Managing Entertainment, 1700-1760

While the year 1700 is not as crisp a starting point for theatre history as the politically punctuated 1660, the turn of the century was the year of John Dryden’s end and Millamant’s beginning. As one of the great playwrights of the Restoration passed away, Congreve’s sparkling female lead in The Way of the World led the project of reconciling theatrical pleasures to the social ideologies of bourgeois culture. The century begins with William still on the throne (Mary had died) and a Bill of Rights now in place, which formalized Lockean and politically modern conceptions of the rights-bearing individual. Whereas the Restoration began with the re-establishment of monarchy, the eighteenth-century began with the renegotiation of sovereign power as something that extends to all subjects. Tracking this shift toward political modernity is a way to think through the move from the Restoration to the eighteenth century which, while much more than a reaction to the sexual candor and cynicism of the Restoration, is impossible to understand without being aware of the political resonance of libertine values in an increasingly bourgeois age.

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