the comedy of dispossession

8/13/2019 The Comedy of Dispossession

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The Comedy of DispossessionAuthor(s): Aparna DharwadkerSource: Studies in Philology, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998), pp. 411-434Published by: University of North Carolina PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174620 .Accessed: 28/04/2013 08:09

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h e o m n e d y o isp ossession

by Aparna Dharwadker

The arbitrary separation of the "literary" from the "political" hasbeen an important issue in recent historicist and materialist arguments

about the interpretation of early modern writing. But the precise prob-lem of the historical relation between these two terms, and the areas ofexperience they designate, involves questions of canonicity and literaryvalue. Scholars dealing with well-known Renaissance materials tendto view the critical politicization of literature, especially the works ofShakespeare, primarily as a corrective act: it restores an incipient cul-tural power to texts that humanist criticism has appropriated and sys-tematically depoliticized through aesthetic and formal analysis. Thiscorrection is necessary because, as Leonard Tennenhouse suggests, inthe Renaissance "literature and political discourse had not yet been

differentiated in the manner of a modern critical discourse." 1 Schol-ars dealing with late-seventeenth-century materials, however, describethe effects of humanist interpretation in nearly opposite terms: Resto-ration texts have been denied literary value precisely because hey areself-evidently, and 'merely," political. Steven Zwicker notes the "gen-eral resistance among literary historians to the politicization of theliterary," but argues that Restoration literature provokes this responseto an unusual extent:

[Iun his most embattled of literary cultures -and perhaps because it is so veryembattled, because the literature s so entangled with or contaminated by poli-

I Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (NewYork: Methuen, 1986), 2. Louis Montrose also observes that the focus of new histori-cist methodologies has been "upon a refiguring of the socio-cultural ield within whichcanonical Renaissance iterary and dramatic works were originally produced; upon re-situating hem not only in relationship o other genres and modes of discourse but also inrelationship o contemporaneous ocial institutions and non-discursive practices" "Pro-fessing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture," n The New Historicism, d.H. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1989], 17).

411

? 1998 The University of North Carolina Press

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412 Aparna Dharwadker

tics-the literary has seemed to need special defense. We are still asked to clingto the idea that what is most literary n Restoration iterature s that which isleast political or that which can be elevated above the political?

Zwicker's comment in part explains why the revisionary effortwithin Restoration studies has been not only to establish the politicalintertexts of canonical literature but to reclaim noncanonical, politi-cally vital forms of discourse. The mass of topical verse collected incontemporary editions like Poems on Affairs f State 1963-75) and CourtSatires of the Restoration 1976) is at best subliterary, yet it demonstrates

that the events of the Civil War and Restoration transformed the re-lation between politics and writing.3 George deForest Lord suggeststhat until the 1630S most English satire is "typical rather than topical,"whereas Augustan satirical verse "freely attacks public figures andinstitutions, concerns itself with every aspect of public affairs, fromnational issues of the greatest consequence down to the most trivialincidents of life at court," and "plays a considerable part in the deter-mination of large issues in England."4 Under these conditions, politicalintention and meaning have no necessary relation to literary value;conversely, the absence of literary value does not cancel the politicalinstrumentality of a body of writing.

I want to explore this tension between topical imperatives and aes-thetic norms in the particular case of Restoration drama by consideringan obscure early group of anti-Puritan comedies-Abraham Cowley'sCutter of Coleman-Street (166i), Sir Robert Howard's The Committee(1662), and John Wilson's The Cheats (1663).5 Chronologically, the plays

2 Steven Zwicker, "Lines of Authority: Politics and Literary Culture n the Restora-tion," n Politics f Discourse: he Literature nd History f Seventeenth-Century ngland, d.Kevin Sharpe and Steven Zwicker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 31.

3 George deForest Lord, ed., Poems on Affairs f State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 66o-1714, 7 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963-75); John Harold Wilson,ed., Court Satires f the Restoration Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976).

4 George deForest Lord, ntroduction o Poems n Affairs f State, vol. i (1963), xxvii,xxvi, xlii.

51 have chosen these three plays because they are comparable n quality, method, andsubstance. Much of what I say here would apply equally well to John Tatham's TheRump:or The Mirrour f The LateTimes i66o) and John Lacy's The Old Troop, r Monsieur Raggou(1664). The Rump combines fact with fantasy to chronicle political events in London be-tween the collapse of Richard Cromwell's Protectorate n October 1659 and the arrival ofGeneral Monk's forces four months later. Tatham's ritique of Puritan power, class, andgender coincides with the representations f Cowley, Howard, and Wilson, although heplay's improvised, split structure makes it generically atypical of Restoration politicalcomedy. Lacy's play introduces the novelty of a Civil War rather han Commonwealthsetting, and uses it to attack both Roundheads and plunderers within the king's army.Other politically oriented comic plays of the early i66os include Francis Kirkman's The



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The Comedy f Dispossession 413belong to a period of royalist mythmaking when discrediting he social,cultural, and political deviations of the Puritan Interregnum was asimportant as celebrating the Stuart Restoration. Most new plays writ-ten between 166o and 1665, for instance, engage in a "triumphal ram-pling upon the remains of the Commonwealth" which Robert D. Humefinds "unsurprising."6 n this volatile and reactive context, the comicplays of Cowley and others constitute a distinctive species of politi-cal drama because they realize political meanings through he specificresources of their literary genre. As comedies they focus on the socialconsequences of the Puritan revolution, mainly by representing Puri-tan political authority as a form of social and sexual transgression hatviolates existing hierarchies of class and gender. As full-length per-formance texts with literary antecedents, they assimilate and displacethe tradition of anonymous closet plays and quasi-dramatic pamphletswhich effectively constitutes the comedic-satiric theater of the Inter-regnum.7 More than other kinds of contemporaneous drama, the come-dies also employ realistic images of the Puritan n power to show whythe new sociopolitical order was destined to fail. Finally, hey treat one

prominent practice of the Commonwealth period-the sequestration,confiscation, and sale of royalist estates-as metonymic of all politicaland social injustice, and turn the loss and recovery of Cavalier fortunesinto powerfully symbolic fictions of dispossession and resistance.

My purpose in reconsidering hese little-known texts, therefore, s toshow the complex interrelation of political and literary impulses evenin "minor" drama: the plays' predictable royalism does not preclude aserious engagement with the practice and theory of comedy as a genre.In section II, I consider how political and literary issues are linked inthe Restoration discourse on dramatic genres, and in the reflexive com-

mentaries that the playwrights in question append to the publishedtexts of their plays. In the same section, I also relate theory to prac-tice by discussing how early-Restoration opical comedies modify thepre-Civil War traditions of anti-Puritan representation. In sections III

Presbyterian ash; r, Noctroff's Maid Whipt i66i), Thomas Porter's A Witty Combat 1663),and Richard Head's Hic et Ulbique, r The Humours f Dublin (1663). Alfred Harbageallows these plays "no merit as drama," ut considers them "interesting s straws in thewind" because they report contemporary cenes and incidents (Cavalier rama London:Oxford University Press, 1936], 85).

6 Robert D. Hume, The Development f English Drama n the Late Seventeenth entury(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 239.

7See Harbage, Cavalier Drama, hapter 4 (in both Parts I and II of the study), andHyder E. Rollins, "A Contribution o the History of the English Commonwealth Drama,"Studies n Philology 8 (1921): 267-333, or a full discussion of these plays and pamphlets.



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414 Aparna Dhawwadker

through V, I focus on the sociopolitical experience which Cowley andothers inscribe in their comedies, and the inversions of class and gen-der they collectively satirize8 In a brief concluding section, I outlinethe influence of these early plays on later political comedy while re-emphasizing their immediate contexts.

II

The "politics of genre" emerges as an explicit concern n Restoration

dramatic heory for two historical reasons: the radical politicization ofdrama and theater in reaction to the Interregnum, and the substantialincrease, after 166o, in reflexive authorial commentary about genre.The discourse of the period conceives of genre as a system of particu-larized representation hat invests specific kinds of works with specifickinds of political meaning, thus defining the limits of political refer-ence even as it makes political representation possible. The event ofthe Restoration, or instance, occasions a spate of pro-monarchist, nti-Commonwealth propaganda, but even in this partisan context Restora-tion playwrights keep in view the specific political potential of major

genres like the historical play, tragedy, tragicomedy, and comedy. Intheir scheme of differentiation, historical drama uses the past as ananalogy for the present so that an audience may better understand tsown predicaments and triumphs. The "high" genre of tragedy and theserious elements in tragicomedy stage the vital confrontation betweenlicit and illicit forms of political authority and power. In contrast, the

8My readings attempt o redress n some measure he scholarly and critical neglect ofthese plays, particularly of their political-literary unctions. Cowley's Cutter f Coleman-Street s not available n a dependable modem edition; Carryl Nelson Thurber's ditionof Robert Howard's 7he Committee University f Illinois Studies n Language nd Literature7 [1921]: 7-138), is both old and textually unreliable; Milton C. Nahm's edition of JohnWilson's The Cheats Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1935) s satisfactory rom the viewpoint oftextual scholarship, but does not make a good reading text. Some political comedies ofthe Exclusion Crisis period, such as Shadwell's 7Te Lancashire Witches i68i), Behn's TheCity Heiress nd The Roundheads both 1682),and John Crowne's City Politiques 1683),arebeginning to attract serious critical attention, but the comedies of the early i66os havenot been the subject of even one full-length essay. Vol. 5 of T7wRevels History f Dramain English, d. John Loftis et al. (London: Methuen, 1976)and Hume's Development f En-glish Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century are at the moment the most recent historicalstudies to comment on the plays under consideration, nd neither work can comment atlength on individual plays. Biographies of the authors present a similar problem: H. J.Oliver's Sir Robert Howard: A Critical Biography Durham: Duke University Press, 1963)and Arthur H. Nethercot's Abraham owley,The Muse's Hannibal New York: Russell &Russell, 1969) are clearly outdated, while Wilson has yet to find a biographer.



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The Comedy f Dispossession 415"low" genre of comedy, with its potential for satire, allows the ideo-logical adversary to be directly represented, ridiculed, and punishedas a political and social being.

The idea of genre as the medium of a political message is pervasivein the authorial rhetoric of the 166os. In the preface to Andronicus Com-nenius (1664), a play about a twelfth-century Byzantine usurper andtyrant, John Wilson states that he chose "A story of the Eastern Empire,between the years 1179 and 1183" because those events "might not bethought altogether unparalel to what our selves have seen."9 Wilson'sparallel s part of a cluster of seriocomic plays which develop Androni-cus as an analogue for Cromwell in an attempt to transform the latterfrom Commonwealth hero to Restoration villain.'0 In the epilogue toThe Usurper performed 1664), Edward Howard describes his tragedyas "A Record of all such Loyalty; / That after long Contests, did safelybring / Subjects o Rights, and to his Throne our King."" As Howard'slanguage suggests, the emotional-political significations of kingshipare the province of serious drama, whether the narrative of a givenplay is historical or fictional. Cowley's special epilogue to Charles II

at a court performance of Cutter of Coleman-Street 166i) commentsmemorably on how the structural logic of comedy fits the purposesof anti-Puritan critique. Cowley suggests that after an age of watchingthe Puritans' madness on the 'Publick Stage," Charles can finally see"Their Tragick Follies brought to Comedy" in plays such as his own.The "low" scene of comedy also rightly degrades characters who hadheld an absurdly high station "On the World's Theatre not long ago." 2Comedy in this view is not only the necessary but the natural weaponof political revenge.

The authors of political comedy in the early i66os are thus

acutely conscious of writing comedies-a stance that produces someunexpected rhetoric, and brings "political" heater remarkably closeto conventional "literary" models of the genre. The playwrights' re-flexive comments on their plays in prologues, epilogues, and printedaddresses contain neither political polemic nor propaganda but moreor less lengthy arguments about the purpose, method, and decorum

9 John Wilson, Andronicus Comnenius: A Tragedy London, 1664), A3r-v.10The other two plays, both anonymous, are Andronicus: A Tragedy London, 1661) and

The Unfortunate Usurper (London, 1663).I1 Edward Howard, The Usurper (London, 1668), 72.12 Abraham Cowley, Cutter of Coleman-Street i661), in The Works of Abraham Cowley

(London, 1693), 7:32. All further references to this play appear in the text.



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of their chosen form. Cowley and Wilson are also on the defensivein their arguments because of the curiously hostile reception of theirplays in an otherwise favorable partisan atmosphere. Despite his yearsof exile with Charles II in France, Cowley was accused of vilifying theroyalists through his three main characters, eading him to point outthat after serving the king's party "twenty years during all the time oftheir Misfortunes and Afflictions, I must be a very rash and imprudentPerson if I chose out that of their Restitution to begin a Quarrel withthem. I must be too much a Madman to be trusted with such an Edg'd Tool

as Comedy" A2r; my emphasis). Wilson's play was censored heavilyby the Master of Revels, Henry Herbert, icensed for performance on6 March 1663, and then withdrawn by the king's order two weeks laterbecause it allegedly contained "many things of a Scandalous offen-sive nature."' 3 The playwrights' discourse on genre is thus inseparablefrom their defensive stance: Cowley's preface to Cutter of Coleman-Street and Wilson's address to the reader in The Cheats are apologiaein an immediate sense, but also important documents in Restorationgenre theory, and the most substantial statements on comedy beforeShadwell and Dryden begin debating the relative claims of humor and

wit later in that decade.The "theory" of comedy that Wilson and Cowley outline is, at one

level, a restatement of neoclassical doctrine as popularized by Sidneyand Jonson. Comedy "either s, or should be, the true Picture of Vertue,or Vice; yet so drawn, as to shew a man how to follow the one, andavoid the other." 4 The objects of satiric attack in comedy are aberrantsocial and psychological types, or humors, which society must cor-rect in order to remain healthy. Since satire is most effective when theaudience recognizes the humors under attack, comedy must deal withits own times without being radically nventive or original. Satire alsoexposes various forms of institutional corruption without dismantlingvital sociopolitical institutions. As usual, these commonplaces elidethe problems of reception and interpretation which make the "defenseof satire" as common as satire itself, but the Restoration playwrightsare accused, in addition, of professing the wrong politics and under-mining the very institutions their society values. Cowley has to fendoff the charge that his play was "intended or abuse and Satyre againstthe King's Party" because in Colonel Jolly he had created an unflatter-

13 Wilson, The Cheats, ed. Nahm, 130.14 Wilson, The Cheats, 237. All further references to this play appear in the text.



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The Comedy of Dispossession 417ing portrait of a royalist, and in Cutter and Worm merely pretendersto royalism. Wilson has to convince the reader (since he had virtuallyno theater audience) that his intention was not to attack religion but toshow "how that venerable name has been abus'd, and that best Thing,made Bawd to the worst actions" (237). Remarkably, both playwrightsproceed by appealing to the "rules" of comedy, not to personal beliefsor party ideology.

Cowley defends the ambivalent figure of Colonel Jolly by arguingthat characters in comedy must be morally if not socially inferior. TheColonel could at best be represented as "an ordinary jovial Gentleman,commonly called a Good Fellow," because to give him "the Characterof a Hero" would have violated the decorum of the genre:

Comedy is humble of her Nature, and has always been bred low, so that sheknows not how to behave her self with the great or the accomplisht.... If Ihad designed here the celebration f the Virtues of our Friends, would have madethe Scene nobler where intended o erect heir Statues. They should have stood inOdes, and Tragedies, and Epick Poems, (neither have I totally omitted thosegreater Testimonies of my Esteem of them). (A2v; my emphasis)

Cowley claims to be equally surprised by the objections to his two hec-tors, Cutter and Worm, since their character types are so familiar inJacobean, especially Jonsonian, satiric comedy. His counterargument isthat the "faults and follies" of a couple of obvious impostors cannot re-flect on the party loyal to the King "or any Man of Virtue or Honour init" (A2r). Wilson offers exactly the same defense for his two impostors,Bilboe and Titere Tu: "For if I have shewn the odd practices of twovain persons, pretending to what they were not, I think I have suffi-ciently justifi'd the Brave man, even by this Reason, That the Exceptionproves the Rule" (236). Cowley finally urges his readers to move be-yond propaganda and to discriminate between slander and satire, be-cause idealized characters would defeat the purpose of comedy:

We are not, I hope, become such Puritans ourselves as to assume the Name ofthe Congregation of the Spotless. It is hard for any Party to be so Ill as that noGood, Impossible to be so Good as that no Ill should be found among them.And it has been the perpetual priviledge of Satyr and Comedy, to pluck theirVices and Follies though not their Persons, out of the Sanctuary of any Title.(A2r)

In this style of discourse, therefore, "politics" seems to have no pri-ority over literary precept. The playwrights' theoretical orthodoxy isalso matched by the overall generic conventionality of their comedies.



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Compared to the formally innovative political plays of authors likeBuckingham, Dryden, Shadwell, Duffett, Behn, Southerne, Otway, andVanbrugh, hese early comedies rely heavily on pre-Civil War models,using variations on the city comedy formula to present retrospectivesatiric fictions about London life at various stages of the Common-wealth. The playwrights' acknowledged model is also invariably Jon-son. Cowley and Wilson stand out among the self-styled "sons of Ben"during the i66os, and their plays are the best early-Restoration x-amples of humors comedy.'5 The Jonsonian dialogue, underworld at-

mosphere, and hard-bitten ynicism of both plays sets them apart evenfrom ater politically oriented city comedies like Aphra Behn's The CityHeiress 1682) and John Crowne's City Politiques 1683). In his addressto the reader in Four New Plays (where The Committee irst appearedin 1665), Robert Howard also declares his preference for Jonson overPlautus and Terence, and marvels at "how severe the former Age hasbeen to some of the best of Mr. Johnson never to be equal'd Come-dies."'6 Generically, Howard's play remains within the Jacobean radi-tion of city intrigue comedy, although it has a stronger romantic plotthan Cutter f Coleman-Street nd The Cheats.

What does this interest in genre and literary history imply for theplays as political theater? However useful they might be as models, theJacobean city plays of Jonson, Marston, and Middleton cannot encom-pass the two great movements of the mid-seventeenth century-theascent of the Puritan o a position of unprecedented political and socialpower, and the corresponding descent of the royalist into political ob-scurity, personal danger, and material oss. The stock stage-Puritans ofJacobean omedy are odd, obsessive, ridiculous figures, usually periph-eral to the action and incapable of seriously threatening the socialorder. In an early play like Middleton's The Family of Love c. 1602),which William P. Holden describes as a "laboratory pecimen ... of the

15Nethercot mentions Cowley's strong sense of indebtedness to the "example andlearning" f Jonson, and remarks hat TheGuardian 1641, the original version of Cutter fColeman-Street) as written mostly under the influence of the humors school of Jonson(Abraham owley, 3). Nahm devotes an entire chapter to the relationship between Wil-son and Jonson n his edition of The Cheats 68-109). For any early-Restoration laywrightinterested n a realistic city setting for satiric purposes, Jonson s the unquestioned mas-ter. More generally, "the early Carolean dramatists eem to have felt pulled between thegenteel Fletcher tradition and the city comedy tradition headed by Ben Jonson," withabout a quarter of the new plays written between i66o and 1665 adhering o the secondmodel (Hume, Development f English Drama, 35).

16Robert Howard, Four New Plays London, 1665), Bir.



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The Comedy f Dispossession 419anti-Puritan omedy," he satire on Puritan hypocrisy and cunning de-velops in conjunction with a strong romantic plot involving the youngwards Maria and Gerardine.'7 onson's Amsterdam saints Ananias andTribulation are only two among the numerous fools victimised bySubtle and Face in TheAlchemist 16io), though their solemn cant aboutwealth makes their humiliation especially satisfying. Even the fanatical"Rabbi" Busy in Bartholomew air 1614) is kept carefully in check. AsBrian Gibbons comments, "perhaps only in the specially festive atmo-sphere of Jonsonian comedy is it so easy to dismiss the threat of suchradical political rhetoric and its purposefully infectious potential.""8

The Restoration playwrights, in contrast, view the Puritan Interreg-num first and foremost as a radical transformation of the social order.Hence they use the realistic, materialist, satiric, and contemporary"matter" f comedy to recreate the Commonwealth as an unjust andunnatural social and material dispensation. The Puritan characters nthese plays are no longer "fools who have gone mad on religion" butthe "new gentry" who have unfairly gained access to a style of livingentirely beyond their birth and breeding. Equally surprised and cor-

rupted by this social advancement, they also exercise power solely forpersonal gain. The comedies therefore centralize the experience of roy-alist dispossession and disempowerment within a sweeping, reductivepolitical critique. Puritan power is shown to be short-lived because it isan illegitimate appropriation of royal authority, and ludicrous becauseit violates the established social hierarchy. This transformation f politi-cal crises into social conflicts centering on class, property, and marriageis the distinctive method of early Restoration political comedy.

III

Narratives about the loss and recovery of Cavalier fortunes embodythe new politics of comedy in the 166os because royalist rhetoric viewsthe assault on property rights as the most explosive social consequenceof Puritan dominance. This symbolism has a firm basis in history, al-though social historians have differed in their assessments of royalistlosses in terms of property, wealth, and social position during the Inter-regnum period. According to Macaulay's History of England rom the

17 William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572-1642 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1954), 131.

18 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1980), 143.



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Accession f James he Second 1849), "a great part of the soil of Englandwas at once offered for sale" after the civil wars, causing many oldfamilies to disappear and as many new ones to gain sudden affluence.'9A century later, G. M. Trevelyan noted that the Church and Crownlands which had been sold to meet the needs of the revolutionarygovernment went back to their original owners at the Restoration, othat "no 'new aristocracy' was founded out of them," and "the amountof [private] land that changed hands was remarkably mall."20 Othertwentieth-century historians of Civil War agrarian egislation and the

Restoration and settlement have taken up a range of positions be-tween these extremes. Joan Thirsk considers the redistribution of landownership during the Interregnum omparable n scale to that broughtabout by the dissolution of monastic lands during the Reformation.2'Christopher Hill describes the Civil War as "more of a class war thanorthodox English theory allows." It brought the conflict between feu-dal methods of management and the interests of merchant capital to ahead, speeding up the process by which improved modes of produc-tion and investment could realize the full capital value of land. As Hillnotes, "the financial measures directed most severely against the roy-

alists had the effect of expropriating the debt-ridden, extravagantly-living sections of the aristocracy and gentry; and their wealth flowedthrough the parliamentary inancial organs by means of state contractsand grants into the pockets of the commercial class."' The Restora-tion necessarily arrested or reversed this process, turning the issues ofproperty and social power into urgent, complex, and intensely topicalproblems in the early i66os.

In considering the land issue as part of the topical context of politicalcomedy, it is important to distinguish between the different stages ofparliamentary ontrol over royalist property, and to consider the terms

of the Restoration and settlement. The first method of fiscal regulationwas sequestration, which began piecemeal in the counties in 1643 as away of generating revenue from delinquent property without interfer-ing with actual ownership. Officers appointed by the county commit-tees collected revenue from a sequestered estate until the delinquent

19Quoted in Robert Howard, The Committee, d. Thurber, 0.20 G. M. Trevelyan, English ocialHistory London: Longman's, Green, 1942), 243-44.21 Joan Thirsk, "The Sales of Royalist Land During the Interregnum," conomic istory

Review, 2d ser., 5 (1952-53): 188.22Christopher Hill, "The Agrarian Legislation of the Interregnum," nglishHistorical

Review 55 (1940): 222-23.



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The Comedy f Dispossession 421owner paid a composition fine, calculated as a variable percentage ofthe value of his property. The fiscal promise of the measure led to thecreation of a central body called the Committee for Compounding (orSequestrations), which oversaw the activities of the provincial com-mittees from Goldsmith's Hall in London. In October 1647, Parliamentalso ordered maximum improvements in rent from sequestered landsto forestall the army's demand for a general sale that would settle ar-rears in pay. Hill reports that sequestration was popular with thosesections in Parliament which supported property rights: the House ofLords, in particular, resisted the sale of private lands until its disso-lution in 1649. By 1651, however, the arrears n military pay and theneeds of Cromwell's Irish campaign had become critical, and nearlyeight hundred delinquent estates were sold by parliamentary ordi-nance between July 1651 and November i652. In general, historiansshare H. Egerton Chesney's view that "the connection between theGovernment's financial needs and its policy concerning delinquents'estates is very close" throughout this period.3'

At the Restoration here could be no uniform solution to the prob-

lem of ownership because private land had changed hands for differentreasons and in different ways during the previous fifteen years. Thirskargues that the sale of royalists' lands "produced far less social dis-location than that caused by the stale of public lands," because a largenumber of individual owners had managed to regain their propertybefore 166o by employing agents to represent them and by negotiatingwith their creditors.24 However, as Hill points out, composition fines,heavy Commonwealth taxation, and a range of other punitive mea-sures against royalists meant that "there was necessarily .. a very greatdeal of transfer of lands by private sale between 1645 and i66o."2 Such

private sales were confirmed at the Restoration, whereas the sales ofCrown and Church lands were revoked on the principle that the pur-chasers would receive appropriate ompensation. In the Declaration ofBreda (April 166o), Charles II left it to Parliament o devise the actualterms for the settlement of land disputes, but there was no generallegislation on behalf of private royalists in the early i66os. As Thirskexplains it, "the problem of restoring royalist lands-insofar as it had

3 H. Egerton Chesney, "The Transference f Lands in England," Transactions f theRoyal Historical Society 16 (1932): 204.

24Joan Thirsk, "The Restoration Land Settlement," ournal fModern History 6 (1954):327.

25 Hill, "Agrarian egislation," 30.



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not already been solved before i66o-was rendered so complex by theacts of royalists themselves that no simple formula or restitution couldhave been devised." 26 ome members of the nobility resorted o privateacts in Parliament o regain their estates, but the majority of privatelandowners were left to seek redress in the courts within a five-yearperiod, with no assurance of a favorable verdict. Chesney interpretsthis to mean that the Crown, Church, and royalist magnates were re-stored, but the "rank and file" were allowed to suffer.27 he figure ofthe dispossessed Cavalier n 166os comedy is therefore a reminder not

only of past injustices but of unresolved conflicts n the present.This experience of loss intensifies and exposes more starkly thanbefore the material asis of comedy's social, sexual, romantic, and reli-gious preoccupations. The atmosphere of the political comedies is bestdescribed as one of pervasive anxiety as royalist characters confrontthe loss of an accustomed way of life, and the "new Saints" attemptto replace them in the social hierarchy.' Predictably, he major locusof material tension in these plays is marriage, because the restratifi-cation of Commonwealth society problematizes the relation betweenmoney, sex, romance, and politics. The propertied, independent Puri-

tan woman, who derives her economic power from a dead husband ora father, now emerges as the object of desperate pursuit as well as un-disguised contempt. Beverly DeBord has noted that the good-natured,even affectionate marriage of convenience between Captain Blade andthe wealthy (and anonymous) Puritan Widow in Cowley's The Guardian(1641) acquires a strong overlay of bitterness n Cutter fColeman-Street(1661).3 n the Restoration version of the play, Colonel Jolly forces him-

26 Thirsk, "Restoration and Settlement," 28.27 Chesney, "Transference f Lands n England," 07.28Cowley and Wilson take a complex view of the effects of social change by main-

tainifig that self-interest motivates Puritans and royalists alike, and ideological differ-ences do not correspond to clear-cut moral divisions. Both their plays contain crudeimpostors within the royalist camp-the "sharking ouldiers" Cutter and Worm n Cut-ter of Coleman-Street, Major" ilboe and "Captain" itere Tu in The Cheats-who claimto have served in the king's army and plan to exploit their "loyalty" s unscrupulouslyas the Puritans exploit their godliness. Cowley's "jovial Gentleman" Colonel Jolly con-siders the threat of poverty sufficient excuse to steal his niece Lucia's fortune. In TheCheats, he royalist Afterwit ies, bullies, and blackmails his way into recovering his mort-gaged estate from Alderman Whitebroth. Both plays combine Jonsonian omic conven-tion with social pragmatism o offer a warped fellowship of "Cheators nd Cheaties"-victims and victimizers who feed off each other. Howard's TheCommittee s thus atypicalin offering a stridently royalist, black-and-white ontrast between Cavalier heroes andPuritan villains.

29 Beverly DeBord, "The Stage as Mirror of Society: The Widow in Two Seventeenth



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The Comedy of Dispossession 423self to marry Mistress Barebottle, the "damnable widow" of the soap-boiler who had bought his confiscated property, although he sees heras "a clog upon [the estate] worse than a Mortgage" (24). Jolly's friendCutter stages elaborate spiritual theatrics to win over the widow'sdaughter Tabitha, then insists that she "shalt Dance, and Sing, andDrink, and be Merry.... Nay, if thou do'st begin to look rustily-I'llhave thee paint thy self, like the Whore of Babylon" (27). Marriage inthese instances is not merely mercenary and antiromantic: it subvertsPuritan power mainly by victimizing the Puritan woman, and thor-oughly compromises the morality of the Cavalier male.

In Howard's The Committee, however, any serious association withPuritan women is ideologically unacceptable to the Cavalier ColonelsBlunt and Careless. As long as Anne, the daughter of a Cavalier knight,maintains her forced Puritan identity as Ruth, Colonel Careless ac-knowledges her charms but treats her parentage as a literally impreg-nable barrier:

Col. Car. Are you not the Committee Day's Daughter?Ruth. Yes, what then.

Col. Car. Then am I thankful, I had no defence against theeAnd Matrimony, ut thy own Father and Mother,Which are a perfect Committee to my nature.

Ruth. Why are you sure I wou'd have match'd with aMalignant, not a Compounder neither.

Col. Car. Nay, I have made thee a Joynture against my will;Methinks t were but as reasonable, hat I shou'd do somethingFor my Joynture, but by the way of Matrimony honestlyTo encrease your Generation; his, to tell you truth, isAgainst my Conscience.30

Careless's wry comment about marriage settlements suggests that theloss of property feminizes the Cavalier male, but by refusing to cohabitwith Puritans he can at least stop short of contributing to the multipli-cation (and by implication, improvement) of the enemy breed.

Besides marriage, the ostensibly new collaboration between religionand money thematically dominates these comedies. While most dis-plays of Puritan hypocrisy and greed in Jacobean city comedy endin failure, political ascendancy allows Puritan characters in the early

Century Comedies," Selected Papers rom the West Virginia Shakespeare nd Renaissance As-sociation 10 (1985): 74-76.

30 Robert Howard, The Committee, n Four New Plays, 87. All further references to thisplay appear in the text.



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Restoration plays to equate material success with spirituality in a waythat is particularly aggravating to the royalists. The two sides, there-fore, hold completely antithetical views on the relation between spiri-tual and worldly power. The Puritan characters maintain that theirnew prosperity is the long-awaited reward for their purity and good-ness-like Alderman Whitebroth in The Cheats, they are amazed at"how wealth trowles in vpon / an honest man" (176). In Howard'splay, members of the Committee for Sequestrations describe the veryobstinacy of malignant royalists as providential, since the forfeited es-

tates then "Of right fall into the hands of the chosen, which / Truly is amercy" (77). Wilson's nonconformist minister Scruple goes a step fur-ther to denounce ideology as a mere inconvenience in the pursuit ofprofit. When Afterwit offers him a living of ?300 a year, Scruple looksfor theological loopholes to defect to the Cavalier side, claiming that"both the Cause and Its Interest" have been

disserted by most men, vnless it be Some few,That haueing found how Sweet a thing it is To heada faction, make vse of vs, as the Monky did of theCatts paw, to Scrape the Nutts out of the fire.

(222)

With such propagandist reductions of the adversary, royalist char-acters feel justified in believing that the Puritans' material successis merely an effect of their illegitimate political power. As Ruth re-marks to her companion Arbella in The Committee, her supposed fatherMr. Day stole her estate by posing as a trustee and guardian, "and nowfor some years / Has confirm'd his unjust power by the unlawful /Power of the times" (67). The dark comedy of injustice and illegalitymasquerading as religious necessity finds climactic expression in thefirst committee scene in Howard's play, when Careless and Blunt losetheir land for refusing to swear loyalty to the Presbyterian Covenant:

Col. Careless. No, we will not take it, much good may it do themThat have swallows large enough;'Twill work one day in their stomachs.

Col. Blunt. The day may come, when those that suffer for theirConscience and honour may be rewarded.

Mr. Day. I, I, you make an idol of that honour.Col. B. Our worships then, are different, you make that

Your dol which brings you interest;We can obey that which bids us lose it.



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The Comedy of Dispossession 425Arbella. Brave Gentlemen.

Ruth. I stare at 'um till my eyes ake.(75)

This scene is ideologically central because it counterposes the Puritans'use of religion as a coercive legal weapon against the royalists' appealto honor as a secular, courtly ideal embodied in the absent monarchy.The conflict over oaths has an added edge because in an earlier scene,Colonel Careless's Irish servant Teague has "taken the Covenant" by

running away with a bookseller's printed copies of it before they "poi-son the whole Nation." More important, his scene convinces Ruth andArbella to pursue the colonels actively as prospective lovers and hus-bands, because "there are not two such again, to be had for love normoney" (76). This atypical congruity between romance and politicseliminates the sense of ideological compromise which undercuts mar-riage in the comedies of Wilson and Cowley, and ensures the Cavaliercouples an unqualified victory over the "Commit sic] rogues."

IV

All three plays widen the gap between politics and spirituality fur-ther by insisting that the primary identity of the Puritan-in-power snot religious but bureaucratic: he is essentially a willing collabora-tor in a coercive, secularized state machinery that has replaced olderinstitutions of governance. In this respect, the comedies occupy anintermediate position between two other bodies of satirical discourseabout the nonmonarchical state: anti-Commonwealth propaganda ofthe Interregnum period, and pre-Licencing Act anatomies of institu-tional power like Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) and Fielding's Pasquin

(1736) and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737). The royalistpamphlet-plays of the late 1640s contribute substantially to the viewthat the new bureaucracy, which implements the government's poli-cies on land regulation and taxation, is an instrument of institutional-ized oppression, theft, and revenge. Collectively, these works confer onwords like "Committee," "Council," nd "Committee-man" he sameconnotations of coercive officialdom and corruption that terms like"big government," "bureaucracy," corporate ethics," and "companyman" now carry in the political-professional rhetoric of late-capitalistsocieties.

For instance, in Samuel Sheppard's virulently antibureaucratic The



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Committee-Man urried 1647),Suck-Dry he Committee Man and Com-mon Curse the Excise Man are "like Hypocrates wins, must live anddie together: the Excise is the Committee's prop.""3 uck-Dry hopesto see "Domestic Jarres" ontinue because they bring him his hundredpounds a day (8), and claims repeatedly that the Committee meetsonly to steal. His only fear is that his brethren may have met "in fullassembly ... except my presence-and ere I come, perhaps may sharethe Gold that's due to me" (2). In The Disease of the House (1649) thePuritan "State" onsists of four rogues, the Commons are a "common

cheat, theif, pick-pocket," and a character called John Capon describesthe Puritans' plan to "kill de King, rob de Shurch, wrong de People,Pill, Poll, Sess, Excise; begar, be all their Trade, nothing but Rob, Steal,Theive."32 heKentish ayre 1648) gives a different wist to the problemof bureaucratic coercion. In it, all sectaries living within the "cursedcitie" are threatened that they will be sent "unto Hell / unto the blackCommittee," and the Cavalier knight, Sir Thomas Peyton, resolves toprevent the Parliamentary ebels from seizing "our ives and states,"and building "high upon our ruins."3 The Restoration political come-dies offer a similar critique of "revolutionary" olitics; in the largerliterary-historical ontext, they also foreshadow the satiric theater ofGay and Fielding. The Beggar's Opera s considered the first major workto separate politics from its charismatic associations with kingship andreligion, and to arrive at a corrosive recognition of "all authority as per-manently corrupted by self-interest."' In Fielding's reflexive "satireson the times," tage and society eagerly embrace corruptions or whichthe realm of politics is the definitive model. It is important to recog-nize, therefore, hat the Puritan functionaries n the Restoration politi-cal comedies exercise power with the same self-satisfied perversity,appeals to necessity, and malice as Gay's underworld "executives" ndFielding's prime ministers theatrical.

31 The Committe-Man urried: Comedy resented o the ViewofAll Men (London, 1647),6. The title page offers a convenient summary of royalist complaints by describing heplay as "A piece discovering the corruption of committee-men, and excisemen, the un-just sufferings of the royall party, the divellish hypocrisie of some Round-heads, herevolt for gaine of some ministers." All further references o this work appear n the text.

32 Anonymous, The Disease of the House; Or, the State Mountebank London, 1649), 5.33Alexander Brome (?), The Kentish Fayre, Or, The Parliament old to their Best Worth

(Rochester, Eng., 1648), 5, 8.4 John Bender, magining he Penitentiary: iction and the Architecture fMind n Eigh-

teenth Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 88.



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The Comedy f Dispossession 427These abuses are particularly visible in The Committee, hich deals

with the new bureaucracy responsible for enforcing the agrarian poli-cies of the Interregnum. Howard's title refers to the central Committeeof Sequestrations at Goldsmith's Hall which supervised the collectionof revenue from sequestered property, set composition terms for de-linquents, and arbitrated cases of uncertain title and default. All ofthe play's Puritan characters are either committeemen or members ofthe "Committee Family"-the household of Chairman Day, which in-cludes Ruth and Arbella, the captive Cavalier heiresses. The very word"Committee" s a badge of identity and a new metonym for power, asthe Days' son Abel recognizes when he boasts foolishly before Arbella:"I know Parliament-men nd Sequestrators; I know Committee-men,and Committee-men know me" (70). The activities of this body serve,then, as textbook examples of corruption in the Puritan control overroyalist property. During its two meetings, the Committee makes anunauthorized gift of confiscated land to one of its members, dispos-sesses a Cavalier infant so that "he may not / Be in possession of theLand till he can promise / He will not turn to the enemy," and turns

away a pregnant widow because the Cavalier in her belly is a signthat the "perverse generation encreaseth" go).The melodrama of thesescenes notwithstanding, the Committee's actions replicate the formsof corruption with which the City and county sequestration commit-tees were actually charged. Chesney reports that the Commissionersfor Compounding in London could acquire land "in excess" or in lieuof salary, and did invariably appear as purchasers of delinquent prop-erty. The transactions, however, were heavily biased in their favor, andwere often on so large a scale as to suggest speculation, not long-term ownership. The machinery of sequestration was also dominated

by London merchants and citizens, explaining why Howard representshis Cavalier-Puritan confrontations as a clash between bluff countryhonesty and smug citified corruption.

Howard's play underscores the gravity of dispossession-ColonelBlunt describes the committee's papers as "the winding sheets to manya poor Gentleman's Estate" 69)-but it also creates an absurd conflictin which the adversaries have no common grounds for dialogue. Likedystopian "mimic men," the Committeemen are armed with "laws,""rules," nd "instructions" which they must enforce so as not to "Losewhat providence hath put into our hands" (75). Like the liminal heroes

of dystopia, the Cavaliers experience the irony of submitting under



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duress to laws they consider both illegal and immoral. The regulatoryfunctions of law are therefore reduced to a travesty, as when Blunt ex-plains to Careless the reasons for his arrest in the street:

Why, an Action or two for Free Quarter, now madeTrover nd Conversion: ay, I believe we shall be suedWith an Action of Trespass; or every Field we haveMarched over, and be indicted for Riots, for going atUnseasonable hours, above two in a Company.

(83)

A similar conception of law appears allegorically in Sheppard's TheCommittee-Man Curried when Rebellion, the turncoat uncle of Loyaltythe Cavalier, boasts about the punitive power of the new order:

our laws give bounds to Roysters, uch as you;We have Committees close and sub, and grand,That make strict Inquisition, after those, who havePresum'd o fight for Royaltie.

(3)

From the royalist viewpoint, this resemblance between the Puritan bu-

reaucracy and the Catholic Inquisition is a conclusive and sensationalindictment of Puritan politics, since it equates the coercive power oftwo institutions that were ostensibly the products of radically anti-thetical religious systems.

v

If the English Civil War was "more of a class war than orthodoxEnglish theory allows," the authors of royalist comedy see Puritandominance almost exclusively in terms of a radical erasure of class

and gender distinctions. All three playwrights configure recent his-tory through the trope of the world upside down, which now signifiesa double inversion-the ascendancy of servants over masters, and ofwomen over men.5 This is a particularized application of a versatiletopos which, as E. R. Curtius notes, informs the structure of numerous"complaint[s] on the times," and can signify a "reversal of the entire

3 A pamphlet by John Taylor ntitled 7he Diseases f the Times London, 642) suggestshow widespread hese perceptions were. The "Distempers f the Common-Wealth" nu-merated on the title page include "the dangerous disease of feminine divinity," "the

aspiring ambition of presumption,""the audacious height of disobedience," and "the

painted deceitfulness of hypocrisie."



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The Comedy f Dispossession 429order of nature."'6 That Christopher Hill uses this topos to charac-terize radical sectarian thought-what he calls the "revolt within theRevolution" during the middle decades of the seventeenth century-demonstrates the centrality of the idea of inversion in revolutionaryEngland. Hill recalls that the suspension of "social decencies" on cer-tain occasions had served a cathartic unction in medieval society, but"what was new in the seventeenth century was the idea that the worldmight be permanently urned upside down: that the dream world ofthe Land of Cokayne or the kingdom of heaven might be attainable onearth now."37 In this respect, royalist ideology simply repudiates whatsectarian thought envisions as the desirable social and spiritual ideal.Furthermore, he fellowship of hectors, con men, and disaffected roy-alists in political comedy does invoke the spirit of misrule in its oppo-sition to Puritan authority, but the underlying intention of anti-Puritancomedy is anti-carnivalesque-it eeks to subvert a present regime onlybecause it prefers an older hierarchical order. According to ColonelCareless's "Malignant Sonnet" n The Committee,

all things that shou'd be

Are turn'd topsie turvy;The Freedom we have,Our Prince made a Slave,

And the Masters must now turn the Waiters.The great ones obeyWhile the Rascals do sway,

And the Loyal to Rebels are Traitors.(93)

The advantage of hindsight hardens the conservatism of such a cri-tique: at the Restoration, royalist playwrights are particularly well-

situated to dismiss the Puritan revolution as an unnatural aberrationrather han a necessary stage in the political evolution of the nation.The comedies' attacks on class inversions in Commonwealth society

rest mainly on the idea that for Puritan upstarts, political power is

36 E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask,Bollingen Series, vol. 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 95.

37Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the EnglishRevolution (New York: Viking, 1972), 13-14. Curiously, Ian Donaldson also uses thefigure of the world upside down to trace "the continuity of a variety of comic traditions,problems, and techniques" n major comedy from Jonson to Fielding, yet completelybypasses the theological, literary, and propagandist raditions of the Interregnum andearly Restoration n which the figure comes closest to lived political history (The WorldUpside-Down: Comedy rom Jonson to Fielding [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], 23).



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The Comedy f Dispossession 431wou'd / Get me" (61). His services to the colonel restore the older idealof reciprocal obligation based on the master's protective patronageand the servant's voluntary devotion. Unlike Mrs. Day, Teague "knowshis place."

If the feminized Puritan households and families in these comediesconstitute a parody of society, the men's efforts at governance consti-tute a parody of politics. This is due in part to the Puritan characters'compulsive abuse of power. In The Cheats, "Alderman" Whitebroth

uses his position to pass off spoilt goods,forfeit fully paid bonds, melt

down currency, profit from the deliberate sinking of merchant vessels,and steal mortgaged property. Howard's Committee of Sequestrationsmeets "to set in order / The weighty matters of State," but its unethicalmethods quickly reduce its members to wolves, vultures, and "privatemarriage-Jobbers" 67, 74). The Puritans' failure arises from what roy-alists regard as a necessary interdependence between the political andsocial realms: those not born to power either misuse it or develop ludi-crous pretensions to it, like the committee clerk Obadiah, who claimsto be reeling under the burden of "affairs of State" 92). The violation

of class divisions ensures that Puritan power is both short-lived andself-canceling.Because of the comedies' specific political orientation, their attack

on female Puritans is also tangential to the dominant traditions ofseventeenth-century satires against women. The source of the attackhere is not what Felicity Nussbaum calls "the patriarchal assumptionof the natural inferiority of women and the inherent superiority ofmen," nor is there much concern with the customary satiric myths ofwomen's inconstancy, ust, deceit, and treachery.38 he array of Puri-tan women in the three comedies includes only two adulteresses, the

wives of Constable Double Diligence and the astrologer Mopus in TheCheats. The playwrights object, instead, to the women's appropriationof male roles and prerogatives which politics has already rendered lle-gitimate. Consequently, the real friction in these plays is not betweenmen and women but between royalists and Puritans of both sexes, re-sulting in a striking ack of sympathy between women on the two sidesof the political divide. Colonel Jolly's daughter Aurelia in Cutter of

38 Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires Against Women, 166o-1750 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), 9. Nussbaum does not deal withpre-Restoration atires, but her commentary n Restoration atires against women (8-42)

shows clearly that the attack on Puritan women in comedies like Cutter of Coleman-Streetand The Committee ollows a different path.



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Coleman treet s among those who "can't abide" he Puritan Barebottlewomen, so much so that she has resolved to "break my sister Tabitha'sheart within a Month one way or other" (13).

From the male Cavalier viewpoint, of course, the economic, sexual,spiritual, and political power of female Puritans s doubly misplaced,and therefore doubly unacceptable. Colonel Jolly finds Mistress Bare-bottle intolerable, irst, because she has inherited her financial powerfrom her husband and, second, because she deludes herself about thesource of that power: "my Husband ... never sought for [spiritual] n-

comes, but he had some Blessing followed immediately" (ti). As thecolonel reminds her, "he sought for 'em once out o' my Estate too, Ithank him" (-i). In The Cheats eligious fanaticism s the prerogative ofPuritan wives. When the minister Scruple threatens to abandon non-conformity, Mrs. Whitebroth and Mrs. Mopus bribe and coerce himback to the cause by haranguing him about how the "despisers of thebrethren [will] bristle," and the "holy Sisters be humbled" by his act(221). Mrs. Day in The Committee s seen as the most predatory becauseshe seeks political, not sexual or spiritual, power. Informing her hus-band that his peers are ready to call her the "real Committee-man,"

Mrs. Day berates him for being "ever at your (Ifs;) / You're afraid ofyour own shadow. . . (if) I did not bear you up, / Your heart wou'dbe down in your Breeches At every turn" (63). Such belligerence de-humanizes her (the Colonels refer to her as "she-Kite" "great Pike,"and "Committee-man's Cow"), even as it emasculates her husband andprevents him from exercising his (illegitimate) authority.

The royalist playwrights therefore ridicule as antifeminine the verypractices which feminism considers liberating in Puritanism. Nuss-baum has suggested that "the effect of Puritanism on the status ofEnglish women defies easy clarification. It both improved the statusof the sex and increased male authority over the family. Certainly itincreased the potential for conflict between the sexes."39 ocial histo-rians like Lawrence Stone, Sheila Rowbotham, and Ralph Houlbrookeagree that the Puritan emphasis on individual will and freedom ofconscience undermined the support for patriarchal authority in sec-tarian thought. This was particularly true of sects (like the Quakersand Ranters) which supported the "natural reedom" of women, allow-ing them to preach, prophesy, and engage in collective political action.Rowbotham describes these activities as "outlet[s] or the suppressed

39 Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, 13.



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The Comedy f Dispossession 433female spirit," which the men had to accept because they subscribedto the same faithY' At the Restoration, however, "patriarchy was oncemore secure and the agitation of 'inferiors' was suppressed.... Thedangerous ideas of the Civil War about the equal rights of all believersto inspiration, and the democratic effects of this in society, were re-jected by the church." 1Even a protofeminist ike Mary Astell argued atthe end of the seventeenth century that a woman's proper sphere wasthe home, not the world of religious and political polemic. The greaterautonomy of Puritan women during the Interregnum was thereforea consequence of sectarian radicalism which, paradoxically, even thesects did not support without ambivalence; the royalist playwrightsexaggerate this uncertainty into a nightmare of female insubordina-tion, spirit-possession, and political meddling.

VI

To describe this multipronged critique of Puritan power in the earlyRestoration plays as "reactionary" nd "partisan" s both true and in-

conclusive, just as it is true that the attention to genre prevents theplays from being merely propagandist. By tapping into and extend-ing the pre-Civil War tradition of anti-Puritan satire, the comedies ofHoward and others are able to accomplish the ideologically impera-tive task of vilifying the Commonwealth. For the same reason, theseplays do not establish the generic models that we consider definitiveor canonical for the Restoration-that accomplishment belongs to thecomedies of Etherege, Dryden, Shadwell, Wycherley, and Otway in the167os, and of Southerne, Vanbrugh, and Congreve in the 169os. Whatthe early political comedies do establish is a sociopolitical perspective

on Puritanism whose significance outlasts its original context, becausefictions of royalist dispossession make a striking comeback in the Torycomedies of the Exclusion Crisis period. Some of these later plays, suchas Thomas Durfey's The Royalist and Aphra Behn's The Roundheads,Or The Good Old Cause both 1682), revive the Commonwealth settingas a reminder of past injustices that would reappear in the present if

40 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: Rediscovering Women n History from the 17thCentury o the Present New York: Pantheon, 1975), 9. Hill also comments that "Womenhad played a prominent role in the heretical sects of the Middle Ages, and this tradi-tion came to surface again in revolutionary England" World Turned Upside Down, 250;

see pp. 247-60 for his discussion of the position of women within sects like the Quakers,Ranters, and Familists).41 Rowbotham, Hidden from History, 13.



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434 Aparna Dharzadker

the Whigs were allowed to prevail in the issue of succession.'2 Others,such as Durfey's Sir Barnaby Whigg 1681) and Behn's The City Heiress(1682), are set in the present, but create Commonwealth connectionsto explain the seditious and disloyal behavior of Whig knights like SirBarnaby and Sir Timothy Treat-All. n short, the transgressions of classand gender represented by the mid-century Puritan state still possessenough cautionary value for supporters of the monarchy n the 168osto shape political theater during the Exclusion Crisis.

The early Restoration comedies raise other questions, however,

which remain peculiarly pertinent to the moment of their compositionand first performance. Why do playwrights like Cowley, Howard, andWilson construct such detailed critiques of the social, economic, class,and gender dimensions of Puritan power in the Interregnum, when thepolitical "literalness" f their arguments seems to undercut the "liter-ariness" of their texts? Or, to reverse the question, why do they choosea genre like comedic satire, which seems to demand a high degree ofliterariness in the treatment of its material, when the material's pri-mary value seems to lie in its political import and efficacy? I have ar-gued throughout this essay that the playwright chose comedy because

it offered very specific potential for the inscription of political meaningand experience, but perhaps a greater mpetus behind the plays is there-empowerment of theatricality tself. The Puritan Interregnum wasthe largest drama of its kind to be enacted in the metaphoric heater ofthe nation, but it was played out without the possibility of legitimatetheatrical re-presentation. In the first half decade of the Restoration,then, it seems equally important o stage the drama of the Interregnumand to reinvest theater with the authority and decorum of dramaticrules. The early playwrights, particularly those who were also activein the pre-Civil War theater, take on both political and literary chal-lenges to stage the experience they do not wish to leave unperformed.3

University f Oklahoma

42 Behn's TheRoundheads s, of course, an updated version of Tatham's TheRump 166o),demonstrating n a particularly direct way the importance of a late Commonwealth et-ting to a Tory playwright.

43I want to thank Daniel Cottom for helpful comments on an earlier version of thisessay, Frank Palmeri or his meticulous reading of the final text, and Vinay Dharwadkerfor knowing how arguments hould end.

the comedy of dispossession

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