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'Hay for the Daughters!': Gender and Patriarchy in
The Miseries of Civil War andHenry VI - Comparative Drama
- Western Michigan University
- Volume 24, Number 3, Fall 1990
- pp. 193-216
- 10.1353/cdr.1990.0038
- Article
- Additional Information
1 COMPAEATIVE i ama Volume 24Fall 1990Number 3 'Hay for the Daughters!' Gender and Patriarchy in The Miseries of Civil War and Henry VI Joyce Green MacDonald A riot broke out at the Dorset Garden Theater during the opening run of John Croune's The Miseries of Civil War in February 1679. In the words of The True News, or, Mercurius Anglicus, "some Gentlemen in their Cupps entring into the Pitt, flinging links at the Actors, and using severall reproachfull speeches against the Dutchess of P. and other Persons of Honour " caused King Charles II to close the playhouse until further notice. Referring to this or to another similar disruption of playing, the Dowager Countess of Sunderland wrote to her friend Henry Sidney that he "must needs hear of the abominable disorders amongst us, calling all the women whores and the men rogues in the playhouses—throwing candles and links— calling ... the Duke of York [a] rascal; and all ended in 'God bless his Highness the Duke of Monmouth. We will be for him against the world'."! Some identification is in order. That "Dutchess of P." whose identity the True News reporter was so reluctant to reveal was probably the Duchess of Portsmouth, the king's well-born French Catholic mistress. The Duke of JOYCE GREEN MACDONALD is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. 193 194Comparative Drama York was the king's brother, James, who had formally converted to Catholicism as early as 1672. The Duke of Monmouth was the king's eldest son, born out of wedlock to him and Lucy Walter in 1649, still unlegitimated but the Londoners' darling. At least two contexts condition our reading of these extraordinary playhouse disorders, one political and one sexual. As we shall see, the political and sexual contexts for the theater riot lend each other substance. The immediate topical occasion for The Miseries of Civil War was the Exclusion Crisis, which ultra-royalists like Croune interpreted as their generation's opportunity to shape a conservative response to questions about the nature and extent of royal authority. At issue was King Charles IFs right to name whomever he chose—even his defiantly Catholic brother, James—as his successor. Charles acknowledged Protestant grounds for fear of James' accession, yet he resented being effectively forced to transcend normal rules of primogenitural order in his search for an heir and saw Parliamentary pressure for a voice in his decision as a threat to his hard-won sovereignty. The sexual context involved the marital and extramarital arrangements of the royal brothers. After nearly twenty years of marriage, Charles and his queen, Catharine of Braganza, remained childless, although he had fathered at least a dozen illegitimate children by various mistresses. His bastards, despite the Stuart blood flowing in their veins, were all barred from the succession, and the king was resisting pressure to set Catharine aside and marry some fertile Protestant princess in her place. James, in contrast, was already the father of two legitimate daughters and had just taken as his second wife a fifteen-yearold Italian princess^.by whom he hoped to father healthy sons. Officially recognizing the place James already held in the succession as the king's only living sibling opened a clear path to the restoration of Catholicism, at least in the minds of the most stringently Protestant observers and of James himself. To forestall this dread event, some Londoners were beginning to raise the possibility of the king's legitimating the Duke of Monmouth and naming him his heir.2 This implication of royal sexuality in royal prerogative demonstrates the deep and continuing presence of patriarchal models for sovereign power, even in the years after the English civil war. Croune clearly draws on absolutist theory in presenting his image of an earlier civil struggle, the Wars of the Joyce Green MacDonald195 Roses—a conflict which, to his mind, displays the unalterable evil of rebellion against the crown. Yet he is far firmer in his belief in the sanctity of sovereign power than those drunken playhouse gentlemen, whose demonstration suggests that they were willing to see a bastard displace a legitimate heir to the throne as long as...