Ravishment of Reason: Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 1660–1690 by Brandon Chua (review)

Mr. Chua argues that the Restoration heroic play, which served as the "primary dramatic vehicle for the depiction of autonomous and heroic service to the state," provided "a unique medium for Restoration writers to interrogate notions of authority, obligation, and agency, as late seventeenth-century political thought continued to redefine the relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm, the constitution of the state and the proper regulation of the body." In contrast to previous studies, Mr. Chua maintains that Restoration heroic plays are neither ideologically reactionary nor "politically interesting only to the limited extent that they provide a war-weary audience with much needed reassurance and comfort by reasserting and confirming the currency of late-Stuart values." Rather, Mr. Chua insists that heroic drama depicts "multivalent negotiations of ideal forms of civic virtue and service" and actively engages "with the complex public debate over the place of affections in a new political order whose terms and repercussions for civic purpose remained uncertain and contested." He succeeds in adding significantly to our understanding of the ways in which heroic drama, broadly defined, participated in the Restoration settlement, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

Early chapters focus primarily on writers and plays that are most traditionally associated with the genre. Chapter 1 examines the ways in which the heroic play's use of emotional appeals problematized the "issue of distinguishing an autonomous and virtuous citizenry under a legitimate government from a slavish and corrupt one bound to a tyrant." Drawing on William Davenant's 1653 A Proposition for Advancement of Morality, By a New Way of Entertainment, which argued that heroic drama performed a vital public function, since this genre "played on the affections of a populace, securing, as a result, a voluntary commitment on the part of the individuals to a state-authorized vision of civility." Chapter 2 explicates how "the humanist discourse of friendship" in Robert Boyle's Henry V (1664) "articulates a model of political obligation that would enable the Restoration government to distinguish the legitimacy of the restored Stuart monarchy from its Cromwellian predecessor." Dryden's The Conquest of Granada, Parts One and Two (1670–1672) take center stage in chapter 3, in which Mr. Chua contends that "it is not coercive force that renders [Dryden's hero Almanzor] subservient to civic authority but the countervailing passion of love." In each of these chapters, Mr. Chua convincingly contends that heroic drama's emphasis on its hero's passions engages contemporary political discourse largely focused on solidifying the restored regime's political power and stability.

Mr. Chua's argument becomes more complex when his historical survey moves to later works that draw on "heroic idioms," a phrase he largely leaves undefined, while moving away from characteristics typically associated with early Restoration heroic drama. Chapters 4 and 5 address two plays performed in 1680 at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, each an attempt "to preserve the heroic tradition established at the start of the Restoration and to renegotiate the relationship between heroic autonomy and political contingency in a public and dramatic realm increasingly hostile to conventional iterations of the political restoration plot and its idealized forms of service and public purpose." In the former, Mr. Chua reads Crowne's The Misery of Civil War, which "attempt[s] to reorient the Restoration heroic play in the form of Shakespearean history" in order to demonstrate the "importance of political obedience" and articulate "a wider concern over the uses of narrative convention for the purposes of political and moral instruction in an increasingly polemicized political sphere where commonplace lessons on virtue and vice are subjected to combative interpretation and the service of partisan interests." If Crowne seeks to "redefine the relationship between politics and pleasure, the passions and politics," Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus "harnesses contemporary anxieties over the profligate nature of the...