[In the following essay, Olsen argues that Tate's Coriolanus is particularly important because it is representative of political and aesthetic tendencies on the Restoration stage.]

Several recent critical studies of Shakespeare's historical evolution into the figure Michael Dobson calls “the national poet” have considerably enriched our understanding of how Shakespearean adaptations functioned politically and culturally on the Restoration stage. Previously, and in the shadow of early-twentieth-century critics such as George C. D. Odell and Hazelton Spencer, abstract aesthetic considerations had dominated scholarly discussion of late-seventeenth-century productions of Shakespeare, an analytical tradition in which Restoration standards were almost invariably disparaged in comparison with those of the Renaissance.¹

Given such a critical climate, it is not surprising that Nahum Tate's adaptation of Coriolanus has long been overlooked, even though Tate as much as John Dryden (both poets laureate, incidentally) has come to stand for the aesthetic principles upon which the Restoration Shakespeare has usually been judged and found wanting. What is more surprising, however, is that even recent scholarship has consistently relegated Tate's The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth; Or, The Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus (1681) to the status of supporting evidence. In fact, the play represents a critical moment in the development of several important Restoration aesthetic and political tendencies, as important to their cultural moment as either of Tate's better-known adaptations:² his notorious King Lear, with its added sexual intrigues and happy ending, and The Sicilian Tyrant, his suppressed revision of Richard II. In contrast to these better-known adaptations, Tate's comparatively restrained rewriting of Coriolanus offers an opportunity to examine his aesthetic and political motives for the adaptation, as well as their relation to the cultural status of the late-seventeenth-century Shakespear.

Tate's most apparent changes occur primarily in the fifth act, but both the prologue and dedication to the printed version of 1682 also reveal an overt, but ultimately conflicted, ideological purpose. Tate cannot deliver on his expressed desire in the prefatory matter, to show the nefarious effects of “the ingratitude of a commonwealth,” because he cannot completely efface the political indeterminacy of Shakespeare's play.³ In attempting to enlist a partisan Shakespeare, he instead reifies an “apolitical Shakespear” that resists rather than advances tendentious political appropriation.

The printed dedication to Charles, Lord Herbert expresses an ambivalent debt to Shakespeare as both artistic source and artistic adversary, an example of a widespread Restoration tradition of borrowing from, while improving upon, Shakespeare's canon. Tate claims artistic authority from that process, his imagery figuring Shakespeare as two different kinds of foundation upon which he bases his artistic strength: “I impose not on your Lordship's Protection a work meerly of my own Compling; having in this Aventure Launcht out in Shakespear's Bottom. Much of what is offered here, is Fruit that grew in the Richness of his Soil; and what ever the Superstructure prove, it was my good fortune to build upon a Rock.”⁴ Not only does Tate express mixed attitudes toward Shakespeare as an artistic source, but like other adapters of his age, he also exploits Coriolanus for what he considered its latent political value. His dedication continues: “Upon a close view of this Story, there appear'd in some Passages, no small Resemblance with the busie Faction of our own time. And I confess, I chose rather to set the Parallel nearer to Sight, than to throw it off to further Distance” (p. 2).

Two central, interrelated questions emerge from the prefatory matter: first, what exactly are the qualities and the status of the “Rock” that Tate imagines he builds upon—who and what was Shakespeare to Tate and his contemporaries? Second, to what extent does his appropriation of Shakespeare for the Tory cause politicize or depoliticize both Coriolanus and Shakespeare?⁵ As I hope to show, the Restoration Coriolanus bodies forth a range of aesthetic and political anxieties that are as significant for what they express as for how they cannot be reconciled. The ambivalence Tate cannot avoid revealing toward his own appropriation of Shakespeare has a darker parallel in his advocacy of the Tory cause: his political position, like his aesthetic one, is more viable as polemic than drama. Specifically, the overtly loyalist claims of his dedication and of the prologue are at variance with the dramatic impact of his Coriolanus. Although Tate successfully blackens the Whig cause by introducing one character and several actions not in Shakespeare's text, and although he exalts Charles II, he finally cannot force the play to conform to an idealized standard of royal grandeur.

The gradual movement from the staid “heroic tragedy” of the 1660s and 1670s to the infinitely more conflicted and politically volatile affective tragedy of the 1680s is the precise aesthetic milieu of Tate's three adaptations of Shakespeare. As Laura Brown has argued, the years surrounding and including the Exclusion Crisis saw a general shift in taste from drama depicting the twin ideals of royalism and aristocracy, to a tragic vision concerned with the middling sorts and sentimentalism.⁶ Tate's Ingratitude draws from both traditions, fully engaging with the affective tendencies of the period but also drawing upon a slightly older set of aesthetics that stressed nobility, aristocracy, and—more to his purpose with Coriolanus—royalism as themes worthy of dramatic representation.

The Shakespeare of the late 1670s and early 1680s was principally a dramatic poet of the theater and not the printed page. Pace Gary Taylor, who rightly sees in the 1685 Fourth Folio “an elegant and readable” tome “comparable” to the best of Continental publishing,⁷ in the Restoration period there is little printed evidence of the enshrining of Shakespeare as a writer of incomparably great literature. Unlike Nicholas Rowe's 1709 The Works of Mr. William Shakespeare, the two Restoration folios make no claims for the transcendent quality of Shakespeare's genius that are not made in the First and Second Folios, nor any for the fixity of his canon. Quite the contrary: to the 1664 edition are added seven new plays, of which only Pericles has survived the trials (or the predispositions) of modern editorial scholarship. Indeed, except for a few printer's touches in the 1685 edition, both Restoration folios follow the pre-Commonwealth editions and make the same limited claims for the status of Shakespeare and his as yet unstable oeuvre.

Restoration adapters developed an elaborate vocabulary for justifying their uses of this malleable “anticanon” of scripts. Central to their lexicon was the notion that Shakespeare's plays were too rough, undisciplined, or obscure to be produced as written, and though the adapters are careful to avoid direct denigration of Shakespeare's genius, their imagery gives away the fact that their anxieties entail more than just aesthetics. They are often subtly subversive, despite their protestations that they act as redactors and not inventors. Thomas Shadwell claims his Timon of Athens is a “Scion grafted upon Shakespeare's stock,” while to Edward Ravenscroft and John Dryden, his works constitute rubble in need of reconstruction. In the dedication to King Lear, Tate himself imagines his literary predecessor “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht; yet so dazling in their disorder.” In his Ingratitude, he figures Shakespeare as the rock upon which he builds. Most significant, however, in his preface to Richard II he imagines Shakespeare as a “first-Father” to his adaptation⁸—a point to which I will return.

In the immediate period of Tate's Ingratitude, the years 1678-82, nine plays by Shakespeare were adapted by seven different playwrights, Tate alone authoring three of them. In sharp contrast to the adaptations of the previous generation, of which Dryden and Sir William Davenant's romantic and radically adapted The Tempest holds a kind of aesthetic preeminence, all of the Exclusion Crisis revisions were tragedies or Roman plays.⁹ They draw upon originals deeply engaged with questions of political organization, particularly those concerning the merits of monarchical and constitutional claims to power. Likewise, other plays of the period also articulate such political concerns openly: Charles Saunders's Tamerlane the Great; Nathaniel Lee's Caesar Borgia and Lucius Junius Brutus; a revival of Davenant's 1673 Macbeth; Aphra Behn's The Young King and The Roundheads; John Banks's The Unhappy Favourite; or, The Earl of Essex; and, perhaps most of all, Thomas Otway's brooding, violent Venice Preserv'd. In addition, Dryden and Lee's Oedipus was reprinted in this period, possibly in conjunction with a revival. And even when the subjects of the plays to which they were appended were not overtly political, many prologues and dedications often waxed polemical.¹⁰

The intersection of affective tragedy and political advocacy was a donnée throughout the Exclusion Crisis. Far from unique to adaptations of Shakespeare, partisan politics and sentimental appeal—or in the case of works such as Behn's The Roundheads, partisan politics and social satire—mix easily in nearly every production of the period. But as Susan Owen argues, the political polemics of prologues and dedications during the period often do not accurately represent the usually affective tendencies of the plays themselves. They “may not simply be taken at face value,”¹¹ she contends, because polemical engagement was a sine qua non of the period's dramatic publishing conventions.

Indeed, Restoration theater was in its very inception overtly political. Henry Killigrew and Davenant were not granted their monopolies in a political vacuum, but rather as licensed, regulated servants of Charles and his new government. The relation between London theaters and topical politics was thus from the beginning of the Restoration period a matter of political control. The years leading up to the production of Tate's adaptation saw the most extensive disruptions within the restored monarchy, including the raising of a royal army that stood ready for three years; Charles II's dissolution of the “Cavalier” Parliament; the debacle of the “Popish Plot”; the coerced exile of James, duke of York; two bills for James's exclusion from the succession; and several politically motivated murders and executions—a combination of ad hominem attacks upon and constitutional resistance to the Stuart claim that had no precedent except in the 1640s.¹² These events together constituted the most serious threat to date against the very constitutional basis of the restored monarchy, and it is into this political maelstrom that Tate launches out in “Shakespear's Bottom.”

Specifically, this intervention occurred in December of 1681, a year of intense political upheavals that included the executions of two Popish Plotters; the arrest and subsequent exoneration of Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury, the prime mover of the Exclusionist cause; the publication of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel; and the guarantee of James's right to succession only after bitter strife and violent disorder at all levels of society. It is also the year that the tide turned against the rising Whig party, as the Tories solidified their position with Charles's dissolution of the Oxford Parliament and numerous political gains at the local level in London and the provinces.¹³ Within about a year, but certainly by late 1683, the polemic in which the dedication to The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth was embroiled had been rendered moot, the Tory cause having taken the day.¹⁴

Amid this welter of political contention, Tate's adapted Coriolanus tendentiously promotes an antidemocratic orthodoxy that Shakespeare's original avoids. Though his first four acts are essentially those of Shakespeare, subtle differences in Tate's treatment of his material indicate that his title was indeed chosen for a reason. For example, in act IV, scene ii, Aufidius plots openly with Nigridius, an invented character who bears a distinct resemblance to Shaftesbury and seems intended as a stock figure of Whig wickedness. Nigridius asks a series of leading questions that make Aufidius's intentions more clearly manifest than in Shakespeare's version. In keeping with the conventions of Restoration adaptation, Tate tightens and regularizes his source, but he also seizes the opportunity to make ever starker lines of demarcation between solitary Coriolanus, Shakespeare's lonely dragon, and the many groups of conspirators against his power.

In the next scene, Brutus and Sicinius plot together, as in Coriolanus, and later Tate's citizens turn upon them when they learn of Coriolanus's threat to Rome, as occurs in Shakespeare's V.iv. As one of their number encourages Menenius to intercede, a subtle change in reported action suggests a political dynamic different from that implied in Shakespeare's text. Tate offers, “The Gods preserve you Sir, Commend my hearty Affections to him; and if it stand with his good liking, we'll hang up our Tribunes, and send them him for a Token” (IV.iii.110-2), but the corresponding passage in Shakespeare has none of Tate's sentiment:

MESS.
Sir, if you'd save your life, fly to your house.
The plebeians have got your fellow-tribune,
And hale him up and down, all swearing, if
The Roman ladies bring not comfort home,
They'll give him death by inches.(15)

Here the image of a specifically public vengeance, death as a token of changed political allegiances, underscores the opposition between royalism and populist republicanism that drives The Ingratitude. Tate's rabble, it seems, have learned the lesson to which he refers in his dedication: “Where is the harm of letting the People see what Miseries Common-Wealths have been involv'd in, by a blind Compliance with their popular Misleaders? Nor may it be altogether amiss, to give these Projectors themselves, examples how wretched their dependence is on the uncertain Crowd … The moral therefore of these Scenes being to Recommend Submission and Adherence to Establisht Lawful Power, which in a word, is Loyalty” (p. 2).

A number of minor lexical changes throughout the first four acts also emphasize the play's topical relevance to exactly this moral. None is so significant, however, as Tate's implied elevation of Coriolanus from deposed consul to wronged, vengeful king. His Cominius tells the First Citizen that all appeals will prove meaningless to enraged Coriolanus, who “sits Thron'd in Gold, his Eye / All Red, as 'twould burn Rome” (IV.iii.114-5). Then, in a streamlining and extension of Shakespeare's version, Menenius confronts the hero, who is enthroned, “seated in State, in a rich Pavilion,” and scornfully throwing aside written petitions from Roman citizens (IV.iv.sd). The setting for the final encounter between Coriolanus and his family, traditionally staged as a military encampment, is in The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth explicitly a palace.¹⁶

Though the topical relevance is clear enough, Tate's revision also strains under two broad aesthetic tendencies of Exclusion Crisis drama. First, in act IV, scene iv, he conflates Menenius's supplication with that of Virgilia, Volumnia, and young Martius. The implication is that begging for Rome's salvation is not so much a political mission but a family affair; the “last old man,” who in Shakespeare's text seems almost a surrogate for the father that Coriolanus lacks, is in Tate's Ingratitude figured even more directly as a father. These “family” members present a unified front, a sentimental appeal to Coriolanus's emotional side, but they are also indications of a broader tendency among Restoration writers to mingle familial and political matters. It is significant evidence of Tate's failure to remake Coriolanus fully that he excises most of the speech on kinship spoken by Shakespeare's Coriolanus, in which he declares his indifference to “[f]resh embassies and suits” from statesmen, friends, and family (V.iii.8-37). This conflation of family and political life, royal and republican governance—the suggestion that Charles II is a man of the people while Coriolanus is an anointed king—completely elides the very distinction for which the Exclusion Crisis developed.

In acts I-IV, then, Tate only subtly adapts Shakespeare's text, in several places streamlining it and sharpening contrasts, but also moving the entire dramatic direction of the play toward a domestic, familial tragedy. The fifth act, as critics from Odell and Spencer onward have noted, is the locus of Tate's most significant departures, almost all of them outright additions. Beyond even the changes that make the play into an affective tragedy, however, Tate's appropriation of Shakespeare reveals a great deal about English theatrical politics in the heady years of the Exclusion Crisis and about his own conception of the “rock” upon which he claims to build. Coriolanus and Aufidius face off in act V, scene iii, wounding each other in the scuffle (mortally, it turns out). Meanwhile, Nigridius has plotted the murder of Menenius and the maiming of young Martius, and has attempted to serve as panderer to Aufidius, whose final triumph is to be the rape of Virgilia before Coriolanus's moribund eyes:

                                                                      but heark, she comes:
I charge thee Dye not yet, till thou hast seen
Our Scene of Pleasures; to thy Face I'll Force her;
Glut my last Minuits with a double Ryot;
And in Revenges Sweets and Loves, Expire.

(V.iii.92-6)

Then, in rapid succession, Virgilia enters, dying from the self-inflicted wound that allows her to preserve her “chast Treasure” rather than give it up as “th' unhallowed Pyrates Prize” (V.iii.120-1). Aufidius expires, clearing the emotional space of the stage for the family drama that closes the play. Virgilia dies a heroine's death just before Volumnia returns, distracted and bearing the mangled body of young Martius, still “living / In quickest Sense of Pain” (V.iii.156-7).

Volumnia delivers an extended rebuke to the conspirators against Coriolanus and his family, her dying grandson innocently calls attention to his own impending death and to his dead mother, and then she snatches a partisan and delivers a death blow to Nigridius. She runs off, still distracted, young Martius asks his father why his mangled arms will not move, then strikes a stoic pose before he too dies, and leaves his father to breathe his last, his arms clutching his dead wife and child:

Thus, as th' Inhabitant of some sack't Town,
The Flames grown near, and Foe hard pressing on,
In haste lays hold on his most precious Store:
Then to some peaceful Country takes his Flight:
So, grasping in each Arm my Treasure, I
                              Pleas'd with the Prize, to Death's calm region fly.

(V.iii.230-5)

In contrast to the closing scene of Shakespeare's play, Tate's revision seems intended to unify and mobilize an audience around a cluster of sentimental family issues, but not only that. In the final analysis, Shakespeare's ambivalent dramatic presentation of Caius Martius proves insurmountable: Tate's revision cannot quite get around the fact that Coriolanus has feet of clay, that he is neither a viable political leader nor an object easily given reverence or deep pity.¹⁷ Like that of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, the fall of Tate's Caius Martius is, in part, just deserts. His Coriolanus cannot inspire the loyalty that the playwright advocates in his dedication to Lord Herbert because Tate is caught between his ideological allegiance to the monarch and his creative allegiance to the Bard.

The larger cultural implications of this creative impasse are significant. Tate's fusion of party polemics and affective appeal is infinitely complicated by his use of Shakespear as a source. His dedication to Lord Herbert, the grandson of one of Charles I's most steadfast supporters and himself a model royalist, is itself a political gesture of no uncertain meaning. Relevant, too, is the prologue by Sir George Raynsford, which represents the adaptation of Shakespeare in the language of parliamentary politics:

Our Author do's with modesty submit,
To all the Loyal Criticks of the Pit;
Not to the Wit-dissenters of the Age,
Who in a Civil War do still engage,
The antient fundamental Laws o' th' stage:
Such who have common Places got, by stealth,
From the Sedition of Wits Common-Wealth.
          Yet he presumes we may be safe to Day,
Since Shakespear gave foundation to the Play:
'Tis Altered—and his sacred Ghost appeas'd;
I wish you All as easily were Pleas'd:
He only ventures to make Gold from Oar,
And turn to Money, what lay dead before.

(lines 2-15)

Both the dedication and prologue to The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth enlist Shakespeare as a Tory partisan. His “sacred Ghost” is “appeas'd,” we are led to believe, by his being appropriated for the (apparently parallel) objectives of financial gain, dramatic improvement, and service to the royalist cause. In fact, the two objectives are less disconnected than might be assumed. Shakespeare functions in Restoration prologues and dedications, especially for Tate, as a literary forefather, an aesthetic analog to Charles II, the political patriarch. The recurring image of fatherhood, a favorite trope of the Tories woven into many plays and their extratextual apparatuses, “is a politically charged notion in the Exclusion Crisis,”¹⁸ and Tate attempts—unsuccessfully—to reconcile an idealized patriarchal image of Charles II with the authority of Shakespeare, his literary father.

The ambivalence toward the forefather shown by Tate and nearly all other adapters of Shakespeare during the Exclusion Crisis implies political instability as much as it suggests a conflicted understanding of literary inheritance. Just as writers created an idealized image of a gifted but barbarous national poet (a rock on which to build, a stock on which to graft a scion, a ruin to be restored, a heap of jewels to be restrung, and so on), so too did they accommodate Charles's unsuitability as an ideal paterfamilias and overlook his notorious and widely publicized promiscuity.¹⁹ One way that several political tragedies, such as Otway's Venice Preserv'd and The History and Fall of Caius Marius, suppressed or moderated the full truth of Charles's public image was to subsume the question of monarchical succession into Venetian or Roman republican settings—to blur the otherwise firm lines separating monarchs from elected or appointed rulers. In Tate's case, this blurring occurs in order to advance a hopelessly idealized political vision, one in which England's greatest dramatic artist could be made to praise its greatest political leader.

Tate's filial respect for his literary forefather runs deeper than first appears, however. Despite his revisions of the fifth act, and despite his typically Restoration attempt to create both an affective and political tragedy, Tate ultimately follows the trajectory set forth by Shakespeare. He does launch out in Shakespeare's bottom and does build a superstructure upon his rock. His presentation of the hero, hardly altered from the source except for what is done to him, proves incompatible with his avowed political objective to advance the royalist cause. Coriolanus, like Charles II, was neither a sympathetic character nor an apt representative of benign, enlightened governing, but instead a headstrong and at times scheming leader who alternately countenanced and disdained the principle of constitutional republicanism. In finally capitulating to Shakespeare's skepticism concerning Caius Martius's ability to inspire loyalty or to govern well, Tate compromises his own Tory principles. The best he can do is to blacken the sins of Aufidius, Nigridius, and the tribunes: he can make the encoded Whig conspiracy more menacing, and he can allow his rabble to see the right reason of loyalty. But out of a sense of duty and deference toward his literary forefather, he balks at the opportunity to improve Coriolanus in any of the ways he made Richard II a better ruler and a more worthy object of loyalty.²⁰

In fact, Coriolanus's final embrace of young Martius seems to suggest a parodic relation to Charles's refusal to acknowledge his bastard son Monmouth, the object of the Exclusionist faction's support.²¹ Subject to intensified supplication by his “family” in Tate's adaptation, Coriolanus nevertheless does not even speak Shakespeare's lines on the dilemma between blood and honor (V.iii.18-36). These words might give meaning to his death at the hands of political schemers and populist rabble; instead, the hero's great moment is a sentimental and politically irrelevant slow death that present a tableau of idealized but impotent fantasies of the family's role in state politics. Caius Martius remains essentially and fundamentally the Caius Martius of Shakespeare's profoundly skeptical play.

My title, “Apolitical Shakespear; Or, The Restoration Coriolanus,” suggests two further considerations I hope to have addressed in offering this reading of Tate's Ingratitude.²² The use of Shakespear, a common enough Restoration spelling, is meant to signal the indeterminate aesthetic and political status of Shakespeare and his canon among Restoration adapters. The Shakespeare plays Tate (and many others) adapted were a fluid group of scripts not yet subjected to the scrutiny of editors and scholars from Rowe onward. To the extent that the Restoration Shakespeare constitutes a canon at all, it is the mutable domain of the public theater, not the fixed one of the gentleperson's library—a repertory and not a great books list.

Shakespear's ambiguously numinous and boorish status in the period of the Exclusion Crisis made his plays appear to adapters as a kind of political tabula rasa for all persuasions, factions, and parties, and Tate's use of that blank slate in The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth is both typical of the period and remarkably restrained. And because restrained, it constitutes not a less but actually a more radical act of appropriation. More than in Davenant and Dryden's radically altered The Enchanted Isle or his own King Lear and Richard II, here Tate claims both Shakespeare's words and what he imagines to be his politics for his own. Without the mediation of deep or radical revision, Tate is truly appropriating Shakespeare through a strategy of multiple but comparatively minor additions and deletions, not wholesale adaptation. In so doing, he attempts to make Shakespeare ventriloquize for the royalist cause and claims, as does Sir George Raynsford in his prologue, that the august “sacred Ghost” of Shakespeare has been appeased and not antagonized.

Therein lies the rub. To the extent that he does so at all, Tate accomplishes this appeasement at the direct expense of his own political purpose: complete glorification of a noble monarch that merits complete loyalty. A truly noble Coriolanus would have had to be different in kind, not in details, from the flawed and sentimentalized figure Tate retains—a great deal, in fact, less like Charles himself.

Only half whimsically, I hope also to have gestured in my title toward the Restoration convention of separating dramatic titles and subtitles by the nearly ubiquitous or. This textual strategy of balancing opposing notions—and often fusing them as if they were one—deserves an extended analysis someday. For my own more restricted purposes here, however, I am convinced that two largely unresolved motives are at work in Tate's The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth; Or, The Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus. His Or ultimately signals alternative and not synonymous or conjunctive concepts: ingratitude, politics, and civic and constitutional matters are fundamentally at odds with the second part of the title, which suggests a sentimentalized tragic fall in an apolitical world. Even Tate's additions and deletions cannot fully elide these basic differences. The title and subtitle will not square.

Tate's Coriolanus is political in more than its party allegiances and its engagement in the micropolemics of the Exclusion Crisis. By domesticating Restoration political polemic and giving it an affective, familial bias, he makes broader claims for the inherently orderly and hierarchical stability of royal authority—a family, in effect, with Charles as the ultimate paterfamilias.²³ But, as I have also argued, that family has a darker side. To adapt Menenius's parable of the belly, its head, like that of the English body politic during the Exclusion Crisis, is no paragon to its members.

Tate's retreat into the sentimentality of prevailing dramatic conventions announces the problems inherent in grafting scions onto Shakespeare's stock and rearranging the jewels (or rubble) of his plays to suit prevailing political needs. Tate's largely ignored play merits attention because, more than offering only an instance of Restoration polemical adaptation, it also exemplifies the political capital that is still imagined to accrue by appropriating “the national poet” 's works. By suggesting that Shakespeare's politics can be not reinscribed, but simply conscripted for one's self, one's party, or even one's political system, Tate marks a crucial early stage in the long and varied history of Shakespeare's appropriation for political gain. That habit and its attendant risks, of course, did not die with Tate.

Notes

1. See Michael Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Authorship, 1660-1769 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Jean I. Marsden, The Re-Imagined Text: Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995) and her introduction to The Appropriation of Shakespeare: Post-Renaissance Reconstructions of the Works and the Myth (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), pp. 1-10; and Gary Taylor, “Restoration,” in Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History, From the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1989), pp. 7-51. Also noteworthy is a survey article by Matthew H. Wikander, “The Spitted Infant: Scenic Emblem and Exclusionist Politics in Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare,” SQ 37, 3 (Autumn 1986): 340-58. Previous to these, Hazelton Spencer's Shakespeare Improved: The Restoration Versions in Quarto and on the Stage (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927) and George C. D. Odell's Shakespeare: From Betterton to Irving, 2 vols. (1920; rprt. New York: Dover Publications, 1966) had dominated in this largely neglected field. One notable exception is Gunnar Sorelius, “The Giant Race before the Flood”: Pre-Restoration Drama on the Stage and in the Criticism of the Restoration (Upsala and Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksells, 1966). Even studies as influential as Robert D. Hume's The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) have little to say about the conjunction of Shakespeare, aesthetic theory, and politics.

2. Steven N. Zwicker concisely characterizes the milieu to which I refer: “the traffic between politics and art in this age allows us to see that all the work of the literary and imagination is embedded in polemic and contest. In these years ephemera and eternity have important relations, and texts that display the gestures of canonical self-celebration often allow the most complex and illuminating conversations with the local, the partisan, and the political” (introduction to Lines of Authority: Politics and English Literary Culture, 1649-89 [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1993], pp. 1-8, 2).

3. On the political representations of Charles II, see Paul Hammond, “The King's Two Bodies: Representations of Charles II,” in Culture, Politics, and Society in Britain, 1660-1800, ed. Jeremy Black and Jeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 13-48. Hammond argues that the execution of Charles I made representations of Charles II “assertive rather than simply declarative”; such representations allowed for “alternatives” that a writer such as Nahum Tate had to negotiate (p. 13).

4. Tate, The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth; Or, The Fall of Caius Martius Coriolanus, in Nahum Tate and the “Coriolanus” Tradition in English Drama with a Critical Edition of Tate's “The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth,” ed. Ruth McGugan (New York: Garland, 1987), pp. 2-5. All further references to The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth are to this edition, the only modern one available, and appear parenthetically in the text. All references to the bodies of plays are by act, scene, and line numbers. See also Dobson, p. 5, and Pierre Danchin, ed., introduction to 1660-76, pt. 1, vol. 1 of The Prologues and Epilogues of the Restoration, 1660-1700 (Nancy: Publications Université Nancy II, 1981), pp. xxiii-xliii, on the importance of the dedications, prefaces, prologues, and epilogues of the period.

5. My use of the term Tory is intended as a convenient shorthand, not a way of reopening a basic historiographical question about the formation of political parties in Britain. Terms like conservative and even royalist have a problematic relation to the drama of the period before the Exclusion Crisis because even in the early years of the crisis, both factions claimed a conservative purpose.

6. Laura Brown, English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), especially pp. 21-5, 69, 86, and 99. In a study of the 1678-79 theatrical season, Susan Owen offers a persuasive rationale for adopting a more tightly historical view of events during the Exclusion Crisis, as well as a taxonomy for making precise sense of what other critics often amalgamate as “Restoration stage politics” (“Interpreting the Politics of Restoration Drama,” SCen 8, 1 [Spring 1993]: 67-97).

7. Taylor, p. 31.

8. Thomas Shadwell (epilogue to his Timon of Athens), Edward Ravenscroft (preface to his Titus Andronicus), John Dryden (preface to his Troilus and Cressida), and Tate (dedication to his King Lear, preface to his Richard II), rprt. in 1623-92, vol. 1 of Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, ed. Brian Vickers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 237, 239, 250, 344, and 321, respectively. See also John Dryden's preface to The Enchanted Isle, where he states (almost prophetically, in the case of Tate) that “Shakespear's pow'r is sacred as a King's” (in Plays: “The Tempest,” “Tyrannick Love,” “An Evening's Love,” in Works, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and George Robert Guffey, vol. 10 [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1970], pp. 6-7, line 24).

9. The nine are Shadwell's Timon of Athens and Ravenscroft's Titus Andronicus (1678); Dryden's Troilus and Cressida and Thomas Otway's The History and Fall of Caius Marius (1679); in the following year, John Crowne's Henry VI and Tate's Richard II; and in the remaining two years, Tate's King Lear and his Coriolanus, and Thomas D'Urfey's The Injured Princess, based upon Cymbeline (William Van Lennep, ed., 1660-1700, pt. 1 of The London Stage, 1660-1800 [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965], pp. 265-76).

10. Van Lennep, pp. 276-7, 281, 292, 295-6, 300, and 303. See also Wikander.

11. Owen, p. 82. In addition, Wikander describes a persistent “double drive towards both inflammatory applicability and regular romantic intrigue” among adapters of Shakespeare in the 1680s (The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1986], p. 113).

12. For surveys of the Exclusion Crisis and the period leading up to it, see especially Geoffrey Holmes, The Making of a Great Power: Late Stuart and Early Georgian Britain, 1660-1722 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 106-42; John Miller, Popery and Politics in England, 1660-88 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 154-95; and J. P. Kenyon, “Charles II, 1649-85,” in The Stuarts: A Study in English Kingship (1958; rprt. London: Fontana Collins, Fontana Library, 1966), pp. 100-43. Kenyon's The Popish Plot (London: Heinemann, 1972) is the most thorough treatment, though with a bias toward the religious rather than the constitutional aspects of the Exclusion Crisis.

13. Miller, pp. 189-90.

14. Holmes, p. 162.

15. William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, ed. Philip Brockbank (London: Methuen, 1976), V.iv.36-40. All quotations from Shakespeare's play are from this edition. Subsequent references will appear parenthetically in the text.

16. Tate anticipates editors and critics from the eighteenth century onward in this matter. See the useful note at V.iii.0.1-2 in R. B. Parker, ed., The Tragedy of Coriolanus, by Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).

17. On the difficulties involved in pitying Coriolanus, see Kenneth Burke, “Coriolanus—and the Delights of Faction,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), pp. 81-97, 82-94.

18. Owen, p. 89.

19. Dryden's image from Absalom and Achitophel, that Charles “Scatter'd his Maker's image through the Land” (2:453-93, line 10), and Rochester's line “His sceptre and his p[ric]k are of a length” from “The Earl of Rochester's Verses for Which he was Banished” (1:423-4, line 11) are perhaps the most widely known squibs on Charles II's promiscuity. The satirical tradition, however, is much more extensive, as demonstrated throughout the anthology here quoted, Poems on Affairs of State: Augustan Satirical Verse, 1660-1714 (ed. George deF. Lord, 7 vols. [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963-75]). To offer only a few examples, Charles was likened (unfavorably) to Henry VIII, because he had illegitimate “sons and daughters more / Than e'er has Harry by three-score” (“The History of Insipids,” 1:243-51, lines 17-8), implicated in charges of incest and compared to drunken Lot (“Hodge,” 2:146-53, lines 43-4), and consistently referred to by the name of “Old Rowley,” that of his stud horse (“Satyre on Old Rowley,” 2:184-8). By the Exclusion Crisis, his promiscuity was thoroughly conventionalized in the satiric literature, and he was among the most frequently satirized figures of the period. See also Hammond, pp. 13-7.

20. See Dobson, p. 81 and n., for a brief but useful review of Tate's adaptation of Richard II.

21. James, duke of Monmouth's military and civil duties were taken from him by Charles in November 1679, from which time he became a popular hero, especially for the anticourt party. Charles's rejection of him became the subject of several satires against the king; see, for example, “‘Letter of the Duke of Monmouth to the King’ and ‘The King's Answer’” for an especially apt Tory satire (Lord, 2:253-6).

    An interesting verbal parallel exists between Coriolanus's dying speech and a satire Tate wrote in approximately May 1682. The final words of his Coriolanus (see above) echo in these lines addressed to Monmouth:

    Both parties boast a star to lead their train,
    One but of late dropp'd out of Charles his wain.
    Unhappy prince! …
    To feed on husks, before thy father's bread!
    Fly to his arms, he like th' Almighty stands,
    Inviting penitents with both his hands.

    ([Tate], “Old England,” in Lord, 3:183-206, lines 227-32)

    As the editor of Poems on Affairs of State indicates, Tate's position in the shifting political field of these years was unstable; he tried to navigate a middle position between Yorkist and Catholic zealots, to maintain “a perilous balance” between extremes that could have proved dangerous as the political landscape changed (Lord, 3:184).

22. I am also, of course, alluding to Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, eds., Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2d edn. (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), and to the larger critical problem of ascertaining (or appropriating) Shakespeare's own politics.

23. See the useful discussions by Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 183-6, and Hammond.