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  • The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and The Restoration Stage by Jennifer L. Airey
  • Kristina Straub
The Politics of Rape: Sexual Atrocity, Propaganda Wars, and The Restoration Stage. By Jennifer L. Airey. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012; pp. 260.

Jennifer Airey’s detailed, carefully researched study of the uses of rape imagery in the second half of the seventeenth century will be of interest and use for both feminist studies and theatre history. Airey enriches the latter with a wealth of detail about many understudied and lesser-known plays of Restoration theatre, and the political and cultural contexts that inform them. She also attends to feminists who wish to learn more about the pervasiveness and power of rape imagery in the political rhetoric of the long eighteenth century. The wealth of evidence that Airey presents makes it clear that the trope of female victimization underwrites a wide array of cultural, religious, and political struggles, from the Restoration of Charles II onward.

The book’s Introduction multiplies examples of sexually violent imagery in the political literature of the seventeenth century, much of it vehemently anti-Catholic, such as a bizarre 1607 tract that narrates the rape, impregnation, and murder of “sixteen innocent [End Page 308] young women” by Jesuit priests. Airey makes a case for the continuity of this imagery across print propaganda and theatrical representation, part of a pervasive pattern of rape imagery in the political literature, particularly of the late seventeenth century. In fact, she refutes previous scholarship linking the prevalence of dramatic rape scenes to the advent of actresses on the stage, noting that this imagery actually does not become ubiquitous until after 1670, ten years after women began acting on the British stage.

The development of violent imagery linking together rape, vampirism, and cannibalism to express the atrocities of religious and social conflicts grows, Airey explains in her first chapter, from the political rhetoric of the 1640s. She moves from English Protestant reactions against the “martyrdom” of Irish Protestants at the hands of “demonic” Catholic Irishmen to anti-royalist, parliamentarian propaganda casting “the debauched Cavalier” in the role of rapist. With the Restoration, these tropes were reversed, and between 1660 and 1665 we see the beginning of staged sexual violence in the theatre that takes up the royalist cause. Airey offers extended readings of The Generall by Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, along with Thomas Porter’s The Villain and Edward Howard’s The Usurper (the first of two rewritings of Titus Andronicus that she engages) that reveal the early royalist roots of sexualized theatrical violence. Airey is not breaking new ground in linking stage violence to political agendas, but her close reading of plays provides a compelling specificity. The changes played by Howard on Titus, for example, show how early Restoration theatre used stage violence to establish monarchy and project onto “Roundheads” the evils that infect the state and effect such violence.

Airey moves her analysis ten years further into Charles’s reign, when the first flush of royalist optimism was beginning to fade. During this period, the stage treatment of rape reflects a more complicated, sometimes contradictory, political rhetoric. In John Dryden’s Aboyna, the demonic Irishman becomes the demonic Dutchman, while Dryden swims against the anti-Catholic, anti-Spanish current to give us a likeable Catholic Spaniard who is a reflection of his (Dryden’s) complex religious politics. It is important to note that Airey is doing more than delivering close readings of plays, although she certainly does that; she includes an interesting excursion into bad Catholic mistresses who held the English imagination during the last half of the seventeenth century, and goes on to examine Elkanah Settle’s Love and Revenge and Thomas Shadwell’s The Libertine as expressions of anxiety over an overweening female influence on irresponsible male authority in the context of Charles’s libertine court. Finally, Airey offers a fresh reading of Aphra Behn’s much-read The Rover, Part I as simultaneously lionizing and demonizing the figure of the Cavalier.

In her third chapter, Airey takes up the source narrative of Lucrèce as it is rewritten in two contrasting plays, the Earl of...

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