The Politics of Restoration Playbook Dedications
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: The dedications to Restoration play quartos were an important part of what readers could expect to find when they picked up a late seventeenth-century playbook. Addressed to aristocrats, celebrities, politicians, and other leading figures of the day, the printed play dedication has been read by later generations of historians and literary scholars as one of the surest means we have of decoding the politics and ideological investments of Restoration dramatists and their works. This article revisits and overturns this assumption by arguing instead that Restoration playbook dedications and their politics need to be read in dialogue with the commercial pressures of contemporary book-trade practices. I argue that the politics of playbooks were inextricable from print marketplace concerns by combining quantitative and qualitative analysis of the dedications produced during the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) with a closely contextualised analysis of Jacob Tonson's quarto edition of Aphra Behn's The Second Part of the Rover (1681).
Source: History of European Ideas
Author: Marcus Nevitt
Institution: University of Sheffield
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4412385806