Whose Restoration, whose republic? Charles Gildon's manuscript version and the remaking of Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus

The Tryal of Skill (1704).1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld dismissed Nathaniel Lee's plays as embodying an unpleasant type of cruelty for the reader or authence without the benefit of Thomas Otway's feelings of pity toward his victims.2 There is a degree of truth in this commentary in respect to a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philological quarterly 2009-09, Vol.88 (4), p.385
Main Author: Novak, Maximillian E
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Brutus, Lucius Junius
Consuls
Criticism and interpretation
Dramatists
Gildon, Charles (English poet)
Lee, Nathaniel (English playwright)
Playwrights
Poets
Politics
Portrayals
Reading
Truth
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Summary:The Tryal of Skill (1704).1 Anna Laetitia Barbauld dismissed Nathaniel Lee's plays as embodying an unpleasant type of cruelty for the reader or authence without the benefit of Thomas Otway's feelings of pity toward his victims.2 There is a degree of truth in this commentary in respect to a play such as Lee's Ccesar Borgia (1679), in which blood and gore seem to be on display mainly for titillating the authence.3 But in what was probably his finest tragedy, Lucius Junius Brutus (1680), the exhibitions of cruelty were far from arbitrary and have a distinctly political meaning. In this essay I want to consider one aspect of the fate of political drama between the Restoration and the beginning of the eighteenth century, and not so much the published version of The Patriot, as a recently discovered, earlier, manuscript revision of the play by Gildon.5 Why Gildon might have been drawn to Lee's play in the first place is difficult to understand.
ISSN:0031-7977
2169-5342