICAL AND PRE-NORMAN TIMES

Succession and the dangers of a divided kingdom are at the heart of Thomas Norton’s and Thomas Sackville’s Gorbudoc and Shakespeare’s King Lear. A tragedy set in ancient Britain, Gorbuduc concerns an aging ruler who, despite the plea of his wise counselor, divides his kingdom between his sons with disastrous consequences. The chorus proclaims that the play “a mirror shall become to princes all/ To learn to shun the cause of such a fall” (I.ii, 390–92). Its “argument” was to show a kingdom divided, dissension, popular rebellion and civil war, and in the aftermath “the land for a long time almost desolate and miserably wasted.” The failure to follow good counsel led to a state in which subjects rebel and even “judge of him that sittes in Caesars Seate.”⁶⁷ A Parliament should have been held and “certaine Heires appoynted to the Crowne/ To staie their title of established right;/ And plant the people in obedience/ while yet the Prince did live, whose name and power/ By lawfull Sommons and auctoritie/ Might make a Parliament to be of force, And might have set the state in quiet state” (sig 3v-E4r). Gorbuduc was first performed at the Inner Temple and then before Elizabeth the same year that Parliament named a committee to consider the succession. The drama proved freer than Parliament to air the issue of succession.⁶⁸

Shakespeare’s King Lear also featured an elderly monarch who unwisely divides his land with dire consequences. Lear, who wishes to give away governance but retain the externalities of royalty, fails to understand the need for unity of regal authority and power. Fragmentation of the state and civil war result from the ruler’s unwillingness to rule and from his inability to distinguish good from evil counsel. The play echoed sentiments of King James I’s Basilicon Doron, which warned his heir that “dividing your kingdoms, yee shall leave the seed of division and discord among your posterities.”⁶⁹

About one-third of the plays on English subjects written between 1500 and 1642 dealt with pre-Norman England.⁷⁰ A Thomas Middleton play, whose subject was the invasion of Kent by the Saxons, portrays an unworldly king whose power and then throne are usurped. The usurper faces a popular rebellion of the people. He is temporarily saved from deposition by the invasion of Hengist the Saxon, who puts down the popular revolt and then challenges the usurper for rule of the country. Hengist proves to be a strong king who attends to his subject’s grievances.

Based on ancient Scottish history, Shakespeare’s Macbeth has been variously interpreted. Some consider it critical of the Scots; others view it as a royal play that emphasizes James I as the heir to Banquo’s line. Largely based on Holinshed’s brief account, the play features a gentle, legitimate but not particularly effective king in war-ridden Scotland killed by a usurper, Macbeth, a tyrant possessing only “a barren scepter” and “a fruitless crown.” Malcolm, the legitimate successor, flees to the protection of Edward the Confessor, the powerful and holy English king. Malcolm’s succession at the end of the play restores public order.⁷¹ There would have been no reason for James to have been offended by the treatment of Scottish history.

MEDIEVAL CHRONICLE PLAYS

Composed largely in the sixteenth century, a series of chronicles purportedly retailing English medieval history had become familiar to Englishmen. Subsequently they became sources for English playwrights. The chronicle plays of England have been subject to detailed and often conflicting criticism and interpretation.⁷² I, for the most part, limit discussion to simply what audiences saw rather than attempt an analysis of what particular playwrights might have intended. We need to be reminded that playgoers viewing a drama did not dissect characters and speeches in the same way that modern critics do. Unlike modern critics, audiences would not have had their Holinshed and Hall before them to analyze and ponder the playwright’s departures from those texts.

Monarchy is at the center of these plays. Audiences saw weak kings and tyrants, depositions and succession crises of the past. They did so in the context of their own culture’s emphasis on the doctrine of obedience to divinely instituted monarchy and an alertness to the dangers of rebellion imparted by contemporary sermons, proclamations and statutes. History plays were most often performed during those decades when theories of divine right and constitutional kingship were widely canvassed, when French Huguenot and Roman Catholic justifications for rebellion were circulated and refuted and when Machiavelli’s ideas of princely behavior were being aired. Although many plays focused on conflicts between kings and their barons, audiences may not have responded by favoring one side or the other. Both feudal and early modern kingship had as their goal the attainment of balance between powerful but lawful kings on the one hand and barons or people on the other. Kings were owed obedience and loyalty; barons owed adherence to custom, privilege, property and law. Plays portrayed the problems of feudal monarchs, but were viewed from the vantage of early modern political conditions and institutions. They also must have been experienced differently depending on immediately pressing issues. Plays featuring problems of succession or the dangers of ambitious favorites, for example, had quite different implications when viewed as long past historical dramas rather than when paralleled by current events. We must also keep in mind that rulers and members of the royal family were often present at performances and were patrons of the theater, and that playwrights had to be careful of the implications that might be drawn from their plays.

John Bale’s King Johan, one of the earliest history plays, served the purposes of the Henrician reformation and provided propaganda against papal tyranny. The audience was informed that “The adminystracyion of a princes gouernance Is the gifte of God and his high ordynaunce.”⁷³ That king, however, was presented differently in both The Troublesome Reign of King John (1591) and in Shakespeare’s King John. In Shakespeare’s version he is neither a just nor strong ruler, but a usurper, responsible for the death of the legitimate heir. The nobility, viewing John as an illegitimate ruler, renounce their fealty and oppose him. Audiences viewed a violent struggle for power, assassination, poisoning, civil war and a succession crisis over who should be king. Embroiled in Continental conflicts, John gives Continental lands to the French king. The play offers no clear resolution between the claims of might and right and does not answer the question of whether John should be treated as a usurper or as a de facto king legitimized by what he calls his “strong possession”(I.i., 39–40). Neither conflict with the papacy nor the Magna Carta is featured, though the latter was central to historical discussions of John’s reign.

Marlowe’s The Troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the Second depicts a bad king manipulated by favorites and a struggle between the king and nobility. The play, whose sources are Holinshed, Fabyan and Stowe, offers both a weak and selfish monarch and a selfish and disloyal nobility, making it difficult for audiences to sympathize with either party. Certainly it would have been difficult to view John or Edward II as a model monarch.

The same would have to be said of plays dealing with Richard II and Henry IV, which were typically based on Holinshed and Daniel. In Shakespeare’s play, Richard voices the doctrine of divine right kingship and is a weak, self-indulgent ineffective ruler who faces rebellion of the nobility and deposition for his misdeeds. Richard ignores advisors and seizes the land of a powerful family. The play raises the issue of what is to be done when one has a bad but legitimate ruler. How is one to view the rebellion of the powerful and the replacement of an ineffective king with one who is effective but whose royal pedigree is lacking? Is it Richard or Bolingbroke who should be held responsible for the latter’s rebellion and the former’s deposition? The playwright does not offer an answer as to whether rebellion is acceptable under some circumstances or whether subjects must bear what God and his Providence provide. Richard may deserve to be deposed, but Henry does not deserve to be king. Because Parliament plays a relatively minor role, the play underlines the view that a successful monarchy depends on the character, intelligence and ability of the ruler. It does not offer a legitimate alternative to a failed or flawed monarch. Nevertheless the play aroused the ire of Elizabeth because of the presumed parallel between Elizabeth and Richard II and Essex and Henry IV. The play was reprinted many times before the civil war, with the deposition scene sometimes included and sometimes expunged. Shakespeare’s Richard II was performed by the king’s troupe in 1634. Presumably it was not thought subversive or offensive to the Crown at that time.

A revival or rather rewriting of Shakespeare’s Richard II took place during the Restoration, when divine right theories were again current. Tate’s version presents Bolingbroke as a Whig leader who manipulates London crowds with slogans such as “Liberty and Rights.” He has become a Machiavellian parliamentarian who calls “a senate in King Richard’s Name/ Against King Richard, to depose King Richard,/ Is such a Monster of curst usurpation.”⁷⁴ Tate eliminates the barons’ and the people’s grievances, encouraging his audience to think of the chaos of the late civil war. Despite the more favorable view of Richard, the play was banned, not surprising given the then current Whig arguments that used Richard’s deposition as precedent for altering the succession.

The treatment of Henry IV was ambiguous both in historical writing and in the drama. The stain of his manner of succession remains to haunt his reign and those of his successors. Shakespeare’s Henry IV shows the audience relatively little about royal governance, though the king does meet with his peers and listens to their advice on governing. The play focuses on the education of Prince Hal and shows him growing into the responsibilities of kingship. Shakespeare’s Henry V portrays the young king at the height of his powers. Though his character has been dissected by countless critics, Shakespeare’s Henry V was the most admired monarch seen on the early modern stage. He is treated as a politically skilful unifier of the country who is effective appealing to humble soldiers, wooing a French princess or meting out harsh justice. He is portrayed as a king well supplied with noble counselors who uses counsel well. Despite horrific acts at the siege of Harfleur, the king is presented as an effective military and political leader who rallies his countrymen in the war against France. Though modern critics have debated whether Henry should be viewed as the drama’s ideal monarch or a deceitful Machiavellian prince, the qualities that he uses to gain the victory of Agincourt surely elicited the contemporary audience’s patriotic pride in his exploits.

The series of Shakespeare plays dealing with the reign of Henry VI presents a quite different picture, a picture in which the fragility of the recently successful monarchical state is on display. Shakespeare treats the reign in three plays, the first beginning with the funeral of the warrior king Henry V, soon followed by the collapse of military efforts, internal dissension and factionalism and the emerging spectacle of political chaos. The second shows an appalling level of conspiracy and chaos in which there is no one, including the king, capable of providing effective rule. His withdrawal from active rule leads to more violence and a savage popular rebellion. In the third play the situation grows still worse and the destructiveness of the Wars of the Roses is presented in all its horrors. It is likely that contemporary audiences, given the issues of the day, must have seen these plays as cautionary tales rather than as editorials in support of particular political actors or causes.

Restoration revisions of Shakespeare’s plays are again instructive. Restoration plays are far more openly political than their pre–civil war predecessors. As Thomas Durfey noted, “[In] this Age . . . ’tis not a Poets Merit, but his Party that must do his business.”⁷⁵ Crowne’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, entitled The Misery of Civil War, comments on the politics of the Exclusion era and the growing anti-French and anti–Roman Catholic sentiment. The prologue and epilogue include the ghost of Richard II, who enunciates the dangers of deposing a legitimate monarch and insists on the need for expiation of his usurpation. When “The Royal rights, and Throne invade,/ Then a high road for vast destruction’s made.” The play announces that the Crown of England was made “Of Antient Rights, and ’tis the gift of Heaven.” “A Monarch’s Right is an unshaken Rock, Nor storms of War nor time can wear away,/ And Wracks those Pirates that come there for prey.”⁷⁶ Here Henry VI is a weak, incompetent but religious king whose title was “founded on Rebellion/ The murder of a King and usurpation.” Characters discuss the nature of kingship and the right to rule. One argues

If Kings may lose their Rights for want of Virtue,

And Subjects are the Judges of that Virtue;

Then Kings are Subjects, and all Subjects Kings

And by that Law that Subjects may destroy

Their Kings for want of Virtue, other Subjects

May think those Subjects Rogues, and cut their throats.

Thus Babel might be builded, but no Kingdom. ⁷⁷

Another questions the notion of lineal succession and suggests that obedience is not owed to those who “know not how to rule” (5.1.6).

Shakespeare’s Richard III, based on Sir Thomas More’s history, portrays the English monarchy at its moral nadir. The deformed tyrant not only performs horrific acts but informs the audience of his evil intentions. “I am determined to prove a villain.” As King Edward “be . . . true and just,” I “am subtle, false and treacherous” (91, 1, 30–32, 36–37). There were other unfavorable dramatic representations of Richard before and after the civil war.⁷⁸

RECENT ENGLISH SUBJECT MATTER

The Tudor period was also the subject of historical drama. There was a 1634 play about Perkin Warbeck, claimant to the Tudor throne, based on Holinshed and Bacon’s history of the reign of Henry VII, as well as several plays dealing with the reign of Henry VIII.⁷⁹ During the Restoration John Banks provided a Tory play dealing with Anne Boleyn and espousing divine right kingship, as well as another drama dealing with Lady Jane Grey.⁸⁰ The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt (1601) dealt with the 1554 rebellion aimed at putting Lady Jane Grey on the throne. The problems of Elizabeth during Mary’s reign were staged in Thomas Heywood’s If you Know Not Me, You know No Bodie; or, The Troubles of Queen Elizabeth, a popular play of 1603–4 based on Foxe and Holinshed in which Elizabeth represents the benefits of Protestantism and exhibits her bond with her subjects. Heywood also published a prose history dealing with the same events,⁸¹ again suggesting the connection between historical drama and historiography. Elizabeth is celebrated and the papacy denounced in Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon.

The Generall scope of this Drammaticall Poem, is to set forth (in Tropicall and shadowed colours) the Greatness, Magnanimity, Constancy, Clemency, and the other incomparable Heroical vertues of our late Queene. And . . . the inveterate malice, Treasons, Machinations, Underminings, and continual blody stratagems, of that Purple whore of Rome.⁸²

The Duchess of Suffolk, licensed in 1624 after having been purged of “dangerous matter,” presented the sufferings of the Protestant duchess during the Marian years.⁸³ The Restoration-era play The Island Queens, or The Death of Mary, Queen of Scotland, which dealt with the death of the Queen of Scots, was prohibited from being played. Banks’s The Unhappy Favorite, or the Earleof Essex (1682) appeared when treason again was of great public concern. In general the more recent the history presented, the more pointed and immediately relevant the political messages presented and taken away by the audience.

EUROPEAN HISTORY STAGED

Plays dealing with European history and especially with the history of the French civil wars explored the problems of succession and were used to reinforce anti-Catholic sentiment. Many were based on recent historical accounts and contemporary news pamphlets, blurring the line between history and the drama. Marlowe’s Massacre at Paris (1594), which dealt with near contemporary events, utilized the deluge of French pamphlets to depict the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of French Protestants.⁸⁴ In 1608 Chapman’s The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron, which follows Edward Grimeston’s General Inventorie of the History of France (1608) fairly closely, dealt with the period in which Henry IV has largely suppressed the Catholic League but continued to face conspiracies, such as that of the ambitious Duke of Byron. Byron is a martial figure whose career is treated as roughly paralleling that of the traitorous Earl of Essex. He is manipulated into rebellion against a generous and forgiving monarch. The play was suppressed, probably as a result of the complaint of the French ambassador. There was also Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1603), which had five editions before 1657, his The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France and Thomas Dekker and Michael Drayton’s Civil warres of France, written in 1598 but never printed.

The French civil wars also provided ample material for Restoration dramatists. Typically they displayed anti-Catholic themes and condemnation of rebellion against virtuous monarchs.⁸⁵ The most controversial Restoration drama dealing with the history of the French civil wars was The Duke of Guise, the joint work of Nathaniel Lee and John Dryden. The separately printed Prologue to the Duke of Guise declared, “Our Play’s a Parallel” and issued a series of warnings against Whig machinations.⁸⁶

The play inspired a flurry of Whig responses. Thomas Shadwell rejected the parallel between Guise and Monmouth and the play’s critique of London and its “ignoramus juries.”⁸⁷ Dryden replied with The Vindication, or, the Parallel of the French Holy-League and the English League and Covenant, defending his historical accuracy and advising readers to compare the play text to Davila’s history. The political lesson of the play was “to reduce men to Loyalty, by shewing the pernicious consequences of Rebellion, and Popular Insurrections.”⁸⁸ When Dryden’s translation of Maimbourg’s History of the League (1684) appeared, the Tory Observator commented favorably on both the translation and its “Application.” In this febrile political environment plays engendered pamphlets, and the pamphlets more pamphlets and historical commentary. While pre–civil war plays dealing with the French civil wars tended to laud Protestants and condemned the Guises and the Holy League, Restoration efforts were more likely to castigate both the French and the English for rebellion.

Events in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands and elsewhere also provided material for politically charged drama. Already in the early seventeenth century Thomas Scot commented on the dramatic potential of a wide array of foreign persona. He queried, Why not “borrow a Spanish name or two, as well as French or Italian . . . ? Why not Gondomar as well as Hieroymo of Duke d’Alva? And why not Philip as well as Peter, or Alfonso, or Caesar?” These characters might be as useful as the “Black Prince, or Henry the Eighth or Edward the Sixth, or Queen Elizabeth, or King James, or the King and Queen of Bohemia.”⁸⁹

Spanish settings often featured tyrannical rulers, the dangers of Catholicism and critiques of the Spanish conquests in Mexico and Peru. Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada featured a divided, faction-ridden country with rival kings and characters who debate the nature of kingship. It celebrated the institution of monarchy but also reminded Charles II and James, Duke of York of their limitations. Dryden’s The Spanish Fryar (1680) attacks priests, denounces conspiracy and usurpation and enunciates the Tory doctrine of divine right kingship.

Spanish settings were used to comment on contemporary politics. A Larum for London, or the Siedge of Antwerpe (1602) presented Spanish atrocities in the Netherlands and warned of Spanish danger. The wildly popular A Game at Chess of 1624 contrasted the malevolent Spanish with the virtuous English and offered a critique of current English policy. During the Restoration The Great Favourite or the Duke of Lerma by Sir Robert Howard offered a parallel between the Spanish minister Lerma and the English politician Clarendon, whose impeachment the politician-playwright supported. Samuel Pepys thought that the play was designed to reproach the king and his mistresses. Given the inclination to look for parallels, corrupt foreign courts presented on stage were frequently taken as critiques of current English courts exhibiting similar behavior.

Spanish conquests in the New World provided settings for several plays. Davenant’s Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), which featured heroic Englishmen rescuing natives from the wicked Spanish conquistadors, provided support for the Protectorate’s anti-Spanish expansion policies as well as appealing to ever-present anti-Catholic sentiments. Librettos were sold at the door to assist the audience in following the songs and tableaux. In 1664 The Indian Queen, jointly written by Dryden and Howard and acted before the king and queen, dealt with the problems of obedience, rebellion and usurpation and endorsed the divine right of kings with allusions to the martyred Charles I and the usurper Cromwell.⁹⁰

Dutch settings were occasionally employed to comment on current relations with the Dutch. The massacre of English merchants by the Dutch at Amboyna in 1624 resulted in anti-Dutch ballads, pamphlets and even paintings portraying tortures inflicted on the English. A play on the subject, however, was suppressed after Dutch complaints to the Council. The Amboyna massacre again provided dramatic fare during the 1672 Anglo-Dutch War when Dryden’s Amboyna (1673) became part of the government’s anti-Dutch propaganda campaign. Dryden dedicated the play to Lord Treasurer Thomas Clifford, who was widely viewed as primarily responsible for the declaration of war. Conflict between Dutch republicans and monarchists was depicted in Massinger’s and Fletcher’s Tragedy of Sir John Van Olden Barneveld (1618). The republican Barneveld, who had been executed for treason shortly before the play was written, analogizes the Prince of Orange to the Roman Octavius, who “seized the absolute rule of all” and prophesies that the Dutch government would become a monarchy.⁹¹ The play was allowed after close scrutiny and revision. It was reported that the play had “many spectators and received applause.”⁹²

Several dramas referred directly or indirectly to the plight of the Protestant Elector Palatine, often with oblique references to the failure of his allies to support him. These include Massinger’s Maid of Honour (1632) and his Believe As you List (1631). Henry Glapthorne’s Albertus Wallenstein (1634), which played at the Globe in the 1630s, also dealt with the current wars on the Continent.

Plays with Italian settings were numerous, though most were devoid of explicit political themes. A substantial number, however, offered opportunities to comment on court morality, condemn the actions of tyrannical rulers or portray corrupt favorites. In John Marston’s The Faun (1604–5), the audience viewed the vices of courtiers and the rise and fall of favorites. Like Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the playwright used the device of a disguised ruler who learns of the disordered state of his domain. John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi portrayal of corruption warned:

a prince’s court

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

Pure silver drops in general, but if ’t chance

Some curs’d example poison ’t near the head,

Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

And what is ’t makes this blessed government

But a most provident council, who dare freely

Inform him the corruption of the times? ⁹³

Some of the Italian plays offered easily recognized parallels to English affairs.

In 1647 there was a popular but violent revolt against Spanish rule in Naples. Two years later the title page of the play The Rebellion of Naples proclaimed that the events dramatized were “Really Acted upon that bloudy stage, the streets of Naples.” A prose account of the revolt appeared in the same year. Written during the English civil war by a Royalist, the play emphasizes the dangers of rebellion, especially one led by the lower class. While the author, who claimed to have been an eyewitness to the events in Naples, insists that the play did not allude to English affairs, the epilogue warns the king not to provoke subjects “with too hard a Yoke.”⁹⁴

Dramatic treatment of Ottoman and Byzantine rulers, especially during the Restoration era, also provided opportunities to present tyrannical rulers, dangerous faction-ridden courts and succession conflicts. At least forty plays set in Asia or the Levant appeared in London between 1660 and 1714. Playwrights often relied on travel books and histories for source material. Ottoman expansion in Europe was a constant worry throughout the early modern period, and events in the region were closely followed in travel and news accounts.

The Ottoman Turks, fascinating because of their continuing danger to Europe, provided an exotic locale for pointing to a variety of state dangers. The locale was sufficiently distant to allow criticism of tyrannical and corrupt rule without openly appearing to suggest English parallels. An early “tyrant” play dealing with Ottoman rulers was Robert Green’s “most lamentable history,” Selimus (1590). Fulke Greville’s early Jacobean Mustapha was one of several plays using Turkish material to focus on the dangers of evil counsel. Davenant’s Siege of Rhodes emphasized Turkish despotism and its continuing conquests. Orrery’s popular Mustapha (1665) and the Siege of Rhodes, first performed in 1656 and revised in 1661, drew on Knolly’s prose account. In Ibrahim, The Illustrious Bassa (1676), Elkanah Settle again draws on Solyman material. Although Settle’s Solyman is a heroic, martial figure, the playwright depicts the corrupt and immoral nature of Ottoman rule as the source of the state’s problems.⁹⁵

Tyrants were also portrayed in Persian settings, though Persia was sometimes viewed as a civilized country and sometimes as a possible bulwark against the Ottomans. In Denham’s The Sophy (1642) the king and the state are ruined by bad advice from the chief civil and ecclesiastical ministers.⁹⁶ Robert Baron’s Mirza: A Tragedy Really acted in Persia in the last age (1655), which, like The Sophy, relied heavily on Sir Thomas Herbert’s account of his travels in that part of the world, explicitly offered a “parallel” from which readers were to draw lessons. Later in the century John Crowne’s Darius, King of Persia portrays a king who views himself as “God’s minister” and “a deputed God” and is deserted by his people who wish to establish a republic. The duplicitous rebels, who argue that there is no such thing as treason but “ill success” makes it so, are eventually defeated as Darius’ kingdom is conquered by Alexander. In this drama, viewed by King James II, the message, “Leave the dispose of Crowns to Kings and Gods,” delivered by Darius, made the divine right of kings ideology clear.⁹⁷

ROMAN PLAYS

Roman history was familiar fare in English theaters, some fifty-seven Roman plays having been staged in England by 1640. Many of these invited discussion of Roman virtue and participation in public life or focused on republican values and institutions and their imperial counterparts. Others used Roman contexts to comment on or provide parallels to current political issues.⁹⁸ Given that Roman plays were performed in a monarchical environment, there was no direct advocacy of republican rule. Plays were not publically performed during England’s republican era. Even portrayals of tyrannical emperors were not accompanied by suggestions that monarchy should be replaced. English governments, therefore, were not inclined to forbid plays featuring Roman tyrants.

Many Roman characters came with pre-existing notions as to their virtues, vices and political significance. Nero and Tiberius could be expected to appear as tyrants. Julius Caesar, Brutus and Augustus were more ambiguous. The role of Julius Caesar in the transition between republic and empire was problematic in both drama and historiography. Playwrights using Roman materials and Roman characters typically based their plays on historical texts but, like playwrights using other historical settings, felt free to add to or alter them to suit dramatic needs. The Roman plays were and were not quite history.

The demise of the early kings and the establishment of the Roman republic were the events with most potential for a positive treatment of the republican era. Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus (1681), performed and then banned during the volatile Exclusion controversy, was halted for its “Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon ye Government.” The play refers to the contrast between “the sway/ Of partial tyrants and a freeborn people.”⁹⁹ Its theme, the establishment of republican liberty, was worrisome given that the recent provocative pamphlet Appeal from the Country to the City was signed “Junius Brutus,” who had been the founder of the Roman republic responsible for the fall of the Tarquin tyranny.

Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, heavily indebted to Plutarch, is set in the early republican era. Neither the overly confident patrician general nor the plebeians are shown in a good light. Audiences may have associated Coriolanus with the Earl of Essex, another military hero who fell into treason. Contemporary concern with the scarcity of food and the London food riots are echoed in the play’s concern with the price of food. The failure of the play’s magistrates to deal with the crisis was parallel to the contemporary failure of the English authorities.¹⁰⁰ The play includes the fable of the belly, which underlines the dangers when all parts of the body politic fail to follow the common good.

The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth (1681), Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as rewritten by Nahum Tate, like many Restoration plays, was far more openly partisan than its pre-1642 predecessor. Tate highlighted the parallel with “the busie Faction of our own Time” which “Seduce the Multitude to Ingratitude, against Persons that are not only plac’t in Rightful Power above them; but also the Heroes and Defenders of their Country.” The play’s “moral” was “to Recommend Submission and Adherence to Establish’d Lawful Power.”¹⁰¹

Several plays situated in the late republican era focus on Julius Caesar. As with historiography some dramas viewed the republic as the site of Roman virtue and deplored its displacement by Julius Caesar and his successors as the beginning of a descent into tyranny, while others pointed to the horrors of civil war during the latter phases of the republic and applauded the new regime for initiating greater political stability. Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, which draws heavily on Plutarch’s Lives, was politically ambiguous, offering no clear answer to the question of whether assassination can be justified. The audience is treated as competent to evaluate and make judgments on complex political issues after considering several points of view rather than told how to judge the characters and their actions. This play and others that are similarly ambiguous contributed to the creation of a politically thoughtful subject seeing himself as capable of making judgments on those who exercised power.

Paulina Kewes suggests that the historical Caesar was viewed differently during the reign of Elizabeth than in that of James I. During the latter’s reign, she suggests, monarchical strength was feared more than its weakness, and there was a growing anxiety about absolutism and tyranny. Perhaps so, but Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar remained in repertory during the early seventeenth century and was revived in 1672. It is likely that its audiences, like readers of the historical works on which it was based, came away with mixed opinions as to the rectitude of the political actors and actions portrayed.¹⁰²

The Tragedy of that Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, attributed to Fulke Greville Lord Brooke, remained unpublished until 1651. The admirable republican Cicero is killed and the state turned into a monarchy. The orator’s brother pronounces “the state is now so wounded/ That there’s no hope of cure.”¹⁰³ It is not surprising that Brooke did not attempt to mount the play during his lifetime or that it was printed during England’s brief republican era.

The romance of Antony and Cleopatra obviously made for great theater. It also might be a vehicle for conflicting political messages. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra the great martial figure Antony abandons public duty for private desire while his rival Octavius is seen as steadfast in his duty to the Roman state. Fulke Greville used the same subject matter for his Antony and Cleopatra but is thought to have destroyed it because it too closely paralleled the Essex rebellion.¹⁰⁴ The Essex rebellion appears to have had a substantial impact on the drama, either inducing playwrights to withhold their dramas or resulting in censorship or suppression. John Dryden’s All for Love (1677), a Restoration adaption of Shakespeare’s play, emphasizes the seductiveness of Cleopatra, who appears dressed as one of Charles’s French mistresses. The drama surely evoked in its audience thoughts of the supposedly Francophile eroticism of Charles II and his court. Dryden dedicated the play to the Earl of Danby, a proponent of an anti-French policy.

Plays with later Roman themes naturally focused on imperial rulers. Good rulers, admirable courts and able advisors might provide suitable material for the masque, but did not provide the basis for exciting drama. Plays dealing with imperial topics were more likely to deal with tyrants, corrupt courts and evil advisors. It seemed obvious to Thomas Heywood that playwrights would use Nero to exemplify tyranny, as does the Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee in his The Tragedy of Nero (1674). Nero and Tiberius were such stock dramatic villains that many of their negative depictions may not have appeared to imply criticisms of contemporary kings. Many of these plays were performed before English monarchs and English courts.

The most studied play dealing with the reign of the emperor Tiberius is Jonson’s Sejanus, which closely followed the Tacitus account of the corrupt minister. It displays a court full of informers and spies, rife with bloody deaths and suicides. Sejanus pursues power, is contemptuous of religion, employs flattery and dissimulation and is eventually destroyed. The play may have been viewed as an indictment of the corruption and immorality of James I’s court. The parallel between Sejanus and the unpopular Duke of Buckingham had become common. Jonson denied a contemporary application when questioned by the Privy Council. Yet there is no evidence that when performed the play offended the king, and Jonson continued to produce masques on behalf of the court.¹⁰⁵

The play Constantine the Great (1684) by Nathaniel Lee, written about the time of the playwright’s conversion to Toryism, glorified divine right theory, and its separately printed epilogue attacks Whigs and Trimmers. John Fletcher’s Valentinian (published in 1647 but written c. 1610–14) deals with the role of corruption in the fall of Rome. An adaptation was presented in 1685. Modern critics have argued pro and con as to whether the play recommends rebellion and republicanism.¹⁰⁶ Whatever the author’s aim, the play allowed the audience to behold a corrupt state and corrupt ruler and to draw a conclusion about the causes and consequences of that political condition. Plays did not have to have an explicit contemporary political message to have a political impact, particularly one of authorizing citizen playgoers to exercise their own judgment about political actors and events.

Audiences and readers of the Roman plays learned of the contrasting vision of republican and imperial regimes and values. They vicariously experienced the acts of good and bad rulers. Some productions clearly sought to teach a political lesson; others were ambiguous or appeared to deliver different messages depending on the changing political circumstances in England.

CONCLUSION

Early modern England witnessed the emergence of a vibrant theatrical tradition that from the 1580s or 1590s offered numerous plays dealing with English, Continental and Roman history. While historical plays, especially those dealing directly with the English past, were more frequent before 1620, a substantial number of plays of the 1620s and 1630s related to current political events or the Roman past. During the revolutionary years, when the drama largely disappeared, highly partisan play pamphlets came into existence but could not offer the intense experience of seeing historical figures and events on stage. After the Restoration history plays were often set in non-English or colonial settings. During 1678–82, the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion controversy, plays often reflected intense partisan conflicts. Separately printed play prologues and epilogues as well as characters within plays were frequently explicit about current political issues and ideologies. As historiography and poetry drew apart, and audiences became less likely to view historical drama as history itself, there was an even greater emphasis on drawing parallels, a practice that enhanced the possibilities for a drama that participated in current political discourse. The lessons of Restoration drama were often more openly and directly political than those of the pre–civil war era.

Prose historical writing and the historical play were related in complex but not easily definable ways. Playwrights did not treat historical plays as fictions and often indicated the historical sources on which they drew. They might deviate somewhat from well-known accounts, but not too much. It would have been difficult to mount a play making Richard II an effective monarch given the historical material that would have been familiar to a substantial part of the audience. Although playwrights presenting entirely fictional personages, times and locales obviously had greater freedom to invent, many chose to portray the historical past and sometimes events close to the present. History was popular at the same time that historical plays were popular.

Historical drama, like history and poetry, was expected to provide appropriate moral and political lessons, but poetry and drama were expected to entertain as well as teach. The entertainment function was crucial to commercial success and court patronage. The drawing of parallels was commonly used to point audiences toward the desired lesson, though audiences were already in the habit of thinking in terms of parallels even without explicit instructions. The habit of thinking in parallels sometimes led to difficulties because it occasionally led authorities to see parallels unintended by authors. What was innocuous in some circumstances might be perceived as politically provocative in others. Lessons were to be taught, but it was often unclear what the message was other than the obvious message that tyranny was to be condemned as were evil advisors and corrupt courts.

The brief sampling of plays presented in this chapter has not attempted to tease out the political lessons or the political implication of individual plays. Rather in a general way it indicates what playgoers saw of political significance and had the opportunity to respond to. The aim is to determine the contribution of the drama, particularly historical drama, to early modern political culture. In this context it is important to remember that the opportunities and constraints inherent in different media meant that no single medium, drama, news, poetry or the sermon, should be taken by itself to represent the political discourse of the era.

To assess the contribution of the historical drama to the political education of early modern English men and women we must remind ourselves that audiences were most often exposed to rulers, some good and effective, but more often weak, ineffective or even tyrannical. Audiences saw courtiers and advisors, some admirable, others corrupt or overly ambitious, who endangered the ruler, the state and the people. Some featured a few villainous courtiers; others courts so deeply corrupt or faction-ridden they undermined the polity. Audiences were frequently exposed to rebellions that resulted in civil wars and other chaotic conditions. Only rarely were those who opposed legitimate rulers treated positively.

If we could draw a composite picture of the monarchies that audiences viewed, it would be monarchy in a perilous state. The historical drama, for the most part, provided a dark picture of monarchy. Even when a historical drama ended on a bright or happy note, it would have been obvious, at least to the historically knowledgeable, that bad times would follow.

What then did such dramas teach? They taught or rather implied that monarchy was the key institution of government and that the character, intelligence and effectiveness of the monarch were the keys to monarchical success or failure. Historical plays often displayed the problems of succession and the difficulties flowing from the lack of a clear, effective and adult heir or from a disturbing excess of claimants, difficulties that sometimes resulted in usurpation and tyranny. The plays underlined the importance of good counsel and the evils that followed from its absence. They displayed the dangers of faction, whether found in court, among the king’s barons or among the Roman republic’s generals. Most often the historical play portrayed trouble, either for the state or for the people. On stage the state was a fragile institution, perennially endangered by domestic or foreign elements threatening its stability. The historical drama thus provided a somewhat different conception of monarchy from that found in other media. Other genres dealing with present monarchs were rarely as critical of incapable or tyrannical rulers. Sermons commonly idealized rulers and repeatedly emphasized that kings and magistrates possessed divinely granted authority, although they also frequently pointed to or threatened God’s punishment of rulers and nations. Only the masque consistently presented idealized monarchs in idealized surroundings. Plays showed flawed rulers, flawed counselors and flawed courts. Neither the dramatized English nor Roman past offered a vision of a Golden Age or utopian state.

Because the history play exposed audiences to defective rulers and defective states, it taught them to be critical of unfit and immoral governors, whether they were English, European, Ottoman or Roman. The theatrical context seemed to entitle audiences to evaluate the actions and abilities of rulers and other powerful figures. They gained access to the minds and motives of rulers, something that they were not permitted or positioned to do in real life. They were being educated to judge their social and political superiors: English kings and those who rebelled against them, the actors and actions of the French civil wars, Spanish rulers and conquerors, Italian rulers and courts and Roman senators, citizens, generals and emperors. Viewers were positioned to think about what made a good king, to judge whether a particular ruler acted morally or effectively and to consider the extent to which he was responsible for his actions. Audiences were also placed in a position to evaluate whether advisors and courtiers provided good or poor advice and to make judgments about whether those who conspired or rebelled against the ruler acted justly or unjustly. Playgoers were invited to make political judgments on political actors that it had not been deemed appropriate for them to view critically as part of everyday life. Most important, audiences were taught to make moral and political judgments about those who ruled and to evaluate those involved in making decisions that affected the entire nation. Elite male members of the audience might take away lessons to guide themselves when they assumed positions of authority. Women and nonelite members of the audience were given the opportunity to think and criticize.

When the common people appeared in historical dramas, they were not often treated favorably. Especially when presented as rebels, they were not represented as models to be emulated. Playgoers thus were taught to become critical observers but not political activists. The drama did not encourage disobedience, let alone outright opposition or rebellion. Rebellion, which resulted in disastrous civil war, was not offered as a suitable means of solving the problems of ineffective or tyrannical rule. The solution for bad rulers and bad advisors was good rulers and advisors. In this sense, plays reinforced monarchical rule.

There were also some limitations to the drama as a teacher of politics. Plays typically focused on individuals and their relationships with other individuals. It was primarily the lack of personal understanding, ability or morality that led historical actors astray. Solutions were to be found in characters that possessed those qualities. Legal and constitutional arguments, so prominent in other genres, were rarely found in the drama, and institutional solutions were rarely offered. Institutional constraints on monarchs exercised by parliaments or law courts, which were so much part of the political discourse in other genres, were not often a part of dramatic offerings. Genre constraints thus shaped certain types of political discourse. The literary conventions that tragedy involved rulers and elites and that history was to focus on rulers and war limited the kinds of problems and the kinds of solutions that would be offered on the stage. The drama did not offer much of an opportunity to consider abstract concepts of the state or the constitution that were explored in pamphlet, treatise or sermon.

Although the drama portrayed many defective rulers, it did not, given government supervision and royal patronage, offer solutions likely to undermine current English rulers. Kings allowed historical or mythical tyrants to be portrayed because they did not view themselves as tyrants. Where some might see parallels, others might see contrasts. Rebels and revolutionaries are not treated positively even when victorious against an ineffective ruler. When Bolingbroke deposes Richard II and assumes the Crown, the stain of his usurpation remains.

Plays, like other forms of printed materials, were supervised and controlled, albeit not consistently, by a mixed group of individuals and institutions that occasionally called on dramatists to explain or defend the political implications of their work. Like most kinds of writing, plays were seen as having the potential to harbor moral, religious and political dangers. Given the fact that some dramatists might be punished for their productions or forced to alter them, there must have been a good deal of self-censorship. This, of course, was the condition under which most early modern writers worked. It is also clear, however, that the Crown was generally favorable to the theater, offering patronage and attendance. The Crown treated the drama with more sympathy than did Parliament or those who governed London, especially during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the English theater could have flourished without royal support. Yet we have seen that occasionally rulers did feel threatened by dramatic productions and that the Crown was willing to bow to the wishes of foreign ambassadors offended by particular plays.

We have also seen that government attitudes sometimes changed with circumstances. Changes in the political climate might transform a politically innocuous play into a dangerous one or vice versa. Plays dealing with succession might seem subversive under one set of circumstances and blameless in another. Succession was a sensitive topic during the reign of Elizabeth and again during the reign of Charles II when Exclusion was being promoted by Whigs.

The historical drama of the period, though it reached an audience of mixed classes and genders, was nevertheless a limited one that did not extend much beyond the environs of London except for those who visited the metropolis. Despite the high aims of playwrights and theorists, the primary draw of the theater was entertainment. We remain uncertain as to how much historical knowledge was absorbed from the theatrical experience, as well as uncertain as to whether audiences were as receptive to the “lessons” as playwrights might wish. In this instance as in most others, it is easier to know what authors purveyed than what playgoers and readers took away from their experience. For better or worse much of our understanding of early modern culture is derived from what was produced and not from how it was consumed.