The Comedy of Dispossession Author(s): Aparna Dharwadker Source: Studies in Philology, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Autumn, 1998), pp.

411-434 Published by: University of North Carolina Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4174620 . Accessed: 28/04/2013 08:09
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The

Comnedy

of

DispDossession

by AparnaDharwadker
The arbitrary separation of the "literary" from the "political" has been an important issue in recent historicist and materialist arguments about the interpretation of early modern writing. But the precise problem of the historical relation between these two terms, and the areas of experience they designate, involves questions of canonicity and literary value. Scholars dealing with well-known Renaissance materials tend to view the critical politicization of literature, especially the works of Shakespeare, primarily as a corrective act: it restores an incipient cultural power to texts that humanist criticism has appropriated and systematically depoliticized through aesthetic and formal analysis. This correction is necessary because, as Leonard Tennenhouse suggests, in the Renaissance "literature and political discourse had not yet been differentiated in the manner of a modern critical discourse."1 Scholars dealing with late-seventeenth-century materials, however, describe the effects of humanist interpretation in nearly opposite terms: Restoration texts have been denied literary value precisely because they are self-evidently, and 'merely," political. Steven Zwicker notes the "general resistance among literary historians to the politicization of the literary," but argues that Restoration literature provokes this response to an unusual extent: this most embattledof literarycultures-and perhapsbecause it is so very [Iun embattled,because the literatureis so entangledwith or contaminatedby poliI

Leonard Tennenhouse, Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare'sGenres (New

York:Methuen, 1986),2. Louis Montrosealso observes that the focus of new historicist methodologieshas been "upona refiguringof the socio-culturalfield within which canonicalRenaissanceliteraryand dramaticworks were originallyproduced;upon resituatingthemnot only in relationshipto othergenresand modes of discoursebut also in relationshipto contemporaneous social institutionsand non-discursivepractices" ("Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politicsof Culture," in TheNewHistoricism, ed.
H. Aram Veeser [New York: Routledge, 1989], 17).

411 ? 1998 The University of North Carolina Press

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tics-the literaryhas seemed to need special defense.Weare still asked to cling to the idea that what is most literaryin Restorationliteratureis that which is least political or that which can be elevated above the political? Zwicker's comment in part explains why the revisionary effort within Restoration studies has been not only to establish the political intertexts of canonical literature but to reclaim noncanonical, politically vital forms of discourse. The mass of topical verse collected in contemporary editions like Poemson Affairs of State(1963-75) and Court Satiresof the Restoration(1976) is at best subliterary, yet it demonstrates that the events of the Civil War and Restoration transformed the relation between politics and writing.3 George deForest Lord suggests that until the 1630S most English satire is "typical rather than topical," whereas Augustan satirical verse "freely attacks public figures and institutions, concerns itself with every aspect of public affairs, from national issues of the greatest consequence down to the most trivial incidents of life at court," and "plays a considerable part in the determination of large issues in England."4 Under these conditions, political intention and meaning have no necessary relation to literary value; conversely, the absence of literary value does not cancel the political instrumentality of a body of writing. I want to explore this tension between topical imperatives and aesthetic norms in the particular case of Restoration drama by considering an obscure early group of anti-Puritan comedies-Abraham Cowley's Cutter of Coleman-Street (166i), Sir Robert Howard's The Committee (1662), and John Wilson's The Cheats (1663).5Chronologically, the plays
2 Steven Zwicker, "Linesof Authority:Politics and LiteraryCulture in the Restoraed. England, of Seventeenth-Century TheLiterature andHistory of Discourse: tion,"in Politics Press,1987),231. KevinSharpeand Steven Zwicker(Berkeley:Universityof California 3 George deForest Lord, ed., Poems Satirical 166oVerse, on Affairsof State:Augustan

1714, 7 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963-75); John Harold Wilson,

of theRestoration (Columbus:Ohio StateUniversityPress,1976). ed., CourtSatires 4 George deForestLord,introductionto Poems on Affairs of State,vol. i (1963),xxvii,
xxvi, xlii.

in quality,method,and 51 have chosen these threeplays because they are comparable TheRump: substance.Muchof what I say here would apply equallywell to JohnTatham's orMonsieur Raggou Times(i66o) and JohnLacy'sTheOldTroop, of TheLate or TheMirrour (1664).TheRump combinesfact with fantasy to chroniclepolitical events in Londonbein October1659 and the arrivalof Cromwell'sProtectorate tween the collapseof Richard critiqueof Puritanpower, class,and GeneralMonk'sforces four months later.Tatham's of Cowley,Howard,and Wilson,althoughthe gender coincideswith the representations political play's improvised,split structuremakes it genericallyatypical of Restoration comedy.Lacy's play introducesthe novelty of a Civil Warratherthan Commonwealth setting, and uses it to attackboth Roundheadsand plundererswithin the king's army. The Otherpolitically orientedcomic plays of the early i66os include FrancisKirkman's

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TheComedy of Dispossession

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belong to a period of royalistmythmakingwhen discreditingthe social, cultural, and political deviations of the Puritan Interregnumwas as important as celebratingthe Stuart Restoration.Most new plays written between 166o and 1665,for instance, engage in a "triumphal trampling upon the remainsof the Commonwealth" which RobertD. Hume finds "unsurprising."6 In this volatile and reactive context, the comic plays of Cowley and others constitute a distinctive species of political drama because they realize political meanings through the specific resources of their literarygenre. As comedies they focus on the social consequences of the Puritan revolution, mainly by representing Puritan political authority as a form of social and sexual transgressionthat violates existing hierarchies of class and gender. As full-length performance texts with literaryantecedents,they assimilate and displace the traditionof anonymous closet plays and quasi-dramaticpamphlets which effectively constitutes the comedic-satiric theater of the InterMore than other kinds of contemporaneousdrama,the comeregnum.7 dies also employ realistic images of the Puritanin power to show why the new sociopolitical order was destined to fail. Finally,they treatone prominent practice of the Commonwealthperiod-the sequestration, confiscation,and sale of royalist estates-as metonymic of all political and social injustice,and turn the loss and recovery of Cavalierfortunes into powerfully symbolic fictions of dispossession and resistance. My purpose in reconsideringthese little-known texts, therefore,is to show the complex interrelationof political and literaryimpulses even in "minor" drama:the plays' predictableroyalism does not preclude a serious engagementwith the practiceand theory of comedy as a genre. In section II, I consider how political and literary issues are linked in the Restorationdiscourse on dramaticgenres, and in the reflexive commentaries that the playwrights in question append to the published texts of their plays. In the same section, I also relate theory to practice by discussing how early-Restoration topical comedies modify the pre-Civil Wartraditionsof anti-Puritanrepresentation.In sections III
Presbyterian Lash; or,Noctroff's MaidWhipt (i66i), ThomasPorter'sA WittyCombat (1663), and Richard Head's Hic et Ulbique, or TheHumours of Dublin(1663). Alfred Harbage allows these plays "nomeritas drama," but considersthem "interesting as straws in the wind"because they reportcontemporary scenes and incidents (Cavalier Drama [London: OxfordUniversityPress,1936], 85). 6 Robert D. Hume, TheDevelopment of EnglishDramain the LateSeventeenth Century Hyder E. Rollins,"AContributionto the Historyof the EnglishCommonwealthDrama," Studiesin Philology i8 (1921):267-333,for a full discussion of these plays and pamphlets.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), 239. 7See Harbage,Cavalier Drama,chapter 4 (in both Parts I and II of the study), and

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throughV, I focus on the sociopolitical experience which Cowley and others inscribe in their comedies, and the inversionsof class and gender they collectively satirize8 In a brief concluding section, I outline the influence of these early plays on later political comedy while reemphasizing their immediate contexts.
II

The "politicsof genre"emerges as an explicit concernin Restoration dramatictheory for two historicalreasons:the radicalpoliticizationof drama and theater in reaction to the Interregnum,and the substantial increase, after 166o, in reflexive authorial commentary about genre. The discourse of the period conceives of genre as a system of particularized representationthat invests specific kindsof works with specific kinds of political meaning, thus defining the limits of political reference even as it makes political representationpossible. The event of antithe Restoration, for instance,occasions a spate of pro-monarchist, Commonwealthpropaganda,but even in this partisancontextRestoration playwrights keep in view the specific political potential of major genres like the historical play, tragedy, tragicomedy,and comedy. In their scheme of differentiation,historical drama uses the past as an analogy for the present so that an audience may better understandits own predicamentsand triumphs.The "high"genre of tragedy and the serious elements in tragicomedystage the vital confrontationbetween licit and illicit forms of political authority and power. In contrast,the
8 My readingsattemptto redressin some measurethe scholarlyand criticalneglect of of Colemanfunctions.Cowley's Cutter these plays, particularlyof their political-literary edition Street is not availablein a dependablemodem edition;CarrylNelson Thurber's andLiterature of IllinoisStudiesin Language (University of RobertHoward's7he Committee 7 [1921]:7-138), is both old and textually unreliable;MiltonC. Nahm's edition of John (Oxford:BasilBlackwell,1935)is satisfactoryfromthe viewpoint of Wilson'sTheCheats textualscholarship,but does not make a good readingtext. Some politicalcomedies of Witches (i68i), Behn'sThe the ExclusionCrisis period, such as Shadwell's7TeLancashire (1683),are (both 1682),and JohnCrowne'sCityPolitiques and TheRoundheads CityHeiress beginning to attractserious criticalattention,but the comedies of the early i66os have of Drama RevelsHistory not been the subjectof even one full-lengthessay.Vol. 5 of T7w of Ened. JohnLoftiset al. (London:Methuen,1976)and Hume'sDevelopment in English, glish Drama in the Late SeventeenthCentury are at the moment the most recent historical

and neitherwork can commentat studies to commenton the plays underconsideration, length on individualplays. Biographiesof the authorspresent a similarproblem:H. J.
Oliver's Sir RobertHoward:A Critical Biography(Durham: Duke University Press, 1963)

(New York:Russell & TheMuse'sHannibal Cowley, and ArthurH. Nethercot'sAbraham

Russell, 1969) are clearly outdated, while Wilson has yet to find a biographer.

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TheComedy of Dispossession

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"low" genre of comedy, with its potential for satire, allows the ideological adversary to be directly represented, ridiculed, and punished as a political and social being. The idea of genre as the medium of a political message is pervasive in the authorialrhetoricof the 166os.In the preface to Andronicus Comnenius (1664), a play about a twelfth-century Byzantine usurper and tyrant,JohnWilson states that he chose "Astory of the EasternEmpire,
between the years 1179 and 1183" because those events "might not be

thought altogether unparalelto what our selves have seen."9Wilson's parallelis part of a cluster of seriocomicplays which develop Andronicus as an analogue for Cromwell in an attempt to transformthe latter from Commonwealth hero to Restorationvillain.'0In the epilogue to TheUsurper (performed 1664),Edward Howard describes his tragedy as "ARecordof all such Loyalty; / That after long Contests, did safely bring / Subjectsto Rights,and to his Throneour King.""As Howard's language suggests, the emotional-political significations of kingship are the province of serious drama, whether the narrative of a given play is historical or fictional. Cowley's special epilogue to Charles II at a court performance of Cutterof Coleman-Street (166i) comments memorably on how the structural logic of comedy fits the purposes of anti-Puritancritique.Cowley suggests that after an age of watching the Puritans'madness on the 'Publick Stage,"Charles can finally see "TheirTragickFollies brought to Comedy" in plays such as his own. The "low"scene of comedy also rightly degrades characterswho had held an absurdlyhigh station "Onthe World'sTheatrenot long ago."12 Comedy in this view is not only the necessary but the naturalweapon of political revenge. The authors of political comedy in the early i66os are thus acutely conscious of writing comedies-a stance that produces some unexpected rhetoric, and brings "political"theater remarkablyclose to conventional "literary"models of the genre. The playwrights' reflexive comments on their plays in prologues, epilogues, and printed addresses contain neither political polemic nor propagandabut more or less lengthy arguments about the purpose, method, and decorum
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 Worksof AbrahamCowley (London, 1693), 7:32. All further references to this play appear in the text.
9 John Wilson, AndronicusComnenius:A Tragedy(London, 1664), A3r-v.

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of their chosen form. Cowley and Wilson are also on the defensive in their argumentsbecause of the curiously hostile reception of their plays in an otherwise favorablepartisanatmosphere.Despite his years of exile with CharlesII in France,Cowley was accused of vilifying the royalists through his three main characters,leading him to point out that after serving the king's party "twentyyears during all the time of their Misfortunesand Afflictions,I must be a very rash and imprudent Person if I chose out that of their Restitution to begin a Quarrelwith them. I must be too much a Madmanto betrusted withsuchan Edg'd Tool as Comedy" (A2r; my emphasis). Wilson's play was censored heavily by the Master of Revels, Henry Herbert,licensed for performanceon 6 March1663,and then withdrawnby the king's order two weeks later because it allegedly contained "many things of a Scandalous offen13 The playwrights'discourse on genre is thus inseparable sive nature."' from their defensive stance: Cowley's preface to Cutterof ColemanStreetand Wilson's address to the reader in TheCheatsare apologiae in an immediate sense, but also important documents in Restoration genre theory, and the most substantial statements on comedy before Shadwell and Dryden begin debating the relativeclaims of humor and wit later in that decade. The "theory"of comedy that Wilson and Cowley outline is, at one level, a restatementof neoclassical doctrine as popularized by Sidney and Jonson.Comedy "eitheris, or should be, the true Pictureof Vertue, or Vice; yet so drawn, as to shew a man how to follow the one, and 14 The objects of satiric attack in comedy are aberrant avoid the other." social and psychological types, or humors, which society must correct in order to remain healthy.Since satire is most effective when the audience recognizes the humors under attack,comedy must deal with its own times without being radicallyinventive or original.Satirealso exposes various forms of institutionalcorruptionwithout dismantling vital sociopolitical institutions. As usual, these commonplaces elide the problems of reception and interpretationwhich make the "defense of satire"as common as satire itself, but the Restorationplaywrights are accused, in addition, of professing the wrongpolitics and undermining the very institutions their society values. Cowley has to fend off the charge that his play was "intendedfor abuse and Satyreagainst the King's Party"because in Colonel Jolly he had createdan unflatter13 14

Wilson, The Cheats,ed. Nahm, 130. Wilson, The Cheats,237. All further references to this play appear in the text.

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The Comedyof Dispossession

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ing portrait of a royalist, and in Cutter and Worm merely pretenders to royalism. Wilson has to convince the reader (since he had virtually no theater audience) that his intention was not to attack religion but to show "how that venerable name has been abus'd, and that best Thing, made Bawd to the worst actions" (237). Remarkably, both playwrights proceed by appealing to the "rules" of comedy, not to personal beliefs or party ideology. Cowley defends the ambivalent figure of Colonel Jolly by arguing that characters in comedy must be morally if not socially inferior. The Colonel could at best be represented as "an ordinary jovial Gentleman, commonly called a Good Fellow," because to give him "the Character of a Hero"would have violated the decorum of the genre: Comedy is humble of her Nature, and has always been bred low, so that she knows not how to behave her self with the great or the accomplisht.... If I had designed herethe celebration I wouldhavemade of the Virtuesof our Friends, theScenenobler I intended where to erecttheirStatues. They should have stood in Odes, and Tragedies,and Epick Poems, (neither have I totally omitted those greaterTestimoniesof my Esteem of them). (A2v; my emphasis) Cowley claims to be equally surprised by the objections to his two hectors, Cutter and Worm, since their character types are so familiar in Jacobean, especially Jonsonian, satiric comedy. His counterargument is that the "faults and follies" of a couple of obvious impostors cannot reflect on the party loyal to the King "or any Man of Virtue or Honour in it" (A2r). Wilson offers exactly the same defense for his two impostors, Bilboe and Titere Tu: "For if I have shewn the odd practices of two vain persons, pretending to what they were not, I think I have sufficiently justifi'd the Brave man, even by this Reason, That the Exception proves the Rule" (236). Cowley finally urges his readers to move beyond propaganda and to discriminate between slander and satire, because idealized characters would defeat the purpose of comedy: We are not, I hope, become such Puritansourselves as to assume the Name of the Congregationof the Spotless. It is hard for any Partyto be so Ill as that no Good, 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 their Vices and Follies though not their Persons,out of the Sanctuaryof any Title.
(A2r)

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

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Compared to the formally innovative political plays of authors like Buckingham,Dryden, Shadwell, Duffett,Behn,Southerne,Otway,and Vanbrugh,these early comedies rely heavily on pre-Civil Warmodels, using variations on the city comedy formula to present retrospective satiric fictions about London life at various stages of the Commonwealth. The playwrights' acknowledged model is also invariablyJonson. Cowley and Wilson stand out among the self-styled "sonsof Ben" exduring the i66os, and their plays are the best early-Restoration amples of humors comedy.'5The Jonsoniandialogue, underworld atmosphere,and hard-bittencynicism of both plays sets them aparteven fromlaterpolitically orientedcity comedies like AphraBehn'sTheCity (1683).In his address Heiress(1682) and John Crowne's City Politiques first appeared to the reader in FourNew Plays (where TheCommittee in 1665),RobertHoward also declares his preferencefor Jonsonover Plautus and Terence,and marvels at "how severe the formerAge has ' never to be equal'd Comebeen to some of the best of Mr. Johnson dies."'6 Generically,Howard's play remains within the Jacobeantradition of city intrigue comedy, although it has a stronger romanticplot and TheCheats. of Coleman-Street than Cutter What does this interest in genre and literary history imply for the plays as political theater?However useful they might be as models, the Jacobeancity plays of Jonson,Marston,and Middletoncannot encompass the two great movements of the mid-seventeenth century-the ascent of the Puritanto a position of unprecedentedpoliticaland social power, and the correspondingdescent of the royalist into political obscurity,personal danger,and materialloss. The stock stage-Puritansof comedy are odd, obsessive,ridiculousfigures,usually periphJacobean eral to the action and incapable of seriously threatening the social order. In an early play like Middleton's TheFamilyof Love(c. 1602), specimen ... of the which WilliamP.Holden describesas a "laboratory
15Nethercot mentions Cowley's strong sense of indebtednessto the "exampleand of (1641, the originalversionof Cutter of Jonson,and remarksthat TheGuardian learning" was written mostly under the influenceof the humorsschool of Jonson Coleman-Street) between Wil73). Nahm devotes an entire chapterto the relationship Cowley, (Abraham playwright (68-109). Forany early-Restoration son and Jonsonin his editionof TheCheats interestedin a realisticcity setting for satiricpurposes,Jonsonis the unquestionedmaster.Moregenerally,"theearly Caroleandramatistsseem to have felt pulled between the with genteel Fletchertraditionand the city comedy traditionheaded by Ben Jonson," about a quarterof the new plays writtenbetween i66o and 1665adheringto the second Drama, 235). of English model (Hume, Development 16 RobertHoward,Four NewPlays(London,1665),Bir.

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anti-Puritancomedy,"the satire on Puritanhypocrisy and cunning develops in conjunctionwith a strong romanticplot involving the young wards Mariaand Gerardine.'7 Jonson'sAmsterdamsaints Ananiasand Tribulationare only two among the numerous fools victimised by Subtleand Face in TheAlchemist (16io), though their solemn cant about wealth makes their humiliationespecially satisfying.Even the fanatical "Rabbi" Busy in Bartholomew Fair(1614) is kept carefully in check. As BrianGibbons comments, "perhapsonly in the specially festive atmosphere of Jonsoniancomedy is it so easy to dismiss the threat of such radicalpolitical rhetoricand its purposefully infectious potential.""8 The Restorationplaywrights,in contrast,view the PuritanInterregnum first and foremost as a radical transformationof the social order. Hence they use the realistic, materialist, satiric, and contemporary "matter" of comedy to recreate the Commonwealth as an unjust and unnaturalsocial and material dispensation.The Puritan charactersin these plays are no longer "fools who have gone mad on religion"but the "new gentry" who have unfairly gained access to a style of living entirely beyond their birth and breeding. Equally surprised and corrupted by this social advancement,they also exercise power solely for personalgain.The comedies thereforecentralizethe experience of royalist dispossession and disempowermentwithin a sweeping, reductive political critique.Puritanpower is shown to be short-livedbecause it is an illegitimate appropriationof royal authority,and ludicrous because it violates the establishedsocial hierarchy. This transformation of political crises into social conflictscenteringon class, property,and marriage is the distinctive method of early Restorationpolitical comedy.
III

Narrativesabout the loss and recovery of Cavalierfortunes embody the new politics of comedy in the 166os because royalist rhetoricviews the assault on property rights as the most explosive social consequence of Puritan dominance.This symbolism has a firm basis in history, although social historians have differed in their assessments of royalist losses in terms of property,wealth, and social position during the Interregnum period. According to Macaulay's Historyof England from the
17 William P. Holden, Anti-Puritan Satire, 1572-1642 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 131. 18 Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy,2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1980), 143.

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(1849), "agreat part of the soil of England of James the Second Accession was at once offered for sale" after the civil wars, causing many old families to disappearand as many new ones to gain sudden affluence.'9 A century later, G. M. Trevelyan noted that the Church and Crown lands which had been sold to meet the needs of the revolutionary government went back to their original owners at the Restoration,so that "no'new aristocracy'was founded out of them,"and "theamount of [private] land that changed hands was remarkablysmall."20Other twentieth-centuryhistorians of Civil Waragrarianlegislation and the Restorationland settlement have taken up a range of positions between these extremes.JoanThirskconsiders the redistributionof land ownership during the Interregnumcomparablein scale to thatbrought about by the dissolution of monastic lands during the Reformation.2' ChristopherHill describes the Civil Waras "moreof a class war than orthodox English theory allows." It brought the conflict between feudal methods of managementand the interests of merchantcapital to a head, speeding up the process by which improved modes of production and investment could realize the full capital value of land. As Hill notes, "the financialmeasures directed most severely against the royalists had the effect of expropriatingthe debt-ridden,extravagantlyliving sections of the aristocracyand gentry; and their wealth flowed throughthe parliamentaryfinancialorgansby means of state contracts and grants into the pockets of the commercial class."' The Restoration necessarily arrestedor reversed this process, turningthe issues of property and social power into urgent, complex, and intensely topical problems in the early i66os.

In consideringthe land issue as part of the topical contextof political comedy, it is important to distinguish between the differentstages of parliamentarycontrolover royalistproperty,and to considerthe terms of the Restorationland settlement.The firstmethod of fiscal regulation was sequestration,which began piecemeal in the counties in 1643 as a way of generatingrevenue from delinquentproperty without interfering with actual ownership. Officersappointed by the county committees collected revenue from a sequestered estate until the delinquent
19Quoted in RobertHoward,TheCommittee, 40. ed. Thurber,
20 G. M.Trevelyan, Green, 1942), Social History(London:Longman's, English

243-44.

21 JoanThirsk,"The History Economic Salesof RoyalistLandDuringthe Interregnum,"

Review, 2d ser., 5 (1952-53): 188. 22ChristopherHill, "TheAgrarianLegislationof the Interregnum," English Historical Review 55 (1940): 222-23.

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owner paid a composition fine, calculated as a variable percentage of the value of his property.The fiscal promise of the measure led to the creation of a centralbody called the Committee for Compounding (or Sequestrations),which oversaw the activities of the provincial committees from Goldsmith'sHall in London.In October 1647,Parliament also ordered maximum improvements in rent from sequestered lands to forestall the army's demand for a general sale that would settle arrears in pay. Hill reports that sequestration was popular with those sections in Parliamentwhich supported property rights: the House of Lords, in particular,resisted the sale of private lands until its dissolution in 1649. By 1651, however, the arrearsin military pay and the needs of Cromwell's Irish campaign had become critical, and nearly eight hundred delinquent estates were sold by parliamentary ordinance between July 1651 and November i652. In general, historians share H. Egerton Chesney's view that "the connection between the Government's financial needs and its policy concerning delinquents' estates is very close" throughoutthis period.3' At the Restorationthere could be no uniform solution to the problem of ownershipbecause privateland had changedhands for different reasons and in differentways during the previous fifteen years.Thirsk argues that the sale of royalists' lands "producedfar less social dislocation than that caused by the staleof public lands,"because a large number of individual owners had managed to regain their property before 166oby employing agents to representthem and by negotiating with their creditors.24 However, as Hill points out, composition fines, heavy Commonwealth taxation, and a range of other punitive measures againstroyalistsmeantthat "therewas necessarily ... a very great deal of transferof lands by privatesale between 1645and i66o."2 Such private sales were confirmed at the Restoration,whereas the sales of Crown and Church lands were revoked on the principle that the purchasers would receive appropriatecompensation.In the Declarationof Breda (April 166o), Charles II left it to Parliamentto devise the actual terms for the settlement of land disputes, but there was no general legislation on behalf of private royalists in the early i66os. As Thirsk explains it, "the problem of restoring royalist lands-insofar as it had
3 H. EgertonChesney, "TheTransference of Lands in England,"Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (1932): 204.

24JoanThirsk,"TheRestoration LandSettlement," Journal ofModern History26 (1954):

327.
25 Hill, "Agrarian Legislation," 230.

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not alreadybeen solved before i66o-was renderedso complex by the acts of royalists themselves thatno simple formulafor restitutioncould have been devised."26 Some membersof the nobility resortedto private acts in Parliamentto regain their estates, but the majority of private landowners were left to seek redress in the courts within a five-year period, with no assurance of a favorableverdict. Chesney interprets this to mean that the Crown, Church, and royalist magnateswere restored, but the "rankand file" were allowed to suffer.27 The figure of the dispossessed Cavalierin 166os comedy is thereforea remindernot only of past injusticesbut of unresolved conflictsin the present. This experience of loss intensifies and exposes more starkly than before the material basis of comedy's social, sexual, romantic,and reliThe atmosphereof the political comedies is best gious preoccupations. described as one of pervasive anxiety as royalist charactersconfront the loss of an accustomed way of life, and the "new Saints"attempt to replace them in the social hierarchy.' Predictably,the major locus of material tension in these plays is marriage,because the restratification of Commonwealthsociety problematizesthe relation between money, sex, romance,and politics. The propertied, independent Puritan woman, who derives her economic power from a dead husbandor a father,now emerges as the object of desperatepursuit as well as undisguised contempt.Beverly DeBordhas noted that the good-natured, even affectionatemarriageof conveniencebetween CaptainBlade and the wealthy (and anonymous)PuritanWidow in Cowley's TheGuardian (1641) acquiresa strong overlay of bitternessin Cutter of Coleman-Street (1661).3In the Restorationversion of the play,ColonelJollyforces him26 Thirsk,"Restoration LandSettlement," 328. 27 Chesney,"Transference of Landsin England," 207.

28Cowley and Wilson take a complex view of the effects of social change by maintainifig that self-interestmotivates Puritansand royalists alike, and ideological differences do not correspondto clear-cut moral divisions. Both their plays contain crude impostorswithin the royalistcamp-the "sharking souldiers"Cutterand Wormin Cutterof Coleman-Street, "Major" Bilboeand "Captain" TitereTu in TheCheats-who claim to have served in the king's army and plan to exploit their "loyalty" as unscrupulously as the Puritansexploit their godliness. Cowley's "jovialGentleman" ColonelJollyconsiders the threat of poverty sufficient excuse to steal his niece Lucia'sfortune.In The Cheats, the royalistAfterwitlies,bullies,and blackmailshis way into recoveringhis mortBoth plays combineJonsonian gaged estate from AldermanWhitebroth. comic convention with social pragmatismto offer a warped fellowshipof "Cheators and Cheaties"victims and victimizerswho feed off eachother.Howard'sTheCommittee is thusatypical in offeringa stridentlyroyalist,black-and-white contrastbetween Cavalierheroes and Puritanvillains. 29 BeverlyDeBord,"TheStage as Mirrorof Society:The Widow in Two Seventeenth

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self to marry Mistress Barebottle, the "damnable widow" of the soapboiler who had bought his confiscated property, although he sees her as "a clog upon [the estate] worse than a Mortgage" (24). Jolly's friend Cutter stages elaborate spiritual theatrics to win over the widow's daughter Tabitha, then insists that she "shalt Dance, and Sing, and Drink, and be Merry.... Nay, if thou do'st begin to look rustily-I'll have thee paint thy self, like the Whore of Babylon"(27). Marriage in these instances is not merely mercenary and antiromantic: it subverts Puritan power mainly by victimizing the Puritan woman, and thoroughly compromises the morality of the Cavalier male. In Howard's The Committee,however, any serious association with Puritan women is ideologically unacceptable to the Cavalier Colonels Blunt and Careless. As long as Anne, the daughter of a Cavalier knight, maintains her forced Puritan identity as Ruth, Colonel Careless acknowledges her charms but treats her parentage as a literally impregnable barrier: Col.Car. Are you not the CommitteeDay'sDaughter? Ruth. Yes,what then. Col.Car. Then am I thankful,I had no defence against thee but thy own Fatherand Mother, And Matrimony, Which are a perfectCommitteeto my nature. Ruth. Why are you sure I wou'd have match'dwith a Malignant,not a Compounderneither. Col.Car. Nay, I have made thee a Joyntureagainstmy will; Methinksit were but as reasonable,that I shou'd do something For my Joynture,but by the way of Matrimonyhonestly To encreaseyour Generation;this, to tell you truth,is Against my Conscience.30 Careless's wry comment about marriage settlements suggests that the loss of property feminizes the Cavalier male, but by refusing to cohabit with Puritans he can at least stop short of contributing to the multiplication (and by implication, improvement) of the enemy breed. Besides marriage, the ostensibly new collaboration between religion and money thematically dominates these comedies. While most displays of Puritan hypocrisy and greed in Jacobean city comedy end in failure, political ascendancy allows Puritan characters in the early
and RenaissanceAsCentury Comedies," SelectedPapersfrom the West Virginia Shakespeare sociation 10 (1985): 74-76. 30 Robert Howard, The Committee,in Four New Plays, 87. All further references to this play appear in the text.

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Restoration plays to equate material success with spirituality in a way that is particularly aggravating to the royalists. The two sides, therefore, hold completely antithetical views on the relation between spiritual and worldly power. The Puritan characters maintain that their new prosperity is the long-awaited reward for their purity and goodness-like Alderman Whitebroth in The Cheats, they are amazed at "how wealth trowles in vpon / an honest man" (176). In Howard's play, members of the Committee for Sequestrations describe the very obstinacy of malignant royalists as providential, since the forfeited estates then "Of right fall into the hands of the chosen, which / Truly is a mercy" (77). Wilson's nonconformist minister Scruple goes a step further to denounce ideology as a mere inconvenience in the pursuit of profit. When Afterwit offers him a living of ?300 a year, Scruple looks for 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 head a faction,make vse of vs, as the Monky did of the Cattspaw, to Scrapethe Nutts out of the fire.
(222)

With such propagandist reductions of the adversary, royalist characters feel justified in believing that the Puritans' material success is merely an effect of their illegitimate political power. As Ruth remarks to her companion Arbella in The Committee,her supposed father Mr. Day stole her estate by posing as a trustee and guardian, "and now for some years / Has confirm'd his unjust power by the unlawful / Power of the times" (67). The dark comedy of injustice and illegality masquerading as religious necessity finds climactic expression in the first committee scene in Howard's play, when Careless and Blunt lose their land for refusing to swear loyalty to the Presbyterian Covenant: Col.Careless. No, we will not take it, much good may it do them Thathave swallows large enough; 'Twillwork one day in their stomachs. Col.Blunt. The day may come, when those that suffer for their Conscienceand 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 Youridol which brings you interest; We can obey that which bids us lose it.

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The Comedyof Dispossession Arbella.BraveGentlemen. Ruth. I stare at 'um till my eyes ake. (75)

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This scene is ideologically centralbecause it counterposesthe Puritans' use of religion as a coercive legal weapon against the royalists' appeal to honor as a secular, courtly ideal embodied in the absent monarchy. The conflict over oaths has an added edge because in an earlierscene, Colonel Careless's Irish servant Teague has "takenthe Covenant"by runningaway with a bookseller's printed copies of it before they "poison the whole Nation."More important,this scene convinces Ruthand Arbella to pursue the colonels actively as prospective lovers and husbands, because "thereare not two such again, to be had for love nor money" (76). This atypical congruity between romance and politics eliminates the sense of ideological compromisewhich undercuts marriage in the comedies of Wilson and Cowley, and ensures the Cavalier couples an unqualifiedvictory over the "Commit[sic] rogues."
IV

All three plays widen the gap between politics and spirituality further by insisting that the primary identity of the Puritan-in-poweris not religious but bureaucratic:he is essentially a willing collaborator in a coercive, secularized state machinery that has replaced older institutions of governance. In this respect, the comedies occupy an intermediateposition between two other bodies of satiricaldiscourse about the nonmonarchicalstate: anti-Commonwealthpropaganda of the Interregnumperiod, and pre-LicencingAct anatomies of institutional power like Gay's TheBeggar'sOpera(1728) and Fielding's Pasquin (1736) and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737). The royalist pamphlet-playsof the late 1640s contribute substantially to the view

that the new bureaucracy,which implements the government's policies on land regulation and taxation, is an instrument of institutionalized oppression,theft, and revenge.Collectively,these works conferon words like "Committee," "Council," and "Committee-man" the same connotations of coercive officialdom and corruption that terms like "big government,""bureaucracy," "corporateethics," and "company man"now carry in the political-professionalrhetoricof late-capitalist
societies.

For instance, in Samuel Sheppard's virulently antibureaucraticThe

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Committee-Man Curried (1647),Suck-Drythe CommitteeManand Common Curse the Excise Man are "like Hypocrates twins, must live and die together: the Excise is the Committee's prop.""3 Suck-Dry hopes to see "DomesticJarres" continue because they bring him his hundred pounds a day (8), and claims repeatedly that the Committee meets only to steal. His only fear is that his brethrenmay have met "in full assembly ... except my presence-and ere I come, perhaps may share the Gold that's due to me" (2). In TheDiseaseof the House (1649) the Puritan "State" consists of four rogues, the Commons are a "common cheat, theif, pick-pocket,"and a charactercalled JohnCapon describes the Puritans'plan to "kill de King, rob de Shurch, wrong de People, Pill, Poll, Sess, Excise;begar,be all theirTrade,nothing but Rob,Steal, TheKentish Theive."32 Fayre(1648)gives a differenttwist to the problem of bureaucraticcoercion. In it, all sectaries living within the "cursed citie" are threatenedthat they will be sent "untoHell / unto the black Committee,"and the Cavalier knight, Sir Thomas Peyton, resolves to prevent the Parliamentaryrebels from seizing "ourlives and states," and building "highupon our ruins."3The Restorationpolitical comedies offer a similar critique of "revolutionary" politics; in the larger literary-historical context, they also foreshadow the satiric theater of is consideredthe first majorwork Gay and Fielding. TheBeggar's Opera to separatepolitics from its charismaticassociationswith kingshipand religion,and to arriveat a corrosiverecognitionof "allauthorityas permanently corruptedby self-interest."' In Fielding's reflexive "satires on the times,"stage and society eagerly embracecorruptionsfor which the realm of politics is the definitive model. It is importantto recognize, therefore,that the Puritanfunctionariesin the Restorationpolitical comedies exercise power with the same self-satisfied perversity, and appeals to necessity, and malice as Gay's underworld"executives" Fielding'sprime ministerstheatrical.
31 TheCommitte-Man Presented to theViewofAllMen(London,1647), Curried: A Comedy 6. The title page offers a convenientsummaryof royalistcomplaintsby describingthe play as "Apiece discoveringthe corruptionof committee-men,and excisemen,the unthe just sufferings of the royall party, the divellish hypocrisie of some Round-heads, All furtherreferencesto this work appearin the text. revoltfor gaine of some ministers."
32

Anonymous, The Disease of the House; Or, the State Mountebank(London, 1649), 5. 33Alexander Brome(?), TheKentish Soldto theirBest Worth Or,TheParliament Fayre,

(Rochester, Eng.,1648),5, 8. 4 JohnBender,Imagining Fictionand theArchitecture of Mindin EighthePenitentiary: teenth Century England (Chicago: Universityof ChicagoPress,1987), 88.

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These abuses are particularlyvisible in TheCommittee, which deals with the new bureaucracyresponsible for enforcing the agrarianpolicies of the Interregnum.Howard's title refersto the centralCommittee of Sequestrationsat Goldsmith'sHall which supervised the collection of revenue from sequestered property, set composition terms for delinquents, and arbitratedcases of uncertain title and default. All of the play's Puritan charactersare either committeemen or members of the "CommitteeFamily"-the household of ChairmanDay, which includes Ruthand Arbella,the captive Cavalierheiresses.The very word "Committee" is a badge of identity and a new metonym for power, as the Days' son Abel recognizes when he boasts foolishly before Arbella: "Iknow Parliament-men and Sequestrators; / I know Committee-men, and Committee-menknow me" (70). The activities of this body serve, then, as textbook examples of corruption in the Puritan control over royalist property. During its two meetings, the Committee makes an unauthorized gift of confiscated land to one of its members, dispossesses a Cavalier infant so that "he may not / Be in possession of the Land 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 sign that the "perversegenerationencreaseth"(go).The melodramaof these scenes notwithstanding, the Committee's actions replicate the forms of corruption with which the City and county sequestration committees were actually charged. Chesney reports that the Commissioners for Compounding in Londoncould acquire land "in excess" or in lieu of salary,and did invariablyappear as purchasersof delinquent property.The transactions,however, were heavily biased in their favor,and were often on so large a scale as to suggest speculation, not longterm ownership.The machinery of sequestrationwas also dominated by Londonmerchantsand citizens, explainingwhy Howard represents his Cavalier-Puritanconfrontationsas a clash between bluff country honesty and smug citified corruption. Howard's play underscores the gravity of dispossession-Colonel Bluntdescribesthe committee'spapers as "thewinding sheets to many a poor Gentleman'sEstate"(69)-but it also creates an absurd conflict in which the adversarieshave no common grounds for dialogue. Like dystopian "mimic men," the Committeemen are armed with "laws," and "instructions" "rules," which they must enforce so as not to "Lose what 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 regulatory functions of law are therefore reduced to a travesty, as when Blunt explains to Careless the reasons for his arrest in the street: Why,an Action or two for FreeQuarter,now made Trover and Conversion: Nay, I believe we shall be sued With an Action of Trespass;for every Field we have Marchedover, and be indicted for Riots,for going at Unseasonablehours, above two in a Company. (83) A similar conception of law appears allegorically in Sheppard's The Committee-ManCurried when Rebellion, the turncoat uncle of Loyalty the Cavalier, boasts about the punitive power of the new order: our laws give bounds to Roysters,such as you; We have Committeesclose and sub, and grand, That make strict Inquisition,after those, who have Presum'dto fight for Royaltie. (3) From the royalist viewpoint, this resemblance between the Puritan bureaucracy and the Catholic Inquisition is a conclusive and sensational indictment of Puritan politics, since it equates the coercive power of two institutions that were ostensibly the products of radically antithetical religious systems.
v

If the English Civil War was "more of a class war than orthodox English theory allows," the authors of royalist comedy see Puritan dominance almost exclusively in terms of a radical erasure of class and gender distinctions. All three playwrights configure recent history through the trope of the world upside down, which now signifies a double inversion-the ascendancy of servants over masters, and of women over men.5 This is a particularized application of a versatile topos which, as E. R. Curtius notes, informs the structure of numerous "complaint[s] on the times," and can signify a "reversal of the entire
(London,1642) suggests of theTimes 3 A pamphletby JohnTaylorentitled 7he Diseases enuof the Common-Wealth" how widespreadthese perceptionswere.The "Distempers merated on the title page include "the dangerous disease of feminine divinity,""the aspiring ambition of presumption,""the audacious height of disobedience,"and "the painteddeceitfulnessof hypocrisie."

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order of nature."'6That Christopher Hill uses this topos to characterize radical sectarian thought-what he calls the "revoltwithin the Revolution"during the middle decades of the seventeenth centurydemonstrates the centrality of the idea of inversion in revolutionary England.Hill recalls that the suspension of "socialdecencies" on certain occasions had served a catharticfunction in medieval society, but "whatwas new in the seventeenth century was the idea that the world turned upside down: that the dream world of might be permanently the Land of Cokayne or the kingdom of heaven might be attainableon
earth now."37 In this respect, royalist ideology simply repudiates what

sectarian thought envisions as the desirable social and spiritual ideal. Furthermore,the fellowship of hectors, con men, and disaffected royalists in political comedy does invoke the spirit of misrule in its opposition to Puritanauthority,but the underlying intention of anti-Puritan comedy is anti-carnivalesque-it seeks to subvert a present regime only because it prefers an older hierarchicalorder. According to Colonel Careless's "Malignant Sonnet"in TheCommittee,
all things that shou'd be Are turn'dtopsie turvy; The Freedomwe have, Our Princemade a Slave, And the Mastersmust now turn the Waiters. The great ones obey While the Rascalsdo sway, And the Loyal to Rebelsare Traitors. (93)

The advantage of hindsight hardens the conservatism of such a critique: at the Restoration,royalist playwrights are particularly wellsituated to dismiss the Puritan revolution as an unnaturalaberration ratherthan a necessary stage in the political evolution of the nation. The comedies' attackson class inversions in Commonwealthsociety rest mainly on the idea that for Puritan upstarts, political power is
36

E. R. Curtius, EuropeanLiteratureand the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask,

BollingenSeries,vol. 36 (Princeton: PrincetonUniversityPress, 1973), 95.

37Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (New York:Viking, 1972), 13-14. Curiously, Ian Donaldson also uses the

figureof the world upside down to trace "thecontinuityof a variety of comic traditions, problems, and techniques"in major comedy from Jonsonto Fielding, yet completely bypasses the theological, literary,and propagandisttraditionsof the Interregnumand early Restorationin which the figure comes closest to lived political history (TheWorld Upside-Down: Comedyfrom Jonson to Fielding [Oxford:ClarendonPress,1970], 23).

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the most effective weapon of class revenge. This explains the malice with which Howard's city bureaucrats press their political advantage over the country gentry, or the glibness with which Wilson's Alderman Whitebroth explains his animosity towards the royalist heir Afterwit: "his first Ancestor Cheated / mine, and I hope I shall be able to requite / his Loue vpon his posterity-thus yow see the / wheele comes round to his first point agen" (176-77). The sudden social prominence that results from political control also makes Puritan characters anxious to prove that they are "of the better sort," but their ersatz gentility usually degenerates into a nauseating vulgarity. Puritan society in the comedies is therefore a parodic formation where no one knows who he or she really is-a condition troped in Mrs. Whitebroth's sack-posset bowl in The Cheats: "Screw a handle to't, and 'tis her bed pan, put a Couer to that [tis] her warmeing pan, take off both it serues to wash her hands In the morneing, and for a Sack posset at Supper" (154). Similarly, Colonel Careless in The Committee recognizes the wife of Committee Chairman Day as Gillian, his father's former kitchen maid, and the confrontation between the two shows that the colonel's only defense against this literal reversal of the master-servant relation is an essentialist insistence on origins: Col.Car.Stay,thou mighty Stateswoman, I did but Give you time to see if your memory would be so Honest as to tell you who I am.... Mrs.D. I do not use to have acquaintancewith Cavaliers. Col.Car. Nor I with Committee-men'sutensils;but in Diebusillis,you were not Honorable,nor I a Malignant. Lord,Lord,you are horribleforgetful,pride comes with Godliness,and good Cloathes;what, you think I shou'd Not know you, because you are disguised with curl'd hair, And white Gloves. Alas, I know you as well as if you were In your Sabbath-dayes CinamonWaiscot,with a silver Edgine round the Skirt.... Mrs.D. 0, you are an impudent Cavalier! ... I'le teach you to abuse those that are in Authority. (104)

Colonel Careless's irritationfinds some relief in the honesty and unquestioning loyalty of his new servant Teague. Having lost his Irish master during Cromwell's devastating campaign,Teague is ideologically programmedto flout the Commonwealthand the Covenant,but he is also emotionally ready to "geta good Master,if any good Master

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wou'd / Get me" (61).His services to the colonel restore the older ideal of reciprocal obligation based on the master's protective patronage and the servant'svoluntary devotion.Unlike Mrs.Day,Teague "knows his place." If the feminized Puritan households and families in these comedies constitute a parody of society, the men's efforts at governance constitute a parody of politics. This is due in part to the Puritan characters' Whitebroth compulsive abuse of power. In The Cheats,"Alderman" uses his position to pass off spoilt goods, forfeit fully paid bonds, melt down currency,profit from the deliberatesinking of merchantvessels, and steal mortgagedproperty.Howard's Committeeof Sequestrations meets "to set in order / The weighty mattersof State,"but its unethical methods quickly reduce its members to wolves, vultures, and "private (67, 74).The Puritans'failure arises from what roymarriage-Jobbers" alists regardas a necessary interdependencebetween the political and social realms:those not born to power either misuse it or develop ludicrous pretensions to it, like the committee clerk Obadiah,who claims to be reeling under the burden of "affairsof State"(92). The violation of class divisions ensures that Puritan power is both short-lived and self-canceling. Because of the comedies' specific political orientation, their attack on female Puritans is also tangential to the dominant traditions of seventeenth-centurysatires against women. The source of the attack here is not what Felicity Nussbaum calls "thepatriarchalassumption of the natural inferiority of women and the inherent superiority of men,"nor is there much concern with the customary satiric myths of The array of Puriwomen's inconstancy,lust, deceit, and treachery.38 tan women in the three comedies includes only two adulteresses, the wives of ConstableDouble Diligence and the astrologer Mopus in The Cheats. The playwrights object, instead, to the women's appropriation of maleroles and prerogativeswhich politics has already renderedillegitimate. Consequently,the real friction in these plays is not between men and women but between royalists and Puritansof both sexes, resulting in a strikinglack of sympathybetween women on the two sides of the political divide. Colonel Jolly's daughter Aurelia in Cutterof
38 Felicity A. Nussbaum,The Brinkof All WeHate: English Satires Against Women,166o1750 (Lexington:University Press of Kentucky,1984),9. Nussbaum does not deal with

satiresagainstwomen (8-42) satires,but her commentaryon Restoration pre-Restoration shows clearly thatthe attackon Puritanwomen in comedies like Cutter of Coleman-Street and The Committeefollows a differentpath.

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Streetis among those who "can'tabide"the PuritanBarebottle Coleman women, so much so that she has resolved to "breakmy sister Tabitha's
heart within a Month one way or other" (13).

From the male Cavalierviewpoint, of course, the economic, sexual, spiritual,and political power of female Puritansis doubly misplaced, and thereforedoubly unacceptable.Colonel Jolly finds Mistress Barebottle intolerable,first, because she has inherited her financialpower from her husband and, second, because she deludes herself about the source of that power: "myHusband ... never sought for [spiritual]Incomes, but he had some Blessing followed immediately"(ti). As the colonel reminds her, "he sought for 'em once out o' my Estate too, I religious fanaticismis the prerogativeof thank him" (-i). In TheCheats Puritan wives. When the minister Scruple threatens to abandonnonconformity, Mrs. Whitebrothand Mrs. Mopus bribe and coerce him back to the cause by haranguinghim about how the "despisersof the brethren [will] bristle,"and the "holy Sisters be humbled"by his act is seen as the most predatorybecause (221). Mrs. Day in TheCommittee she seeks political, not sexual or spiritual, power. Informingher husband that his peers are ready to call her the "realCommittee-man," Mrs. Day berates him for being "everat your (Ifs;) / You'reafraid of your own shadow. . . (if) I did not bear you up, / Yourheart wou'd be down in your Breeches/ At every turn"(63). Such belligerence dehumanizes her (the Colonels refer to her as "she-Kite""greatPike," and "Committee-man's Cow"),even as it emasculatesher husbandand prevents him from exercisinghis (illegitimate)authority. The royalist playwrights thereforeridicule as antifemininethe very practices which feminism considers liberating in Puritanism.Nussbaum has suggested that "the effect of Puritanism on the status of English women defies easy clarification.It both improved the status of the sex and increased male authority over the family. Certainly it Social histoincreased the potential for conflict between the sexes."39 rians like LawrenceStone, Sheila Rowbotham,and RalphHoulbrooke agree that the Puritan emphasis on individual will and freedom of conscience undermined the support for patriarchalauthority in sectarian thought. This was particularly true of sects (like the Quakers freedom"of women, allowand Ranters)which supportedthe "natural ing them to preach,prophesy,and engage in collective political action. Rowbothamdescribes these activities as "outlet[s]for the suppressed
39 Nussbaum,

The Brinkof All WeHate, 13.

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female spirit,"which the men had to accept because they subscribed was once to the same faithY'At the Restoration,however, "patriarchy
more secure and the agitation of 'inferiors' was suppressed.... The

dangerous ideas of the Civil Warabout the equal rights of all believers to inspiration, and the democratic effects of this in society, were re41Evena protofeministlike MaryAstell argued at jectedby the church." the end of the seventeenth century that a woman's proper sphere was the home, not the world of religious and political polemic. The greater autonomy of Puritan women during the Interregnumwas therefore a consequence of sectarian radicalism which, paradoxically,even the sects did not support without ambivalence; the royalist playwrights exaggerate this uncertainty into a nightmare of female insubordination, spirit-possession,and political meddling.
VI

To describe this multiprongedcritique of Puritanpower in the early and "partisan" is both true and inRestorationplays as "reactionary" conclusive, just as it is true that the attention to genre prevents the plays from being merely propagandist. By tapping into and extending the pre-Civil Wartradition of anti-Puritansatire, the comedies of Howard and others are able to accomplish the ideologically imperative task of vilifying the Commonwealth.For the same reason, these plays do not establish the generic models that we consider definitive or canonical for the Restoration-that accomplishmentbelongs to the comedies of Etherege,Dryden,Shadwell,Wycherley,and Otway in the 167os, and of Southerne,Vanbrugh,and Congreve in the 169os. What the early political comedies do establish is a sociopolitical perspective on Puritanismwhose significanceoutlasts its original context,because fictions of royalist dispossession make a striking comebackin the Tory comedies of the ExclusionCrisis period. Some of these laterplays, such as Thomas Durfey's The Royalistand Aphra Behn's The Roundheads, Or TheGoodOld Cause(both 1682), revive the Commonwealth setting as a reminder of past injustices that would reappearin the present if
40 Sheila Rowbotham, Hiddenfrom History: RediscoveringWomenin History from the 17th

to thePresent(New York:Pantheon,1975),9. Hill also comments that "Women Century had played a prominentrole in the hereticalsects of the Middle Ages, and this tradition came to surface again in revolutionaryEngland"(World Turned UpsideDown,250; see pp. 247-60 for his discussion of the position of women within sects like the Quakers, Ranters,and Familists). 41 Rowbotham, Hiddenfrom History, 13.

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the Whigs were allowed to prevail in the issue of succession.'2 Others, such as Durfey's Sir Barnaby Whigg(1681)and Behn's TheCity Heiress (1682),are set in the present, but create Commonwealthconnections to explain the seditious and disloyal behavior of Whig knights like Sir In short, the transgressionsof class Barnabyand SirTimothyTreat-All. and gender representedby the mid-century Puritanstate still possess enough cautionaryvalue for supporters of the monarchyin the 168os to shape political theaterduring the ExclusionCrisis. The early Restoration comedies raise other questions, however, which remainpeculiarly pertinentto the moment of their composition and first performance.Why do playwrights like Cowley, Howard, and Wilson constructsuch detailed critiques of the social, economic, class, and gender dimensions of Puritanpower in the Interregnum, when the of their argumentsseems to undercut the "literpolitical "literalness" ariness"of their texts?Or, to reverse the question, why do they choose a genre like comedic satire, which seems to demand a high degree of literariness in the treatment of its material, when the material'sprimary value seems to lie in its political import and efficacy?I have argued throughoutthis essay that the playwrightchose comedy because it offeredvery specific potential for the inscriptionof political meaning and experience,but perhaps a greaterimpetus behind the plays is the re-empowerment of theatricalityitself. The Puritan Interregnumwas the largest dramaof its kind to be enacted in the metaphorictheaterof the nation, but it was played out without the possibility of legitimate theatricalre-presentation.In the first half decade of the Restoration, then, it seems equally importantto stage the dramaof the Interregnum and to reinvest theater with the authority and decorum of dramatic rules. The early playwrights, particularlythose who were also active in the pre-Civil War theater,take on both political and literarychallenges to stage the experience they do not wish to leave unperformed.3 University of Oklahoma

42 Behn'sThe TheRump (166o), Roundheads is, of course,an updatedversionof Tatham's setdirect way the importanceof a late Commonwealth demonstratingin a particularly ting to a Toryplaywright. 43I want to thank Daniel Cottom for helpful commentson an earlierversion of this essay,FrankPalmerifor his meticulousreadingof the finaltext, and VinayDharwadker for knowing how argumentsshould end.

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