Lothario's Corpse

Libertine Drama and the Long-Running Restoration, 1700-1832

Daniel Gustafson

2020
258 pages
$34.95
ISBN 9781684482115
Transits

Lothario's Corpse unearths a performance history, on and off the stage, of Restoration libertine drama in Britain's eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While standard theater histories emphasize libertine drama's gradual disappearance from the nation's acting repertory following the dispersal of Stuart rule in 1688, Daniel Gustafson traces its persistent appeal for writers and performers wrestling with the powers of the emergent liberal subject and the tensions of that subject with sovereign absolutism. With its radical, absolutist characters and its scenarios of aristocratic license, Restoration libertine drama became a critical force with which to engage in debates about the liberty-loving British subject's relation to key forms of liberal power and about the troubling allure of lawless sovereign power that lingers at the heart of the liberal imagination. Weaving together readings of a set of literary texts, theater anecdotes, political writings, and performances, Gustafson illustrates how the corpse of the Restoration stage libertine is revived in the period's debates about liberty, sovereign desire, and the subject's relation to modern forms of social control. Ultimately, Lothario's Corpse suggests the "long-running" nature of Restoration theatrical culture, its revived and revised performances vital to what makes post-1688 Britain modern.

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Reviews

"Lothario's Corpse directs the reader's attention to the power of performance and to the expansiveness and breadth of history and its multiplicity - histories - when viewed through performance's lenses. [Gustafson's] readings and case studies of the Restoration libertine's many afterlives lift the curtain on the long-running repertoire of performances and reenactments that have shaped cultural fantasies about the British subject since the early eighteenth century. "
-Eighteenth-Century Studies, Summer 2021

"'When did the Restoration end?' is a question much debated. . . . In Lothario's Corpse Daniel Gustafson makes a compelling case for a Restoration that is, if not unending, at least subject to unexpected revivals. . . . [Gustafson's] attention to detail in echoes, shadows, and allusions to libertine drama and its rakes is largely compelling. . . . The chronological range of the book and the wealth of examples also amply highlight the pervasiveness of Lothario's corpse as well as the political range his libertine assertion of personal liberty could be put to."
- Restoration Journal, Spring 2021

"Lothario's Corpse is an innovative contribution to the study of Restoration and 18th-century drama. Gustafson has read admirably widely, taking as a remit not only dramatic texts but pamphlets, diaries, and press accounts that consider the figure of the rake or libertine as theatrical character type, political phenomenon, or both. In these provocative pages the irrepressible, unruly return of the rake - onstage and as performed in nontheatrical life - is a phenomenon beyond theater history that makes visible the unsettled dynamics of sovereignty and subjectivity in the long 18th century."
-Brett D. Wilson, author of A Race of Female Patriots: Women and Public Spirit on the British Stage, 1688-1745

"Lothario's Corpse exemplifies the very best of recent work on Restoration and eighteenth-century performance history . . .The writing is lively and pleasing, and the scholarship commendable: Gustafson has clearly done his homework. Readers from a range of disciplines, from theatre studies to eighteenth-century literature, will benefit enormously from his erudition."
-Deborah C. Payne, editor of The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre

About the author:

Daniel Gustafson is assistant professor of English at The City College of New York, CUNY.

Distributed by Rutgers University Press

Cloth: $120.00, 978-1-6844-8212-2; EPUB: $34.95, 978-1-6844-8213-9