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"Instructive Recreations": Playbooks and Political Stability in the English Republic, 1649-1660

Kuhn, Justin
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155558224340157

Abstract Details

2019, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, English.
Instructive Recreations: Playbooks and Political Stability in the English Republic, 1649-1660 reassesses how early modern drama became literature by studying the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that were published—often for the first time—during the unique and short-lived period in English history when the nation was governed as a republic, not a monarchy. Throughout this Interregnum, the country struggled to reestablish order after a civil war that had caused profound transformations in the civic structures, social hierarchies, gender relations, and religious identities of the body politic. I argue that, with these institutions and cultural frameworks still in flux, booksellers and editors repurposed the plays of Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton, Richard Brome, and other dramatists in order to attempt to reestablish social and political stability. Drawing on book historical methods that examine drama not only in terms of original performance conditions but also in terms of publication history, I explore the new and sometimes surprising meanings that early modern plays acquired when they were printed in republican England. My chapters demonstrate how a collection of Brome’s anticourt satire, condemning the disorderly Cavaliers influenced by the defeated King Charles I, was intended to align drama with a republican political culture founded upon repudiation of the Caroline government; how Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1596) and Othello (1604) were appropriated to legitimize the idea that an aristocratic government would ensure internal harmony within a kingless state; how Middleton’s proto-feminist plays More Dissemblers Besides Women (1614) and Women Beware Women (1621) were actually used to reinforce a patriarchal social order at a time of unprecedented political participation among women; and how William Davenant, the only playwright to stage drama during the 1650s, addressed similar political concerns when he produced operatic entertainments asserting that a civilizing English Protestantism would allow stable territorial expansion within the burgeoning republican empire. Modern scholars have argued that the circumstances of the mid-seventeenth-century reshaped early modern plays into aesthetic objects disentangled from social and political concerns. My project suggests, however, that Renaissance plays gained cultural value during the 1650s not for any formalist reasons but due to publishers, editors, and readers finding meanings within them relevant to navigating the wrenching changes in republican England. As the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were repurposed to explore how the country could implement kingless self-rule, they took on a heightened significance as classic works from an older age that offered political wisdom for a new era. Initiating a process of appropriation that continues to this day, early modern drama during the 1650s became flexible, adaptable, and open—like any kind of literature—to myriad uses and interpretations
Alan Farmer (Committee Chair)
Richard Dutton (Committee Member)
Jennifer Higginbotham (Committee Member)
Christopher Highley (Committee Member)
303 p.
Literature
Literature; Shakespeare; Republicanism; Bibliography; Renaissance

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kuhn, J. (2019). "Instructive Recreations": Playbooks and Political Stability in the English Republic, 1649-1660 [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155558224340157

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kuhn, Justin. "Instructive Recreations": Playbooks and Political Stability in the English Republic, 1649-1660. 2019. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155558224340157.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kuhn, Justin. ""Instructive Recreations": Playbooks and Political Stability in the English Republic, 1649-1660." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu155558224340157

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

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