Drama and Politics in the English Civil War.

Susan Wiseman. Drama and Politics in the English Civil War.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 289 pp. $64.95. ISBN: 0-521-47221-0.

This book challenges the widely held assumption that after the closing of the theaters in 1642, drama stopped altogether in England for eighteen years. The notion of this period as a gap in English theater, Wiseman argues, has bolstered the purposes of conventional literary periodicity, maintaining an inaccurate portrait of theater as uniformly serving court power. Wiseman's study serves both to rectify and to interrogate the assumption that drama did not exist in England during the 1 640s and 165 Os. Readers of this book will come away better acquainted with a range of dramatic forms written (and occasionally performed) in this period. Moreover, through Wiseman's balanced and judicious exploration of the political positions represented in these texts, readers will also deepen their appreciation of the ways in which mid-seventeenth century dramatic forms engaged with contemporary politics.

Wiseman begins by reexamining the edict that closed the theaters in 1642. She argues that the tendency to construe this edict as the inauguration of a gap in the history of drama is part of a larger ideological tendency to treat the 1640s and 1650s as discontinuous, a rupture rather than a discrete period in its own right. In this way, Wiseman's study is part of a larger attempt to reconsider the culture and literature of the Civil War period -- an attempt that has been of particular importance to readers of seventeenth-century British literature in recent years. In short, this book is a rereading of the 1640s and 1650s as well as of the range of dramatic forms these two decades produced. Wiseman observes that many forms of dramatic production continued in this period, some legal and public, others illegal and private. It is in fact the monolithic account of the period that has muted the appreciation of the richness of its drama, rather than any fixed anti-theatricalism of the period itself; puritanism, as W iseman argues, was "diverse rather than monolithic" in its responses to drama (6). By disentangling the period's drama from its customary aristocratic and royalist ties, Wiseman is able to represent this period's drama anew.

In order to appreciate the wealth and complexity of Civil War drama, we need to recognize the connections between drama and ancillary kinds. In her first chapter, Wiseman demonstrates that the written dialogue, which had achieved prominence in the early sixteenth century, continued to be a crucial form during the Civil War. Out of the increasingly close association between drama and dialogue as part of the new "news" between 1640 and 1642, Wiseman sees the emergence of the "pamphlet playlet," a dramatic form circulating in print with special significance in the early years of the 1640s. These "pamphlet playlets" or "pamphlet dialogues" importantly conjoined the printed and the spoken spheres. Wiseman sees these pamphlet dialogues emerging in greatest number at times of political ferment -- the 1640s to 1648 and again in the late 1650s (36). Such pamphlet dialogues served to critique contemporary politics as well as to reflect conflict, as Wiseman demonstrates in her second chapter. Dramatic forms, in short, were popular vehicles for staging political views, revealing the extent to which radical critique and dramatic forms converged in the 1630s and 1640s.

Each chapter in Wiseman's study treats a different facet of the theater from the 1630s to the 1650s. Some chapters treat individual authors in some detail, including chapters on well-known figures such as Margaret Cavendish and William Davenant, and lesser known figures such as the playwright John Tatham. Others focus on dramatic genres such as opera and tragicomedy. Though the book moves chronologically from the 1630s to the 1650s, it is not proposing a "progress" or restoration of the drama as the restoration of the monarchy approaches. Instead, Wiseman maintains her purpose throughout: to demonstrate the wealth of theatrical texts and theatrical experiences in a period that richly deserves recognition and attention in its own right, and not merely as a proem to the effluence of drama after 1660. Not only does Wiseman firmly establish the prevalence of dramatic forms in the 1640s and 1650s, she also adds importantly to our understanding of the relationships between the period's politics and its literature. The ways in which drama and dramatic forms persisted during these decades, as Wiseman rightly argues, should alter our understanding of drama as a national form. Drama may in part be molded by monarchy, as so much new historicist criticism has suggested, but as Wiseman's book argues so elegantly, it must also be seen as conditioned by those events which "deposed the earlier Stuarts" (217).