Politics, Transgression, and Representation at the Court of Charles II


Book Description

This volume brings together ten distinguished scholars of history, literature, music, theatre, and art to explore the political and cultural implications of the court's transgressive new character.







Culture and Politics at the Court of Charles II, 1660-1685


Book Description

The reconstitution of the royal court in 1660 brought with it the restoration of fears that had been associated with earlier Stuart courts: disorder, sexual liberty, popery and arbitrary government. This volume illustrates the ways in which court culture was informed by the heady politics of Britain between 1660 and 1685.




Rebranding Rule


Book Description

In the climactic part of his three-book series exploring the importance of public image in the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, Kevin Sharpe employs a remarkable interdisciplinary approach that draws on literary studies and art history as well as political, cultural, and social history to show how this preoccupation with public representation met the challenge of dealing with the aftermath of Cromwell's interregnum and Charles II's restoration, and how the irrevocably changed cultural landscape was navigated by the sometimes astute yet equally fallible Stuart monarchs and their successors.




Opera and Politics in Queen Anne's Britain, 1705-1714


Book Description

Explores the political meanings that Italian opera - its composers, agents and institutions - had for audiences in eighteenth-century Britain.




Conspiracy Culture in Stuart England


Book Description

On a cold October afternoon in 1678, the Westminster justice of the peace Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey left his home in Charing Cross and never returned. Within hours of his disappearance, London was abuzz with rumours that the magistrate had been murdered by Catholics in retaliation for his investigation into a supposed 'Popish Plot' against the government. Five days later, speculation morphed into a moral panic after Godfrey's body was discovered in a ditch, impaled on his own sword in an apparent clumsily staged suicide. This book presents an anatomy of a conspiratorial crisis that shook the foundations of late Stuart England, eroding public faith in authority and official sources of information. Speculation about Godfrey's death dovetailed with suspicions about secret diplomacy at the court of Charles II, contributing to the emergence of a partisan press and an oppositional political culture in which the most fantastical claims were not only believable but plausible. Ultimately, conspiracy theories implicating the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.ng the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.ng the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.ng the king's principal minister, his queen and his brother in Godfrey's murder stoked the passions and divisions that would culminate in the Exclusion Crisis, the most serious challenge to the British monarchy since the Civil War.




Thomas Killigrew and the Seventeenth-Century English Stage


Book Description

Despite his significant influence as a courtier, diplomat, playwright and theatre manager, Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683) remains a comparatively elusive and neglected figure. The original essays in this interdisciplinary volume shine new light on a singular, contradictory Englishman 400 years after his birth. They increase our knowledge and deepen our understanding not only of Killigrew himself, but of seventeenth-century dramaturgy, and its complex relationship to court culture and to evolving aesthetic tastes. The first book on Killigrew since 1930, this study re-examines the significant phases of his life and career: the little-known playwriting years of the 1630s; his long exile during the 1640s and 1650s, and its personal, political and literary repercussions; and the period following the Restoration, when, with Sir William Davenant, he enjoyed a monopoly of the London stage. These fresh accounts of Killigrew build on the recent resurgence of interest in royalists and the royalist exile, and underscore literary scholars' continued fascination with the Restoration stage. In the process, they question dominant assumptions about neatly demarcated seventeenth-century chronological, geographic and cultural boundaries. What emerges is a figure who confounds as often as he justifies traditional labels of dilettante, cavalier wit and swindler.




Britain and the Continent 1660‒1727


Book Description

This monograph examines the most prestigious political paintings created in Britain during the High Baroque age. It investigates a period characterized by numerous social, political, and religious crises, in the years between the restoration of the Stuart monarchy (1660) and the death of the first British monarch from the House of Hanover (1727). On the basis of hitherto unpublished documents, the book elucidates the creation and reception of nine major commissions that involved the court, private aristocratic patrons, and/or civic institutions. The ground-breaking new interpretations of these works focus on strategies of conflict resolution, the creation of shared cultural memories, processes of cultural translation, the performative context of the murals and the interaction of painted images and architectural spaces.




Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England


Book Description

Fashion featured in black-letter broadside ballads over a hundred years before fashion magazines appeared in England. In the seventeenth century, these single-sheet prints contained rhyming song texts and woodcut pictures, accessible to almost everyone in the country. Dress was a popular subject for ballads, as well as being a commodity with close material and cultural connections to them.This book analyses how the distinctive words and images of these ballads made meaning, both in relation to each other on the ballad sheet and in response to contemporary national events, sumptuary legislation, religious practice, economic theory, the visual arts and literature. In this context, Clare Backhouse argues, seventeenth-century ballads increasingly celebrated the proliferation of print and fashionable dress, envisioning new roles for men and women in terms of fashion consumption and its importance to national prosperity. The book demonstrates how the hitherto overlooked but extensive source material that these ballads offer can enrich the histories of dress, art and culture in early modern England.




Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England


Book Description

Reading Authority and Representing Rule in Early Modern England explores the publication and reception of authority in early modern England. Examples are drawn from a broad range of source, including royal portraits, architecture, coins and medals and written texts.This is a volume that presents the history of society and state as a cultural as well as an institutional or political history. The author, Kevin Sharpe, was a leading scholar in interdisciplinary approaches to the study of early modern Britain. He pioneered the application of methods and approaches from other disciplines, such as literary criticism, reception studies and visual culture, to the study of the English Renaissance state. This will be an important text for anyone studying early modern England, as well as for those interested in the methods of cultural history and the explication of written and visual texts.