Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832 by Daniel Gustafson (review)

Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832 is a timely book. This project follows the many and varied afterlives of the Restoration stage rake, and more specifically, the “persistent fantasy of and fascination with the autonomy of sovereign rule embedded within a discourse of personal liberty and political rights” (5). As such, it represents a compelling contribution to ongoing discussions about sovereignty, power, and the modern liberal subject that we encounter in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Steven Pincus, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. Daniel Gustafson approaches this topic with an attentive and informed eye to performance theory and, particularly, to Rebecca Schneider’s Performing Remains (2011) and Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (2003). As “an embodied praxis and episteme” (Taylor 17), performance is a medium through which specific figures, scenarios, and poses reappear. It offers a means of rethinking historical narratives and their attendant literary canon(s), which have long cordoned off history into discrete blocks like the Restoration and the Romantic periods. Moving chronologically, Gustafson traces the persistent reemergence of the rake figure and the associated scenarios that structured Restoration drama and evolving ideas of personal liberty into the early nineteenth century. Generally, his literary history is not focused on the sporadic revivals of Restoration dramas, but rather, he sifts through the archives, discovering the “residual force” (Raymond Williams) of the libertine figure, which has, he argues, informed the evolving and intertwined genealogies of absolute power and liberal conceptions of governance (Williams, cited on 10).

In the book’s first chapters, Gustafson traces how eighteenth-century scholars have reified a book-end model of the Restoration period and theater history by adhering to the idea that the libertine was banished from the history, the repertoire, and the stage in the cultural and political backlash against Stuart license during the Williamite era. The opening anecdote provides readers with an explanation of the book’s title and represents the hinge upon which the Lothario’s Corpse turns. Citing an 1827 column in The New Monthly Magazine, which looks back to the performances of the amateur actor, Robert Coates, at London’s Haymarket Theatre (1811–1814) as Nicholas Rowe’s Lothario in The Fair Penitent (1703), Gustafson introduces readers to the theatrical practice of corpsing. As he explains later in more detail, corpsing refers to “onstage bloopers that inadvertently turn tragedy into farce” (53). The actor accidently breaks the fourth wall and creates an unscripted “event” that elicits the audience’s laughter at the most somber moment in the play, a character’s death. The popularity of Coates’s bumbling performances and the multiple requests for Coates to reanimate Lothario and replay his death during any given performance at the Haymarket signal one of the many encores in the post–1688 era when the figure of libertine rake was brought back to life.

Drawing on Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s formulations of the ontic and the mimetic in New World Drama (2014), where she “contends that ‘the signifying economy of the theatre operates in two registers: one that is ontic (thingy, material, resolutely present) and one that is mimetic (referential, immaterial, gesturing toward a scene located elsewhere’” (51), Gustafson notes that the “effect and affect of Lothario’s body onstage, confound the hegemonic drive of Rowe’s script, collapsing the linear distance between the Stuart past and post-revolutionary present and evoking the long-running Restoration” (52). The repeated performances of Lothario’s corpsing at the Haymarket and the memory of Coates’s performances in the pages of The New Monthly Magazine attests to the open-endedness and the persistent multivocality of the Restoration libertine and Restoration drama in subsequent historical periods. This “ontic failure,” as Gustafson writes, “to finalize the rake’s demise lays bare the post-revolutionary Whiggish declaration of the eclipse of Stuart culture as ideological, not factual, and...