Performing identities on the Restoration stage

Abstract

This work explores identity - especially masculinity and femininity, English and foreign, middle-class and aristocratic - as it is enacted, idealized, deployed and redefined on the late-17th-century British stage. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways the theatre contributed to new and often shifting early early modern definitions of the boundaries of nation, status and gender. The first section focuses on the playwright's presentations of idealized men and the comic ridicule of male bodies and behaviours that fall short of the ideal. Of special interest are those moments when playwrights use stereotypes of national character, particularly the Spaniards and Turks, as examples of the worst in male behaviour. The second section focuses on playwrights' attempts to redefine the idealized woman. Anchored by Manley's Royal Mischief, Lowenthal's reading reveals that even a woman playwright's attempts to represent female subjectivity or interiority at odds with the surfaces of the body are doomed to return to those same surfaces.

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