The Horror Plays of the English Restoration by Anne Hermanson (review)

Between the 1670s and 1680s, English playwrights composed a series of exceptionally violent plays. Before then, an English tragedy might have included rape or murder as a plot twist, but a decade after the Restoration, Ms. Hermanson claims, such shocking scenes begin to be performed and lingered over for their own sake.

Ms. Hermanson sets plays by Behn, Settle, Lee, Dryden, Otway, Shadwell, and Rochester apart from the cultural products of the preceding and succeeding decades: from the "heroic" plays of the 1660s and the "serious" plays of the 1680s. The plays she examines "are characterized by a cynical and unrelenting depiction of evil, violence, an insatiable human drive for power, and an explicit absence of providential justice or moral absolutes." These dramas, according to Ms. Hermanson, convey an intense disenchantment with the ruling classes and the social order they bring into being. Their unrelenting violence reveals what their authors perceive as a truth about how callous and godless the world generally is.

Ms. Hermanson marshals many examples of this relentless violence which make these plays unquestionably horrific. Behn's demonic mothers, Lee's egotistical kings, Lee and Dryden's lustful Oedipus—as the list goes on, these plays' fascination with depravity becomes increasingly difficult to contest. They merit being seen not merely as forms of sensationalism, but as wild speculations about alternative, nonreligious political and social worldviews.

But her study does not quite succeed in its attempts at weaving a larger historical and theoretical narrative out of its observations. First, this book does not do much to connect its chosen plays back to a longer history of English literature's obsession with violence before and after the 1670s. Versions of the argument Ms. Hermanson makes about these horror plays—that they record and sublimate experiences of social unrest and violence—have been made about vast swathes of British writing from Beowulf to Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Within this broader context, the typologies and explanations that Ms. Hermanson offers frequently seem too generic: "the monstrous woman is a disruption of the natural order of things"; "The English people were caught up in recurrent patterns over which they had no control." Where do the particular style and focus of these plays' preoccupation with violence come from? How do these plays borrow from their predecessors? These questions are all the more pressing since Ms. Hermanson's case for these plays' qualitative difference from those of the 1680s is not fully convincing. Her two introductory chapters: "Horror and Spectacle" and "Memory, Re-enactment, and Trauma" also disappoint: the robust theoretical framing they promise turns out to be extremely thin. In the first chapter, Ms. Hermanson does not cover even the basic theoretical literature about horror, understood either as a feeling or as a trans-historical genre. The latter is especially surprising since Ms. Hermanson herself mentions horror films as other critics' point of comparison for the plays she examines.

The theoretical framework this monograph does establish leans on a mixture of historicism and psychoanalysis. Ms. Hermanson claims that these plays are a "traumatic" response to the shock of the former decade's political and social turmoil. But the trauma theory she mentions is sparse—it is buttressed by only a handful of American critics, mostly Dominick LaCapra, without much mention even of Lacan or Freud. More important, her insistence on trauma as these plays' point of origin short-circuits a variety of other, equally significant questions. For instance, Ms. Hermanson does not really talk about these plays as sources of pleasure both for their writers and, even more important, for their spectators. Her book also does little to distinguish between plays that appear genuinely troubled by the immorality they represent and ones, like Rochester's, that relish it immensely.

As a result of both its shortcuts and its overreach, this book offers less than it promises. While useful, Ms. Hermanson's monograph is not fully satisfying.