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  • Staging the Revolution: Drama, reinvention and history, 1642–72 by Rachel Willie
  • Brandon Chua
Willie, Rachel. Staging the Revolution: Drama, reinvention and history, 1642–72. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. xi + 242 pp.

At the midpoint of his 1650 Horatian Ode celebrating Cromwell’s heroic feats at Drogheda and Wexford, Andrew Marvell digresses into a brief but compelling account of Charles I’s theatrical exit from the new English Commonwealth. Marvell describes the regicide as a dramatic scene where the “royal actor” mounts the “tragic scaffold” to the applause of “armed bands.” The theatrical imagery is not accidental. The new political order marked by the regicide is understood in Marvell’s ode as a clash between competing understandings of theatre. Marvell’s “tragic scaffold” references the actual theatrical site of Charles’s execution, which occurred in front of the Banqueting House at Whitehall Palace where lavish court masques were staged. Marvell’s poem draws attention to the repurposing of this space, initially conceived for the performance of spectacular entertainment aimed at theatricalizing royal sovereignty. The performance space now no longer caters to the King’s enjoyment, but to a collective audience gathered to applaud his punishment. A form of dramatic entertainment designed to mystify monarchy gives place to another idealization of the theatre: a space where a public authorizes staged spectacles not for the king’s pleasure, but for the common good. The theatrical digression in Marvell’s ode suggests the significance of the dramatic stage to the political crises of the mid-seventeenth century, a significance not muted, but likely intensified by the closure of commercial theatres at the outbreak of the first civil war in 1642.

The various ways in which the theatre functioned as a site for negotiating the new modes of civic consciousness emerging in the battles over political legitimacy in the 1640s are the subject of Rachel Willie’s book, Staging the Revolution: Drama, reinvention and history, 1647–72. For Willie, “drama is used both to create enduring constructions of kingship and to question what kingship means when established forms of government break down” (4). Willie begins her study in 1647, the same year in which Parliament passed an ordinance to continue the 1642 ban on public theatres. For Willie, this 1647 continuation of the earlier ban suggests the degree to which drama had been politicized [End Page 101] by the late 1640s. The decision to continue supressing the public playhouses reflects an awareness of the extent to which stagecraft could intervene in public debates over state-craft, as Marvell’s deft framing of the regicide as a well-acted and greatly applauded scene demonstrates. Following recent revisionist scholarship on the dramatic culture from the Commonwealth and Protectorate periods, Willie ventures beyond the material spaces of the public playhouses. Deploying a more expansive definition of theatre, Willie recovers, in her analysis, the ephemeral body of pamphlet dramas that appeared pointedly after the 1642 ban on stage plays was continued in the parliamentary ordinance of 1647. Beginning her study with two chapters on pamphlet drama, Willie embeds her conceptual understanding of theatre within the new discursive opportunities occasioned by a new media landscape, where proliferating newsbooks, pamphlets, and libels opened up the basis of political legitimacy to multiple interpretations. Subsequent chapters in this chronologically arranged study move to physical performances spaces. The book’s opening section on pamphlet drama is followed by a chapter examining the Protectorate regime’s attempts to renovate the court masque to cater to a new, potentially restive public no longer united under a single monarch. The latter half of the book is devoted to two chapters on the reopened Restoration playhouses. Surveying the popular genres of the Heroic Play and Rump Comedy, Willie explores how the new repertoire of the restored playhouses articulates the public stage’s divided allegiances to both the returning court, and a new collective audience formed under this period of unprecedented political experiment. A brief epilogue discusses how a new theatrical generation in the 1700s understood the dramatic and political revolutions of the past century.

Willie’s limited timeline, taking in less than thirty years of dramatic history, allows her to present a focused account...

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