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Mr. Turbulent

A Critical Edition

by Jorge Blanco-Vacas (Editor)
©2020 Others 282 Pages
Series: Restoration Drama, Volume 1

Summary

Mr. Turbulent (1682) is an anonymous city comedy which starred popular comic actors and young actresses of great appeal. The play was produced in the immediate aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis. This first-ever critical edition offers a fully annotated modernized version of the text, together with an introduction that examines the contexts of the play. The editor also discusses at length such topics as the political dimension of the Moorfields setting and the green spaces of Restoration London. He examines as well the rethorical use of madness associated with the Bedlam hospital for the insane, the other pivotal cityscape setting in the comedy.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the author
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Table of Contents
  • Acknowledgements
  • Abbreviations
  • Introduction
  • 1. Authorship.
  • 2. The stage history of Mr. Turbulent.
  • 3. Comedy in the late Carolean period (1678–1682): a stage in crisis.
  • 4. Mr. Turbulent: politics, place and identity.
  • 4.1. Moorfields: green spaces and tory anxieties.
  • 4.2. Bedlam: madness as a political trope
  • 5. The text.
  • Mr. Turbulent; or, the Melancholics comedy. As it was acted at the Duke‗s Theatre.
  • Dramatis Personae
  • The Prologue
  • Act 1
  • Act 2
  • Act 3
  • Act 4
  • Act 5
  • The Epilogue
  • Appendix A Bibliographical Description
  • Appendix B Monetary Units Alluded to in Mr. Turbulent
  • Works Cited

cover

Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available online at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for
at the Library of Congress.

About the author

Jorge Blanco-Vacas holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is a member of the Restoration Comedy Project. His research interests include anonymity in the late Carolean stage, textual topographies of London in the Restoration period and the relations between drama, politics and religion in the late seventeenth century.

About the book

RESTORATION DRAMA 1

Mr. Turbulent (1682) is an anonymous city comedy which starred popular comic actors and young actresses of great appeal. The play was produced in the immediate aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis. This first-ever critical edition offers a fully annotated modernized version of the text, together with an introduction that examines the contexts of the play. The editor also discusses at length such topics as the political dimension of the Moorfields setting and the green spaces of Restoration London. He examines as well the rethorical use of madness associated with the Bedlam hospital for the insane, the other pivotal cityscape setting in the comedy.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my most sincere thanks to all the colleagues and friends who have helped in the preparation of the present work: Francisco Alonso Almeida, Julia Fernández Cuesta, Manuel J. Gómez-Lara, José Miguel Jiménez Delgado, María José Mora, María Jesús Pérez Jaúregui, Juan A. Prieto-Pablos.

The edition of this play has been made possible by the support of the Spanish government, which provided funding for this research through its programme “Plan estatal de investigación científica” (project ref. FFI2015-68376-P MINECO/FEDER, EU).

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INTRODUCTION

There seems to be a growing interest in the exegesis and publication of non-canonical texts in the scholarly field of Restoration drama. Regarding comedy, the times when this period was eminently characterized by a teleological transition from the 1670s sex comedies to the sentimental comedies of the late Restoration period—epitomised by Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675), Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676), and Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700)—were long ago superseded. It is now acknowledged that an evolvement towards a certain model of comedy did not exist as such. On the contrary, the development of Restoration drama is characterized by rapid changes in theatrical trends which responded to the audience’s demands, the internal mechanics of playhouse competition and external sociopolitical factors; thus, the sub-genre of political city comedy that surfaced in the early 1680s was completely dependent upon the latter.

Mr. Turbulent is an anonymous comedy published in the midst of the tumultuous years we have come to know as the Exclusion Crisis period (1678–1683). In these years, theatrical activity was affected: the diminishing attendance figures eventually put an end to playhouse competition with the creation of the United Company in 1682. The stage was going through a difficult period that made sex comedy and heroic drama, the burgeoning subgenres of the great period of Carolean drama (ca. 1668–1680), collapse. Most authors resorted then to topicality in order to survive the lean years and a number of political comedies and tragedies found their way onto the stage between 1680 and 1683, especially after the defeat of the whigs at the 1681 Oxford parliament. Probably produced in late November 1681, Mr. Turbulent; or, the Melanchollicks—reissued in 1685 as The Factious Citizen; or, The Melancholy Visioner—is one of these comedies. The play, published anonymously by Simon Neal in early 1682, certainly swam with the political tide of the tory reaction period (i.e., 1681–1683) in offering a merciless mock portrait of the opposition party while raising appealing issues about late seventeenth century culture and society.

Probably due to its anonymous character, Mr. Turbulent has long retained a marginal status in the scholarly works on Restoration drama. Although it has never been the subject of a critical edition or a comprehensive study, it has nonetheless not remained completely unnoticed for some scholars, who agree to characterize the comedy as anti-whig. Nicoll briefly pictures it as a “vivid, if somewhat coarse, satire of the Whigs” (1921: 235). Whiting likewise argues that ←11 | 12→the author aligns himself with loyal dramatists characterizing the whigs as anti-monarchical nonconformists (42). Canfield places it in his own thematic analysis of plays based on “aggressive cuckolding of Cits by Town wits” (1997: 31), even though much of the space he allows to this work is devoted to present a summary of its plot (1997: 116–120). Owen mentions it several times as one of the plays of the tory reaction period that “aim to place the entire citizen class beyond the pale” (1996: 152), briefly discusses the use of the food motif in the play as a satire on citizens (1996: 183–185), and treats the dating of the play in her appendix (310), refuting the conclusions of Nicoll (1923: 205), Van Lennep (304) and Hume and Milhous (1974: 392). The play, however, has relevant things to offer. Probably intended as a satire on stereotyped citizens—and hence whigs—, the comedy enables the reader to gain appreciation of the politically vicious climate of the Exclusion Crisis London. The use of madness in the play as a political tool is revealed to be very context-specific, reflecting the political and religious dynamics present in the tory campaign of vilification of the opposition party that began to take place towards the end of 1681. Though this may be seen as just a counterpoint to the staunch anti-catholic rhetoric deployed by whigs from 1678–1681, the implications of aligning either political or religious dissent with madness transcend the mere political move.

Details

Pages
282
Year
2020
ISBN (PDF)
9783034338981
ISBN (ePUB)
9783034339490
ISBN (MOBI)
9783034339506
ISBN (Softcover)
9783034338417
DOI
10.3726/b16379
Language
English
Publication date
2020 (June)
Keywords
Restoration comedy textual scholarship 17th century green spaces madness Restoration politics
Published
Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2020. 282 pp., 5 fig. b/w

Biographical notes

Jorge Blanco-Vacas (Editor)

Jorge Blanco-Vacas holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the Universidad de Sevilla. He is a member of the Restoration Comedy Project. His research interests include anonymity in the late Carolean stage, textual topographies of London in the Restoration period and the relations between drama, politics and religion in the late seventeenth century.

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283 pages