INTRODUCTION: RADICAL TALKING

Sinne

{Stage playes

Opinion}

It is a pity that Henry Marten, as a republican, never delivered himself of his Opinions on stage plays. In part this chapter attempts to use the available evidence to reconstruct the positions of tolerationist radicalism and other critical discourses of the 1640s with regard to stage plays and dramatic form. In registering events, as the last chapter argued, pamphlet plays were reciprocally influencing and influenced by contemporary ‘public’ debate. By tracing the playlets offering political critique in the 1640s into the 1650s we can see that some playlets which have been regarded as simply ‘royalist’ have links to the demands and protests in the radical writing of the 1640s: royalist and radical positions in popular polemic were not always diametrically opposed, but drew on some similar strands of popular discontent. Thus, radicalism in popular pamphlets combines at points with popular royalism and, in the 1650s, even with Quaker fervour.

Another reason to return to these texts is that in contemporary literary and historical debate ‘radicalism’ is itself a disputed term. Whilst some critics see early modern radicalism as their object of study, others, including Conal Condren, challenge the term and associated concepts. Condren is obviously right to argue that not only ‘radical’, ‘left’, ‘right’, but other apparently less loaded terms such as ‘citizen’, ‘community’, ‘court’, ‘country’, have resonances for us which inevitably permeate our use of them.