Restoration Theatre and Crisis
In this ambitious study of the relationship between theatrical culture and political crisis, Susan Owen builds her account of the Restoration stage around the Exclusion Crisis and the drama of the years 1678-83. Her interest in the drama and the specific plays she surveys stems from her desire to explore the ways in which this most public of literary forms relates to the political life of society: "what makes the drama interesting is precisely its engagement with its peculiar times, and therefore its topicality and partisanship." (21)
The brief period covered by this book provides an excellent context for such a criticism. The discovery of Sir Edmund Bury Godfrey's still mysterious murder in October 1678 precipitated a political crisis that vividly revealed the fragility of the Restoration settlement. Historians may still disagree about how close Charles II's government came to falling, but, as Owen notes, those who participated in the crisis certainly thought it a possibility. For over four years the nation struggled to come to terms with its complex, partisan, and violent past; elections, courtrooms, pageants, printing presses (the last freed from governmental restraint after the Licensing Act's lapse in June 1679), as well as theaters participated in the unruly institutional and cultural processes through which the nation attempted to define its civic and constitutional identity.
The compression and intensity of the crisis have shaped a rich but notoriously labyrinthine historical landscape in which historians as well as literary critics can lose their way, but Owen does an excellent job in negotiating the terrain. She has an enviable knowledge of not just the theatrical but the political materials, and a sophisticated awareness of how historians have dealt with many of the issues and questions she confronts. Moreover, she possesses an admirable forthrightness and common sense, an ability to see multiple perspectives, and a willingness to be frank about her own preconceptions.
Owen delineates those critical assumptions in chapter two, where she adjudicates between Whig, Marxist, and Tory interpretations of the seventeenth century offered by contemporary historians. She outlines the narratives presented by all three groups, and provides intelligent critiques of each. Her own position is decidedly Marxist, although by revising Christopher Hill in light of recent scholarship by Robert Brenner and Ellen Meiksins Wood, she attempts to avoid the teleological flaws that she attributes to Hill: "A perception of the development of capitalism in a partial way before 1688 and more fully afterwards is helpful in understanding the use of class themes by the parties." (60)
Owen's understanding of Restoration history yields great benefits when she considers individual plays and attempts to place them within the shifting political debates of 1678-83. She is particularly sensitive to the ways in which Tory and Whig dramatists use similar tropes for very different reasons. Both parties, for instance, utilized a "rhetoric of loyalty," although the Whig language of "Loyal Protestantism" insisted on fidelity to country while the Tories stressed constancy to king and the hereditary succession. Both possessed plausible claims to tradition: the Whigs to parliamentary liberties, the Tories to the interrupted reign of Charles I. Both represented on stage the dangers of tyranny, although the Whigs located these perils in popery or royal misrule, the Tories in rebels and usurpers. Rejecting what she regards as the interpretative excesses of both deconstruction and New Historicism, Owen strives "to clarify political difference, not to deconstruct it" (157), to reveal how apparent similarities in political language reveal genuine differences between the two parties, and to locate individual plays and dramatists within their Restoration political contexts.
My hesitations about Owen's approach do not involve disagreements with her about specific plays, although these exist, but with the way in which such judgments distract her attention from questions of how a theatrical context might affect, qualify, or transform the political import of a literary work. Owen rarely considers questions of audience reaction, theatrical spectacle, or performative values. Even her analysis of the Lord Mayor's Shows in the final chapter deals almost entirely with the political adjudication of textual meaning.
In such readings, the drama seems indistinguishable from its reductive political significance, as if it lived simply as party propaganda. Yet Owen certainly assumes that the plays she considers can be distinguished from propaganda; she insists that "since drama is not propaganda, there are contradictions in all plays." (203) But propaganda can itself be marked by contradiction, and the mere presence of such fissures seems insufficient to account for the cultural work that may have been performed by the Restoration theater. Owen assures us that "plays might inspire or even mobilize people politically, overriding doubts and contradictions. In this limited sense they may be said to resemble propaganda." (203) But she neither provides evidence that plays mobilized their audiences nor explains how they overrode the contradictions that supposedly distinguish them from propaganda.
The relationship between theater and crisis can only partially be explained by the political interpretation of individual plays. Owen is sensitive to these plays as political texts, and can always explain if a particular phrase "seems Whiggish" or reveals a Tory sympathy. She keeps score, as it were, very well, carefully delineating where a play fits in the Whig or Tory spectrum of values. But she is less successful in explaining how drama participates in political processes and how those processes are shaped by the theatrical imagination.
