Killigrew, Thomas | Alfred Harbage (essay date 1936)
Alfred Harbage (essay date 1936)
SOURCE: “The Courtier Playwrights,” in Cavalier Drama: An Historical and Critical Supplement to the Study of the Elizabethan and Restoration Stage, Russell & Russell, 1964, pp. 93-126.
[In the following excerpt from a work originally published in 1936, Harbage surveys Killigrew's plays, judging them “entertaining for their sheer bravura and unabashed excess.”]
Despite his traffic with drama, [Lodowick] Carlell was an old-fashioned courtier governing his life with a decorum befitting his elegant calling. Other courtly dramatists were younger men, modelled upon a newer ideal of gallantry, matching more nearly the popular conception of the Cavalier. In this younger set moved Thomas Killigrew (1612-83)1 who has become, not with entire justice, traditional as a roisterer and roué. Killigrew belonged to a somewhat improvident younger branch of an old Cornish family, which ever since the...
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