The Horror Plays of the English Restoration

Abstract

Anne Hermanson. The Horror Plays of the English Restoration. Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. 186 pp. $109.95 USD, £60 (hardback). ISBN 9781472415523.In order to explain the emergence of the genre of horror tragedy on the English stage during the 1670s, Anne Hermanson analyzes the cultural climate of social dislocation during this period. Hermanson begins by asking why these plays were written at this particular time, and why did they enthrall audiences during the period from 1670 to 1680, only to die away? In this timetable Hermanson is perhaps a little too selective; Thomas Porters The Villain was first performed in 1662 and was drawing audiences, due to Samuel Sandfords lurid performances, well into the eighteenth century, while a play such as Mrs. Pix's Ibrahim of 1696, a product of the 1690s horror revival, is astonishingly violent. However, undoubtedly the majority of plays in which villainy and gruesome violence are on display were written in the 1670s and early 1680s. For Hermanson, the reason for this is rooted in the traumatized collective psyche of the English people following the death of their king, Charles I, and the subsequent civil war. The turmoil, unrest, and instability of the period informed its drama, and many playwrights were writing from their own personal experience of violence and the ideological conflicts of the time. In this book, Hermanson successfully weaves together the influences of politics on the plays, but also (and often in surprising ways) the influences of theatre history, sociology, psychology, gender, religious ideology, philosophy, and scientific discovery.The methodology that Hermanson employs is built upon the foundation of seminal studies such as Derek Hughes' English Drama 1660-1700 and Susan Owen's Restoration Theatre and Crisis, which examine the complex interaction between drama and sociopolitical strife. Like Hughes and Owen, Hermanson grounds her textual interpretations of the dramas within a meticulous analysis of Restoration political history; however, her work does not attempt a comprehensive study of the major and minor plays of the period, rather, it discusses representative and selective plays. In all, the author paints a vivid, imaginative picture of Restoration culture that offers the first comprehensive study of macabre and gruesome dramas, and their appeal to authors and audiences alike.The opening chapter, "Horror and Spectacle," begins with a brief over- view of the political history of England leading up to the civil war, continuing through the Interregnum, the Restoration of the king, the Popish Plot, and the Exclusion Crisis. Hermanson contextualizes the horror tragedies of the 1670s by comparing and contrasting them in a broad, sweeping manner to heroic drama, court masques, and Roman and Jacobean drama, providing examples from the Roman tragedies written by Seneca, as well as the Restoration dramas of Nathanial Lee, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell, John Dryden, and Elkanah Settle, among others. At the start of her examination, she follows R.D. Hume in locating the evolution of spectacle within the context of rivalries between the King's Company and the Duke's Company. The audience's desire for spectacularly elaborate, violent portrayals progressively increased throughout the 1670s, placing the dramas alongside the public obsession with public execution during the period of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis. Interestingly, however, Hermanson argues that the function of violence in the horror plays of the period was not to teach or instruct the audience. They are not, she claims, "morality plays," and at the end of the performances,there is little if any moral closure or edification... [the villains] die without remorse. The playwrights give a voice-often in the form of a "dying speech"-to those who are least likely to merit it; and the legacy of their words outlasts them... [they] regularly chose to amplify the voices of the guilty and silence the voices of the innocent. …