Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage

Abstract

Philip Major, ed. Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage. Farnham: Ashgate Publishers, 2013. 236 pp. £60.00 (hardback); also available in ebook PDF. ISBN 9781409466680.As part of Ashgate's New Perspectives series, the book celebrates the quadricentenary of Thomas Killigrew's birth and re-examines the life and career of a man who, in the words of Philip Major, "possessed a ceaseless love of life, boundless energy, dogged determination, attractive cosmopolitanism, and witty articulacy" (2). This new study on the hitherto "strangely elusive figure" (1) is especially timely because of the staggering paucity of scholarship on Killigrew: Alfred Harbage wrote the last and only biography in 1930 and William T. Reich's edition of Claricilla in 1980 was the most recent publication of any of Killigrew's plays. The book, furthermore, comes out at a time when studies in royalism are becoming ever more popular and nuanced, rendering a new monograph on an influential royalist courtier such as Killigrew not only desirable but also essential. In this "more receptive and propitious critical atmosphere" (2) the eight contributors to the volume deal with different aspects of Killigrew's tumultuous life and his varied career. Over half a century on from Harbage's detailed study of Killigrew, this volume challenges the narrow one-dimensional characterization of Killigrew as a mere cavalier bon vivant and provides a newly complex and insightful portrayal of a man who was not a saint and was undoubtedly "one of the most colourful characters of the mid-seventeenth century" (1).In chapter 1, Eleanor Collins examines Thomas Killigrew's early plays of the 1630s when he was a Cockpit dramatist. During the period of "the second war of the theatres," Queen Henrietta's Men at the Cockpit produced two plays by Killigrew: The Prisoners and Claracilla. Through a close reading of the plays Collins persuasively argues against the conventional view that these pieces were primarily meant by Killigrew as a means of ingratiating himself with the queen. In particular Collins convincingly suggests that Killigrew's treatment of the theme of platonic love is not a "straightforward endorsement of the court culture with which he was entwined" (26). Instead of placing the two plays within the hitherto limited context of court politics, Collins explores the plays within a new setting of the stage rivalry between the Queen's Men and the King's Men. She argues that Killigrew's plays were employed as a competitive device by the Queens Men seeking to take their repertory in a new direction so as to distinguish itself from its rival and also as a way of engaging royal attention by employing, for the first time, a courtier playwright. Collins thus not only sheds light on the interpretation of Killigrews early plays but also increases our understanding of the repertory strategy of an important early modern playing company.In chapter 2, Victoria Bancroft analyzes Killigrews popular comedy, The Parsons Wedding, and sees the play as evidence of the playwright being both a traditionalist and innovator. The play, originally performed in 1641, secured its fame when it was re-produced in 1664 with an all-female cast. Modern critics have often suggested that the play was a precursor to the Restoration comedy of manners. Bancroft, however, argues that the play has made a more subtle contribution to the development of English drama. She suggests, for instance, that while Killigrew moves towards a new type of comedy "privileging image and surface representation" he also develops a "traditional Renaissance dramaturgy in his consideration of the shifting relationship between actor, author, text and situation" (62). Similarly Killigrews apparent experimentation with an all-female cast for both male and female roles betrays his covert wish for "the restoration of a patriarchal society" (50). Killigrews depiction of his contemporary and rival, William Davenant, as an off-stage character in the play further develops "original themes introduced by Jonson and Brome" (62). …