Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660–1745 (review)

Despite the past decade's resurgence of interest in theaters and theatricality in the long eighteenth century, critical coverage of this material is still riddled with gaps. Elaine McGirr's study of the heroic mode partially fills one such hole by closely examining the complex overlapping of the culture of theater and the thematics of drama, on the one hand, and the theory and practice of politics and sovereignty, on the other. The heroic is a mode, not a genre, McGirr argues; it is best understood as a portable set of conventions and codes closely associated with the Stuart court and with absolutism. The book briefly underscores the lingering power of narratives of restored rule and spectacles of political power in our own day, but it argues primarily for the importance of the heroic mode as a key political language and a political force in its own right.

Though McGirr's work does not limit its attention to the theater, drama is what distills the definitive traits of the heroic. In considering texts and documents related to the theater the book is at its most original and convincing. The heroic mode, in McGirr's account, informs the London stage's response to political developments, trends, and crises over the course of the Restoration and post-Restoration periods. Each chapter takes as its hub a political crisis—the Restoration, the Exclusion Crisis, the Glorious Revolution, the Hanoverian Succession, and the 1745 Jacobite rising—and links that crisis to the heroic productions that it spawned. The heroic, McGirr argues, retains its power well after its heyday following the Restoration, appealing in particular to critics of modernity with its vision of cyclical history and communal identities organized around divinely sanctioned sovereigns. Heroic Mode and Political Crisis importantly links the aesthetic mode of the heroic theater—which places the viewer in a passive position, captivated and thoroughly subjected to the drama—to the ideal experience of the monarchical subject, similarly awed and similarly passive. The heroic mode is an ideological effort to restore the aura of mystery that should surround a sovereign, a mystery that died on the scaffold in 1649. The continuing power of the heroic can also be traced, however, in the lineaments of its Whiggish opponents, who alternately undermine the heroic by lampooning its power or by offering an alternative aesthetic of exemplarity. Because the heroic mode itself gradually solidifies into a synecdoche for an absolutist ideology, satires of the heroic mode by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and Henry Fielding are not simply amusing deflations of a pompous rhetorical style; they are also savage cancellations of the absolutist political theory that undergirds them. This cultural language spreads from its roots in the theater to other genres, and McGirr offers intriguing if somewhat unsubtle readings of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, John Dryden's Annus Mirabilis, and Richard Steele's writings on Christian heroism, among others, as important instances of or rejoinders to the heroic mode.

The book is at its best and most original in its treatment of Buckingham's play The Rehearsal. McGirr traces the play's development from a simple spoof of Dryden in the mid-1660s through the version that was performed in 1671. The revised version lampoons the specific tropes of the heroic, but also imagines a different politics of theater. While the heroic demands submission from the audience, Buckingham's parody wrecks the illusion and opens up a space for the viewer as a different kind of subject. Later chapters offer an intriguing explanation for the play's intermittent success in revival—a success linked not so much to rising and falling public taste as to the vagaries of political crisis. Although the play remained popular in the early eighteenth century, it enjoyed a tremendous revival in the period from 1739 through the end of the Jacobite uprising in 1746. McGirr links this resurgence in popularity to a public need to deflate the heroic mode that was strongly associated with Jacobitism and...