INTRODUCTION: POLITICAL AESTHETICS

This chapter investigates the way two plays printed in the republic intervened in the aesthetic–political debates of the moment. Little or nothing remained of the ‘golden age’ of the Caroline court by 1649. A myth of halcyon days survived beside militaristic royalism, but after the regicide all royalist myths were in competition with the actuality of the new republic. That government itself needed to establish a cultural rhetoric, and lacked a rich repository of images. What transformation into a republic meant was not clear; nor was it evident how the republic was to assert its status in opposition to all the centuries of royal iconography. Accordingly, claims to aesthetic value were densely politicised, whether the royalist claim to wit and aesthetic pleasure or the austere ethic of the early republic. It is in the debate between texts such as The Famous Tragedie of Charles I (1649) and The Tragedy of the Famous Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (1651) that the politicised aesthetics of royalist and republican were brought into being under the new republic. The debate is in part between royalism and classical republicanism, but it is also about how politics can be represented and symbolised.

CLAIMING THE HIGH GROUND: DRAMA AND POLITICAL DISCOURSES

The Famous Tragedie calls upon divine right, future opinion and cultural capital to underwrite its analysis of events. It presents the closing moments of royalist struggle in 1648, particularly the siege of Colchester (presented initially as Troy).