The Heroic Mode and Political Crisis, 1660-1745

I trace the making and breaking of Stuart mythology dramatised in the development of and criticism of the heroic mode from the Restoration through the aftermath of the 1745 Jacobite uprising. My analysis of the heroic as a cultural language corrects the dismissive attitude that rejects the heroic as mere dramatic fad, drawing on a rich range of cultural productions, from stage tragedy to occasional verse, to demonstrate that the pronouncement of the heroic’s death in 1670 was premature, and the assertion of its unimportance to theatre history part of the very Whig history the anti-heroic was created to serve.