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"Power like new Wine": the Appetites of Leviathan and Durfey's Massaniello CHRISTOPHER WHEATLEY 1 raditional descriptions of Restoration political drama as "Whig" or "Tory" are sometimes irrelevant to plays that lack an immediate topical application to English political events: Thomas Durfey's two part The Famous History of the Rise and Fall of Massaniello is an example of a play that defies such classification. Although unsuccessful when it premiered in 1700 at Drury Lane,1 the play is of interest dramatically for its deft juxtaposition of the comic and serious, and for its subject: the 1647 peasant rebellion in Naples led by the fisherman Thomas Aiello.2 A playwright identified only by the initials T. B. made the rebellion the subject of a tragedy in 1649, and Giraffi's history of the rebellion was translated into English by James Howell in 1650, with a second edition appearing in 1664. The insurrection attracted wide-spread European interest also; Croce claims that medals were struck in Europe with a likeness of Massaniello on one side and Cromwell on the other, and that Spinoza had a portrait of Massaniello in his bedroom.3 The play's "mixed" genre and complex depiction of an unsuccessful rebellion recall Venice Preserved, and Eric Rothstein and Robert Hume have praised the peculiar power of Durfey's play while arguing that it is a "Tory" play designed to show the dangers of mob rule.4 While Durfey's play does show the dangers of mob rule, it is not a Tory play, at least as the term would typically be used in reference to partisan politics in 1700. However 231 232 / WHEATLEY devout Durfey's Toryism during the early 1680s, after 1688 he discovered he really had nothing against Whigs at all. Durfey's patrons in the 1690s were Whigs: Charles Montague (also a patron of Addison) and Philip Sidney, third earl of Leicester.5 The political content of plays like Love for Money (1690) and The Campaigners (1698) is limited to antiJacobitism . How far Durfey moved politically is indicated by the fact that his most virulent play of the exclusion crisis was Sir Barnaby Whig (1681), an attack on Shadwell through the title character, yet in 1692 Durfey wrote the prologue for Shadwell's posthumous The Volunteers. If anything, Durfey's political commitment in the 1690s could be described as "Williamite." William had Durfey in to sing for him on occasion and rewarded him for his singing (Day, 15). The only explicit comment on the English political situation in Massaniello is on William's political problems and occurs in a conversation between Massaniello's wife, Blowzabella, and an English servant named Pimpwell who is trying to make his fortune through playing on her attraction to him: Blowzabella Ha, ha, ha, ye Rascal, well, and as to your State-affairs, we hear there are great feuds amongst ye as well as here; tho' the King has done great things for 'em, and they say —is a very brave Man. Pimpwell Ay, he is so Madam, —but you must know that we English have some Affinity with the nature of some Dogs we have there, We never receive a good Bone but we snap at our Benefactor's fingers.6 Christopher Hill suggests that while William may have had a personal predilection for the Tories, he had to rely on the Whigs since they supported his foreign policy, and Hill quotes Sunderland as summing up William's problem: "it was true that the Tories were better friends to monarchy than the Whigs were, but then His Majesty was to consider that he was not their monarch."7 William described himself to Halifax as a "trimmer."8 William's problem in 1700 was that the "Country" parliament , largely Tory in makeup, was isolationist in its outlook and opposed to the standing army that William regarded as essential to English security. Thus, Durfey's remark on ingratitude is more likely to refer to ungrateful Tories than to Whigs in the immediate political context of the play. If Massaniello is a "Tory" play, then, it is so only in the larger context of its subversion of the emergent political concept of...

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