The Heroic Drama's Legend of Good Women

Charles II's return to England in 1660 breathed new life into the traditional monarchical notions of the body politic and the king's two bodies.¹ In the first few years of the Restoration, Charles advertised his own vigorously overflowing, bastard-producing sexuality as a sign of England's reviving commercial, political, and social health—of the body politic's post-Cromwellian vigor and fruitfulness.² But such a stance invited close scrutiny of his body natural and left Charles wide open to criticism for adulteries that continued long after he married in 1662.³ A series of natural and military disasters at mid-decade—plague, fire, and war—were seen by many as divine punishment for the King's and the Court's luxury and debauchery.⁴ Some, like Marvell in Last Instructions to a Painter, charged that the King's mistresses had unmanned him by exercising influence in important policy decisions. These "masculine wives transgressing Nature's law" seemingly threatened both the King and the English body politic.⁵ This essay reads an exotic but popular genre as a creative response to the body politic in crisis, to the body politic reduced to little more than the body natural. In a series of so-called heroic dramas culminating in Tyrannick Love (1669) and The Conquest of Granada (1670-71), Dryden articulated and managed these anxieties over women's influence by downplaying women's threat to the (male) body politic. Rather than emasculating their blustering, overblown heroes, Dryden's heroines tame their passions and thus help to heal divisions within and between states. The heroic drama thereby attempts to defuse and dispel anxieties over the sexual threat posed by both women and the King.

1. Charles II, Women, and the Body Politic

The Restoration of monarchy and theater in 1660 also ushered women onto the English stage for the first time. Women, of course, had become newly important in English culture more generally. The Civil Wars had overturned or unsettled many of the traditional hierarchies, including that of gender.⁶ In addition to writing,⁷ women had been emboldened to preach during the 1640s and '50s, and continued to do so after the Restoration, if we are to judge by the Quaker Margaret Fell's Womens Speaking Justified (1666).⁸ But as the figure of Marvell's outspoken "bloody Thestylis" had showed in Upon Appleton House (1651),⁹ women's new roles provoked considerable anxiety, and a large body of misogynist and anti-misogynist literature recapitulated and extended debates from earlier reigns.¹⁰ Next to Fell's pamphlet should be set a misogynistic diatribe like A Discourse of Women (1662), which lists women's faults alphabetically, among them "Concupiscence," "Pleasant Contagion," "Ruine of Realms," "Terrible Tyranny," and "Xerxes's Ambition."¹¹

At the same time that women began acting the parts of gay but forceful comic heroines, demanding (and getting) various freedoms from their lovers in proviso scenes, women became lightning rods for criticism of the King. Critics began to attack the Court for allowing its women—often the mistresses of the King and the Duke of York—to become overly assertive in state affairs. Especially after mid-decade, detractors blamed everything from fire, plague, and war defeat on the Court's debauchery and laxity, representing the Court's men as emasculated by the decidedly unheroic sports of adulterous love, and therefore as utterly negligent and incompetent in affairs of state.

The advice-to-a-painter satires of 1667 are only the best known in a vast array of attacks on the Court of Parliament, sermons, and broadsides, but they reveal a main strand of the opposition's concern with the Court's management of state affairs: misogyny.¹² "Women," declares the anonymous Fifth Advice to a Painter, "have grossly snar'd the wisest prince / That ever was before, or hath been since."¹³ Marvell attacks the concupiscence of the King's mistress, Lady Castlemaine, twice in Last Instructions to...