The Lost Rhetoric of Liberty: Marvell and Restoration Drama

Abstract

To anyone coming to the drama of the mid-Restoration period for the first time, it seems hard to believe that the drama can really be so politically engaged. Critics continue to note the fact of political engagement; 1 but it is more difficult to know how we should read this politicization of the drama. In particular, it is hard to know how to be aware of subtleties and nuances, without losing sight of political partisanship. It can feel more natural to focus on ambiguity than on partisanship. However, this can lead to an assumption that all political meaning must be either indeterminate or compromised, so that the real engagement of the drama with party politics is underestimated. Critics who avoid the danger of writing out political engagement in Restoration drama sometimes fall into a different trap: a denial of opposition, an assumption that the drama was, in Douglas Canfield’s phrase, ‘Royalism’s Last Dramatic Stand’. 2 These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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