Project MUSE®: Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700 - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 32 (2008) through current issue Latest Articles: Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700TWOProject MUSE®Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-17001941-952X0162-9905Latest articles in Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Character and Caricature, 1660–1820 ed. by Jennifer Buckley and Montana Davies-Shuck (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965745
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This edited collection examines a wide time span that extends well beyond the Restoration. As the editors note, however, the evolution of character is not only chronological but also thematic, and across the chapters “thematic strands emerge relating to gender, print culture, theatrical performance, and the curation of identity” (3). The volume as a whole, not just the chapters on Restoration texts and culture, thus offers much to scholars of the Restoration. Indeed, the collection merits particular praise for how well it manages to make the various sub-fields that it covers (Restoration, eighteenth century, Romantic) mutually intelligible across the diverse essays, which all provide clear explanations of their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallCharacter and Caricature, 1660–1820 ed. by Jennifer Buckley and Montana Davies-Shuck (review)2025-07-17text/htmlen-USCharacter and Caricature, 1660–1820 ed. by Jennifer Buckley and Montana Davies-Shuck (review)2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®87792026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17On Not Overlooking Ogilby’s Homer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965746
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I think myself fully justified in distinguishing Ogilby by the title of Pope’s Old Friend; for Pope has most assuredly many and great obligations to him; more, indeed, than he seems willing to acknowledge.Ogilby, who is by no means worthy of the contempt, in which he is generally holden.In the preface to his Iliad, Alexander Pope makes the translator’s familiar pious gesture, confessing himself “utterly incapable of doing justice” to his source. “I attempt [Homer] in no other hope,” he writes, “but that … of giving a more tolerable copy of him than any entire translation in verse has yet done.”1 He had three predecessors in this regard: George Chapman (1611), John Ogilby (1660), and Thomas Hobbes (1676). On their
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallOn Not Overlooking Ogilby’s Homer2025-07-17text/htmlen-USOn Not Overlooking Ogilby’s Homer2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®808892026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian: An Annotated Edition, including Betterton’s The Amorous Widow by Charles Gildon (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965747
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David Roberts presents The Life of Mr Thomas Betterton (1710) as a landmark text: the “first full-scale theatrical biography in English to focus on the art rather than the mis-deeds of its subject” (1). It is also, however, one that presents many challenges to modern readers. Charles Gildon took around a quarter of the text from an English translation of Michel Le Faucheur’s Traité de l’action de l’orateur (1657; tr. 1700?), raising the issue of plagiarism. Beyond this, a sloppy original printing, numerous allusions to classical and contemporary culture, and a heteroclite range of material all pose difficulties. Roberts’s new edition does an excellent job of tackling all these things and should be the first port of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallThe Life of Mr Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian: An Annotated Edition, including Betterton’s The Amorous Widow by Charles Gildon (review)2025-07-17text/htmlen-USThe Life of Mr Thomas Betterton, the Late Eminent Tragedian: An Annotated Edition, including Betterton’s The Amorous Widow by Charles Gildon (review)2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®93972026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17“Lucretius Whole”: Waller’s “Unlimited Praise for the Philosophy of Epicurus”
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965748
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Waller’s “To His Worthy Friend, Master Evelyn, upon His Translation of Lucretius” (1656), a witty encomium of much interest, has excited virtually no comment. In his nineteenth-century edition of Waller, still the sole authoritative one, G. Thorn Drury prints the poem as republished in 1664, annotates textual variants, and implicitly justifies its neglect, on these grounds: “Little attention need be paid to the commendatory verses which good-nature prompted him to address to such of his friends as were authors.”1 A recent book of essays on Waller finds no place for the encomium.2 Of the monographs about Waller by Alexander Ward Allison, Warren L. Chernaik, and Jack G. Gilbert, only the first and third even mention
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmall“Lucretius Whole”: Waller’s “Unlimited Praise for the Philosophy of Epicurus”2025-07-17text/htmlen-US“Lucretius Whole”: Waller’s “Unlimited Praise for the Philosophy of Epicurus”2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®690382026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1741 by Melissa Mowry (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965749
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Melissa Mowry’s Collective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1741 is an ambitious, innovative, and provocative book; some parts I found fascinating, others I disagreed with vehemently. It sets out nothing less than “an alternate genealogy” of English Literature through the period of the Civil Wars, Restoration, and early eighteenth century. Mowry takes aim at the received narrative that frames the period as one in which absolutist sovereignty was triumphantly dethroned by “the rise of individualism,” enshrined by Whiggish historians like Jonathan Israel, and “rise of the novel” literary histories derived from Ian Watt. Instead, Mowry reads the period as one of frantic establishment reaction
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallCollective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1741 by Melissa Mowry (review)2025-07-17text/htmlen-USCollective Understanding, Radicalism, and Literary History, 1645–1741 by Melissa Mowry (review)2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®107952026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17Consuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660–1751 by Dayne C. Riley (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965750
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In this ambitious and wide-ranging study, Dayne Riley sheds fresh light on the growth of consumer culture in Britain by examining how a range of addictive substances are depicted in the literature of the time. He brings together literature, history and economics and examines how satirical literature represents ways in which wine, beer, pipe tobacco, snuff and gin are involved with ideas of class, gender and nationhood and how all these are connected with trade. Though expansive, this study is carefully structured. The book is divided into five chapters, “each of which is organized around an alcoholic beverage or a tobacco product” (9). Most of the chapters begin with a summary of the historical context and then
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallConsuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660–1751 by Dayne C. Riley (review)2025-07-17text/htmlen-USConsuming Anxieties: Alcohol, Tobacco, and Trade in British Satire, 1660–1751 by Dayne C. Riley (review)2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®81262026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17Staging Restoration Comedy: the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1967–2019 by David Roberts (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965751
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The introductory chapter of David Roberts’s Staging Restoration Comedy accurately indicates the plays’ problems for the contemporary theatre: their male-centred world-view, the difficulty of finding the right tone and setting, the alienating effect of a highly verbal drama, the still more alienating effect of its ideology. Restoration revivals outside the Royal Shakespeare Company represent a range of approaches to “Restoration style,” which most directors seem to have associated with artificiality and “camp.” (Venice Preserved is the only tragedy mentioned here. It is hardly surprising that, apart from All for Love, the serious drama rarely gets revived.) In subsequent chapters, Roberts focuses on the RSC, which
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallStaging Restoration Comedy: the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1967–2019 by David Roberts (review)2025-07-17text/htmlen-USStaging Restoration Comedy: the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1967–2019 by David Roberts (review)2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®81152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17Staging the London Charter Crisis and Policing Political Participation in John Crowne’s City Politiques
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965752
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John Crowne’s 1682 play City Politiques is arguably the most specific and topical political play staged during the Exclusion Crisis. From even before it was performed publicly—as it was licensed for performance, suppressed, and relicensed—it drew attention for its representation of real political actors of the era, most notably Titus Oates and Stephen College.1 When it was finally performed in January of 1683, half a year after it was originally granted a license, reactions focused largely on the play’s personal satire. A report in the Newdigate Newsletters the following day described the satire, specifically naming Oates: “Dr Oates pfectly represented berogued & beslaved.”2 Crowne himself directed attention this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallStaging the London Charter Crisis and Policing Political Participation in John Crowne’s City Politiques2025-07-17text/htmlen-USStaging the London Charter Crisis and Policing Political Participation in John Crowne’s City Politiques2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®980472026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17Country Wife Problems: How to Stage Wycherley’s Classic Play in the Twenty-First Century
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/965753
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Scholars and artists have long debated the benefits and drawbacks of staging plays that contemporary audiences may find racist or misogynist by current standards. Can a play from three hundred to four hundred years ago still be relevant? Should we try to draw connections between Elizabethan and Restoration England and contemporary times? Or should we invite people to enjoy work from this time for what it is? The debate is particularly acute when considering college students and how to help them process their reactions to situations well outside their frame of reference, or more importantly, situations that are familiar, but potentially triggering.Many theater artists engage with early modern texts because of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/415/image/coversmallCountry Wife Problems: How to Stage Wycherley’s Classic Play in the Twenty-First Century2025-07-17text/htmlen-USCountry Wife Problems: How to Stage Wycherley’s Classic Play in the Twenty-First Century2025-07-172025TWOProject MUSE®546062026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002025-07-17