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Coda
from Part III - Theater History
Lauren Robertson, Columbia University, New York
Book:

Entertaining Uncertainty in the Early Modern Theater

Published online:

02 February 2023

Print publication:

09 February 2023, pp 218-225
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Summary

The coda considers the effect of the eighteen-year closure during the Interregnum on the commercial theater’s phenomenology of uncertainty. When Thomas Killigrew and William Davenant were granted patents to form theater companies by Charles II in 1660, they did not return to the practices of the earlier theatrical era, instead outfitting playhouses with the perspective sets and proscenium frames of court and Continental performance. The coda demonstrates that heroic drama, the first major genre to emerge under these new performance conditions, favored resolution rather than ambiguity. In John Dryden’s vision of the new genre, majestic spectacles that aimed to control spectators’ imaginations replaced the ambivalent metatheatricality of the earlier theater. The Restoration theater, the coda suggests, ultimately rejected the uncertainty that had defined theatrical experience from the late sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century.