Ravishment of Reason

Governance and the Heroic Idioms of the Late Stuart Stage, 16601690

By (author) Brandon Chua

Publication date:

11 September 2014

Length of book:

230 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

ISBN-13: 9781611485820

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas written for the restored English theatres in the later seventeenth century, reading them as complex and sophisticated responses to a crisis of public life in the wake of the mid-century regicide and revolution. The unique form of the Restoration heroic play, with its scenes of imperial conquest peopled by hesitating and indecisive heroes, interrogates traditional oppositions of agency and passivity, autonomy and servility, that structure conventional narratives of political service and public virtue, exploring, in the process, new and often unsettling models of order and governance. Situating the dramas of Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in their historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, Brandon Chua offers an account of a culture’s attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.

Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction

One: “Heroicall Pictures”: Government and the Restoration Heroic Play

Two: “New Rights we Grant not, but the Old Declare”: History, Friendship, and Consent in Roger Boyle’s Henry V (1664)

Three: “Tis All but Ceremony Which Is Past”: Conversion and Heroic Passions in John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, Parts One and Two (1670-1672)

Four: Shakespeare's History Lesson: John Crowne's Misery of Civil War (1680)

Five: “Cajoling the People with his Known Industry”: The Passions and Spectacular Politics in Nathaniel Lee’s Lucius Junius Brutus

Six: The Politics of Cowardice: Fear, Interest, and Security in Aphra Behn’s The Widdow Ranter (1689)

Seven: “Half Loath and Half Consenting”: Interpretive Relativism and Incest in John Dryden's Don Sebastian (1690)

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index
About the Author

[An] intelligent reconsideration of the Restoration heroic play.