The Miseries of History: Shakespearian Extremity as Cautionary Tale on the Restoration Stage

{ 81 } \ The Miseries of History Shakespearian Extremity as Cautionary Tale on the Restoration Stage —ROBERT SHIMKO After the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in the person of Charles II, the producers of theatre in London treaded carefully around anything associated with the body of republican values (and their results in praxis during the Civil War) euphemistically referred to by both republicans and royalists as the Good Old Cause. Coined by Sir Henry Vane in his republican pamphlet A Healing Question Propounded and Resolved, the term rapidly gained currency as a shorthand way of denoting “whatever it was that motivated whatever it was that happened in England between 1640, when the Long Parliament came into existence, and 1660, when the Stuart monarchy was restored.”1 Due in no small part to the theatre managers Davenant and Killigrew owing their patents to Charles II—coupled with the king’s personal watchfulness over their two theatres—evocations of the Good Old Cause, and by extension representations of interregnum upheavals as a whole, were understood as taboo. But as the political situation circa 1678–79 came more and more to resemble 1641–42, memories of open rebellion as well as the persecution of the theatre seemed more likely to repeat themselves in the present. Widespread suspicions of a Catholic coup d’etat, which culminated in the public hysteria of the so-called Popish Plot, as well as the subsequent showdown between the king and the predominantly Whig parliament over whether or not Charles’s overtly Catholic brother James could be excluded from royal succession made it seem not only possible but pressing for royalist playwrights to thrust visceral memories of the Civil War back into the popular imagination as a warn- { 82 } ROBERT SHIMKO ing about where a similar road had led in the past. As John Miller has noted, the Whigs sought to gain political advantage in their attempt to exclude James from succession by exploiting anti-Catholic sentiment and popular fears of a secret plot. But they pursued this tactic so “ferociously and unscrupulously” that they aroused a serious backlash.2 The increased political divisiveness led royalists to dredge up imagery of civil strife—which had up to that point generally been repressed in the interest of quietism—as a visceral reminder to the populace of what might happen if the opposition insisted on a new face-off with the crown. The Restoration theatre’s position as both public forum and courtly bastion offers an avenue of investigation into the ways in which royalist plays of this time reflected royalist political discourse in refusing to let the contemporary Whig opposition distance themselves from the previous generation of antimonarchical rebels by reenacting again and again extreme images of revolt, repression , and regicide. Of particular concern to playwrights and other theatre professionals was the precipitous drop in theatre attendance exacerbated by an increase in play censorship and fears of possible Puritan attempts to place further restrictions on the theatre. These worries encouraged some playwrights to revisit bitter memories of the Puritans’ attempts to stamp out the theatre during the interregnum. In particular, the royalist-aligned playwright John Crowne broke from the tacit moratorium on representing the vicissitudes of civil war. Crowne’s plays from this period not only sent a cautionary message to potential rebels or sympathizers but also reflected the anxieties of the Duke’s and King’s Companies as they saw their audiences diminish due to fears of violence (particularly the king and his courtiers’ fear of assassination) during the civil unrest of the Popish Plot and the rise in the number of plays banned during the political polarization and increased sensitivities of the subsequent Exclusion Crisis. It was in this context that Crowne elected to write two plays based on the second and third plays in Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy—the earlier one performed by the Duke’s Company at their theatre in Dorset Garden in late 1679 or early 1680 near the end of the public frenzy over of the Popish Plot and the latter performed in the same venue in early 1681 as the Exclusion Crisis had become the dominant political concern—reflecting shifts in...