shakespeare in the restoration

Shakespeare in the Restoration

Sandra ClarkBirkbeck, University of London

Abstract

This article considers the role and status of Shakespeare in the period from 1660 to1700, a liminal period when the adaptations of his plays had many cultural functionsto perform, not only in providing a ready-made repertoire when the theatresre-opened, but also, in their adapted forms, articulating the political concerns ofthese troubled years. Because Shakespeare, though increasingly venerated by critics,was not regarded as sacrosanct as he was to become from the mid-eighteenth century,it was possible to rewrite his plays in radical ways that responded to the new moodof the times as well as to new aesthetic standards. Some of the plays of the Beaumontand Fletcher canon, more popular than Shakespeare’s for much of the period, werealso adapted, but to a lesser extent, and in much less radical ways, suggesting thatthe extraordinary cultural flexibility of Shakespeare’s plays had already beenperceived.Towards the end of the century the concern to distinguish his own textfrom that of adapters began to appear, leading to the production of many editionsof his complete works in the eighteenth century.This marks another stage in theconstruction of Shakespeare’s identity as author and national icon.

In September 1642 the London theatres were closed and all theatricalproductions banned by order of parliament, a state of affairs which continuedfor 12 years throughout the Interregnum and Commonwealth times.Surreptitious performances did, however, take place, and even somequasi-official ones directed by William Davenant in the closing years of theCommonwealth.1 Pre-restoration theatrical traditions were by no meanslost.When the London theatres reopened in 1660 after the restoration ofthe monarchy, new companies were rapidly established. In August patentshad been issued to Thomas Killigrew and Davenant, loyal cavaliers who hadboth been active as playwrights in the reign of Charles I, each to ‘purchasebuilde and Erect, or hire at theire Charge’ a playhouse and organize a troupeof actors.2 In the absence of a current repertoire both were initially obligedto draw on pre-restoration plays to present to an eager public. Killigrew’scompany, the King’s Men, the one more favoured by Charles II, tried toclaim all the existing repertory of pre-war plays, but was given rights tothose of the former King’s Men, which included more than half ofShakespeare’s and most of those of Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher.Davenant and his troupe, the Duke’s Men, comprising actors of lesserexperience, compensated by presenting the Lord Chamberlain with a© Blackwell Publishing 2005

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‘proposition of reformeing some of the most ancient Playes that were playedat the Blackfriers and makeinge them, fitt, for the Company of Actors’.3

Although Davenant was obliged by the terms of his patent to adapt theBlackfriars plays rather than presenting them in their original form, thisturned out to be no setback in the new theatrical climate; for, unlike thework of Beaumont and Fletcher, it soon transpired that Shakespeare’s playswere much preferred in adapted form, and only a few, notably Julius Caesar,Hamlet, Henry IV, part 1, and especially Othello, had much success withoutconsiderable modification. But in the early years of the new regimeShakespeare’s works constituted an important resource for both companies,and between 1660 and 1667 sixteen of the thirty-seven were revived insome form.Othello was performed in 1660, with the first recorded appearanceof an actress on the public stage in London, and along with Henry IV, part1 and The Merry Wives of Windsor, it came a staple of the King’s Men;Hamlet,which had been allotted to Davenant, was performed by the Duke’s Menin 1661, and regularly thereafter, and even though John Evelyn was tocomment critically on it after one performance that ‘the old playe began todisgust this refined age; since his Majestie being so long abroad’,4 it wasvitally important to the financial well-being of the company. Other playsstaged in the early years included Henry IV part 1, Henry VIII, Pericles, Romeoand Juliet, Richard III, King Lear, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream andTwelfth Night. Davenant was not slow to bring out his adapted versions.Thefirst was perhaps the most experimental, The Law Against Lovers (1662),which conflated Measure for Measure with the Beatrice and Benedick plotfrom Much Ado About Nothing; it was followed by an operatic Macbeth (1663–64), and his greatest success, The Tempest, or The Enchanted Island (1667),co-written with the young John Dryden.5 Pepys’s Diary records twelvedifferent Shakespeare plays seen on forty-one separate occasions between1660 and 1669.

But Shakespeare was not the most popular of the pre-restoration dramatistson stage at this time.This honour goes of course to Beaumont and Fletcher,and Dryden commented in the Essay of Dramatic Poetry (1668) that theirplays were twice as often seen those of either Shakespeare or Ben Jonson,the third member of the ‘triumvirate of wit’ as they were commonly knownin the period. Dryden ascribed this to the fact that ‘there is a certain gaietyin their comedies, and pathos in their more serious plays, that suits generallywith all men’s humours’,6 but undoubtedly the publication of the Beaumontand Fletcher first folio in 1647, put out by the royalist publisher HumphreyMoseley and surrounded by a strong royalist aura, had something to do withit. These plays were at their most popular in the early years. It has beencalculated that between 1660 and 1671 plays from the Beaumont and Fletchercanon constituted twenty-eight of the 105 revivals of older plays.7 Pepys,who attended something like 350 theatrical performances between 1660and 1669, went on 72 occasions to performances of 28 different Beaumontand Fletcher plays, as against 42 visits to 12 Shakespeare plays, and 18 to

2 . Shakespeare in the Restoration

© Blackwell Publishing 2005 Literature Compass 2 (2005) SH 154, 1–13

five of Ben Jonson’s.8 The meaning of Beaumont and Fletcher’s popularityat this time needs to be considered in the light of pre-war conditions; of the114 plays performed at court between 1615 and 1642, 46 were theirs, ascompared with 16 by Shakespeare.9 The qualities for which the plays werevalued in the restoration suggest some continuity of elitist appeal. Forinstance, their wit and verbal refinement were much praised, and linkedwith their ability to reproduce what Dryden called ‘the conversation ofgentlemen’.10 Flecknoe’s claim that ‘Beaumont and Fletcher first writ in theHeroick way’ points to another aspect of their attraction, especially theirhandling of the themes of honour, nobility, self-sacrifice and the competingclaims of love and friendship. Their styles of plotting (‘more regular thanShakespeare’s’ as Dryden said) were more imitated than those of Shakespeare,and their inclination towards tragicomedy has been thought to appealespecially to the earlier part of the period when every opportunity was takento celebrate providential restoration and unexpected reconciliation pluckedout of disaster. Jonson enjoyed greater critical prestige than Beaumont andFletcher or Shakespeare. Dryden admired his erudition, remarking of hisclassical borrowings that ‘he invades authors like a monarch; and what wouldbe theft in other poets, is only victory in him’. His plays were regarded as‘regular’ and ‘correct’ in their plotting, and Dryden in the Essay of DramaticPoetry takes Epicoene as ‘the pattern of a perfect play’. But of all Jonson’splays only this, Volpone (in the earlier years), and The Alchemist achievedmuch stage popularity, and his work was not absorbed into the theatricalmainstream to the extent of that of his rivals in the triumvirate. It is significantin this respect that his plays were never adapted, or, to use the contemporaryterm,‘improved’; Dryden’s view that ‘in his works you find little to retrenchor alter’ may not be the whole truth.

Although Shakespeare was venerated, and his reputation grew in the lateryears of the century, improving markedly after 1700, his works were neverregarded as faultless or as a standard to which other writers should aspire.Bardolatry (Shaw’s term) had yet to develop. In the later seventeenth centurythe language of Shakespeare’s plays was considered archaic and incorrect,their plotting and construction clumsy, and their morality defective in itslack of evident poetic justice. Although, as Flecknoe said, Shakespeare‘excelled in a natural vein’,11 and was deemed by comparison with Jonsonan untaught genius, the wit and polish of Beaumont and Fletcher wereprized more highly, especially during the reign of Charles II. Dryden paidmore than lip service to the figure of ‘the divine Shakespeare’, whom hegenuinely venerated, but he was highly critical of his predecessor when itcame to specifics. In The Grounds of Criticism in Tragedy (1679), attached tohis version of Troilus and Cressida, he said that Shakespeare’s language was‘so pestered with figurative expressions’ as to be obscure, and his play sobadly constructed that ‘the later part of the tragedy is nothing but a confusionof drums and trumpets, excursions and alarms’.12 Restoration taste was clearlydefined, and there was a complete absence of the idea that Shakespeare’s


Shakespeare in the Restoration . 3

works were sacrosanct.With the exception of The Tempest, in Dryden andDavenant’s version, and The Merry Wives of Windsor, his comedies were notpopular in the restoration, and rarely staged. Pepys’s view of A MidsummerNight’s Dream, which he saw in 1662, that it was ‘the most insipid ridiculousplay that ever I saw in my life’,13 was probably quite typical. ‘His principaltalent and chief Delight was tragedy’, as John Dennis later pronounced.14

This sense that Shakespeare’s plays could benefit from aestheticmodifications of several kinds was a strong impetus behind many of theadaptations, which were presented in the spirit of improvements, offeringa service to a long-dead writer from a more primitive past. Shakespeare’splays, judged by the standards of neo-classical regularity, which weredeveloping concurrently with the new playwriting, were rambling andpoorly constructed. Dryden’s apprehension of signs ‘of admirable genius’beneath the ‘heap of rubble’ which in his view constituted Troilus and Cressidamoved him to attempt his revision of it, albeit, as he said, ‘with no smalltrouble’.15 Nahum Tate claimed similarly for King Lear that it was like ‘aheap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht’, to which he could bring order andconnection. His dedicatory epistle draws attention to the device by whichso many of the problems created by Shakespeare were simultaneously solved:

’Twas my good fortune to light on one Expedient to rectifie what was wantingin the Regularity and Probability of the Tale, which was to run through thewhole, A Love betwixt Edgar and Cordelia, that never chang’d word with eachother in the Original.This renders Cordelia’s indifference and her Father’s passionin the first Scene probable. It likewise gives Countenance to Edgar’s Disguise,making that a generous Design that was before a poor Shift to save his Life . . .This Method necessarily threw me on making the Tale conclude in a Success tothe innocent distrest Persons; Otherwise I must have incumbred the Stage withdead Bodies,which Conduct makes many Tragedies conclude with unseasonableJests.16

This adaptation ousted Shakespeare’s play from the stage completely untilGarrick’s version in 1756, and was praised by Samuel Johnson for its greaterattention to poetic justice and the provision of a happy ending. ThomasRavenscroft called Titus Andronicus ‘the most indigested piece in all hisworks . . . rather a heap of Rubbish than a structure’, which he tooproceeded to regularise, though his creation, The Rape of Lavinia, enjoyedno great success.Although it is often stressed that far more of the Beaumontand Fletcher plays, particularly the comedies, were revived in their originalform than were Shakespeare’s, a number of them were adapted, usually inthe interests of adding music and spectacle but also of improving thestructure. In Davenant’s version of The Two Noble Kinsmen, entitled TheRivals and accepted in its own time as an original piece of work, ‘a very fineInterlude . . . of vocal and Instrumental Musick, mixt with very DivertingDances’ caught the imagination of Downes.17 The plot was also changed soas to provide a happy ending in which the Jailor’s Daughter, now promoted



to Provost’s Daughter, is enabled by her social elevation to marry one ofthe noble kinsmen.

Aesthetic considerations combined with a growing awareness of thepossibilities made available by the new theatrical conditions in shaping theadaptations of Shakespeare’s plays. Both the cultural climate of the Londonstage and the physical conditions of the performance space had changed. Itwas a narrower scene in many ways from pre-restoration times, with onlytwo companies (for a period from 1682 to 1695 only one), fewer performingspaces, and a more socially selective audience.There was more direct inputfrom royal taste and aristocratic patronage; Charles II attended the publictheatres not infrequently, and was well known to the performers, in a numberof whom he took a personal interest. He also had his own private playhousein Whitehall. Several of the playwrights themselves were members of thearistocracy, and even if it is distorting to refer to the theatre, as AllardyceNicoll did in 1923, as ‘this toy of the upper classes’,18 the presence of citizensin the audience was so unusual as to be thought worthy of note by Pepys,who much preferred to see gentlemen or courtiers.The theatres themselveswere much smaller, artificially illuminated, and the stage now took the formof the picture-frame, rather than the thrust, with corresponding emphasison visual effects.There was increasing use of spectacle, with lavish moveablescenery as introduced by Davenant at his newly equipped theatre with scenesand machines of various kinds.As early as 1664, Flecknoe commented thatplays were designed now ‘more for sight than hearing’.19 Davenant’s operaticversion of Macbeth was produced that year, ‘being drest in all it’s Finery, asnew Cloath’s, new Scenes, Machines, as flyings for the Witches, with allthe Singing and Dancing in it’, as Downes put it in Roscius Anglicanus.20 HisTempest (1667) incorporates some new songs for devils who torment thecourtiers, and was immediately popular, but only became truly operatic inthe version by Shadwell (1674), on which most eighteenth-centuryproductions of the play were based. In 1695 there was a sumptuous newproduction with music by Purcell.The set for the play became increasinglyelaborate, and the illustration for it in Rowe’s edition of 1709 suggests whatmight have been achieved from the stage directions of Shadwell’s text.Downes makes a clear link between spectacle and commercial success, inhis description of

The Tempest, or Enchanted Island, made into an Opera by Mr Shadwell, havingall New in it; as Scenes, machines; particularly one Scene painted with Myriadsof Ariel spirits; and another flying away, with a Table Furnisht out with Fruits,Sweet-meats, and all sorts of Viands; just when Duke Trinculo and his companionsgoing to dinner; all things performed in it so Admirably well, that not anysucceeding Opera got more Money.21

Between 1660 and 1700 the Dryden/Davenant version of The Tempestwas the most performed revival of any Shakespeare play and it was not untilthe middle of the eighteenth century that Shakespeare’s original began totake over. But the popularity of this adaptation was not just due to its musical© Blackwell Publishing 2005 Literature Compass 2 (2005) SH 154, 1–13


and spectacular effects. Among the many changes made by Dryden andDavenant were crucial additions to the cast, which not only provided thesatisfactions of neo-classical symmetry, for instance by giving both Calibanand Ariel counterparts of the opposite sex, but also allowed for theexploitation of that commodity newly available to the restoration stage, thesex appeal of the actress. Dryden in his Preface points out, as Tate did, thatShakespeare’s design for the plot could admit of improvement, and this camein the shape of a new character, the counterpart to Miranda, in the form ofa man who had never seen a woman.This figure, Hippolyto, was intendedas a transvestite role, and possibly played by Moll Davis, an actress famedfor her legs, who caught the king’s eye in the part and subsequently becamehis mistress.With the concomitant introduction of Dorinda as a sister forMiranda and a lover for Hippolyto, Dryden and Davenant vastly increasedthe scope of the play for an exploration of human sexuality and providedmany opportunities for the kind of innuendo and risqué dialogue muchenjoyed by restoration audiences. Elsewhere in Shakespeare adaptations,women’s roles are enlarged and new ones invented; Lady Macduff ’s part isexpanded both in order for the Macduffs to provide a fuller counterpart tothe Macbeths as a virtuous couple and to make a better part for an actress.In Tate’s King Lear, all three daughters’ roles are enhanced so as to expandon the perfunctory love-triangle sketched in by Shakespeare for Goneril,Regan and Edmund, but also, of course, to give expression to the newlyinvented relationship between Cordelia and Edmund. The fact that theDuke’s Men, for whom the play was written, had at their disposal severalwell-known actresses, including Elizabeth Barry, formerly the Earl ofRochester’s mistress, was also a factor. Similarly Dryden, in his rewriting ofAntony and Cleopatra for the King’s Men in 1677 as All for Love had to providegood women’s parts not only for Cleopatra but also for Octavia; he mayhave tailored them to suit the styles of the two chief actresses, creating asympathetic Cleopatra for the small and innocent-looking Betty Boutell,and a more imposing Octavia than Shakespeare’s to fit the tall and forcefulElizabeth Corey. For male performers too, parts in Shakespeare were createdor developed with particular individuals in mind. John Lacy, a well-lovedcomic actor especially associated with dialect roles, took this to an extreme,writing an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew which he entitled Saunythe Scot (1677), a major feature of which is the hugely enlarged role forPetruchio’s servant as the eponymous Sauny, played by Lacy himself. ColleyCibber expanded the already considerable part of Richard III by seven moresoliloquies for his version of Shakespeare’s play, but with another actor inmind; when, however, Samuel Sandford, for whom the role had beenwritten, was not available, Cibber himself took over, though to mixedsuccess. James Nokes, a comic actor, early on distinguished himself asPolonius, but later became so associated with the part of the Nurse(conceived of as a transvestite role) in Otway’s play based on Romeo andJuliet, Marius (1679) that he was commonly known as ‘Nurse Nokes’.



Shakespeare was central to the creation of Thomas Betterton’s reputationas a tragic actor, and his success as Hamlet, a part he played from 1661 until1709 to universal admiration, was key to the financial well-being of hiscompany. As Downes recorded, ‘his exact Performance of [Hamlet] gain’dhim Esteem and reputation, Superlative to all other Plays . . . No succeedingTragedy for several Years got more Reputation, or Money to the Companythan this’.22

While theatrical interests of one kind or another lay behind the adaptationand revision of many Shakespeare plays, they could also be appropriatedinto the service of agendas of another sort. With the exception of a fewBeaumont and Fletcher plays such as Rochester’s Valentinian (1685), andWaller’s The Maid’s Tragedy (published 1690 but written much earlier ‘toplease the court’),23 this was not the case with other pre-war playwrights.The Beaumont and Fletcher adaptations tend to become more royalist;Waller’s revisions endorse the view of the monarch as sacred anduntouchable, a notion problematized in the original, and Elkanah Settle’sversion of Philaster (1695) makes the hero more obviously noble than theoriginal rather ambivalent figure, and insists strongly on the impiety ofrebellion. But comparison with the Shakespeare adaptations makes it clearthat these other plays were never systematically co-opted to serve particularagendas as Shakespeare’s were.The recognition and exploration of politicalcontent both latent and explicit has become the most prominent theme ofrecent studies of the Shakespeare adaptations, in for instance, the work ofJean Marsden, Michael Dobson, Katherine Eisamen Maus, Nancy KleinMaguire and Matthew Wikander, among others.24 Even the early Davenantadaptations have been shown to reflect topical concerns. In Maguire’s view,Davenant’s The Law Against Lovers is shaped in such a way that ‘irreconcilabledilemmas . . . become an occasion to show how under the stern butbenevolent Duke (Charles II) the state could be made secure, peacefulsuccession assured, and the effects of the act of regicide mended’.25 TheDryden/Davenant Tempest has been seen to respond both to topical foreignevents as well as to issues of domestic politics. The relations in the playbetween the Dukedoms of Savoy and Milan (belonging to Alonso andProspero) and Mantua (Hippolyto’s rightful domain) may mirror thosebetween France, Spain and England at the time the play was written,reflecting the anti-French feeling that dominated the latter part of theseventeenth century,26 and its ‘restoration’ themes were of course verycurrent. The fact that parallels have been detected between Prospero andCharles II or Clarendon, and between Hippolyto and James Duke of York,or the Duke of Monmouth or even Charles I or Charles II suggests that theplay’s political stance was far from specific, although its authors clearly revisedShakespeare’s original in the light of 1660s politics.

The most obviously political adaptations of Shakespeare were writtenduring the years of the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis. Michael Dobsonhas counted nine Shakespeare adaptations in this particular wave, constituting



a marked revival of interest in his work.27 They are: Ravenscroft’s TitusAndronicus, or, The Rape of Lavinia (1679), Dryden’s Troilus and Cressida(1679), Otway’s Caius Marius (1679),The Miseries of Civil-War (1680), taken fromHenry VI, part 3, and Henry the Sixth,The First Part (1681) both by JohnCrowne,Tate’s plays The Sicilian Usurper (1680), a resetting of Richard II inItaly, The History of King Lear (1681) and The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth:or the Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus (1681) and Thomas Durfey’s The Injur’dPrincess (1682), a version of Cymbeline. Thomas Shadwell’s The History ofTimon of Athens, the Man-Hater (1678) might also be included here.Theseplays were generally royalist in their political perspective, though some, suchas Caius Marius and The Injur’d Princess, were not without criticism of themonarchy in their representation of bad father-figures. New plays were alsowritten in response to the crisis, but Shakespeare’s were clearly perceivedto fill a need. It is likely, judging from Ravenscroft’s misleadingly apoliticalprologue to Titus Andronicus, in which he claims to be safe from the ‘rage’of critics because he has taken shelter ‘under [Shakespeare’s] sacred Lawrels’,that playwrights hoped to escape the vigilant censorship operating at thetime by their recourse to the work of so old and respected a playwright.But this was not necessarily the case, and both Tate’s The Sicilian Usurperand Crowne’s Henry the Sixth fell foul of the censor, the former for its tactlesschoice of the deposition of a monarch as a dramatic subject, and the latterfor satire of Catholics and of court corruption. Not all of the plays offeredequal comfort to Charles II and the Tories. Notoriously,Tate rewrote KingLear in tragic-comic mode so as to offer the prospect of ‘the King’s blestRestauration’ by keeping Lear alive at the end, and had Edgar conclude theplay on a distinctly more positive note than his predecessor:

Our drooping Country now erects her Head,Peace spreads her balmy Wings, and Plenty Blooms.

But Shadwell’s Timon of Athens, which is unusual in taking a pro-Whig line,sympathetically depicts a justifiable and bloodless uprising by Alcibiadesagainst the corrupt Athenian senate, and includes lines which appear tocontain what has been called ‘an explicit political stance against the kingand in favour of parliament’.28 Otway’s Caius Marius is a royalist text butnonetheless reshapes Shakespeare in a way that robs the play of its originalcomforting closure. It resets the Romeo and Juliet story during the civil warbetween Caius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla in republican Rome ofthe first century BC, and, unlike Tate’s King Lear, remains firmly tragic inits conclusion. Here, Marius, having found the bodies of Lavinia ( Juliet)and his son Marius Junior (Romeo) in the tomb, speaks ominous final wordsas he is led away to political defeat:

Be warn’d by me, ye Great ones, how y’embroilYour Country’s Peace, and dip your Hands in Slaughter:Ambition is a Lust that’s never quencht,Grows more inflam’d and madder by Enjoyment.



Otway omits the reconciliation and monarchical final emphasis ofShakespeare’s play, concluding instead with an announcement of new uproarin Rome and the curses of the angry and dying Sulpitius.

Towards the end of the century Shakespeare’s reputation rose as that ofBeaumont and Fletcher began its uninterrupted decline; between 1703 and1710 about 11 percent of all plays performed in London were Shakespeare’sand the proportion increased steadily during the eighteenth century. Hewas making his ascent into the national pantheon.29 A new interest inestablishing the integrity of Shakespeare’s texts was manifesting itself,culminating in the complete editions of his works, first by Rowe (1709)and then by Pope (1723) and a troupe of eighteenth-century editors.Restoration play-texts had commonly included lines which were not actuallyspoken on the stage; for instance, the 1676 edition of Hamlet marked thecuts made by Davenant for stage performance, but printed the full text sothat ‘we may no way wrong the incomparable Author’ (sig.A2). But Cibberin the Preface for his Richard III went a step further by drawing attention tohis desire to separate his own contributions to the play from the original,using typographical conventions to do so: ‘I have caus’d those [lines] thatare intirely Shakespear’s to be Printed in this Italick Character; and those lineswith this mark (‘) before ’em, are generally his thoughts, in the best dress Icould afford ’em;What is not so mark’d, or in a different Character is intirelymy own.’30 Following suit, George Granville in The Jew of Venice (1701)marked out his own lines with inverted commas ‘that nothing may beimputed to Shakespear which may seem unworthy of him’. AlthoughGranville’s disclaimer turns out to be somewhat disingenuous on closerexamination of the text, in which lines ostensibly Shakespeare’s are oftenrewritten or redistributed to different characters, this textual self-consciousnessis significant in the history of Shakespeare’s role as an author. Both Cibberand Granville may have had in mind the charges of Langbaine and othersagainst ‘our modern Plagiaries’ who stole wholesale from others’ workwithout shame.

No one took much notice of the restoration adaptations of Shakespearebefore the early twentieth century, when accounts by Odell (1920 –21)31

and Hazelton Spencer (1927)32 became standard for many decades andenthusiastically promoted the Victorian view of these plays as sacrilegiousperversions of the Bard’s divine originals, aberrations, contaminatinginfluences, that needed to be decisively rejected in the search to recover thetrue plays. Spencer wrote in his conclusion that despite all modern attemptsto ‘set forward the actual, the historical, play . . . not yet . . . have we gotwholly free of the Restoration attitude towards revision, or indeed of theRestoration versions themselves’.33 The view that adaptations had only atheoretical interest as ‘a kind of laboratory manual of the diction, dramatictheory, and dramatic practice of the age in which they were written’ wasprevalent.34 By the mid-century the tone was beginning to change; MoelwynMerchant (1965) managed to produce a generally sympathetic account of



All for Love and Tate’s King Lear, despite a few references to the ‘vandalism’of the restoration adapters35 and Christopher Spencer’s anthology containsan unprejudiced introduction. In what has been vividly characterized as ‘thebazaar of postmodernist consciousness’36 of the late twentieth century, wherehierarchical distinctions between art forms are dissolved, the significance ofthe adaptations has been re-evaluated in the light of growing interest in themany cultural forms taken by the appropriation of Shakespeare and the rangeof purposes to which his works have been put.Whereas some (not all) ofthe restoration adapters believed themselves to be doing Shakespeare a serviceby improving his faulty originals in the light of new standards of taste, themotivations behind the impulse to take over a work with a certain culturalprestige and make it new can now be interpreted much more variously.

In the 1980s criticism of restoration Shakespeare took a new turn withthe growing interest in the politics of the plays, in the work of critics suchas Maus, Guffey and Wikander.37 Shakespeare in the restoration was nowseen as playing an ideological role in the definition of national identity.Dobson’s work on his developing status as an author and national icon from1660 to 1769 puts the restoration perception of Shakespeare into a newperspective, and connects the processes of adaptation and canonization inan illuminating way. Jean Marsden builds on this in her book The Re-ImaginedText,38 which considers the adaptations in the context of reception studies,and also relates them to the development of the definition of Englishnationalism seen at work in the early Shakespearean criticism of Dryden andothers. Paulina Kewes’s work considers the adaptation of Shakespeare inrelation to the contemporary adaptations of French and Spanish plays, andreviews the special status implicitly accorded to it by many critics.39 Themost recent book on Shakespeare in the period, Barbara Murray’s RestorationShakespeare, examines all the adaptations between 1662 and 1682 todemonstrate how the adapters worked to ‘develop the visual andmetaphorical coherence’ of the originals for the new stage, but takes littleaccount of recent work on the construction of Shakespearean authorship orthe political context within which his work was produced.40 Despite itsaffinities with many currently attractive critical approaches the drama of therestoration remains a neglected subject at all levels of university study,although the adaptations of Shakespeare continue to excite critical interest.Perhaps it is now time to revisit the area covered by Gunnar Sorelius in hisseminal book of the 1960s, ‘The Giant Race before the Flood’: Pre-RestorationDrama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration, in the light of newertheoretical approaches to literary culture and to Shakespeare. It would beuseful to have a focussed overview of Shakespeare in the restoration thatnot only examines his cultural status and construction as an author in thisliminal period, but also contextualizes his work in relation to that of otherpre-war playwrights still being staged, and explores his plays in terms ofperformance history and of topical politics.



Notes1 For details, see A. Nicoll, A History of Restoration Drama 1660 –1700 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1928), pp. 268–9.2 British Library Add. MSS 19265, fol. 47, quoted from G. Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare. ACultural History from the Restoration to the Present (London: The Hogarth Press, 1990), p. 9.3 Quoted from Nicoll, History of Restoration Drama, p. 314.4 J. Evelyn,The Diary of John Evelyn, ed.E. S. de Beer (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1955), vol. 3, p. 304.5 See M. Raddadi,Davenant’s Adaptations of Shakespeare (Uppsala:Almqvist and Wiksell International,1979) for an account of Davenant’s work.6 J. Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays, ed. G. Watson, 2 vols. (London: Dent,1962), vol. 1, p. 69.7 N. K. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992), p. 56.8 The figures come from G. C. Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (London and NewYork: Constable and Co, 1920– 21), vol. 1, p. 22. Odell comments, ‘Not a great showing forShakespeare!’ Further figures are given by G. Sorelius, ‘The Giant Race before the Flood’:Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Uppsala: Almqvist andWiksells, 1966), pp. 71–73.9 See G. E. Bentley, The Profession of Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 209; Sorelius, ‘Giant Race before the Flood’.10 See Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, vol. 1, p. 68.11 R. Flecknoe, A Short Discourse of the English Stage, in Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century,ed. J. Spingarn, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908–09), vol. 2, p. 93.12 Ibid., pp. 239, 240.13 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. H. B. Wheatley, 6 vols. (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1928), vol. 2,p. 326.14 J. Dennis, The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. E. N. Hooker, 2 vols. (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins Press, 1939–43), vol. 2, pp. 432–3.15 Dryden, Of Dramatic Poesy, vol. 1, p. 240.16 N. Tate, The History of King Lear (1681), in Shakespeare Made Fit. Restoration Adaptationsof Shakespeare, ed. S. Clark (London: J. M. Dent, 1997), pp. 295–6.17 J. Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, 1709, ed. M. Summers (New York and London: Benjamin Blom,1929), pp. 63–4.18 Nicoll, History of Restoration Drama, p. 12.19 R. Flecknoe, Love’s Kingdom (1664), sig. G7v.20 Downes, Roscius Anglicanus, p. 33.21 Ibid., p. 35.22 Ibid., p. 21.23 Sorelius, ‘Giant Race before the Flood’, p. 57.24 J. I. Marsden, ed., The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Worksand the Myth (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991); M. Dobson, The Making of the NationalPoet. Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660 –1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); K. E.Maus, ‘Arcadia Lost: Politics and Revision in the Restoration Tempest’, Renaissance Drama newseries 13 (1982), pp. 189 –209; Maguire, Regicide and Restoration; M. H. Wikander, ‘The SpittedInfant: Scenic Emblem and Exclusionist Politics in Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare’,Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), pp. 340–58.25 Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, p. 63.26 G. Guffey,‘Politics,Weather and the Contemporary Reception of the Dryden-Davenant Tempest’,Restoration 8 (1984), pp. 1–9.27 Dobson, Making of the National Poet, p. 62.28 J. I. Marsden, The Reimagined Text. Shakespeare,Adaptation, and Eighteenth-century Literary Theory(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995), p. 44.29 P. Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation. Writing for the Stage in England, 1660 –1710 (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 91.30 C. Cibber, The Tragical History of King Richard III, in Clark, ed., Restoration Adaptations, p. 376.31 Odell, Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving.



32 H. Spencer, Shakespeare Improved:The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (Cambridge,MA.: Harvard University Press, 1927).33 Ibid., p. 371.34 G. C. Branan, Eighteenth-Century Adaptations of Shakespearean Tragedy (Berkeley and Los Angeles:University of California Press, 1956), p. v.35 M. W. Merchant, ‘Shakespeare Made Fit’, in Restoration Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies(London: Edward Arnold, 1965).36 The phrase comes from J. Malcolm, The Silent Woman. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (London:Granta Publications, 1994), p. 177.37 See note 18.38 Marsden, Reimagined Text.39 Kewes, Authorship and Appropriation.40 B. Murray, Restoration Shakespeare.Viewing the Voice (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh DickinsonUniversity Press; London:Associated University Presses, 2001).

Bibliography

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