Table Of ContentStaging the revolution
Staging the revolution
Drama, reinvention and history, 1647–72
Rachel Willie
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Rachel Willie 2015
The right of Rachel Willie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
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First published 2015
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Contents
List of figures page vi
Acknowledgements vii
List of abbreviations x
A note on dating and on spelling xi
Introduction: Of 1647, theatre closure and reinvention 1
1 The paper stage 25
2 Fairs, ghosts, tyranny and usurpation: debating the body
politic on the paper stage 52
3 Reinventing the masque: Shirley’s and Davenant’s
protectorate entertainments 80
4 Heroic drama on the commonwealth and Restoration stage 117
5 Ideas of panegyric in early Restoration comedy 157
Epilogue: Of 1688 and reinventing the past 188
Bibliography 210
Index 237
List of figures
1 A Dialogue Betwixt the Ghosts of Charles the I Late King of
England: and Oliver the Late Usurping Protector (London,
1659), RB 77181, frontispiece. Reproduced by permission of
the Huntington Library, San Marino, California page 43
2 A New Meeting of Ghosts at Tyburn Being a Discourse of Oliver
Cromwell. John Bradshaw. Henry Ireton. Thomas Pride. Thomas
Scot, Secretary to the Rump. Major Gen. Harrison and Hugh
Peters, the Divills Chaplain (London, 1660 [1661]), A.10 (7),
frontispiece © The Governing Body of Christ Church, Oxford
(2014) 44
3 A Messenger from the Dead, or Conference Full of Stupendious
Horrour, Heard Distinctly, and by Alternate Voyces, by Many as
that Time Present. Between the Ghosts of Henry the 8. and Charls
the First of England, in Windsor-Chappel, Where They Were
Both Buried. (London: 1658), P1597, frontispiece. Reproduced
by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library 45
4 John Ogilby, ‘Of the rebellion of the hands and the feet’, in
The fables of Æsop paraphras’d in verse, and adorn’d with
sculpture, 3rd edn (London, 1673), Douce A. 694, Vol. 1 pp.
136–9 (p. 137). Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian
Libraries, University of Oxford 149
Acknowledgements
As with many first books, this one had its genesis in my doctoral research,
undertaken at the University of York. Here, I benefited in different ways
from conversations with Michael Cordner, Mark Jenner, Helen Pierce,
John Roe, Richard Rowland, Bill Sherman and Jonathan Wainwright.
Helen Pierce and Mike Cordner both supplied me with material that (at
the time) awaited publication, for which I am very grateful, and Mike
helped me to fully comprehend how a generally non-reactionary par-
liament might have been driven to regicide. My fellow early modern
graduate students, Tamsin Badcoe, Nick Moon, Varsha Panjwani, Kate
Pond, Chloe Preedy and Amritesh Singh, proved excellent colleagues and
friends. The greatest intellectual debt goes to Helen Smith and I would
also like to thank especially Kevin Killeen and Martin Butler for their
wisdom and patience with my wayward ideas.
Further afield, I was very lucky to come into contact with some
very generous scholars. Conversations with Anne Coldiron, John
Cunningham, Michael Dobson, Claudia Kairoff, Jennifer Keith,
Ian Gadd, Jane Grogan, Jerome de Groot, Helmer Helmers, Gordon
McMullan, Lucy Munro, Susan Wiseman, Maarten van Dijck and Mimi
Yiu helped to inform my critical thinking. Carol Morley kindly provided
me with an extract from James Fraser’s diary, and Mark Rankin very
generously shared with me A Messenger from the dead, (London: 1658),
discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. As part of the Making Publics (MaPs) pro-
ject, in 2009 I took up a summer fellowship at McGill University, which
greatly influenced the ways in which I have been considering performance
and the circulation of text in the nascent public sphere. Thanks especially
to Paul Yachnin, Shankar Raman and Angela Vanhaelen, not only for
giving me this fascinating and rewarding opportunity but also for contin-
uing discussions after the project ended.
viii Acknowledgements
Tamsin Badcoe deserves considerable praise for reading the
manuscript with unflagging good humour, and especially for identify-
ing a worrying and unintended correlation between historical narrative
and Star Trek. Thanks are also due to Natalie Pollard and Elizabeth
Swann for comments upon parts of the piece, to Liam Haydon for his
help with locating materials, and Barbara Eichner deserves special men-
tion for her abilities at conceiving headline-grabbing titles. Julia Knaus
proved an exemplary exchange student and an excellent checker of
quotations.
Librarians at the Bodleian Library, the British Library, Guildhall
Library, Huntington Library, King’s College London Library, University
of London Library at Senate House, York Minster Library, and the
Borthwick Institute and J. B. Morrell Library at the University of York
were all very helpful. Paul Carr at the BL deserves special thanks for
checking a pamphlet for me and correcting an unforced error. In 2011,
I was very lucky to be awarded a short-term fellowship at the Folger
Shakespeare Library and I would like to thank all the librarians and fel-
lows for welcoming me into a friendly and stimulating community and
for allowing me to present work in progress. Thanks too to Kevin de
Ornellas and to Helen Wilcox for inviting me to present papers at the Irish
Renaissance Society and the Wales-wide Institute for Medieval and Early
Modern Studies (IMEMS) respectively, and to all who were present for
their helpful comments.
In 2011, I joined Bangor University and have enjoyed conversations
with my new colleagues. It is a privilege (albeit an intimidating one)
to work amongst such erudite and perspicacious scholars. Some of the
material presented in this book has been reprinted from my ‘Viewing the
paper stage: civil war, print, theatre and the public sphere’, in Angela
Vanhaelen and Joseph Ward (eds), Making Space Public in Early Modern
Europe: Performance, Geography, Privacy (New York and London:
Routledge, 2013), pp. 54–75. Thanks to Routledge for allowing me to
reprint this material. I am grateful to all at Manchester University Press
for helping to transform this matter into a book and for their patience
with its author.
Various people deserve thanks for offering me a bed/floor/sofa when I
visited libraries and attended conferences: Anne and Peter Gill; Hayley,
Sumedha and Sebastian Gunawarna; Rachael and Nick Hilliard; Lindsay
McSporran; Nick Moon and Pragya Vohra; Ella Paremain; Natalie
Pollard; Lizzie Swann and Tom McAuley were all kind enough to let
me be an absent house-guest. My siblings, Rob and Hannah, were good
