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Despite his significant influence as a courtier, diplomat, playwright and theatre manager, Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683) remains a comparatively elusive and neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary volume shine new light on a singular, contradictory Englishman 400 years after his birth. They increase our knowledge and deepen our understanding not only of Killigrew himself, but of seventeenth-century dramaturgy, and its complex relationship to court culture and to evolving aesthetic tastes. The first book on Killigrew since 1930, this study re-examines the significant phases of his life and career: the little-known playwriting years of the 1630s; his long exile during the 1640s and 1650s, and its personal, political and literary repercussions; and the period following the Restoration, when, with Sir William Davenant, he enjoyed a monopoly of the London stage. These fresh accounts of Killigrew build on the recent resurgence of interest in royalists and the royalist exile, and underscore literary scholars' continued fascination with the Restoration stage. In the process, they question dominant assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and cultural boundaries. What emerges is a figure who confounds as often as he justifies traditional labels of dilettante, cavalier wit and swindler.
An exploration of the ways in which Restoration comedy was performed, using the costume, customs, manners and behaviour of the age as a way of understanding its theatre and drama. It also considers problems encountered in early twentieth century revivals of plays by authors such as Etherege, Dryden, Congreve and Farquhar.
The Oxford Handbook of Restoration Literature begins by asking if there was a distinctive literature of the Restoration. For a long time, the answer seemed obvious: heroic drama, libertine comedy, scandalous lyrics, and the short but brilliant career of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester. Could there be an age when the coincidence of literary culture and political rule were any more obvious? But as this Handbook will remind us, some of the most wonderful literature of this Restoration came from writers who had lived across the decades of turbulence and into an age when the Stuart kings returned, when the Church and House of Lords were restored, a world made safe for bishops and for the memory of divine right rule. Of course, these returns and restorations did not meet with uniform celebration. John Milton wrote his great epic poems not in quiet submission but in a kind of resistance to the dominant culture of the 1660s, and Andrew Marvell produced his most brilliant satiric verse by holding up a looking glass to court corruption and Anglican intolerance. So we begin with the most obvious conclusion: Restoration literature does and does not fit to the categories that so long defined the late Stuart age. This book explores and contests, challenges and reimagines the experience embodied by the writing of the late Stuart world and invites readers new to this world and those who have often read its literatures to the pleasures but as well to the challenges and discomforts of its texts.
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