The Politics of Restoration Playbook Dedications
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11345016 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Marcus Nevitt (University of Sheffield, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Pages | 1-17 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-14 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of European Ideas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0191-6599 • E-ISSN: 1873-541X |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/01916599.2025.2528402 |
| OpenAlex | W4412385806 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
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)
Political science · Politics · Australian History and Society · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · Law · Social and Cultural Dynamics
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |