Ravishment of Reason

Ravishment of Reason examines the heroic dramas that populated 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 midcentury regicide and revolution. The trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, and the relatively passive role played by his heir in the eventual reinstitution of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, drew unsettling attention to the primacy of the approval, affections and desires of subjects in enacting and maintaining structures of political authority. In the wake of a violent conflict between King and Parliament, the political and imaginative literature of the later seventeenth century repeatedly asked and offered several competing answers to the question of how political consent could be secured from autonomous and self-determining agents. 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 work of Davenant, Dryden, Behn, Boyle, Lee, and Crowne in its historical and intellectual context of civil war and the destabilizing theories of government that came in its wake, this book offers an account of a culture's attempts to reconcile civic purpose with political stability after an age of revolutionary change.