Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832

Daniel Gustafson argues in Lothario’s Corpse: Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700–1832 that the death of the theatrical libertine at the end of the seventeenth century has been greatly exaggerated. The consensus among most theatre historians has been that plays by William Wycherley, Sir George Etherege, Thomas Shadwell, and Aphra Behn were no longer revived by the early eighteenth century and that the rake lost his prominence on the stage, becoming a figure of the past rather than of the present. As Brian Corman explains, the stage libertine’s demise is often attributed to a cultural shift “away from the social values that inform so much of Carolean comedy in favor of moral values of a more traditional and timeless sort” (65). Daniel Gustafson, in contrast, argues that after 1700 this figure became a kind of palimpsest in which “the rake’s lawless exploits of aristocratic license and antisocial wit,” both of which were associated with Stuart absolutism, served as “a means of exploring, on the one hand, the powers of the freeborn British subject and, on the other hand, the affordances and limits of liberal institutions” (5–6). Consequently, he claims, “the rake’s sovereign autonomy . . . became a means of exploring the tension, rather than the linear transition, between absolute sovereignty in rule and absolute sovereignty over the self” (6). Gustafson offers readers a thorough and compelling revision of our understanding of the theatrical rake’s cultural and political importance on and around the eighteenth-century stage.Lothario’s Corpse’s primary appeal is its rich engagement with both theatre history and the big ideas that dominated eighteenth-century cultural debates on regimes of governance. This history and these debates are mapped out in the introduction. Far from vanishing from the stage, the libertine frequently reappears both as an emblem of a now rejected Stuart absolutism, a threat to postrevolutionary values such as liberty of the subject, property, and representative government, and as an appealing “model for the sovereign subject endowed with the right to self-rule” (17). This duality made the figure of the rake useful to a wide range of cultural and political debates on eighteenth-century regimes of governance. Chapter 1 demonstrates the radical potential inherent in the theatrical libertine as a critique of the “new Williamite conditions of moral and sociopolitical governance” especially as they relate to issues of capitalism and property. The chapter ends with an exploration of how Nicholas Rowe’s 1703 The Fair Penitent uses the libertine figure to critique bourgeois capitalism (47). Chapter 2 reexamines debates between Richard Steele and John Dennis concerning Dorimant, the libertine protagonist of The Man of Mode; or, Sir Fopling Flutter (1676), and analyzes this dialogue’s effects on subsequent dramatic works, especially John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728). Gustafson argues that Dennis casts Dorimant as “the embodiment of liberty, self-possession, and heroic independence” (69), leading to his appropriation as a positive cultural symbol for Robert Walpole’s ministry, an association satirized by Gay. The third chapter examines the Restoration rake’s usefulness in making sense of real-life personages who adopt poses associated with theatrical libertines and thereby “engender a debate about the proximity of liberal Whig values to transgressive lawlessness” (95). These poses include “the histrionic style of David Garrick in the late 1740s and in the out-of-doors politicking of John Wilkes and his radical adherents in the early 1760s” (95–96). The chapter ends with an analysis of James Boswell’s “posturing” as a Restoration-style libertine in his journals (126). Chapter 4 makes a case for Restoration drama’s continued presence in the early nineteenth century via “a wave of pseudohistorical comedies” that starred Charles II and his libertine court (132). Gustafson argues that these comedies’ depictions of libertines “index questions of the subject’s liberty in the face of a perceived post-Waterloo resurgence of absolutist governance . . . and imagine outcomes in line with the terms of liberal reform” (133). A brief conclusion reiterates the monograph’s argument that in “the reappearance of Restoration dramatic poses and scenarios—on the stage, in literature, and in political argumentation—emerge a set of debates in which postrevolutionary claims about the powers and limits of the freeborn subject, liberal institutions, and forms of social governance were played out” (168).Lothario’s Corpse effectively reanimates debates, ideas, and texts that, until recently, seemed largely settled. Gustafson draws on a wide range of theatrical, political, and documentary sources, but there are nevertheless gaps in his account: women playwrights, questions of audience composition, and the last forty years of the eighteenth century are largely sidelined or omitted. Nevertheless, Gustafson convincingly shows that throughout most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the libertine served as a useful theatrical tool in contesting unresolved questions concerning governance, sovereignty, and individual liberty.